#Centralized Management

[medicaldevicesindustrynews]

The Growth of the U.S. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Software Market

With the rapid digitization of businesses and the rise in cyber threats, the demand for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software in the U.S. is growing significantly. Organizations across various industries are increasingly investing in DLP solutions to protect sensitive information, ensure compliance with data security regulations, and mitigate financial losses due to data breaches. Key Drivers of…

[cloudbends]

something I feel like isn't nearly appreciated enough about mob's arc in mp100 is that his background is... Completely normal. I see a lot of people interpreting mob's parents as neglectful or distant based on the few scenes we've seen of them, which greatly baffles me because their few scenes aim to establish his family life as.. completely normative. They have the normal, average quips of a normal family. And I think it's very unique and refreshing because it means mob's troubles and internal hardship isn't a product of his upbringing, it's a byproduct of a traumatic experience and of his own personality and how it coalesces with his psychic powers. And I personally think more media should acknowledge that some people, even with perfectly normative and healthy familial dynamics and circumstances, will still develop very complex internal issues and personal psychology. and on the same note, some people with perfectly normal upbringing won't feel comfortable to confide in their parents and seek an external authority figure to look up to, which doesn't necessarily mean them and their parents are estranged. I dont think mob's (or ritsu's) life have to be unhappy to legitimize or explain the fact he has the personal struggles he does. Embracing normalcy is the main theme of this series.

[ragsy]

[ OK ]

[tanadrin]

it’s interesting how no religion (with all the caveats the use of that word entails) can resist making cosmological and scientific claims, and that this is true even for very recently invented religions that ought to know the risk of their claims getting debunked is very high. if I were going to start a religion, I would at least make sure it wouldn’t be debunked in my lifetime.

[atwhughesversion]

☹️☹️☹️ + the expanded written version:

We had a good conversation about shyness. I’ve learned over my life that shyness is not a weakness, just the way some people are wired. And, too often, we mistake shyness (or reticence) to mean someone isn’t willing to compete or be, as he says, “the best version” of themselves. That’s not true, it’s just they don’t like to express themselves in words. Now, that may mean someone can’t be a captain, because being vocal — even if only in private — is part of that job, but it doesn’t mean you can’t lead in your own way.

“I've always been more of a shy person and talking in front of a group hasn't been my thing,” Pettersson said. “I hated schoolwork presentations from class.” He brought up that English is his second language, which makes it more challenging. “It's just always been with me to not mess up in front of a group. I don't know if all the guys would just laugh, but it’s…one of those things that I have never been comfortable (with). But I'm trying, you know? I definitely think I can do better in that and it doesn't have to be a lot.” Right place, right time.

[hiraethwrote]

even good men are, at the end of the day, still a man . I’ll stick to fictional men, they’ll never disappoint me 🥰

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic:

Teresa Borrenpohl later told the Coeur d’Alene Press that, as it happened, she didn’t know if it was an arrest or a kidnapping. She was seated in a nearly-full town hall hosted by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee on Saturday. At first, the scene was similar to those that have played out over the last week or so, with opponents of the Trump and Musk takeover showing up to tell their lawmakers to show some spine, even in deeply conservative counties. But then, when a group of unmarked security descended on Borrenpohl, the conflict at the town hall took a more terrifying turn.

A member of the panel was giving an anti-abortion talking point when a voice from the audience talked over him, saying “Women are dying.” The panel member continued. The moderator, a local website developer named Ed Bejarana, interrupted to lecture audience members who he said were “just popping off with stupid remarks,” and Teresa Borrenpohl yelled back, “Is this a town hall or a lecture?” Bejerma continued: “You’re just crazy people.”

Kootenai County Sheriff Robert Norris by then was standing over Borrenpohl. He was in plainclothes and she didn’t recognize him at first. “Get ‘em out!” Bejarana exclaimed, to boos and applause. Sheriff Norris told Borrenpohl to get up or be arrested. He leaned over to a woman next to her, recording the scene on a phone, and said she would also be removed. Borrenpohl was likely recognized by at least some in the room as a former Democratic candidate for office, but she said she didn’t know why she was in trouble. She stayed in her seat. “That little girl is afraid to leave!” Bejarana called from the stage. “She spoke up and now she doesn’t want to suffer the consequences.”

