trashcankitty12

[trashcankitty12]

Patreon is at it once again...

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i'm holding a gun to Blik's head, if they even fucking think about going down Visa and Mastercard route--

[trashcankitty12]

Heads up for anyone considering moving from Patreon to SubscribeStar because of Patreon going after accounts again.

You might get hit with a age verification wall like I did. So if any of my favorite creators move there, then I can't support them anymore and see their content.

[trashcankitty12]

Anonymous Just Released A Chilling Video “The UK Has Fallen Watch This B…

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the internet safety act is bullshit. i forgot what it's called.

this is a really bad rage filled tumblr post that isn't going to make sense it's just me getting really pissed at the government and using what's left of my soon-to-be-revoked freedom of speech.

also sorry for all the swearing im really fed up and annoyed i really didn't want to make my blog have ANY politics involved or on it whatsoever i wanted it to be an escape to look at silly art of ocs and terraria stuff. I'm so sorry.

i fucking hate it. (internet safety act that's affecting youtube and stuff like that) I'm a minor, hell, im a teen. a teen under 16. YEAH. I'm 13 and two months, barely old enough to have an account ANYWHERE. might as well say it since the internet will steal all of my data anyway. they already know this and you could probs look it up with a google search.

go on and tell me: "you shouldn't be on the internet" "you're too young to be on this hellsite." "this law will protect you." "this law will prevent other teens from experiencing suicidal thoughts."

THE FUCK IT WONT. THE INTERNET (mostly tumblr, it has cultivated a feed of supportive friends for me <3 love y'all) IN GENERAL IS MY SAFE SPACE. IT'S MY ESCAPE FROM THE SHITTY WORLD WE LIVE IN.

i feel, me personally, the internet makes me feel better it helps me connect with friends outside of school time, it lets me share my passion with others and find new fandoms be freely cringe. it's a nice place FOR ME most of the time. yes i DO know that ppl get cyber bullied all the time and it gets really bad.

is the internet also shitty? yes. it is. a lot actually, but it's better than the real world imo.

let's look at the: "this law will prevent other teens from experiencing suicidal thoughts." bc that's what i mostly want to yap about bc i hate it the most. I'm suicidal ok? it's awkward to admit because i know someone will just say "you're too young to feel that way wait till you're an adult!" WELL IF I DIE NOW IT WON'T GET ANY WORSE BITCH! HAHA!!!:i don't want to live, i wouldn't mind getting thanos snapped out of fucking existence. Why? it's a mix of my self hatred and the shit world.

the THOUGHT of knowing damn well i will NEVER be able to afford basic human needs no matter how hard i work no matter now hard i try to please my employers, meet expectations, that the government wants people like me dead, like im saying trans, gay, LGBTQIA+ homies, ethnic people, people who are not white, disabled people, and many more; i'm not a human to the government not human! i'm just a product, i'm just more money in their pockets! Fuck the government! I LIVE IN A DYSTOPIAN NIGHTMARE WITH NO WAY OUT OTHER THAN DEATH BECAUSE APARENTLY 1984 IS A FUCKIN HOW-TO GUIDE AND NOT A CAUTIONARY TALE! WOOHOO I LOVE LIVING HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA! I FEEL SO VALUED AND SO WORTH SOMETHING! THANK YOU HOSTILE WORLD!

i don't wanna be a scapegoat for shitty government policies that censor my opinions and mass-harvest my data to sell. i don't want that. . . i don't want that, i don't wanna be here anymore. . .

[trashcankitty12]

Getting too anxious about all of this

Neal Mohan is the YouTube CEO

I even went to the app store and reviewed them

Edit: Here's this

400+ on Excessive censorship!

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I really think we should stop saying "kid-friendly" and start saying "ad-friendly". We shouldn't indulge these companies and their excuses anymore. I also think that continuing to pretend that this is about "protecting the children" pushes a lot of the blame onto kids and teens, who don't have the political power to push through any of this censorship legislature. Corporations and governments are to blame.

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Use recycled cardboard to make postcards! It’s less than a dollar to send one 😎

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I love folklore so much because depending on the location and era it comes from it's either the most terrifying concept or the dumbest thing you've ever heard

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So in addition to KOSA making a return (CALL YOUR CONGRESS PERSON AND TELL THEM TO VOTE AGAINST IT BTW!!!) the Senate has just introduced TWO internet censorship bills!

The Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors Act (Block BEARD Act)

And the equally ridiculous and ineffective Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act

Both of these acts seek to force Internet Service Providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said this is ridiculous and ineffective, that site-blocking bills only serve to censor the internet and make it more unsafe for everyone. AND THE'YRE RIGHT!!!

Piracy has existed until the dawn of time. And pirates will find ways around bills like these with no issue. But these bills are still dangerous and essentially pave the way for your ISP to block whatever our government thinks is "Objectionable". These DINOSAURS who dont understand the internet have no BUSINESS creating legislation around it. This is a bald faced attempt to block the internet for users for corporate gain. Wanna know how I know that?

The people that have endorsed the bill

Are all

People

Who

Would benefit from a bill like this. CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES!! TELL THEM YOU DO NOT SUPPORT EITHER OF THESE BILLS! OR KOSA WHILE YOURE AT IT! TELL THEM YOU OPPOSE INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN ALL FORMS!

We will not sit idly by while these GHOULS try and block and censor a free Internet!

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES! - Here's a link to find and call your representatives!

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Keep an eye on who agrees to this; with a cast this size there are going to be a lot of actors we're all going to be very unhappy with real soon

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Governments are conducting a sneak attack on the internet and we’re about to lose what we didn’t even know we had.

In the UK, they may have already lost it. The Online Safety Act, which was smuggled into British law on the pretext of restricting access to porn, went live last week. Already it has led to Spotify, Reddit, Twitter/X, YouTube and a load of other websites blocking access unless you upload ID for age verification. The law, which the UK government initially said would only apply to adult content, was written in such a broad way that it brings a huge amount of internet traffic into its orbit. For example, and you can read it here, the law prohibits, without ID verification, access to any content which “realistically depicts serious violence against a fictional creature or the serious injury of a fictional creature.” So, cartoons. SpongeBob. Tom & Jerry. Roadrunner. It would be a joke, but unlike SpongeBob, it’s really not funny. It also prohibits access to any type of "violent content” meaning large amounts of graphic content from the holocaust of Gaza is no longer free to access on sites like Reddit and Twitter/X. Maybe the timing is purely coincidental, but it really doesn’t feel like it.

Because sites don’t want to be liable for showing adult content, even in the form of song lyrics or a comically large hammer to the head of a cartoon cat, the legally expedient thing for them to do is require verification. To verify ages, these sites are using a variety of shady verification companies, some of which have connections to the security state, with a number of them owned and operated by ex-Israeli spies. (Yes I realise this is becoming a common theme).

...

There are of course non-Israeli owned verification companies who may not be passing all your details onto the Mossad to check if you’ve ever said free Palestine. But there are no restrictions on what these companies can do with your data, no laws on what data they can collect and who they can sell it to. And if you care about not living under fascism, this is important. More on that later.

It’s not just the UK. A blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media is due to come into force in Australia by the end of the year. The only way to prevent access to under-16s is to know everyone’s age, so the Australian law requires anyone who wants to access a social media site - Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter/X, TikTok - to verify themselves using government ID. Law makers in New Zealand are pushing a similar ban.

Beginning next week, YouTube is rolling out ID and age verification for a small number of users. The idea is to test and refine processes before rolling it out globally. States across the US have enacted age verification laws and there is a push for a federal bill to cover the whole country. The EU is pushing ahead with an identikit bill to the UK’s. All of course under the guise of protecting children from adult content.

It’s clever to make the public case for verification hinge on the right to watch porn. Because who wants to defend PornHub? Who wants to look like they’re arguing in favour of kids watching porn? But as we can see from the UK, porn is the trojan horse. Adult content is so broad a category it can come to mean anything remotely violent or sexual. The real goal is the de-anonymisation of the internet. The objective is to know what everyone is doing and where they are, all of the time. Governments know pretty much everything now about your offline life. Where you live, the car you drive, the job you have, the tax you pay. The network of license plate capturing CCTV that saturates most western countries means they can, if they want, know where you’re going as well. And if you leave the country, they know that too. The internet is too anarchistic in this sense. It’s one of the last private spaces in our highly surveilled lives. And governments were always going to want to find ways to prise open a space they couldn’t see into. As the tech lawyer Eric Goldman says, ‘governments always want to know more about us.’ This new drive towards total knowledge, he argues, poses one of the greatest threats to privacy we’ve ever seen.

