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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Saturday linkdump, part the sixth

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

On September 14, I'm hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco.

I usually write this blog 5-6 days/week, but every now and again, I take a break, and when I do, I get massive link backlogs of stuff I want to write about, but lack the time to address in depth. When that happens, I turn my Saturday edition into a linkdump. Today, I present the sixth in the series – here's the other five:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Why was I offline and away from my blog? I went to the dirt rave. Yes, I was one of the 70,000+ people stuck in the mud at this year's Burning Man, and when I emailed my editor at the New York Times to say I might be late on the op-ed I was working on, she asked me to write about what this year's mud crisis meant:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opinion/burning-man-flood-playa-climate-change.html

tl;dr:

Bad weather is normal at Burning Man (it's a feature, not a bug);

Mostly burners leapt to the occasion, which is what people almost always do in disaster situations;

This is the second Burning Man heavy weather year in a row;

The climate emergency is tipping the Black Rock Desert from "extremely challenging" to "impossible";

This isn't the last event, place and tradition that will have to be radically reconsidered in light of the climate emergency;

But now I'm home, in my hammock, with all the laundry done – just in time to leave again. I'm about to head back to my hometown of Toronto for a book launch. The Internet Con, my latest nonfiction (from Verso Books) came out last week, and I'll be appearing at Another Story Bookshop on Tuesday:

https://anotherstory.ca/events/29283

Internet Con is a "Big Tech disassembly manual." It explains how Big Tech got so big (lax anti-monopoly enforcement, which led to regulatory capture, which let Big Tech abuse our privacy, labor rights, and consumer rights), and how we can use interoperability so it's no longer Too Big to Fail, nor Too Big to Jail:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

You can read a long excerpt from the book in Wired, which lays out some of the shovel-ready legislative, regulatory and technical proposals that are the book's main purpose:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-book-excerpt/

You can also hear me read the whole introduction and first chapter of the audiobook on my podcast:

https://craphound.com/internetcon/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-audiobook-outtake/

That comes from the audiobook, a DRM-free, independent edition that I financed, produced and narrated myself. You can get the audiobook everywhere except Audible, Apple Books, and Audiobooks.com, all of which have mandatory DRM policies. You can also get it direct from me:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992826/DEA0CE12/purchase

The DRM-free ebook is available everywhere ebooks are sold (Kobo, Kindle, Nook, etc), as well as in my own DRM-free ebook store:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992801/9C4FC2B8/purchase

Verso's books are sold in bookstores around the world; you can support your local bookseller by buying it through Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-cory-doctorow/18771891?ean=9781804291245

If you'd like a signed copy, there's stock at Book Soup:

https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245

Now, it was inevitable that I would do a book event for Internet Con in Toronto – I've never had a bad event there, and I love my hometown – but the timing of this event was driven by a non-book-related factor. Talking Heads is appearing together at TIFF, to support the re-release of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert film in human history:

https://pluralistic.net/StopMakingSense

People often ask me what my favorite book is, and I always tell them that you should never trust people who have one favorite book, as it inevitably turns out to be The Bible, The Fountainhead, or Mein Kampf. But while I don't have a favorite book, I have a clear and unambiguous favorite band.

If I was forced to listen to no music other than Talking Heads for the rest of my life, I would be perfectly happy. Ecstatic, even. Throw in David Byrne, Tom Tom Club and Casual Gods and I probably wouldn't even notice anything missing.

