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silveradeptLet us begin with an annual roundup of things that had to be removed from rectums, because people make bad decisions about objects without flared bases.
Trans women whose culture includes the quinceañera are celebrating the rite of passage for themselves as an important touchstone of their lives.
A white suit worn by Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway in a Star Trek: Voyager episode is about as loud a billboard declaring Janeway queer as you could get away with on television at the time. I get to be part of the Lucky 10,000 in understanding that suit and its origins, and so, hopefully, do you.
People familiar with the culture and traditions of Hawai'i explain why the live-action Lilo and Stitch disrespects that entire tradition, history, and the original animation's messages as well.
The ways that humans have for expressing affection for each other are greater than sex and romance, and many of those acts that WEIRD people would classify as sexual or romantic are instead culturally appropriate expressions of affection. Because there's still not an underlying acceptance of the idea that people can be affectionate to each other without it being sexual, and extra so for people of the same perceived gender.
What we think of as local culture and tradition is global culture and tradition. We have just forgotten that things like food migrate and then integrate really well into wherever they land. Which is why you will occasionally have someone yelling that Italians of an era before the tomato migrated out of the Americas are not having marinara sauce with their pasta. The idea that there is only one human culture, and what we have are a bunch of local implementations and place-and-time specific manifestations of it, is really rather true, but because our memories and our records don't always persist over time, we forget that we have already done this before. Repeatedly.
Research into autism that has done less assuming the neurotypical is "normal" and the standard continues to find things that are classified as deficits and disorders are often strengths and consistencies, just at a different angle than the neurotypical one.
Claudette Colvin, who was getting arrested for not giving up a bus seat in a segregated South before Rosa Parks became the face of it, has died at 86 years of age.
Further evidence that our eyes are not lying to us, the Lemkin Institute warns us that the United States is in the early stages of trying to stomp out all trans people. Which is not necessarily news to those who are having to experience it, but for people who aren't quite as close to the action, this is your sign. (And also, pay attention to your history.)
The United States engaged in a military operation in Venezuela, ostensibly to capture and extradite the former President of the country to the United States to face charges for drug trafficking. This paper reason doesn't stand up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny: it's about seizing control of fossil fuels, destabilizing the separation of powers, distracting from scandal, and behaving as a rogue nation unfettered by anything while daring someone else to do something about it. Because they believe they have that power and nobody will try to stop them, they're also now seizing control of other countries' infrastructure, believing they now own it all and can do whatever they want with it.
After having attacked another sovereign nation, the current administrator boasted that he could and would do it to other sovereign nations in the region. And threatened the person ascending to the role of leader of Venezuela that he'll do worse to her if she doesn't do what he wants.
The justification for all of this is that the legitimate governments of other sovereign nations are really run by criminal organizations and it is the responsibility of the United States to destroy those cartels, usually with the snide statement that the governments of those nations "won't" or "can't."
Well, those justifications are. When he wants to talk about invading and taking over Greenland, it's more on the matter of seizing resources and trying to prevent international cooperation, even though Greenland is currently subject to the government of Denmark. Which means that if the U.S. really were serious about taking Greenland for its supposed strategic purposes, they would be attacking a NATO ally and invoking the mutual defense pact of the alliance, among other things that would make it an international disaster for the U.S.
In the United States, the administration approved using the National Guard of Louisiana against the population of New Orleans, which is, unsurprisingly, mostly colors that this white supremacist administration believes are inferior and should be terrorized. The usual deployment of excuses involving reducing crime and going after criminals were deployed, and rang as hollow as they always have.
The kidnappers were in Tuscon, Arizona, as well, trying to create chaos and terror in the predominantly brown-skinned areas of the city.
The kidnapping squads escalated into being the murder squads they were always intended to be, this time killing a woman in Minneapolis. Shortly after the video of the murder was shared, the mother of the victim identified her as Renee Nicole Good. Further details indicate that she was married to a woman that loved her, and she has a child of her own.
The administration, and those responsible for the murder squads, immediately proclaimed that the evidence of one's eyes and the videos circulated were false and the murderer acted in self-defense against a violent attack, and continued to stick to that position, because to do otherwise would be to admit that everything that has been said about the kidnapping and murder squads is absolutely true and they are encouraging this kind of behavior because of their own racist and white supremacist reasons. (And they are claiming there's no way that the murderer is immune from prosecution or any other criminal charge.) Local officials expressed their contempt for this position, and for the murder squads, with the mayor of Minneapolis saying "Get the fuck out" to the murder squads and calling their justifications "bullshit". Which is entirely justified, as the administration continues to state complete fabrications as their official positions and statements. They are also insisting they are the ones who can investigate the murder and nobody else is allowed, even as schools go virtual so their students and teachers are not subjected to the possibility of being kidnapped or murdered, because, yes, they're targeting students and teachers for kidnappings.
