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silveradeptLet us begin with what might very well be a common situation, where a prominent author gets locked out of her own work because she uses Google Docs to draft, share, and gather feedback, and Google had determined, through it's unknowable proprietary algorithms and other data, that the documents or its content are "inappropriate" and can no longer be shared.
We put this right next to the state of Louisiana's demand, upon pain of cutting off library funding, that all libraries in their state institute censorship on their under-18 readers and require a guardian adult to give their permission to access materials that are queer, have queer people in them, or are things that white conservatives might find uncomfortable. In both cases, there are arbitrary decisions being made about what is "appropriate" and who should be allowed access to them, by entities that believe themselves unaccountable and that they do not have to describe the methods by which something is determined to be "inappropriate" and restricted. The problem is that the legislators of Lousiana are far more accountable to the people that will be affected by them than the people at Google who designed whatever algorithm caught the romance writer. The Google folks also need to be appropriately accountable when their decisions cause problems like this.
We can't expect everyone to follow the example of Courtney Gore, who got herself elected to a school board promising to root out all the leftist indoctrination, and then actually read the curriculum and the documents and found out there wasn't any of the stuff that her right-wing backers claimed was there. Not everyone will have the dedication to actually read the material, and then change their minds based on what they've seen. And several of the people who are campaigning are doing so knowing full well the thing they're supposedly going to fight isn't there.
Another one of those "wish the US wasn't exporting its hangups everywhere" situations, where sex education is set to be limited only to children nine and above, and explicit talk for even greater ages in English schools, as opposed to, say, managing some form of age-appropriate conversations about such things. Because children much younger than nine have questions and thoughts about themselves and their identities, and deserve to have age-appropriate conversations about those things, yes, in schools if they don't have people at home who want to take on that situation.
A summary of just how over a barrel libraries are when it comes to the pricing of their electronic materials, and how little anyone in the pipeline of supplying library e-books is able or willing to do something other than continue the gouging and extortion. Overdirve and Hoopla, of course, disclaim that they're not the ones causing the problems, it's the publishers. The publishers, of course, will make up whatever excuse they want to justify the extortion, and be reasonably confident they won't find themselves on the wrong end of the Copyright Office or pointed legislation that tells them they can sell to libraries at the rates and terms they would sell to end-users or they can be sanctioned in ways that will hurt. And while this gets wrangled, more and more library budget space gets allocated to paying the extortion ransoms, because e-books are really very popular and well-used. The librarians are also trying to prevent your browsing data and history from being sucked up by resource providers and used in other contexts, including possibly being transferred from one product owned by the conglomerate to another product and building profiles on you that can be used for tracking, surveillance, or trying to tip off law enforcement about you.
In a different vein, the one where people with websites try to show to others what might be good contact points or updates on themselves, adding /about, /ideas, and /now to a site to describe yourself, what big concepts and ideas you have and want to work on, and what projects and/or life things you are currently working on now, (where /now also has some of its own directories where people can see what is the now in other people's lives.) In addition to those ideas, /interests is suggested as another point of connection between people with websites, so they can talk with each other about shared interests.
Why do it this way, with webpages, rather than with social media posts? To prevent getting locked into one service, or being algorithmically defeated, and because before such things as social media, this was the way that people with their own websites and web pages would communicate about their interests to others and possibly make contacts over e-mail. It's very much an IndieWeb aesthetic, but also, putting it on your own site also makes it more permanent than any of the instances that you might be working social media on, as well. Because one of the things we have figured out about the eras of social media and instant messaging is that many services only exist as long as there is the money behind it.
Further in this vein of making your own spaces, a call to rewild the Internet and make networks and spaces and our own things to break the control of those who have turned it into a factory farm, which includes a suggestion to produce new web browsers and ways of using the network, rather than using Google's products, Microsoft's products, and Apple's products to do so, and to break the dependency those browsers have on big tech companies and the money they provide for development in exchange for places of prominence or the setting of the default search engine in those browsers. So even when we use Firefox, there's a good chance Google money went into it to make Google the default search engine. (I also like the idea of forcing interoperability, so that you're not locked into using a walled garden's product to connect with other people on the network, and about sending Bourke's belief in anti-trust only being used when it raised consumer prices to the dust bin.)
