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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents"

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TOMORROW, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology – alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

The effects of this are all around us. In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a magnificent paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents. This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to figure out how to build a new digital space where technology served users.

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case, the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

Now – as Berjon points out – you might not know exactly what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you also asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise. Like, maybe you're trying to access your own website, and you know that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers no opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google every five minutes. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do any work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

These faithless user agents both reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and operating systems for Android and Ios devices means that manufacturers – and their business partners – have an arsenal of legal weapons they can use to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are generically referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

This is – in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase – "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, no app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates criminal liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

This has been tacitly understood by technologists since the web's earliest days and has been reaffirmed even as enshittification increased. Berjon quotes extensively from "The Internet Is For End-Users," AKA Internet Architecture Board RFC 8890:

Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (…). This creates an incentive for implementers to consider the users' needs carefully, which are often reflected into the defining standards. The resulting ecosystem has many remaining problems, but a distinguished user agent role provides an opportunity to improve it.

And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

But the W3C's commitment to faithful agents is contingent on its own members' commitment to these principles. In 2017, the W3C finalized "EME," a standard for blocking mods that interact with streaming videos. Nominally aimed at preventing copyright infringement, EME also prevents users from choosing to add accessibility add-ons that beyond the ones the streaming service permits. These services may support closed captioning and additional narration of visual elements, but they block tools that adapt video for color-blind users or prevent strobe effects that trigger seizures in users with photosensitive epilepsy.

The fight over EME was the most contentious struggle in the W3C's history, in which the organization's leadership had to decide whether to honor the "priority of constituencies" and make a standard that allowed users to override manufacturers, or whether to facilitate the creation of faithless agents specifically designed to thwart users' desires on behalf of manufacturers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This fight was settled in favor of a handful of extremely large and powerful companies, over the objections of a broad collection of smaller firms, nonprofits representing users, academics and other parties agitating for a web built on faithful agents. This coincided with the W3C's operating budget becoming entirely dependent on the very large sums its largest corporate members paid.

W3C membership is on a sliding scale, based on a member's size. Nominally, the W3C is a one-member, one-vote organization, but when a highly concentrated collection of very high-value members flex their muscles, W3C leadership seemingly perceived an existential risk to the organization, and opted to sacrifice the faithfulness of user agents in service to the anti-user priorities of its largest members.

For W3C's largest corporate members, the fight was absolutely worth it. The W3C's EME standard transformed the web, making it impossible to ship a fully featured web-browser without securing permission – and a paid license – from one of the cartel of companies that dominate the internet. In effect, Big Tech used the W3C to secure the right to decide who would compete with them in future, and how:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In arguing for faithful agents, Berjon associates himself with the group of scholars, regulators and activists who call for user agents to serve as "information fiduciaries." Mostly, information fiduciaries come up in the context of user privacy, with the idea that entities that hold a user's data would have the obligation to put the user's interests ahead of their own. Think of a lawyer's fiduciary duty in respect of their clients, to give advice that reflects the client's best interests, even when that conflicts with the lawyer's own self-interest. For example, a lawyer who believes that settling a case is the best course of action for a client is required to tell them so, even if keeping the case going would generate more billings for the lawyer and their firm.

For a user agent to be faithful, it must be your fiduciary. It must put your interests ahead of the interests of the entity that made it or operates it. Browsers, email clients, and other internet software that served as a fiduciary would do things like automatically blocking tracking (which most email clients don't do, especially webmail clients made by companies like Google, who also sell advertising and tracking).

Berjon contemplates a legally mandated fiduciary duty, citing Lindsey Barrett's "Confiding in Con Men":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129

He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" – innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.

Now, the tech giants insist that they are already fiduciaries, and that when they thwart a user's request, that's more like blocking access to a page where the encryption has been compromised than like HAL9000's "I can't let you do that, Dave." For example, when Louis Barclay created "Unfollow Everything," he (and his enthusiastic users) found that automating the process of unfollowing every account on Facebook made their use of the service significantly better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

When Facebook shut the service down with blood-curdling legal threats, they insisted that they were simply protecting users from themselves. Sure, this browser automation tool – which just automatically clicked links on Facebook's own settings pages – seemed to do what the users wanted. But what if the user interface changed? What if so many users added this feature to Facebook without Facebook's permission that they overwhelmed Facebook's (presumably tiny and fragile) servers and crashed the system?

