#facebook tech support number

[subjectsix]

KIP'S BIG POST OF THINGS TO MAKE THE INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Post last updated November 23, 2024. Will continue to update!

Here are my favorite things to use to navigate technology my own way:

A refurbished iPod loaded with Rockbox OS (Rockbox is free, iPods range in price. I linked the site I got mine from. Note that iPods get finicky about syncing and the kind of cord it has— it may still charge but might not recognize the device to sync. Getting an original Apple cord sometimes helps). Rockbox has ports for other MP3 players as well.

This Windows debloater program (there are viable alternatives out there, this one works for me). It has a powershell script that give you a little UI and buttons to press, which I appreciate, as I'm still a bit shy with tech.

Firefox with the following extensions: - Consent-O-Matic (set your responses to ALL privacy/cookie pop-ups in the extension, and it will answer all pop-ups for you. I can see reasons to not use it, but I appreciate it) - Facebook Container ("contains" Meta on Facebook and Instagram pages to keep it from tracking you or getting third party cookies, since Meta is fairly egregious about it) - Redirect Amp to HTML (AMP is designed for mobile phones, this forces pages to go to their HTML version) - A WebP/AVIF image converter - uBlock Origin and uBlacklist, with the AI blacklist loaded in to kill any generative AI results from appearing in search engines or anywhere.

Handbrake for ripping DVDs— I haven’t used this in awhile as I haven’t been making video edits. I used this back when I had a Mac OS

VLC Media Player (ol’ reliable)

Unsplash & Pexels for free-to-use images

A password manager (these often are paid. I use Dashlane. There are many options, feel free to search around and ask for recs!). There is a lot that goes into cybersecurity— find the option you feel is best for you.

Things I suggest:

Understanding Royalty Free and the Creative Commons licenses

Familiarity with boolean operators for searching

Investing in a backup drive and external drive

A few good USBs, including one that has a backup of your OS on it

Adapter cables

Avoiding Fandom “wikias” (as in the brand “Fandom”) and supporting other, fan-run or supported wikis. Consider contributing if its something you find yourself passionate or joyful about.

Finding Forums for the things you like, or creating your own*

Create an email specifically for ads/shopping— use it to receive all promotional emails to keep your inbox clean. Upkeep it.

Stop putting so much of your personal information online— be willing to separate your personal online identity from your “online identity”. You don’t owe people your name, location, pronouns, diagnoses, or any of that. It’s your choice, but be discerning in what you give and why. I recommend avoiding providing your phone number to sites as much as possible.

Be intentional

Ask questions

Talk to people

Remember that you can lurk all you want

Things that are fun to check out:

BBSes-- here's a portal to access them.

Neocities

*Forums-- find some to join, or maybe host your own? The system I was most familiar with was vbulletin.

MMM.page

Things that have worked well for me but might work for you, YMMV:

Limit your app usage time on your smartphone if you’re prone to going back to them— this is a tangible way to “practice mindfulness”, a term I find frustratingly vague ansjdbdj

Things I’m looking into:

The “Pi Hole”— a raspberry pi set up to block all ads on a specific internet connection

VPNs-- this is one that was recommended to me.

How to use computers (I mean it): Resources on how to understand your machine and what you’re doing, even if your skill and knowledge level is currently 0:

This section I'll come back an add to. I know that messing with computers can be intimidating, especially if you feel out of your depth. HTML and regedits and especially things like dualbooting or linux feel impossible. So I want to put things here that explain exactly how the internet and your computer functions, and how you can learn and work with that. Yippee!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

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

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

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

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

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

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

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

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

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

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

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

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

[his-secondbest]

– thunderbolts* headcanons; pt 2 i am not romantically shipping anyone btw !

part 1 - general part 3 - cleaning

theme; social media ════════════════════════════════════════════

JOHN WALKER

advocates that instagram reels is better than tiktok. will trash on you for being on tiktok. but he's also a reddit user. he tries to defend himself saying that he's the 'normal one' when he's really not. he loves those AITA stuff tho. his favorite thing to watch? idk why but i can see him as a dude who loves commentary channels. also he's a twitter/x keyboard warrior. he crashes out at memes making fun of him. probably blocked bucky's number.

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BUCKY BARNES

only uses youtube because it's the only thing he can navigate. he tried to get onto twitter/x but gave up because of the UI (me too bucky, me too). he's that parent that gets upset at your screentime. he constantly tells the others that they're online too much. he doesn't like youtube shorts much but he likes long documentaries. the others, including valentina, want to get rid of the cable tv but he wants to keep it 😭 don't get me wrong he's not completely grandpa, he knows how to use messaging apps like whatsapp. he has an instagram account just because yelena told him to make one, but he doesn't use or check it much. he still prefers sending emails.

═══════════════════════════════════

ALEXEI SHOSTAKOV

he loves memes. also will spam the whatsapp group chat with tiktoks. i feel like he'd be interested in conspiracy theories. sometimes he sends the others memes against them yet still laughs heartily at them. he doesn't take them that seriously. he also yells at his device if it's lagging or if the wifi is bugging. he watches those clickbait celebrity or online drama channels LOL. he has facebook too. but he loves sending yelena those wholesome posts like "my daughter is the light of my world" with floral backgrounds fshkdfhsfm

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AVA STARR

TUMBLR. SHE'S ON TUMBLR. you cannot change my mind. also ao3 is her guilty pleasure. she is def on twitter/x and has a john walker hate account. literally messages walker: "i hate you 98" "i hate you 99" "i hate you 98" "oh no i messed up." "i hate you 1" she calls people on twitter/x morons and idiots. i feel like she'd looove watching legitimate drama channels. enjoys looking at shopping online. and is defff a chill pinterest girl. she's also the girl that helps with all the tech issues. is also a discord mod and does nitro giveaways. constantly calls people out for using ai and mocks them. "oh poor baby 🥺🥺 do you need the robot to make you pictures? 🥺🥺 yeah? 🥺🥺" (og tweet from @/peterokii)

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BOB REYNOLDS

definitely watching baking and cooking videos. the one least on his device aside from bucky. he also likes watching puppy videos and shares them with yelena. he avoids blocking people as much as possible. is the guy in the comments who says 'guys pls dont argue.' defends himself against hate posts. trying to learn the online terminology ("why do people call me a pookie?") he also loves looking at art and stuff. he uses tiktok and instagram. he has trouble telling the difference between real and AI but when he does realize it's AI he reports it. he's not a complete softy though, he will call people out for posting disgusting things. also the guy who has 'dms open if u need to vent' in his bio. has a pinterest account where he posts those like 'everything will be okay' positivity posts with pictures of flowers or animals. definitely wants to use the internet to help people because he knows not everyone has a shoulder to lean on :) he also sometimes forgets to reply to people and leaves them on read unintentionally

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YELENA BELOVA

definitely a tiktok girly!!! she ADORES animal videos. also will spam the others' DMs with reels or tiktoks or memes. often times supports Ava, liking and retweeting/reblogging/reposting her stuff. is the person on pinterest that always puts in the comments the original poster if there aren't any credits. she definitely watches minecraft videos. bought walker a pair of cat ear headphones ("now you're a true redditor"). is the one in charge of hosting movie nights. she is obsessed with actor and broadway drama. always checking movie reviews. watches those 'lazy meal' videos. finds speed paints mesmerizing. she also listens to those like slime asmr videos. she likes to argue with people in twitter/x. always makes sure bob is staying safe on the internet (gotta take care of her little brother) but if he doesn't wanna share she doesn't push.

