#Apps and Technology

[positivity-in-pain]

Top 5 Apps To Keep In Your Digital Health Toolkit

BY: Jennifer Navigating life with a chronic illness often means juggling numerous aspects of health management, from symptom tracking to medication adherence. Fortunately, in today’s digital age, there’s a wealth of applications specifically designed to make this journey smoother. These apps can serve as indispensable tools, offering features like reminders, tracking, community support, and much…

[spongebobssquarepants]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

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

[hotgirlbedtimescenarios]

Rewind

Pairing: Joel x f!reader (drabble) - Joel tries Tinder for the first time. His girthy digits get in the way lmao.

Word count: < 1.0k

Warnings: none, just a fluffy and clumsy Joel!

Main Masterlist

Joel Miller sat on his well-worn couch in his cozy flannel pajama pants, the soft glow of the TV flickering in the dim light. With his broad shoulders and rugged good looks, he exuded a kind of understated handsomeness that only came with age and experience.

His dark hair, now tousled after a long day, had a few silver strands, and his deep-set eyes held a warmth that made him feel both strong and approachable. But tonight, those eyes were filled with uncertainty as he stared at his phone.

It had been ages since he’d even thought about dating, let alone using an app like Tinder. But after Ellie had teased him about being a “lonely old man,” one too many times, he’d finally given in.

With a reluctant breath, he downloaded the app and set up his profile. He chose a picture from a rare sunny day when he and Ellie had gone fishing, both of them grinning like they’d won the lottery.

The other pictures he added to the profile were of him and Tommy with their arms slung around each other's shoulders, and there was a photo Ellie had snuck of him on a rare day he was wearing something other than his dirty work clothes. “Well, don’t you look pretty,” she teased and snapped a photo of his slicked-back hair before he could swat her away.

For his bio, he simply wrote, “Just a simple man lookin’ for a bit of happiness.” But as he stared at it, doubt crept in like a thick fog. What if nobody found him interesting? What if he made a complete fool of himself? Even worse, what if someone he knew saw him and told everyone how desperate he was.

Shaking off the nerves, he started swiping. No, No, No, he continued swiping left, either put off by something in their bio or not feeling drawn to them. Most profiles began to blur together until he stumbled upon yours.

Your smile was like sunshine breaking through clouds, and your bio spoke of adventures and cozy evenings. You seemed down to earth, and judging by the pictures in your profile, you didn't take life too seriously. A warmth spread through his chest, and he felt a flutter he hadn’t experienced in years.

“Lord have mercy,” he whispered to himself, heart racing. He meant to swipe right but, in his flustered state, his thumb fumbled, swiping left instead.

Panic shot through him like lightning. “No, no, no! Shit,” he exclaimed, almost dropping his phone. The realization hit him like a punch to the gut. How could he be so clumsy? He let you slip away. "Damn sausage fingers."

Joel frantically tries to go back and undo the mistake, but the app denies him; it's a premium service to rewind a swipe and try again.

He stares at his phone screen, contemplating. Is he really about to spend $10 to go back and swipe right for the slim chance that the two of you might match?

He leans forward, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers, and sighs.

Fuck.

Yeah, he is.

Frantically, Joel digs through his wallet for his debit card and quickly punches in the numbers, upgrading to a premium membership.

Each second feels like an eternity, he doesn’t want to lose your profile. Finally, he swipes backward and your face flashes across the screen again, relief washes over him.

He swipes right quickly before he screws up again, but his heart sinks—no match. Shame washes over him, and he flops back onto the couch, burying his face in his hands, his broad chest rising and falling rapidly.

Embarrassed for wasting 10$ just to get rejected he gets up from the couch with a sigh and calls it a night.

Hours later, he lay in bed, replaying the day in his mind, tossing and turning in his mess of sheets. Every time his thoughts drift back to you, that sweet smile, he feels a pang of longing.

Just as he is about to drift off to sleep, a buzz breaks the silence.

Curiosity prickles at him, and he grabs his phone, squinting against its bright screen with his sleep-fogged eyes.

You have a new match!

His heart races with anticipation. Could it be?

With eager fingers, he opens the app. There it is—your name and profile glowing on the screen.

A match!

A goofy grin spreads across his face, chasing away the earlier embarrassment. Without wasting a second, he types a message, his heart thumping like a bass drum.

“Hey, darlin', I'm Joel. You have no idea how glad I am we matched.”

He sets the phone down, a giddy mix of excitement and nerves bubbling in his chest as he waits for your reply.

[ajastu]

i find it really funny when people complain about like...'oh, they have [insert thing here] in the game that is set in medieval times when IN THE REAL WORLD that thing hasnt been invented yet in that time period!!!'

its like. well. you see. we are playing pretend in a fantasy world. there are dragons. i dont think it's meant to mirror real life development stages. its tuoys. were playing tuoys.

Like, no harm done here! but maybe you need to relax a little...

[nyctoheart]

this thread of gen z learning to burn cds is crazyyy

like I'm not trying to make fun, it just blows me away that technology (and capitalism) evolves so fast that some of the things said here are quite a pill to swallow

[erynies]

In weird podcast app news....

Since I had @re-dracula in there *BEFORE* May 3rd...

The app was DELETING episodes from the list as they were re-released. I opened it up and had... May 18th. But May 3rd? May 16th? No.