These arguments have lately resurfaced with Ethan Zuckerman and Knight First Amendment Institute's lawsuit to clarify that "Unfollow Everything 2.0" is legal and doesn't violate any of those "felony contempt of business model" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/

Sure, Zuckerman seems like a good guy, but what if he makes a mistake and his automation tool does something you don't want? You, the Facebook user, are also a nice guy, but let's face it, you're also a naive dolt and you can't be trusted to make decisions for yourself. Those decisions can only be made by Facebook, whom we can rely upon to exercise its authority wisely.

Other versions of this argument surfaced in the debate over the EU's decision to mandate interoperability for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would let you switch from, say, Whatsapp to Signal and still send messages to your Whatsapp contacts.

There are some good arguments that this could go horribly awry. If it is rushed, or internally sabotaged by the EU's state security services who loathe the privacy that comes from encrypted messaging, it could expose billions of people to serious risks.

But that's not the only argument that DMA opponents made: they also argued that even if interoperable messaging worked perfectly and had no security breaches, it would still be bad for users, because this would make it impossible for tech giants like Meta, Google and Apple to spy on message traffic (if not its content) and identify likely coordinated harassment campaigns. This is literally the identical argument the NSA made in support of its "metadata" mass-surveillance program: "Reading your messages might violate your privacy, but watching your messages doesn't."

This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it. When called on the absurdity of "protecting" users by spying on them against their will, they simply shake their heads and say, "You just can't understand the burdens of running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of users, and if I even tried to explain these issues to you, I would divulge secrets that I'm legally and ethically bound to keep. And even if I could tell you, you wouldn't understand, because anyone who doesn't work for a Big Tech company is a naive dolt who can't be trusted to understand how the world works (much like our users)."

Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: scalesplaining.

Now, it's totally true that every one of us is capable of lapses in judgment that put us, and the people connected to us, at risk (my own parents gave their genome to the pseudoscience genetic surveillance company 23andme, which means they have my genome, too). A true information fiduciary shouldn't automatically deliver everything the user asks for. When the agent perceives that the user is about to put themselves in harm's way, it should throw up a roadblock and explain the risks to the user.

But the system should also let the user override it.

This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

The only way to be certain a user won't be tricked into taking a course of action is to forbid that course of action under any circumstances. If there is any means by which a user can flip the "are you very sure?" circuit-breaker back on, then the user can be tricked into using that means.

This is absolutely true. As you read these words, all over the world, vulnerable people are being tricked into speaking the very specific set of directives that cause a suspicious bank-teller to authorize a transfer or cash withdrawal that will result in their life's savings being stolen by a scammer:

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.

Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

This is broadly true of any system intended to control users at scale – beyond a certain point, additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

At this point, we've had a couple of decades' worth of experience with technological "walled gardens" in which corporate executives get to override their users' decisions about how the system should work, even when that means reaching into the users' own computer and compelling it to thwart the user's desire. The record is inarguable: while companies often use those walls to lock bad guys out of the system, they also use the walls to lock their users in, so that they'll be easy pickings for the tech company that owns the system:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

What's more, the mere possibility that you can override the way the system works acts as a disciplining force on corporate executives, forcing them to reckon with your priorities even when these are counter to their shareholders' interests. If Facebook is genuinely worried that an "Unfollow Everything" script will break its servers, it can solve that by giving users an unfollow everything button of its own design. But so long as Facebook can sue anyone who makes an "Unfollow Everything" tool, they have no reason to give their users such a button, because it would give them more control over their Facebook experience, including the controls needed to use Facebook less.

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which would let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This could be beneficial to the user – you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?" Since the trusted computing system produced its report on your computer using a sealed, separate processor that the user couldn't directly interact with, any malicious code you were infected with would not be able to forge this attestation.

