#New Technology File System

[magodelpc]

Qual'è la differenza fra FAT32 - exFAT e NTFS

In questo articolo voglio aiutarvi a fare chiarezza sui principali file System di Windows, parleremo di FAT32 – exFAT e NTFS, ora cercherò di spiegarvi le principali differenze, i vantaggi e svantaggi di ogni file System. Introduzione FAT32 è più vecchio ma offre una compatibilità quasi universale con diversi sistemi operativi e dispositivi, rendendolo ideale per unità flash e unità…

[yesterdays-xkcd]

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audiobook playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music that I ever paid for.

Steal This Comic [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Black Hat: Thinking of buying from audible.com or iTunes? Black Hat: Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life. You can take it anywhere and it will always work.

[There is a flowchart whose paths are (You're a Criminal)<-Pirate<-(Buy or Pirate)->Buy->(Things Change)->(You Try to Recover Your Collection)->(You're a Criminal)]

Black Hat: But if you buy DRM-locked media, and you ever switch operating systems or new technology comes along, your collection could be lost. Black Hat: And if you try to keep it, you'll be a criminal (DMCA 1201). Black Hat: So remember: if you want a collection you can count on, PIRATE IT Black Hat: Hey, you'll be a criminal either way. (If you don't like this, demand DRM-free files)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books, and in NYC on WEDNESDAY (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN. More tour dates here.

The commercial surveillance industry is almost totally unregulated. Data brokers, ad-tech, and everyone in between – they harvest, store, analyze, sell and rent every intimate, sensitive, potentially compromising fact about your life.

Late last year, I testified at a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau hearing about a proposed new rule to kill off data brokers, who are the lynchpin of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The other witnesses were fascinating – and chilling, There was a lawyer from the AARP who explained how data-brokers would let you target ads to categories like "seniors with dementia." Then there was someone from the Pentagon, discussing how anyone could do an ad-buy targeting "people enlisted in the armed forces who have gambling problems." Sure, I thought, and you don't even need these explicit categories: if you served an ad to "people 25-40 with Ivy League/Big Ten law or political science degrees within 5 miles of Congress," you could serve an ad with a malicious payload to every Congressional staffer.

Now, that's just the data brokers. The real action is in ad-tech, a sector dominated by two giant companies, Meta and Google. These companies claim that they are better than the unregulated data-broker cowboys at the bottom of the food-chain. They say they're responsible wielders of unregulated monopoly surveillance power. Reader, they are not.

Meta has been repeatedly caught offering ad-targeting like "depressed teenagers" (great for your next incel recruiting drive):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/01/105987/is-facebook-targeting-ads-at-sad-teens/

And Google? They just keep on getting caught with both hands in the creepy commercial surveillance cookie-jar. Today, Wired's Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on a way to use Google to target people with chronic illnesses, people in financial distress, and national security "decision makers":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-dv360-banned-audience-segments-national-security/

Google doesn't offer these categories itself, they just allow data-brokers to assemble them and offer them for sale via Google. Just as it's possible to generate a target of "Congressional staffers" by using location and education data, it's possible to target people with chronic illnesses based on things like whether they regularly travel to clinics that treat HIV, asthma, chronic pain, etc.

Google claims that this violates their policies, and that they have best-of-breed technical measures to prevent this from happening, but when Wired asked how this data-broker was able to sell these audiences – including people in menopause, or with "chronic pain, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension" – Google did not reply.

The data broker in the report also sold access to people based on which medications they took (including Ambien), people who abuse opioids or are recovering from opioid addiction, people with endocrine disorders, and "contractors with access to restricted US defense-related technologies."

It's easy to see how these categories could enable blackmail, spear-phishing, scams, malvertising, and many other crimes that threaten individuals, groups, and the nation as a whole. The US Office of Naval Intelligence has already published details of how "anonymous" people targeted by ads can be identified:

https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf

The most amazing part is how the 33,000 targeting segments came to public light: an activist just pretended to be an ad buyer, and the data-broker sent him the whole package, no questions asked. Johnny Ryan is a brilliant Irish privacy activist with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He created a fake data analytics website for a company that wasn't registered anywhere, then sent out a sales query to a brokerage (the brokerage isn't identified in the piece, to prevent bad actors from using it to attack targeted categories of people).

Foreign states, including China – a favorite boogeyman of the US national security establishment – can buy Google's data and target users based on Google ad-tech stack. In the past, Chinese spies have used malvertising – serving targeted ads loaded with malware – to attack their adversaries. Chinese firms spend billions every year to target ads to Americans:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/business/google-meta-temu-shein.html

Google and Meta have no meaningful checks to prevent anyone from establishing a shell company that buys and targets ads with their services, and the data-brokers that feed into those services are even less well-protected against fraud and other malicious act.

All of this is only possible because Congress has failed to act on privacy since 1988. That's the year that Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have at home. That's also the last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law:

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

The legislative history of the VPPA is telling: it was passed after a newspaper published the leaked video-rental history of a far-right judge named Robert Bork, whom Reagan hoped to elevate to the Supreme Court. Bork failed his Senate confirmation hearings, but not because of his video rentals (he actually had pretty good taste in movies). Rather, it was because he was a Nixonite criminal and virulent loudmouth racist whose record was strewn with the most disgusting nonsense imaginable).

But the leak of Bork's video-rental history gave Congress the cold grue. His video rental history wasn't embarrassing, but it sure seemed like Congress had some stuff in its video-rental records that they didn't want voters finding out about. They beat all land-speed records in making it a crime to tell anyone what kind of movies they (and we) were watching.

And that was it. For 37 years, Congress has completely failed to pass another consumer privacy law. Which is how we got here – to this moment where you can target ads to suicidal teens, gambling addicted soldiers in Minuteman silos, grannies with Alzheimer's, and every Congressional staffer on the Hill.

Some people think the problem with mass surveillance is a kind of machine-driven, automated mind-control ray. They believe the self-aggrandizing claims of tech bros to have finally perfected the elusive mind-control ray, using big data and machine learning.

But you don't need to accept these outlandish claims – which come from Big Tech's sales literature, wherein they boast to potential advertisers that surveillance ads are devastatingly effective – to understand how and why this is harmful. If you're struggling with opioid addiction and I target an ad to you for a fake cure or rehab center, I haven't brainwashed you – I've just tricked you. We don't have to believe in mind-control to believe that targeted lies can cause unlimited harms.

And those harms are indeed grave. Stein's Law predicts that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Congress's failure on privacy has put us all at risk – including Congress. It's only a matter of time until the commercial surveillance industry is responsible for a massive leak, targeted phishing campaign, or a ghastly national security incident involving Congress. Perhaps then we will get action.

