#tiktok is a tool and is a useful as the user wants it to be

[athena5898]

(The Cradle) Several users of the social media app TikTok have noticed that any comment containing “Free Palestine” is being removed automatically. This comes with the news of the US trying to ban the app.

FBI Director Chris Wray claims that the app poses a national security risk, saying that Chinese companies are required to essentially “do whatever the Chinese government wants them to in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government.”

However, reporters and activists are saying that the TikTok ban is lagely about censoring Pro-Palestinian content.

In a conversation with the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli said “TikTok is better now than it was 10 months ago, but there is still a lot of work to do.”

Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a recording in November 2023, “We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem.” He also adds that Israel is facing a “major generational problem” in the US and that “the numbers of young people who think that Hamas’, you know, massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high.”

A study by the Northeastern shows that pro-Palestinian posts on Tiktok significantly outnumber pro-Israeli posts.

There are at least 170,430 pro-Palestinian posts, 8,843 pro-Israeli posts and 101,706 neutral or general posts. 236 million views for pro-Palestinian posts, 14 million for pro-Israeli posts and 492 million views for neutral or general posts.

[never-quite-buried]

Follow Darienne Nez on xiaohongshu for more 🫶🏻

[subjectsix]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[bookinit02]

i really do think there’s a huge disconnect on here w/ people who have never used tiktok as to what it actually is and who actually uses it. the number of people i’ve seen call it a “teen dancing app” is actually insane. it has not been a teen dancing app since i was in high school, around 2016 - 2020. the main communities i saw on a daily basis were 1) black history/anti-racism educators, 2) high school & college teachers sharing in-classroom strategies and frustrations with the education system, 3) local/state political leaders giving real-time updates on behind-the-scenes government decisions, & 4) community activism & leadership. like tiktok is an adult platform. almost every person i interacted with was my age or older. and yes it completely depends on your fyp and how you interact with the app, yes there’s still teenagers and dance videos and literally anything else you can think of. but these communities of adults aren’t insubstantial at all, they have literally millions of interactions on a daily basis. there’s about a million other types of communities that i could name just off the top of my head, because the range of users was SO diverse and thriving. it’s a long-distance community tool, just like any other social media—and honestly much better than any other social media, because it relies primarily on the kindness of strangers. i saw at least 5-10 videos today of queer people in rural areas panicking because they don’t have any access to queer community on any other platform or in real life. and before i end this i do want to say i think tiktok is coming back, i think this is a highly orchestrated political move, etc., but i do know it won’t ever be exactly the same. people are panicking about free speech violations because tiktok was a place where people fucking SPEAK. i have never seen mass mobilization and communication in this same way for as long as i’ve been alive. it is the people’s app, not just a silly teenage thing. if you’re not on tiktok and never have been, please stop talking about it like you know anything at all😭

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: Congress about to pass a mass censorship and surveillance bill under the guise of "protecting children"

May 13 2023

The Senate has been in a "do something!" mode regarding children's online safety. They're using this as an excuse to push for widespread internet censorship and surveillance. The EARN IT Act, has a slimmer chance of passing with widespread opposition and some senators saying they won't vote for it. TLDR;The real threat is actually KOSA (s.1409), the Kid's Online Safety Act, which will mass censor and surveill the entire internet by giving all 50 state attorney generals the power to remove content that is "harmful" for kids, and force you to upload your govt ID online to access the internet. I'll explain how it works below the action items but it's absolutely urgent that anyone who likes having a free and open internet fights back. It's all hands on deck, because this has so much public support it's insane:

HOW TO FIGHT KOSA

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES & THE COMMERCE COMMITTEE

This is a link to the Senate Commerce Committee phone numbers and a call script to read off of. (202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline

Opposition is getting drowned, and these upcoming weeks will be heavy for lobbying and they're using young people to do it. We NEED to show these senators that young people are actually opposed to this and don't want it.

2. Sign these petitions

Open Letter Against KOSA

Petition 1

Petition 2

Petition 3

Petition 4

Resistbot: Text PHJDYH to 50409

3. Spread the word.

The opposition is getting absolutely drowned online. Dove has nearly 100k signatures to push for KOSA. Influencers on tiktok are pushing for this without ever having read the bill. Fucking Lizzo is sponsoring it. If you have twitter, reddit, tiktok, are in any community, SPREAD THE WORD, PLEASE.

Here is a linktree with all the above petitions for easy shargin: Link to linktree

HOW KOSA WORKS

First, KOSA pressures platforms to install filters that would wipe the net of anything deemed “inappropriate” for minors. This means instructing platforms to censor. We saw how these filters impacted websites firsthand with tumblr in 2018, with not only blocking all adult content but also sfw queer content such as suicide hotlines, art archives, wiping out entire blogs because they had queer fandom related posts, etc. Places that already use content filters have restricted important information about suicide prevention and LGBTQ+ support groups. KOSA would spread this kind of censorship to every corner of the internet. And who gets to decide what is and isn't harmful for minors? Oh don't worry, just every single state attorney general and the FTC, which is appointed by the president. You know, the same attorney generals that just banned gender-affirming healthcare under the guise that it "ruins mental health" of minors. This is why the Heritage Foundation was one of the first to sponsor the bill because they can use it to censor trans content, and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is it's co-author.

Second, KOSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by forcing websites to use age verification and parental monitoring tools. Yup, that's right. Now every single person who wants to access the internet has to upload their govt ID online to third party apps that get hacked all the time. You queer in a red state? You undocumented? You an activist? Have fun getting all your online activity and metadata attached to your govt ID.  

Over 90+ human and LGBT rights groups agree that KOSA is dangerous and updates to the 2023 version won’t and can’t address the big problems with the bill. This bill has MASSIVE bipartisan support, and the authors Blumenthal and Blackburn (yes, that Blumenthal that's pushing the EARN IT Act, and who also sponsored the RESTRICT Act and SOPA/PIPA if you remember) are using the tragedy of mothers who lost their kids to online harassment and young adults who've been traumatized online to lobby for it, and got Dove the company to use a bunch of influencers to push for this under the guise it prevents eating disorders...I wish I was lying. There are already 30 co-sponsors.

It is all hands on deck. I'm dead serious when I say if this bill is passed it is the beginning if not end of the open and free internet.

[mollyjimbly]

🚨🚨🚨RED ALERT🚨🚨🚨

if you care about trans folks please take a few minutes to read through this post and share.