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

[warningsine]

what is the best way to get safer/more anonymous online

Ok, security and anonymity are not the same thing, but when you combine them you can enhance your online privacy.

My question is: how tech literate are you and what is your aim? As in do you live in a country where your government would benefit from monitoring private (political) conversations or do you just want to degoogle? Because the latter is much easier for the average user.

Some general advice:

Leave Windows and Mac operating systems and switch to Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu (both very user friendly). Switch from Microsoft Office or Pages/Numbers/Keynote (Mac) to LibreOffice.

You want to go more hardcore with a very privacy-focused operating system? There are Whonix and Tails (portable operating system).

Try to replace all your closed source apps with open source ones.

Now, when it comes to browsers, leave Chrome behind. Switch to Firefox (or Firefox Focus if you're on mobile). Want to go a step further? Use LibreWolf (a modified version of Firefox that increases protection against tracking), Brave (good for beginners but it has its controversies), DuckDuckGo or Bromite. You like ecofriendly alternatives? Check Ecosia out.

Are you, like, a journalist or political activist? Then you probably know Tor and other anonymous networks like i2p, freenet, Lokinet, Retroshare, IPFS and GNUnet.

For whistleblowers there are tools like SecureDrop (requires Tor), GlobaLeaks (alternative to SecureDrop), Haven (Android) and OnionShare.

Search engines?

There are Startpage (obtains Google's results but with more privacy), MetaGer (open source), DuckDuckGo (partially open source), Searx (open source). You can see the comparisons here.

Check libRedirect out. It redirects requests from popular socmed websites to privacy friendly frontends.

Alternatives to YouTube that value your privacy? Odysee, PeerTube and DTube.

Decentralized apps and social media? Mastodon (Twitter alternative), Friendica (Facebook alternative), diaspora* (Google+ RIP), PixelFed (Insta alternative), Aether (Reddit alternative).

Messaging?

I know we all use shit like Viber, Messenger, Telegram, Whatsup, Discord etc. but there are:

Signal (feels like Whatsup but it's secure and has end-to-end encryption)

Session (doesn't even require a phone or e-mail address to sign up)

Status (no phone or e-mail address again)

Threema (for mobile)

Delta Chat (you can chat with people if you know their e-mail without them having to use the app)

Team chatting?

Open source options:

Element (an alternative to Discord)

Rocket.chat (good for companies)

Revolt.chat (good for gamers and a good alternative to Discord)

Video/voice messaging?

Brave Talk (the one who creates the talk needs to use the browser but the others can join from any browser)

Jami

Linphone

Jitsi (no account required, video conferencing)

Then for Tor there are various options like Briar (good for activists), Speek! and Cwtch (user friendly).

Georestrictions? You don't want your Internet Provider to see what exactly what you're doing online?

As long as it's legal in your country, then you need to hide your IP with a VPN (authoritarian regimes tend to make them illegal for a reason), preferably one that has a no log policy, RAM servers, does not operate in one of the 14 eyes, supports OpenVPN (protocol), accepts cash payment and uses a strong encryption.

NordVPN (based in Panama)

ProtonVPN (Switzerland)

Cyberghost

Mullvad (Sweden)

Surfshark (Netherlands)

Private e-mails?

ProtonMail

StartMail

Tutamail

Mailbox (ecofriendly option)

Want to hide your real e-mail address to avoid spam etc.? SimpleLogin (open source)

E-mail clients?

Thunderbird

Canary Mail (for Android and iOS)

K-9 Mail (Android)

Too many complex passwords that you can't remember?

NordPass

BitWarden

LessPass

KeePassXC

Two Factor Authenticators?

2FAS

ente Authenticator

Aegis Authenticator

andOTP

Tofu (for iOS)

Want to encrypt your files? VeraCrypt (for your disk), GNU Privacy Guard (for your e-mail), Hat.sh (encryption in your browser), Picocrypt (Desktop encryption).

Want to encrypt your Dropbox, Google Drive etc.? Cryptomator.

Encrypted cloud storage?

NordLocker

MEGA

Proton Drive

Nextcloud

Filen

Encrypted photography storage?

ente

Cryptee

Piwigo

Want to remove metadata from your images and videos? ExifCleaner. For Android? ExifEraser. For iOS? Metapho.

Cloak your images to counter facial recognition? Fawkes.

Encrypted file sharing? Send.

Do you menstruate? Do you want an app that tracks your menstrual cycle but doesn't collect your data? drip.

What about your sexual health? Euki.

Want a fitness tracker without a closed source app and the need to transmit your personal data to the company's servers? Gadgetbridge.

[saturniandevil]

July 2025 Important Dates

AKA my notes on The Astrology Podcast’s July forecast, hosted by Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock. Graphics are from Honeycomb, except the Planetary Alignments Calendar which is made by Paula Belluomini for the podcast. It's a little late, but I finally made it...!

Major themes this month:

Saturn conjunct Neptune 

Uranus’s first foray into Gemini

Uranus trine Pluto

Mercury Retrograde in Leo

June Recap

There was a Mars-Uranus square on June 15th,and during the buildup to this aspect we saw a number of militant and disruptive events occu.r.. In the US there was the flop military parade for Trump’s birthday and accompanying No Kings protests around the country, and a Minnesota politician was assasinated. In world news, this aspect came with the ramping up of military tensions beween Iran and Israel, as our hosts predicted in their forecast for the month. With Mars in Leo, conjunct the royal star Regulus, we’ve seen some eerie parallels with lion imagery in the above events.

July Forecast

July 4th - Venus enters Gemini, Neptune stations retrograde This marks the first retrograde in Aries for both Neptune and Saturn this month. A planet’s first retrograde in a new sign loudly emphasizes what the rest of the transit will be about. For example, the first Pisces Saturn retrograde heralded the lost millionaire submarine disaster. More about the conjunction with Saturn below.

Venus conjoined Uranus at the end of Taurus, and Mercury reached his longest evening star elongation (at his brightest and most visible) before disappearing during retrograde later this month. What Mercury significations were particularly loud at this time?

July 7th -  Uranus enters Gemini

Pay attention to which house this enters in your chart: new chapters and disruptions will open up in your Gemini house. Similarly, events from your Taurus house will come to a close. What was happening in 2011-2018, Uranus in Aries? In retrospect these 7-year periods seem very different at the end than the beginning. Determine if Uranus is going from a more influential or less influential part of your chart and you can get a good idea of what to expect. (For example, angular houses, rising signs, and planetary rulers will feel this more intensely, while Uranus moving out of an influential place will close up a disruptive chapter for you.) Make note of any themes that start to arise around this time, as they may become more important later.

