#'it's clearly the education system!'

[sharonisthebettercarter]

y'all...

if you haven't yet (and have read the boys comics first of course), def read "dear becky".

it's perfect. it's just fuckin' perfect. that's all i can say... OOH~! i wanna say moar! it hurts so goddamn much but it's a good bittersweet hurt.

also lovely to get full confirmation that kripke is a superfan of the source material and ennis' work~<3

very reassuring and show's he's an open minded person willing to listen and learn with good media literacy, but also means he set out to adapt the story proper from the very beginning<3<3<3! and boi, it has shown from the very beginning but it just gets me all the more excited<3

butt~ if you have any wonder of what he's going for with butcher--motives, self view, goals, even spoilers--this might help clear it up... leik a LOT actually lol

comics butcher and show butcher are actually a lot more alike than people want to admit (def looks like kripke is going for making him as accurate as he can tho)

plus i'm always a sucker for moar big bobbi<3<3<3 she is literally the BEST<3!

[pan-diasaster]

I HOPE THE PERSON WHO DECIDED THAT SCHOOL SHOULD START AT 7 AM IN THE MORNING HAS A SPECIAL PLACE IN THE NINTH LEVEL OF HELL

[luxlightly]

Just saw someone tag my "Dystopian fiction is not meant to predict anything. It's meant to be an allegory for things happening in the present. Discussing it as a prediction or warning defeats the purpose and is largely counter productive. This is basic literary analysis this isn't a groundbreaking revelation" post with "Wow, i never thought of it that way and I'm an English teacher!"

I mean, I know the post was criticizing the education system for teaching these works outside their historical context and generally not actually discussing anything actually relevant about them alongside missing or entirely misconstruing the point of the work but dear god seeing someone just say in so many words "I'm a teacher who has never grasped the basic priciples of one of the most influential genres of literature which I have almost certainly taught about at some point" is just something else.

The kids are really hosed, now.

[levil0vesyou]

Having a post get popular enough to be independently reblogged by someone you follow but aren't mutuals with is. Wild

[pneumonic-screamers]

tbh the only reason why I'm not skipping every math lesson and actually giving it ago is bc I know Alan Turing would be disappointed

[falled-over]

very autistic media day

[lillcarrionbird]

“we had tipped 12%, which is still fucking generous considering we were 3 minimum wage retail workers with very little disposable income!”

Tell me you’ve never been a server without telling me you’ve never been a server! Servers do not make minimum wage. They make between $4 and $5 an hour. So they’re making about half what you do hourly.

Being expected to tip is a burden on poor people? EATING OUT AND NOT TIPPING IS A BURDEN ON POOR PEOPLE. You are not being asked to put extra money into a toll booth or a vending machine or a parking meter for its services, your server is a human being. Who is making less money than you. And you don’t care, because all you have the capacity to think about is how YOU don’t like that you’re expected to leave an extra $5 for your $20 meal. Why don’t you just get takeout then? Is it because you enjoy sitting in a nice place and having someone bring you food and drinks and napkins and any other little extra thing you can ask for? Great. That’s why you’re expected to tip.

You are undoubtedly a total piece of shit.

COUNTRIES OUTSIDE THE USA EXIST YOU STUPID FUCK LMAO

I specifically said in the post, and in the previous posts, that they make the same minimum wage as retail workers IN MY COUNTRY!! WHICH IS NOT THE USA!

Here's the fucking screenshot from the exact post your responding to.

I am begging you to stop foaming at the mouth and get some reading comprehension. Servers in my province don't make $4, they make $16 an hour, just like EVERY OTHER MINIMUM WAGE EMPLOYEE.

Why should minimum wage retail employees have to subsidize the wage of people who make the exact same amount as they do?

I tipped 12% to a person who makes the exact same amount as me. Why is that so hard for you idiots to understand?