There's a running joke among my Burning Man campmates that whenever I'm in charge of the music, I'm just shuffling Talking Heads rarities, and whenever someone puts on anything else, I demand to know which Talking Heads album it came from. Which is all to say: I have tickets for the Talking Heads event at TIFF and I could *not be more excited.*

Continuing on the Canadian theme, one of the annual highlights of Canadian media is the Massey Lectures, a series of public lectures given around the country and rebroadcast on CBC. These are always great, but recent years have been superb – Ron Deibert's 2020 series was unmissable:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#citizenlab

This year's Masseys are shaping up to be the GOAT. They're presented by Astra Taylor, an activist rock-and-roller turned documentary filmmaker who is one of the founders of the Debt Collective, fighting for student debt cancellation. Everything Astra does is amazing and her profile on CBC Ideas gives some background on the role that unschooling played in making her the powerful activist she is today:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/astra-taylor-interview-2023-massey-lecturer-1.6959320

There's no question that things are messed up right now, but Astra and people like her shine out like beacons of hope. 17 years ago, self-described "democracy nut" Tom Stites gave one of the seminal lectures on the role news media play in democracy:

http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

17 years later – and from his perch as editor at the essential International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – Stites presents us a long-overdue, extremely pertinent followup: "Building Civic Energy is the Goal, Not Saving Old News Business Models":

https://banyanproject.coop/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Hope-College-speech-for-Banyan-website-1.pdf

Stites's intervention is extremely timely, because policymakers all over the world have made the mistake of thinking that Big Tech is stealing the news media's content, which is absolutely untrue. It is good, actually, to index news stories and let people discuss, quote from and link to news stories. News you're not allowed to talk about isn't news, it's a secret.

But Big Tech is stealing from news. They're not stealing content – they're stealing money. The Google/Apple duopoly rakes 30% off every subscription payment collected in an app. The Google/Meta duopoly rakes 51% out of every ad-dollar (and maintain that death-grip through creepy, privacy-invading surveillance ads). Meta and Twitter hold social media subscribers hostage, forcing publishers to pay to reach their own subscribers.

We don't want the news to be Big Tech's partners – we need them to be Big Tech's watchdogs. "Link taxes" and other profit-sharing arrangements between the media and tech cut against the civic energy Stites wants to build.

(You can read more about this – along with policy prescriptions for halting Big Tech's rent-extraction from the news – in "Saving the News From Big Tech," my EFF white-paper:)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

If your spirits are lifted by stories of principled activists achieving important – and improbable – victories, you could do worse than to attend the EFF Awards on in San Francisco Sept 14 (I'm the emcee). This year, we're honoring Alexandra Elbakyan for her founding of Sci-Hub, the Library Freedom Project and the Signal Foundation:

https://www.eff.org/awards/effawards/2023

In more activist news: Mozilla produced a startling and astoundingly good – if demoralizing – report on the state of digital privacy and security in the automotive sector:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

Entitled, "It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy," the report reveals just how absolutely terrible the automotive sector is when it comes to privacy practices, collecting (and selling) (and giving away) information about your sex life, your geneology, your genetic characteristics, and your smell (no, seriously).

Their recommendations for which new car you should buy boil down to "don't buy a new car." I have been urging consumer research groups to release a report like this for a decade. There are whole categories of gadgets – like, say, "smart speakers" – that are unsafe at any speed. At a certain point, reviewers need to have the guts to say that every manufacturer in an entire sector is a dumpster fire and they should all be dragged in front of a firing squad – or at least a Congressional committee.

Cars, after all, are nightmares of privacy invasion and rent-extraction, the source of autoenshittification on a massive scale, a mobile form of technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that cars score so badly on privacy is especially ironic given the campaign Big Car waged against the 2020 Massachusetts Right to Repair ballot initiative, in which car manufacturers held themselves out as the defenders of driver privacy from unscrupulous third parties who couldn't be trusted to handle the vast troves of data your car collects with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

This is a familiar refrain: monopolists often claim that any check on their absolute authority over their users will expose those users to privacy risks. Apple has run a global ad-campaign claiming this, and while Apple does prevent Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, they also secretly spy on those customers in exactly the same way that Facebook used to, and lie about it:

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

It turns out that giant companies just aren't good proxies for their customers' interests, and that the power they amass through monopolization shouldn't be counted on as a source of user safety. Monopolists won't reliably defend user privacy – that job belongs to democratically accountable regulators. That's an argument I developed in detail with Bennett Cyphers in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly":

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

That is, rather than getting privacy by "voting with your wallet," you need to get it by voting with your ballot. "The market" is an election that you vote in with dollars, which means that the people with the most dollars always win. When there are zero cars on the market that are safe to drive, you can't vote with your wallet by buying a good one.