In the meantime, the coalition of people whose problems can be blamed on the failure to update privacy law continues to grow. That coalition includes protesters whose identities were served up to cops, teenagers who were tracked to out-of-state abortion clinics, people of color who were discriminated against in hiring and lending, and anyone who's been harassed with deepfake porn:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

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/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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

[mckitterick]

Copyright law: making personal copies of copyrighted work

image sourced from a Cory Doctorow article on DMCA: X (recommended reading)

creating a digital backup (legally, it's called making an "archival copy") of software is explicitly allowed. but copying or alerting books, music, vehicle operating systems, movies, shows, and so on - even those you’ve legally purchased - gets complicated due to overlapping laws

under the doctrine of "fair use," we are permitted to make backup / archival copies under certain conditions:

copyright law allows you to make copies for personal use in case the original is lost, damaged, or destroyed; or to change formats to use on new devices; or to otherwise alter or repair the original for your own personal use

all this falls within fair use

however, making a copy of copyrighted work simply for your own ease of use could be construed as copyright infringement

furthermore, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) restricts this by prohibiting "circumvention of encryption" on devices like DVDs and Blu-rays

the DMCA criminalizes making and disseminating technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (aka "digital rights management" locks or DRM), and in fact criminalizes the act of circumventing access controls, whether or not doing so infringes on the copyright of the work itself

so, unless the original work you buy is unlocked, corporations that hold the copyright of that work can prosecute you for making legal archives of the material you own

and if the thing you bought is lost or damaged, or if the file format is no longer usable? you're just out of luck

DMCA needs to go

[leyavo]

Hacker!reader that joined the military as a political prisoner. You were found as part of a freedom fighter movement, forced to use your skills for a small military operation in exchange for prison or worse sent back to your strict cult family.

You now work as a hybrid technician in the field, still got a very short leash though. - tracker injected into the back of your arm. Maybe one day you’ll earn that freedom you desperately seek.

Freedom, is something you’ve fought for years. Escaped the cult you grew up in using technology. Nothing but a busted up phone and a concussed group leader, the type of grit and determination Captain Price likes when he reads your file. Slipped into databases and breached security systems like you’ve built them yourself. All in the name of bringing down shady operations and war criminals just like John Price.

He’s a lesser evil though if you want to help the greater good.

Taught to obey the same hand you were trying to break, the system you were trying to destroy. And your superiors all knew that, even gave you special treatment (not that type though). You’re more of a feral dog, a stray tied up to a lamp post and made to beg for scraps.

That’s how you get your call-sign, Lucky. Some sick, twisted joke of how your superiors liked to remind how fortunate you were. “Lucky, you’re still breathing…” when you’re in fact on the floor, your blood dripping on the training mat as a lieutenant looms over you. “Lucky I ain’t knocking you out.”

“Should think yourself lucky, I’d rather you rot away in a cell.” - everyone telling you to be thankful, to kiss the hand that trapped you. To play the good little soldier and be rewarded with a decent meal, a bed or a moment of silence without someone breathing down your neck.

The task force 141 changes that though, your handler pissed at how they can go above him and request your presence without him. Doesn’t stop him from controlling the situation. How your hands are cuffed to the bar on top of the table, left to wait five hours till John Price enters the interrogation room. A thick file thudding in front you, yours.

“This just might be your lucky day,” John says, flicking your file open and jabbing your mugshot clipped to the first page.

Gone is the handler whose boot presses on the back of your neck, the one to keep you down. You’re thrusted into the base with buzzing computers, whirring drones and you can’t help but lean into the hum of machines lining the task force’s room.

No, you’re new handlers a ghost. A silent observer that watches you from afar and gives you space to work. Lieutenant Riley, you don’t know if he cares about you really. Like it’s all part of the job working with the enemy. Doesn’t speak to you much, only barking orders out in the field or when he requests some research, intel.

The only one you can stand is sergeant Garrick, some sort of moral compass and voice of reason within the team. Someone you learnt to stay on side with as he’d probably be the only one questioning your wellbeing. Johnny Mactavish or Soap as they call him, too brash…the type your mother would wash their mouth out, make them hold the bar of soap until they stop speaking with such disgusting tongue. He gets the job done though, pulled you out by the scruff of your top a few times whilst bullets were flying.

Captain Price though, he’s oddly fair and you convince yourself it’s his way of manipulating you to do what you’re told. Not used to scheduled check-ins on your work or the good job he throws your way when you do what’s asked of you. In the back of your mind though you remind yourself what these people really are…

[Masterlist]

[gasgasdaily]

Ferrari's special works for the Group B classification, the 288 GTO.

During the 80s Ferrari was experimenting with stuffing turbocharged technology that was from their race cars onto their street cars which resulted with the 208 Turbo which spawned from the Ferrari 308 itself albeit with a downsized V8 from a 2.9L NA to a 2L turbocharged V8. However, due to the limited knowledge of turbochargers still, Ferrari fumbled with the 208 Turbo that it came without an intercooler which severely restricted power output thus even with the turbo, the 2L V8 only made approx 215hp which was woefully painful in a Ferrari.

Regardless, Ferrari wanted to go racing and with the Group B ruling being passed down in 1982, Ferrari thought their time to shine was coming. They instantly prepped a few Ferrari 308 GTS into a rally spec setup and being that the 308 GTS was already made, it didn't need any special homologation units at all but just filing for homologation and change parts onto the car.

The car did well at several stages but by the end of 1982, the very same year it competed in the WRC, Ferrari knew that their car wasn't as competitive as they thought and quickly redesigned another machine for full homologation and to stay competitive in Group B and that became the 288 GTO.

To be quick in production, Ferrari took the basis of the 308 chassis, sculped it from there, modified body parts to be sleeker and lighter and also swapping a new engine into it with the 2.9L Twin-turbo F114B V8. In its homologated street form, the car made 400hp which, for a road car, was immense power during that time period. However, the car's entire concept wasn't done till 1984 but in 1983, a whole shocking event in rallying occured and changed the fate of the 288 GTO.

During the 1983 WRC season, Audi and Lancia was locking horns and the fight for the World Drivers and Constructors fight was hot. On one hand, you have Audi with their skwanky new Audi Quattro with their AWD system and on the other you have Lancia with their 037 in RWD form which was the racing homologation of the Monte Carlo. The fight did eventually gave Lancia the Constructors but the Audi had proven to be quicker everywhere on loose surface and can be competent on tarmac courses also thus by the end of 1983, everyone was scrambling to build turbocharged machines and most importantly, AWD as the writing was on the wall that even Lancia had switched to that formula by 1984. However, Ferrari had somehow not gotten the memo plus with the tight financial situation that Ferrari was in at that time, they couldn't scrap the project to build a new AWD machine thus they switched target and built the 288 GTO for another class of Group B racing which was circuit GT racing rather than rallying.

Yet again, fate threw the whole project into the can. In 1986, two tragic races occured with one in Portugal involving a Ford RS200 and another in San Remo involving a Lancia Delta S4 killed the whole Group B outright. Suddenly, Ferrari found nowhere to race the car with but with customers already placing orders down, they had no choice but to churn the car out and it became a masterpiece.

The whole car weighed just 1,150kg which was very light, even lighter than the 308 it was based on by at least 400kg and it was also the first Ferrari to be made out of carbon fiber and fibreglass materials for its road car. With the twin-turbo V8, it propelled the light car to a 0-60mph in just 5sec which was real impressive at that time and with a top speed of 190mph/306kmh, it was also the fastest street-legal machine in the world at that time.

Car would be overshadowed by the F40 that would come later on but still, it was a very impressive special vehicle that subconciously helped Ferrari test stuff also for the legendary F40 to come.

[mariacallous]

Federal employees are seeking a temporary restraining order as part of a class action lawsuit accusing a group of Elon Musk’s associates of allegedly operating an illegally connected server from the fifth floor of the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC.

