devers

[devers]

progress report bs 180

[devers]

Merry X Bones, skate progress on x-mass day 2020.

[devers]

Progress report, pool skaten

[devers]

Gein skatepark Amsterdam

Met de Skatepool ontdekkingsreizigers, and yours truly

[devers]

HP ends its customers' lives

HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.

Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.

The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers’ interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.

By contemporary standards, the opening hostilities in the ink-wars look positively quaint:

Manufacturing special half-full cartridges to ship with new printers so their owners have to buy a new set just days after the open the box

Requiring frequent “calibration” printouts that use vast amounts of ink

Gimmicking cartridges’ sensors to declare them “empty” even when there’s still ink in them

Thing is, all of this just makes official printer ink less desirable and fuels demand for third party ink.

For this to work, you need to win a two-front war: one on your customers and the other on your competitors. HP is fighting both.

First they pioneered the use of DRM to detect and prevent third-party ink.

Then when ink makers started making their own chips, or harvesting chips out of discarded cartridges to use in news ones, HP got US customs to seize the product, calling it a patent infringement.

But the real ugliness started in March 2016, when HP pushed out a fake “security update” for inkjet printers. Owners who ran the update saw nothing, just a software version number that went up by one.

What they didn’t know was that they’ve been given an asymptomatic infection - a malicious update that only kicked in five months later, after everyone had had a good long time to update. That update’s real purpose was to detect and reject third party ink.

It went off right after school started, stranding cash-strapped parents with a year’s worth of ink for their kids’ school projects. People were outraged. HP issued a nonpology.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/what-hp-must-do-make-amends-its-self-destructing-printers

(One year later, they did it again)

https://gizmodo.com/one-year-after-bricking-third-party-ink-with-update-hp-1809073739

Every time HP got caught doing something evil, they had the same excuse: “that’s the deal we offered and you accepted it.”

For example, if the box says “Works best with HP ink,” then you are “agreeing” that it might not work with other ink. Nevermind that the only reason your printer doesn’t work with other ink is that HP tricked you into downgrading it so that the ink stopped working.

This is the grifter’s all-purpose excuse: “If you didn’t want me to rip you off, then why did you click ‘I agree’?”

HP was just getting started, though. In the ideal world, you wouldn’t even own your printer ink, you’d just RENT it.

Enter HP Instant Ink.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03760650

This  is “ink as a service.” You pre-commit to printing a certain number of pages/month and they mail you ink, which they own. You’re not buying the ink, you’re buying the right to use it.

If you don’t print your quota in a month, some of the pages roll over, but they don’t let you bank more than a few months’ worth - and to keep those pages, you have to keep paying for your sub. Meanwhile, if you blow through your limit, you get charged for every page.

This is a weird and unpalatable idea, so to sell it, HP rolled out a pay-one-price “Free Ink for Life” plan that gave you 15 pages every month for as long as you owned your printer.

But this is HP we’re talking about, so words have no meaning. Last month, HP notified its “free ink for life” customers that their life had ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to pay $0.99/month, forever, or else.

This Darth Vader “Pray I don’t alter it further” shit is the most on-brand HP thing ever

Worse still are the many imitators HP inspires - all those companies that have decided that it’s your solemn duty to arrange your affairs to suit their shareholders’ needs.

The right-to-repair criminals like Apple, John Deere and Medtronic. Tesla and GM, Juicero and Keurig - companies that are not merely content with waging war on customers, but also on competitors who offer those customers shelter.

Since the turn of this century, HP has been shedding its productive business units that make useful products, and focusing its legal and engineering departments on innovations in shitty dystopian hack-futurism.

[devers]

Working repost from 2012 broken embed code

[devers]

Astronaut Ed White walks in space, June 3, 1965.

(ASU/NASA)

[devers]

Zellig Ahlberg in Fall or Dodge in Hell

Just finished reading (Well listening to, actually) Fall or Dodge in hell (https://www.nealstephenson.com/fall,-or-dodge-in-hell.html) and was curious where this "Zeligh Ahlberg" might be situates. The fractal like 'country' situated on the border between Netherlands and Belgium.. Could it be luxemburg? After a bit of googling I figured it was a made up name. But what was it is most likely based on Baarle Nassau / Baarle Hartog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau).