Uranus entering Gemini brings up more questions involving disrupted information and new technologies in communications. This ingress will also likely give us a preview of the upcoming Uranus-Pluto aspects:

We'll get five exact conjunctions from 2026 to 2028, with another close pass in 2029. Austin describes this alignment as the cyberpunk dystopia finally arriving for real. Uranus accelerates things it's involved with, supporting the massive social changes that Pluto in Aquarius is bringing us. Uranus in Gemini also often sees the widespread implementation of inventions made before the transit, like airplanes and tanks in World War 2. Drones don't seem to do a whole lot that previous technologies didn't at the moment, but check back in 2033...

Here's the chart of Uranus's ingress into Gemini:

Pluto is already at two degrees of Aquarius, and Saturn at one degree Aries, so Uranus's trine to the former and sextile to the latter are immediately starting to take effect upon ingress. This is also a great time to bring up historical Uranus in Gemini periods:

Uranus was in Gemini during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the United States's entry into World War II, a striking and foreboding correlation for what's ahead. While Uranus in Taurus did see some disruptions in farming and banks, in the tech sphere initial "disruptors" that arose during Uranus in Taurus like Apple, Facebook, and Google ended up simply becoming new static monopolies themselves.

There is also a communications & messenger archetype associated with Uranus. For example, previous Uranus in Gemini periods gave us advances in the telegraph (1860s) and two-way radios (1940s).

July 10th - Full Moon in Capricorn

This Full Moon is at 18 degrees of Capricorn, making it ruled by Saturn, who in turn is slowing down in Aries and about to make a loud statement about what his trip through the sign is going to entail. Generally, Capricorn Full Moons highlight an area that could use some more structure and reordering, but with Saturn in fall, slowing down, and conjunct confusing Neptune, we'll get equal parts of clarity and illusions. Order is needed, but exactly what we need isn't available to us, so what's the best we can do under the circumstances? Pay attention to which house this occurs in for you to see, as this lunation's proximity to Saturn's and Neptune's first stations in Aries means a preview of what the planetary transits have in store for you.

July 13th -  Saturn stations retrograde 

July 14th -  Retrograde Saturn conjunct retrograde Neptune

We’ll feel the peak of Saturn-Neptune tensions this month, raising questions about what’s real or not real, boundaries and traditions. The rise of AI image & video generators is one such theme that may reach a new climax around this time. Saturn also has a tendency to solidify things, so rules and habits may be set in stone soon. This near-conjunction will be followed up exactly next February, so this is the next chapter in a building series of events.

A Saturn-Neptune conjunction went exact in 1953 when the US & UK overthrew Mossadegh in Iran, utilizing CIA disinformation techniques and false flag operations. They used illusions to change the structure and leadership of a country. The son of the Shah installed in that event & ousted by the current government has now started making more press appearances, so our hosts speculate he may be a player in events to come...

July 14th - Electional Chart (not pictured)

This month's election has the Ascendant at 24 degrees of cancer, which occurs at about 6:00AM local time (A/N: eek!). Exalted Jupiter is making his heliacal rising (discussed below) at this time, in the first (whole sign) house, which is mainly what this election takes advantage of. The Moon in Pisces trines Jupiter with mutual reception (each planet is in the other's sign, making a strong point of communication and cooperation in favor of the native, or in this case, the event being initiated). The Moon is also square Venus, bringing in some of her help. Mercury is about to station retrograde, unfortunately something we can't avoid this month, so Chris doesn't recommend starting anything huge and life-changing this election, but it can be a good time to do something that involves fond reflections of the past (see Mercury rx below). Be prepared to run into some delays or miscommunications and launch something that can stand a couple bumps in the road. With Mars in the 3rd house of neighbors, short-distance travel, siblings, and communications, it's not great for any of those topics, but for other areas of life this Jupiter in his exaltation illuminating the Earth can be helpful. Saturn is a little close to the Midheaven, so make sure it's a day chart to have Saturn and Jupiter both cooperating best for you.

July 15th - Jupiter's Heliacal Rising (not pictured) Jupiter will be very brightly visible as a morning star just before sunrise, having been under the beams (invisible because he's too close to the Sun) for most of his Cancer transit up to this point. Jupiter is stepping back into view astronomically, telling us more loudly what he's going to do in our charts. A morning star this close to the Sun illuminates the Earth brightly with its own light, and we interpret this as a planet being stronger to bring forth its significations. If you haven't been feeling this Jupiter in Cancer transit much lately (this is his exaltation, isn't it?!), no fear--he'll start helping you out more once he's visible (and no longer squaring Saturn so closely).

More generally, exaltation indicates where you can stand out from your peers or rise to the occasion. Jupiter in Cancer can help us take the high road.

But Jupiter won't necessarily heal all evils. For example, this is a Jupiter return for the U.S., and the last one coincided with 9/11 and subsequent launch of the Iraq War. However, the United States did get a lot of international sympathy and (my opinion ahead) indeed the ruling class of the US was able to secure a lot of geopolitical power, natural resources, and alliances using 9/11 as a pretext. Thus, Jupiter's help does not eliminate everything bad, nor does the "good" occur equally for everyone...

July 18th -  Mercury stations retrograde 

This Mercury retrograde actually starts better and ends in a rougher position this time around, with Mercury opposite Pluto and Mars entering Libra (opposing Saturn in Aries) soon after. Things will actually get crazier once Mercury's confusion clears up. But for now the retrograde begins with a nice sextile to Venus, making it a good time to look back fondly on the past.

July 20th - Mars conjunct South Node (not pictured) Last year when Mars conjoined the North Node & the Moon the South, the president of Iran mysteriously died in a helicopter crash, and considering world events at the moment this other nodal contact will likely involve a new phase of war. The South node (AKA Ketu or the Tail of the Dragon), there's a strong association with sweeping things away. Mars-Ketu often involves going to far when trying to purify things and ending up purging it completely. Mars is also approaching the eclipse points from this Spring, though that reaches a head later this year.

July 22nd -  Sun enters Leo

July 23rd - Venus (♊) squares Mars (♍)

Venus-Mars contacts often bring up gender politics and topics of sex & sexuality. Squares put planets at cross-purposes with each other, making it difficult to reconcile our Venusian and Martial pursuits. Plus, both planets are ruled by Mercury, who's about to station retrograde! This transit is rough on mutable signs.  

July 24th - New Moon in Leo 

This lunation opposes Pluto exactly, making it much rougher than the Full Moon. Pluto topics like power struggles, covert control, and hidden forces and paranoia are all at work here. This lunation does make a harmonious trine to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries and a helpful sextile to Uranus in Gemini, providing us some possible creative outlets for this tension.

July 30th -  Venus enters Cancer She's heading towards an auspicious conjunction with Jupiter next month, but first she has to get through this square to Neptune and Pluto. She's having a bit of cold water dumped on her before she becomes one of the very good influences next month (where we'll have double benefics and double malefics simultaneously!).

July 31st -  Sun conjunct retrograde Mercury (cazimi) (A/N: a cazimi means an exact conjunction to the Sun, it's kind of like the planet's energy is broadcasted along with the sunlight.) This cazimi marks the halfway point of Mercury's retrograde and would usually entail the beginning of resolution for issues raised earlier, but because Mercury's direct station is so rough this year we shouldn't expect to see full resolutions yet. Still, we can expect some kind of turning point.

