#Fee Collection Software

[cofeelife]

Revolutionize Your Finances with the Best Fees Payment App

In today’s fast-paced world, managing finances efficiently is more crucial than ever. Whether you're a student juggling tuition fees, a parent handling school expenses, or a professional dealing with various bills, finding a convenient and reliable fees payment app can simplify your life significantly. At Coffee Life, we're excited to delve into how the right fees payment app can transform your financial management experience and help you stay organized.

Why a Fees Payment App is Essential

Gone are the days of scrambling for cash or writing checks to cover various fees. A fees payment app offers a streamlined, digital solution to handle all your payments with ease. Here’s why integrating a fees payment app into your financial routine is a game-changer:

Convenience at Your Fingertips: Imagine paying your bills or school fees from the comfort of your home or on-the-go. With a fees payment app, you can complete transactions quickly without needing to visit physical locations or handle paper forms.

Time Savings: By automating your payments, you save valuable time. Set up recurring payments for regular fees, and avoid the hassle of manual transactions. This way, you can focus on what truly matters, whether it's your career, studies, or family.

Enhanced Organization: Keeping track of various payments can be overwhelming. A fees payment app centralizes all your transactions, providing a clear overview of your financial commitments. Many apps also offer notifications and reminders, ensuring you never miss a payment due date.

Increased Security: Digital payment apps employ advanced security measures to protect your sensitive information. This added layer of security is crucial in preventing fraud and unauthorized access to your financial details.

Instant Confirmation: No more waiting for days to confirm your payment. With a fees payment app, you receive instant confirmation and receipts for your transactions, which can be useful for record-keeping and resolving any potential issues.

Features to Look for in a Fees Payment App

When choosing a fees payment app, it's important to select one that meets your specific needs. Here are some key features to consider:

User-Friendly Interface: Opt for an app with an intuitive design that makes navigation simple, even for those who aren't tech-savvy.

Multiple Payment Options: Ensure the app supports various payment methods, such as credit/debit cards, bank transfers, and digital wallets.

Recurring Payment Setup: Look for an app that allows you to set up automatic payments for recurring fees, saving you from manual entry each time.

Expense Tracking and Reporting: Some apps offer tools to track and categorize your expenses, providing insights into your spending patterns.

Customer Support: Reliable customer support is essential for addressing any issues or questions you might have.

Top Fees Payment Apps to Consider

At Coffee Life, we understand that choosing the right app can be overwhelming given the multitude of options available. To help you get started, here are a few highly-rated fees payment apps to consider:

PayPal: Known for its broad acceptance and security features, PayPal is a versatile option for various types of payments.

Venmo: Ideal for quick, peer-to-peer transactions, Venmo also offers easy bill-splitting features.

Google Pay: Integrating seamlessly with other Google services, Google Pay offers a straightforward payment experience with enhanced security.

Apple Pay: For Apple users, this app provides a smooth payment process and integrates well with the Apple ecosystem.

Final Thoughts

Incorporating a fees payment app into your daily life can significantly enhance your financial management by offering convenience, security, and efficiency. By choosing the right app that aligns with your needs and preferences, you can streamline your payment processes and enjoy more free time to focus on what truly matters.

At Coffee Life, we’re here to help you navigate the world of financial technology and find solutions that simplify your life. Stay tuned for more insights and tips on how to make the most of digital tools in managing your finances.

For more information Visit Our Website: https://www.cofee.life/

Contact Info:

Address:  1st floor, Smartcity, Kakkanad, Kochi,Kerala, 682042, India Phone: +91 7994891888

[eazyscholar1]

Eazyscholar offers a comprehensive Fee Collection Software designed to streamline financial operations for educational institutions. With Eazyscholar, managing student fees becomes effortless, allowing administrators to easily track payments, generate invoices, and send reminders. The user-friendly interface ensures smooth navigation, while robust security features safeguard sensitive financial data. Simplify fee management with Eazyscholar and focus on enhancing educational experiences.Visit us:https://eazyscholar.com/fee-management

[cakiweb]

Streamline Your Finances with Fee Management Software

Introduction

Managing fees, whether in an educational institution, a business, or any organization, can be a complex and time-consuming task. Traditional fee management methods, like spreadsheets or paper-based systems, often lead to errors, inefficiencies, and a lack of transparency. Fortunately, fee management software has emerged as a powerful solution to these challenges, offering organizations the tools they need to streamline their financial processes. We'll explore the benefits and features of fee management software, and how it can transform the way you manage fees.

