Orbits and Revolutions - Early July 02025
Jul. 16th, 2025 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with a zine constructed for those who feel like the U.S. Fourth of July holiday is not very representative of the country. Or that it is very representative of the country, and there needs to be a lot of changes.
A useful ponderance on how humans will ascribe beneficence to things they believe are genuine, and will declare things that are identified as copies and knockoffs to have malice, or at least ugliness, associated with them, even though humans, as a whole, are very bad at determining which is authentic and which are not, since that determination tends to be the domain of experts who have studied and have to make such determinations based on their studies and whether a possible forgery matches what they have studied. I think the more interesting thread to tease on this piece is the one that's about the value of enjoying a good fake, because "enjoying a good fake" is pretty well at heart of most human entertainment. We know so many of the stories we tell contain elements of fakery, or special effects that make the fake appear real, and yet we willingly go to them, sometimes repeatedly. I think that's the more interesting route, and the excerpted piece walks around it without answering it. If we get something useful out of the forgery, does the fact that it's a forgery mean that we have to discard everything associated with it? In some cases, the answer is yes, often because the things that came with the forgery are anti-social and harmful to other people, but some of the Pratchettian lies are very, very useful to us. Do we need to discard them, as well? Why are we so upset when something that is warranted as true turns out to be false, even if it is useful, but we do not have similar upset for things that do not warrant themselves as true, even though considerable effort goes in to making them appear as if they are true?
A victory! After a visually impaired man died from falling off a train platform that did not inform him of the edge of the platform, tactile paving has been completed on all of the train platforms so that hopefully there are no further tragedies of the nature of Cleveland Gervais. If someone needs an example of the saying "Regulations are written in blood," this is the kind of thing they can be pointed at.
The education minister of Alberta desperately wishes to be or to buddy up to the current U.S. administration, adopting rules and arrogating the power to himself to decide what books are allowed in Alberta school libraries, while claiming explicitly that it's not about book banning, but some fig leaf that he pretends is sufficient coverage.
The Internal Revenue Service has discarded a part of the Internal Revenue Code that says churches and other entities incorporated under the code will not have their tax-exempt status put at risk for endorsing political candidates, never you mind the bits about trying to keep the church and the state out of each other's business. But, of course, the theocrats have definitely been hoping for the ability to tell their congregations from the pulpit who they should vote for. (They used to have to be at least a little subtle about it, like talking about what "issues" the people were supposed to vote for, rather than specifically calling for candidates to vote for.)
A person has claimed that a trans woman has physical biological advantages that make her unsuitable for competing against cis women…in chess, an abstract and nearly fully intellectual game.
The University of Pennsylvania forfeits its right to be called an institution of any learning by agreeing to remove Lia Thomas from its athletic achievement roles and adopting incorrect classification standards for its sport programs. This is to avoid having to actually fight the administration over the allegations that allowing women to compete in women's sport categories was a violation of Title IX, the part of the law that involves sex-based discrimination and equal opportunities. We will have to see what the next demand is from the government to continue avoiding being convicted of Title IX violations that Penn could probably fight and win on. (A good consequence for them might be to have their athletic conference kick them out or declare that all matches played by Penn in the athletic conference will be forfeits until they restore Lia Thomas to her correct positions in their athletic history.)
The United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that teachers have no speech rights in their classrooms, and therefore, even on matters of their own personal identification and honorifics, a teacher can be compelled to use whatever the State decides their honorific, name, or other identifier is. Since Florida, the state where the suit was brought, has a law that requires someone to use the pronouns and personal titles associated with their assigned sex at birth, this means a teacher is required to misgender themselves or risk legal or professional penalty.
Continuing in this administration's desire to get rid of anything that might mean they had empathy or compassion or a thought for the planet, the website that had government information about climate change data has been deleted. This also will make it harder for states and localities to understand and plan for decisions and disasters. (Some of those states and localities don't care and are more than ready to let their inhabitants die.)
After having had the DOGE fools raid data stores of the government, and then given that information to other persons who are not authorized to have it, the U.S. government claims to now have a database of all persons in the country and their citizenship status. While they claim this is for things like defeating voter and benefits fraud, it's far more likely to be abused by the administration to change the citizenship status of other people and then trigger systems designed to make benefits or other things that a someone is allowed to have get cut off once their citizenship status is reported as being not-citizen. It's likely to be the bigger operation that putting people incorrectly into the Social Security death file was the trial balloon for.
United States military personnel are being deployed in support of the kidnapping squads, nominally for non-law enforcement duties, but the best way to make sure that the military is not deployed for impermissible purposes is not to deploy them for any kind of activity that might affect people who are outside of their jurisdiction.