The fact that a woman in a relationship with another woman died, called a "fucking bitch" by the man that shot her, and that accounts and administration people alike are erasing her relationship, is not accidental.
And then, in Portland, Oregon, two people were also shot by a federal agent claiming self-defense against someone attempting to hurt them with a vehicle. As you can guess, that justification is almost certainly a lie, because there is no reason to believe that any statement justifying violence from people who are committing violence without justification should be believed. And yet, they claimed that the people shot were members of a gang, and other such nonsense.
A kidnapper shot a protester in the face with a supposedly "nonlethal" round, giving skull fractures, a loss of sight, and otherwise disabling the protester trying to get the kidnapping and murder squads to listen to their consciences.
At this point, instead of treating masked, unidentified entities who claim to be federal agents as potential kidnappers and reacting accordingly, you should now treat them as potential murderers and mass violence perpetrators and react accordingly. And understand that they are also trying to disguise themselves so they can kidnap and murder more effectively and with even less accountability. They're behaving as people unconstrained by any kind of law and who believe they will not be held to account.
And they intend to start going from one door to the next to find people to kidnap and murder, since their terrorism of people in more public spaces isn't doing enough to satisfy the racists, ghouls, and white nationalists currently in power. And, of course, they're using Palantir tech to try and decide who they want to terrorize next in that campaign. Since they're also giving the green light, or at least not severely reining-in, the kidnappers and murderers who are using chokeholds and other potentially-lethal moves on the people they intend to terrorize. Because, again, they don't believe themselves to be bounded by anything, even as they claim the powers of things that come with bounds. Their "screening" process for recruiting people is minimal at best and nonexistent in reality, so there's no way of knowing whether the person sent to kidnap and murder is someone who would be able to get any other job at all. (And that they appear to be falsifying data to ensure that they get enough of the people they want to have on the streets.) They want people intimidated and scared that they will be treated poorly if "arrested" on whatever trumped-up reason the kidnappers can come up with, and they feel empowered to destroy whatever they want while they're at it.
Those with technical skills, and those without, can do their part to map surveillance devices and to use code to know when they are being recorded, and to use that information to pressure the people that nominally have power to stop throwing their lot in with surveillance technology that often allows warrantless snooping. And, of course, you can always distribute correct and up-to-date information on how to handle encounters with the kidnapping and murder squads when they're trying to invade your house or detain you for no reason.
The most polite remedy there is available for these actions is to pass and sustain articles of impeachment against the administrator and the chief who permits and encourages these murders. If those remedies do not work, or are ignored, then it falls to states and local authorities to refuse not only cooperation, but entry, to kidnapping and murder squads. The people are already out and exercising their rights to prevent kidnapping and murder from happening in their spaces, even as the kidnapping and murder squads use chemical warfare and their own weaponry against he will of the people. And making their displeasure known in unmistakable, but plausibly-deniable, ways on the platforms they have available to them.
A Hilton Hotels chain member that had been refusing reservations from the murder squads was forced to recant and accept them from the corporate offices, reminding us that free speech is really only available to those with the money to pay for it.
The murder squadrons are also equipped with wide-spread surveillance devices that they deploy without authorization or proper court order, because commercial data, obtained by companies, is not apparently subjected to court order. Although, when those companies screw it up, then you can find out whether you've been targeted, and who else is being targeted, by people who are looking for excuses to do damage to you and yours. Along with that, the kidnapping and murder squads also want the authority to track and de-anonymize anyone who criticizes them, because they are all thin-skinned, and want to hide while giving nobody else the ability to do so.
At least one of the possible explanations for the aggression in Venezuela and in the United States is to distract from the requirements that materials in the files regarding the known pederast be released properly to the public. Some of the redactions they attempted were not done correctly, and could be undone through trivial means, giving insight into what is being additionally redacted past what might have been required by the law, and in what things might very well should have been or were required to be redacted and weren't.
Because they're sexists as well as the other -isms this administration practices, the head of the Defense Department has demanded a review intended to find women insufficiently capable of being part of front-line combat operations in the military.
A senator, retired from the military, is suing the Secretary of Defense because said Secretary is trying to dock his pay and rank for speaking in a video reminding military servicepeople they are prohibited from following illegal orders. Because these people are very much so thin-skinned, they treat the truth as something they have to fight back against as personal affront.
And, of course, there's always the specter in the background that if things continue to not go in his favor, the administrator will simply cancel elections and continue to rule in the autocratic manner that he believes he's entitled to. Even if he secretly wants to go ahead with that anyway, legislators in several states are doing their best to hide all of the work and discussion they do around redistricting electoral maps from public oversight and inquiry by asserting various forms of privilege over the entire thing. Which makes it harder to prove someone had discriminatory intent if you can't access the things that definitely would prove it.