[america-hold-the-line]

I am sick of doomscrolling and feeling helpless.

At this point, I can only hope that the communities put on notice by the Radical Right Wing Republican party—which I will henceforth refer to as the American neo-fascist regime—will rally around the actions that need to be done to send a real message to this administration, and to the world.

This will not be the ultimate enfuckening of America.

The neo-fascists who have installed themselves into power have wasted no time ensuring that they make as much of an impact on the rest of us as soon possible.

There is no reason to sit here and take it.

What I’ve personally realized is that I already have action items. We all do. And we can act on them to the best of our ability.

We can’t all do everything, and that’s ok. Sometimes we need to make space for ourselves so that we don’t lose our minds to the helplessness, and that is completely valid and necessary. We can always feel secure in the knowledge that when we are ready to engage and step closer to the front lines, the people who came before us will have our back with some good ideas that have proven track records of success.

This blog hopes to capture some of those action items as inspiration, and to ruminate on the case studies of the past so that those who feel helpless—like me—can find hope and encouragement in the resilience of the people who already fought some version of the fascist dragon.

The history books are on the shelves. Start reading them.

Between social media eureka moments and various think pieces being written lately, it’s well understood that playbooks of everyone who already went through some iteration of this can be accessed at any time.

One boon for America is that we’re in the early-ish stages of this shock. Nothing to the scale of what has happened in the Ukraine, Gaza, South Korea, or anywhere else in socio-political turmoil is happening here just yet. We still have power, food, generally safe infrastructure, and are going on about our days at our little jobs, furtively peeking at social media and the news every so often. We know the beginning, middle, and end of the book being written arc to arc because we read it, adapted it into a movie, made sequels, prequels and TV shows, and even wrote fanfic. We can course correct at any time. But it will require unification, consistency, and perseverance. None of these things will be easy, or even convenient. Resistance never is.

1. Passive Resistance

Divest your capital from businesses that funded the neofascist administration. This is the hard part for many of us. But on a small scale, start here, and do what you can. For examples, on my end, I’ve deleted my personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, deleted the TikTok app (can’t get back in to fully delete my actual account sadly), cancelled my Spotify subscription, and will be working to remove other ongoing subscriptions like Amazon prime, Netflix, and more. I am working to replace the on and offline vendors I use with local businesses and vendors, and to switch the productivity/entertainment tech platforms I use—as much as is possible and realistic—to ones that are open source or decentralized (that’ll be another post later, it’s not blockchain shilling shit don’t worry). This action, though technically passive, will only make a huge difference with a force multiplier of millions. Remember that in an oligarchy, power rests with a small number of generally very wealthy individuals. Their foremost goal is to amass more wealth, and the power they have really only lies in their capital and ability to manipulate people out of it. Our goal needs to be hyperfocused on ensuring that the oligarchs stock tanks and that their businesses lose revenue. That means financially divesting from all of the big tech/business entities who have supported the neo fascist administration.

Do not let the oligarchs terrorize you and the world with your own money.

Attend Marches. Sit ins. Walk-ins/outs. We already did this in the cause of Palestine. It seems this only went as long as it was trendy. How quickly Americans tire of protest and being arrested. If the people doing sit-ins, marches and walk outs to protest Jim Crow, segregation, lack of woman’s rights, and lack of LGBTQ rights had peaced out as soon as things got hairy or boring, we wouldn’t have any rights to fight for in the first place. Keep up the pressure, even if they drag you away. We have to be annoying.

2. Support Persecuted Groups

Protect our trans community. They are under direct attack from this neo fascist administration. As cis folks, we need to protect them. Stand up for them. Fight for them. Walk with them, march with them support them wherever and whenever you can. Ensure that anyone who feels emboldened to attack someone who is trans thinks twice about it.

Protect our immigrant community. They have a similar target painted on them. Tons of posts around tumblr and the net have better and more specific advice. Those of us who do not fall under the immediate ire of this neo fascist administration now have to step up to use whatever privilege we have to protect the most vulnerable. This will demonstrate who the majority in this nation is, and show the world that perhaps, at our core, America is not completely lost, and not all of her people are not to be colored in Neo fascist colors.

Protect the queer community. People of color. Women. The neo fascists believe it is now open season on everyone that they hated in the first place. The neofuhrer has been frothing at the mouth to strip away key rights for women already. Any guess at this point as to what’s next in the queue. We have to spin up our own resources to protect each other, backed by support from the business people, scientists and intellectuals who aren’t afraid to have a target on their backs. Unifying and standing up for each other is the only way we will make it through to the other side in generally one piece.

3. International Alliance

For our friends across the seas and borders who see what’s happening here, you can help us by amplifying our protest, our messages, and our mission. Right now, America—rightfully—is looked upon with some scorn internationally. How could we let this happen, again? How did things get this way? Perhaps this is who we were all along and perhaps we deserve to be helmed by a neo fascist regime. But truthfully there are many good people in America, and we are an incredible nation of people despite our system’s many, many flaws. America is in a self-induced chokehold from flaws that it has been fighting to extricate from for centuries. Its flaws are sadly an intentional and key component of its design. As a nation built through colonialism and slave trade, the concept of America has struggled to be completely true as it wades through a thick mire of hypocrisy. Despite this, that concept has had great staying power. The “American Dream” of autonomy, independence and democracy has won the hearts and minds of people across the globe, and is a mantra/philosophy that reminds every American what we work towards everyday—some of us even successfully! The fantasy can still inch towards being a reality with more time. But right now, we are almost certainly at a standstill. And with a neo fascist regime in power, we now run a real risk of going back to point A after so much hard work has been done to make the American Dream an American Reality. It might sound a little pathetic…but at least personally, I believe that Americans do need someone to cheer us on from the sidelines and throw us a glass of water from time to time as we work ourselves out of our own twisted grasp. Not all Americans are delusional, hateful or mean spirited. As the TikTok/Red Book fracas has helped in a way to illustrate, many of us simply want to know that there are friends—not merely vague cartoon enemies—waiting for us beyond the North American shore. I know this is a very abstract action item…but maybe you get the picture.

4. Intellectual Resistence

Publicly celebrate, consume and share banned literature and art. Fascists hate knowledge, and will do everything they can to either prevent access to it, or destroy it. This is one of the most vital and important things we can do. Read. Podcast. Make art. Write things. Gather together to discuss the words and thoughts of people who came before us, who lived through adjacent socio-political struggles, and who used their minds, words and plain old facts to fight back against the forces of ignorance and bigotry.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered… Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - 1984, George Orwell

Take every opportunity to share verifiable, documented resources to counter the doublespeak of the neo fascist administration and its followers. We will need intellectual leaders who have not been bought by the neofascist regime to lean in here. Our scientists, philosophers, educators, and more, need to form an intellectual phalanx that advances on right wing anti-intellectuals (or psudeo intellectuals as it may be) and curbstomps them with facts, science, and pure logic. We have to treat these neo fascists like bad magicians. The success of a magicians trick relies on the audience being distracted by the left hand enough to not notice what the right hand is doing. This is why the concept of being aware—a.k.a “woke”—is so important. Through their doublespeak, the neo fascists have redefined being aware of reality as an undesirable thing. Logic—for all those who practice it—dictates that the opposite of being awake is to be asleep. Unconscious. Unaware. Helpless. And that is exactly what we cannot become, now more than ever.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am blogging about it, I will outline my Tiktok "ban" stance - it is "fine", I have no objections and mildly support it, though I am not nearly as concerned about the tool as its proponents are and I approach it differently.