[devers]

Good

[devers]

The cats who say #ni?

Wow!

Video by Ed Trist

[devers]

Feelings Wheel

[devers]

C̴͖̰͎͚a̴͙v̛̞̤̩̪̺͉͎e͔̲͙̣̜͕ ̼͈̘͙̦̙̮͞d̩̫̗̣̙̖̕ͅi̫̦͈͘vi̠n̠̤͖̱͖g҉̗̹

[devers]

(via Finally got to do something creative with my ugly shoulder scar thanks to Chris Earnhart at Arcade Tattoo, CA. : tattoos)

[devers]

#6yrsago Neal Stephenson's Some Remarks, a remarkable essay collection

Neal Stephenson is a talented essayist, a fact that anyone who read his seminal In the Beginning… Was the Command Line will be aware of. Some of the finest moments in his fiction is really nonfiction, essays that make up part of the story, which some critics take umbrage at. I love it. I happen to love discursive novels. But that said, Stephenson’s essays are even more enjoyable than the discursions in his novels, which is saying something.

Some Remarks is a new collection of mostly reprinted, mostly nonfiction. I’ve read nearly every word in this collection before, some of it multiple times, but nevertheless found it to be a breezy, fast, and thoroughly enjoyable read.

The collection is dominated by Mother Earth Mother Board a “hacker tourist” travelogue that tells the story of the FLAG transoceanic cable, a pioneering privately funded project that was originally published in Wired magazine, which deserves kudos for having the bravery to commission an essay that runs to more than 100 pages in this 300-page book. This essay still stands as a kind of Moby-Dick for undersea cabling, a ferociously detailed, gripping account of an obscure but vital field that manages to be both highly technical and highly dramatic. I found  my 2012 re-read of this essay much different from my original reading of it in 1996, in particular because of all the references to politics in middle eastern countries like Libya and Egypt, which have been so much in the news lately. There’s a little frisson of history-in-the-making from this essay, as you realize that the establishment of redundant, high-speed network links into the region prefigured a vast, global change that we are still experiencing.

There are many other pieces in this book, including two pretty good short stories (Stephenson readily admits that he’s at his best with fiction at much longer lengths), as well as some classic interviews and a speech in which Stephenson lays out a theory of the sort of work that he writes and its place relative to literature and culture.

There’s an unabashedly esoteric and absolutely delightful account of Leibniz’s metaphysics, and an evocative piece on life as a child in a midwestern college town. In short, there is the sort of highly varied and erudite contrasts that make Stephenson’s novels so pleasurable (and important).

Stephenson lightly edited these essays to remove anachronistic irrelevancies, but some of them still stand as perfect reflections of the period in which they were written, time capsules and core samples of the heroic days of the early commercial Internet. This is, in short, a fantastic book and an indispensable companion to Stephenson’s canon.

I’m also delighted to note that there’s a Brilliance audio MP3CD unabridged audiobook edition.

Some Remarks

https://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/neal-stephensons-some-re.html

[devers]

#6yrsago Neal Stephenson's Some Remarks, a remarkable essay collection

Neal Stephenson is a talented essayist, a fact that anyone who read his seminal In the Beginning… Was the Command Line will be aware of. Some of the finest moments in his fiction is really nonfiction, essays that make up part of the story, which some critics take umbrage at. I love it. I happen to love discursive novels. But that said, Stephenson’s essays are even more enjoyable than the discursions in his novels, which is saying something.

Some Remarks is a new collection of mostly reprinted, mostly nonfiction. I’ve read nearly every word in this collection before, some of it multiple times, but nevertheless found it to be a breezy, fast, and thoroughly enjoyable read.