Most of us have never known true freedom. It seems unbelievable now, but there was a time, barely one hundred years ago, when you didn’t even need to have a passport to cross a border. A time when people weren’t stopped from going where they wanted to go, and staying there for however long they liked, based on arbitrary ideas of nationality. Now borders are harder than ever, we have biometric passports, fingerprint and retina scans at ports and airports, and the idea of nation is culturally dominant. And we’re constantly being tracked on the pretext of protecting the nation.

Using that same pretext in the digital realm, it’s not hyperbolic to say we’re going to lose the internet as we’ve known it. If these laws aren’t stopped, and the ones on the books scaled back or repealed entirely, accessing the internet will be another chore, another pain in the arse, and a further large chipping away of our civil liberties. As Taylor Lorentz, the only journalist on the left covering any of this says, the left ‘have completely dropped the ball.’ The discourse about online censorship and freedom has so far been dominated entirely by the right. This is not unusual. Civil liberties fights, especially those concerning broadly drawn ideas of “freedom”, have in the last decade or so, become the almost exclusive purview of the right.

This needs to change.

Too many people will welcome these censorship laws as necessary protections without thinking through the consequences. Others will excuse them on the basis of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear.’ Many will wave it all away as a non-issue, something only to worry about if you’re a criminal.

Firstly, you can only think this way if you are utterly naive, believe politics is a static process and that bad actors, state and private, don’t, and won’t, utilise bad laws. (Can anyone really believe nations financing a holocaust that has killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children, care about children.) Secondly, and relatedly, governments decide, and regularly expand, who they consider a criminal. For example, the UK’s Labour government have decided saying the words Palestine and Action together in one sentence is now a terrorist offence. Write those words on the internet under your real name, and you will probably have a knock on your door from agents of the security state. In this case, terror legislation was expanded to make criminals out of peaceful protestors. It’s not exactly a stretch to imagine a future where the ability for governments to see all your online activity is utilised to criminalise dissenting political speech and enforce a total police state. Protest and dissent is a foundational tool for citizens to force changes in material conditions. Without it, change comes only at the behest of the elite class.

Thirdly, and as Goldman explains in his conversation with Taylor, the potential for ID theft and fraud is huge. He provides a hypothetical scenario where a viral app targeted at kids is deliberately created by thieves to breach adult content rules and coax millions of kids to hand over their IDs. In the name of protecting children you've created a perfect honey pot for their identities to be harvested and abused.

And even if apps aren’t set up for this purpose, there are constant data breaches by incompetent companies running websites and services. Even if apps and verification companies don’t sell the IDs or hand them over to governments, they will get hacked and all those IDs will end up on the dark web where malicious actors including governments will buy them and use them.

Finally, the burden of controlling what children do online should not fall to governments. It should fall to parents. Entire societies should not bear the price. And it strikes me that in many ways it will only create more problems for parents. In the name of online protection, kids are now going to be sending their official IDs, complete with their faces, to random companies and apps, some of whom are bound to have malicious intent.

Overall, these laws are another signal of the illiberal drift we’re seeing across the west, a reactionary puritanical sentiment that, politically, can only lead to authoritarianism and fascism.

So what can we do about it? At a systemic level, speak up, write to your political representatives, to your MPs, make your opposition known.

At a personal level, there are a number of things we can do to maintain our privacy and anonymity in the face of these crack-downs. I’m not a cyber security expert, so I spoke to someone who is for their top five tips. In order of importance, this is what they said.

Get a VPN.

In the context of age verification laws, this is the obvious one. A VPN reroutes your internet traffic through a remote server, providing you with a different IP address to the one assigned by your internet service provider. While a VPN doesn't fully anonymise you, it can be part of making you anonymous. For most people, it'll increase privacy significantly by hiding your location, enabling you to choose which country you want virtually to operate in. For now, with age verification only in certain countries, you can skirt restrictions and censorship with a VPN. The expert stresses that it can’t be any VPN, as some are compromised and some collect and sell data. In their opinion the best is paid Proton VPN (although there is a reasonably functional free version). They also recommend Mullvad VPN as a good option. This website provides more options and compares different VPNs. They emphasise however that having a VPN doesn’t make you invisible. “People need defence in depth.”

Switch to Brave browser.