But this remote attestation feature could also be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

Seth proposed an answer to this: "owner override," a hardware switch that would allow you to force your computer to lie on your behalf, when that was beneficial to you, for example, by insisting that you were using Microsoft Word to open a document when you were really using Apple Pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users. But Seth calculated – correctly! – that the risks of having a key to let yourself out of the walled garden were less than being stuck in a walled garden where some corporate executive got to decide whether and when you could leave.

Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor. Last year, Google toyed with the idea of adding remote attestation to web browsers, which would let services refuse to interact with you if they thought you were using an ad blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps – that is, they'd be making it as practical for your browser to betray you as it is for your apps to do so (note that this is the same justification that the W3C gave for creating EME, the treacherous user agent in your browser – "streaming services won't allow you to access movies with your browser unless your browser is as enshittifiable and authoritarian as an app").

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

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/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

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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sharkuro · 11 months ago

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over 1 year on the agent32 grind and i still love them, happy 8/4

#click for quality in app it might be blurry there but its normal in browser even tho im still on my phone #splatoon #splatoon 3 #grandfest #agent 32 #agent 48 #agent 4 #agent 8 #my art #8/4 day #bad grandfest outfits i know and this is kinda wonky in general but??? i tried #still i feel like i improved a lot since my 4/8 piece so :))

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glassedplanets · 2 years ago

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🤍🤎 🩶💛

#my art #mainewash #rvb art #agent washington #agent maine #me: i'm never going to draw shields again #me three months later: unless 👀#shame the gray and yellow emojis don't work in my browser but oh well it's enough that they Exist #editing tags to add that i think this might be the most intensive thing i've drawn..... either that or the felix one #this took a significant amount of time longer than things usually take me to draw #feels good!!!!#rvb tag #P vs NP #art for fic

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starlit-writer · 5 months ago

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sometimes i wonder if i should buy an actual thesaurus so my poor google isn’t getting questions like “synonyms for pornographic”

#writeblr #fanfic #fanfic writer problems #writing struggles #writing problems #i’m so sorry to my browser history #and my fbi agent

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vaguely-concerned · 1 year ago

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I have genuine Deep Thoughts about this for all the characters in the Evil Campaign and I have been struggling to put it into words for so long, but like... selfishness/striving for self genuinely does seem like. the main redemptive force in that particular story. Which is so fucking interesting, considering the way it plays around with/subverts how Star Wars cosmology is most often posited in canon. I keep saying 'the Evil Campaign is a story about a group of very bad people whose sole saving grace and hope for salvation is that they love each other', and I think this is part of what I mean. The selfishness of love, and personal love; of deliberately choosing oneself and each other. The most immediate example is Aava's struggle for selfhood and freedom and individuation and separateness from the structure that has enslaved her — so SHE can get to choose what she'll be a part of, so her love along with all of her feelings and being can be unfettered. (Through victory my chains are broken, and so on, I guess!)

But it’s also there in Blue and Zero and their dance around each other that has its own gravitational power on them both, ‘I want you and you want me but neither of us trusts it yet so we’ll just keep circling around each other and hoping’ vibes. But once they figure that mess out between them and connect with each other truly and honestly, I genuinely think they’d go the full ‘I would choose you. In every lifetime and over everything and everyone else in the world, every time, I’d choose you; as far as I’m concerned you ARE the world’ IMMEDIATELY, in a vaguely unsettling and stark but also weirdly moving and human kind of way. Again, the selfishness of love. Weird codependent love with a likely triple digit body count attached, to be sure, but very real and mutual love haha. Specific love and connection, built on ‘you are specifically you and I am specifically me and together there’s a specific we’, not a universal undifferentiated love.

I feel like the arc was left abandoned about half-way through because of the point where the podcast ended, but that really does seem to me to be where we were headed, that’s the aching yearning thing that lies beneath their whole dynamic, for all the bullshit and fuckery (most of it Blue’s lol, a little bit of it Zero’s) resting on top. Maybe there would have been a lot more twists and turns along the way, but as the story stands I choose to take the near-miracle final dice roll in the last ep as an indication that Blue's need to be loved does win out over his ambitions and ego, when push really comes to shove. Not gracefully so right away, necessarily, but hey when has he ever been graceful about anything lol. I think he would choose his friends at the end of the day, not because he’s secretly good (lmao imagine!) but because that’s the kind of selfish he is deep down.