They are not even trying to hide their true intentions with KOSA...

"Top of the agenda is to go after providers of gender affirming care, including for adults. The FTC could also go after online platforms for displaying LGBTQ content which would be supercharged under KOSA."

This is catastrophically bad.

There is a HUGE push to pass KOSA rn at the end of the year.

Real quick summary: Blumenthal and Blackburn "rewrote" KOSA to appeal to the right more. They worked with ELON MUSK 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️ to push this bill "protecting kids". Tomorrow, many orgs are bringing groups of parents to speak to congress. This is coming at a time when FTC commissioner admitted their agenda is straight transphobia:

There are two ways KOSA can be passed right now. Either from the House or attaching it to an end of year spending bill. They will try both.

Republican leadership (Scalise and Johnson) are surprisingly what is stopping thia from going through. They wont admit it out loud but they dont like the bill.

WE NEED TO PUSH BACK NOW!! Tomorrow those phones need to be ringing OFF THE HOOK while they meet with parents.

PLEASE SPREAD THIS EVERYWHERE!! ADD THESE LINKS TO TWITTER, REDDIT, INSTA, TIKTOK!!

USE THESE CALLING TOOLS AND SCRIPTS TODAY AND TOMORROW ALL DAY!!!

SCRIPTS:

🔴 If your rep is GOP:

"I am urging you to VOTE NO on KOSA, the Kid’s Online Safety Act. This is a dangerous bill that will harm children.

Many news organizations have reported that this bill actively harms kids by exposing their private data to strangers under the guise of protecting them.

We need to hold Big Tech accountable, but KOSA is not the solution.

The bill let any state attorney general and the FTC to sue any website for “harmful” content. Do we really want blue state lawyers deciding what can and can’t be allowed online?

Big Tech is already censoring us. That’s why they support KOSA. This is massive government overreach. We need a bill that actually protects children by creating better security measures instead of bringing about more censorship.

Multiple experts agree this bill pushes age verification, even with the new language.

KOSA hands more private data of children to third party companies, which would put them in further danger. How is this protecting children’s privacy?

What parent would want their child’s private data in the hands of strangers like this? KOSA is actively putting kids in danger.

Do NOT support this bill. Thank you."

Also,to note, Biden supports KOSA: You could try asking your GOP rep why they would support a bill that has Biden's support,and that he could use it to his advantage somehow (we know GOP does not like Biden,so it should be utilized somehow). We need to ensure the bill doesnt pass at all.

🔵 if your rep is DEM:

"I am urging you to VOTE NO on KOSA. Nearly 200 human rights and LGBT organizations total came out in an open letter opposing it. The ACLU is against it. Hundreds of thousands of Gen Z, who actually live online, are against it.

We know the harms of social media, and we know this is not the solution. The new language does NOT meet any concerns brought up, in fact many organizations were ignored.

Major news have reported that this bill actively harms kids. We do not want this. The rewritten bill would still allow any state attorney general, and now the FTC, to sue any website for “harmful” content. When you have Republicans calling anything LGBT “sexual exploitation” or anything about race “CRT” to successfully ban books and teachers, then they will use any justification to censor the internet.

The Missouri attorney general used “mental health” successfully to ban gender-affirming care with backed up research. Suicide rates will skyrocket for marginalized youth with this bill restricting content. Multiple experts agree this bill pushes age verification, even with the new language.

KOSA hands more private data of children to third party companies. Furthermore, updated language threatens encryption the same way the Earn It Act does.

How is this protecting children’s privacy? KOSA actively harms kids. Do NOT support this bill. Thank you."

Tell them you'll vote for your reps if they vote no on KOSA, anything goes. But most importantly it's crucial that KOSA is not being brought at all for any vote.

Thank you, remember to stay calm and stay strong. We've got this!! ♡

[atley01]

Tips for all of my alternative & Chronically ill/ disabled friends!

A big thing that's helped me feel more comfortable accommodating my disability is finding accessibility tools that reflect my personality / interests.

I should put a disclaimer that making disability "aesthetic" should not be the most important thing about your health! I do this where I can to help me accept my disability.

Here are some alt accessibility tools I've found / made & utilized for myself!

1. If you're prone to nausea:

Anti-nausea meds work, but I also find that peppermints work just as well! I always have mints on me. At home, I've stored them in this coffin container!

I do keep a few of these mints in my bag, as well as ginger hard candies (they taste very strong, but are VERY efficient). I got the peppermints at Dollar tree, and they've genuinely been a life saver.

Alternatively, I've found this adorable ouija board altoids container that has mints in it!

The mints are even fun-shaped! I also saw other horror-movie themed altoid containers in-store as well. Since they're tiny, they dont work well for severe nausea, but they are still helpful!

2. If you struggle with temperature-regulation:

For me, my hands and feet are always FREEZING, but my core will be super warm. What has helped me a lot has been gloves and fuzzy socks!

I have a lot of spooky gloves like this, but I prefer the fingerless ones because I can still use my phone and be warm at the same time! I've also heard my friends who are wheelchair users say gloves can help protect your hands if you use a manual wheelchair. Another added bonus is that certain gloves can help limit mobility for those of you who struggle with hypermobility in your hands.

3. Do you have noise-canceling headphones? Decorate them!

I decorated my N/C headphones in shark stickers because sharks are my special interest!

These are Soundcore Life Q30's. I have gotten compliments on the stickers many times! You could put halloween stickers on yours or decorate your headphones in other ways! I've seen people crochet horns onto the headband portion of their headphones.

4. I would recommend any chronically ill person carry a cup around to stay hydrated:

ESPECIALLY If you need electrolytes. You can either have a drink like propel or powerade in your cup (or any drink of your choice, and you could put electrolyte packets in there).

This specific cup isn't the best at keeping my drink cold, but it holds a decent amount of liquid! And it's spooky. If you're someone who struggles to drink enough water, I've found that getting a fun cup helps me a lot!

5. Make communication bracelets!

If I'm having a difficult time voicing my needs, or I'm in a verbal shutdown, these bracelets can come in handy for me.

I'll either wear them on my wrist when needed or present them to my friends so they can read the bracelet and understand what I need. I keep them on a keychain that way I dont lose them and can transport them easily. An example of some of the phrases I've turned into bracelets is; "No spoons," "spoon debt," "verbal shutdown," and "flashbacks," (for when I'm having a PTSD episode.) You could make a bracelet with the medical condition you have as a DIY medical-alert bracelet. I added tiny spoon charms to some of my bracelets because I thought it was funny.