The collection is dominated by Mother Earth Mother Board a “hacker tourist” travelogue that tells the story of the FLAG transoceanic cable, a pioneering privately funded project that was originally published in Wired magazine, which deserves kudos for having the bravery to commission an essay that runs to more than 100 pages in this 300-page book. This essay still stands as a kind of Moby-Dick for undersea cabling, a ferociously detailed, gripping account of an obscure but vital field that manages to be both highly technical and highly dramatic. I found  my 2012 re-read of this essay much different from my original reading of it in 1996, in particular because of all the references to politics in middle eastern countries like Libya and Egypt, which have been so much in the news lately. There’s a little frisson of history-in-the-making from this essay, as you realize that the establishment of redundant, high-speed network links into the region prefigured a vast, global change that we are still experiencing.

There are many other pieces in this book, including two pretty good short stories (Stephenson readily admits that he’s at his best with fiction at much longer lengths), as well as some classic interviews and a speech in which Stephenson lays out a theory of the sort of work that he writes and its place relative to literature and culture.

There’s an unabashedly esoteric and absolutely delightful account of Leibniz’s metaphysics, and an evocative piece on life as a child in a midwestern college town. In short, there is the sort of highly varied and erudite contrasts that make Stephenson’s novels so pleasurable (and important).

Stephenson lightly edited these essays to remove anachronistic irrelevancies, but some of them still stand as perfect reflections of the period in which they were written, time capsules and core samples of the heroic days of the early commercial Internet. This is, in short, a fantastic book and an indispensable companion to Stephenson’s canon.

I’m also delighted to note that there’s a Brilliance audio MP3CD unabridged audiobook edition.

Some Remarks

https://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/neal-stephensons-some-re.html

[devers]

Facebook Liberation Army Link List, April 12, 2018

Facebook Liberation Army Link List (April 12, 2018)Compiled and edited by Geert Lovink & Patricia de Vries (Institute of Network Cultures)

Facebook Delete Manuals

https://pageflows.com/blog/delete-facebook/

https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/after-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-to-delete-your-facebook-account/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/28/people-really-deleting-their-facebook-accounts-its-complicated/464109002/

https://androidreader.com/how-to-delete-your-facebook-account-step-by-step/https://beat.10ztalk.com/2018/03/26/why-deletefacebook-is-a-bad-idea-unless-you-have-these-4-questions-answered/

https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/

Divorce Tools

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90164935/want-to-fight-back-against-facebooks-algorithm-check-out-these-tools

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/

https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/https://degooglisons-internet.org/

Departure & Alternatives

https://gab.ai/

https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/facebook-competition/

https://www.tippereconomy.io/

https://mastodon.social/about

http://www.orkut.com/index.html

https://peepeth.com/about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE

https://degooglisons-internet.org/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prevaat-the-privacy-focused-social-network#

/https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-alternatives/

https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/#decide

http://threatbrief.com/deletefacebook-5-best-facebook-alternatives-focus-privacy/

https://mashable.com/2018/03/20/facebook-replacement-openbook-competition/#frm9x3CADZqZ

The RSS Alternative

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/

https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/

To Regulate or Not to Regulate

http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/cambridge-analytica-the-kontrollverlust-and-the-post-privacy-approach-to-data-regulation/

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-current/

https://medium.com/@YESHICAN/an-open-letter-to-facebook-from-the-data-for-black-lives-movement-81e693c6b46c

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/04/algorithms-powerful-europe-response-social-media

https://www.republik.ch/2018/03/27/menschen-wuerden-ihre-daten-verkaufen-wenn-sie-koennten

https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/

Long Reads & Analysis & Opinion

https://cyberwanderlustblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/why-feminists-should-abandon-social-networks-ideology/  

https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine

https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult

https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook-pyramid/

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/cambridge-analytica-and-our-lives-inside-the-surveillance-machine

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/03/26/Quit-Facebook/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/facebook-zuckerberg-apologies/?utm_term=.156887e60e4b

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-a-history-of-mark-zuckerberg-apologizing/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/technology/zuckerberg-elections-russia-data-privacy.html

(Tech) Facts &  & Threads

https://mashable.com/2013/06/26/facebook-shadow-profiles/#b9irCKx_MZqz 

https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-the-facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-debacle-b69fe692d747

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-28/fakebook-its-way-zero

https://twitter.com/therealjpk/status/976484505035751424

https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/983725115903852544

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2_fUqaHGe8