#streaming audio solutions

[dailydoseoffunblogs]

OXS Sound Bars for TV: Home Theater Audio System

Gadgets and Home Essentials may earn a commission. You incur no extra cost when you buy through links on our site. I love making our home a place where everyone wants to be. A top-notch home theater system is key to this. That’s why OXS sound bars for TV have changed the game for me. OXS is a big name in audio, known for their sound bars. They turn your TV’s sound into a full, rich experience.…

[serenatechie]

How to Find the Perfect Audio Streaming Solution for Your Needs

Introduction

In the fast-paced digital world, choosing the right streaming solution is key to delivering high-quality audio content to your audience. Whether you're an independent creator or a large enterprise, the right platform will ensure seamless delivery and monetization of your content. This guide will help you understand the key factors to consider when selecting an audio streaming solution that fits your needs.

What is an Audio Streaming Platform?

An audio streaming platform allows users to stream music, podcasts, live broadcasts, or other audio content over the internet. Instead of downloading, users can access the audio content in real-time. Popular for their convenience and efficiency, streaming audio solutions offer a way to deliver content across multiple devices, including mobile phones, computers, and smart speakers.

Key Features to Look for in an Audio Streaming Solution

When selecting a right streaming solution for audio, there are several important features to consider:

Live audio streaming solutions for real-time broadcasts.

High-quality sound with minimal buffering.

Compatibility with various devices and platforms.

Robust audio streaming software to support different content formats.

Customization options to tailor the app to your needs.

Top Audio Streaming Apps in the Market

Here are some of the top audio streaming solutions available today:

Spotify: Known for its extensive music library and user-friendly interface.

Apple Music: Offers seamless integration with Apple devices.

SoundCloud: Ideal for independent artists and music enthusiasts.

Tidal: A premium service focused on high-quality sound.

Pandora: Offers personalized radio stations.

YouTube Music: Combines audio and video content for a unique experience.

Monetization Options for Audio Streaming Solutions

Monetization is crucial for any live audio streaming solution. Popular options include:

Subscription models for premium content.

Ad-based revenue streams.

Pay-per-stream or pay-per-download models.

Security and Content Protection in Audio Streaming

Ensuring content protection is a must for all streaming services. Look for platforms that offer:

Advanced DRM (Digital Rights Management) features.

Secure servers to prevent unauthorized access.

Tools to safeguard against content piracy.

Cost Considerations for Audio Streaming Solutions

The cost of setting up an audio streaming solution varies widely depending on the platform and features. Factors that affect cost include:

Hosting and server costs.

Licensing fees for music streaming.

Development costs for custom apps. A cost-effective music streaming solution should balance price with essential features and scalability.

Why Scalability Matters for Audio Streaming

As your audience grows, your streaming audio solution needs to scale with it. Scalability ensures:

Seamless streaming for larger audiences.

Flexibility to add new features without disruption.

Support for increased traffic without affecting performance.

How to Choose the Right Audio Streaming Solution

Choosing the right best audio streaming solution involves evaluating your needs based on:

The type of content you’ll stream.

The size of your audience.

Your budget.

Whether you need features like live streaming solutions or music streaming solutions. Select a platform that aligns with your content goals and future growth.

How Innocrux Provides the Best Audio Streaming Solution Provider

Innocrux is a leader in providing top-tier audio streaming solutions. Whether you're looking for a live audio streaming solution or a music streaming solution, Innocrux offers:

A customizable platform for various types of audio content.

Cost-effective pricing models that fit your budget.

Top-notch security features, including DRM protection.

Scalability for growing businesses.

Easy-to-use audio streaming software that ensures a smooth user experience.

Conclusion

Choosing the right audio streaming solution is crucial for delivering high-quality, secure, and monetizable content to your audience. Whether you're looking for a live audio streaming solution or a streaming solution for audio content like music, Innocrux provides the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to succeed in the competitive audio streaming market.