Mr. Abrego-Garcia, wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, recounted his experience at the prison, including physical and psychological torture, as supporting evidence in his lawsuit against the administration for his unlawful detention and deportation. The administration, characteristically, is trying to get the lawsuit dismissed because they brought Mr. Abrego-Garcia back to the United States, as they were ordered to do, and therefore there's no longer any standing to sue the government over anything. They've also charged Mr. Abrego-Garcia with crimes and stated openly their intention to deport him again, if not necessarily to El Salvador this time. (I'd say he has an argument to get charges dropped because it's clear to any observer that the government intends to make an example of him, because they were required to bring him back from the illegal deportation.
The kidnapping squads have continued to attack southern California, looking for anyone who looks insufficiently white to detain and attempt to deport, so they can make quotas and look like they're finding all kinds of criminals. Another lawsuit has been filed to attempt to force them to halt their kidnapping.
Let we think that states that are more liberal are resisting the kidnapping squads that much, in Washington State, the Department of Licensing seems to be sharing driver and vehicle information with the kidnapping squads in violation of state law prohibiting that information being shared with anyone for deportation purposes.
And, of course, neither legislature nor Supreme Court seems willing to curb the excesses of this administration. The Congress refused to defeat a bill that offsets tax breaks for people who already have enough wealth for themselves and seven generations of descendants by throwing millions of persons off of Medicaid (the low-income medical insurance program) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (designed to help ensure people receive enough to eat when their wages don't cover their costs), while also providing more funding for kidnapping squads to increase their operations and open more concentration camps in the United States, and The majority of the Supreme Court of the United States continues to render decisions that weaken themselves and consolidate power in the hands of the Executive, including refusing to allow anyone to stop them from deporting anyone to anywhere they wish and preventing lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions against executive actions to protect those who would be affected, but who aren't specifically part of the case brought before the court making the ruling.
There is a good thing, however, so if you have been in limbo or worried about getting a gender marker updated on a passport or a passport issued in your correct gender marker, it looks like the State Department is currently complying with court orders to make those marker changes to passports.
In technology, Certain types of Brother (and other manufacturer) printers are vulnerable to a flaw that would allow an attacker to generate a default administrative password by knowing the serial number of the printer they wished to attack. A printer that has had the administrative password changed from the default, however, cannot fall prey to this attack. Changing defaults is something that should happen anyway, so this is going to be something that shows up in all the places where default passwords have not been changed. Which makes me think that one of the best practices a manufacturer could ever do with their devices is make something run on first boot and after every reset that forces a password change off the default. By not giving the user the opportunity to keep using the default, security practices improve greatly.
Proving that the person in Conquests of Camelot who, when under the influence of the truth apple, stated simply that they were interested in your money and nothing else (they were selling supposed saintly relics), is perhaps the most common character we meet in the world, there will be the option to engage in a "buy now, pay later" for game microtransactions, so long as such things add up to $50 USD or more, which is a recipe rife for abuse and for continuing to make people spend far more, most likely on gacha mechanics, than they otherwise would. Given that those kinds of "buy now, pay later" loans will now factor into credit scoring, it feels like, across all of the various places that offer us credit and loans, that there are more debt merchants and traps than ever before. (I feel like we used to only have to worry about the credit card getting out of hand, and the extreme predatory behavior of the payday loan, but it seems that everyone is willing to extend credit on favorable terms to themselves.)
As companies rush to roll out and use LLMs, chatbots, and other things completely unsuited for any purpose in a business setting, several consultants, copywriters, and coders find themselves asked to fix the damage and problems that the uncritical acceptance of LLM output has caused. Almost like this is something that requires human oversight, planning, and implementation because humans are infinitely creative in finding ways to do things to machines, either for the lulz or for the malice.
In a rare case of things following procedure, that of course benefits corporations that were about to have to make it easy for people to do something, a federal appeals court in the United States says that the Federal Trade Commission is not allowed to implement the rules it created that would allow consumers to unsubscribe from services with the same ease that they can be subscribed to them. Funny how the lower courts can find some procedure matters to use, but the upper court has some real troubles getting the government to follow procedures.
Since dating apps are privacy nightmares, and queer dating apps are even worse, the best way to use them to try and meet people is to provide as little data as possible to the company that controls the app. And to consider whether using that app at all is a good idea in your situation.
(Regrettably, not everyone has a convenient metropolitan area to do their networking in.)
Google is once again reducing the capacity of a Pixel phone, this time the 6a, to mitigate the possibility that the battery might catch alight due to the degradation of the same. Replacable batteries would be helpful, certainly, for those of us who try to run their phones into the ground before upgrading them. But also, it would be nice to have things like the Fairphone and other such things come into the United States market, so that we can once again be in an era where components are replaceable and the materials involved are much less environmentally stressful.
