Welcome to December. Have some links - Late November 02024

[silveradept]

Let us begin with the understanding that the legalization of marijuana and the subsequent chasing of dollars has meant the concentration of THC available in many marijuana products has gotten stronger. Which makes a certain amount of sense - when it was forbidden-forbidden, weak strains went for high amounts of cash, because the supply was restricted. Now that it isn't, the people who are spending significant amount of money on marijuana are the ones who are looking to stay baked for longer and bake harder. The market chases the money, after all.

We continue with a request to survey creators to think really hard about whether you actually need demographic data, and what data you need, because sloppy questions make it easy to re-identify people.

We mourn the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz at 96 years of age, responsible for the BASIC programming language and probably a lot of people getting into computer science from the hobbyist perspective before the professional one.

We also have lost Elwood Edwards at 74 years of age, best known for the various memetic phrases stuck in our heads from the people who used or heard the advertisements for America On-Line.

The International Cirminal Court issued arrest warrants for the prime minister of Israel, a former defense minister of Israel, and the military commander of Hamas, on allegations of war crimes. Which will allow the conflict to continue as it has before, with each side prosecuting the other's accusations and ignoring their own.

Because Tennessee's laws about what books are considered acceptable to school children are vague, board members and administrators are filling the gap with demands that all kinds of books be taken off the shelves, obeying censorship demands in advance of the legislature or agencies having to clarify what they meant. And, of course, using the assistance of bad faith actors to accomplish this. And, unsurprisingly, once again, the things being banned are things that acknowledge the existence of sex, queerness, or that teenagers and kids sometimes have to deal with terrifying and terrible circumstances.

Tennessee's laws about making school threats have exceptions for children with disabilities, but it doesn't look like anyone is doing much to figure that out before handcuffs are applied to kids who may or may not recognize their slang will be taken literally. Which is extremely traumatizing to those kids to be treated as if they had made serious threats or that their plush bunny was thought to be a bomb. Almost like those schools should be putting more money into education and helping their students feel welcome rather than investing in scanners and officers and other such things that often turn out not to be useful at all.

Teen Vogue continues to be one of the best magazines for all ages, offering a guide of actions that can be taken now to try and make the ride of the incoming administration smoother. Which we put next to one satirical account that details just how much (lack of) effort went into the Democratic campaign and how much Democratic voters should be grateful it was that much effort. There's a lot there that's funny if you've been around the center-rightists that are the more liberal of the two major parties, but there's a lot more that could be put to use.

(One of the programs that I listen to has had someone on regularly who is trying very hard to say the transphobic ad was a message about how the Democrats were for right speech, rather than right action, and not acknowledging, or just barely brushing an acknowledgement that it was, in fact, a transphobic ad, even perhaps primarily a transphobic ad and this person is very desperately trying to say anything else other than "Yeah, it was absolutely a transphobic ad, and it played extremely well," which might, I dunno, cause someone to think real hard about what side they're making apologia for.)

Representative Mace of South Carolina disqualifies herself to be a representative of the people by introducing a bill of attainder. Because she saw how well the ad played and thinks that it would be good to get herself cred with reprehensible people by attacking the first openly trans representative and trying to restrict where the representative can go based on her sex.

Which we put next to a reminder that a Black trans woman is far and away the most likely person to be a victim of transphobic violence, and also of groups that are fighting against that tide.

The standards to which the Democratic candidate, a woman of Black and South Asian heritage, was held regarding leadership, policies, expertise, and electability, were infinitely more stringent (and punished for straying from them) than the complete lack of standards the Republican candidate was allowed to skate by on. We knew this was true when the white woman Democratic candidate was also held to far stricter standards than the same Republican candidate eight years ago, but of course, it was far worse and stricter for the non-white woman. While the white man who repeatedly disqualified himself in both word and deed was allowed to continue as a candidate and benefit from a comparison that seemed to think he was anywhere near her equal. It would not be out of character to say this election, much like 2016, was an election where appeals to make sure women could not exercise power landed very well. With the additional intersectional caveat that a large amount of white women voted against Harris and for a man who wants to ensure that patriarchal power gains through the exclusion of women from any sphere that isn't fully controlled by men.

Cabinet announcements for the incoming administration seem to be very focused on people who were sycophants, donors, or who have been credibly accused or convicted of sexual assault. Although one of them did finally decide that he wasn't going to try for the position. Whether that had to do with the testimony of more than one girl who said the nominee had sex with her while she was a minor and all of the other boastful acts that the nominee did about his sexual prowess, well, who can say? (We can.) Too many people thought that particular nominee was vulnerable to blackmail or other influence for the position he was nominated for, and given the report that was also due to come out about everything, he probably withdrew knowing that he couldn't get through even a friendly Congress.

The state of Texas is more than ready to comply with the demands of the incoming administration, offering land they intended to build border wall on for the purposes of detainment and concentration camps for accused immigrants. Regardless of the clear economic and social hits that a mass deportation success would have. Unfortunately, the agency that would be in charge of this are not the kind of people you want to be in charge of such a policy or process.