[quemirabobo]

I'm writing a Bruce and Damian "A Goofy Movie" AU and it's kinda difficult cause it's a road trip story and like one hand: As a Writer you really need everything to be geographically accurate...but as an Argentinian you also really want revenge for X-men First Class

I see, you're in a crossroad my friend, as a fellow writer I know what you're going through, if you make a mistake it will haunt you forever but as an argie it's your sacred duty to avenge us!! My advice is you either do it subtle enough so they start questioning if their whole life it's a lie, they have to stop and google some shit that can't be true but only half of the time is wrong! Or you can go fucking big and rearrange that place however you fucking want! Pick a random place and make it your playground, give it life, kill it, mess it up, whatever you want will be perfect and I'm absolutely certain that you'll avenge us big time because we argies do everything with more passion than it's necessary and that's why we are the best🥰

[childishzombiejellyfish]

oh let me count the ways the danish state has built integrated (and yet strangely disconnected) automatic systems that don't recognise me as a person, despite having spent my entire childhood there...

[cinematicbookworm]

Saw a TikTok complaining about anti intellectualism and making fun of people who are going to modern art museums and missing the point of works by saying oh I could do that. Long rant about us academic intellectuals missing the whole god damn point of the criticism under the cut… tldr… people keep complaining about anti intellectualism with out acknowledging the failings of museums to provide context for art pieces that would otherwise make no sense or come across as opaque and pretentious with out the proper context and background and that it is not the fault of the people who are unfamiliar with the piece when they then either horribly misinterpret it or dismiss it as garbage that is likely little more than rich people being pretentious. And the people who complain about these people need to fucking acknowledge when us ivory tower intellectuals are the ones who are the problem because anti intellectualism doesn’t exist in a vacuum

The persons whole argument about why these people standing next to works of art saying they could make that piece was stupid and an example of anti intellectualism was to provide the entire backstory of that art piece a backstory which clearly was not displayed next to the art and I’m of two minds yes the piece that they were having fun laughing saying they could make that was indeed more than just the piece itself and was important with context. however my problem with the argument provided and a lot of the modern art world in general, is that one this is not the case for all or even arguably most modern art and two even if a piece has that context the museum it self fails in its purpose if that context is not provided for the people visiting and your gotcha argument of um actually it’s got a real impressive backstory is not valid in defeating the actual problem here because a person who goes to a museum should not have to look up a third party thesis paper on the piece to understand the context that gives the piece it’s meaning otherwise either museum or the piece it self fails in its purpose. that context should at least in part be provided by the museum and I have been to numerous modern art museums in different states where they do not do that at all, and the particular pieces that where being talked about seemed to only have the usual dates name and small blurb about the artist with out context for the piece, so of course people who do not have easy access to that information or even know that that information exists are going to criticize what looks like a a random sheet or a single color canvas. Anti intellectualism is a problem yes but so is this ivory tower academic, and yes pretentious, mindset of if someone isn’t engaging with the context of art they must be a lazy slob who isn’t interested in the greater context of the piece. Because the whole reason a lot of people have the mind set of modern art being pretentious and opaque bullshit that’s good for little more than rich people money laundering is because that is at least partially the case. The very fact that these people where in a museum in the first place shows that the argument that these people are lazy and unwilling to learn the greater context is false because they were in the museum they paid the money to go there to see the work they obviously want to see and learn something or else they wouldn’t be there. The whole purpose of a museum is to be an educational space and if all they are doing is providing a date and name of an artist you cannot then get mad at the person who misses the point of a piece when they weren’t even aware that the point existed in the first place. Especially when there do exist pieces of abstract art whose whole purpose is to make people think that abstract art is bullshit. If context isn’t provided people are not going to be able to tell the difference. It’s like if you got mad at someone for not knowing today was your birthday when they’ve never even met you before. Satire is only effective if people know it’s satire. A piece of work is only going to be effective if context is provided. And if your reaction to someone going somewhere to look at modern art where the context of that art fails to be disseminated in any meaningful way and then to say hur dur look at these idiot plebeians who know nothing look at them missing the point entirely I hate to break it to you are a pretentious asshole who is part of the fucking problem anti intellectualism doesn’t exist in a fucking vacuum.