The CBS program 60 Minutes produced a segment about the CECOT prison in El Salvador that the current administration has been trying to send the kidnapped to, and the new administration-friendly CEO installed to prevent such acts of journalism spiked it. But because it would run in other markets and places, the segment was aired as produced there, and therefore is widely available for people in the United States to view as well.
After the administrator illegally demanded that the National Parks entry pass use his visage instead of the contest-winning nature photograph, the National Park Service had to reiterate Interior Department guidelines to say that any pass in which the visage of the administrator had been defaced would may no longer be considered valid for entry into a national park.
The board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the arm of the government responsible for supporting public media outlets, and for some of the educational programming seen throughout childhood, voted to dissolve itself after having had its funding zeroed and the corporation itself threatened to be used to disseminate propaganda.
The current Health and Human Services secretary has directed the Food and Drug Administration to remove warnings from their websites about the real damage that can be done from fake "treatments" for autism, all with the idea of promoting an agenda that means unverified and quack "treatments" and other such things, usually promoted by people whose scientific knowledge would not fill a thimble, but who want to make all kinds of money fleecing people with "wellness" materials.
Rural parts of the United States have persistent mythologies about them and their lifestyles, each of which are interesting in their own way, but the one I have the highest eyebrow-raise at is the one where they say "well, no, it wasn't a sudden change that brought rural people to the current administrator, they've been at it for decades." That's not the kind of mythbusting they think it is. (Some of the other ones are also of this same sort of thing - "it's not all white, it's just a supermajority of white people.") Something more on target is a retrospective on the friendly societies, who performed many functions of mutual aid before there were things such as state-run social insurance, and who continue in the vein of mutual aid even afterward.
Wegman's grocery in New York City is deploying facial scanning technology and is storing biometric data of shoppers without their consent. Which is the kind of thing that sparks human creativity and ingenuity on how to defeat such systems, as well as practical things to do, like supporting legislation and letting corporate owners know how much you detest their intrusions on privacy.
A cop accused a woman of porch piracy, and then refused to look at evidence that made it clear it wasn't her. Because our regular cops are also pretty convinced they don't have to follow the laws and the constraints upon them.
A rare set of photographs of Ada Lovelace acquired before they were to be sold at auction to a private buyer.
Adding solar power generation to crop fields helps to increase crop yields as well as generate solar energy, thanks to the shade and shielding the solar power installations provide to the crops underneath.
After a search conducted after the previous stationmaster died, there is a new stationmaster at Kishi Station, a calico cat named Yontama. (Which, I believe, translated to "third cat"), The succession line has also been worked out, as there is an apprentice stationmaster named Rokutama ("fourth cat".) (The predecessor was Niitama, "second cat," so the naming sequence makes sense.)
In technology, the program put into existence from the person in charge of Twitter is being asked to nonconsensually rework pictures of women so that they're wearing nothing or nearly nothing, and because it seems perfectly okay with that kind of action, it's also being used to generate child sexual abuse material by doing the same to pictures of children. All of this is further developments for a chatbot that has been developed and marketed as not being constrained in the same ways that other ones are, and is proving in real-time why those restrictions are necessary. But, rather than turn off the thing, the company running it seems to have decided that deepfake nudes and CSAM is for paying customers only, and are complaining that their free speech rights are being impugned as governments talk about banning the platform because of the presence of CSAM on it.
Of course, there would be an easier solution to this problem, but the people running the App and Google Play stores are not interested in kicking out apps that clearly violate their policies when the consequences of doing so would be to anger all the people who want to have CSAM-generation at their fingertips. While also getting rid of applications that provide useful services, like alerting people to the location of murder squads in their neighborhoods. If there's something that this era has shown us as something we already knew, it was that capital and business does not have any ethics, only the pursuit of profit, and all things can be justified in the pursuit of profit.
The US Secretary of Defense has decided that all military systems will have the CSAM generator integrated into their own systems, which I am sure will result in all kinds of new ways for classified information to leak out or be exfiltrated, as well as providing military members with all the CSAM they would like to generate, I guess.
HarperCollins has decided they are no longer interested in the Harlequin line of romance and erotica being profitable, announcing they will use a company that uses find-and-replace for translation to translate Harlequin novels into other languages. Because romance and sex is exactly the kind of thing that you can trust a computer to get both correct and properly nuanced. (The company supposedly also employs humans to translate, which is probably more that they're there to make sure that the slop generator isn't too egregiously wrong.)