The Importance of Effective Fee Management

Financial Stability: Fees are a significant source of revenue for many organizations. Mismanagement can lead to financial instability, affecting an organization's ability to meet its financial obligations and invest in growth.

Compliance: Staying compliant with regulations and ensuring that fees are collected and distributed accurately is vital. Fee management software can help automate compliance checks and reporting.

Transparency: Stakeholders, whether they are students, parents, or clients, expect transparency in fee structures and transactions. Fee management software can provide real-time visibility into financial data.

Efficiency: Manual fee collection and tracking can be time-consuming and error-prone. Fee management software automates these tasks, saving time and reducing human error.

Key Features of Fee Management Software

Fee management software offers a range of features designed to simplify and enhance the fee collection process:

Online Payment Processing: One of the most significant advantages of fee management software is its ability to facilitate online payments. Users can pay fees conveniently through various payment methods, including credit cards, electronic transfers, and more.

Customizable Fee Structures: Create and customize fee structures to accommodate a wide range of fees, from tuition and course fees in educational institutions to subscription fees for software services.

Automation: Automate fee collection, late fee calculations, and reminders, reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

Reporting and Analytics: Generate detailed financial reports, helping organizations gain insights into their financial health and make informed decisions.

Integration: Fee management software can often integrate with other software, such as accounting and student information systems, to create a seamless financial ecosystem.

Notifications: Automated notifications for fee reminders, payment confirmations, and other important updates keep stakeholders informed.

Benefits of Fee Management Software

Error Reduction: The automation of fee collection and calculations minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring that fees are accurately recorded and processed.

Time Savings: Manual fee management can be a time-consuming process. Fee management software automates many tasks, freeing up staff to focus on more critical responsibilities.

Improved Communication: Real-time notifications and access to financial information enhance communication between the organization and its stakeholders.

Enhanced Security: Fee management software is designed to meet stringent security standards, ensuring the protection of sensitive financial data.

Scalability: As your organization grows, fee management software can easily adapt to accommodate more students, clients, or users.

Cost Savings: By reducing manual labour and errors, fee management software can lead to cost savings in the long run.

Conclusion

Fee management software is a game-changer for organizations looking to streamline their financial operations, improve transparency, and enhance the user experience. Whether you're an educational institution, a business, or any organization that relies on fee collection, implementing fee management software can lead to significant benefits, both in terms of financial efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction. Consider the specific needs of your organization and explore the many fee management software solutions available to find the one that best suits your requirements.

[procturblog01]

Why Is The Fee Management System Important for Educational Institutions? | Proctur

It’s a special kind of software that helps schools handle fees in a smooth and easy way. With this software, schools can make things faster, keep everything clear and organized, and get more things done. It’s like having a superpower to manage fees and make school life better for everyone through a school management system!

This fee management software helps schools manage student fees really well and keep everything in order. It helps make invoices for students, keep an eye on payment statuses, and keep records of all the money stuff. For more, read blog - https://proctur.com/blog/why-is-the-fee-management-system-important-for-educational-institutions/

[tooros1]

Fee Collection Software Bhubaneswar

Eazyscholar, the fee collection software in Bhubaneswar is the payment process for educational institutions. Offering seamless transactions, automated reminders, and detailed reporting, it ensures hassle-free fee management. With user-friendly interfaces and robust security, Eazyscholar simplifies administrative tasks, enhancing efficiency for educational organizations in Bhubaneswar.

[sameergaza]

Hello my friends who I am proud of, welcome to those who are like a support that does not bow, I address you simple words, the past period was one of the most severe and difficult moments of our lives in the steadfast Gaza that everyone has let down, everyone knows what we suffer from the circumstances here and the harshness of scenes that I do not want to mention again.

You are the only ones, yes, you are the ones who stood by us. You are the ones who helped families and individuals to complete their lives and compensate them for some of what they lost in this fierce war, so I am like Samir on my behalf and on behalf of my family. I thank you all without exception, because you have been by our side all this time. I just wanted to start my post with these words that you deserve 🫂❤️.

In short, so as not to prolong.