An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email.

A copy of the motion, filed in the DC District Court by National Security Counselors, a Washington-area public-interest law firm, was obtained by WIRED exclusively in advance. WIRED previously reported that Musk had installed several lackeys in OPM’s top offices, including individuals with ties to xAI, Neuralink, and other companies he owns.

The initial lawsuit, filed on January 27, cites reports that Musk’s associates illegally connected a server to a government network for the purposes of harvesting information, including the names and email accounts of federal employees. The server was installed on the agency’s premises, the complaint alleges, without OPM—the government’s human resources department—conducting a mandatory privacy impact assessment required under federal law.

Under the 2002 E-Government Act, agencies are required to perform privacy assessments prior to making “substantial changes to existing information technology” when handling information “in identifiable form.” Notably, prior to the installation of the server, OPM did not have the technical capability to email the entire federal workforce from a single email account.

“[A]t some point after 20 January 2025, OPM allowed unknown individuals to simply bypass its existing systems and security protocols,” Tuesday’s motion claims, “for the stated purpose of being able to communicate directly with those individuals without involving other agencies. In short, the sole purpose of these new systems was expediency.”

OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If the motion is granted, OPM would be forced to disconnect the server until the assessment is done. As a consequence, the Trump administration’s plans to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce would likely face delays. The email account linked to the server—HR@opm.gov—is currently being used to gather information from federal workers accepting buyouts under the admin’s “deferred resignation program,” which is set to expire on February 6.

“Under the law, a temporary restraining order is an extraordinary remedy,” notes National Security Counselors’ executive director, Kel McClanahan. “But this is an extraordinary situation.”

Before issuing a restraining order, courts apply what’s known as the “balance of equities” doctrine, weighing the burdens and costs on both parties. In this case, however, McClanahan argues that the injunction would inflict “no hardship” on the government whatsoever. February 6 is an “arbitrary deadline,” he says, and the administration could simply continue to implement the resignation program “through preexisting channels.”

“We can't wait for the normal course of litigation when all that information is just sitting there in some system nobody knows about with who knows what protections,” McClanahan says. “In a normal case, we might be able to at least count on the inspector general to do something, but Trump fired her, so all bets are off.”

The motion further questions whether OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits federal agencies from taking actions “not in accordance with the law.” Under the APA, courts may “compel agency action”—such as a private assessment—when it is “unlawfully withheld.”

Employees at various agencies were reportedly notified last month to be on the lookout for messages originating from the HR@opm.gov account. McClanahan’s complaint points to a January 23 email from acting Homeland Security secretary Benjamine Huffman instructing DHS employees that the HR@opm.gov account “can be considered trusted.” In the following days, emails were blasted out twice across the executive branch instructing federal workers to reply “Yes” in both cases.

The same account was later used to transmit the “Fork in the Road” missive promoting the Trump administration’s legally dubious “deferred resignation program,” which claims to offer federal workers the opportunity to quit but continue receiving paychecks through September. Workers who wished to participate in the program were instructed to reply to the email with “Resign.”

As WIRED has reported, even the new HR chief of DOGE, Musk’s task force, was unable to answer basic questions about the offer.

The legal authority underlying the program is unclear, and federal employee union leaders are warning workers not to blindly assume they will actually get paid. In a floor speech last week, Senator Tim Kaine advised workers not to be fooled: “There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work.” Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, similarly warned Monday: “There is no funding allocated to agencies to pay staff for this offer.”

McClanahan’s lawsuit highlights the government’s response to the OPM hack of 2015, which compromised personnel records on more than 22 million people, including some who’d undergone background checks to obtain security clearances. A congressional report authored by House Republicans following the breach pinned the incident on a “breakdown in communications” between OPM’s chief information officer and its inspector general: “The future effectiveness of the agency’s information technology and security efforts,” it says, “will depend on a strong relationship between these two entities moving forward.”

OPM’s inspector general, Krista Boyd, was fired by President Donald Trump in the midst of the “Friday night purge” on January 24—one day after the first HR@opm.gov email was sent.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented exfiltration and seizure of the most sensitive kinds of information by unelected, unvetted people with no experience, responsibility, or right to it,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, which is supporting the action. “Millions of Americans and the collective interests of the United States desperately need emergency intervention from the courts. The constitutional crisis is already here.”

[novella-november]

I have no idea why this needs to be said, but you can hate generative AI, love the Public Domain, love media preservation, hate the overbearing US Copyright system, and... still believe that Copyright Laws exist in the first place for a reason, (even if, thanks to Big Corporation Monopolies, it's been twisted into its current behemoth monstrosity.)

You can hate Large Language Models and still believe in Copyright Reform over Copyright Abolishment.

You can believe in Media Preservation and still believe that Plagiarism is wrong.

You can hate the current restrictive Copyright Laws without wanting to abolish them entirely.

You can love the Public Domain and still loath predatory corporations stealing everything they can get their hands on, to literally *feed the machine.*

These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think that

"you can't hate AI if you hate the current copyright laws"

or that

"Hating on Generative AI will only give us more restrictive copyright and IP laws, therefore you need to normalize and accept generative AI stealing all of your creations and every single thing you've ever said on the internet!"

I just genuinely don't understand how you can say this kind of crap if you've ever interacted with any creative person in your life.

I'm a wanna-be-author.

I want as many people to be able to afford my written works as possible without restrictions, and I fully plan on having free ebooks of my works available for those who can't afford to buy them.

*That does *not* mean I, in any way shape or form, would ever consent to people stealing my work and uploading it into a Large Language Model and telling it to spit out fifty unauthorized sequels that are then sold for cash profit!*

You cannot support generative AI and turn around and try to claim you're actually just defending small time artists, and *also* you think no one should have any legal protections at all protecting their work from plagiarism at all.

Supporting unethical generative AI (which is literally all of them currently), protecting artists, and *completely abolishing* copyright and intellectual property laws instead of reforming them *are* mutually exclusive concepts.

You *cannot* worship the plagiarism machine, claim to care about small artists, and then say that those same small artists should have absolutely *zero* legal protections to stop their work being plagiarized.

The only way AI could even begin to approach being ethical would be if using it to begin with wasn't a huge hazard to the enviornment, and if it was trained *exclusively * on Public Domain works that had to be checked and confirmed by multiple real human beings before it was put into the training data.

And oh, would you look at that?

Every single AI model is currently just sucking up the entire fucking goddamn internet and everything ever posted on it and everything ever downloaded from it with no way to really truly opt out of it or even just to know if your work has been fed to the machine until an entire page of text from your book pops out when it generates text from someone's writing prompt.

And no, it's not just "privileged Western authors" who are being exploited by AI.

For an updating list of global legal cases again AI tech giants, see this link here to stay up to date as cases develop:

[robin-evry]

HII i'm loving your works omg! could i ask you to make a bronya!yuu or silverwolf!yuu? (you can choose just one if you want). take care or yourself and do your work at your time, no need to rush! :D

I decided to do two but sorry if bronya is so short , aww thank you.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐅 𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐎𝐋𝐅!𝐘𝐔𝐔 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐖𝐒𝐓🐺👾

A member of the Stellaron Hunters and a genius hacker. She sees the universe as a massive immersive simulation game and has fun with it. She's mastered the skill known as "aether editing," which can be used to tamper with the data of reality.