A reminder that the prison population is often one of the least served by library services, has the most restrictions on their ability to use library services, and library services in prisons is often an afterthought to other things that are deemed more important, even though library and education services are some of the most valuable and most likely to help an incarcerated person both serve out their sentence and have useful skills to get them employed and stay out of recidivism.
A deep dive into the world of the people who repair the undersea cables that keep the world connected, and how the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami meant having to do a lot of repair and thinking on their feet to keep the world connected. It's impressive, but it's also an industry that doesn't have a whole lot of people, vessels, and resources devoted to the maintenance of these crucial fiber-optic links. We know that maintenance is not one of the things that gets adequately budgeted for, but this is one of the situations where not budgeting properly for the maintenance could mean a lot more in costs of lost business and connectivity.
The account of a person who underwent gender confirmation surgery, the pain that she went through, the costs that were involved, and the feelings that were present throughout. Which was a lot in all of those categories.
Anti-war protesters who occupied the library building at Portland State University were receptive to the request of the university archivist to keep the special collections secured and unharmed during the protest. Which, y'know, sticks a spoke into the wheel of the idea that the protesters are not reasonable or are only interested in destruction to make their point. Even after the police were deployed to remove the protesters, the collections themselves remained secured and most of the materials were undamaged. (Which is not to say there was no damage, but that it was not the rare collections or the books that were the things that were damaged.)
The Eurovision Song Contest this year had a lot of strong opinions expressed and allegations fired off for this year's ESC, many of which had to do with Israel's participation and behavior in the contest.
Panera is removing the drinks they had on their menu that contained most of the recommended limit of caffeine in them in their 20 or 30 ounce cup variety, after being sued for wrongful deaths in relation to persons who consumed the beverages and then died.
Continuing to adapt human infrastructure to facilitate nature doing what it does best, this time with adder tunnels for snakes to mix.
In technology, a crawl of nearly 100,000 websites in the jurisdiction of the European Union found more than a majority of them had at least one violation of what is supposed to happen with regard to cookies and the ability to reject them and have that rejection stick, including a reporting that nearly two-thirds of the websites that have an option to reject cookies set them anyway even after the rejection is selected.
Those who release under copyleft licenses or F(L)OSS licenses or similar are not in a supplier relationship or any other relationship with those who use the code. Because if they were, the correct response to being asked to fix and maintain that as a supplier out of the goodness of their heart is "no, fuck you, pay me." Tidelift offers some thoughts about how you can successfully pay maintainers, many of which are about paying a maintainer to maintain, rather than donating or dropping money for new features that also will have to be maintained.
Using new methods for attempting to read scrolls preserved but fragile from Herculaneum, an account of Plato's final hours and burial site has been retrieved. Technology manages to find new ways of recovering things that were preserved but thought unreadable. Very impressive.
Problems continue for Boeing, but this one is members of the company reported required tests as being not done or done improperly and reported as completed on work logs. The FAA is investigating, and I suspect there will be heads rolling if the allegations are substantiated and the specific personnel can be identified.
Tesla continues to lay off more staff from the company, to the point where the total layoffs through all of the rounds so far may constitute 20 percent of the company's headcount. And this is while new things about the ugly genital substitute vehicle surface, including decisions made that are exactly opposite of what safety would demand. And we find out that Tesla employees were saving, memeing, and sharing the pictures and video captured by the car's external and internal cameras, although it appears only among themselves, rather than more widely. At the same time, if the process is anything like the indirect, nightmarish way that someone can turn off data collection and transmission in a Honda car is any example, basically any car after a certain model year is likely to be collecting this kind of sensitive data and then doing whatever they like with it. (Most likely sending it to your insurance company so they can change your rates.) And while it might be possible to turn data collection and sharing off on certain vehicles, it's not easy and the car nags you (or likely will) to turn it back on if you actually do succeed at turning off data sharing. This particular situation also makes it highly suspicious that the data collected truly is anonymized and can't be easily traced back to a particular vehicle and owner.