A man dressed in a black jacket, olive pants, and an earbud or earpiece stepped into the row and grabbed Borrenpohl’s wrist. She yanked it back. He went for her hands again. She pointed at the man looming over her, yelling out, “this man is assaulting me.” The man stepped further into the aisle, joined be a second in identical attire. “Is this your deputy?” she yelled. “Sheriff Norris, is this your deputy?” If the men were working for the sheriff, they weren’t showing any insignia. Their faces were blank. “Who the fuck are these men?” Borrenpohl yelled again. As the two men grappled her, some in the audience began to cheer, while others took up the woman’s demand that the men identify themselves. A third man in the same jacket and pants arrived, holding a bunch of plastic zipcuffs. They got Teresa Borrenpohl on her stomach, kneeling over her. Then they dragged her out of the room.

In the past week, with Congress in recess, Republican lawmakers across the country have faced hostile town halls, where constituents dissatisfied with the Trump/Musk chaos in the federal government boo, chant, and interrupt. Some Democrats have been facing pressure from their own. “Tyranny is rising in the White House, and a man has declared himself our king,” one audience voter challenged his representative at a town hall in Georgia days before. “So, I would like to know rather, the people would like to know, what you, congressman, and your fellow congressmen are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House?” Like the rolling pickets outside Tesla showrooms in recent weeks, these actions have at times been intentionally disruptive, meant not merely as protest but to interrupt business as usual. What was done to Borrenpohl in Coeur d’Alene for speaking out at a town hall is a terrifying escalation. In Idaho, the lines between Republican politics and political violence are thinner than they are in some places, but there’s no reason to believe this escalation won’t be repeated.

Who were the men who accosted Teresa Borrenpohl, and what was the local sheriff doing with them? Much remains murky—LEAR did not respond to a request for comment for this piece—but the Coeur d’Alene Press has found some answers. The unmarked security force were from a private security firm called LEAR Asset Management, the Press reported, but Sheriff Norris “claimed no knowledge of the security personnel or who hired them.” The man who founded and runs the group is Paul Trouette, who was seen in Coeur d’Alene several months ago at a city council meeting, opposing a local ordinance that would have required private security outfits more clearly identify themselves. At the time, the Kootenai Journal reported, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White “made references to situations in which security personnel were confused with law enforcement officers, or acted as if they were law enforcement officers, within the last year in Coeur d’Alene.”

LEAR has operated in California going back at least to 2012, with Trouette running what “looks like a military assault force,” as Time magazine observed in 2014. “Clad in body armor and camouflage and carrying AR-15 rifles, they creep through the trees toward their target: one of the illegal marijuana gardens dotting Mendocino County.” More recently, LEAR seems to have turned up pro bono and perhaps uninvited to clear an encampment where unhoused people were living near Ackman Creek in Mendocino County. After a local news outlet reported on Paul Trouette doing security at the clean-up, a county agency involved in the effort said “it is unclear to us who contacted Lear.”

At a GOP town hall organized by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee this past weekend in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Teresa Borrenpohl was unlawfully dragged out of the meeting by private security for speaking out against the diabolically un-American agenda of DOGE and MAGA.

[serpentface]

What's the Wardi cultural take on Akoshos sleeping with/partnering with/marrying other Akoshos?

It's not highly regulated to a degree that there are overwhelming cultural norms about it. There's a lot of societal focus on akoshos being theoretically suitable sexual partners for both men and women due to being dual-gendered, but not to an extent that relationships with One Another are stigmatized.