5. Mobility aids!

Decorate your mobility aids with things like stickers, kandi, lights, etc! Pinterest, instagram, and tiktok have a lot of good ideas. You can easily customize your mobility aids to look spooky or look however you want them to!

6. Bags!

I know that for me, I NEED to carry a bag around whenever I go out because it has important medical items that I need, but it also keeps all my important items like keys, id, ect, in one spot so that I dont forget / lose them. SOME spooky bags are expensive, but you could find a plain black bag at a thrift store or walmart and accessorize it with patches, keychains, and pins! I've seen people paint designs onto their bags before as well.

• You dont have to spend a lot of money on your accessibility tools!

Find ways to DIY them, or get them secondhand! You could even try working with household items you already have! A lot of these items, or items very similar to it, can be found at the dollar tree - even the materials needed to make the beaded bracelets! (Outside of the spoon charms)

Thats all!

If I think of more, you'll see me again! Be spooky, and be kind to yourself!

[artsekey]

I'd been seeing videos on Tiktok and Youtube about how younger Gen Z & Gen Alpha were demonstrating low computer literacy & below benchmark reading & writing skills, but-- like with many things on the internet-- I assumed most of what I read and watched was exaggerated. Hell, even if things were as bad as people were saying, it would be at least ~5 years before I started seeing the problem in higher education.

I was very wrong.

Of the many applications I've read this application season, only %6 percent demonstrated would I would consider a college-level mastery of language & grammar. The students writing these applications have been enrolled in university for at least two years, and have taken all fundamental courses. This means they've had classes dedicated to reading, writing, and literature analysis, and yet!

There are sentences I have to read over and over again to discern intent. Circular arguments that offer no actual substance. Errors in spelling and capitalization that spellcheck should've flagged.

At a glance, it's easy to trace this issue back to two things:

The state of education in the United States is abhorrent. Instructors are not paid enough, so schools-- particularly public schools-- take whatever instructors they can find.

COVID. The two year long gap in education, especially in high school, left many students struggling to keep up.

But I think there's a third culprit-- something I mentioned earlier in this post. A lack of computer literacy.

This subject has been covered extensively by multiple news outlets like the Washington Post and Raconteur, but as someone seeing it firsthand I wanted to add my voice to the rising chorus of concerned educators begging you to pay attention.

As the interface we use to engage with technology becomes more user friendly, the knowledge we need to access our files, photos, programs, & data becomes less and less important. Why do I need to know about directories if I can search my files in Windows (are you searching in Windows? Are you sure? Do you know what that bar you're typing into is part of? Where it's looking)? Maybe you don't have any files on your computer at all-- maybe they're on the cloud through OneDrive, or backed up through Google. Some of you reading this may know exactly where and how your files are stored. Many of you probably don't, and that's okay. For most people, being able to access a file in as short a time as possible is what they prioritize.

The problem is, when you as a consumer are only using a tool, you are intrinsically limited by the functions that tool is advertised to have. Worse yet, when the tool fails or is insufficient for what you need, you have no way of working outside of that tool. You'll need to consult an expert, which is usually expensive.

When you as a consumer understand a tool, your options are limitless. You can break it apart and put it back together in just the way you like, or you can identify what parts of the tool you need and search for more accessible or affordable options that focus more on your specific use-case.

The problem-- and to be clear, I do not blame Gen Z & Gen Alpha for what I'm about to outline-- is that this user-friendly interface has fostered a culture that no longer troubleshoots. If something on the computer doesn't work well, it's the computer's fault. It's UI should be more intuitive, and it it's not operating as expected, it's broken. What I'm seeing more and more of is that if something's broken, students stop there. They believe there's nothing they can do. They don't actively seek out solutions, they don't take to Google, they don't hop on Reddit to ask around; they just... stop. The gap in knowledge between where they stand and where they need to be to begin troubleshooting seems to wide and inaccessible (because the fundamental structure of files/directories is unknown to many) that they don't begin.

This isn't demonstrative of a lack of critical thinking, but without the drive to troubleshoot the number of opportunities to develop those critical thinking skills are greatly diminished. How do you communicate an issue to someone online? How do look for specific information? How do you determine whether that information is specifically helpful to you? If it isn't, what part of it is? This process fosters so many skills that I believe are at least partially linked to the ability to read and write effectively, and for so many of my students it feels like a complete non-starter.

We need basic computer classes back in schools. We need typing classes, we need digital media classes, we need classes that talk about computers outside of learning to code. Students need every opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and the ability to self-reflect & self correct, and in an age of misinformation & portable technology, it's more important now than ever.

[photomatt]

Hey, genuine question, although I'm not honestly expecting a response: if tumblr users have been telling you what they want and what they don't want since you've taken over, and their feedback has more or less been ignored consistently whilst rolling out changes that nobody asked for or uses (tumblr live is coming to mind), and you're not getting the content use you want, might it be an idea to try those before abandoning the site? What is the worst that could happen, really? Listen to your userbase. You had a lot of good will from listening to people at the start of your ownership: blaze did well, as did ad-free, polls and so on, but there are some really popular things you've removed or made obsolete (prev tags, blog themes, avatars etc.) that a lot of people want back. Equally, there are some things I've never heard a single person want - this site isn't TikTok, and never will be. Instead of trying attract a crowd that is already catered for elsewhere, making the people who love tumblr still despite all the changes in ownership more comfortable under you can only be a benefit. Thank you for reading, if you did actually read this.

Thank you for the genuine question! First, I'll say that we've never launched anything with the expectation the community would hate it, but there sometimes is a big difference between what people say they want and how people respond or what information (and often misinformation) goes viral.

As an example, Post+, which is a feature where you can pay to subscribe to other users, had some misinformation go viral that if you used it you'd be sued by copyright holders if you did fan fiction, and there was a huge backlash that the site was going paid and a coordinated campaign to attack (including with death threats) everyone who signed up for the program.

I'll repeat, this was a program where the money all went to creators, Tumblr did not take a cut, and the creators were often already selling work on Patreon or Ko-fi, this just was an integrated way for it to work. Because of the hate and attacks, every launch creator canceled the program. It was sad, because this was a feature users and creators said they wanted, and we prioritized making users money over projects that would make us money.

