#r2r

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

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

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

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

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

[ebajous-curves]

[earndiltheequalizer]

Is "Rads to Riches" the title a subtle tribute to Tim Cain given one of his earliest games at Interplay was "Rags to Riches?"

Genuinely? Never knew that was something they made. I was not the kind of kid to play Wall Street Simulators. Fallout 3 was my start point, and I wormed my way into Interplay's wares sort of in reverse from there.

But just so I generate cred as a person who loves Interplay's work, like some kind of hack, we'll say yes.

[anotherwvba]

I've been thinking of adding boxers from other game franchises to my fic as recurring characters as the Women's Circuit in the WVBA grows. As part of my planning, I've drawn what they would look like in my fic. From left to right, we've got...

King from "The King of Fighters"

Tiffany Lords from "Rival Schools"

Lulu Valentine from "Ready 2 Rumble"

My problem is, I don't know who to introduce first. So... I'm leaving it to you fine folks :)

[best-fictional-marine-reptile]

ROUND 2 ROUNDUP

Welcome to the end of Round 2 everyone! Round 2 started about a month ago, lasting for 4 weeks, and was of course a bracket of all the winners from Round 1! In this post I've collected some data to analyze everyone's performance, just like I did with Round 1!

However, there will be a few more metrics this time, to measure certain stats as they've changed from Round 1. For the purposes of clickbait, I will post a single stat above the cut, and the rest below it. Enjoy!

Highest Round 2 Score (Overall):

1: Cera [Land Before Time]: 88.8 2: Tropius [Pokemon]: 85.7 3: Chomper [Land Before Time]: 82.7

Highest Round 2 Score (Ornithischian Bracket):

1: Cera [Land Before Time]: 88.8 2: Pepperoni [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]: 82 3: Parasaurmon [Digimon]: 79.3

Highest Round 2 Score (Saurischian Bracket):

1: Tropius [Pokemon]: 85.7 2: Yoshi [Super Mario]: 80.6 3: Aurorus [Pokemon]: 80.5

Highest Round 2 Score (Megatheropod Bracket):

1: Chomper [Land Before Time]: 82.7 2: Godzilla [Toho/Monsterverse]: 75.5 3: Tyrantrum [Pokemon]: 75.3

Highest Total Score (Round 1 + Round 2), Ornithischian Bracket (and Overall!)

1: Cera [Land Before Time]: 169.3 2: Chomp [Dinosaur King]: 165.1 3: Old Buck [Deadsound's Dinosauria/Sauria]: 156.4

Total Score (Round 1 + Round 2), Saurischian Bracket

1. Yoshi [Super Mario]: 151.0 2. Tropius [Pokemon]: 149.6 3. Meganium [Pokemon]: 147.5

Total Score (Round 1 + Round 2), Megatheropod Bracket

1. Chomper [Land Before Time]: 155.4 2. Rexy [Night at the Museum]: 155.2 3. Greymon [Digimon]: 154.7

Biggest Score Increase From Round 1 to Round 2 (Ornithischian Bracket)

1. Aptonoth [Monster Hunter]: 23.5 2. Ankylomon [Digimon]: 21.2 3. Parasaurmon [Digimon]: 19.8

Biggest Score Increase From Round 1 to Round 2 (Saurischian Bracket)

1. Tropius [Pokemon]: 21.8 2. Aurorus [Pokemon]: 21.4 3. Compsognathus [Paleo Pines]: 18.8

Biggest Score Increase From Round 1 to Round 2 (Megatheropod Bracket)

1. Stumpy [Dinosaur Revolution] 19.3 2. T-Rex [Super Mario] : 13.2 3. Godzilla [Toho/Monsterverse]: 10.5

Biggest Score Increase From Round 1 to Round 2 Overall

1. Aptonoth [Monster Hunter]: 23.5 2. Tropius [Pokemon]: 21.8 3. Aurorus [Pokemon]: 21.4

Highest Series Average Round 2 Score*

1. Pokemon: 70.70 2. Super Mario: 67.93 3. Land Before Time: 67.73

Biggest Series Average Score Increase From Round 1 Round 2

1. Xenoblade: 2.73 2. Super Mario: 2.05 3. Pokemon: 1.97

Best Series Round 2 Win Ratio*

1. Pokemon: 1.0, Super Mario: 1.0, Dino Squad: 1.0 2. Land Before Time: 0.83 3. Transformers: 0.80, Prehistoric Planet: 0.80