Fundamentally, "you can never impinge on freedoms in international relations" is a silly stance, because it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation by other parties. You do in fact have to "build" markets, rights, etc, none of them exist in the state of nature or whatever. China currently bans the large majority of western social media apps from the country as part of an explicit strategy for industrial policy for its own tech space and as information control on its citizenry. It is completely fair to go "samesies" in response, in the same way free trade agreements are signed by both parties. Now the US government didn't put a "until China lets Facebook in" clause in the bill or anything, but that is because everyone knows China isn't budging on this topic, I can't fault them for not bothering.

China also definitely does do the things it is accused of re: Tiktok. They aren't as heavy-handed as they are with their domestic platforms of course, but they algorithmically censor anti-China content, promote messages they care about, and share user data with central authorities. Now, I care about this less than others. Algorithms are perpetually overstated in their power, as users have agency, opinions, and also know what algorithms are and notice the rigging. The vast majority of people self-select their information consumption more than algs shape it. Tiktok is not a very effective tool in the CCP's kit. But it still is a tool, and again a stance of "the US government can never interfere with our speech institutions but foreign governments can go to town" is not practical stance, that isn't free speech at all. I find these crimes to be minor, but given that the punishment is "sell Tiktok to a US company at a fair price", that seems fine to me. The fact that ByteDance isn't doing that speaks volumes.

(I really don't care about the data stuff, as a bonus note. Data privacy is the perpetual "dog that didn't bark", and we in fact have large social costs from how religiously we try to protect it to avoid exaggerated harms. But it isn't of no concern, I am sure there are valid points in there.)

Still, I don't think people should downplay that it is legitimately awful for the community in practice. There are lots of wildly exaggerated numbers going around (no, 170 million Americans are not "active users" lol unless you stretch that word to the moon), but still, there are going to be millions of people who will have something load-bearing in their lives affected by a legal fight. The world is full of tradeoffs, I have no reason to think they should be happy about this. They have every right to lament it.

I do think this is another classic example of the US "legalism" policy dynamic - the idea of sitting down and just building the parallel infrastructure for US-hosted Tiktok once Bytedance refused to sell, and cutting them out of the loop entirely, was completely beyond us to consider, when that is the win-win solution to the dilemma. But w/e, in this case I recognize that is pretty idealistic, can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[jackoshadows]

Reminder that Joe Biden and the US congress wanted TikTok banned because they wanted to censor and shut down Palestinians speaking from Gaza and prevent young people from seeing the genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians.

Yes, there was always Sinophobia and fear mongering involved with TikTok but the urgent push to have it banned started with Americans being able to see what was being done to the Palestinians compared to main stream media doing genocide propaganda for Israel.

“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis,” Borat actor Sacha Baron Cohen told TikTok executives on one of these calls. Former Will and Grace actress Debra Messing pushed them to simply bar the phrase “from the river to the sea” from the platform entirely. For start-up founder Anthony Goldbloom, who organized the come-to-Jesus meeting with forty tech leaders, the fact that pro-Palestinian content was so popular on the platform “just seemed crazy” and was simply inexplicable.

So called 'liberal' actors like Sacha Baron Cohen and Debra Messing pushing on lobby groups to have TikTok banned is why this happened.

Meta/Twitter/Tumblr have all censored and removed posts, facebook and Instagram have actively blocked and disabled accounts. Because they are US owned. That's the difference - Biden was unable to stop this with TikTok.

Plus, why should TikTok do what the government that shut them down wants them to do? Why should TikTok be beholden to the likes of Apple and Google on how their App works?

TikTok is making a stand against the government that shut them down - Democrats - and cosying up to Trump so that he will reverse the ban. It's plain strategy. They want their app to work in the US on their terms. Of course they are going to do this.

So if Trump reversing the ban and getting young voters happens then there is no one else to blame but the genocidal democrats who are so hell bent on genociding Palestinians they don't care about losing American voters at home.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

New SpaceTime out Wednesday

SpaceTime 20250702 Series 28 Episode 79

New samples of Martian rock intrigue scientists

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just drilled into a new sample of rock from a new region with features that could reveal whether the Martian subsurface ever had an environment that could have supported life.

Solar flares linked to changes in planetary weather patterns

A new study has uncovered a connection between stellar flares and short-term changes in weather patterns on distant Earth-like exoplanets.

NASA to gather in-flight imagery of commercial test capsule re-entry

A NASA team specializing in collecting imagery-based engineering datasets from spacecraft during launch and re-entry is supporting a European aerospace company's upcoming mission to return a subscale demonstration capsule back to Earth from space.

The Science Report

A new drug to cut body weight by 25% in just 36 weeks.

Killer whales seen making and using tools to groom each other.

How the popular artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT responds to nonwords

Alex on Tech YouTube could be included in the government’s digital ID censorship plans.

SpaceTime covers the latest news in astronomy & space sciences.

The show is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through your favourite podcast download provider or from www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com

SpaceTime is also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

SpaceTime daily news blog: http://spacetimewithstuartgary.tumblr.com/

SpaceTime facebook: www.facebook.com/spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime Instagram @spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime twitter feed @stuartgary

SpaceTime YouTube: @SpaceTimewithStuartGary

SpaceTime -- A brief history

SpaceTime is Australia’s most popular and respected astronomy and space science news program – averaging over two million downloads every year. We’re also number five in the United States.  The show reports on the latest stories and discoveries making news in astronomy, space flight, and science.  SpaceTime features weekly interviews with leading Australian scientists about their research.  The show began life in 1995 as ‘StarStuff’ on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) NewsRadio network.  Award winning investigative reporter Stuart Gary created the program during more than fifteen years as NewsRadio’s evening anchor and Science Editor.  Gary’s always loved science. He was the dorky school kid who spent his weekends at the Australian Museum. Gary studied astronomy at university and was invited to undertake a PHD in astrophysics, but instead focused on a career in journalism and radio broadcasting. His radio career stretches back some 34 years including 26 at the ABC. Gary’s first gigs were spent as an announcer and music DJ in commercial radio, before becoming a journalist, and eventually joining ABC News and Current Affairs. He was part of the team that set up ABC NewsRadio and became one of its first on air presenters. When asked to put his science background to use, Gary was appointed Science Editor and quickly developed the StarStuff Astronomy show, which he wrote, produced, and hosted. The program proved extremely popular, consistently achieving 9 per cent of the national Australian radio audience -- based on the ABC’s Nielsen ratings survey figures for the five major Australian metro markets: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. That compares to the ABC’s overall radio listenership of 5.6 per cent. The StarStuff podcast was published on line by ABC Science -- achieving over 1.3 million downloads annually.  However, after some 20 years, the show finally wrapped up in December 2015 following ABC funding cuts, and a redirection of available finances to increase sports and horse racing coverage.  Rather than continue with the ABC, Gary resigned so that he could keep the show going independently.  StarStuff was rebranded as “SpaceTime”, with the first episode broadcast in February 2016.  Over the years, SpaceTime has grown, more than doubling its former ABC audience numbers and expanding to include new segments such as the Science Report -- which provides a wrap of general science news, weekly skeptical science features, special reports looking at the latest computer and technology news, and Skywatch – which provides a monthly guide to the night skies. The show is published three times a week (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and it’s available from the United States National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio, and through both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for scaring a facebook scammer?

so theres this scam that goes around on facebook marketplace a lot where a person acts like they are gonna help people get a free government phone. there are government programs where you can apply for a free phone or phone bill but you need really personal info to apply like social security numbers (because stuff like Social Security and other welfare benefits is one of the things that can get you approved). well my last job was phone based and i was basically phone tech support half the time so I have talked to people personally who get scammed by these people and it made me mad.