Since then we've gotten better at managing attacks and threats, with new tools and a bigger Trust & Safety team, but Post+ never recovered.

You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.

To your broader point, though, one thing I'm hoping with a more focused approach in 2024 is that we can streamline some of the extra things that were launched (like Live) that haven't gotten the adoption we hoped, and focus in on the core functionality that people use a ton of on Tumblr. We will likely be shipping less new stuff and more focused on improving existing functionality and core flows.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pinkslump linkdump

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages. From now on, only Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and the faceless mere centimillionaires running companies like Match.com will be able to directly harvest Americans' most private, sensitive kompromat. The People's Liberation Army will have to build their dossiers on Americans' lives the old fashioned way: by paying unregulated data-brokers who will sell any fact about you to anyone and who know everything about everyone.

After all, the reason the American market matters so much to Tiktok is that America is the only rich, populous country in the world without a federal privacy law. That's why an American is the most valuable user an ad-tech company can acquire. Keep your wealthy Norwegians: sure, they're saturated in oil money and thus fat prizes for ad-targeting, but they're also protected by the GDPR.

If you're an American (or anyone else, for that matter) who wants to use Tiktok without being spied on, Privacysafe has you covered: their Sticktock tool is a private, alternative, web-based front-end for Tiktok, with optional Tor VPN tunnelling:

https://sticktock.com/

As Privacysafe's Sean O'Brien explains, Sticktock is an free/open utility that's dead easy to use. Just change the URL of any Tiktok video from tiktok.com/whatever to sticktock.com/whatever, and you're have a private viewing experience that easily penetrates the Great Firewall of America:

https://bitsontape.com/p/sticktock-share-tiktok-videos

O'Brien – founder of the Yale Privacy Lab – writes that Privacysafe built this because they wanted to help Americans continue to access the great volume of speech on Tiktok, and because they knew that Americans would be using ad-supported, spyware-riddled VPNs to evade the Great Firewall.

Sticktock is a great hack, but it only defends your privacy while you're using Tiktok. For other social media, you'll need to try something else. For example, Mark Zuckerberg is the last person you want to entrust with your data, and always has been. Never forget that as soon as Zuckerberg's Harvard-based nonconsensual fuckability-rating service TheFacebook was up and running, he started offering copies of all his users' data as a flex to his buds:

Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Just ask I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

What? How'd you manage that one?

People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb fucks

Don't be a dumb fuck! Lots of people can't manage to leave Meta platforms because they love the people there more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, and Zuck knows it, which is why he keeps turning the screws on his users. That doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Over the years, various law enforcement and regulatory agencies have forced Meta to add privacy controls to its services, and though the company has implemented these as a baroque maze of twisty little malicious compliance passages, all alike, it is possible to lock down your data if you try hard enough. My EFF colleague Lena Cohen has a walkthrough of Meta's privacy settings, AKA the world's worst dungeon crawler, which will see you through safely:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/mad-meta-dont-let-them-collect-and-monetize-your-personal-data

If this kind of thing interests you, you can spend a whole weekend learning about it, chilling and partying with some of the most fun-loving, fascinating weirdos in hackerdom this summer. 2600 magazine's semi-annual Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) con – now in its 31st year! – has gone annual, and they're pre-selling tickets at a freakishly low earlybird rate:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope_16

I keynoted HOPE last year and it was every bit as much fun as I remembered. Sure, DEF CON is amazing, but you can't really call a 40,000-person gathering in the Las Vegas Convention Center "intimate." HOPE is a homebrew, homely, cheap, cheerful and delightfully anarchic hacker con with deep history and great people.

Speaking of weird ancient history, my pal Ada Palmer – sf writer, librettist, singer, and Renaissance historian – blew my mind this week with her article on the tower-cities of medieval proto-Italy during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars (1125-1392):

https://www.exurbe.com/the-lost-towers-of-the-guelph-ghibelline-wars/

Once upon a time, Italian city-states were forested with tall towers, like miniature Manhattans. Rich families built these stone towers as a show of wealth and a source of power, since the stone towers were taller than nearby homes and far less flammable, so the plutes of the day could drop flaming garbage on their neighbors, burn them out, and emerge triumphant. This ended with cities like Florence banning towers above a certain height, forcing their warring oligarchs to decapitate their fortresses down to compliance levels.

The images need to be seen to be believed. Ada's got a new book about this, Inventing the Renaissance, "which shows how the supposed difference between a bad 'Dark Ages' and a Renaissance 'golden age' is 100% propaganda, but fascinating propaganda with a deep history":

https://www.adapalmer.com/publication/inventing-the-renaissance/

Palmer is one of the most fascinating writers, thinkers, performers, and speakers I know. This is the book for every history nerd in your life, and also a magic artifact with the power to transform normies into history nerds.

Speaking of scholars finding nontraditional ways to do technical communication to the general public: this week, 404 Media's Emmanuel Maiberg reported on Zara Dar, an OnlyFans model who's racked up millions of Pornhub views for videos that consist of detailed, accessible, fully clothed explanations of machine learning:

https://www.404media.co/why-this-onlyfans-model-posts-machine-learning-explainers-to-pornhub/

Dar's videos cover a variety of poorly understood, highly salient mathematical subjects, like this introduction to probability theory:

https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=65cfae54411b9

Dar's got a pretty straightforward reason for posting her explainers to Pornhub – it pays about 300% more than Youtube does for the same amount of viewership ($1,000 per million views vs. Youtube's $340 per million). But it comes at a cost. Other platforms like Linkedin have banned her for discussing the economics of posting videos to Pornhub, without explanation or appeal.

The reason Dar's in the news now is that the Supremes didn't merely ban Tiktok this week, they also heard arguments about the red state "age verification" laws, in which Alito asked if looking at Pornhub was analogous to reading Playboy, which was famous for interleaving softcore pornography with hefty, serious reporting and editorials. Can you really look at Pornhub "just for the articles?" Seems like the answer is a resounding yes.

These "age verification" laws are jaw-droppingly reckless. Red state lawmakers – and ALEC, the dark money org that wrote the model legislation they're pushing – envision a system where each person who looks at porn is affirmatively identified as a named adult, and where that identity information is indefinitely retained. The most common way of gating services to adults is to demand a credit-card, which means that these weirdos want to create highly leakable databases of every one of their constituents' sexual kinks, which can be sorted by net worth by would-be blackmailers. Remember, any data you collect will probably leak, and any data you retain will almost certainly leak. Good times ahead.

