#Tech Watch

[roboe1]

News and Headlines.6/19/2025.

IDF strikes Arak nuclear reactor, dozens of sites across Iran Un caza israelí que participa en los ataques a Irán.IDF Forty Israeli Air Force fighter jets overnight Wednesday struck dozens of nuclear and military targets in Tehran and other locations across Iran, including the reactor near Arak, according to the Israeli military. The reactor strike specifically targeted the core seal…

[morganbritton132]

17 year old, CEO Tim Drake canceling a press conference and then putting out a statement like, “Sorry for canceling last min, Alfred said that he was going to run my laptop through the dishwasher if I didn’t clean my room. I think he’d do it :/. Also, wasn’t really in the mood. Cya -Tim.”

[parasolladyansy]

Hero of Bombs AU (original concept by @mipmoth)

The crossover I didn’t know I desperately needed but do indeed desperately need, & thanks to Tears of the Kingdom, we do have Bomb Flowers & all manner of projectiles for Ingo to throw at baddies, or to Link in a pinch! 💣

I’d go back to their original comic now & again (partially because Legends Arceus really reminds me of BotW), where Moth imagines Ingo in BotW Hyrule with the popularly feral Link. In this AU of their AU it’s more or less the same, except Link is cured of his amnesia, & wants to help Ingo with his, as well as help him go home.

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First / Sage of Spirit Arc / Koroks? / Screenshot Edit 1 / Screenshot Edit 2 / Link’s Abilities / Round Ears & Lore / Reunion /

[lazylittledragon]

what if i broke all the bones in your legs actually

[appldino]

Sometimes a relationship is a woman a man and a personal computer

[misstoodles-doodles]

Bad Batch Sketch Page #1

I filled a whole canvas with sketches because my brain won’t stop thinking up stuff

✨Featuring✨:

Tech and Crosshair content because I’m SAD ABOUT THEM

RIP Hunter and his concussion and probably a stab wound

ProTECHtive Tech

Brother Drama™️

Echo’s near death experience and zinger number 132425226

Echo and Cross Sass

Big bro Wrecker who has my whole heart

Bandana-less Hunter because I said so + Baby Omegaaaaaaa

Bonus full unedited page+ B&W version :

[poppng]

☆ cybercore PNGs made by me ੈ✩‧₊˚

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚pls like or reblog if you use! ty ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

[hira492]

WAKE UP, BAD BATCH NATION!!

[obsessedbyneon]

The Seiko TV Watch, from 1982. I'm afraid the 2nd and 3rd pictures are a bit of wishful thinking.

[kaidatheghostdragon]

De-age fic, but good parents AU

Something de-ages danny, not a clue what exactly, but it does. BUT, danny had already had a good reveal with his parents, so he goes home and they see him de-aged and immediately get to work figuring out how to get him back to normal.

Life goes on as normal, its just that danny's body is about ten years younger. He still has to go to school (with a story that the thing that de-aged danny was aimed at fenton and phantom jumped in to take the hit but it got both of them - or open secret au, take your pick), still has chores, still has to deal with the ghosts that cause problems.

With barely a pause to question 'is that still danny?' everyone continues as normal.

Thing is, there's the typical information firewall we like to invoke to explain why the justice league doesnt know about amity. It blocks ghosts, Phantom, infinite realms, liminality and ecto-contamination, you name it.

What it doesnt block? Baby Hero.

As in, now that Phantom is tiny, everyone and their dog is taking pics and recording phantom to coo all over him on social media. Everyone is enjoying how adorable he is while it lasts. Even the rogues are playing nicer to soak it all up.

The justice league is concerned. Apparently there's some new hero (phantom has been active for over a year by now, minimum) operating in the midwest, and he is literally preschool age. Even the Robins didn't start that young! Who is raising this kid? What are they thinking?!

Its frustratingly hard to get any more intel about phantom (because the firewall is still catching everything else about him), so theyre gonna have to send someone in blind to scope out the situation.

Who do they send? You can decide, but i vote they put together a team: batman (wfa characterization) because he knows how to handle child vigilantes, wonder woman because everyone loves wonder woman and she's a good voice of reason, and zatanna (NOT constantine! Zatanna is more child friendly) to cover magical bases in case this is something like a captain marvel situation.

[frownyalfred]

Victor doesn’t actually have to spend his Watchtower shifts reviewing and deleting horrific JL porn searches on the Watchtower network. instead, he has to review and delete hundreds of embarrassing tech-related searches a day. 27 of which are just from Ollie trying to connect his Bluetooth headphones to his JL laptop (“why won’t headphones connect” “headphones connect issue” “headphones connect issue Reddit”). the rest are even less tech literate and are usually accompanied by all caps VICTOR DONT JUDGE ME IM TRYING (Hal) or a pitiful attempt at the use of a VPN (Booster Gold) and yes, Hal’s freaky porn searches he does on his monitor shifts just to make Victor’s remaining eyebrow raise (even to a man with total access to the internet at every waking moment, there are some porn videos that can make you freeze up for a second)

[internetc00kie]

Casio WQV-1 Wrist Camera Cool concept from the 00s

[cabbagege]

I want to go back to the days when 'Bad Batch' had only one season and I didn't know that it was possible to cry like a Bad Bitch.

[leonardcohenofficial]

isn’t it wild that we’ve only been able to photographically capture history for about two hundred years like across all of human history we’ve only had the technology to produce photographs for an extraordinarily short amount of time that really blows my mind

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

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

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

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/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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

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

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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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KGBO https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suncorp_Bank_ATM.jpg

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[dindjarindiaries]

Today marks 5 years since we officially met the Bad Batch in The Clone Wars!

It also marks 1 year since the premiere of The Bad Batch season 3.

It’s hard to believe we’ve had the Batch for half a decade now, but I’m so grateful, because they’ve since become some of my favorite Star Wars characters ever!