I was so confused and lost. But a reset fixed the whole thing and now it will be fine. But it was a pretty strange event!

[atompalmers]

minecraft at the abbott household

[computer-nerd-girl]

Honestly I can be both, it really depends on the day 🤷‍♀️

[mooifyourecows]

went out to mow my lawn before we have like 5 straight days of rain predicted but just mowed for 3 min before spotify decided to shit the bed and refuse to work, blaming my internet for the problem (and yet when i switched to youtube to check, it played a whole video with no issue hmmmm mysterious so strange hmmmm), and it just totally killed my already precarious mood so i guess i will lie down and cry a little instead

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Subprime gadgets

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.

That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.

Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.

Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.

Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.

What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.

Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.

With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.

Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.

Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/

For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.

So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.

This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.

There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.

Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.

But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.

This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.

Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.

One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.

Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.

This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.

Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":

https://lemmy.world/post/13359866

Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.

There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.

This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"

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/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003

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

[icqmuseum24]

📞💔 To our great regret, following in the footsteps of Russia’s VK Group and its quiet farewell to ICQ, Microsoft has now officially shut down Skype — a true legend of the 2000s internet era. What once defined how we connected, called, and chatted across the globe has been silenced… not by users, but by boardroom decisions.

💻 Skype wasn't just software — it was a cultural milestone. It brought faces to voices, bridged continents in seconds, and made "Skyping" a verb in dozens of languages. Its shutdown is not just sad — it's irreplaceable. Another digital monument lost to corporate fatigue.

📉 This only proves one thing: well-paid marketers and project managers have repeatedly failed to breathe new life into legacy platforms. Instead of adapting tradition to modern times, they let icons wither. And for what? Another feature-bloated app with no soul?

🌐 But we haven’t lost hope. If Winamp can rise from the ashes, why not Skype? Why not AIM? Why not ICQ? Maybe, just maybe, it won’t be Microsoft or VK who lead the resurrection — maybe it’ll be an indie developer or a bold startup that understands nostalgia can be modern.

👀 Paging Yahoo Inc. and AOL… We’re waiting.

[olahresidence]

30 - Digital Art in Procreate

Today I turn 30, happy bursday to meeeeee. My gift to myself is to be more true to myself than ever before.

[pale-opal]

Something that's been on my mind for a while is that a lot of artists have been struggling to find programs that work with their budgets. Adobe's prices are... infamous, to say the least, and there seems to be a sharp learning curve for the more affordable options. And if you're like me, you might not feel comfortable with pirating to get an art program that is out of your price range. So here's a list of free art/editing tools. Any options without links are either mobile apps or can only be downloaded on Macs: Options without ads or watermarks:

FireAlpaca (notes: while this is an art program at heart, it can also be used as basic photo editing software once you get the hang of it. There is also a blog dedicated to tutorials on how to use FA in case you get stuck)

Medibang (note: the aforementioned FireAlpaca blog has some information on this software as well)

Krita (note: also available as an app for android and Google devices)

Storyboarder (notes: not to be confused with "Storyboarder.AI". While this program does require your email address before downloading, it is safe to use as far as I know (but please use caution regardless))

Pixilart (notes: link leads to browser version, also available as a mobile app)

Audacity (notes: apparently, the company behind this software, Muse Group, have also created a separate, subscription-based AI-voice program. I am unsure if it uses AI in a way that is generally considered to be ethical, like SynthV does, or if it follows the trends typically expected of those kinds of applications. The reason that I include this information is that I want to give everyone the ability to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to use anything from Muse Group, as I know many users on this site are anti-AI. However, I also know that some of those users wouldn't mind using Audacity since downloading it wouldn't be giving Muse Group monetary support - hence why the program is staying on the list.)

Clipchamp (notes: there are also paid tiers for this program. It is also available in-browser and as an iOS app. Furthermore, please be aware that there are some optional features that use AI)

iMovie (note: also available as a mobile app on iOS devices)

DramaQueen (notes: this is a software used to write scripts for plays, movies, etc. While it does require you to fill out some information before downloading, as far as I am aware, it is safe to use (but as always, use your own discretion))

Options that do have ads, watermarks, or microtransactions

ibisPaint X

Sketchbook (notes: formerly known as "Autodesk Sketchbook". PC and Mac versions do exist, but you have to pay to download them)

Medibang Paint

Capcut (note: has optional AI tools).

Be sure to check what system requirements are necessary for each program, and be aware of their limitations before downloading (for example, many users report Clipchamp has a tendency to crash, while others seem to be able to use it fine). Also, please feel free to add on to this. I know I haven't even scratched the surface here, as I tried to stick to software that I've either heard of extensively or have used personally.

[ask-swansea]

swanseamore. swanseamore i dont have wifi what did you do before the internet existed

Yeesh. You kids and your electronics, even Daisuke falls victim to it. Have to tell him at least three times a day while workin' to turn down that darn gameboy.

Back when /I/ was a kid, before I had too much responsibility on my hands, I personally liked makin' wooden cars and goin' out with friends to explore the woods near my house. Collected frogs and toads, found the coolest lookin' leaves, and as we got a little older started swimmin' in the lakes or goin' on night time camping trips in the backyard.

I was partial to drawin' some too, designs and such. Haven't in awhile. I like seein' Daisuke doodle on all the papers we work on.