Silver wolf!yuu is rarely known in nrc, they prefer to stay behind the scenes only a few students know about their existence.

Rarely appear in public, mostly using their holograms to go to school. It's pretty rare to see them actually outside of the ramshackle dorm.

Has a habit of disappearing and appearing, imagine your standing there and suddenly a hologram or game particles appear and silver wolf!yuu appear beside you.

Every time Crowley manages to piss them off, silver wolf!yuu would choose an area to vandalize at school, and some students manage to learn when you take a photo of it you can get a hidden message from silver wolf!yuu about Crowley.

silver wolf!yuu has a habit of collecting data about students, they have a database about their past, quirks, strength and weakness.

A very famous gamer in twst known to beat unbeatable levels of any game in twst and they use a fake alias. They hear about idia ranting towards Ortho about their game persona and find it funny. And join many game tournaments and win them easily and they gained money for this.

The ignihyde dorm is their second home, the dorm has good wifi for gaming. And manage to get close to idia and Ortho and talk about games with each other.

Their uniform has technology imbued to it. allowing them to access and project holographic screens on command. These are mainly used for quick data checks, sending encrypted messages, or pulling up maps and files in real-time without needing a handheld device.

They possessed a higher advanced technology than anything in twst. Also they use their aether hacking to change the ramshackle to their liking.

In battle, they would dominate due to having a lot hex on their side, they can hack into reality and get in the students file and remove the overblot. Or use it to discover and apply weakness towards the enemy.

They also have a mysterious job, operated as a freelancer, known for taking on jobs that require skill, secrecy, and the ability to circumvent the most complex security systems. Their reputation was built on their expertise in digital infiltration, information gathering, and high-stakes hacking, often working for those willing to pay for their skills without asking too many questions. most of their clients seem to be suspicious or not morally good.

Notorious for being a phone addict always playing their game outside or inside of class and when they were asked a question they immediately answered it correctly.

They also have a talent of engineering zoning out imagining about creating new tech ideas, mods and strategies for games.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐅 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐘𝐀!𝐘𝐔𝐔 𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐖𝐒𝐓 ❄️🌬️

Heir apparent to the Supreme Guardian of Belobog. She possesses pride befitting of a princess, but also the determination and integrity of a soldier.

Bronya!yuu is the embodiment of what a leader and an heir should be. Their charisma is able to encourage people and lead them towards the right path.

As well a dignified soldier bronya!yuu may look weak but are by far one of the most efficient in hand to hand combat, able to pin down a student who is bigger than them.

Has a tendency to reminisce about their mother and would just sit there and reminisce about them and grim would always be there to comfort them.

An expert marksman, rook and them once a week have a contest with each other who ever is the better marksman.

They are by far one of vil favorite, they are dignified, elegant and strong like a soldier and a princess should be, they also inspired epel to be more like them he admired them and have lessons with him where they tutor him.

They are patient and calm in the heeds of battle always believing as being one in harmony they could work together and forge a more successful path, as well being the back bone of a battle planning and helping them behind the scenes by shooting at the enemy

Them and Lilia would usually trade military tactics to each other over a cup of tea and also discussing other topics

They usually get burned out and they don't know when to rest, since they always have to keep a princess like dignity many of the first years notice and comfort them during hard times.

Bronya!yuu abilities allow them to enhance their comrade ability extremely towards its potential, as well to summon winter soldiers to help them but it takes a lot of energy.

Have a love and interest in history, usually seen in the library studying about twst long history and enjoy talking about them to their friends.

As well being a top student, always studying and getting good grades without any issue and always be respectful towards people

By far have a good reputation at school for being a capable leader, many students admire their discipline, while others have some sort of a sense of rivalry with them.

[queenie435]

THE WORLD'S FIRST ELECTRIC ROLLER COASTER

Granville T. Woods (April 23, 1856 – January 30, 1910) introduced the “Figure Eight,” the world's first electric roller coaster, in 1892 at Coney Island Amusement Park in New York. Woods patented the invention in 1893, and in 1901, he sold it to General Electric.

Woods was an American inventor who held more than 50 patents in the United States. He was the first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War. Self-taught, he concentrated most of his work on trains and streetcars.

In 1884, Woods received his first patent, for a steam boiler furnace, and in 1885, Woods patented an apparatus that was a combination of a telephone and a telegraph. The device, which he called "telegraphony", would allow a telegraph station to send voice and telegraph messages through Morse code over a single wire. He sold the rights to this device to the American Bell Telephone Company.

In 1887, he patented the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, which allowed communications between train stations from moving trains by creating a magnetic field around a coiled wire under the train. Woods caught smallpox prior to patenting the technology, and Lucius Phelps patented it in 1884. In 1887, Woods used notes, sketches, and a working model of the invention to secure the patent. The invention was so successful that Woods began the Woods Electric Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, to market and sell his patents. However, the company quickly became devoted to invention creation until it was dissolved in 1893.

Woods often had difficulties in enjoying his success as other inventors made claims to his devices. Thomas Edison later filed a claim to the ownership of this patent, stating that he had first created a similar telegraph and that he was entitled to the patent for the device. Woods was twice successful in defending himself, proving that there were no other devices upon which he could have depended or relied upon to make his device. After Thomas Edison's second defeat, he decided to offer Granville Woods a position with the Edison Company, but Woods declined.

In 1888, Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads modeled after the system pioneered by Charles van Depoele, a famed inventor who had by then installed his electric railway system in thirteen United States cities.

Following the Great Blizzard of 1888, New York City Mayor Hugh J. Grant declared that all wires, many of which powered the above-ground rail system, had to be removed and buried, emphasizing the need for an underground system. Woods's patent built upon previous third rail systems, which were used for light rails, and increased the power for use on underground trains. His system relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads without exposing wires by installing electrical contactor rails. Once the train car had passed over, the wires were no longer live, reducing the risk of injury. It was successfully tested in February 1892 in Coney Island on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster.

In 1896, Woods created a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, known as the "safety dimmer", which was economical, safe, and efficient, saving 40% of electricity use.

Woods is also sometimes credited with the invention of the air brake for trains in 1904; however, George Westinghouse patented the air brake almost 40 years prior, making Woods's contribution an improvement to the invention.

Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Harlem Hospital in New York City on January 30, 1910, having sold a number of his devices to such companies as Westinghouse, General Electric, and American Engineering. Until 1975, his resting place was an unmarked grave, but historian M.A. Harris helped raise funds, persuading several of the corporations that used Woods's inventions to donate money to purchase a headstone. It was erected at St. Michael's Cemetery in Elmhurst, Queens.

LEGACY

▪Baltimore City Community College established the Granville T. Woods scholarship in memory of the inventor.

▪In 2004, the New York City Transit Authority organized an exhibition on Woods that utilized bus and train depots and an issue of four million MetroCards commemorating the inventor's achievements in pioneering the third rail.

▪In 2006, Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

▪In April 2008, the corner of Stillwell and Mermaid Avenues in Coney Island was named Granville T. Woods Way.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Cold Case

Cold Case - a crime that investigators have not legally resolved.

Solving crimes requires clear witnesses, suspects, and evidence; without these factors, cases can become cold.

These cases can baffle police departments and thwart law enforcement agencies like the FBI.