Microsoft is continuing to flog their CoPilot division and using their monopoly leverage to force integration of CoPilot into more products, make other products look more like the UI of CoPilot, and prevent disabling CoPilot in those products. Which should tell you all you need to know about whether CoPilot is actually worth anything, if it has to be forced into everything and left with the switch stuck on. Microsoft is so ready to embrace the foolishness that they're closing their library and replacing it with CoPilot. (Although they may be allowing system administrators on Pro accounts to uninstall and keep CoPilot uninstalled. At least, to do it once.)
They're at least saying they're going to cover the full energy costs of the new datacenters they're building, but if they were really interested in the full costs of the datacenter, they'd be covering a whole lot more for the communities they're going to build in.
Even Wikipedia is being forced into the era of data scraping and LLMs, getting several of the companies producing these environmentally-destroying LLMs to at least pay for the bandwidth they're using to DDoS and scrape Wikipedia for training data for their LLMs. One can hope that all kinds of AI things will be immediately discarded from the Wiki as soon as they appear. Games Workshop, creators of Warhammer, have said generative "AI" is banned from their spaces, and music platform Bandcamp has also banned works created by or that primarily use generative "AI", so there are places that are able to say no to slop.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has determined that your search engine queries are not protected or private in any way, because search engine companies collect and sell that data. Yep, because a corporation abuses privacy, a court has ruled there's no expectation of it.
Technology companies are starting to notify users when they believe those users have been targeted by government spyware and surveillance, so they can turn on additional protections for their devices and online accounts. And there are other entities who are there to help with hardening and protection after those notifications appear, if someone takes it seriously and seeks help.
The burnt-on ROM keys for the PlayStation 5 console have been leaked to the Internet, which will make certain older PS5 consoles more likely to be moddable and for custom firmware to be loadable onto those devices.
The metadata servers for Windows Media Player may no longer be working, making it difficult to use it for playing or extracting audio from physical media that you may still have.
Microsoft GitHub engaged in suspensions without warnings of several accounts associated with creating mods for erogames or functionality for vibrators and other sex toys, although the people whose repositories were suspended without warning say they have received no official reason for the suspension, and that they were careful not to do anything that would be in violation of the Terms of Service for GitHub. I expect there will not be any official reason given, because justifications based on "this offended someone and we were looking for an excuse to suspend this content anyway" generally don't have anywhere in stated Terms they can point to as actual violations. Sex workers are used to this happening to their sites and presence without justification or warning, and so now we should expect the same for people who are creating content that is protected in the United States, as soon as the repository hosting them notices, or has their attention directed to these codebases.
The Federal Communications Commission believed Verizon's exaggerations about "fraud" and allowed them to no longer have to make their phones available for use on other networks after 60 days to their subscribers. Verizon is also on the list of places you should never do business with because they refuse to allow the bootloaders of their phones to be unlocked, so that old phones can continue to receive updates from unofficial operating system sources. So they both want subscriber lock-in and to produce more e-waste by preventing users from using their devices for longer than the support the manufacturers or Verizon want to provide for them. They claim to need longer unlocking periods to deal with their handsets being used in criminal enterprises, but I suspect those criminal enterprises wouldn't have much trouble at all obtaining various handsets and phones even with a longer unlock period.
Unethical behavior from fabrication of things is bad, but the fabrication of things in the way that Oliver Sacks did makes things worse, and a malpractice of being a doctor.
If Elizabeth Warren is your Senator, ask her why she's supporting KOSA yet again, despite knowing that a bill like it wouldn't do anything at all toward protecting children online, and instead would do a lot more harm to adults in the name of protecting children from anything that isn't approved by ultra-right-wing conservatives.
Last for this entry, dressed as the pink ranger from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers / Zyuranger, Martha Root demonstrated how she had gained control of white supremacist websites, had the members talk to chatbots, and then deleted the sites live during the talk.
A plea to start posting the snippets of our lives again, rather than trying to figure out what would be the best for the algorithm or withdrawing entirely from posting because we are trying not to chase the unsatisfiable algorithm. I think that will be an easier task on sites where there is no algorithm to game, but the difficulty of getting people to those sites is that they also need to have their friends decamp to a compatible network as well, and that's not necessarily an easy sell, even if someone wants to leave a toxic environment. (And, as has been well-documented in places like the Fediverse, for minorities, it's a question of leaving one toxic platform for another, and evaluating whether or not the controls on the new platform are good enough that they won't get subjected to more harassment getting through their filters or not.)
The ways that people are using chatbots as social and erotic companions, even though a fair number of them know they're chatbots. Which is the kind of future the techbros would like - interactions as event flags with characters that aren't human and don't have human needs or changes in mood.
And a method that presumably allows you to not have CoPilot or other "AI" features in your Windows 11 install, and sets things up so that they won't reinstall themselves, either.