So i decided to try and waste one of these scammers time on facebook. at first i was just acting like i wasnt tech savvy (giving a fake email address instead of home address when asked) but i got this idea. this person had their legal name attached to this scam post and it wasn’t hacked in any way. so i googled their full name and what city was listed on their profile. voter record websites show peoples addresses in some states and i hoped this scammer wasnt ignorant enough to attach their real fucking name to a scam listing.

Yeah so I found their address. I had no intention to post it anywhere but I thought to myself, what if I sent them their own home address when they ask me for one? so I did. and they stopped responding UNTIL i gave them a negative review on fb saying they are a scammer. suddenly they got super pushy and mean and starting asking me info about their own house. “what cars are outside, my maps arent working” and all that bullshit. so i look up their address on maps and describe the cars outside on google map satellite signal. at this point i know they’re just seeing how much I know about them (and everything was accessible with a google search so no hacking stuff here) and eventually they stop responding when i guessed wrong if they had their sibling living with them.

honestly i prolly didnt need to keep going after the first address and after i gave them a fake review but i fully just wanted to scare them away from scamming people. i’ve talked to older people personally and they legitimately deactivate everything and get a flip phone when they get scammed because of how terrified they are. i dont regret it but i wonder if it was unethical or just not productive to try and waste her time and at least give me the ability to give her a review saying shes a scammer. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[mariacallous]

Big Tech may have found their response to the European Union’s (EU) digital competition and content moderation policies: tariffs. “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his announcement eliminating the company’s fact-checkers. President Trump, of course, has described himself as a “Tariff Man.”

Europe’s “ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship” were number one on the Zuckerberg target list. The only way Meta “can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government,” he explained, adding, “that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.”

The semantic conflation of curatorial responsibility and censorship, a familiar domestic political gambit, has been internationalized and weaponized to attack the expectation—at least in Europe—that media platforms like Meta should practice responsible content curation.

Tariffs and truth

Thanks to intensive lobbying by Big Tech, the U.S. Congress has done little to provide meaningful oversight of the digital platform companies. The tech CEOs invited to the Trump inaugural lead companies that dominate the free flow of information, invade personal privacy, and pervert the competitive marketplace. Yet, these companies have been able to avoid meaningful domestic oversight for their entire existence.

The void created by American inaction has been filled by EU regulations despite the companies’ strong objections. Combining claims of censorship with Donald Trump’s affinity for tariffs just might be the leverage Big Tech seeks against the EU’s digital policies. Mark Zuckerberg appears ready to spearhead the effort.

By framing the EU’s actions as “institutionalizing censorship,” and asserting that the EU is “going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg presses all the right MAGA buttons to provide a rationale for the Trump administration to fight the EU’s decisions. It is not a surprising strategy, and is made even more significant because it reverses previous corporate policy.

After the January 6 insurrection, Facebook along with Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing,” President Trump said at the time. Accusing Zuckerberg of plotting against him, Trump wrote in a 2024 book that the Meta CEO could, “spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Meta’s 2025 policy switch, however, has been met with the new president’s approval. Asked if Meta was responding to his earlier threats, Trump replied, “probably,” adding, “I think they have come a long way.” 

What’s the fuss over EU regulation?

The EU has enacted multiple laws to try and provide oversight of the previously unsupervised activities of Big Tech. It started in 2018 with privacy protection under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In 2022, the European Parliament passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to deal with the lack of digital marketplace competition. Twenty-twenty-four saw the AI Act (AI) establishing a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence.

All these actions were aggressively fought by Big Tech. But for social media companies, the EU legislation that is the biggest challenge is the 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA). This law covers a handful of online platform companies deemed pervasive enough to be “gatekeepers” with a new style of regulation.

Instead of the traditional form of regulatory oversight that micromanages how a company operates, the DSA establishes expectations for what the company will deliver.  These expectations include content moderation and transparency. The law does not specify how moderation is achieved, but that it is being done in a meaningful and significant manner. Far from regulatory micromanagement of corporate operations, the companies are required to self-certify that they are delivering on the law’s expectations. If they are not, then there are penalties.

While Meta has eliminated fact-checking in the U.S., it has not done so in the EU. It is hard to certify content moderation, as the DSA requires, when you’ve fired all the moderators. This has created a conflict between the company’s U.S. practices and EU requirements. Even if it represents a legal problem, the decision is good for the company since social media platforms, such as Meta, thrive on engagement-stimulating, unedited rage, and bottom-line profits should increase with the elimination of fact-checking jobs.

Elon Musk and NATO—a signal?

Comments by Vice President Vance during the 2024 campaign hinted at leveraging the power of the federal government to deal with DSA requirements. Asked in an interview whether American support of NATO could hinge on whether the EU regulated Elon Musk’s social media platform X, Vance responded affirmatively.

“So, what America should be saying is, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Vance said. “It’s insane that we would support a military alliance if that military alliance isn’t going to be pro-free speech. I think we can do both. But we’ve got to say American power comes with certain strings attached. One of those is respect free speech, especially in our European allies.”

These comments reveal a willingness to link trade and security to digital regulation. A tariff-based response to EU policies seems plausible under such a mindset.

A regulation vs. trade crusade?

On his first day as President of the United States, Donald Trump said “tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” A few days later, he threatened the EU with tariffs unless they bought more U.S. oil and gas.  

The U.S. has a trade deficit with the EU when it comes to goods such as oil and gas but a favorable trade balance when it comes to services such as those of Big Tech. The challenge, therefore, is not to use tariffs to force the EU to buy more, but, as Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan podcast, “the United States should be defending its companies.”

Caught between a U.S. Congress that has done little to protect against misinformation and hate, and the world’s second largest trading block which has tried to combine freedom of expression and the expectation of curatorial responsibility, Big Tech faces a dilemma. The combined arguments of censorship and defending American companies is a powerful elixir served to an audience of one man.

Wall Street analysts hail Mark Zuckerberg as “the best CEO of our time” for his ability to align Meta’s self-interest with prevailing political winds. The emerging narrative of “censorship vs. trade” is a powerful, if calculated, political move. Threatening tariffs in response to EU digital regulations could be a strategy that appeals to “Tariff Man.”

Ironically, this push comes at a time when artificial intelligence offers low-cost tools for fact-checking and content moderation. Yet, the political calculus behind the “censorship vs. trade” strategy may overshadow technical realities.