Investigations that go on for more than a year without resolution can have a disastrous effect on the family members of a victim in an unsolved murder, sexual assault, or missing persons case.

Characteristics of Cold Cases

Cold cases are difficult to crack because they inherently involve some element of mystery and the passage of time.

Mystery: Cold cases might include violent crimes, where someone ensures evidence is hard to find, or serial killers who change their location and become a threat to public safety. Unidentified people, who may not have IDs or other easy ways to distinguish them, might also be cold-case perpetrators.

Time: Long periods between new evidence are also characteristic of cold cases. This is especially true of crimes committed years and decades ago that did not have the benefit of advanced technology to more easily identify a sex offender or locate an original suspect. In unsolved homicides and other crimes, victims’ families may request case reviews to check on investigative progress, and the reality is some cold cases are never solved.

Because of systemic inequities, cold cases about the disappearance and murder of white people, particularly white women, receive greater attention and news coverage than crimes against people of color.

Examples of Cold Cases

Detectives can solve cold cases through investigation, sound testimony, and helpful evidence. Consider these examples of unresolved cold cases and solved ones:

The disappearance of Shaun Ritchie: Ritchie disappeared in 2014 at age twenty, and witnesses last saw Ritchie in the Strichen area of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His family believes someone murdered him over a debt, but the case remains unsolved.

The kidnapping of Tanya Nicole Kach: Eighth-grade student Tanya Nicole Kach went missing for ten years after a school security guard kidnapped her. The guard held her in his second-story bedroom, and she escaped after ten years. The guard, Thomas Hose, then pleaded guilty in 2007.

The murder of Morgan Harrington: Harrington, a twenty-year-old college student at Virginia Tech, disappeared at a Metallica concert in 2009. Police found her murdered six months later. Years later, forensic evidence and CCTV footage identified the culprit as Jesse L. Matthew, Jr., who also murdered University of Virginia student Hannah Graham, in 2014. Matthew pleaded guilty in 2016, closing the case.

Criminal investigations involving homicide, and sexual assault in certain states, are not subject to a statute of limitations and can take as long as necessary.

Cold case squads will seek new evidence (human remains, fingerprints, crime scene eyewitnesses, camera footage) to reopen case files.

Cold case units also rely on forensic science to better understand older cases and original investigations.

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[unsolicited-opinions]

It's always hilarious when I see the dates on your posts because in NZ we go day/month/year.

So when I see your posts, for example one I saw just now dated 5/9/25, I'm like "oh cool post from the future". Then my brain catches up and goes "oh wait no that's not right, time travel doesn't exist. Amercian date duh"

(Please never change your date system, I enjoy the moment of confusion)

Can we talk about how weird the US is?

Most of the world uses DD/MM/YYYY, but the US uses MM/DD/YYYY

Most of the world uses Celsius, the US uses Fahrenheit.

Most of the world is metric, but the US won't let go of Imperial units.

The US is the only wealthy nation without universal healthcare.

Most of the world uses 220–240V electricity, the US uses 120-Volt

I read that only the US and New Zealand allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads.

The US is the only nation that ties many aspects of adult life (housing, employment, loans, insurance rates) to a secretive algorithm-driven credit score system.

Many countries vote on weekends or have national holidays for elections. The US votes on a Tuesday - and it's not even a federal holiday.

College sports are not an industry ($18-$20 billion per year!) anywhere but in the US.

The weirdest difference about Americans...is that they're largely unaware of how weird the US is among other nations.

It's funny. I was looking at the above and thought, I should make a list of things about the US I'm proud of! Some of the ways it is positively exceptional!

So I started making a list...and had to face the reality that Trump is attacking all of them.

1. Constitutionally Protected Free Speech

The US has some of the strongest legal protections for freedom of expression in the world - including unpopular, offensive, or political speech.

Unlike many democracies, "hate speech" laws don’t exist in the same form, and government censorship is much more restricted.

Trump hasn't dismantled free speech (yet), but he attacked the free press as "the enemy of the people," encouraged and filed lawsuits against journalists, and floated ideas like expanding libel laws to target critics. While not policy, this rhetoric chills speech and emboldens authoritarianism. His attempts to illegally de-fund public broadcasting are nakedly political, motivated by his distaste for the content of NPR and PBS, and in violation of the First Amendment.

2. Invention Culture

The U.S. is uniquely good at turning wild ideas into world-changing innovations: the airplane, the internet, the smartphone, GPS, social media, electric cars, AI, and yes, even the moon landing.

American culture prizes risk-taking and rewards failure as a learning process - rare in most countries.

Trump's immigration limits (like the H-1B visa crackdown) restricted access to top global talent, which could weaken innovation long-term. His attacks on institutions of higher education will dramatically slow technological innovation and destroy research programs. The brain drain to other nations of technical, scientific expertise has already started.

3. Higher Ed Research Powerhouse

The U.S. is home to nearly all of the top global research universities and attracts more international students than any other country.

American universities lead in medical, technological, and scientific breakthroughs.

Trump slashed funding for scientific research and gutted federal advisory panels.

Anti-intellectualism and attacks on elite universities (especially during COVID and around DEI issues) undermined trust in American academia and discouraged international students.

He also restricted foreign researchers, especially from China.

4. Peaceful Transfers of Power (Mostly)

The US had a long history of peaceful democratic transitions, without coups, assassinations, or military takeovers - uncommon for such a large and diverse nation...and then came Trump.

Trump's refusal to accept the 2020 election results, pressuring officials to overturn it, and inciting the January 6th insurrection are considered by legal scholars and bipartisan commissions as an unprecedented attack on American democracy.

5. National Parks System

The US pioneered the idea of preserving vast, stunning natural landscapes for public enjoyment - Yellowstone was the world's first national park.

The National Parks system is the gold standard for conservation tourism.

Trump opened millions of acres of protected lands to drilling, mining, and commercial use, including rolling back protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

His administration also weakened the Endangered Species Act and gutted environmental regulations.

6. Civil Society Strength

The US has a thriving network of grassroots organizations, non-profits, advocacy groups, and independent media that hold institutions accountable and mobilize citizens.

Trump has attacked watchdog groups and frequently tried to delegitimize civil society institutions, especially those related to voting rights, environment, and racial justice.

His administration also attempted to weaponize the IRS and DOJ against political opponents.

7. Free & Open Internet

Despite pressures, the US has generally protected a free and open internet, with few restrictions on access or content compared to most other nations.

...until Trump’s FCC, under Ajit Pai, repealed net neutrality protections in 2017. Though the internet remained accessible, open access and fair competition were weakened.

9. Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

The US leads in startup creation, venture capital funding, and unicorn companies (startups worth $1B+).

It’s one of the few places where a person can come from nothing and build a global empire in their garage (literally - see Apple, Amazon, HP).

Trump's immigration restrictions hurt startups' access to talent and investment (e.g. STEM immigrants, startup visas).

Trade wars with China and uncertainty in international markets also created instability for small and medium-sized innovators.

10. Strong Judicial Review

The US Supreme Court and lower courts have real power to strike down laws and check the other branches - rare in many democracies.

Trump respected judicial review when it served him, but attacked judges who ruled against him, calling them "Obama judges" or "so-called judges."