Last for tonight, The Lavender marriage, where at least one of the participants is queer in one form, but the marriage is to someone who the law will see as being right and appropriate, providing protection for the queer person about being seen to obviously as queer.
(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.)
A useful ponderance on how humans will ascribe beneficence to things they believe are genuine, and will declare things that are identified as copies and knockoffs to have malice, or at least ugliness, associated with them, even though humans, as a whole, are very bad at determining which is authentic and which are not, since that determination tends to be the domain of experts who have studied and have to make such determinations based on their studies and whether a possible forgery matches what they have studied. I think the more interesting thread to tease on this piece is the one that's about the value of enjoying a good fake, because "enjoying a good fake" is pretty well at heart of most human entertainment. We know so many of the stories we tell contain elements of fakery, or special effects that make the fake appear real, and yet we willingly go to them, sometimes repeatedly. I think that's the more interesting route, and the excerpted piece walks around it without answering it. If we get something useful out of the forgery, does the fact that it's a forgery mean that we have to discard everything associated with it? In some cases, the answer is yes, often because the things that came with the forgery are anti-social and harmful to other people, but some of the Pratchettian lies are very, very useful to us. Do we need to discard them, as well? Why are we so upset when something that is warranted as true turns out to be false, even if it is useful, but we do not have similar upset for things that do not warrant themselves as true, even though considerable effort goes in to making them appear as if they are true?
A victory! After a visually impaired man died from falling off a train platform that did not inform him of the edge of the platform, tactile paving has been completed on all of the train platforms so that hopefully there are no further tragedies of the nature of Cleveland Gervais. If someone needs an example of the saying "Regulations are written in blood," this is the kind of thing they can be pointed at.
The education minister of Alberta desperately wishes to be or to buddy up to the current U.S. administration, adopting rules and arrogating the power to himself to decide what books are allowed in Alberta school libraries, while claiming explicitly that it's not about book banning, but some fig leaf that he pretends is sufficient coverage.
The Internal Revenue Service has discarded a part of the Internal Revenue Code that says churches and other entities incorporated under the code will not have their tax-exempt status put at risk for endorsing political candidates, never you mind the bits about trying to keep the church and the state out of each other's business. But, of course, the theocrats have definitely been hoping for the ability to tell their congregations from the pulpit who they should vote for. (They used to have to be at least a little subtle about it, like talking about what "issues" the people were supposed to vote for, rather than specifically calling for candidates to vote for.)
A person has claimed that a trans woman has physical biological advantages that make her unsuitable for competing against cis women…in chess, an abstract and nearly fully intellectual game.
The University of Pennsylvania forfeits its right to be called an institution of any learning by agreeing to remove Lia Thomas from its athletic achievement roles and adopting incorrect classification standards for its sport programs. This is to avoid having to actually fight the administration over the allegations that allowing women to compete in women's sport categories was a violation of Title IX, the part of the law that involves sex-based discrimination and equal opportunities. We will have to see what the next demand is from the government to continue avoiding being convicted of Title IX violations that Penn could probably fight and win on. (A good consequence for them might be to have their athletic conference kick them out or declare that all matches played by Penn in the athletic conference will be forfeits until they restore Lia Thomas to her correct positions in their athletic history.)
The United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that teachers have no speech rights in their classrooms, and therefore, even on matters of their own personal identification and honorifics, a teacher can be compelled to use whatever the State decides their honorific, name, or other identifier is. Since Florida, the state where the suit was brought, has a law that requires someone to use the pronouns and personal titles associated with their assigned sex at birth, this means a teacher is required to misgender themselves or risk legal or professional penalty.
Continuing in this administration's desire to get rid of anything that might mean they had empathy or compassion or a thought for the planet, the website that had government information about climate change data has been deleted. This also will make it harder for states and localities to understand and plan for decisions and disasters. (Some of those states and localities don't care and are more than ready to let their inhabitants die.)
After having had the DOGE fools raid data stores of the government, and then given that information to other persons who are not authorized to have it, the U.S. government claims to now have a database of all persons in the country and their citizenship status. While they claim this is for things like defeating voter and benefits fraud, it's far more likely to be abused by the administration to change the citizenship status of other people and then trigger systems designed to make benefits or other things that a someone is allowed to have get cut off once their citizenship status is reported as being not-citizen. It's likely to be the bigger operation that putting people incorrectly into the Social Security death file was the trial balloon for.
United States military personnel are being deployed in support of the kidnapping squads, nominally for non-law enforcement duties, but the best way to make sure that the military is not deployed for impermissible purposes is not to deploy them for any kind of activity that might affect people who are outside of their jurisdiction.