Letter the first suggesting that electronic voting tabulators were compromised in the 2024 election and for the Democratic candidate to request hand-counting of ballots. Letter the second suggesting the hack required to change vote totals would not be sophisticated and there are enough anomalies for the Democratic candidate to request a hand-counting of ballots. Both of which suggest that the software for tabulators has been in the hands of hostile entities, including keys that could be used to access the tabulators, and therefore malware targeting those systems could have long since been developed and deployed to ensure that, rather than having to call a governor and ask for votes, the systems themselves could have been altered to find it. The telltale anomaly, according to the letters, is ballots that were filled out with a single vote for the Republican candidate for President and no other race. The percentage of those "bullet ballots" is apparently several times what a normal distribution of such would be, even in hotly contested elections. Hand-counting of ballots would expose the potential fraud, according to the letters.

This, of course, would require that the Democratic candidate believe in the possibility of the fraud and request the recounts, which seems unlikely to happen, if only for wanting to avoid the optics of "the loser always claims fraud" based on how much the Republican candidate was seeding in the minds of his supporters that if he didn't win, it had to be fraud. (And the Democrats being a right-leaning party, just less right-leaning than the Republicans.)

(Memo from your future self: a post refuting the claims in the letters, suggesting that the anomalous phenomenon is actually a fairly common one, and that several of the regular checks on election integrity would have caught the scenario detailed in the allegation letters. Also pointing out that the results of the election generally follow the exit polling conducted, so it's less likely there were anomalies in the count. Because that was something missing from the original materials and wasn't produced or posted until later. You're still allowed to have a poor opinion of others who voted in the Republican candidate, and to have that opinion very justified.)

The situation of women's rights in Afghanistan has deteriorated, as expected, after the government backed by the United States collapsed and the Taliban retook power. Back to the point of the forbidding of singing and not being allowed eye contact with men who aren't related.

Not to say that the situation of women in the United States is doing very well, either. Texas has had a third known woman to die from their abortion ban because the doctors do not have access to their regular, safe suite of tools without risking prosecution and a lifetime jail sentence for using them. Porsha Ngumezi could have lived, but that Texas said she had to die. What started as a campaign to make people think that abortion was about destroying healthy live babies is now killing women who could have lived to try again, had they received appropriate and prompt medical care.

South Korea's labor ministry ruled that K-pop group members are contractors, not workers, and therefore there's no way that a record label boss can be sued for workplace harassment. Which is apparently the same as it is in the U.S., unless you're part of a labor union. Yet more reasons to organize and collectively bargain for yourselves.

A curious argument for the preservation of materials, even though the supposed science in which those unclothed photographs were taken has been sent off and the regularity in which those materials were taken from their proper storage and used for prurient interests. The part that is interesting and worth exploring further, however, is the ways in which non-white people do not always have the ability or ease of erasing their own imagery from the archives, or at least requiring much greater care and sensitivity in their treatment.

Changing abilities of men to provide and changing roles of both men and women mean there are a lot more people who want to be parents but can't manage it, either financially or because cultural expectations would mean having to give up their professional careers to raise kids. Which, if it's mostly educated women and low-income men, sounds a lot like the two things that men that believe themselves superior would think of as threats to their hegemony.

The state superintendent of Oklahoma demanded all schools show a video he made explaining the department he created so he could unconstitutionally mingle church and state. Several of the school districts refused to do it.

Which is to say, the first duty is to survive, to continue existing, and to do what gets you through the day, because when you're targeted by the government, your continued existence is a proper "fuck you." If there's capacity past that point, then there are more things that can be done. A fair number of people will still need to find their mutual aid networks and support them, increase their education, and go in with humility, rather than the belief they are the savior. There are places for everyone to help with their neighbors and those that need support, building structures that do not need the hostile state to survive and thrive.

Rebecca Solnit complains that people are withdrawing into their technology and avoiding the greatest parts of being in a dense urban area: other people, community spaces, and small talk. She's on firmer ground complaining about media consolidation and the way that algorithms routinely promote content that's antisocial and unhealthy for the psyche because they want "engagement." rowyn points out that one of the underlying assumptions of Solnit's piece is faulty: "Stop being nostalgic for a time when you thought social norms made it acceptable to demand the attention of strangers in all public spaces. We didn't want to talk to you then, either. Which is entirely true. The girl with the headphones on now was the girl with the book who does not want to talk to you about her choice in literature, or anything else, for that matter. If you want to talk to strangers, go to a place where people want to talk. It'll definitely help if you go to such a place where people are meeting because they have shared interests.

A product influencer has sued another influencer for copyright infringement, claiming that the other influencer has been mimicking her videos and aesthetic too closely, as well as doing some of the same products that she has. This fight looks like the kind that will result in a decision that will satisfy nobody except the IP lawyers that will enjoy their additional billable hours. And, also, it probably says something scathing about the way that recommendations and influencers and algorithms are moving everyone toward things that are the same, rather than pushing them toward trying to do unique things.