They also largely get to escape from the most severe concerns about penetrator/penetrated power dynamics because they're not regarded as Men (they're regarded as dual-gendered, and they're a female social class on every practical level), there's no status of manhood to Lose by receiving sexual penetration. The only real thing you see in that department is people assuming that one acts as 'the man' and one acts as 'the woman', but this is largely due to preoccupation with a notion of sex being Penetration With A Penis (and that Penetration With A Penis means that one person is in a Man's Role and one person is in a Woman's Role). But this will not be regarded as unnatural as in same-gender male relations, akoshos will Have to take up a position in this sexual dichotomy if they want to have Real Sex (Penetration With A Penis) with each other, and this is not unnatural and doesn't involve gaining or losing status since they are simultaneously male and female, not men.

So like you might see individual culture critics finding stuff to nitpick about it as their annoyance of the week or a singular Guy here or there who thinks it's weird, but this isn't a widespread norm. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about akoshos having sex with each other. The worst thing you're likely to experience Solely by virtue of being in an akoshos-akoshos relationship is someone asking you (probably with genuine curiosity) which one does the man stuff and which one does the woman stuff.

Akoshos also don't experience Hard expectations for marriage (though there are societal pressures that make marriage an attractive safety net all the same, ESPECIALLY marriage to a man) so unofficial life-partnerships between akoshos are pretty much the Only same gender partnerships between unwed people that are going to go unquestioned. ((Sworn brotherhood is technically a same gender life partnership for men that is Functionally similar to marriage (in that it's a kin-making practice between unrelated adults), but the tradition is Built upon the assumption that both parties will be married to women and that a primary goal of this kinship is to provide security for both parties' wives and children)). Marriage obligations in general are more lax in the economically secure but not Wealthy lower mercantile classes (as obligations to support and perpetuate one's family are universal, but these obligations can be filled simply by having at least One son who can get hitched, and marriages in the lower classes have no political functions and therefore there's less reason to ensure All your children are wed (there's still incentives like dowry, but this is not desperately needed when a family is economically secure)). So akoshos in this class group tend to have a Lot more freedom in terms of their life arrangements and chosen partners (though still experience the limiting frameworks of structural misogyny in other capacities).

The only thing that is out of the picture is akoshos/akoshos marriage. Marriage in this society has a predominantly reproductive function, the concept of reproductively non-viable marriages is generally considered absurd. This is not JUST this culture's form of homophobia, as marriage is a very practical arrangement at its core - both in a reproductive capacity and as bedrock for the patriarchal blood-kinship family system that forms the core social unit. The idea of same gender marriage isn't just absurd because 'ewwww weird' it's like, that Cannot work within this system, it Cannot fill core functions of what a marriage intends to do here, the ways on which marriage and kinship are BUILT makes same gender marriage practically (rather than just socially) untenable.

The sole exception to the 'marriage = reproductively viable" rule is that akoshos can be married to men (which in practice is almost always as a remarriage after a man has secured At Least an heir). This has a Little bit of internal logic here in that they perform predominantly female social roles (thus are suited to being a wife, even if they can't bear children) (and also on practical levels of them having the same legal status as women) but it's really more of a 'this is just how it's always been' kind of thing. A lot of the older pre-Wardi identity dual-gender roles that got mashed together under the 'akoshos' name would have involved marriage to a man as a second wife/concubine, in addition to his primary wife who would bear his children. Men potentially having multiple spouses has not been retained as a cultural practice, but the notion that an akoshos Can be a wife to a man has survived into modern day legal and doctrinal practices around marriage.

So like this being said, marriage as it is legally defined is only between a man and a woman, a man and an akoshos, or a woman and an akoshos. In practice the latter two are comparatively VERY rare- a man/akoshos marriage cannot provide children (though an akoshos can practically fulfill all other obligations and duties of a wife), a woman/akoshos marriage Can provide children (and while akoshos cannot function as a male heir, these children Will take their akoshos-parent's family name (though the wife retains her father's family name)), but akoshos are legally grouped with women in terms of rights and privileges (including being permanently under legal domain of their father unless they have been legally handed off to a male husband) and Cannot provide hard power patriarchal support that this family system is built upon and therefore depends upon, which makes these marriages socio-economically insecure. They can obviously still be a good partner and parent, but this is not the same as having the Legal hard power of a patriarch.