You know the person who keeps choosing selflessness — who consistently subsumes his will and his self and his power, who surrenders his selfhood entirely into a larger cause? Who keeps deprioritizing his own personal feelings and connections to serve his role in something ‘greater’? You better believe it’s Synox baby!!! Which is why I’m not so sure there is a way out for him, or that he’d ever take it — or even recognize it if it was offered to him. (fucking ouch)

And it makes me so fucking sad b/c in a way he’s doing exactly what he was ‘meant to’ as a clone, from his designers’ point of view, and what the jedi needed and profited from when it came to the clones during the war, however the moral implications of that might have sat with them. He’s still ‘following his programming’, he’s doing it all ‘right’, he serves and is ready to die for a higher ideal (an ideal that sucks absolute ass, to be clear lol, but is a dark continuation of what he was ‘born’ to serve, the Republic sliding quietly into the Empire). It’s why he’s such an interesting mirror to Bacta, whose individuation was born out of love and connection and, yes, loss. (Loss at Synox’ hands, even.) Synox clearly does care for the people under his command at least, but in his view of the world he’s not allowed to make that ‘important’ — soldiers serve and die, just like under the Clone Wars, but it’s all for the Empire and so it is justified. (Everything must be justified, if it’s for the Empire.) I don’t know if Synox can let people in close enough that he can experience a true personal loss when and if they die, because depersonalizing yourself that far means extending that to others too, even on your own side. And also I think that if Synox allows himself to think like that now, he would have to look back at what he’s done properly and I don’t feel like he would psychologically survive it. So. ‘Good soldiers follow orders’. And Synox did, he does, and he will, every time. And I feel like it’s going to doom him.

(Considering Kat’s stated feelings within the podcast on the Sith/Jedi theology divide, I cannot imagine this emergent theme is entirely accidental hahaha. One of the most interesting and subversive examinations of the selflessness/selfishness dichotomy of light and dark in Star Wars in any medium, hands down. I don’t know that it’s The definitive answer in canon or anything (and frankly I think the franchise sprawls too much for such a thing to even exist), but it’s a novel and fascinating lens to read it through and I fucking love the story it produces. It really brings home how much Campaign Star Wars is transformative work, and the power in transformative work to examine and deconstruct the narrative framework of canon. Also sort that under 'Campaign Star Wars is a deeply queer work right down to the structural level', I suppose!)

+ Headcanons for how defecting from the Empire would work (or not) for all of them under the cut to save people’s dashes at least a little!

Blue has the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair and conspired with rebels to fuck over a rival minister after like. a month, tops, in the job. He has NO principles or larger loyalties beyond ruthless self-interest, craving for recognition and needing his friends to love him, and he could just as easily do all of that with the rebels if that was made more convenient to him by circumstance. Give him a couple of hours to spin it until he's convinced himself 'no no I always meant for it to happen like this actually I’ve been playing 5D space chess all along don’t worry about it', and I think he'd be good to go as long as he had Zero with him lmao. Just remove him from his main means of exerting power (i.e. all that money, his position) and he's basically ineffectual and pathetic (affectionate). I don’t think he’d ever become a fundamentally better person no matter what happens, exactly, (maybe not even a particularly worse one, either) but he could be rendered a more harmless one pretty easily, is sort of what I’m getting at. You could harness his admittedly impressive drive and general nonsense into good-ish-ness (or at least less-badness) without that much of a narrative push. He has his own grand plans, and he probably would have worked just as easily in the Republic as he did in the Empire. Neutral awful posterboy.

Zero's a simp (laudatory, honorific). He's here for the sake of love I mean a fat paycheck of course, he goes where Blue goes. and that's so valid of him. No tears spilled on his part methinks. He doesn't fuck with the Empire at all, really, he's just doing some compartmentalizing about it so he won't have to think about it. He’d jump at the chance to get out of there and bring his emotional support little bitch boy with him.