Guys, the past period has been very difficult in terms of food and drink, rent costs, and education costs. I have chosen, the most priority and I chose to collect costs for the most thing we needed in the past period, I will mention it now :

I asked for $500 to rent the house we live in now, and thanks to you, I was very successful with that. Then I collected $500 to buy food. It took longer, but it's okay, I succeeded and achieved the goal of feeding my family and satisfying their hunger.

Thus, the basic costs have been achieved, which are rent and food. Thank you for that 🙏 .

I still have a personal goal, which is the costs of education, as you know, I am Samir, a software engineer studying at the Islamic University in Gaza, in my fourth year.

All I want to say is that I am about to finish my educational career and not waste the effort of many years that have passed.

I will note something simple before the war, my father was paying for the study costs, but since the beginning of the war I have not paid any of these costs, I have paid some of these costs but they accumulate little by little, imagine with me for two years and I am trying hard to save these fees, but the war has another opinion, I can't and my father can neither, and debts have accumulated a lot .

I have two very important goals in this publication, but there is a goal from both of them based on collecting the amount as soon as possible during the next 5 or 6 days.

1 - The first goal is the costs of quarterly fees, which are worth 550 Jordanian dinars, I paid about 200 dinars in two stages, and I have one last payment left that I need as soon as possible before the end of the semester. So that I can take the final exams and pass the class and be able to start a new semester. What is required is only 350 dollars.

2 - The second goal is to collect the accumulated amount of 1122 dinars = equivalent to about $1,600. I’ll explain the offer from that.

There is a system in my university that if I do not pay all the required costs, and I graduate, I will not be able to get my degree from the university, and the fatigue of the past years will go away unless I can collect the accumulated amount, everything will be fine.

I have attached in this post pictures that explain everything.

That’s all I want to say so far, guys, I hope to find cooperation from you on this issue because I urgently need help. And thank you 🤍.

Donation link 👇🏻👇🏻

My campaign link.

The deadline is 5 days for the first goal and I need it as soon as possible. If I can’t collect it, I won’t be able to pass the final exams and finish the class. 💔

I trust you

Campaign verification link.

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[evannamari]

Distribution of Paid Custom Content Is Harmful

Speaking about the eternal topic of paid access, I’d like to share my opinion (even though no one asked for it).

I want to note right away that I’m talking about permanently paid content — I have no complaints about early access.

I saw that a certain person wrote that hoping to get custom content from certain paid authors for free is impudence, because they put a lot of effort and time into creating it.

That sounds fair, but do free creators put in less effort? Let’s say this is a debatable issue. There can also be long discussions about what counts as high-quality content.

But I want to draw attention to something else: these creators do not exist in a vacuum. They didn’t gain their knowledge on their own. Everything we and they know about modding in The Sims 2 is the result of intellectual — and not only intellectual — work done by many people.

I also see that paid creators tend to form closed, elitist groups and do not share their experience with the rest of the community, even though they benefit from its collective knowledge.

For example, would these paid creators be able to make their content without SimPE? This software is distributed for free. Or didn’t they learn from tons of tutorials published absolutely for free?

Programs, plugins, resources — all of this helps our community thrive around an old game abandoned by its developers (don’t tell me about Legacy).

It’s the players who openly share knowledge about their favorite game who prevent it from being forgotten and keep reviving interest in it again and again.

Let’s imagine all custom content for The Sims 2 were distributed for a fee. This would cool interest in the game — not only because obviously not every player could afford to buy everything. It would also make content creation less sustainable: access to resources would be more difficult, and competition in the creator market would split the income so much that it would become negligible.

This is why I believe that custom content locked behind permanent paywalls is harmful to our community.

[ikuharaisabitch]

Fundraiser for Palestinian student in Poland

I’m posting this fundraiser on behalf of @yahya-abuhassan, Palestinian who’s been studying in Poland for the last 2 years. His entire family, including his older brother who worked as a senior software engineer in Germany, had to flee to the south of Gaza after their home in the north was destroyed.

They are currently living in tent in al-Mawasi, so-called “safe area” that was nevertheless relentlessly bombed by Israel. Yahya is fundraising money to get them to Egypt through the Rafah crossing.

He needs to raise approximately 47 000 $ (enough to evacuate 7 adults and 3 children and pay for their initial living expenses in Egypt), and his fundraiser is only at ~20 000 $!