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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.)
Trans women whose culture includes the quinceañera are celebrating the rite of passage for themselves as an important touchstone of their lives.
A white suit worn by Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway in a Star Trek: Voyager episode is about as loud a billboard declaring Janeway queer as you could get away with on television at the time. I get to be part of the Lucky 10,000 in understanding that suit and its origins, and so, hopefully, do you.
People familiar with the culture and traditions of Hawai'i explain why the live-action Lilo and Stitch disrespects that entire tradition, history, and the original animation's messages as well.
The ways that humans have for expressing affection for each other are greater than sex and romance, and many of those acts that WEIRD people would classify as sexual or romantic are instead culturally appropriate expressions of affection. Because there's still not an underlying acceptance of the idea that people can be affectionate to each other without it being sexual, and extra so for people of the same perceived gender.
What we think of as local culture and tradition is global culture and tradition. We have just forgotten that things like food migrate and then integrate really well into wherever they land. Which is why you will occasionally have someone yelling that Italians of an era before the tomato migrated out of the Americas are not having marinara sauce with their pasta. The idea that there is only one human culture, and what we have are a bunch of local implementations and place-and-time specific manifestations of it, is really rather true, but because our memories and our records don't always persist over time, we forget that we have already done this before. Repeatedly.
Research into autism that has done less assuming the neurotypical is "normal" and the standard continues to find things that are classified as deficits and disorders are often strengths and consistencies, just at a different angle than the neurotypical one.
Claudette Colvin, who was getting arrested for not giving up a bus seat in a segregated South before Rosa Parks became the face of it, has died at 86 years of age.
Further evidence that our eyes are not lying to us, the Lemkin Institute warns us that the United States is in the early stages of trying to stomp out all trans people. Which is not necessarily news to those who are having to experience it, but for people who aren't quite as close to the action, this is your sign. (And also, pay attention to your history.)
The United States engaged in a military operation in Venezuela, ostensibly to capture and extradite the former President of the country to the United States to face charges for drug trafficking. This paper reason doesn't stand up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny: it's about seizing control of fossil fuels, destabilizing the separation of powers, distracting from scandal, and behaving as a rogue nation unfettered by anything while daring someone else to do something about it. Because they believe they have that power and nobody will try to stop them, they're also now seizing control of other countries' infrastructure, believing they now own it all and can do whatever they want with it.
After having attacked another sovereign nation, the current administrator boasted that he could and would do it to other sovereign nations in the region. And threatened the person ascending to the role of leader of Venezuela that he'll do worse to her if she doesn't do what he wants.
The justification for all of this is that the legitimate governments of other sovereign nations are really run by criminal organizations and it is the responsibility of the United States to destroy those cartels, usually with the snide statement that the governments of those nations "won't" or "can't."
Well, those justifications are. When he wants to talk about invading and taking over Greenland, it's more on the matter of seizing resources and trying to prevent international cooperation, even though Greenland is currently subject to the government of Denmark. Which means that if the U.S. really were serious about taking Greenland for its supposed strategic purposes, they would be attacking a NATO ally and invoking the mutual defense pact of the alliance, among other things that would make it an international disaster for the U.S.
In the United States, the administration approved using the National Guard of Louisiana against the population of New Orleans, which is, unsurprisingly, mostly colors that this white supremacist administration believes are inferior and should be terrorized. The usual deployment of excuses involving reducing crime and going after criminals were deployed, and rang as hollow as they always have.
The kidnappers were in Tuscon, Arizona, as well, trying to create chaos and terror in the predominantly brown-skinned areas of the city.
The kidnapping squads escalated into being the murder squads they were always intended to be, this time killing a woman in Minneapolis. Shortly after the video of the murder was shared, the mother of the victim identified her as Renee Nicole Good. Further details indicate that she was married to a woman that loved her, and she has a child of her own.
The administration, and those responsible for the murder squads, immediately proclaimed that the evidence of one's eyes and the videos circulated were false and the murderer acted in self-defense against a violent attack, and continued to stick to that position, because to do otherwise would be to admit that everything that has been said about the kidnapping and murder squads is absolutely true and they are encouraging this kind of behavior because of their own racist and white supremacist reasons. (And they are claiming there's no way that the murderer is immune from prosecution or any other criminal charge.) Local officials expressed their contempt for this position, and for the murder squads, with the mayor of Minneapolis saying "Get the fuck out" to the murder squads and calling their justifications "bullshit". Which is entirely justified, as the administration continues to state complete fabrications as their official positions and statements. They are also insisting they are the ones who can investigate the murder and nobody else is allowed, even as schools go virtual so their students and teachers are not subjected to the possibility of being kidnapped or murdered, because, yes, they're targeting students and teachers for kidnappings.