Biggest Series Win Ratio Increase From Round 2*

1. Transformers: 0.42 2. Dino Squad: 0.25 3. Super Mario: 0.20

Ties:

Dimitri [The Legend of Zelda] vs. Aladar [Dinosaur (2000)]

Closest Non-Tie:

Rhenoplos [Monster Hunter]: 50.5 Salada [Fossil Fighters]: 49.5

Highest Raw Vote Count:

Tyrannosaur in F-14 [Calvin and Hobbes] vs. Colossal Dreadmaw [Magic the Gathering]; 1106 votes**

*Indicates that only series with more than 2 candidates were considered, to give the data meaning!

**I really didn't feel like tracking individual vote counts for various reasons, I may do that for the later rounds, but usually we get like 80 - 200 votes per poll, so this one is just insane.

[bini-style]

BINI wore these custom pieces from sustainable Filipino fashion brand R2R for their appearance on Wish USA. 😍🇵🇭 #SupportLocal (via @rags2richesinc)

[bivouacrecording]

The Instrument : Part 2: Components

<- Go to Part 1

Cables

The veins and arteries. As is tradition with any new idea I have, I make new cables. Mostly because the cables I made previously were all custom that the lengths or connectors just cannot be used anywhere else. Coming off of the relay box, I kept the solder gun warm and went straight into making cables. I used Canare wires and Yongsheng connectors. Easy to source for me and good quality.

I never made a MIDI cable before and believe me, they look really beautiful with these metal connectors (see above).

I made a total of 37 analog/midi cables.

I also made:

Four 10 pin remote control cables for the Revox units.

One 15 pin extension cable for the Fostex D2424

One DB25 AES I/O cable for communication between the DM1000 and SPX units.

This makes a grand total of 43 finished cables, 93 connectors, and about 90 meters of cable. All93 heat shrunk and perfectly made. 93

You can b93elieve me when I say 93 that I was counting 93down Every. Last. One. 9.3.

Phew. 93

Of course after you finish with something, you always think of how it could be better. After connecting it all up, I am really wanting to have a more polychromatic palette of cables rather than just a rat's nest of black (boring). Maybe I can sell the black cables and make a more colorful back-end (gulp).

MOTU Midi Express XT

So now I needed something to manage the MIDI messages between all of my equipment. I have used MOTU software and hardware for 20 years and their MIDI patchbays were always affordable and reliable so I found a used one for a reasonable price and wired it up. 

In my research I found this article and decided MOTU was the way to go.

RME Digiface USB

Connecting the DM1000 to the computer took a bit of consideration.  I knew that once the audio was converted in the DM1000, I wanted it to stay in the digital domain wherever it went until it was output again. So I needed a multichannel USB interface that didn't take up another rack space and had a reasonable cost. I didn't need any other preamps or other extra things, just a digital I/O. The RME was the best solution and had the best reputation. This was the only thing that I bought new.

The DIGIface has 32 digital I/O via 4 banks of ADAT I/O which allows me to input/output sound from the computer (to the recorders) and manage the audio routings throughout the instrument using the included RME TotalMIX software. Every single connection was used like it was made just for this.

Tech 21 NYC Midi Mongoose

A small MIDI foot pedal that can output 128 MIDI program change messages. So far I have programmed it to start the Freeze layer playback in each internal effect. The foot pedal is a bit fiddly when you want to go from say, 3 to 65, but it should make you arrange the programs in such a way that makes it easier for you. To make it more dynamic and user friendly, I will program more functions in the MIDI translator program.

Speaking of which...

Computer and Software

This is the climax of this post. At least for me. Best take a seat for this one. <br><br>

Welcome to the Brain. The computer exclusively manages all MIDI and audio routing.  For the MIDI translator, I use Bome MIDI Translator PRO (BMT). An amazing program that allows you to translate anything to anything (really, i mean it) and more.

I hired the Bome forum moderator, Steve Caldwell, to help me make a program using BMT that remembered the fader, button, and knob positions between each USER DEFINED layer on both REMOTE layers. The USER DEFINED layer on the DM1000 has 4 banks but they are only overlays that are meant to be used one at a time. With this custom program, I now have a total of 8 INDEPENDENT banks over two REMOTE layers (384 controls total) that can be recalled with a button press and be used to control anything via MIDI. This was not how Yamaha intended it but this is the kind of power MIDI can have.  This rack mountable DM1000 just got a whole lot BIGGER.

