#Data Hoarding

[do-not-emulate]

You can also find and back things up from libgen (free ebooks and articles), z-library (free ebooks), and others.

You can download from Anna's Archive ("We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. All our code and data are completely open source") and they are looking for volunteers and code bounty hunters to continue and expand their work.

Reddit has a thriving community of data hoarders you can join.

Buying copies of banned books is awesome, but I also want to put this out there. If anyone is in college and/or has access to peer reviewed academic journals PLEASE do the following:

Buy USB drives

Download as many articles from academic journals in the coming months as you can about topics under attack, such as gender variance, DEI, critical race theory, racism, reproductive rights, climate change, and so on. Maybe pick one or two journals and topics to focus on per month! (There may be pay walls or limits on how many you can freely download)

Keep them organized on your USB’s by topic or journal

We don’t really know what will happen, what will get erased or censored from the web, but they’re already taking websites down related to DEI and reproductive rights. We need to work together to save the research and literature that we have!

[silvermoon424]

This is your daily reminder to archive your favorite fandom stuff!!!

I've been a voracious archivist/data hoarder ever since I first got access to a computer, and it's paid off more times than I can count. Just the other day I came across a PDF copy of an analysis post for one of my fandoms. The post was made on an old forum and is the most detailed and interesting analysis of a particular story element I've ever seen. Back in like 2012 I saved the post as a PDF, because even then I saved everything I liked.

Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and I decided to see if the URL included in the document was still live. I wasn't very surprised to see that the forum is long dead. However, even the Wayback Machine had no record of this thread. If I hadn't saved a copy of it way back when, I would have never, ever been able to read this analysis again!

The Internet Archive is sadly not infallible, especially when it comes to things like forum threads. You can do your part by manually saving things to the Wayback Machine, but I also recommend keeping your own archives. Aside from just saving pages as PDFs, I highly recommend a browser extension called SingleFile that lets you archive pages as HTML files.

[track-maniac]

safely storing my data on my 3 weed-smoking off-site backups

[thesomebodywho]

FTFY

[disease]

the only people who'll be spared during the dystopia are those audiophilic data-dumpers who host full .FLAC discographies of your underground faves. avantgarde archivists.

[netscapenavigator-official]

I downloaded an entire 20-Season series via a torrent. The torrent came in around 160+ GB. After re-encoding everything as AV1 via Shutter Encoder, it's currently on path to being around 55 GB when it's complete.

This shit's crazy. I wish torrent makers would utilize modern codecs and file types before seeding them. It'd sure save a lot of bandwidth, data, and time downloading 7zips and AV1 media, rather than ZIP and H.264/5 media. And, like, given that 7zip is open-source and VLC supports AV1, and both are free and open-source, there's literally no excuse.

[cryptid-catnip]

piracy (especially of games) is cool and based because under late capitalism you don't really own anything

all the steam games you buy for instance are not actual copies of the game, just a revocable license to play it

which is why I find it unfathomably based when developers like dennis whedon and jonaton soderstrom (creators of hotline miami) and ville kallio (creator of cruelty squad) say "yeah you can pirate hotline miami/cruelty sqaud idfc"

Hell, dennaton went out of their way to put hotline miami on pirate bay after learning that the version being circulated was pretty shitty and buggy

moral of the story? piracy is based, you should do it

[xx-cr]

this

the cruel choice between pdf (free) vs physical copy (annotatable)

[glowing-disciple]

So here’s a crazy little side project idea I had the other day: building yourself a tiny copy of the old internet.

Using the Wayback Machine and a custom script to process the data, I’ll create a (somewhat) working clone of the Internet circa January 1st, 2007.

I’m mostly doing this for some nostalgia, as many of the websites I used to visit are gone (I specifically picked the date because one of my old favorites stopped updating in December 2006), but what’s surprising me the most about this is how easy it is to set up.

Once I’ve perfected the processing script, it’ll be almost entirely automated. There are the occasional things that might need fixing manually, but it looks like those problems are going to be rare.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

keeping up with good omens fanfiction is a full time job

these are *some* of the new fics published over the last few hours. I don't even follow the main tag, these all come from the aziraphale/crowley ship tag -which, to be fair, is probably in 98% of all the published good omens fics. and this feed doesn't take into account the fics that I personally follow, which show up in my email

this is why I am wanting to properly order and archive the fics that I read; not only do I want to be sure to leave nice comments when I like a fic, I also don't want to "lose" them in the firehose stream of my feed

[labelleizzy]

Really this is going to be the age of the warrior librarian. Who else can shepherd through dense scrub of misinformation, who guards the truth against the wolves? I know it's supposed to be a sneering thing to call academia an ivory tower, but the thing is with towers, they hold. Being a center of learning is very pretty, mission wise, but the retention of knowledge is the critical task. That is where we're being attacked. That is what must not fail.

And some of you, my beloved friends, have already given your lives to this battle. But we must have more; we must use all the ways that work to hold onto what is known.

(author requests anonymity)

[silvermoon424]

Hey @sand-rose sorry for calling you out but we may in fact be the same person. At this rate I have tens if not hundreds of thousands of pics that, while sorted by broader fandom, desperately need to be individually tagged/categorized instead of just sitting in a gigantic folder named "Sort" that I never fucking sort. Let's procrastinate and data hoard together 🩷

[65oh7]

Alright I got my bug-out drive in case someone takes it down or paints it. Seeing archive.org down kinda set me off.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Given the recent news with the CDC being scrubbed of references to trans people, I’d start collecting and downloading as many studies and papers on trans people as you can find and storing it on an external hard drive or SD card.