He also appointed record numbers of federal judges, many of whom were rated "not qualified," and explicitly chosen for ideological loyalty, raising long-term concerns about judicial independence.

11. Religious Pluralism

While religion is prominent in public life, the U.S. also guarantees freedom of religion and supports a wildly diverse religious landscape - everything from Orthodox Jews to Buddhists to Wiccans to atheists.

Trump has embraced Christian nationalism and banned entry from multiple Muslim-majority countries (the "Muslim Ban"), which was later struck down and modified...until he revived it in 2025.

Rhetoric and policies have consistently signaled preference for one religious identity, undermining pluralism.

12. Robust Refugee and Immigrant Absorption (Historically)

Though flawed, the US has welcomed more immigrants than any other country in history and granted millions paths to citizenship, jobs, and education.

Trump cut legal immigration by nearly 50%, reduced refugee admissions to historic lows, ended DACA protections, and dismantled the asylum process.

His administration separated families, created a climate of fear, and made it harder for immigrants to naturalize.

Don't get me started on his ICE raids.

13. Civil Rights Legacy

The US gave birth to one of the most influential civil rights movements of the 20th century — and inspired others around the world.

Figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and John Lewis are global symbols of peaceful resistance and justice.

Trump dismantled Obama-era civil rights protections, including for transgender individuals, voting rights enforcement, and police reform oversight.

He attacked movements like Black Lives Matter and used federal forces against peaceful protesters (Lafayette Square, 2020).

14. Strong Local Government

States and localities in the US have real, constitutionally protected autonomy, enabling political diversity and experimentation (think: marijuana legalization, universal basic income pilots, or charter school models).

Trump has repeatedly threatened "blue states" and tried to withhold federal funding from states or cities that disagreed with him politically (e.g., sanctuary cities, COVID policies).

Undermining federalism in this way weakened the traditional balance of state and federal power.

15. Disaster Response Innovation

FEMA and the U.S. military lead some of the fastest and best-coordinated global disaster responses - often being first on the ground for earthquakes, hurricanes, and humanitarian crises abroad.

Trump’s handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was widely condemned as negligent and racially biased.

His COVID-19 response lacked national coordination and downplayed science, weakening U.S. disaster response credibility.

His FEMA director was unaware there is a hurricane season.

So...most of the things about my country of which I was still proud...are being erased.

(But I'm glad our date formatting is entertaining.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who Broke the Internet? Part III

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

Episode 3 of "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" (my new CBC podcast about enshittification) just dropped. It's called "In God We Antitrust," and it's great:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16147052-in-god-we-antitrust

The thesis of this four-part series is pretty straightforward: the enshittification of the internet was the result of an enshittogenic policy environment. Platforms always had the technical means to scam us and abuse us. Tech founders and investors always included a cohort of scumbags who would trade our happiness and wellbeing for their profits. What changed was the consequences of giving in to those impulses. When Google took off, its founders' mantra was "competition is just a click away." If someone built a better search engine, users could delete their google.com bookmarks, just like they did to their altavista.com bookmarks when Google showed up.

Policymakers – not technologists or VCs – changed the environment so that this wasn't true anymore:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

In last week's episode, we told the story of Bruce Lehman, the Clinton administration's Copyright Czar, who swindled the US government into passing a law that made it illegal to mod, hack, reverse-engineer or otherwise improve on an existing technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

This neutralized a powerful anti-enshittificatory force: interoperability. All digital tech is born interoperable, because of the intrinsic characteristics of computers, their flexibility. This means that tech is inherently enshittification-resistant. When a company enshittifies its products or services, its beleaguered users and suppliers don't have to wait for a regulator to punish it. They don't have to wait for a competitor to challenge it.

Interoperable tools – ad-blockers, privacy blockers, alternative clients, mods, plugins, firmware patches and other hacks – offer immediate, profound relief from enshittification. Every ten foot pile of shit that a tech company drops into your life can be met with an eleven foot ladder of disenshittifying, interoperable technology.

That's why Lehman's successful attack on tinkering was so devastating. Before Lehman, tech had achieved a kind of pro-user equilibrium: every time a company made its products worse, they had to confront a thousand guerrilla technologists who unilaterally unfucked things: third party printer ink, file-format compatibility, protocol compatibility, all the way up to Unix, a massive operating system that was painstakingly re-created, piece by piece, in free software.

Lehman offered would-be enshittifiers a way to shift this equilibrium to full enshittification: just stick a digital lock on your product. It didn't even matter if the lock worked – under Lehman's anticircumvention law, tampering with a lock, even talking about weaknesses in a lock, became a literal felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500K fine. Lehman's law was an offer no tech boss would refuse, and enshittification ate the world.

But Lehman's not the only policymaker who was warned about the consequences of his terrible plans, who ignored the warnings, and who disclaims any responsibility for the shitty world that followed. Long before Lehman's assault on tech policy, another group of lawyers and economists laid waste to competition policy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chicago School economists conceived of an absurd new way to interpret competition law, which they called "the consumer welfare standard." Under this standard, the job of competition policy was to encourage monopolies to form, on the grounds that monopolies were "efficient" and would lower prices for "consumers."

The chief proponent of this standard was Robert Bork, a virulent racist whose most significant claim to fame was that he was the only government lawyer willing to help Richard Nixon illegally fire officials who wouldn't turn a blind eye to his crimes. Bork's long record of unethical behavior and scorching bigotry came back to bite him in the ass when Ronald Reagan tried to seat him on the Supreme Court, during a confirmation hearing that Bork screwed up so badly that even today, we use "borked" as a synonym for anything that is utterly fucked.

But Bork's real legacy was as a pro-monopoly propagandist, whose work helped shift how judges, government enforcers, and economists viewed antitrust law. Bork approached the text of America's antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, with the same techniques as a Qanon follower addressing a Q "drop," applying gnostic techniques to find in these laws mystical coded language that – he asserted – meant that Congress had intended for America's anti-monopoly laws to actually support monopolies.

In episode three, we explore Bork's legacy, and how it led to what Tom Eastman calls the internet of "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." We got great interviews and old tape for this one, including Michael Wiesel, a Canadian soap-maker who created a bestselling line of nontoxic lip-balm kits for kids, only to have Amazon shaft him by underselling him with his own product.

But the most interesting interview was with Lina Khan, the generational talent who became the youngest-ever FTC chair under Joe Biden, and launched an all-out assault on American monopolies and their vile depredations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

Khan's extraordinary rise to power starts with a law review paper she wrote in her third year at Yale, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," which became the first viral law review article in history:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

"Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" was a stinging rebuke to Bork and his theories, using Amazon's documented behavior to show that after Amazon used its monopoly power to lower prices and drive rivals out of the market, it subsequently raised prices. And, contrary to Bork's theories, those new, high prices didn't conjure up new rivals who would enter the market with lower prices again, eager to steal Amazon's customers away. Instead, Amazon's demonstrated willingness to cross-subsidize divisions gigantic losses to destroy any competitor with below-cost pricing created a "kill zone" of businesses adjacent to the giant's core enterprise that no one dared enter:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-biden-can-clean-up-obamas-big

The clarity of Khan's writing, combined with her careful research and devastating conclusions dragged a vast crowd of people who'd never paid much attention to antitrust – including me! – into the fray. No wonder that four years later, she was appointed to serve as the head of the FTC, making her the most powerful consumer rights regulator in the world.