Aava doesn't even want to be here!!! *teary voice* she should be at the club. She should be femme fataling it up in freedom and do her witch shit in peace. Out of the cast she’s also the person who’s not here of her free will at all and doesn’t profit from her position in basically any way. It’s all but stated that freeing herself is her deepest motivation. I suggest that they should all team up and kill Aava’s shitty abusive Sith mom together (Louphan you are not valid) and then run off together.

Meanwhile, in leaving the Empire Synox would have his whole sense of self obliterated in a way I'm not sure he could even survive, if it somehow happened. I love him. he's the worst of clones. he’s the best of clones. he's the funniest bitch in the whole show to me. Nightmare straight man of my heart. I still believe in my soul that he's a Spiffie and it brings me unspeakable joy to consider. But for all my love I really don’t think he’s ever making it out, he’s trapped by his own nature and history at this point. If he did make it out, it would be because the others fought to bring him with them (at least Aava and Blue seem quite fond of him (Zero less so haha), so it isn’t entirely impossible!).

This meta started life as a tag ramble under drefvalentine's hilarious post over here! I’ve really been trying to capture this in non-fiction words for like a year now and today something finally just clicked into place for me, hopefully there is some kind of sense in this. Finally I can let go of it in my brain, at least, what a relief haha

#campaign star wars #aava arek #synox #zeblue #agent zero #minister blue #meta #wanna hear something devastating. I lost half of this to a browser crash and had to put it all together again. but I stay silly.

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dangerous-fighter-fairy · 8 months ago

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My fbi agent watches as I open my computer, go to my web browser, and then switch to incognito. I stay there for quite a while. The fbi agent begins to get nervous, because they can’t see past the impenetrable wall of the incognito browser, a mysterious force which fbi agents are solemnly sworn to obeying the privacy of, and they’re curious what I could possibly be up to that would take so much of my time. I exit the browser and leave no search history. They are left to ponder

Little do they know that all I have masked from them is a multitude of attempts to find songs I don’t know the full lyrics of, basic human anatomy questions I’m too old to not know the answers to, and the word “smeme” because I wanted to know what would come up if I searched it

#this is not my actual browser history #I would not be so foolish as to reveal that here #but my fbi agent doesn’t know that #so don’t tell them and spoil the mystery #shitpost #thoughts #ponderings #you know how the monsters under your bed weren’t allowed to eat you if you were in your bed #or if you stood in certain spots or had the lights on #that’s fbi agents and incognito browsers #trust me I’ve looked into it #I know what I’m talking about

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buggyboba · 9 months ago

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Hey shout out to Grindr and Gq for having articles I needed for how to properly degrade someone, you are the real ones. My internet history is a fucking mess.

#buggy talks #like seriously researching for fanfictions is wild #my fbi agent probably thinks I am this wild sex animal #or a very confused gay man about to enter the world of kink #either way my browser history is wild and kinky thanks kinktober

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jcmarchi · 1 year ago

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Kamatera Review – The Best Scalable Cloud Host Yet?

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/kamatera-review-the-best-scalable-cloud-host-yet/

Kamatera Review – The Best Scalable Cloud Host Yet?

This Kamatera review will help you decide whether the web host is the best option for you!

Being able to scale your resource demand effortlessly as your website grows… paying only for the resources you use… no-single-point-of-failure security guarantee… what’s not to love about cloud hosting?

As a web hosting consultant I have helped hundreds of my clients choose the best web hosts to migrate their websites to – and many times, they were also upgrading from a shared or VPS plan to cloud hosting. Kamatera has always been high up in the list of options when we were considering cloud hosts, so I decided to check out their service and take you along.

In the rest of this Kamatera review, I’ll discuss all the web host’s plans, features you can expect to enjoy, how much you should budget, real-time performance figures, their dedication to customer support, and other important factors you should look out for.

Kamatera Review

Founded in 1995, Kamatera is no new kid on the block. They offer generic cloud hosting and every other cloud hosting hybrid you can think of – from managed and unmanaged cloud servers to virtual private cloud (VPC) services and cloud VPS hosting. They also offer reseller hosting for mini hosting companies and web professionals who want to cross-sell this with their core services.

I get it. The differences between their virtual private cloud hosting and cloud VPS hosting can be subtle but don’t worry we’ll discuss them in detail.