Mark Zuckerberg’s maneuvering is a shrewd effort to redefine the debate about European digital regulation. The question now becomes whether President Trump will add relaxed enforcement of the EU’s digital laws—all of them—to his list of trade demands.

[skullamity]

Need to veeeent.

So we are almost a week without internet. We were with Rogers for TWENTY YEARS, and over those 20 years every interaction we had with Rogers was a huge fucking mess, stemming from the fact that, waaay back when we were in college, if you wanted their normal services AND their cell phone services, it was two separate accounts. Eventually they decided to merge those two accounts and informed us after the fact. Whatever they did to merge them? Completely locked us out of being able to view and pay bills online through Rogers' interface.

Over the years, we would call Rogers for one reason or another (just switching around and then eventually slowly cancelling all services with them except for internet) and every single time they'd be like "so we see you are still receiving paper bills. we are going paperless and phasing this out, so can we get you to pay through the online portal?" and every time we would have to explain that no, we needed paper bills because their broken ass system made even logging into the portal impossible.

Without fail, whatever intrepid techie would say, "don't worry, we will walk you through it, I'll get this fixed!" completely sure that they would be the one to hold our presumably tech illiterate hands though baby's first reset password sequence and then tell us to hit okay and watch the magic happen! Only for us to get the same error message that every other tech over the years got, have us read it out to them, have them be stumped, have them tell me that they have never encountered this before, that their supervisor is also stumped, and how about we just put a pin in that and see if there's a solution in the future! We will keep sending you paper bills for as long as we can (eventually they did stop and we had to have them email our bills to our personal emails directly as a work around solution).

We first encountered this issue when we were 19 years old and living with roomates. We have both recently turned FORTY.

Anyhow, flash to last week. The internet goes out after a day where we had freezing rain, no big deal, it happens. Oddly, I'm not seeing anyone complaining about internet outages in the local Facebook communities, which makes me think, 24 hours later when it still hasn't come on again, that it might just be us. We call Rogers and a nice lady on the phone tries to walk us through cycling the router (a thing we have done in the past 24 hours about 50 times and have been doing for years), and in the process of doing this, we discover that the issue is that our old ass Rogers router has kicked the bucket when she has us unplug it and plug it back in and it just...doesn't turn back on. We tell her the model, she says OH BOY THAT'S ANCIENT, LET ME SEND YOU A NEW ONE! Just let me confirm your address!

And here is where the problems start. You see, a decade ago when we bought this house after living in it and renting it from my inlaws, my inlaws split the property down the middle and sold the other half to someone else. Even though our house shows up on Google maps, even though uber eats and various other delivery services have no problem finding our very real house with our new, updated house number (went from something like 1234 Main St., Unit 2 to 1232 Main St., no unit), Rogers tries to update our address in the system and their system is like...that's not a real house or address. We assure them that it is, and has been, for like a fucking decade. They tell us that they can't send us a new router until they have someone physically come out to our house and confirm that it is 1) real and 2) in their service area.

I need to be so clear that our house is in the exact same place it has been for over a hundred years, and that up until the router broke while tech support was trying to get us to cycle it, we had a 20 year old Rogers account for which we were paying bills! We had internet last week! And they were sitting there telling us that before we can have internet again, they need to send someone physically to our house to be like that's a house all right.

So Shay was like...you know what? Fuck this, please close our account, we are looking into your competitors. The dude on the phone (to be clear was just doing his job, I get that) offered to cut our bill down from $126/month to $50/month if we would reconsider, which only made Shay more pissed, because like...way to tip your fucking hand? Thank you for admitting you overcharge us for a service that you could have offered us better rates on literally any other time over the past 20 years? Fuck you, we aren't doing business with Rogers anymore!

So we close our account and call a competitor who offers us a better plan for $40/month, says they will have a router to us to self set up by today and didn't make us wait on hold for 45 minutes to do any of that.

The router arrives this morning at 9:30am, we set it up, and....no internet. Tech support is like not sure what's happening? So we explain the lot severence again, and they're like...okay so we run off of Rogers system. So we have to call Rogers, and have them send someone out to your house to physically confirm it is a real house, and we have to wait on them to do this because otherwise our system will refuse to believe that your house exists. So now we are waiting on a Rogers tech to be like yeah that's a house!

I just want internet, man. I have work to do, Shay is still trying to apply for jobs. My phone data for the month is almost completely used up and it is only the 6th!

Love that we left this bastard ass company and are STILL haunted by the spectre of their incompetence!

[dumpstain]

On "The Social Network" (2010) by David Fincher

Social Network correctly portrays the Zuck as pretentious, insensitive, and chauvinistic—but I can't help but feel that this film pulls its punches. Aside from a couple quick disgust reaction shots by female Harvard students, it doesn't comment much on Facemash. I've been thinking a lot recently about how you can never really separate things from how they started. The SAT started as an IQ test designed to exclude people of color, there's a private school down the street from me that started as an all-white alternative to the public schools, and Facebook started as a savagely misogynistic bullying site. Facebook is now a very official, very buttoned-up tech institution with office campuses and an HR department and an "oversight board." Zuck stood conspicuously behind the current President at his inauguration, pursuing his invitation to the oligarchy like a desperate freshman pledge reciting Harvard facts in the snow. (Zuck and his innovator billionaire boy genius friends might view themselves as introverted savants who have ascended beyond the need for external gratification, but don't be fooled: they are, in their hearts, social climbers.)

Facebook has become an old marble bank with an antique facade and big impressive Roman columns. But that bank sits atop a bubbling lake of tar and male insecurity. There's a monster living underneath Menlo Park, and it feeds on AI pictures of Jesus-shaped spaghetti, foreign disinformation campaigns, and your most racist aunts and uncles. For every Facebook group called The Hive where everyone roleplays as worker bees groveling at the feet of their Queen, there is also a spirited debate about whether to exterminate gay people in the comments of your cousin's wedding announcement. For every "happy birthday" post you have half-heartedly and obligatorily written (how many exclamation points to use...), there is a Neo-Nazi Whatsapp group text run by a 16 year-old from Wichita, Kansas. For every lost friendship rekindled by Zuck's infinite spider web, there is a genocide in Myanmar. Zuck himself didn't do any of these things; you don't need Section 230 to acknowledge that Zuck cannot be held personally responsible for all the awful shit that people choose to post on his little rolodex. Maybe what I'm trying and failing to describe here is the horribleness at the center of humankind, which would cancerously spread whether or not some college student fucks over his roommates and makes a gazillion dollars in the process. At least Zuck's original sin gave us this film.

Isn't it tempting, though, to do away with it all? Don't you want to know at what temperature servers burn? More broadly, is it really easier to reform something than to start over? Go and read the original, unamended text of the U.S. constitution. Do it right now. Then go look at an illustration of a slave ship at full capacity. Is that a document that any number of edits can really save? Is the internet redeemable, after everything that's happened? (That's currently happening?) Should a shark chew through the cables on the ocean floor and get this over with? Reddit went public last year and now enjoys a market cap of 29 billion dollars. Before 2015, Reddit also had communities dedicated to hating fat people, watching videos of violent death, supporting white supremacy, and indulging pedophilia. Ellen Pao's move to ban those communities was met by site-wide protest and led, more or less directly, to Pao's exit as CEO a few months later.