[techdriveplay]

Logitech G Releases Full Version of MIXLINE: A Free and Easy-to-Use Audio Mixing Solution for Gamers and Creators

Logitech G is thrilled to announce the full release of MIXLINE, starting July 16, 2024. This free audio mixing solution is now available for Windows 10 (21H2 or later) and Windows 11 in 22 languages, catering to gamers and creators around the globe. “If you have more than one audio source while streaming, gaming, or even just wearing your headphones, then MIXLINE is for you,” said Daniel Bowen,…

[haberai]

TUBİDY

In a world where music and entertainment are just a click away, finding the right platform to access your favorite tracks can be a challenge. Enter Tubidy, your ultimate solution for seamless music enjoyment. Whether you want to discover new tunes or download cherished classics, Tubidy has you covered. This innovative platform makes it easy to search and find any MP3 file you desire, allowing you to download music without the hassle. From trending hits to timeless melodies, Tubidy mp3 offers an extensive library designed to cater to every music lover’s taste.

Tubidy

Tubidy serves as an exceptional multimedia platform that makes accessing and downloading music an effortless experience. If you’re looking for a vast library that caters to your music needs, Tubidy is designed to provide exactly that. With its user-friendly interface, navigating through your favorite tracks has never been simpler or more intuitive.

Key Features of Tubidy

Extensive Library: Tubidy offers a broad range of music genres, ensuring that you can find everything from popular hits to hidden gems.

High-Quality Downloads: Enjoy your favorite tracks in impressive quality, making every listening experience more enjoyable.

Fast and Reliable: Downloading music is quick and hassle-free, allowing you to listen to your favorite songs without delay.

Why Choose Tubidy?

Choosing Tubidy means opting for convenience. Whether you're looking for Tubidy mp3 files or seeking Tubidy music options, the platform provides you with comprehensive solutions tailored to all audio needs. Its simple navigation and instant access to downloads ensure that you spend less time searching and more time enjoying your tunes.

Tubidy MP3

If you're looking for a versatile platform to find and download your favorite music, Tubidy mp3 is your best choice. With an extensive library of songs across various genres, Tubidy mp3 makes it easy to search for, stream, and download high-quality audio files. Say goodbye to the hassle of searching for music on multiple sites – Tubidy is your one-stop destination for all things music-related.

One of the main advantages of using Tubidy mp3 is its user-friendly interface. You can navigate the site effortlessly, allowing you to find specific tracks or discover new favorites quickly. Whether you’re a fan of pop, rock, hip-hop, or any other genre, Tubidy provides a seamless experience tailored to satisfy your musical cravings.

Additionally, Tubidy mp3 offers a variety of download options to suit your needs. Whether you want to enjoy music offline or create a personal playlist, Tubidy mp3 download ensures that you can easily save your favorite tracks on your device without any complications. Enjoy your music anywhere, anytime, with the convenience of offline listening.

Experience the benefits of using Tubidy mp3 today and immerse yourself in a world of endless music possibilities. Visit Tubidy and start your musical journey now!

Tubidy MP3 Download

When it comes to accessing music effortlessly, Tubidy mp3 download offers a seamless experience that caters to all your audio needs. With a user-friendly interface, finding and downloading your favorite tracks has never been easier. Whether you’re looking for the latest chart-toppers or nostalgic classics, Tubidy provides a vast library of mp3 files at your fingertips.

In addition to its comprehensive collection, Tubidy ensures high quality in its downloads. Each mp3 file is optimized for sound quality, allowing you to enjoy crisp and clear audio that enhances your music listening experience. Plus, with regular updates, you can expect to find the newest releases on the platform, keeping your playlists fresh and exciting.

Don’t miss out on the chance to enrich your music library with ease. Start using Tubidy mp3 download today, and discover how simple it is to find and download your favorite tracks. Experience the joy of having the music you love accessible at any time with Tubidy’s efficient and effective platform.

Tubidy Music

Tubidy music offers an unrivaled experience for music lovers seeking a seamless way to access their favorite tracks. With a massive library of songs that spans various genres, Tubidy ensures that you can find exactly what you’re looking for, whether it’s the latest chart-toppers or timeless classics.