Short term goal is to raise around 2 500 $ which is the remaining cost to evacuate his older brother with his family, including his elderly mom and cover initial survival costs after evacuation. His brother can then return to work in Germany and hopefully earn enough money to help with faster evacuation of the rest. Right now we raised 0/2500$. I will reblog this post with updates. This fundraiser has been verified by Polish collectives, non-governmental organisations, refugee & human rights activists including Polish-Palestinian sociologist Emil Al-Khawaldeh. Yahya's situation and fundraiser was also described in our national edition of Newsweek. You can find more details in English description of the fundraiser in the link below. 

If you are a foreigner please do not hesitate to donate. Pomagam.pl is the biggest Polish fundraising platform which enables donations via PayPal and credit card. I have tested it with American friends and it works perfectly well. 1$ equals to 4 PLN. You can be charged with intercontinental payment fee, which to my knowledge is usually around 3$ but you will see the amount before payment. Your bank may also require 2-factor-verification before proceeding, which usually means simply pasting a code from your phone to a browser.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”

[...]

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while­ simultaneously raising subscription fees.  Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch. How did we get here? 

28 February 2025

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment?

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Barbra Streisand is famous for many things: her exciting performances on the big screen, the small screen, and the stage; her Grammy-winning career as a musician (she's a certified EGOT!); and for all the times she's had to correct people who've added an extra vowel to the spelling of her first name (I can relate!).

But a thousand years from now, her legacy is likely to be linguistic, rather than artistic. The "Streisand Effect" – coined by Mike Masnick – describes what happens when someone tries to suppress a piece of information, only to have that act of attempted suppression backfire by inciting vastly more interest in the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

The term dates to 2003, when Streisand sued the website Pictopia and its proprietors for $50m for reproducing an image from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project (which produces a timeseries of photos of the California coastline in order to track coastal erosion). The image ("Image 3850") incidentally captured the roofs of Streisand's rather amazing coastal compound, which upset Streisand.

But here's the thing: before Streisand's lawsuit, Image 3850 had only been viewed six times. After she filed the case, another 420,000 people downloaded that image. Not only did Streisand lose her suit (disastrously so – she was ordered to pay the defendants' lawyers $177,000 in fees), but she catastrophically failed in her goal of keeping this boring, obscure photo from being seen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Streisand has since called the suit "a mistake." On the one hand, that is very obviously true, but on the other hand, it's still admirable, given how many other failed litigants went to their graves insisting that their foolish and expensive legal gambit was, in fact, very smart and we are all very stupid for failing to understand that.

Which brings me to Ian Linkletter and the Canadian Privacy Library. Linkletter is the librarian and founder of the nonprofit Canadian Privacy Library, a newish online library that collects and organizes privacy-related documents from Canadian public institutions. Linkletter kicked off the project with the goal of collecting the Privacy Impact Assessments from every public university in Canada, starting in his home province of BC.

These PIAs are a legal requirement whenever a public university procures a piece of software, and they're no joke. Ed-tech vendors are pretty goddamned cavalier when it comes to student privacy, as Linkletter knows well. Back in 2020, Linkletter was an ed-tech specialist for the University of British Columbia, where he was called upon to assess Proctorio, a "remote invigilation" tool that monitored remote students while they sat exams.

This is a nightmare category of software, a mix of high-tech phrenology (vendors claim that they can tell when students are cheating by using "AI" to analyze their faces); arrogant techno-sadism (vendors requires students – including those sharing one-room apartments with "essential worker" parents on night shifts who sleep during the day – to pan their cameras around to prove that they are alone); digital racism (products are so bad at recognizing Black faces that some students have had to sit exams with multiple task-lights shining directly onto their faces); and bullshit (vendors routinely lie about their tools' capabilities and efficacy).

Worst: remote invigilation is grounded in the pedagogically bankrupt idea that learning is best (or even plausibly) assessed through high-stakes testing. The kind of person who wants to use these tools generally has no idea how learning works and thinks of students as presumptively guilty cheats. They monitor test-taking students in realtime, and have been known to jiggle test-takers' cursors impatiently when students think too long about their answers. Remote invigilation also captures the eye-movements of test-takers, flagging people who look away from the screen while thinking for potential cheating. No wonder that many students who sit exams under these conditions find themselves so anxious that they vomit or experience diarrhea, carefully staring directly into the camera as they shit themselves or vomit down their shirts, lest they be penalized for looking away or visiting the toilet.