29 billion dollars. That's about a third of what it would cost annually to eradicate childhood poverty in America. So please, gild my funny comment. Superlike my YouTube video. Badge my Tumblr (unless you have female-presenting nipples). Invite me to [ thefacebook ] so I can bag a Cambridge chick. Gentlemen, you are standing where presidents have stood. You are pissing on the very spot where Benjamin Franklin invented lightning with the power of his gigawatt brain. How terribly unsurprising that the modern public square started at a university founded in 1636 as a Puritan seminary. Of fucking course it did. There's nothing ironic about it. Nothing new has ever happened, but everything is always happening for the first time. It is happening to everybody. Zuckonit dot blogspot dot com.

Good movie!

[gveret-fic]

I’m Lebanese American and I just wanted to get your perspective. As a Lebanese person I think I’ve always been more aware of middle eastern issues than other people in the west, including not necessarily seeing Israel with rose colored lenses, but I’ve always held the opinion of separating Israeli people and their government. I have lots of Israeli coworkers abroad (yes I work in tech lol) who before the war had expressed liberal views their distaste for Netanyahu. Now, post Oct 7, I feel like they now have borderline insane opinions now including supporting Trump’s plan for Gaza? I just don’t know how I can reconcile these beliefs with the idea that they aren’t complicit with their governments actions (they previously told me about being idf but I hadn’t thought much about it). I’ve felt sick to my stomach ever since hearing them say this. And I’ve had an awful feeling these coworkers that I’ve previously brought to my home and introduced to my parents might also be people that would’ve seen me differently if we hadn’t met in America. I know this is probably a very prejudiced opinion and that I shouldn’t let my emotions get to me but it’s been heavily weighing on me. How as a leftist Israeli person yourself do you reconcile with the honestly genocidal opinions of people including friends and coworkers that you otherwise thought were fine and nice people?

Oh I don't reconcile it. I hate it. It sucks major ass. Existing here as a leftist surrounded by genocide supporters is genuinely maddening. I'm the last person who's gonna tell you to have sympathy for these people, I have come close to a screaming match with my coworkers on multiple occasions. These are horrible people who deserve to be punched in the face for their politics.

That said, this still doesn't justify antisemitism, conspiratorial thinking, or advocating for the killing of civilians. Not accusing you of any of these obvs, just saying this is what it means to separate the government from its people.

Some stats: 11% or fewer of Israeli Jews identify as leftists. But 70% want the second phase of the ceasefire, which includes an end to the war. But also (same source) 69% support Trump's ethnic cleansing plan. But also also hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting weekly for ceasefire for over a year.

There's been this idea termed the התפכחות (disillusionment or sobering), used to describe the massive shift towards the far right following Oct 7, including previously very leftist people. I'm sure I don't need to explain how a major attack like that would cause radicalization in many people. This is not an excuse but a simple sociological explanation. Many of the people I know lost loved ones. We all saw the horrific violence, some of it streamed live by Hamas, sometimes through the hijacked facebook feed of the very people they murdered. This is a nation-wide trauma. Unfortunately, this means many people seek revenge, and are driven to inhuman extremes by this urge.

And this of course intersects with the already racist and militant Israeli mentality, and with the normalized reality of the occupation, and with the global rise of ultranationalist and plainly neo-nazi sentiment, and with the most extremist, fundamentalist, autocratic right wing government in the history of this country. And now also in yours. What Trump did to normalize Kahanism and literal ethnic cleansing can't be overstated.

I don't fucking know. I've heard people personally admitting to things that would have them indicted by the Hague. We're committing a genocide and many people support it. We're engaging in protests in huge numbers for unprecedented periods of time and the government doesn't bat an eye. The leader of the largest global superpower is nudging our far right government further to the right. I'm just rambling now. We just have to do our best to fight for humanity, what else can we do

[beardedmrbean]

Salt Lake City — Utah on Wednesday became the first state to pass legislation requiring app stores to verify users' ages and get parental consent for minors to download apps to their devices.

The bill headed to the desk of Gov. Spencer Cox has pitted Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, against app store giants Apple and Google over who should be responsible for verifying ages. Similar bills have been introduced in at least eight other states in the latest fight over children's online safety. The proposals targeting app stores follow legal fights over laws requiring social media platforms to verify the ages of users.

Meta and other social media companies support putting the onus on app stores to verify ages amid criticism that they don't do enough to make their products safe for children - or verify that no kids under 13 use them.

"Parents want a one-stop shop to verify their child's age and grant permission for them to download apps in a privacy-preserving way. The app store is the best place for it," Meta, X and Snap Inc. said in a joint statement Wednesday. "We applaud Utah for putting parents in charge with its landmark legislation and urge Congress to follow suit."

The app stores say app developers are better equipped to handle age verification and other safety measures. Requiring app stores to confirm ages will make it so all users have to hand over sensitive identifying information, such as a driver's license, passport, credit card or Social Security number, even if they don't want to use an age-restricted app, Apple said.

"Because many kids in the U.S. don't have government-issued IDs, parents in the U.S. will have to provide even more sensitive documentation just to allow their child to access apps meant for children. That's not in the interest of user safety or privacy," the company said in its most recent online safety report.

Apple considers age a matter of privacy and lets users decide whether to disclose it. The company gives parents the option to set age-appropriate parameters for app downloads. The Google Play Store does the same.

Apple and Google are among a litany of tech companies that help support the Chamber of Progress, a tech policy group that lobbied Utah lawmakers to reject the bill. Last year, Apple helped kill a similar bill in Louisiana that would have required app stores to help enforce age restrictions.

Kouri Marshall, a spokesperson for the Chamber of Progress, called the measure "a tremendous encroachment of individual privacy" that he said places a heavy burden on app stores to ensure online safety.

Republican Sen. Todd Weiler, the bill's sponsor, argued it's "a lot easier to target two app stores than it is to target 10,000 (app) developers."

Under the bill, app stores would be required to request age information when someone creates an account. If a minor tries to open one, the bill directs the app store to link it to their parent's account and may request a form of ID to confirm their identity. Weiler said a credit card could be used as an age verification tool in most cases.

If a child tries to download an app that allows in-app purchases or requires them to agree to terms and conditions, the parent will first have to approve.

Melissa McKay, a Utah mother, is among those who pushed for the legislation. She said she started asking questions about device safety after her nephew in 2017 was exposed to "really harmful content on another student's device at school." Inaccurate age ratings on apps and faulty parental controls are "at the root of online harm," McKay said.

The eight other states considering proposals would similarly place responsibility on app stores to verify ages and seek parental permissions. A legislative committee advanced Alabama's bill last week.

Lawsuits have delayed implementation of state laws regulating social media apps and websites. A federal judge in 2024 temporarily blocked Utah's first-in-the-nation law requiring social media companies to check the ages of all users and place restrictions on accounts belonging to minors.

If Cox signs the Utah bill into law, most provisions would take effect May 7. The governor's office didn't respond to emails seeking comment Wednesday. Cox, a Republican, supported the state law currently on hold that requires age verification on social media.