What sets Tubidy apart is its user-friendly interface, making searching for music incredibly simple. You can easily navigate through categories, allowing you to explore new artists and discover hidden gems without any hassle. This feature is particularly beneficial for those who love to explore different styles and trends in music.

For music enthusiasts who are always on the move, Tubidy music provides an excellent solution for downloading tracks quickly and efficiently. The convenience of having your favorite songs available offline allows you to enjoy them anytime, anywhere, without relying on a constant internet connection.

If you want to elevate your music consumption experience, make Tubidy your go-to destination. Discover, download, and enjoy the best music around with just a few clicks. Don’t miss out—dive into the vast world of Tubidy music today!

[demilypyro]

Being a streamer really feels like being your own stagehand. I'm constantly tabbing out to make sure everything's working correctly, making sure we're on schedule. Sometimes there's a technical issue and I have to find a solution on the fly, sometimes right before the stream or even during the stream. Sometimes there's audio trouble, or a piece of equipment just fucking breaks.

Then there's scheduling the guests, scheduling the games, planning things out week to week. Not to mention work emails, administrative work, finances, procuring tech and the games themselves, interfacing with games companies.

As my standards have risen, so has the work load. It's a lot of plates to spin. People think it's just sitting there and playing games, but after a hectic stream I really am exhausted.

[shinosarna]

To all you fuckers saying "BUY DIGITAL MEDIA" lol. Lmfao, even.

Physical media will not save you and were never going to save you. Especially when people making them are the same greedy companies that run streaming services.

Learn to torrent. If you also want to back up your pirated media on Audio CDs or DVDs that's opposite of a bad thing, but buying random pre-made DVDs off Amazon is not it.

There are no real affordable archival solutions for digital media that don't decay with time, as far as I know. SSDs can lost a long time, but flash memory isn't invincible. All magnetic storage can decay over time or with mechanical accidents, and that includes hard drives or floppy disks. Optical disks are vulnerable to disk rot (like in OP).

Torrents seem nice, but P2P connections in the end is just the file on somebody's SSD or hard drive - you just add more redundancies. It can be pretty resilient if specifically organized for, but that almost never is the case, and old torrents for obscure media are almost always dead.

I don't know what is the answer and if anyone with archival knowledge/training would like to pitch in, that'd be great.

[izsheum]

Hello!!!

Can i listen to you yap about rodimus and swerve for hours please 🥺🥺🥺🥺

WHEN I TOLD YOU I JUMPED FOR JOY!!!

ugh these guys have been in my brain for a bit now…i swear

“it’d be cool if i took my favs and made them kiss haha that’d be so silly” and then Boom. I kept thinking.

have some art of them i am in the trenches methinks

when i tell you they are PEAK yapper + louder yapper…

like i genuinely believe that’s how it can start. two losers who love to hear themselves talk? it should be a recipe for disaster.

However.

it’s not like swerve doesn’t know when it’s not his turn to talk. he’s got a big mouth, and criminal levels of audacity, but he has manners. and that means that whenever rodimus goes on and on about whatever bullshit he had to deal with during the day, he listens.

and, good lord, rodimus can definitely talk.

he does so with swerve probably after having a few because i mean…that’s how this starts, surely. a bottle of top-shelf and a purely functional arrangement.

(hundreds of words of sleep-deprivation-induced writing under the cut. i am so sorry. completely sfw btw just barely on the edge of suggestive.)

predictably, swerve’s constant chatter is bearable after rodimus gets in a few drinks. and in the beginning of Whatever The Hell They Got Going On starts with the two of them building a routine.

swerve supplies the shots of liquid stress relief and a listening ear (audio processor? cybertronian anatomy is lost on me), and rodimus provides what can only be described as a semi-coherent stream of complaints and whines about his day. and he has a lot to gripe about—he’s suffering from an acute case of ‘doomed by the narrative’, primus help him.

and swerve, for the most part, is quite a good active listener. not that rodimus would ever admit that out loud (for now) because swerve wouldn’t be able to keep that kinda praise to himself. i mean, the guy raved for months after getting his own rodimus star…yeah, no, not happening. rodimus’ appreciation will remain unspoken, thank you very much.

