#the new cold war

[stillnaomi]

in the last few years:

- the US has railed against a made up a genocide in China

- had the CIA spread false stories about CPC officials acquiring secret fortunes

- run a propaganda campaign against the belt and road initiative

- and spread an anti vaxx conspiracy in the Philippines to discourage the use of Chinese vaccines

now they're trying to pass a $1.6 billion budget to spread more anti China propaganda. be ready for what's coming

[tikitania]

UPDATE: VK restored access. I had to prove that I was not a bot. Now, here's to hoping that life doesn't get in the way to watching Sleeping Beauty.

___ UGH…I’ve been blocked on VK for no apparent reason. I read that the platform is booting users with American & Canadian phone numbers, so I’m assuming that’s why. Hoping that Kokoreva’s debut in Sleeping Beauty will show up on YouTube in its entirety.

[usafphantom2]

New Year's day B-2

@JarodMHamilton via X

[sneeplerbeepler]

Hindus are being gangraped, lynched, and having their property destroyed in Bangladesh rn. Amidst all the news coming out of there don't forget about the minority that always ends up dealing with the brunt of chaos. in 1971 most of the victims of the genocide were Bangladeshi Hindus and everyone conveniently leaves this detail out.

(And i know some mf will either no true scotsman this or say that it's all lies and that all the videos coming out are fake or propaganda from the BJP or something instead of another event in a long chain of violence. The Hindu population has crashed from 30% at independence to 9% today. Estimates say that in the next 30 years, Hindus will be extinct in Bangladesh)

[shellshooked]

link skywalker redraw to celebrate the au that started it all🤸🏼‍♀️

[pavlov-sdog]

The way Adler (probably) just made up a scar story to fuck with Bell. 

In the story where he says he was attacked by a tiger, Adler follows up with “have you ever been attacked by a tiger, Bell?” (Thats also the only one he asks Bell a question to follow up with to my memory.) I am rather bad with tone, but to me his tone shifts when he asks Bell that. I refuse to believe that isn’t a reference to Arash and his jacket and he isn’t saying it just for his own personal amusement with the fact Bell is none the wiser.

I know its common knowledge just how smug Adler is about literally everything regarding Bell but christ can he be normal for just one minute!! The way he’s so confident saying things like this drives me crazy, i could go on foreeeverr about small things/voicelines like that.

[gamora-borealis]

I feel like I've lived ten lives since dan and phil last uploaded

[mnasthaii]

ADLER + BELL, DOMESTICITY

not a lot, just forever - adrienne lenker / tender is the night - f. scott fitzgerald / the lover's dictionary - david levithan / the white room - jeanette winterson / keeping 13 - chloe walsh / sparks fly - taylor swift

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Privacy first

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.

Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data.

Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data.

Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads.

Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.

The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.

America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

Here's what should be in that law:

A ban on surveillance advertising:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking.

Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on.

No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Illinois biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

No arbitration. Your right to sue for violations of your privacy shouldn't be waivable in a clickthrough agreement:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal

No tricks. Getting "consent" with confusing UIs and tiny fine print doesn't count:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/designing-welcome-mats-invite-user-privacy-0

A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down.

A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online

When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series.

A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements.

A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation

There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And for many of AI's other harms, a muscular privacy law would starve AI of some of its most potentially toxic training data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-updated-terms-to-use-customer-data-to-train-ai-2023-9

Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead?

Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[budugaapologist]

still dont see how so many people say that dawntrail is poorly written in comparison to other expansions like. what, did you realize you had to learn about a new culture and immediately not care anymore lmao? you've done it before, was this one not white enough for you?

genuinely i think more people should do side quests during msq so idk you can form a heart about the characters you're interacting with if you struggle with that and understand the land better so when impactful shit happens your illiterate ass can actually read and have empathy. theres no excuse for this.

if you can't handle storybuilding and character introductions from the expansion that feels like stormblood and shadowbringers had passionate gay sex that got one of them pregnant and birthed a beautiful daughter they both love and care about then idk what to tell you, maybe youre just lame and can't read. best of luck with that.

[mortal-kombattore-115]

Happy Holidays !! 🎄🎁☃️

[catgirljaneway]

Voy + Textposts 17, Special ParisKim Showcase

(Voy + Textposts 16) + (Voy + Textposts 18)

[usafphantom2]

@GinnieSionney via X

[kalashnikovlobotomy]

alfred's playhouse

[dearlydevoured]

russell adler x bell! reader. meant to be longer, meant to be proofread, inspired by @altcvnningham

berlin was home to you now.

you don’t know why—considering all that had happened—but you found illegally renting apartments under fake identities was just comforting that you stayed in the city months after your psyche was broken down and put back together with chewing gum and lint-covered duct tape.

maybe it was more of a safe zone but you consciously didn’t acknowledge it, too afraid to leave and see the rest of the world under the forceful title you gave yourself as a german civilian. months passed and you were still anxious about people and places you could barely picture in your head.

nothing more, always something less.

lighting your cigarette, you moved away from the kiosk and walked back to your building, winter chill nipping at the exposed tips of your ears. you started smoking again, trying to reclaim what chunks of identity had been taken away from you, no matter how little.

it was nearing midnight. usually, when it was this late and your pack had already been finished, you tried to ignore your body’s craving for nicotine and wait until the morning. but after cleaning your own sob-session-induced bile off the parquet with a dirty t-shirt the night before, you took the trip down the block and bought a fresh pack to semi-congratulate for not throwing yourself out the window—as much as you desperately wanted to. the acidic smell of your own stomach’s contents hit you mid-cleaning causing you to gag, stomach cramping painfully as you tried to focus on just cleaning the mess you already made, the only thing you could do in the situation besides forcing your body to keep everything down and to not think about it.

you often got away with beating memories of 1981 down. still, your chest would tighten when men at bars used a familiar cologne, closing your eyes and trying to imagine that they smelled of citrus and laundry detergent, not warm spices carried by wood and leather. you would imagine adler when you would hook up with these same men that led you to places you’d only see once yet criticize a million times in your head due to the lack of results when searching for a piece of décor that could scream his name at you as if to console, aching to focus in on just one thing that would remind you of his style. when you were completely disconnected, you only found comfort through pretending he was on top of you, a stranger’s fingers peeling your clothes off in a way so delicate that he could never compare, hands too rough and undeserving.

they would ask if you’re okay and you would only nod in response, sometimes putting a smile on your face just for them and of course, the men before them.

you forgot the pattern of his scars. climbing the first flight of stairs, you reached into your coat pocket, feeling for your keys before hooking a finger into the ring and pulling them out. cigarette hanging from your lips, you separated the apartment key from everything else.

in your head, they created the ursa major. a prfectly carved constelattion on his face, able to be seen even in the daytime.

[septic-salad]

"See ya 👹"