Of course, it wasn't all gruesome policy malpratice this week. In the final days of the Biden admin, antitrust enforcers from multiple agencies launched a flurry of investigations, cases, judgments, fines and sanctions against companies that prey on the American public. The FTC went after John Deere for its repair monopoly:

https://www.404media.co/ftc-sues-john-deere-over-its-repair-monopoly/

And the FTC sued to end a system of secret noncompetes, where employers illegally collude not to hire each others' workers, something the workers are never told:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-01-17-building-service-workers-ftc-stops-secret-no-hire-agreements/

That's just for starters. Matt Stoller rounds up the "full Tony Montana" of last-week enforcement actions undertaken by Biden's best appointees, an all-out assault on pharmacy benefit managers (most notably Unitedhealth), junk-fee-charging corporate landlords, Capitol One, Cash App, rent-rigging landlords, Southwest Airlines, anesthesia monopolists, Experian and Equifax, private equity plunderers, lootbox-peddling video game companies, AI companies, Honda finance, politically motivatedd debanking, Google, Elon Musk, Microsoft, Hino Motors, and more:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/out-with-a-bang-enforcers-go-after

This is all amazing, but also frustrating, as it exemplifies what David Dayen rightly calls the "essential incoherence" of Bidenism, a political philosophy that sought "balance" between different Democratic Party factions by delegating enormous power to people with opposing goals, then unleashing them to work at cross-purposes:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-17-essential-incoherence-end-of-biden-presidency/

What to make of a president whose final address warned the American public of an out-of-control oligarchy, but whose final executive order was a giant giveaway to the biggest AI companies – and their oligarch owners?

And what to make of a president who oversaw a genocide in Gaza, fronting for an Israeli regime that made a fool of him at every turn, laughed at his "red lines," and demanded (and received) fresh shipments of arms even as they campaigned for Trump?

This had nothing to do with sound electoral politics. The vast majority of Americans supported a cease-fire in Gaza, and have done virtually since the beginning of the bombings. Harris – who reportedly agreed not to criticize Biden's record as a condition of Biden stepping aside – made it clear that she would ignore voters' horror at the mass killing. Voters responded by staying home in droves: 19 million 2020 Biden voters simply refused to cast a ballot in 2024:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-israel-biden-election-poll

A Yougov poll showed that 29% of the "non-voters" who turned out for Biden in 2020 refused to vote at all in 2024 because of Biden's support for genocide in Gaza. Polling during the campaign made it clear that Harris would improve her electoral chances by promising a cease-fire, but that was a bridge too far, even during an election "where democracy was on the ballot."

America is famously a country where legislators and leaders ignore the policy preferences of voters and give elites everything they want. In that world, not voting – even when "democracy is on the ballot" – makes a lot of sense:

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained

But Biden did do some popular things that elites hated – fighting corporate power, price-fixing, rent-gouging, and other forms of predatory business conduct. The "compromise" the Biden administration made with its elite backers was to call as little attention as possible to all this stuff. The Biden admin did more on antitrust in four years than all the preceding administrations of the previous forty years, combined. Just last week, the Biden admin did more on antitrust than any presidential administration did in a four-year term. And yet, they barely whispered about it.

This is a great example of what Anat Shenker-Osorio calls "Pizzaburger politics." Imagine half your family wants pizza for dinner and the other half wants burgers, so you make a disgusting pizzaburger that makes them all equally miserable and claim that everyone being mad at you is proof that you've been "fair":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

Handing billionaires a bunch of voter-enraging gimmes and sucking up to ghouls like Liz Cheney didn't buy the loyalty of America's tower-owning, neighbor-incinerating princelings. They gave millions to Trump, whom they knew would hand them billions in tax breaks and a license to loot the country. Worse, this pizzaburger strategy caused voters to stay home by the millions, convinced that they couldn't trust Biden or Harris.

We're heading into another four years of planet-incinerating, human-rights-destroying, immigrant-pogroming, mass-imprisoning misery. The incoming dictator has promised to throw all kinds of people in prison, so maybe we should learn a little about how America's prolific, crowded, nightmare penitentiaries actually function.

David Skarbek is a political scientist who studies prison gangs. In a fascinating interview with Asterisk, he describes the forces that led to the rise of race-segregated prison gangs, from virtually nonexistent for 100 years to ubiquitous:

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/why-we-have-prison-gangs

It boils down to this: in small prisons, it's possible to enforce a social code among prisoners that maintains order. Each prisoner can keep track of the trustworthiness of others and of the safety risks they pose. But once we started building larger prisons, this system broke down, requiring hierarchical, authoritarian structures – gangs – to keep people in line. Gangs are brutal, but they also keep the peace, regulating financial disputes, contraband trade, and the use of violence.

Skarbek thinks that building more, smaller prisons would eliminate gangs – as would increasing the number of guards, which would give the institution the capacity to step in and fill the regulatory void filled by gangs. He's not saying prison gangs are good, but he's explaining why they emerged and why they have remained.

There is no pleasure quite like reading the work of top-flight scholars explaining their areas of research. That's why I subscribe to the RSS feed for Matthew Green's blog about cryptography. Green is a great explainer who works in fascinating areas.

In his latest post, Green talks about the way that AI interacts with end-to-end encryption. After decades of rising catastrophes, mobile device makers and cloud providers finally standardized on end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, meaning that your data in the cloud is so scrambled that the cloud provider can't even guess about what it is (which means that if the cloud gets breached, none of that data can be read by hackers or sold on the darknet):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/01/17/lets-talk-about-ai-and-end-to-end-encryption/

This works great for cloud storage, but it poses a serious impediment to cloud computing. You can't offload computationally intensive tasks onto someone else's giant data-center if you scramble your data so thoroughly that it can't be read or understood by the computers there. This is especially salient when we're talking about "AI," which involves a lot of data-processing that exceeds the capacity of your phone or laptop.

This presents a serious privacy risk, because it implies that AI companies are going to abandon the idea of end-to-end cloud encryption. They'll need the capacity to decrypt (and possibly retain) all the data you ask their "AI" services to munge in some way. Green uses this conundrum to discuss Apple's solution to this: a "trusted computing" server environment.