On a related subject, the DOJ Antitrust Division has brought the most important tech anti-monopoly case of the century, charging Google with monopolizing search:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/technology/modern-internet-first-monopoly-trial-us-google-dominance.html

Part of the DOJ case turns on the fact that Google goes to extraordinary lengths to keep you from every trying another search engine, paying out more than $45 billion every year to be the default search on every device, program and service you might use. In other words, Google spends entire Twitter's worth of dollars every year, lighting it on fire to keep you from finding out about rivals.

Google argues that this is fine, actually, because these are only defaults, and users can dig through their settings to change their search engine. Sure, Google – and the first 20 search results you serve are only defaults, and it wouldn't matter if you were ordered to put them ten screens down, because users could always scroll to see them.

But search defaults aren't the only way that Google locks in searchers – and then harms us by invading our privacy. Google's ubiquitous Chrome browser ties Google's search to Google's invasive, nonconsensual, total surveillance. Chrome turned 15 this year and Google made a huge PR splash out of the anniversary:

https://blog.google/products/chrome/google-chrome-new-features-redesign-2023/

But all that puffery conspicuously failed to mention that Google had quietly rolled out its long-discredited, new surveillance technology, FLOC, which it pretended to kill in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

FLOC is back, rebranded as the Topics API: this is a system for spying on you so advertisers can target you. Google is spinning this as a privacy improvement because it might someday replace "third party cookies," one of the creepiest web surveillance systems.

But as Ron Amadeo writes for Ars Technica, Chrome is the last major browser to support third party cookies – both Safari and Firefox block them by default. So Google is basically saying, "We are going to improve your privacy by changing how we spy on you, even though all our competitors don't do this kind of spying at all":

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

This kind of gaslighting, where Google pisses in all our mouths and tells us it's raining, is the hallmark of a decrepit, arrogant, crapulent monopolist that needs to be shattered in the courts. Kudos to the DoJ for doing the people's business here – and kudos to DoJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter for promising that he will not go into corporate law when he finishes his stint in government.

The DoJ isn't the only public agency that's serving the American people. The FCC just announced proceedings to force cybersecurity labels for "smart" devices:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumer-governmental-affairs/fcc-proposes-cybersecurity-labeling-program-smart-devices

This is long overdue, and it's a welcome action from the FCC, which was hamstrung for years because cowardly Democratic senators joined with homophobic, libelous Republicans in blocking confirmation hearings for the amazing Gigi Sohn:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

After years of abuse, Sohn bowed out. Now, Anna Gomez has been confirmed to fill that fifth FCC chair, turning the FCC into a fully operational battle station:

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/senate-votes-approve-anna-gomez-5th-fcc-commissioner

The fact that there's all this great stuff going on in the administrative branch is easy to lose sight of amidst the circus of federal electoral politics, in which Donald Trump has retained his role as ringmaster and chief distractor.

Thankfully, we have expert Pantsless Emperor skewerers like Ruben Bolling around – his latest Tom the Dancing Bug revives his brilliant Calvin and Hobbes-inspired Trump gag:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-a-calvinesque-and-hobbesian-look-at-taking-a-mug-shot.html

Well, that's me signing off for the weekend – I've got to pack for my flight to Toronto. If you're looking for more weekend fun, check out the trailer for Fractured Veil, the video game my old pal Chris DiBona has been working on for seven years and which is heading for Steam early access next month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjNd3QQnENU

Just watch it. I mean. Wow.

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/2023/09/09/nein-nein/#everything-is-miscellaneous

Image: Roel Schroeven (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/roelschroeven/45413895

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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