The expert calls this a no-brainer. Brave (which is free) blocks trackers, fingerprints and ads, and this is especially important they say, as 1. lots of malware is delivered via the ad network and 2. ad companies are an extension of the surveillance state. Ad companies hoover up information and sell it to whoever wants to pay for it, including governments. They say that laws preventing government agencies accessing certain digital data can be skirted if that agency purchases the information from a commercial third party. Ads, they say, are also an influence machine, micro targeting people to push them down ideological holes. Also, they say to ditch Google Chrome. And, once considered on a par with Brave, they would no longer recommend Firefox (which gets 90% of its revenue now from Google) or Mozilla. They add that if you only get Brave to have an ad-free YouTube experience, like it’s 2009 again, it’s worth it.

Use Signal, not WhatsApp.

They are strong on this one. “Meta products including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram’s messaging service pretend they are private and secure but they aren’t. It’s a complete lie. They regularly hand over data to police and security forces. The WhatsApp claim of end-to-end encryption is not what it seems. The messages themselves are encrypted, but unlike Signal, none of the metadata, such as who you’re messaging, the time of those messages, your profile image and who you’re in groups with, is encrypted. And metadata is what gets people killed. Signal does everything WhatsApp does and is infinitely safer. There is no reason to still be on WhatsApp.” They also advise against Telegram as a messenger.

Use a password manager

A password manager autogenerates and stores passwords for you. You only need to remember one master password to access the manager itself, then from there, everything else is done for you. The best is Proton Pass. Set it up, install it as a browser extension and once installed it will begin randomly and automatically generating and saving passwords for you. “Most people have one or two passwords for everything,” the expert says. “Hackers find one password and spray hundreds of sites with it, regularly leading to individuals losing tens or hundreds of accounts at once to the hackers. A password manager stops this.”

Switch from Outlook or Gmail to Proton Mail

“Microsoft and Google,” they say, “have become part of the surveillance state.” With Proton Mail your emails are encrypted. You can do a one click import of all emails, and a one click forwarding rule from old email addresses. They emphasise however that “email itself as a protocol is outdated and insecure. Emails should be reserved for communicating with companies, while everything else such as talking to your friends, family, and comrades should be via Signal or in person. Signal's encryption is much stronger, but if you are going to email, use Proton Mail.”

The expert makes a final point: “This is about digital self defence. We need to take preventative action taken to safeguard our data and ourselves. And we really need to stop giving out this data now so it's not used to round us up in the future.”

The de-anonymising of our online activity will provide the perfect architecture for end-stage fascism. And across the west, we are moving ever-closer to this stage.

We still have a chance to stop it.

Where laws are already up and running, it’s still early days. We can adopt the above tips, disrupt their efforts and refuse to comply.

On this one, we have agency, and we have the tools.

Let’s use them.

(If you would like to get in touch with the cyber security expert I spoke to for this piece, they can be contacted at this link. They welcome questions and can provide more advice.)

[trashcankitty12]

anyway. onto better things

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Found a change.org petition for YouTube’s ai bs. Here’s the link if anyone wants it!

[trashcankitty12]

I HAVE FOUND A YOUTUBE ALTERNATIVE!!!!

if you've been on YouTube you've likely seen all of the people who hate it, either for demonetization, excessive ads, copyright abuse, ai slop, short form content, and even the looming threat of age verification, and im here to tell you that we no longer have to deal with any of it anymore! there is now officially an open source, alternative. glomble.com its currently down due to the user amount doubling all in one day but they are currently working on it. WHEN THE AGE VERIFICATION UPDATE HAPPENS PLEASE DO NOT GIVE GOOGLE YOU PERSONAL INFORMATION! USE GLOMBLE INSTEAD! lets show these greedy corporations how we feel about this stupid shit.

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i'm still mad about that post thats like "humans USED to be able to memoriize long epic poems, but we no longer have Bards so our memories arent as good" boy shut the fuck up. a good chunk of people i went to high school with had the entirety of hamilton memorized for fun and they weren't even autistic.

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(pa kent giving The Talk voice) see when a bull and a cow love each other very much, that’s how a calf is born [remembers his son came from space] of course if the bull comes from another farm, the cow might not end up taking, but that’s alright [remembers clark might be gay] sometimes bulls also love other bulls [remembers clark is an alien again] but if the bull is from another farm, he might have a calf if he fools around with bulls from here so he should be careful.