he gets his sentiment of ‘thank you for listening to my bullshit, you’re such a good friend’ out there by continuing to show up. same time, every day, like clockwork. he’s there in the bar, long laundry list of things he’s going to cry like a baby about, and swerve is at the ready with the fainting couch. their little ‘whine and cheese hour’ (as swerve calls it. rodimus will adamantly deny that he likes the name. it’s not clever. it’s not! it’s apparently a human thing, anyways. little thief.) is probably the only thing he’s ever on-time for at this rate.

having someone listen politely to your woes is. nice! having someone gently try and guide you into solutions to said problems is…manageable, i suppose.

having someone who gasps dramatically and exclaims “i can’t believe you had to deal with that—you’re so much stronger than me for putting up with such scrap” is euphoric.

because since getting the weight of the universe thrust on his shoulders again and again. since he had it ground into him every single day that he needs to be this mature, wise, thoughtful leader who doesn’t react to problems with complaints, but rather calm understanding followed by benevolent resolution…rodimus has completely, truly missed just being able to talk shit.

and, oh, does swerve just love that song and dance.

this isn’t therapy, and neither of them are going to pretend it is, though the constant flow of drinks does manage to feel like something akin to self-medication after a while. their lives are messy, god damn it, and they’re going to cope with it messily!

and cope they do. and they talk. a lot. and—for some reason—it helps. turns out, when you get to vent all your frustrations towards someone who knows how to match your energy exactly, you feel seen. not as this esteemed figure who needs to watch what he says and make sure he keeps up the display of picture-perfect-motivational-cat-poster-leader twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five��but as just. a guy. a guy with a lot on his shoulders and a lot more on his mind. turns out, talking with swerve ends up helping rodimus feel normal.

go figure.

and somewhere between the start of their little unofficial gossip sessions and the end of another bottle of the good engex, something bubbles up that wasn’t there before. and it isn’t the carbonation in the cocktail.

feelings. affectionate ones. rodimus goes to recharge afterwards all giddy, like some newly forged spark still buzzing with boundless energy, and honestly? he feels like he might be going crazy. might need some actual fucking therapy, because ho-ly shit he is not about to entertain this. not at all.

because, let’s be real here, it’s swerve we’re talking about. swerve. s-w-e-r-v-e. the ‘shut your damn mouth’ guy? he used to annoy the living hell out of rodimus when he first came aboard, and nowadays rodimus finds himself excited at the thought of going to talk to him again.

war changes people…and, okay, the war is. over, technically. but still. maybe he hit his head a little too hard during a mission. yeah! yeah, that’s it. little concussion knocked a couple things loose in his processor. that’s why he’s suddenly wanting to share more than just his woes with the little ‘bot. that’s why he starts asking swerve about himself, why he starts listening back. chimes in every so often with “huh, i never knew that” or “you should show that to me some time” when swerve goes on his little tirades about foreign media.

why rodimus can’t help but wonder how that big mouth would feel against—

phew! yeah, definitely brain damage. because the alternative is that rodimus has started feeling terrible, awful, affectionate things for swerve. and that just won’t do. nope!

but ohhhhhh god, does that do nothing to stop his imagination. because really. how would swerve fare if he used that mouth for something else—

thankfully for rodimus, swerve is an avid fan of imagining things that he can never have. dreaming like the hopeless mech he is about a future that only someone as deeply delusional and para-social as himself could think up.

in his swerve-y fantasy, the talks start to mean something. rodimus goes from coworker to situational friend to…something. something that he can’t place his finger on. but it’s something that he doesn’t believe he can have. because while rodimus laughs at his jokes…he’s also laughing drunk. and swerve is desperate to let people close, sure. he likes people, he wants friends, he loves connection. but he’s not stupid. a bit air-headed? sure. but not dumb. not by a long shot. he has a mental list of things that he can try to have (friendship, a successful business, endless adventures with said friends that he plans to get more of, he swears), and things that are off-limits.

you can guess which box rodimus starts to fall into.