After having done the firing of at least one division because the CEO didn't like their manager, Tesla attempted to rehire the division that had been laid off. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the laid-off people went "No." or tried to negotiate a better pay package as a condition of their return. (There's also the problem that if you were looking to purchase a less-expensive Tesla from the rental car company Hertz, you may want to make absolutely sure that all the damage done to the vehicle, internal and external, is spotted before buying, as someone found out their rental fleet Tesla had a damaged battery that would have taken tens of thousands of dollars to repair.
After programming answers (primarily) site StackOverflow announced a partnership with OpenAI to use the corpus of the site's questions and answers to train ChatGPT, the users who did not want their work used for confabulation machines attempted to edit or delete their answers to questions, and found themselves banned from changing their answers and their accounts suspended because that change was apparently a Terms of Service violation, and StackOverflow needed to ensure that the cash cow they were trying to slaughter would still be sufficiently fatted for the partnership. As you might expect, having found out they could not exercise control over their own data, the users are likely to make a mass exodus from the site and set themselves up somewhere else to provide useful information to others, in ways that will not be obviously monetized. Or, if they are, presumably will not be monetized to train a machine to confabulate. StackOverflow will now be one more of the casualties of "decided to chase a large payout from people that the users disapprove of," and will then be in the process of Finding Out that this particular decision killed any hope they had of further monetization.
Through the use of Option 121 in DHCP, it is possible to have traffic that would otherwise be destined for a Virtual Private Network tunnel to instead be routed insecurely and through hostile servers that have proclaimed themselves more important and the place for traffic to go, even though the person using the VPN will supposedly see their traffic as going through the protected tunnel. It's a known attack, but it also has a certain amount of complexity necessary to set up and it works best when you have an evil admin to set it up with.
Last for tonight, the still thriving scene of floppy disk users, some for necessity, some for aesthetics, some because the data itself is not likely available in any other form, even if they have likely copied the data off the floppy to have good backups for it. I remember needing to use an archive program to split the newfangled MP3 format across several floppies so that I could move songs from the single Internet-connected computer all the way over to the machine in my room, which was not so connected.
And in similar matters of "the decisions you make because they are clear defaults at the time will last forever," why vim uses the keys it does: the terminal that vim was developed on had a keyboard with a specific key layout. They keyboards have changed and rearranged their layouts since, but there you are. "It made sense at the time" is often the true justification for a lot of things that seem strange in hindsight.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
We put this right next to the state of Louisiana's demand, upon pain of cutting off library funding, that all libraries in their state institute censorship on their under-18 readers and require a guardian adult to give their permission to access materials that are queer, have queer people in them, or are things that white conservatives might find uncomfortable. In both cases, there are arbitrary decisions being made about what is "appropriate" and who should be allowed access to them, by entities that believe themselves unaccountable and that they do not have to describe the methods by which something is determined to be "inappropriate" and restricted. The problem is that the legislators of Lousiana are far more accountable to the people that will be affected by them than the people at Google who designed whatever algorithm caught the romance writer. The Google folks also need to be appropriately accountable when their decisions cause problems like this.
We can't expect everyone to follow the example of Courtney Gore, who got herself elected to a school board promising to root out all the leftist indoctrination, and then actually read the curriculum and the documents and found out there wasn't any of the stuff that her right-wing backers claimed was there. Not everyone will have the dedication to actually read the material, and then change their minds based on what they've seen. And several of the people who are campaigning are doing so knowing full well the thing they're supposedly going to fight isn't there.
Another one of those "wish the US wasn't exporting its hangups everywhere" situations, where sex education is set to be limited only to children nine and above, and explicit talk for even greater ages in English schools, as opposed to, say, managing some form of age-appropriate conversations about such things. Because children much younger than nine have questions and thoughts about themselves and their identities, and deserve to have age-appropriate conversations about those things, yes, in schools if they don't have people at home who want to take on that situation.
A summary of just how over a barrel libraries are when it comes to the pricing of their electronic materials, and how little anyone in the pipeline of supplying library e-books is able or willing to do something other than continue the gouging and extortion. Overdirve and Hoopla, of course, disclaim that they're not the ones causing the problems, it's the publishers. The publishers, of course, will make up whatever excuse they want to justify the extortion, and be reasonably confident they won't find themselves on the wrong end of the Copyright Office or pointed legislation that tells them they can sell to libraries at the rates and terms they would sell to end-users or they can be sanctioned in ways that will hurt. And while this gets wrangled, more and more library budget space gets allocated to paying the extortion ransoms, because e-books are really very popular and well-used. The librarians are also trying to prevent your browsing data and history from being sucked up by resource providers and used in other contexts, including possibly being transferred from one product owned by the conglomerate to another product and building profiles on you that can be used for tracking, surveillance, or trying to tip off law enforcement about you.