Linkletter quickly realized that Proctorio is a worst-in-class example of a dreadful category. The public-facing materials the company provided about its products were flatly contradicted by the materials they provided to educators, where all the really nasty stuff was buried. The company – whose business exploded during the covid lockdowns – is helmed by CEO Mike Olsen, a nasty piece of work who once doxed a child who criticized him in an online forum:

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

Proctorio's products are shrouded in secrecy. In 2020, for reasons never explained, all the (terrible, outraged) reviews of its browser plugin disappeared from the Chrome store:

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

Linkletter tweeted his alarming findings, publishing links to the unlisted, but publicly available Youtube videos where Proctorio explained how its products really worked. Proctorio then sued Linkletter, for copyright infringement.

Proctorio's argument is that by linking to materials that they published on Youtube with permissions that let anyone with the link see them, Linkletter infringed upon their copyright. When Linkletter discovered that these videos already had publicly available links, indexed by Google, in the documentation produced by other Proctorio customers for students and teachers, Proctorio doubled down and argued that by collecting these publicly available links to publicly available videos, Linkletter had still somehow infringed on their copyright.

Luckily for Linkletter, BC has an anti-SLAPP law that is supposed to protect whistleblowers facing legal retaliation for publishing protected speech related to matters of public interest (like whether BC's flagship university has bought a defective and harmful product that its students will be forced to use). Unluckily for Linkletter, the law is brand new, lacks jurisprudence, and the courts have decided that he can't use a SLAPP defense and his case must go to trial:

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

Linkletter could have let that experience frighten him away from the kind of principled advocacy that riles up deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bullies. Instead, he doubled down, founding the Canadian Privacy Library, with the goal of using Freedom of Information requests to catalog all of Canada's post-secondary institutions' privacy assessments. Given how many bodies he found buried in Proctorio's back yard, this feels like the kind of thing that should be made more visible to Canadians.

There are 25 public universities in BC, and Linkletter FOI'ed them all. Eleven provided their PIAs. Eight sent him an estimate of what it would cost them (and thus what they would charge) to assemble these docs for him. Six requested extensions.

One of them threatened to sue.

Langara College is a 19,000-student spinout of Vancouver Community College whose motto is Eruditio Libertas Est ("Knowledge is Freedom"). Linkletter got their 2019 PIA for Microsoft's Office 365 when he FOI'ed the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (universities often recycle one another's privacy impact assessments, which is fine).

That's where the trouble started. In June, Langara sent Linkletter a letter demanding that he remove their Office 365 PIA; the letter CC'ed two partners in a law firm, and accused Linkletter of copyright infringement. But that's not how copyright – or public records – work. As Linkletter writes, the PIA is "a public record lawfully obtained through an FOI request" – it is neither exempted from disclosure, nor is it confidential:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/legal-threat/

Langara claims that in making their mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment for Office 365 available, Linkletter has exposed them to "heightened risks of data breaches and privacy incidents," they provided no evidence to support this assertion.

I think they're full of shit, but you don't have to take my word for it. After initially removing the PIA, Linkletter restored it, and you can read it for yourself:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/langara-college-privacy-impact-assessments/

I read it. It is pretty goddamned anodyne – about as exciting as looking at the roof of Barbra Streisand's mansion.

Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only Streisand – a person who has foolishly decided to use the law to bully a weaker stranger out of disclosing some innocuous and publicly available fact about themselves. But sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. A lot of people who read my work are much more familiar with ed-tech, privacy, and pedagogy than I am. If that's you, maybe you want to peruse the Langara PIA to see if they are hiding something because they're exposing their students to privacy risks and don't want that fact to get out.

There are plenty of potential privacy risks in Office 365! The cloud version of Microsoft Office contains a "bossware" mode that allows bosses to monitor their workers' keystrokes for spelling, content, and accuracy, and produce neat charts of which employees are least "productive." The joke's on the boss, though: Office 365 also has a tool that lets you compare your department's usage of Office 365 to your competitors, which is another way of saying that Microsoft is gathering your trade secrets and handing it out to your direct competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

So, yeah, there are lots of "features" in Office 365 that could give rise to privacy threats when it is used at a university. One hopes that Langara correctly assessed these risks and accounted for them in its PIA, which would mean that they are bullying Linkletter out of reflex, rather than to cover up wrongdoing. But there's only one way to find out: go through the doc that Linkletter has restored to public view.