I've been fascinated (and horrified) by Trusted Computing ever since a group of Microsoft engineers came by EFF in 2002 to explain their plans for something called "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" (AKA "Palladium") to us:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The idea was to put a second, secure computer into every device. This "trusted platform module" (or, sometimes, "technical protection measure") would be tamper-evident and tamper-resistant, contain some factory-installed, non-modifiable cryptographic signing keys, and run an extremely limited set of programs. It would observe and record the code your computer ran, from the bootloader to the OS and on up.

Other computers elsewhere in the world could "challenge" your computer to prove that it was running an OS and programs that would behave in certain way (for example, that it would block screenshots of confidential messages). This challenge would include a long random number. Your computer's TPM would combine that number with hashes of all the other elements of your computer's operating environment – it's bootloader, OS, etc – and cryptographically sign that using its signing keys. This is then sent back to the other computer as a "remote attestation" about how your computer is configured.

Notably, it's an attestation that is outside of your own control – you can't override it or falsify it. That TPM in your computer isn't loyal to you, it doesn't take orders from you. It's a snitch that tells other people truthful things about your computer, including things you'd rather it not disclose.

Over the years, variations on this idea and its applications have popped up. TPMs aren't necessarily a second chip anymore – these days, they're more likely to be a "secure enclave" – a rectangle of logic gates on your computer's CPU that is designated as "secure" and subject to more strict testing and scrutiny than the rest of the chip. These secure enclaves are used to prevent you from installing a third-party app store on your games console or phone, and to prevent your car from being serviced by an independent mechanic.

But despite all these anti-user applications, Trusted Computing remains a fascinating subject. For example, you could use Trusted Computing to ask a remote technician to assess whether your phone had been infected with spyware, and the spyware (theoretically) couldn't hide from that helper.

This is how Apple proposes to solve the privacy/AI conundrum. Its remote AI servers are outfitted with their own TPMs, and before your phone sends them your data to be AIed, it can challenge the server to send it an attestation that proves that it is running software that will not leak or retain that data, or use it in any way other than for the task you're asking it to perform.

Apple calls this "Private Cloud Compute" and if it comes into widespread use, it'll be the first time in a quarter century that there is a major pro-user application for Trusted Computing, something the industry has touted as on the horizon since the first days of the second Gulf War.

That said, Green writes that he's "not thrilled" with Apple's privacy solution:

it still centralizes a huge amount of valuable data, and its security relies on Apple getting a bunch of complicated software and hardware security features right, rather than the mathematics of an encryption algorithm.

Nevertheless, this is way better than the approach of Apple's competitors, like Openai/Microsoft, who are just YOLOing it. Green points out that even if this works, it's only one of the many privacy issues raised by AI, notably the use of private information in AI training, which this does nothing for. He also worries that techniques like this will cause lawmakers to insist that "client-side scanning" (where your device runs a program that scans it constantly for illegal content and uploads anything suspicious to the police) can be done in a "privacy-preserving" way. It's not true, but it's easy to see how bad-faith would-be spies could spin, "There is a way to do some AI stuff in a more-private way" to "there are no privacy risks with this other AI stuff."

It's a gnarly issue, and like I say, it's one you can easily spend decades chewing on (or at least, one that I have spent decades chewing on). It's interesting how many of the fundamental tech policy questions have been with us since the start of the internet age. This week, I happened on a viral 1994 post explaining the difference between "the internet" and the promised "information superhighway":

https://www.wired.com/1994/11/q-what-is-the-information-superhighway/

It's not entirely prophetic, but it sure lands some blows that still sting, 30 years later:

It's just like the Internet, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * You can't post, and there's no killfile. * There's no alt.sex or alt.drugs. * The new rec.humor.funny has a laugh track. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes. * Everything is formatted to 40 columns for TVs. * The free software costs you US$2 per Mbyte to ftp, more for long distance. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like cable TV, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * The picture isn't as good. * There are 500 channels of pay-per-view and home shopping. * You can watch any episode of Gilligan's Island or any Al Gore speech for only $2. * There are no public-access channels. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like renting videos, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * There's only 1 percent of the selection. * There's no porn. * There's no pause, fast-forward, or rewind, and it costs you another $3.95 if you want to watch something twice. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like the telephone, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * There's no one to talk to. * Every number is a toll call. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

(Image: Jen, CC BY 2.0, cropped)

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/18/ragbag/#reading-pornhub-for-the-articles

[muffinmonstah-art]

It's been a thing of late that real digital artists are accused of being AI users that use AI tools to create their drawings. It already happened to popular established artists that I follow, Yuumei being the example that comes to mind right now.

It happened to me recently too. An user came out of nowhere and accused me of using AI to create this specific fanart. I'm now posting the steps I saved and shared on my Patreon the last two months as proof this is a digital drawing I created using PaintToolSai 2 and Photoshop (like all my other drawings) I can even explain the steps and tools I used to paint the drawing, it's no mistery.

-I created a linework layer over the raw sketch canvas to make the lineart

-I painted the drawing with a base generic bright color palette because I wanted this piece to look shiny and magical in the end.

-I used a darker tone for each one of the colors to add the shadows. I also used the degradation tool in Sai 2 to help add a subtle yellow shadow on the left side.

-I used a small fraction of a giant background sky picture and resized it behind the character as reference, then painted all over it to give it the form I liked. This scene is happening in a dream, so the sky looking a bit floaty with many clouds on different directions was intentional.

-Once all that was done, I opened Photoshop and used the tool Curves to re-adjust the color palette. Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves.

-At last, I used the gaussian blur tool to make the sky look blurry.

As you can see, Sakura doesn't have a bow in the back of her dress in the final version because I didn't like it, so I removed it manually.

It sucks that even the steps for digital drawings making are being faked by AI these days, so if anyone still have doubts, this is my tiktok and youtube accounts where I uploaded some of my speedpaint processes: https://www.tiktok.com/@mooniemonstah

It takes a lot of time to record and edit 8-14 hours of painting into 2 minutes of video, time I unfortunately don't have to record every single one of my drawings and post it on presentable pretty videos. But I have no problem doing that more often to continue prooving I'm a real person. It's sad that it had to end like this. We, real people that have been posting our art online for years now have to proove we exist and that our work is real because of AI.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Neural Nets, Walled Gardens, and Positive Vibes Only

the crystal spire at the center of the techno-utopian walled garden

Anyone who knows or even just follows me knows that as much as I love neural nets, I'm far from being a fan of AI as a corporate fad. Despite this, I am willing to use big-name fad-chasing tools...sometimes, particularly on a free basis. My reasons for this are twofold:

Many people don't realize this, but these tools are more expensive for the companies to operate than they earn from increased interest in the technology. Using many of these free tools can, in fact, be the opposite of "support" at this time. Corporate AI is dying, use it to kill it faster!