In a different vein, the one where people with websites try to show to others what might be good contact points or updates on themselves, adding /about, /ideas, and /now to a site to describe yourself, what big concepts and ideas you have and want to work on, and what projects and/or life things you are currently working on now, (where /now also has some of its own directories where people can see what is the now in other people's lives.) In addition to those ideas, /interests is suggested as another point of connection between people with websites, so they can talk with each other about shared interests.
Why do it this way, with webpages, rather than with social media posts? To prevent getting locked into one service, or being algorithmically defeated, and because before such things as social media, this was the way that people with their own websites and web pages would communicate about their interests to others and possibly make contacts over e-mail. It's very much an IndieWeb aesthetic, but also, putting it on your own site also makes it more permanent than any of the instances that you might be working social media on, as well. Because one of the things we have figured out about the eras of social media and instant messaging is that many services only exist as long as there is the money behind it.
Further in this vein of making your own spaces, a call to rewild the Internet and make networks and spaces and our own things to break the control of those who have turned it into a factory farm, which includes a suggestion to produce new web browsers and ways of using the network, rather than using Google's products, Microsoft's products, and Apple's products to do so, and to break the dependency those browsers have on big tech companies and the money they provide for development in exchange for places of prominence or the setting of the default search engine in those browsers. So even when we use Firefox, there's a good chance Google money went into it to make Google the default search engine. (I also like the idea of forcing interoperability, so that you're not locked into using a walled garden's product to connect with other people on the network, and about sending Bourke's belief in anti-trust only being used when it raised consumer prices to the dust bin.)
A reminder that the prison population is often one of the least served by library services, has the most restrictions on their ability to use library services, and library services in prisons is often an afterthought to other things that are deemed more important, even though library and education services are some of the most valuable and most likely to help an incarcerated person both serve out their sentence and have useful skills to get them employed and stay out of recidivism.
A deep dive into the world of the people who repair the undersea cables that keep the world connected, and how the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami meant having to do a lot of repair and thinking on their feet to keep the world connected. It's impressive, but it's also an industry that doesn't have a whole lot of people, vessels, and resources devoted to the maintenance of these crucial fiber-optic links. We know that maintenance is not one of the things that gets adequately budgeted for, but this is one of the situations where not budgeting properly for the maintenance could mean a lot more in costs of lost business and connectivity.
The account of a person who underwent gender confirmation surgery, the pain that she went through, the costs that were involved, and the feelings that were present throughout. Which was a lot in all of those categories.
Anti-war protesters who occupied the library building at Portland State University were receptive to the request of the university archivist to keep the special collections secured and unharmed during the protest. Which, y'know, sticks a spoke into the wheel of the idea that the protesters are not reasonable or are only interested in destruction to make their point. Even after the police were deployed to remove the protesters, the collections themselves remained secured and most of the materials were undamaged. (Which is not to say there was no damage, but that it was not the rare collections or the books that were the things that were damaged.)
The Eurovision Song Contest this year had a lot of strong opinions expressed and allegations fired off for this year's ESC, many of which had to do with Israel's participation and behavior in the contest.
Panera is removing the drinks they had on their menu that contained most of the recommended limit of caffeine in them in their 20 or 30 ounce cup variety, after being sued for wrongful deaths in relation to persons who consumed the beverages and then died.
Continuing to adapt human infrastructure to facilitate nature doing what it does best, this time with adder tunnels for snakes to mix.
In technology, a crawl of nearly 100,000 websites in the jurisdiction of the European Union found more than a majority of them had at least one violation of what is supposed to happen with regard to cookies and the ability to reject them and have that rejection stick, including a reporting that nearly two-thirds of the websites that have an option to reject cookies set them anyway even after the rejection is selected.