The fact that a woman in a relationship with another woman died, called a "fucking bitch" by the man that shot her, and that accounts and administration people alike are erasing her relationship, is not accidental.
And then, in Portland, Oregon, two people were also shot by a federal agent claiming self-defense against someone attempting to hurt them with a vehicle. As you can guess, that justification is almost certainly a lie, because there is no reason to believe that any statement justifying violence from people who are committing violence without justification should be believed. And yet, they claimed that the people shot were members of a gang, and other such nonsense.
A kidnapper shot a protester in the face with a supposedly "nonlethal" round, giving skull fractures, a loss of sight, and otherwise disabling the protester trying to get the kidnapping and murder squads to listen to their consciences.
At this point, instead of treating masked, unidentified entities who claim to be federal agents as potential kidnappers and reacting accordingly, you should now treat them as potential murderers and mass violence perpetrators and react accordingly. And understand that they are also trying to disguise themselves so they can kidnap and murder more effectively and with even less accountability. They're behaving as people unconstrained by any kind of law and who believe they will not be held to account.
And they intend to start going from one door to the next to find people to kidnap and murder, since their terrorism of people in more public spaces isn't doing enough to satisfy the racists, ghouls, and white nationalists currently in power. And, of course, they're using Palantir tech to try and decide who they want to terrorize next in that campaign. Since they're also giving the green light, or at least not severely reining-in, the kidnappers and murderers who are using chokeholds and other potentially-lethal moves on the people they intend to terrorize. Because, again, they don't believe themselves to be bounded by anything, even as they claim the powers of things that come with bounds. Their "screening" process for recruiting people is minimal at best and nonexistent in reality, so there's no way of knowing whether the person sent to kidnap and murder is someone who would be able to get any other job at all. (And that they appear to be falsifying data to ensure that they get enough of the people they want to have on the streets.) They want people intimidated and scared that they will be treated poorly if "arrested" on whatever trumped-up reason the kidnappers can come up with, and they feel empowered to destroy whatever they want while they're at it.
Those with technical skills, and those without, can do their part to map surveillance devices and to use code to know when they are being recorded, and to use that information to pressure the people that nominally have power to stop throwing their lot in with surveillance technology that often allows warrantless snooping. And, of course, you can always distribute correct and up-to-date information on how to handle encounters with the kidnapping and murder squads when they're trying to invade your house or detain you for no reason.
The most polite remedy there is available for these actions is to pass and sustain articles of impeachment against the administrator and the chief who permits and encourages these murders. If those remedies do not work, or are ignored, then it falls to states and local authorities to refuse not only cooperation, but entry, to kidnapping and murder squads. The people are already out and exercising their rights to prevent kidnapping and murder from happening in their spaces, even as the kidnapping and murder squads use chemical warfare and their own weaponry against he will of the people. And making their displeasure known in unmistakable, but plausibly-deniable, ways on the platforms they have available to them.
A Hilton Hotels chain member that had been refusing reservations from the murder squads was forced to recant and accept them from the corporate offices, reminding us that free speech is really only available to those with the money to pay for it.
The murder squadrons are also equipped with wide-spread surveillance devices that they deploy without authorization or proper court order, because commercial data, obtained by companies, is not apparently subjected to court order. Although, when those companies screw it up, then you can find out whether you've been targeted, and who else is being targeted, by people who are looking for excuses to do damage to you and yours. Along with that, the kidnapping and murder squads also want the authority to track and de-anonymize anyone who criticizes them, because they are all thin-skinned, and want to hide while giving nobody else the ability to do so.
At least one of the possible explanations for the aggression in Venezuela and in the United States is to distract from the requirements that materials in the files regarding the known pederast be released properly to the public. Some of the redactions they attempted were not done correctly, and could be undone through trivial means, giving insight into what is being additionally redacted past what might have been required by the law, and in what things might very well should have been or were required to be redacted and weren't.
Because they're sexists as well as the other -isms this administration practices, the head of the Defense Department has demanded a review intended to find women insufficiently capable of being part of front-line combat operations in the military.
A senator, retired from the military, is suing the Secretary of Defense because said Secretary is trying to dock his pay and rank for speaking in a video reminding military servicepeople they are prohibited from following illegal orders. Because these people are very much so thin-skinned, they treat the truth as something they have to fight back against as personal affront.
And, of course, there's always the specter in the background that if things continue to not go in his favor, the administrator will simply cancel elections and continue to rule in the autocratic manner that he believes he's entitled to. Even if he secretly wants to go ahead with that anyway, legislators in several states are doing their best to hide all of the work and discussion they do around redistricting electoral maps from public oversight and inquiry by asserting various forms of privilege over the entire thing. Which makes it harder to prove someone had discriminatory intent if you can't access the things that definitely would prove it.