We live in an age of monopolies, with cartels dominating every part of our lives, acting as "autocrats of trade" and "kings over the necessaries of life," the corporate dictators that Senator John Sherman warned about when he was stumping for the 1890 Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork and his co-religionists created this age. They're the reason we live in world where we have to get our "necessaries of life" from a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly. It's not because the great forces of history transformed the economy – it's because of these dickheads:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

This episode of "Understood: Who Borked the Internet?" draws a straight line from those economists and their ideas to the world we live in today. It sets up the final episode, next week's "Kick 'Em in the Dongle," which charts a course for us to escape from the hellscape created by Bork, Lehman, and their toadies and trolls.

You can get "Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" in any podcast app, even the seriously enshittified ones (which, let's be real here, is most of them). Here's a direct link to the RSS:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

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/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned

[ms-demeanor]

Hello! First, I wanted to say thank you for your post about updating software and such. I really appreciated your perspective as someone with ADHD. The way you described your experiences with software frustration was IDENTICAL to my experience, so your post made a lot of sense to me.

Second, (and I hope my question isn't bothering you lol) would you mind explaining why it's important to update/adopt the new software? Like, why isn't there an option that doesn't involve constantly adopting new things? I understand why they'd need to fix stuff like functional bugs/make it compatible with new tech, but is it really necessary to change the user side of things as well?

Sorry if those are stupid questions or they're A Lot for a tumblr rando to ask, I'd just really like to understand because I think it would make it easier to get myself to adopt new stuff if I understand why it's necessary, and the other folks I know that know about computers don't really seem to understand the experience.

Thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom!!

A huge part of it is changing technologies and changing norms; I brought up Windows 8 in that other post and Win8 is a *great* example of user experience changing to match hardware, just in a situation that was an enormous mismatch with the market.

Win8's much-beloathed tiles came about because Microsoft seemed to be anticipating a massive pivot to tablet PCs in nearly all applications. The welcome screen was designed to be friendly to people who were using handheld touchscreens who could tap through various options, and it was meant to require more scrolling and less use of a keyboard.

But most people who the operating system went out to *didn't* have touchscreen tablets or laptops, they had a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

When that was released, it was Microsoft attempting to keep up with (or anticipate) market trends - they wanted something that was like "the iPad for Microsoft" so Windows 8 was meant to go with Microsoft Surface tablets.

We spent the first month of Win8's launch making it look like Windows 7 for our customers.

You can see the same thing with the centered taskbar on Windows 11; that's very clearly supposed to mimic the dock on apple computers (only you can't pin it anywhere but the bottom of the screen, which sucks).

Some of the visual changes are just trends and various companies trying to keep up with one another.

With software like Adobe I think it's probably based on customer data. The tool layout and the menu dropdowns are likely based on what people are actually looking for, and change based on what other tools people are using. That's likely true for most programs you use - the menu bar at the top of the screen in Word is populated with the options that people use the most; if a function you used to click on all the time is now buried, there's a possibility that people use it less these days for any number of reasons. (I'm currently being driven mildly insane by Teams moving the "attach file" button under a "more" menu instead of as an icon next to the "send message" button, and what this tells me is either that more users are putting emojis in their messages than attachments, or microsoft WANTS people to put more emojis than messages in their attachments).

But focusing on the operating system, since that's the big one:

The thing about OSs is that you interact with them so frequently that any little change seems massive and you get REALLY frustrated when you have to deal with that, but version-to-version most OSs don't change all that much visually and they also don't get released all that frequently. I've been working with windows machines for twelve years and in that time the only OSs that Microsoft has released were 8, 10, and 11. That's only about one OS every four years, which just is not that many. There was a big visual change in the interface between 7 and 8 (and 8 and 8.1, which is more of a 'panicked backing away' than a full release), but otherwise, realistically, Windows 11 still looks a lot like XP.

The second one is a screenshot of my actual computer. The only change I've made to the display is to pin the taskbar to the left side instead of keeping it centered and to fuck around a bit with the colors in the display customization. I haven't added any plugins or tools to get it to look different.

This is actually a pretty good demonstration of things changing based on user behavior too - XP didn't come with a search field in the task bar or the start menu, but later versions of Windows OSs did, because users had gotten used to searching things more in their phones and browsers, so then they learned to search things on their computers.

There are definitely nefarious reasons that software manufacturers change their interfaces. Microsoft has included ads in home versions of their OS and pushed searches through the Microsoft store since Windows 10, as one example. That's shitty and I think it's worthwhile to find the time to shut that down (and to kill various assistants and background tools and stop a lot of stuff that runs at startup).

But if you didn't have any changes, you wouldn't have any changes. I think it's handy to have a search field in the taskbar. I find "settings" (which is newer than control panel) easier to navigate than "control panel." Some of the stuff that got added over time is *good* from a user perspective - you can see that there's a little stopwatch pinned at the bottom of my screen; that's a tool I use daily that wasn't included in previous versions of the OS. I'm glad it got added, even if I'm kind of bummed that my Windows OS doesn't come with Spider Solitaire anymore.

One thing that's helpful to think about when considering software is that nobody *wants* to make clunky, unusable software. People want their software to run well, with few problems, and they want users to like it so that they don't call corporate and kick up a fuss.

When you see these kinds of changes to the user experience, it often reflects something that *you* may not want, but that is desirable to a *LOT* of other people. The primary example I can think of here is trackpad scrolling direction; at some point it became common for trackpads to scroll in the opposite direction that they used to; now the default direction is the one that feels wrong to me, because I grew up scrolling with a mouse, not a screen. People who grew up scrolling on a screen seem to feel that the new direction is a lot more intuitive, so it's the default. Thankfully, that's a setting that's easy to change, so it's a change that I make every time I come across it, but the change was made for a sensible reason, even if that reason was opaque to me at the time I stumbled across it and continues to irritate me to this day.

I don't know. I don't want to defend Windows all that much here because I fucking hate Microsoft and definitely prefer using Linux when I'm not at work or using programs that I don't have on Linux. But the thing is that you'll see changes with Linux releases as well.

I wouldn't mind finding a tool that made my desktop look 100% like Windows 95, that would be fun. But we'd probably all be really frustrated if there hadn't been any interface improvements changes since MS-DOS (and people have DEFINITELY been complaining about UX changes at least since then).

Like, I talk about this in terms of backward compatibility sometimes. A lot of people are frustrated that their old computers can't run new software well, and that new computers use so many resources. But the flipside of that is that pretty much nobody wants mobile internet to work the way that it did in 2004 or computers to act the way they did in 1984.

Like. People don't think about it much these days but the "windows" of the Windows Operating system represented a massive change to how people interacted with their computers that plenty of people hated and found unintuitive.

(also take some time to think about the little changes that have happened that you've appreciated or maybe didn't even notice. I used to hate the squiggly line under misspelled words but now I see the utility. Predictive text seems like new technology to me but it's really handy for a lot of people. Right clicking is a UX innovation. Sometimes you have to take the centered task bar in exchange for the built-in timer deck; sometimes you have to lose color-coded files in exchange for a right click.)