Those who release under copyleft licenses or F(L)OSS licenses or similar are not in a supplier relationship or any other relationship with those who use the code. Because if they were, the correct response to being asked to fix and maintain that as a supplier out of the goodness of their heart is "no, fuck you, pay me." Tidelift offers some thoughts about how you can successfully pay maintainers, many of which are about paying a maintainer to maintain, rather than donating or dropping money for new features that also will have to be maintained.
Using new methods for attempting to read scrolls preserved but fragile from Herculaneum, an account of Plato's final hours and burial site has been retrieved. Technology manages to find new ways of recovering things that were preserved but thought unreadable. Very impressive.
Problems continue for Boeing, but this one is members of the company reported required tests as being not done or done improperly and reported as completed on work logs. The FAA is investigating, and I suspect there will be heads rolling if the allegations are substantiated and the specific personnel can be identified.
Tesla continues to lay off more staff from the company, to the point where the total layoffs through all of the rounds so far may constitute 20 percent of the company's headcount. And this is while new things about the ugly genital substitute vehicle surface, including decisions made that are exactly opposite of what safety would demand. And we find out that Tesla employees were saving, memeing, and sharing the pictures and video captured by the car's external and internal cameras, although it appears only among themselves, rather than more widely. At the same time, if the process is anything like the indirect, nightmarish way that someone can turn off data collection and transmission in a Honda car is any example, basically any car after a certain model year is likely to be collecting this kind of sensitive data and then doing whatever they like with it. (Most likely sending it to your insurance company so they can change your rates.) And while it might be possible to turn data collection and sharing off on certain vehicles, it's not easy and the car nags you (or likely will) to turn it back on if you actually do succeed at turning off data sharing. This particular situation also makes it highly suspicious that the data collected truly is anonymized and can't be easily traced back to a particular vehicle and owner.
After having done the firing of at least one division because the CEO didn't like their manager, Tesla attempted to rehire the division that had been laid off. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the laid-off people went "No." or tried to negotiate a better pay package as a condition of their return. (There's also the problem that if you were looking to purchase a less-expensive Tesla from the rental car company Hertz, you may want to make absolutely sure that all the damage done to the vehicle, internal and external, is spotted before buying, as someone found out their rental fleet Tesla had a damaged battery that would have taken tens of thousands of dollars to repair.
After programming answers (primarily) site StackOverflow announced a partnership with OpenAI to use the corpus of the site's questions and answers to train ChatGPT, the users who did not want their work used for confabulation machines attempted to edit or delete their answers to questions, and found themselves banned from changing their answers and their accounts suspended because that change was apparently a Terms of Service violation, and StackOverflow needed to ensure that the cash cow they were trying to slaughter would still be sufficiently fatted for the partnership. As you might expect, having found out they could not exercise control over their own data, the users are likely to make a mass exodus from the site and set themselves up somewhere else to provide useful information to others, in ways that will not be obviously monetized. Or, if they are, presumably will not be monetized to train a machine to confabulate. StackOverflow will now be one more of the casualties of "decided to chase a large payout from people that the users disapprove of," and will then be in the process of Finding Out that this particular decision killed any hope they had of further monetization.
Through the use of Option 121 in DHCP, it is possible to have traffic that would otherwise be destined for a Virtual Private Network tunnel to instead be routed insecurely and through hostile servers that have proclaimed themselves more important and the place for traffic to go, even though the person using the VPN will supposedly see their traffic as going through the protected tunnel. It's a known attack, but it also has a certain amount of complexity necessary to set up and it works best when you have an evil admin to set it up with.
Last for tonight, the still thriving scene of floppy disk users, some for necessity, some for aesthetics, some because the data itself is not likely available in any other form, even if they have likely copied the data off the floppy to have good backups for it. I remember needing to use an archive program to split the newfangled MP3 format across several floppies so that I could move songs from the single Internet-connected computer all the way over to the machine in my room, which was not so connected.
And in similar matters of "the decisions you make because they are clear defaults at the time will last forever," why vim uses the keys it does: the terminal that vim was developed on had a keyboard with a specific key layout. They keyboards have changed and rearranged their layouts since, but there you are. "It made sense at the time" is often the true justification for a lot of things that seem strange in hindsight.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