Also, Tumblr is the queerest place on the internet. Much of Tumblr is trans history from the eyes of trans people. Save your Tumblr blogs offline, everyone.

Go to “Blog Settings” then scroll all the way down and click on “Export Blog.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An interoperability rule for your money

This is the final weekend to back the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, The Lost Cause. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!

"If you don't like it, why don't you take your business elsewhere?" It's the motto of the corporate apologist, someone so Hayek-pilled that they see every purchase as a ballot cast in the only election that matters – the one where you vote with your wallet.

Voting with your wallet is a pretty undignified way to go through life. For one thing, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and for another, no matter who you vote for in that election, the Monopoly Party always wins, because that's the part of the thick-wallet set.

Contrary to the just-so fantasies of Milton-Friedman-poisoned bootlickers, there are plenty of reasons that one might stick with a business that one dislikes – even one that actively harms you.

The biggest reason for staying with a bad company is if they've figured out a way to punish you for leaving. Businesses are keenly attuned to ways to impose switching costs on disloyal customers. "Switching costs" are all the things you have to give up when you take your business elsewhere.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Think of how Facebook keeps users glued to its platform by making the price of leaving cutting of contact with your friends, family, communities and customers. Facebook tells its customers – advertisers – that people who hate the platform stick around because Facebook is so good at manipulating its users (this is a good sales pitch for a company that sells ads!). But there's a far simpler explanation for peoples' continued willingness to let Mark Zuckerberg spy on them: they hate Zuck, but they love their friends, so they stay:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

One of the most important ways that regulators can help the public is by reducing switching costs. The easier it is for you to leave a company, the more likely it is they'll treat you well, and if they don't, you can walk away from them. That's just what the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau wants to do with its new Personal Financial Data Rights rule:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-jumpstart-competition-and-accelerate-shift-to-open-banking/

The new rule is aimed at banks, some of the rottenest businesses around. Remember when Wells Fargo ripped off millions of its customers by ordering its tellers to open fake accounts in their name, firing and blacklisting tellers who refused to break the law?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

While there are alternatives to banks – local credit unions are great – a lot of us end up with a bank by default and then struggle to switch, even though the banks give us progressively worse service, collectively rip us off for billions in junk fees, and even defraud us. But because the banks keep our data locked up, it can be hard to shop for better alternatives. And if we do go elsewhere, we're stuck with hours of tedious clerical work to replicate all our account data, payees, digital wallets, etc.

That's where the new CFPB order comes in: the Bureau will force banks to "share data at the person’s direction with other companies offering better products." So if you tell your bank to give your data to a competitor – or a comparison shopping site – it will have to do so…or else.

Banks often claim that they block account migration and comparison shopping sites because they want to protect their customers from ripoff artists. There are certainly plenty of ripoff artists (notwithstanding that some of them run banks). But banks have an irreconcilable conflict of interest here: they might want to stop (other) con-artists from robbing you, but they also want to make leaving as painful as possible.

Instead of letting shareholder-accountable bank execs in back rooms decide what the people you share your financial data are allowed to do with it, the CFPB is shouldering that responsibility, shifting those deliberations to the public activities of a democratically accountable agency. Under the new rule, the businesses you connect to your account data will be "prohibited from misusing or wrongfully monetizing the sensitive personal financial data."

This is an approach that my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers and I first laid our in our 2021 paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly," where we describe how and why we should shift determinations about who is and isn't allowed to get your data from giant, monopolistic tech companies to democratic institutions, based on privacy law, not corporate whim:

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

The new CFPB rule is aimed squarely at reducing switching costs. As CFPB Director Rohit Chopra says, "Today, we are proposing a rule to give consumers the power to walk away from bad service and choose the financial institutions that offer the best products and prices."

The rule bans banks from charging their customers junk fees to access their data, and bans businesses you give that data to from "collecting, using, or retaining data to advance their own commercial interests through actions like targeted or behavioral advertising." It also guarantees you the unrestricted right to revoke access to your data.

The rule is intended to replace the current state-of-the-art for data sharing, which is giving your banking password to third parties who go and scrape that data on your behalf. This is a tactic that comparison sites and financial dashboards have used since 2006, when Mint pioneered it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we

A lot's happened since 2006. It's past time for American bank customers to have the right to access and share their data, so they can leave rotten banks and go to better ones.

The new rule is made possible by Section 1033 of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which was passed in 2010. Chopra is one of the many Biden administrative appointees who have acquainted themselves with all the powers they already have, and then used those powers to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

It's pretty wild that the first digital interoperability mandate is going to come from the CFPB, but it's also really cool. As Tim Wu demonstrated in 2021 when he wrote Biden's Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, the administrative agencies have sweeping, grossly underutilized powers that can make a huge difference to everyday Americans' lives:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

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/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Steve Morgan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._National_Bank_Building_-_Portland,_Oregon.jpg

Stefan Kühn (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abrissbirne.jpg

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

 - 

Rhys A. (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysasplundh/5201859761/in/photostream/

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

[netscapenavigator-official]

I know this is an improper use of this meme format, but

I’m honestly tired of Tumblr Dot Com users trying to promote CDs, DVDs, and BDs are the best way to “own your media” in 2024. They’re not. They never were. They never will be. (You stupid sluts.)

With the exception of M-Discs. M-Disc BDs, and the even rarer format (M-Disc DVDs), are adequate for archiving. In fact, it’s what they’re designed to do. But good luck finding some that won’t blow the bank. And they’ll most likely be 128 GB or less, so you’re still better off just running two cheap Walmart HDDs in parallel.