You can't give a full, educated critique of something's flaws and failings without engaging with it yourself, and I fully intend to rip Dall-E 3, or more accurately the companies behind it, a whole new asshole - so I want it to be a fair, nuanced, and most importantly personally informed new asshole.

Now, much has already been said about the biases inherent to current AI models. This isn't a problem exclusive to closed-source corporate models; any model is only as good as its dataset, and it turns out that people across the whole wide internet are...pretty biased. Most major models right now, trained primarily on the English-language internet, present a very western point of view - treating young conventionally attractive white people as a default at best, and presenting blatantly misinformative stereotypes at worst. While awareness of the issue can turn it into a valuable tool to study those biases and how they intertwine, the marketing and hype around AI combined with the popular idea that computers can't possibly be biased tends to make it so they're likely to perpetuate them instead.

This problem only gets magnified when introduced to my mortal enemy-

If I never see this FUCKING dog again it will be too soon-

Content filters.

Theoretically, content filters exist to prevent some of the worst-faith uses of AI - deepfakes, true plagiarism and forgery, sexual exploitation, and more. In practice, many of them block anything that can be remotely construed as potentially sexual, violent, or even negative in any way. Frequently banned subjects include artistic nudity or even partial nudity, fight scenes, anything even remotely adjacent to horror, and still more.

The problems with this expand fractally.

While the belief that AI is capable of supplanting all other art forms, let alone should do so, is...far less widespread among its users than the more reactionary subset of its critics seem to believe (and in fact arguably less common among AI users than non-users in the first place; see again: you cannot give a full, educated critique of something's failings without engaging with it yourself), it's not nonexistent - and the business majors who have rarely if ever engaged with other forms of art, who make up a good percentage of the executives of these companies, often do fall on that side, or at least claim to in order to make more sales (but let's keep the lid on that can of worms for now).

When this ties to existing online censorship issues, such as a billionaire manchild taking over Twitter to "help humanity" (read: boost US far-right voices and promote and/or redefine hate speech), or arcane algorithms on TikTok determining what to boost and deboost leading to proliferation of neologisms to soften and obfuscate "sensitive" subjects (of which "unalive" is frequently considered emblematic), including such horrible, traumatizing things as...the existence of fat people, disabled people, and queer people (where the censorship is claimed to be for their benefit, no less!), the potential impact is apparent: while the end goal is impossible, in part because AI is not, in fact, capable of supplanting all other forms of art, what we're seeing is yet another part of a continuing, ever more aggressive push for sanitizing what kinds of ideas people can express at all, with the law looking to only make it worse rather than better through bills such as KOSA (which you can sign a petition against here).

And just like the other forms of censorship before and alongside it, AI content filtering targets the most vulnerable in society far more readily than it targets those looking to harm them. The filters have no idea what makes something an expression of a marginalized identity vs. what makes it a derogatory statement against that group, or an attempt at creating superficially safe-for-work fetish art - so, they frequently err on the side of removing anything uncertain. Boys in skirts and dresses are frequently blocked, presumably because they're taken for fetish art. Results of prompts about sadness or loneliness are frequently blocked, presumably because they may promote self harm, somehow. In my (admittedly limited) experiment, attempts at generating dark-skinned characters were blocked more frequently than attempts at generating light-skinned ones, presumably because the filter decided that it was racist to [checks notes] ...acknowledge that a character has a different skin tone than the default white characters it wanted to give me. Facial and limb differences are often either erased from results, or blocked presumably on suspicion of "violent content".

But note that I say "presumably" - the error message doesn't say on what grounds the detected images are "unsafe". Users are left only to speculate on what grounds we're being warned.

But what makes censorship of AI generated work even more alarming, in the context of the executive belief that it can render all other art forms obsolete, is that other forms of censorship only target where a person can say such earth-shaking, controversial things as "I am disabled and I like existing" or "I am happy being queer" or "mental health is important" or "I survived a violent crime" - you can be prevented from posting it on TikTok, but not from saying it to a friend next to you, let alone your therapist. AI content filtering, on the other hand, aims to prevent you from expressing it at all.

This becomes particularly alarming when you recall one of the most valuable use cases for AI generation: enabling disabled people to express themselves more clearly, or in new forms. Most people can find other workarounds in the form of more conventional, manual modes of expression, sure, but no amount of desperation can reverse hand paralysis that prevents a person from holding a pen, nor a traumatic brain injury or mental disability that blocks them from speaking or writing in a way that's easy to understand. And who is one of the most frequently censored groups? Disabled people.

So, my question to Bing and OpenAI is this: in what FUCKING universe is banning me from expressing my very existence "protecting" me?

Bad dog! Stop breaking my shit and get the FUCK out of my way!

Generated as a gift for a friend who was even more frustrated with that FUCKING dog than I was

All images - except the FUCKING dog - generated with Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[weirdusernamesuggestion]

Now is the time to delete tiktok.

If you are like me, you have hundreds of saved recipes, fashion inspiration, workouts, tutorials, etc, on tiktok that you don't want to lose. This tutorial let's you batch download directly from a tiktok users page on a PC or MAC or even Linux. If you want to download YOUR saved videos, you must make those folders public first. You can use this for your own account, and any public accounts.

Tiktok is going to become progressively more censored and influenced in the coming weeks, based on what we're already seeing. It's time to take what you need from the app, and get off of it if you can. This tool made it much easier to leave tiktok because all the collections I've curated are now safely on my hard-drive! I have my videos, and my saved folders, and everything I need to comfortably exit the app before it gets worse. You can message me if you need help with the tutorial!

[mariacallous]

The patriarch of a right-wing Canadian family of 11 had had just about enough of gay people in his country. “We didn't feel safe for our children there in the future anymore,” father Arend Feenstra told Russian media. “There's a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don't agree with that they teach there now, and we wanted to get away from that for our children.”