[Techie side note: The only drawback for this is that you cannot exclude (Recall Safe) these faders from a scene change like you can for the top level faders. Still searching for a solution or workaround...]

As an example, I mapped all of the parameters of each SPX2000 unit AND all 4 internal effects to the faders and knobs allowing live control of multiple parameters at the same time in any combination using BMT. The controls can also be automated with the internal automation on the DM1000. The sky's the limit.

I should add that even on the top layers, each control for the audio channels 1-48 (faders, knobs,  buttons) can be used exclusively as a MIDI controller (no audio thru the channel) or mixed together (MIDI fader next to an audio fader) side by side, as desired. For example, I am using faders 9-16 to exclusively send MIDI messages to control the A77s (for now). Additional buttons (72 buttons) can be programmed on the USER DEFINED KEYS section. So taking all of this into account, you can have a grand total of 600 controls* for other MIDI instruments from a single console. (Not counting all the other function buttons on the console that transmit MIDI. Even the headphone level knob sends MIDI!)

* Note: I think there is a limit with the amount of unique MIDI messages that can be programmed, but using BMT you can program a computer keystroke to control software, use SysEx, and so on.

Studio

Okokok. Deep breaths.

I had to get some furniture to put all this stuff. I had a custom table made per my specifications and  got rid of all the old furniture (green desk).  For monitors, I bought a pair of JBL Studio 2 speakers. These are powered by my old, underused Yamaha Hi-fi amplifier (RX-V357) and subwoofer that I woke up after a very long, dusty, moldy, sleep in storage.

The JBL speakers are designed to be recessed in a wall but I custom made an aluminum enclosure for them and hung them on speaker wall mounts. This was a cost saving measure but also a space saving one, as these speakers are not as expensive, deep, and boxy as a typical monitor.

I opted for a standing studio to practice a 'live' performance. After so much soldering, I really didn't mind standing and its good practice for the future. I found I move faster that way, though I do have to take breaks more often. I had to put the DM1000 on sturdy packing paper boards to prop it up.

Sonosax Mini R82

My trusty Sonosax. This and my other recorders, are the breath that give this instrument life. I don't create sound.

I made a new custom cable that connects to the digital stereo out of the DM1000 for quick sketches and stereo recordings. At the end of the day I take it on the road to listen to the daily recordings and take notes.

Fostex D2424 LV

Last but not least. This was the last thing I bought. It was pretty much a new unit and very reasonably priced for a 24-track recorder. I only needed to get a compatible HD, replace the lithium battery, and change the FAN which was SO noisy. I replaced it with a Noctua NF-A8 ULN (Ultra low noise) and now it lives silently under my desk. If you have one of these HD recorder units, I HIGHLY recommend this upgrade. I found out that the reason that the fans are so loud is because the unit does not have a thermometer that regulates fan speed. So the fans are just running at its maximum speed all the time, hence all the noise. With research, I found that the Noctua was one of the quietest fans on the market at its highest RPM.

I remember these Fostex units way back when and it was the remote that caught my eye. All of the controls and display are contained in a removable unit that can be extended and used as a remote control. I contacted Fostex and their great customer service answered any questions I had with this long discontinued unit. I have my eye on another one just for parts for the future.

The D24 + DM1000 will essentially be my DAW. To tell you the truth I have been on the fence about using this. On one hand it's a solid piece of equipment. On the other its discontinued. I reassure myself saying that many people still use vintage synths so this should be no different, no? I assume, vintage synth owners always have something in the back of their mind hoping that their synth doesn't die before they sell it. Even the A77 has a better chance of lasting longer than this unit (and it has). By using a computer it will be future proof but it also has its shortcomings. In any case, since the DIGIface is managing the audio via my computer, I can also use my DAW to playback and record files if needed. I guess it is reassuring that these equipment are built within their capabilities so there will be fewer surprises during use. I have evolved to embrace and enjoy the fleeting nature of sound, maybe I should also embrace and enjoy the finite life of recording equipment.