Fashionable maximalism in Africa, with the model being a grandmother. The return of salt marshes to England, with the attendant benefits that come from it against floods and other effects of climate change. An advertisement for a chief scorpion wrangler. The continued march of nature evolving resistance to common weed killer chemicals, and many humans who think the answer is more and different herbicides.

Thinking on the time scale of trees, and on trying to plan for the next seven generations, when the places that offer the time scale of trees are becoming smaller and less protected. A climate model that relies on both emissions and on the changes made to the land by humans.

The ways in which recipes and food woven into fanworks brings fans together, or at the least gives them new things to try for themselves. And also, Sharing food as mutual aid among the disability justice community, because food is both a way of keeping you alive and keeping you happy.

Making cooking and baking more physically accessible and less spoon-eating, a compilation of tips and anecdotes.

In technology, it looks like synthetic voices are now narrating audiobooks, and those synthetic-narration books are finding their way into library digital catalogues, because neither Overdrive or hoopla has any intention of excluding the non-human from their marketplaces. Which means that our libraries need to start having collection development policies about whether they will intentionally purchase materials written by computer programs, LLMs, or narrated by synthetic voices. They're already here. I think it best for the library world to agree with Violet B. Fox's "Against AI" zine and generally commit to excluding LLMs and other such environmentally destructive slop generators from their professional practice and to discourage their use by their user base as well. (Even if we're also going to have some knowledge of how to make those prompts go better, because we're the people who regularly translate human to machine and back again.)

The United States Department of Justice suggests that Google sell off its Chrome browser division, cease the preferential payments it was giving to others so that Google would be the default search engine, and be barred from re-entering the web browser market for at least five years as penalties for monopoly behavior by Google. The DoJ also filed a plan that would make Google sell off Android in addition to Chrome if the one isn't enough to get competition back into play.

Australia passed a ban forbidding all children under 16 from using social media sites, but did so without any suggestion of how such a thing was to be done, and I strongly suspect that there will be plenty of easy ways around whatever system is put in place. Because this is not about making social media or a child's life safer, making things less toxic for them, or otherwise preparing a child to behave well online and to handle it, it's about blaming a technology and hoping that getting rid of the technology will magically make things better. It won't. It never has. But that doesn't stop people from doing it because they're worried about the pearl-clutchers voting them out of office.

A rather sophisticated set of hacks allowed for a GRU-connected hacking group to compromise networks in the building next to their target, and then use those networks to launch attacks at the actual target. Which allows for what was thought to need actually close people to engage from very far away instead. It's always nice to know that network security against state-funded actors is a difficult prospect, and I can only hope that none of us are ever considered that important.

A meeting of the AIEEE in 1916 involved a trans-country telephone call so that several participating sections could communicate with each other in real time, so the meeting-by-Internet that so many of us came to get to know in 2020 has at least this antecedent to show that synchronous telecommunication has been possible for quite some time.

An extremely niche project of developing new applications for a Game Boy Advance peripheral, but projects like this are often really good at teaching things and at documenting all kinds of love for the programming, the challenge, and the accessory itself.

Twitter registered an objection the Onion buying InfoWars, and in it, asserted that Twitter owns all of the social media accounts on their platform, and that people who use the platform are licensed, much like how nobody who uses most commercial software actually owns it, but is instead licensed to use it. With continued assertions like these in all of our digital environments, it must be interesting to take stock of what we actually own, and to punish corporations accordingly for hoarding wealth and goods and not actually allowing their users to own their devices and software. Someone, surely, is willing to void all of that category of contract as fundamentally deceptive or unfair to the consumer/user.

Last for tonight, armaina linked to some things that are likely to be deep dives of their own: A science fiction encyclopedia, a museum of previous website designs of various services and brands, a list of forums that are still active, and their general topics (although some of the links will be to places that are closer to the cesspool line, if not in it),

And, the one that gets a little bit of special treatment, the Library of Babel, which theoretically contains everything that has been written and ever will be written, if only you happen to come across the correct page in the correct volume in the correct shelf on the correct wall in the correct hex. Which is to say, expect to find a lot of things you could feed your random number generator.

(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.)

Comments

[madgastronomer]

Did you catch that a Wiccan delivered the invocation at a city council meeting in Tulsa, and the evangelicals (etc) are screaming?

[silveradept]

I did not see that, and I find it both typical of those kinds of evangelicals and a lot funny about how such small things can send them into these kinds of reactions.

[jadelennox]

FWIW, I have not seen a single credible journalist, election security expert, or infosec expert say that allegations of voting machine irregularities have any evidence whatsoever. The allegations thus far appear to be wishful thinking at best, and Blue Anon at worst.

[silveradept]

I can certainly believe enough people legitimately voted for him, and I can imagine some amount of voters only caring about such a thing that they would neglect the rest of the ballot. So it would be a question of whether the candidate believed the allegations of fraud enough to request the recount. Perhaps if someone wanted to investigate that angle, they could, later.