Akoshos marrying each other would be reproductively and socially nonviable, and is treated as a similarly absurd concept to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. It's just not a part of the marriage and kinship framework, it's not a thing that you can Do.

[essektheylyss]

If anyone was genuinely curious why I ended up at "by the same logic that early c2 viewers used to argue Caleb was a werewolf, so is Essek," it was because I went to check if the etymology of Thalamus (in Occultus Thalamus) was different from its use in anatomy, and it is, in that the original Greek use is more akin to "inner chamber," which is similar but distinct in concept, particular when considering the Genesis Ward, from the anatomical usage, which is for the nerve center of the brain. So the Occultus Thalamus is either a central control for Aeor or some kind of hidden chamber or vault, which could feasibly hold anything.

The related terms included, in order: "thalame: 'den, lair'; tholos: 'vault'," and the combination of 'den' followed by 'tholos' made me wonder if there was actually an etymology for Thelyss, given a lot of other pointed origins. I don't necessarily think there is, but getting down to PIE with "*del" (variably written with the [th], though I couldn't find a ton of confirmation on it, but it is the origin of the word "tale" so it's somewhere in between) meaning, roughly, "to count, calculate, aim, reckon" and either "*lewk" meaning 'to shine' or "*wĺ̥kʷos" meaning 'wolf'. All of this is irrelevant because it's probably a coincidence because who the fuck besides me is going back to PIE for fantasy etymology, but it is fun as hell.

But most importantly I did somehow also manage to actually get the homework I was trying to finish done, which means I have virtually finished two of my three current courses, which means I will shortly be released from my torment (spring quarter) and get to unleash this absolute bullshit investigative energy on fic again instead of going down this line of absurd rabbit hole.

[loverboy-havocboy]

When you get this ask, answer with 5 of your favorite songs and then send this ask to 10 of your followers? 💖

YES I GOT IT AGAAAAAAAIIN!!!! this is like vitamins to me 🥰

1. do what i gotta by naethan apollo

2. end of beginning by djo

3. atlas: two by sleeping at last

4. go easy by matt maeson

5. blink twice by shaboozey & myles smith

thank you!!!! 💖💖💖

[wardensantoineandevka]

I feel like it says a lot about the relationships between the major institutions of the Trust and the Consectorship's place in it that Spahr's role, the role of any Prime Consector, can be summarized as: show pony, attack dog, scapegoat.

[relaxedstyles]

It's getting real out there ...

[fullmxtal-elrich]

"..." It had been years since he'd felt so much hurt, anger and frustration burning in his veins. The gentle, happy-go-lucky and friendly personality that he and Roy had worked so hard to achieve had been tossed out the window.

He'd already been irritated today as it was, but that one final comment about Alphonse had been all it took for him to revert back to the same angry, cagey teenager he had once been, and he wasn't in the mood for anyone to try and get too close to him.

If someone did choose to try and approach him, it was iffy if he would even tolerate such a thing, though of course it depended on who it was. But now he was as angry and closed off as he'd once been all those years ago, when he had lost his mother.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

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

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

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/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

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

[hide-your-bugs-away]

Music-related content mill YouTube channels making uncanny AI videos about the Animals' history is almost funny to me for how ridiculous they are but then I remember that the emphasized details of said history (usually regarding Alan and Eric's relationship) are going to be the over-exaggerated parts that have been regurgitated uncritically since the 90s for the most shock value and drama and will just poison the well for their impressionable audience of boomers and "did you know the bassist of the Animals managed Jimi Hendrix?" fun-fact sharers, yet again pushing the blame and scapegoat status onto Alan and sullying interpretations of their relationship (and the band's general dynamic) further.

...Bring it on. Those shitty channels may work hard to spread misinformation, but my overly affectionate art and earnest infodumping about a band and a musical duo only like eight people care about works harder. 😎

[collectivelykellen]

it's getting to that time of year when I can no longer wear a hoodie to bed...