Mr. Abrego-Garcia, wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, recounted his experience at the prison, including physical and psychological torture, as supporting evidence in his lawsuit against the administration for his unlawful detention and deportation. The administration, characteristically, is trying to get the lawsuit dismissed because they brought Mr. Abrego-Garcia back to the United States, as they were ordered to do, and therefore there's no longer any standing to sue the government over anything. They've also charged Mr. Abrego-Garcia with crimes and stated openly their intention to deport him again, if not necessarily to El Salvador this time. (I'd say he has an argument to get charges dropped because it's clear to any observer that the government intends to make an example of him, because they were required to bring him back from the illegal deportation.
The kidnapping squads have continued to attack southern California, looking for anyone who looks insufficiently white to detain and attempt to deport, so they can make quotas and look like they're finding all kinds of criminals. Another lawsuit has been filed to attempt to force them to halt their kidnapping.
Let we think that states that are more liberal are resisting the kidnapping squads that much, in Washington State, the Department of Licensing seems to be sharing driver and vehicle information with the kidnapping squads in violation of state law prohibiting that information being shared with anyone for deportation purposes.
And, of course, neither legislature nor Supreme Court seems willing to curb the excesses of this administration. The Congress refused to defeat a bill that offsets tax breaks for people who already have enough wealth for themselves and seven generations of descendants by throwing millions of persons off of Medicaid (the low-income medical insurance program) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (designed to help ensure people receive enough to eat when their wages don't cover their costs), while also providing more funding for kidnapping squads to increase their operations and open more concentration camps in the United States, and The majority of the Supreme Court of the United States continues to render decisions that weaken themselves and consolidate power in the hands of the Executive, including refusing to allow anyone to stop them from deporting anyone to anywhere they wish and preventing lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions against executive actions to protect those who would be affected, but who aren't specifically part of the case brought before the court making the ruling.
There is a good thing, however, so if you have been in limbo or worried about getting a gender marker updated on a passport or a passport issued in your correct gender marker, it looks like the State Department is currently complying with court orders to make those marker changes to passports.
In technology, Certain types of Brother (and other manufacturer) printers are vulnerable to a flaw that would allow an attacker to generate a default administrative password by knowing the serial number of the printer they wished to attack. A printer that has had the administrative password changed from the default, however, cannot fall prey to this attack. Changing defaults is something that should happen anyway, so this is going to be something that shows up in all the places where default passwords have not been changed. Which makes me think that one of the best practices a manufacturer could ever do with their devices is make something run on first boot and after every reset that forces a password change off the default. By not giving the user the opportunity to keep using the default, security practices improve greatly.
Proving that the person in Conquests of Camelot who, when under the influence of the truth apple, stated simply that they were interested in your money and nothing else (they were selling supposed saintly relics), is perhaps the most common character we meet in the world, there will be the option to engage in a "buy now, pay later" for game microtransactions, so long as such things add up to $50 USD or more, which is a recipe rife for abuse and for continuing to make people spend far more, most likely on gacha mechanics, than they otherwise would. Given that those kinds of "buy now, pay later" loans will now factor into credit scoring, it feels like, across all of the various places that offer us credit and loans, that there are more debt merchants and traps than ever before. (I feel like we used to only have to worry about the credit card getting out of hand, and the extreme predatory behavior of the payday loan, but it seems that everyone is willing to extend credit on favorable terms to themselves.)
As companies rush to roll out and use LLMs, chatbots, and other things completely unsuited for any purpose in a business setting, several consultants, copywriters, and coders find themselves asked to fix the damage and problems that the uncritical acceptance of LLM output has caused. Almost like this is something that requires human oversight, planning, and implementation because humans are infinitely creative in finding ways to do things to machines, either for the lulz or for the malice.
In a rare case of things following procedure, that of course benefits corporations that were about to have to make it easy for people to do something, a federal appeals court in the United States says that the Federal Trade Commission is not allowed to implement the rules it created that would allow consumers to unsubscribe from services with the same ease that they can be subscribed to them. Funny how the lower courts can find some procedure matters to use, but the upper court has some real troubles getting the government to follow procedures.
Since dating apps are privacy nightmares, and queer dating apps are even worse, the best way to use them to try and meet people is to provide as little data as possible to the company that controls the app. And to consider whether using that app at all is a good idea in your situation.
(Regrettably, not everyone has a convenient metropolitan area to do their networking in.)
Google is once again reducing the capacity of a Pixel phone, this time the 6a, to mitigate the possibility that the battery might catch alight due to the degradation of the same. Replacable batteries would be helpful, certainly, for those of us who try to run their phones into the ground before upgrading them. But also, it would be nice to have things like the Fairphone and other such things come into the United States market, so that we can once again be in an era where components are replaceable and the materials involved are much less environmentally stressful.
Last for tonight, The Lavender marriage, where at least one of the participants is queer in one form, but the marriage is to someone who the law will see as being right and appropriate, providing protection for the queer person about being seen to obviously as queer.
(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.)