[suboficialflores]

I’m gonna have to work on my vocabulary cause students in transition doesn’t mean trans students smh

[moaninmoonen]

Videos Show Teen Accused of Trashing Baby Rushing to Bathroom, Staff Detailing Gruesome Crime Scene

Bodycam: Teen Accused of Dumping Dead Baby in Trash Arrested for Murder in Front of Hysterical Mom

Law&Crime Network

[dduane]

Sorry, the original EuroNews link seems to have gone away. Here's a CNN one instead.

...The EU AI Act outlaws social scoring systems powered by AI and any biometric-based tools used to guess a person’s race, political leanings or sexual orientation. It bans the use of AI to interpret the emotions of people in schools and workplaces, as well as some types of automated profiling intended to predict a person’s likelihood of committing future crimes. Meanwhile, the law outlines a separate category of “high-risk” uses of AI, particularly for education, hiring and access to government services, and imposes a separate set of transparency and other obligations on them. Companies such as OpenAI that produce powerful, complex and widely used AI models will also be subject to new disclosure requirements under the law. It also requires all AI-generated deepfakes to be clearly labeled, targeting concerns about manipulated media that could lead to disinformation and election meddling.

[shoresalt]

long post about school

i cant help but take academic advice and suggestions and marks so personally as if they reflect who i am morally and my personality. even the simplest mistake of formatting a citation incorrectly ((when citations weren't even necessary i just wanted to provide a source... ) makes me think i am unfixable. and then i see 80s on my report cards and freak out inside. but if anyone else told me they got that mark i would be happy for them. i dont view even lower marks as a representation of my friends? so why do i assume others are having those thoughts about me? is it because i dont know my teachers very personally? and they're more prone to making assumptions about me? (are they even, really??) i feel offended when i see that i'm not at the top of my class. because it makes me look lazy compared to past grades, even if my teachers and classmates didn't even know me then. i'm afraid they'll see me failing and be mad or rude or think i'm no good. grades never affect the way i perceive others. why isnt it the same when i flip it to myself???

i need to find a way to understand that that advice will result in me learning! it does! i have demonstrated this! i can learn from my mistakes!!! i already understand it, logically, but it still pains me anyways. maybe its the permanence of grades. the way they dont change even when i learn something correctly or fix a mistake.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

i had a friend who was raped as a teenager and had a really strict mum who did not let her go out so she was really lonely. when she turned 18 she started going clubbing and since we live in a city with a big fetish scene, she started going to the kinky venue. since she was young, naive and very pretty, she was immediately roped in by older men who did bondage shootings with her and everything. she started working in the club. to me, she was clearly groomed, but she works in a fetish shop now and is fully immersed in the scene

i have a friend who answered a job ad for a secretary when she was abroad and she and her friend ran out of money but when they arrived there it was a brothel. they both prostituted themselves for several months. they were only 18. she still talks highly of that brothel, how clean and safe it was, and wants prostitution to be legal

i read the gut wrenching biography of a thai woman who ran away from home, whose parents refused her education and treated her brother very preferably while openly hating her, and entered prostitution in sex tourist destination pattaya at only 13. she was paid by men in their 50s first for her virginity, then to piss on her. she exited at 19 and developed psychosis. she defends sex buyers, hates feminists and wants prostitution to be legal

do you see where im going with this? brainwashing is real. despite the obvious facts, the grooming, the system that pushed and pulled them, the men taking advantage of them; they defend it. so yeah, we shouldnt dismiss firsthand testimony and personal experience, but always take it with a grain of salt, always contextualise, always see it as one part of a bigger picture. liberals dont do that and have duped too many people into not doing it either. „if thats her choice its none of our business“ fuck you!