doesn’t mean he can’t…y’know. think about him. a lot. find excuses to comm him about this or that, subtly hint that he misses him…uh, he meant their talks! offer him free drinks just to see the way his face lights up. deny the suspicion of special treatment by reminding rodimus that he’s the captain! c’mon! of course he deserves a little leeway!

and ignore the fact that the reassurance is more for himself.

swerve is so good at believing that this something he imagines with rodimus is so, so far out of reach that he thinks it’s a joke when rodimus propositions him for the first time.

and, c’mon, he’s gotta be having auditory hallucinations. because there’s no fucking way in the world—in the galaxy, or in the whole universes that he’s visited, for that matter—that (co-) captain fucking rodimus prime-not-prime-status-still-pending-thanks-a-lot-matrix-of-lameship asked to borrow him for the evening. he nearly drops the glass in his hand.

because that’s the only way rodimus can bring himself to phrase it when he finally fucking gets through all five-billion stages of grief over this stupid crush. god. he was so pathetic. the worst part was that he didn’t even care anymore.

“yo! are you working tonight? can i borrow you for the rest of it? we can watch that movie you were talking about earlier this week, or whatever.”

or whatever. rodimus would’ve just tossed himself out the nearest airlock if he wasn’t glued to his recharged slab (not literally, this time) rocking back and forth like an asylum patient. he could hear the cries now—nurse! nurse! he’s out again!

successful attempts at being casual: zero. days since last urge to ram his head into the wall: also zero.

swerve’s response comes in quickly just before rodimus contemplates jumping ship and taking a page outta megatron’s book and starting a new life in another universe. and if rodimus wasn’t busy having a fucking panic attack, he’d’ve noticed the undercurrent of excitement in swerve’s voice when he strains out those six little words.

“sure thing! your place or mine?”

it ends up being at rodimus’. more space meant more wall for the projection of ‘Alien’.

not that they ended up paying much attention to the movie by the time the fledgling xenomorph got loose.

and liiiisten. listen. they didn’t plan on it going that way, alright? major props to ridley scott—the two of them were intensely invested in the film for a good long while. but, as per usual, swerve brought drinks to help ease the tension that threatened to smother them as soon as he entered rodimus’ quarters.

he would’ve pat himself on the back, too, if he wasn’t so consumed by the way the light of the projection reflected off of rodimus’ frame. and rodimus would’ve thanked him (and i mean, like, actually thank him, no reluctance left in him whatsoever) if he wasn’t so focused on the warmth of swerve next to him.

the elephant in the room was slaughtered and left for dead in the same way as the crew of the nostromo as soon as they locked eyes.

and rodimus ended up being right.

swerve’s mouth could do a lot more than just talk.

[suibiansubs]

Announcing: The Closure of Suibian Subs

It's never truly easy to make these type of announcements... but what would I know, I've never had to make one like this before:

I am announcing the permanent closure of Suibian Subs. The public discord server and translation work will cease.

As for our downloads, we are still deciding whether to offer them on our tumblr - which will stay open - or if there is a better solution going forward.

Please note that this doesn't mean everyone should race to upload MDZS audio drama to Youtube!! We still do not appreciate our wishes being broken.

However, if you have a friend who's downloaded the audio drama, you can have them share with you privately either online or in person. Do not upload it for the public anywhere.

Treasure Chest subs is currently working on MDZS audio drama subs. Please find their information to get access to their downloads, and respect their rules.

Thank you everyone for your kind words and support these 6-7 years.

If you're truly wondering, this closing is not about the server hack. It's 10% server hack and 90% member interest. The server being hacked is what really brought things into perspective for us. That is:

It's just time.

A little note from kittykat2010 down below:

From kittykat2010:

It's kind of hard to believe this all happened because I was impatient. LOL

I was impatient and decided to try MTL translating the MDZS audio drama, myself. We all know how well that would've worked. Luckily, the first person to contact me was iarrod before I released anything

"Since 2018, Suibian Subs has been providing quality subtitles, especially known for subtitling the MDZS audio drama, for fans to enjoy worldwide."

I never really thought it would be of such significance to hundreds of people. It was simply a passion project between iarrod and I. Then we added a bunch of other members: Gwyn, askcj1, Yen, and several more that have left over the years... and the rest is history.