There is some housekeeping that needs to be done with this machine. The HD is cloned to another one after each session and also backed up on a computer. NOS compatible hard drives for the unit are still easily bought at the moment. I'd better stock up. The manual is very extensive and a little crazy at times, but easy to read. Once you start using it, it gets pretty easy and there is just something about pressing a physical click-y button that just makes things more fun. The audio can also be recorded in real time to a DAW.

One thing is that new HDs need to be formatted in the unit before use. This takes FOREVER. 160 GB took about 12 hours to format. So its best to format all your HD ahead of time to save time. I probably didn't need to get the 160GB HD. I think 40 or 80 GB would have been more than enough for me.

Special Mention:

Deity V-Lav Microphones

In my recent recording tests, I realized that although you can hear the tape machines in a 'live' setting, you miss this experience in the audio recording. This means you cannot distinguish the edits recorded to the tape and the edits made by stopping/ starting the machine. I tried several options from mounting microphones on stands, or on the desktop but they were in my way and were going to be pretty expensive if I got 4 of them. I needed a smaller, affordable solution.

I had made some videos for Deity a few years ago and they gave me a sampler of all their microphones at the time to try out. The D2 and D3 are great short shotgun microphones and great for field recording. They also gave me one V-Lav and I was amazed how easy it was to use. Its built-in 'smart' power supply means you can plug it anywhere which is great because some pro lavaliers usually require a 10V phantom supply via a special adapter.  I gave my contacts at Deity a ring and asked if I could have some more for my new sound project. They graciously sponsored 3 more microphones and D-XLR adapters for the project. Now the recordings all have the tape machine sounds which indicate stop/start of the audio and a sense of movement. I know you haven't heard any sounds yet but trust me it is just the right touch.

Which brings us back to...

Today. One year after our journey, and the beginning of a new one. As you can see the amount of thought and hours put into creating this instrument were many but worth it. I feel that it is truly an extension of me and reflects the way I think and move.

Stay tuned for sounds, articles, and videos of how this instrument evolves as well as a more in depth look at how I configure my components and creation process.

Thanks for reading!

In Winter 2021 I was able to finally present this instrument to the public during the Vital performance in Shanghai. Read about it here.

[prophecyofgray]

finally getting caught up on @returntoregalia (my ass rly guest starred on an episode while being 8 episodes behind lol) and ohhh my god TUC is literally the series of all time. it's so good. i forget sometimes just how good it is but it is sooooo good and the lovely host + guests of R2R are soooooooo good at examining why the series succeeds so well. ive thought about these books EXTENSIVELY for YEARS and R2R STILL makes me think of it in new ways. which is a testament to the books themselves but also oona + the other folks behind the podcast. Man. so good.

[littleolepink]

A build I can’t help but to be proud of. It was a Rags 2 Riches build that grew into my best build! It’s a Japanese Teahouse inspired home (with extensions) - limited packs - fully functional - bb.moveobjects ON - please enjoy! 🌸 gallery name: Kiyomatsu Point | gallery ID: littleolePink 🩷

Value: $147,223 | Lot Size: 50x50

[mangomorte]

I have too low of funds to purchase the new expansion pack. In the meantime, I'm going to play through the packs I have that I haven't really explored yet!

Starting with a Rags to Riches challenge in Chestnut Ridge. 🐎 ✨️

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

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

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

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

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[ebajous-curves]

I wrote a crude parser for AsciiMath formulas to be able to get some Fourier series art from wolframalpha and draw them on oscillosope.

Here is the Konata Izumi-like curve :3 (not mine)

[saptutorials]

The R2R Process: Key to Financial Decision-Making

Data is the king for businesses in the current age, which is dominated by technology. However, it has to be processed, structured and presented correctly. It’s clarity, precision, compliance, and, most importantly,, decision-making that is always needed when it comes to financial data. The Record-to-Report process (R2R) is a way for organizations to accumulate, store and manage financial…

[9to9imall]

[qxfnauk]

Maximize outsourcing success with these 14 essential questions for your Record to Report process partner! Elevate your efficiency and ensure seamless operations. 💼🔍

[frenchvintagehifi]

45 years of age and not a wrinkle…

My Christmas present to myself…

I was part of the team who put that machine on the French Pro Audio market and bought a SP7 at the time…

Now I am lucky to have found this SP8 in pristine condition 👌