Linkletter has excellent pro bono representation from Norton Rose Fulbright, a large and powerful law-firm that is handling his Proctorio case. Linkletter writes, "they have put this public college on notice that any proceeding is liable to be dismissed pursuant to the Protection of Public Participation Act, BC’s anti-SLAPP legislation."

Langara has now found themselves at the bottom of a hole, and if they're smart, they'll stop digging.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/08/01/eruditio-libertas-est/#streisand-v-linkletter

Image: Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Streisand_Estate.jpgbr>

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

--

Langara College (modified) https://langara.ca/

Fair use (parody) https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104

Fair dealing (parody) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1468015

[eazyscholar1]

EazyScholar offers a seamless fee collection software solution designed for educational institutions. Streamline payment processes, track outstanding fees, and generate reports effortlessly. With user-friendly interfaces and secure payment gateways, managing fees becomes hassle-free. EazyScholar ensures transparency, accuracy, and efficiency, empowering schools and colleges to focus on academic excellence while effortlessly managing their financial operations.Visit us:https://eazyscholar.com/fee-management

[cakiweb]

Eazyscholar offers cutting-edge fee collection software in Bhubaneswar, streamlining financial processes for educational institutions. With a user-friendly interface, it simplifies fee management, automates transactions, and ensures seamless tracking. Eazyscholar's software enhances efficiency, reduces errors, and provides real-time financial insights, empowering institutions to focus on education. Simplify your fee collection with Eazyscholar and experience a hassle-free financial management solution tailored for Bhubaneswar's educational landscape. For more information visit us:https://www.eazyscholar.com/fee-management

[fourohfourlifenotfound]

Okay so hi I'm not super in any of your fandoms (watcher + try guys + dropout, hello welcome) but I'm a software developer and BOTH try guys and watcher announcing a custom streaming platform so close together had me suspicious.

So with just one, I'd assume that maybe they scraped together the money and resources to hire enough devs to make a well-designed secure platform (you want security for your login info and payment info). But two? Seems a bit odd.

So I actually looked a bit closer, at their privacy policies:

So it looks like Vimeo has decided to up their game and partner with existing yt content creation outlets to make streaming platforms.

Wait, what about Dropout? Dropout uses it too!

What does this mean, exactly?

Well, it means that Vimeo is providing a base software that gets customized for use by the companies (watcher, 2nd try). It means that Vimeo has a hand in your data associated with these platforms (account info, payment info, watch info, etc...). Is that a bad thing? Idk yet. Read through the streaming platform's privacy policy and Vimeo's privacy policy and make your own decision about what you feel comfortable sharing. But realistically the only additional info collected compared to your average youtube use is the financial info, and that seems to go through another third party (4th party?) (like Stripe or something like that. very common, most of your financial transactions online use things like that). It also likely means that Vimeo is taking some kind of cut of the profits made from these subscriptions (and lets be real, in this day and age, they're not just demanding a flat fee. It's likely some percentage of your subscription cost). The companies switching over (watcher and 2nd try) are making the gamble that the money made on subscriptions after cost taken is more than their adsense from yt, which isn't a wild idea considering how much we know yt loves demonetizing videos and paying their creators poorly.

It also means that Vimeo seems to be on some sort of marketing push, and that more of your favorite channels may swap over to streaming services in the near future.

Vimeo???? Yes, vimeo, that bootleg youtube that's been around for like as long as I can remember being on the internet. I guess they finally found a way to usurp yt's market control and good for them ig. Maybe this will be the thing that finally forces yt to fix their creator relationships? time will tell Why are you posting this in my favorite media company's tag?? I wanted fanart! Sorry to intrude, I just think this is neat and would love to hear opinions from other people on this knowledge.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 19, 2025

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “​​[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sabellart]

I am literally itching to know what drawing software and brushes you use, your art always just has a certain 🤌🤌🤌

i’m so sorry it took this long to answer this but i use clip studio paint for pretty much everything i make, right now i'm mostly using a collection of random artist's brushes that i come across (though i don't use all the brushes in the sets it mainly just depends on how i'm feeling.