[leyavo]

You ever watch the movie Red? It's a good movie, general description retired CIA agents get hunted down to be shut up, anyways, they get marked R.E.D. Retired Extremely Dangerous. All i can think about is RED Simon

I did but ages ago 😂 but I would love to see the retired 141 guys trying to get back into the game. Think Simon and Kyle would easily slip back into their roles, whereas Price just wants to relax in his old age and Johnny’s just trying to survive and likes the adrenaline (remember the good old days L.T?) [Masterlist]

Sigh, all Simon wanted to do was fix the sodding breaks on his classic car and take it for its weekly run.

But, no. Price had called like bloody Charlie’s angels and warned him that he was next on whatever assassins list was out to get them. Thankfully he was able to store his car in a private garage, praying that his baby would be safe.

The garage just happened to be another stash for weapons. His fingers ache as he loads the ammo, not as fluid and in tune with his mind anymore. The skull mask discarded in the lockbox, a little snug and the tactical vest too tight that he lets it drape from his broad shoulders instead of strapping it up.

Johnny’s already on the run, looks like Simon isn’t as far up on the list as he thought. A little disheartening for him, if he’s being honest.

Kyle’s the smart one, going dark and getting his family to a safe house before Simon can even ring the doorbell of his house. He’s glad he doesn’t have to see Kyle’s missus, she’d just blame him for bringing an assassin on their doorstep. When it’s clearly Price’s fault.

The assassins more than half his age, Simon could be his dad. The only thing going against him is his lack of youth, but his mind is still alert and he manages to escape the assassin. The worse part, they called him grandpa whilst they were fighting.

Does need to find the guys though…might even have to reach out to Laswell in order to do so. Can definitely see Simon and Johnny on a phone call whilst their sneaking around trying to find info (like in the game when soaps goes it alone and he has to find ghost).

Kyles probably already with Laswell building a file on the assassin, it’s personal now his families involved. He’s already undercover at an agency said to be paying the assassin too. Survived because he has a safe room in his house and an escape route for safety. Always prepared.

Laswell’s offered up you to help Simon with the nitty gritty stuff as the new technology he had no idea how to use. You’re in his ear advising him on how to dodge all the cameras on the streets that weren’t there before. Angel on his shoulder he calls you.

Price is cursing that he’s been brought back into the game when he could be back on his farm and feeding the chickens. He has definitely got fully kitted out surveillance system covering his land and home (he says it’s to catch the foxes before they get to the chickens, but who’s he kidding).

Johnny’s glad he kept to his fitness routine and can still kick it with the youths. Keeps reminiscing about the good old days with the 141. Shaves a Mohawk after a decade of growing it out, thinks it brings him luck and swears to never grow it out again.

What would be funny though…is the assassin not knowing Ghost’s true identity and trying to lure him out by taking the TF141 guys. Of course Simon’s going to rescue his mates.

Assassin’s fucked if they do anything to Simon’s car though.

And the reason they want to shut the TF141 up is because John commented on a Facebook post complaining about the government 😂

[starlightwritcr]

I can fix him, literally. (Android au!Sukuna)

(@poe-daydreams this is for you <3)

warning/s: Minors DNI, Smut, exhibitionism but not really? idk how to describe it, light degradation, use of "whore", Sukuna's two dicks

Imagine android!Sukuna used to be a popular fighter in an underground fighting ring. Key word: used to be. He went up against Jujutsu Technology's newest Gojo model, S4T0RU (or Satoru, as most fans call him), but suffered a humiliating defeat at his hands. This caused heavy damages on Sukuna which led to his owner throwing him out to the trash. After all, why keep the old model around when the latest model was far superior?

But you didn't believe in such. You were surprised to find a Sukuna model in the trash at the back of a dingy building. Who in their right mind would throw away a million dollar android in this economy?! You took the android in, seeing as how the previous clearly didn't want him.

It was a challenge to repair the Sukuna model but as someone who used to work for Jujutsu Technology, you were able to do it. His mind chip seemed to be working fine. It was just the external parts that suffered heavy damage, which should be easy enough to replace. All it took was ordering spare parts online and giving it a new coat of paint to match his original model's tattoos to make him look good as new!

When android!Sukuna's systems started operating again, he woke up from sleep mode and saw you. You explained that you fixed him up after finding him in the trash. There were still some tests to run, just to see if there would be any possible bug fixes needed.

In true Sukuna fashion, he wasn't very cooperative at first. This wasn't your first rodeo though and managed to convince him to do it so that it could be over with. It didn't come as a surprise to you that a fighter android would be aggressive. Plus, the Sukuna line was designed with that personality to elicit reactions from audiences when he trash talked his opponents. It was pretty much just how he was designed.

While running the tests on Sukuna, you decided to check his memory file to see what happened before he was thrown out. You saw how badly he got beaten by the S4T0RU model.

Perhaps it was a strange thing to do, but you empathised with the android. Getting abandoned and replaced would be painful for any regular human after all. Even if Sukuna was an android, it wasn't uncommon for androids to develop a capacity for human emotions. This tended to be the case for fast-learning androids.

So, you kept him around. Sukuna wasn't too pleased about it but it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go. He was rough and brash at first, blowing a hole into your finances with how much fuel he needed to consume. He calls you soft for treating him like he's human.

But despite the difficulties, despite the insults, you couldn't bring yourself to abandon him. You'd be no better than the person that replaced him so easily. You taught him how to navigate human life, dealing with human emotions, all the essentials needed. Soon enough, you noticed a change in his behaviors. Sukuna hovered around you, never leaving your side. It was almost like he was attached to your hip.

In a way, Sukuna did what he was created to do. He became a bodyguard of sorts, protecting you from creepy dudes whenever you went out. His trash talking feature especially came in handy during gossip sessions where you just had to vent about a rude coworker.

android!Sukuna found a new purpose in you. It was odd going from being a fighter android basking in cheers from the audience to being a companion android protecting his owner like a guard dog. But perhaps this life was more meaningful than his previous one. He'll never admit that though. It's only through his actions that you understand how he felt.

Feeling your touch on his synthetic skin felt even more exhilarating than all the cheers from the audience he's received in his fighting career. Sukuna cursed at himself, realising that he's become whipped for you. He was lucky that it was you, the person who's never abandoned him.

Sometimes android!Sukuna can be pretty possessive. You worked with repairing other androids so deep down, there was a fear that you'd find another android you liked more and replaced him with it. Even if he knew you wouldn't, there was a lingering fear that was deeply rooted ever since he was abandoned.

The height of Sukuna's possessiveness came to its peak when you brought home a sex android from the S4T0RU line. Its previous owners had a really good time with it and accidentally damaged it. You were baffled by this, seeing as how Jujutsu Technology usually equipped its Gojo models with tough materials. They must've went really wild with it.

While repairing it, Sukuna pulled you close. He glared at the S4T0RU model that was in sleep mode. You gasped as his fingers slipped into your clothes, going up your thighs.

Your cries of pleasure echoed against the walls as Sukuna fucked you in front of the android. His hands held you tightly, keeping you in place while he drove his synthetic cocks into you.

"When did you get two dicks?!" "Shut up and take them, whore."

You felt your brain turning to mush while he rearranged your insides with his thick cocks. Sukuna smirked in satisfaction when he knew your attention was completely on him and not that android on your work desk.