Yes, people come and go, life changes, they need to take a break, then a "break" turns into leaving. Sometimes personalities clash and drama ensues. And the group either recovers from these types of changes or struggles to come back to its full glory.

I will certainly miss the camaraderie among us, the random chats, the streams, etc. It was all a fun time in my life that I will look back on and cherish.

Thank you especially to all of the team members, translators and subbing team, for sticking around, enjoying the good times and not-so-good times. Thank you iarrod for helping me out when I was so damn impatient - ha!.

Thank you to those members who have left for your work and dedication to the server.

Thank you fans!!!

Those who have donated (when we had donations for the MDZS audio drama team), those who have thanked us for our work, and those who haven't. Those who have told everyone that the MDZS audio drama is the best adaption of the novel and the best/only place to watch is through Suibian Subs.

Again, thank you everyone. Suibian Subs and its fans will truly be missed.

[thekoalapastriesbakery]

another follow up nobody asked for but oh well!

NSFW OSCAR PIASTRI HEADCANONS PT.2

ft. bunny!ftm!sub!bottom!oscar, thanks to @babybearnation + @milessunflowers <3 (love u pookies)

whenever he rides you his ears flop soooo much

tugs them down to try to muffle his whines when you eat him out

massive secret slut

window sex, fucking in bathroom stalls, fucking where he knows people will hear because nobody will guess that oscar piastri is making those noises

he cries so easily and so much but it's so adorable

lil bunny nose twitchin as he rides you so desperately and tears stream down his face

hiccuping in between moans and semi-coherent thoughts about how good it feels

lowkey loves wearing lingerie and skirts. make him feel pretty i beg

he adores it when you kiss his tummy + thighs before eating him out

loves the idea of being marked up but his skin is so sensitive he just cries (in a bad way)

the compromise is that you draw "property of [your name]" on his pecs so he still gets the same giddy thrill without the pain

would definitely bend over any available surface at home n show off his bunny tail (+ how wet he is)

it's a stereotype but he still fits it *perfectly* so ... he has insane stamina. like he doesn't last very long but he can go for so many rounds and still want more a few hours later

this is where fingering him/eating him out comes in handy

because you physically cannot keep up with him otherwise

also those remote controlled vibrators w the apps n stuff? good investment

would brag to logan about how good you are at eating him out

^ especially if this is like all-the-drivers-are-trans au

he gets so pouty and his ears will be full-on shaking if anybody actually approaches you about it

he's your bunny! nobody else gets to feel it!!!

word spreads quick in the paddock tho. so it definitely happens

the solution is to eat him out until he's sobbing while making an audio recording

sends it to the unofficial drivers gc

make it very clear that you are only allowed to/interested in taking oscar apart <3

[healpimp]

#FixTF2 Masterpost: Important Information Regarding the Movement

As promised, here is a comprehensive post about the #FixTF2 movement, the issues it tries to bring up and where to find more information and follow developments.

It is now day 7 of the protest with no response form Valve. Either this is them trying to wait for this to blow over or waiting for the signatures of the petition to be printed out and brought to their office, or they are still preparing a proper response to the movement. Regardless, this protest is still ongoing.

❓What's going on with TF2?❓

I'm sure everyone and their grandma knows by now, but TF2's most popular game mode, Casual, has been plagued by bots for several years by now. This is in fact not the first attempted protest and you may have heard of the one conducted two years ago named #SaveTF2. The movement wrested a response from Valve, which since the first protest has earned infamy and a status as a blatant lie among the game's players.

However, this task has seemingly been abandoned entirely. The last time in recent memory with no bots was when the game upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit, which seemed to break the bots for a while. This was something the bothosters remedied a few days later, and no steps to remove them from the game has been made ever since.

It is worth mentioning that TF2 has had updates to battle the bot issue many times after #SaveTF2. They did indeed move to make TF2 a bot-free game for a while.

❓Why is this even bad?❓

Now, this might seem like a non-problem; TF2 is a video game and no more than that. People could simply move on and play similar games, like Overwatch, Paladins, Splatoon, etc. This would certainly be an easy solution but this has roots much deeper than simply playing a game.