Kamatera’s cloud hosting plans are incredibly affordable too. I also like that on all their core plans, you can choose between ready-made packages or customize your plan yourself by setting the number of CPUs, memory (RAM), traffic, storage, and bandwidth. Kamatera also allows you to choose where you want your servers to be located.

Kamatera has been reviewed by 200 users on TrustPilot and users give them a rather decent 3.2 stars. Their positive reviews are from users praising how easy it to set up a server, transparent pricing, and uncommon level of support.

Kamatera Ratings – My Personal Take

It’s been a tradition for me to always give my personal ratings of each host I recommend – and Kamatera will be no different. there’s really no guarantee you can trust the reviews that many web hosts publish on their websites. Plus many businesses doctor reviews on popular platforms like TrustPilot.

The best approach to know exactly how great a web host’s services are? A non-biased overall rating of the web host through expert eyes.

Considering Kamatera’s key features and their real-life performance, here’s how I’d rate the web host on a scale of 1-5. Note that these scores are not static and only reflect their offerings at the time of this writing:

Quality My rating Why I gave this score Features and specs 5.0 Exceptional scalability, a cloud firewall, load balancing tech, and their specialized disaster recovery service makes Kamatera one of the most reliable cloud hosts on the market. They get a resounding 5.0 stars here. Pricing 4.9 Starting at $4/month for their cloud servers, Kamatera’s services are also undoubtedly some of the cheapest on the market. Many VPS plans from other hosting providers even cost more. Performance stats 4.7 My personal tests of Kamatera’s servers recorded a response time of 270 ms. That’s really decent and up there, even though a good number of hosts still perform better so they get a 4.7 in this category. Ease of use 4.0 One of the chief complaints users filed about Kamatera was how it logged you out repeatedly with an IP error message and I experienced this first-hand. Asides that, Kamatera makes it easy to manage your website backend using cPanel, Plesk, Vesta, and CyberPanel. I give them a 4.0 here Customer support guarantee 4.5 Several call lines for their different support portals, email addresses, ticketing, and a knowledgebase are how Kamatera caters to its users’ inquiries. However, I’d have loved to see a live chat option for real-time support. I give them a 4.5 here.

Kamatera Hosting Plans and Prices – 2024

Kamatera offers cloud servers, managed cloud services, virtual private cloud hosting, cloud VPS hosting, and reseller hosting. One small caveat you need to know about Kamatera’s plans is they don’t have a money back guarantee and even if you cancel your plans within the first month, they still charge you the full month’s fee.

You can pay for any Kamatera hosting plan you’ve decided on using your credit card or via Paypal.

Kamatera cloud servers

Kamatera ‘Simple’ cloud hosting plans come in three tiers and allow you to choose your server location and server specs – Windows, Linux, or SSD-optimized.

These plans start at $4/month and you get between 1-2 vCPUs, 1-2 GB RAM of memory, 20-30 GB SSD storage, and 5TB of data transfer on all plans. I love just how much server flexibility you get with Kamatera’s hosting.

Custom cloud servers on Kamatera

What’s more? Kamatera also allows you to configure your hosting plan – you can choose the number of processors you want, where you want your data centers to be located, the amount of memory you need, amount of storage, your OS, amount of traffic, and number of IPs. You also get to decide whether you want to pay for their services per month or per hour. Amazing!

Who this is for:

Kamatera’s cloud servers are for businesses that need to be able to add or remove hosting resources when necessary. With these plans, you can manage your spending exceptionally and don’t have to pay for infrastructure you may not use. Monthly payment drives home your control over what you spend even further.

Kamatera’s managed cloud hosting

Pro Managed

Features – OS monitoring, firewall & networking management, DNS setup, server resources performance metrics, apps installation and configuration, 24/7 NOC support, dedicated account manager on plans with 10+ servers.

Price – $50/month

Premium Managed

Features – Everything in Pro Managed plus custom and application monitoring, database high availability setup, application/service updates, quicker customer agent response times, and dedicated account managers on all plans.