The CBS program 60 Minutes produced a segment about the CECOT prison in El Salvador that the current administration has been trying to send the kidnapped to, and the new administration-friendly CEO installed to prevent such acts of journalism spiked it. But because it would run in other markets and places, the segment was aired as produced there, and therefore is widely available for people in the United States to view as well.
After the administrator illegally demanded that the National Parks entry pass use his visage instead of the contest-winning nature photograph, the National Park Service had to reiterate Interior Department guidelines to say that any pass in which the visage of the administrator had been defaced would may no longer be considered valid for entry into a national park.
The board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the arm of the government responsible for supporting public media outlets, and for some of the educational programming seen throughout childhood, voted to dissolve itself after having had its funding zeroed and the corporation itself threatened to be used to disseminate propaganda.
The current Health and Human Services secretary has directed the Food and Drug Administration to remove warnings from their websites about the real damage that can be done from fake "treatments" for autism, all with the idea of promoting an agenda that means unverified and quack "treatments" and other such things, usually promoted by people whose scientific knowledge would not fill a thimble, but who want to make all kinds of money fleecing people with "wellness" materials.
Rural parts of the United States have persistent mythologies about them and their lifestyles, each of which are interesting in their own way, but the one I have the highest eyebrow-raise at is the one where they say "well, no, it wasn't a sudden change that brought rural people to the current administrator, they've been at it for decades." That's not the kind of mythbusting they think it is. (Some of the other ones are also of this same sort of thing - "it's not all white, it's just a supermajority of white people.") Something more on target is a retrospective on the friendly societies, who performed many functions of mutual aid before there were things such as state-run social insurance, and who continue in the vein of mutual aid even afterward.
Wegman's grocery in New York City is deploying facial scanning technology and is storing biometric data of shoppers without their consent. Which is the kind of thing that sparks human creativity and ingenuity on how to defeat such systems, as well as practical things to do, like supporting legislation and letting corporate owners know how much you detest their intrusions on privacy.
A cop accused a woman of porch piracy, and then refused to look at evidence that made it clear it wasn't her. Because our regular cops are also pretty convinced they don't have to follow the laws and the constraints upon them.
A rare set of photographs of Ada Lovelace acquired before they were to be sold at auction to a private buyer.
Adding solar power generation to crop fields helps to increase crop yields as well as generate solar energy, thanks to the shade and shielding the solar power installations provide to the crops underneath.
After a search conducted after the previous stationmaster died, there is a new stationmaster at Kishi Station, a calico cat named Yontama. (Which, I believe, translated to "third cat"), The succession line has also been worked out, as there is an apprentice stationmaster named Rokutama ("fourth cat".) (The predecessor was Niitama, "second cat," so the naming sequence makes sense.)
In technology, the program put into existence from the person in charge of Twitter is being asked to nonconsensually rework pictures of women so that they're wearing nothing or nearly nothing, and because it seems perfectly okay with that kind of action, it's also being used to generate child sexual abuse material by doing the same to pictures of children. All of this is further developments for a chatbot that has been developed and marketed as not being constrained in the same ways that other ones are, and is proving in real-time why those restrictions are necessary. But, rather than turn off the thing, the company running it seems to have decided that deepfake nudes and CSAM is for paying customers only, and are complaining that their free speech rights are being impugned as governments talk about banning the platform because of the presence of CSAM on it.
Of course, there would be an easier solution to this problem, but the people running the App and Google Play stores are not interested in kicking out apps that clearly violate their policies when the consequences of doing so would be to anger all the people who want to have CSAM-generation at their fingertips. While also getting rid of applications that provide useful services, like alerting people to the location of murder squads in their neighborhoods. If there's something that this era has shown us as something we already knew, it was that capital and business does not have any ethics, only the pursuit of profit, and all things can be justified in the pursuit of profit.
The US Secretary of Defense has decided that all military systems will have the CSAM generator integrated into their own systems, which I am sure will result in all kinds of new ways for classified information to leak out or be exfiltrated, as well as providing military members with all the CSAM they would like to generate, I guess.
HarperCollins has decided they are no longer interested in the Harlequin line of romance and erotica being profitable, announcing they will use a company that uses find-and-replace for translation to translate Harlequin novels into other languages. Because romance and sex is exactly the kind of thing that you can trust a computer to get both correct and properly nuanced. (The company supposedly also employs humans to translate, which is probably more that they're there to make sure that the slop generator isn't too egregiously wrong.)