Yeah, if there’s one place that’s just not safe for kids, it’s Canada. Russia would be soooo much safer. 

So Arend (and wife Anneesa) sold everything they had to move to sunny Russia and raise eight of their nine kids with “orthodox” values. They also gladly took donations on their social media platform from fellow right-wingers, all so they could live in Vladimir Putin’s wonderland. Russian officials assured them that they would work with them to get them established, and even help them get a farm. They did all of this just three weeks ago; long story short, they lived happily ever after. 

Except they didn’t. 

First, according to the family, the Russian bank where they moved the proceeds from selling their farm and belongings? It immediately froze their assets. The amount of money seemed suspicious, Arend states in a Feb. 9 video. I guess it would, since so many Russians outside of Putin’s circle are dirt poor. As a result, the family didn’t have money to live on—apparently those nice Russian officials offering to help them had disappeared.

Since no one in the family speaks Russian, they’ve also had a bear of a time trying to argue for their money—because Russia doesn’t require any bank, or any business, to hire English translators. In the meantime, they discovered that Russia is a pretty damn miserable place to be right now.

TikTok user Ukrainian.Networking translated a Russian Federation Reported Media story in a snarky post. 

The Russian reporter noted that Anneesa spoke her mind in a since-deleted video on the family’s “Countryside Acres” YouTube channel.

"I'm very disappointed in this country at this point. I'm ready to jump on a plane and get out of here. We've hit the first snag where you have to engage logic in this country and it's very, very frustrating."

Hoooo boy. They just arrived and already she’s insulted Russia. Now, I’m not saying Russia doesn’t have freedom of the press, but it’s really just freedom to praise Putin and the country he controls. Anything that resembles criticism in Russia is NOT taken as kindly as it is in our godless Western dystopias. I’m also not suggesting that Russian officials paid the family a visit to remind them of where they are, but I will point out that Arendquickly posted an apology video to the Countryside Acres channel, saying that his wife misspoke and they’d deleted the video. 

In that video, he reiterated that no, Russia is really, really great (subtext: “Please don’t push me out of a window”) and he spoke of his hope to resolve the issue with the bank. Commenters weren’t so sure, or kind. They pointed out that the bank will likely never release their funds and it is more likely that he will be recognized as a foreign agent.

At this point, I’m not sure the Countryside Acres farming gig is going to work out. Patriarch Arend should have agreed to be used as a tool for Russian state media. I mean, if you are going to be a Russian Asset, might as well go all-in. 

I’m willing to bet that living in a country that grants gay people basic civil rights might not be looking so bad now. I was wondering if the family is desperately trying to split, so I looked up how difficult it is to leave Russia. According to the BBC, you can leave “as long as you have money and have not been called up to the army.” 

Even if only for his kids’ sakes, let’s hope Arend’s only lost his money.

And I’ll end with this charming reprise of a German eurodisco tribute to Moscow, originally released in 1979. (English lyrics here)

“Welcome to Moscow!” At least the song is catchy.

Comment Award goes to Laughing Gravy: “I’ll bet back home they used to whine about immigrants who don’t know the language, who have no money, who expect the government to hand them a house and a job, and who complain when they don’t get everything they want.”

[meret118]

But on Tuesday, the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals released an opinion reviving the mother’s lawsuit, allowing her case against TikTok to proceed to trial. TikTok may not have filmed the video that encouraged Nylah to hang herself, but the platform “makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users,” Judge Patty Shwartz wrote in the appellate court’s opinion, “and by doing so, is engaged in its own first-party speech.”

. . .

“My best guess is that every platform that uses a recommendation algorithm that could plausibly count as expressive activity or expressive speech woke up in their general counsel’s office and said, ‘Holy Moly,'” says Leah Plunkett, faculty at Harvard Law School and author of Sharenthood, a book about protecting kids online. “If folks did not wake up [Wednesday] thinking that, they should be.”

Advocates of Section 230 have long held the broad liability shield is necessary for the internet to exist and evolve as a societal tool; if websites were responsible for monitoring the heaps of content that hundreds of millions of independent users create, they contend, lawsuits would devastate platforms’ coffers and overwhelm the judicial system.“

If you have fewer instances in which 230 applies, then platforms will be exposed to more liability, and that ultimately harms the Internet user,” says Sophia Cope, senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and innovation non-profit. A narrower interpretation of Section 230 immunity would make platforms “not want to host third party content, or severely limit what users can post,” Cope says, adding that the shift would amount to platforms engaging in “preemptive censorship” to protect their bottom lines.

But critics of Section 23o’s current scope say the statute has been interpreted far too leniently and that companies should at least sometimes be responsible for dangerous content their online platforms disseminate. In its monumental ruling this week, the appeals court said that when platforms curate harmful content, they—not their third-party users—may be engaging in a form of “expressive activity” for which they can be sued.

[cacodaemonia]

I've seen a lot of people panicking, getting really angry, and sharing blatant misinformation about this upcoming lore.fm app, so I wanted to share this update I found from the creator.

I'm not defending it because I haven't seen exactly how it works yet, but from what I can tell, it's similar to a desktop program such as Calibre, which is what I (and many other people) often use for text-to-speech to read fics.

Calibre downloads the fic (just like ANYONE can download fics from AO3, mind you) into the computer from a URL provided by the user, and reads it from that file with the wonky robotic voice. I don't know if the lore.fm app even downloads the pages users provide for it to read, or if it just accesses them on a case-by-case basis, but I suspect it's the latter because otherwise, they would need to pay for a LOT of cloud storage.

Maybe the app is totally shady, but it could also be an attempt to make an accessibility tool for mobile screen reading that doesn't suck. The project definitely seems clumsily-executed, and they should really be providing more information beyond their TOS, privacy policy, and tiktok videos, but that doesn't automatically make them nefarious. It's also unclear to me if they are simply 'marketing' this as a better way to listen to fics that haven't been podficced, or if it can be used on any website, but I think it's the latter? I don't have a tiktok account and I don't feel like sifting through a bunch of videos, so. 🤷

Anyway, before you send them angry emails or messages on social media or share rumors, please consider looking into this on your own rather than relying on wild speculation.

Oh, and here's a reddit post from someone who emailed @ao3org and got a reply from them regarding the legality.

EDIT: looks like the app is shutting down. I'm still not sure what their goal was, exactly. Such a weird situation.