Price – $150/month

Who this is for:

Kamatera’s managed cloud hosting plans take the hassle of managing the technical aspect of your cloud servers out of your hands. From monitoring and setup, to technical support, reporting, and application management, the host does these critical processes for you. What’s more? Kamatera also dedicates a particular human support agent to you who’ll be in charge of your account and you can count on to respond to any inquiries you might have.

Don’t know much about the server-side of websites? Kamatera’s managed cloud hosting plans might just be for you.

Kamatera’s virtual private cloud hosting

Kamatera’s virtual private cloud (VPC) packages are exactly identical to their cloud server plans on both the ‘Simple’ and ‘Customized’ fronts. They are also priced similarly and give you the same features.

Kamatera’s reseller hosting plans

Want to create your own web hosting business or are you a web dev, IT guy, or marketing professional looking to sell web hosting with your core services as a comprehensive package to your clients? Kamatera’s reseller hosting plans are just for you.

Here are some of the benefits you get to enjoy:

Managed setup

With Kamatera’s reseller hosting, their agents support you through setting up your servers and handling client requests.

Outsourced support

You have access to Kamatera’s support team to service your clients whenever they have inquiries.

Less as you grow

The more customers you get, the more discounts you get and the less you have to pay, meaning more profitability for your business.

Ready to get started with Kamatera’s reseller hosting? You’ll need to contact their sales department by creating a support ticket:

Who this is for:

Selling web hosting is one of the best ways to scale your business as a web dev, marketer, or IT professional. You can offer these as part of a comprehensive package and your clients are more likely to buy from you since they already buy your core services from you.

And for web-hosting-only businesses, you can rest assured that you have a business that’s evergreen. Websites will always need website hosting to stay online and it’s an excellent recurring revenue model.

Kamatera Features

Here’s an overview of some of Kamatera’s main features:

SSD storage

Custom hosting plans

Superior load balancing technology

High-performance block storage

Cloud firewall

Transparent pricing

Kamatera, as a cloud-only host, provides premium features that emphasize superior performance and security with its packages.

But some of its more unique features are the load balancers that instantly distribute workloads across a network of servers, ensuring high speeds and quick response times.

Kamatera’s block storage technology emulates a virtual private disk for your cloud plans and ensures there’s no single point of failure. It also ensures extremely low latency (or very quick response times and data transfer) further improving the performance of your website.

Kamatera Performance Tests

Your web host’s servers are your website home and how they perform are exactly how your website will perform. Some important factors to consider when choosing a hosting provider like Kamatera are the server response speeds and uptime.

The web host’s server speed is a measure of how quickly their servers respond and send back your website data to a visitor. On the other hand, the uptime measures the availability of their servers – i.e how much of the time their servers are online to serve up your website’s content to visitors.

The quicker the server speeds are, the less time it will take for your website to load. And the higher the uptime, the more reliable your website will be and you won’t risk losing traffic just because your website was down.

To measure Kamatera’s speed and uptime, I tested a website hosted on their platform and these were the results I got:

Kamatera’s servers started sending the first byte of data back in 276 ms. Quite impressive, even though I still expected better as some high performers respond in sub 100ms.

For the uptime, the website I tested has been available 100% of the time over the last 30 days:

This confirms their 99.9% uptime guarantee!

Kamatera’s Customer Support

It’s easy for web hosts to promise heaven and earth but once many of them take your money, it’s cricket-y silence. Kamatera does well though in terms of customer support. You can reach out to their agents via:

Phone

Kamatera has phone lines for its sales and account managers, technical support, and billing departments.

You can also reach out to Kamatera via email at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

I tried reaching out to their technical support agents via email and got a response in a few hours – quite decent!

Support ticket

Create a support ticket to talk with an agent, fill in your details and phone, and write down your inquiry. Kamatera will reach out to you via email.

Knowledgebase

Simple and straight-to-the-point, Kamatera’s knowledgebase is just how I like it. The built-in search engine also makes it easy to find answers to questions around server setup and security.

Blog

And finally, Kamatera has an up-to-date blog with relevant posts on latest industry information for website and business owners.

Kamatera Security Features

If there’s one thing I like about Kamatera, it’s their security guarantee. First, is their native Cloud Firewall designed to protect your website from attacks while monitoring your servers in real time.