Microsoft is continuing to flog their CoPilot division and using their monopoly leverage to force integration of CoPilot into more products, make other products look more like the UI of CoPilot, and prevent disabling CoPilot in those products. Which should tell you all you need to know about whether CoPilot is actually worth anything, if it has to be forced into everything and left with the switch stuck on. Microsoft is so ready to embrace the foolishness that they're closing their library and replacing it with CoPilot. (Although they may be allowing system administrators on Pro accounts to uninstall and keep CoPilot uninstalled. At least, to do it once.)
They're at least saying they're going to cover the full energy costs of the new datacenters they're building, but if they were really interested in the full costs of the datacenter, they'd be covering a whole lot more for the communities they're going to build in.
Even Wikipedia is being forced into the era of data scraping and LLMs, getting several of the companies producing these environmentally-destroying LLMs to at least pay for the bandwidth they're using to DDoS and scrape Wikipedia for training data for their LLMs. One can hope that all kinds of AI things will be immediately discarded from the Wiki as soon as they appear. Games Workshop, creators of Warhammer, have said generative "AI" is banned from their spaces, and music platform Bandcamp has also banned works created by or that primarily use generative "AI", so there are places that are able to say no to slop.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has determined that your search engine queries are not protected or private in any way, because search engine companies collect and sell that data. Yep, because a corporation abuses privacy, a court has ruled there's no expectation of it.
Technology companies are starting to notify users when they believe those users have been targeted by government spyware and surveillance, so they can turn on additional protections for their devices and online accounts. And there are other entities who are there to help with hardening and protection after those notifications appear, if someone takes it seriously and seeks help.
The burnt-on ROM keys for the PlayStation 5 console have been leaked to the Internet, which will make certain older PS5 consoles more likely to be moddable and for custom firmware to be loadable onto those devices.
The metadata servers for Windows Media Player may no longer be working, making it difficult to use it for playing or extracting audio from physical media that you may still have.
Microsoft GitHub engaged in suspensions without warnings of several accounts associated with creating mods for erogames or functionality for vibrators and other sex toys, although the people whose repositories were suspended without warning say they have received no official reason for the suspension, and that they were careful not to do anything that would be in violation of the Terms of Service for GitHub. I expect there will not be any official reason given, because justifications based on "this offended someone and we were looking for an excuse to suspend this content anyway" generally don't have anywhere in stated Terms they can point to as actual violations. Sex workers are used to this happening to their sites and presence without justification or warning, and so now we should expect the same for people who are creating content that is protected in the United States, as soon as the repository hosting them notices, or has their attention directed to these codebases.
The Federal Communications Commission believed Verizon's exaggerations about "fraud" and allowed them to no longer have to make their phones available for use on other networks after 60 days to their subscribers. Verizon is also on the list of places you should never do business with because they refuse to allow the bootloaders of their phones to be unlocked, so that old phones can continue to receive updates from unofficial operating system sources. So they both want subscriber lock-in and to produce more e-waste by preventing users from using their devices for longer than the support the manufacturers or Verizon want to provide for them. They claim to need longer unlocking periods to deal with their handsets being used in criminal enterprises, but I suspect those criminal enterprises wouldn't have much trouble at all obtaining various handsets and phones even with a longer unlock period.
Unethical behavior from fabrication of things is bad, but the fabrication of things in the way that Oliver Sacks did makes things worse, and a malpractice of being a doctor.
If Elizabeth Warren is your Senator, ask her why she's supporting KOSA yet again, despite knowing that a bill like it wouldn't do anything at all toward protecting children online, and instead would do a lot more harm to adults in the name of protecting children from anything that isn't approved by ultra-right-wing conservatives.
Last for this entry, dressed as the pink ranger from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers / Zyuranger, Martha Root demonstrated how she had gained control of white supremacist websites, had the members talk to chatbots, and then deleted the sites live during the talk.
A plea to start posting the snippets of our lives again, rather than trying to figure out what would be the best for the algorithm or withdrawing entirely from posting because we are trying not to chase the unsatisfiable algorithm. I think that will be an easier task on sites where there is no algorithm to game, but the difficulty of getting people to those sites is that they also need to have their friends decamp to a compatible network as well, and that's not necessarily an easy sell, even if someone wants to leave a toxic environment. (And, as has been well-documented in places like the Fediverse, for minorities, it's a question of leaving one toxic platform for another, and evaluating whether or not the controls on the new platform are good enough that they won't get subjected to more harassment getting through their filters or not.)
The ways that people are using chatbots as social and erotic companions, even though a fair number of them know they're chatbots. Which is the kind of future the techbros would like - interactions as event flags with characters that aren't human and don't have human needs or changes in mood.
And a method that presumably allows you to not have CoPilot or other "AI" features in your Windows 11 install, and sets things up so that they won't reinstall themselves, either.
(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.)