Kamatera’s Cloud Firewall allows you to set rules and filter data packets, exclusively authorizing the entry of certified and approved data packets to your servers. What’s more? The firewall can also function as a VPN giving you even more functionality!

Another core part of Kamatera’s security is the disaster recovery portal. Unforeseen events can impact your website severely. Kamatera’s disaster recovery provides backups, recovery, and failover systems to minimize service disruptions.

Your website’s database is archived at restore points for immediate recovery. And finally, Kamatera’s backup machines are automatically triggered in the event of a system failure to ensure your user experience is not affected.

Kamatera’s hosting plans also allow you to install a free Lets Encrypt SSL certificate, giving your website the padlock seal of trust in the eyes of search engines.

Kamatera User Friendliness – Ease of Use

How to register an account on Kamatera

Setting up an account on Kamatera is super easy. Simply select the plan you want and click on ‘Create server’. You’ll be redirected to the sign up page:

Fill in your email and choose a password you can remember easily – your password should contain at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, a number, and should be at least 8 characters long. Click on ‘Create Free Account’

You’ll receive a confirmation link in your email. Click on it and your account should be ready to go!

How to create a server on Kamatera

To create a new server on Kamatera, from your account dashboard, navigate to “My Cloud” on the left and under the dropdown options, select “Create New Server”

Next, select your preferred data center location and then the operating system you want on the server.

Once that’s done, choose the number of CPUs and specify your server specs – RAM and SSD storage amount.

And finally, configure the fine print – backup, select whether you want a dedicated account manager, set a password, and select your billing schedule. Click on ‘Create server’ and it should be done in a few minutes.

Kamatera control panel

Kamatera doesn’t come with a custom control panel like some other high performing hosts – SiteGround, Hostinger, and A2Hosting – however, Kamatera gives you access to cPanel, Plesk, Vesta, and CyberPanel.

How to install WordPress on Kamatera

The swiftest way to deploy WordPress on Kamatera is via your control panel. Using cPanel as an example, we’ll use the Softaculous installer:

In your cPanel account, navigate to ‘Tools’ and click on ‘Softaculous Apps Installer’.

In the search engine, type in ‘WordPress’. Click ‘Install’ and then ‘Choose protocol’.

Next, choose the domain name you want WordPress installed on and configure the directory. If you’re not sure, just choose the default values and proceed.

Configure your ‘Site Name’ and ‘Site description’. Whatever you put here will be shown in the title bar of a website visitor’s browser.

Next, configure your ‘Admin Username’, ‘Admin password’, and ‘Admin Email’. These are the login details you will use to access your WordPress dashboard once it is installed.

Select the auto update boxes for WordPress, plugins, and themes.

Now configure where you want your website backups to be stored and check the ‘Automated backups’ so Softaculous makes backups of your website at specified intervals.

Review all the installation options and click ‘Install’. Voila!

Kamatera Server Footprint

If Kamatera had just one thing going for them, it’d be their continent-wide server footprint. Their servers are spread across dozens of data centers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia and several countries in between.

This guarantees exceptional website performance for businesses targeting audiences spread across the globe.

Conclusion – Should You Choose Kamatera?

Kamatera is a very decent dedicated cloud host and their performance and built-in features are no joke. I recommend Kamatera if you’re looking for affordable packages and have outgrown your shared/VPS plans.

Their block storage, load balancers, cloud firewall, and disaster recovery ensure your website performs exceptionally and is protected from bad actors.

My only fault with Kamatera would be their account creation process. Their IP address protocol system glitches often and may log you out for no reason at all.

Visit Kamatera →

FAQs

What is Kamatera?

Kamatera is a cloud hosting company that provides web hosting infrastructure mainly to eCommerce businesses and other enterprises that require exceptionally scalable resources.

What is cloud server monitoring?

Cloud server monitoring is one of the services offered by Kamatera to customers. The host constantly monitors your website servers to prevent malware and minimize service disruptions.

What payment methods does Kamatera accept?

Kamatera accepts payments for their hosting plans via credit cards and standing order. They also accept Paypal payments.

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