For one, this game has been around for about 17 years by now. Ancient by FPS standards, but that the game is still played and talked about to this day stands as a testament to the love and passion the playerbase and general fandom has for it. The playerbase is loyal, the potential for content is seemingly endless and many are willing to pay money for the game. And therein lies some issues.

TF2 has millions of dollars invested in it by the playerbase. Loot boxes, MvM tickets and any sale made in the community market all gives Valve a steady and reliable revenue stream. This is significant, because you will have to make the assumption that this money will come back to sustain the game from imploding in on itself and remain functional. In the case with MvM, the PvE mode (that has not been updated in QUITE a while), the chances of receiving valuable loot from the missions is actually so small that there is no way to feasibly make any of your money back.

Additionally, any content updates added to the game every event (Summer Update, Scream Fortress and Smissmass) is community made. This means Valve picks and chooses cosmetics, emotes, unusual effects, warpaints and maps made by fans in the workshop.

While the creators of these items are compensated for their work, Valve naturally profits from these content updates.

In shorter terms: Valve profits off a game that has been in a near-unplayable state for more than 5 years by doing next to nothing.

And that isn't even the end of it. This is just the general negligence of Valve. It gets a lot uglier when delving into the punishable crimes conducted by the bothosters.

This video by TheWhat Show talks about this in depth, focusing on a particularly important case that involves MegaScatterBomb, who was harassed, doxxed, impersonated and swatted for trying to develop a working anti-cheat for casual.

This video is also in a document form for those who would rather read.

A more recent development with the bots has been their blatant advertising and promotion of CSAM, which you may better know as CP.

After #FixTF2 started, bots have been found spamming links in text chat that they claim is CSAM, while micspamming disturbing audio into the voice chat that is either edited to sound like or is legitimately CSAM. Valve has yet to respond to these reports, but good amount of players on Twitter/X have already started notifying FBI about this situation.

Another thing worth noting is that the bothosters have actively attempted to take down the petition website by DDoSing it and by filing a fake DMCA claim, both which are punishable crimes.

So to summarize:

It is wholly unsafe to play the game due to the bothosters and their willingness to commit crimes in the name of ruining the game experience.

Valve is profiting from keeping this broken product running, yet refuses to put any meaningful effort into fixing the bot problem.

The community actively contributes to the game by designing cosmetics and maps, and while they are compensated for their work, Valve are the ones who profit the most from their contributions.

Real people have been and are being harmed by the bot problem, and as far as we are aware, no one has been held accountable.

This is wholly unacceptable, both from a professional and unprofessional standpoint. If Valve fancies themselves a corporation worth using money on, their choice to simply ignore the problem speaks volumes of their priorities.

As Valve is releasing their new game Deadlock, there are serious concerns about the security of this game. TF2 is far from the only game that has bot/cheater problems. CS2 has had a similar problem for a long while as well and there is a clip of a Chinese bot farm that has been going around and which has even breached into the #FixTF2 movement.

❓What should we do?❓

Sign the petition while it is still up. At the time of this post, the petition has reached 270k+ signatures. The website has more general information as well.

Add to the #FixTF2 tag on mainly Twitter/X. Tag your posts with it, retweet and like posts in the tag and put the focus on the bots and ONLY the bots. One of the issues of the last movement, #SaveTF2, was that it wasn't focused enough on any particular problem and Valve could get away with making no promises. So, post clips, fanart and rants to your heart's content, so long it is specifically about the bots.

Watch youtube videos with #FixTF2 as the subject. Here are some good places to start:

4. Boycott any transactions in TF2. While Weezy was against this method in his video above, he has since changed his opinion. It has been established that Valve is very unlikely to shut down TF2, since the TF2 community market has millions of dollars invested in it and shutting down TF2 would render all items useless, thereby fully taking away any and all investments any players have put into the game. This would not just be devastating to the general economy of Valve's marketplaces, but a huge blow to their reputation if they want to remain reliable in the eyes of consumers.

5. Don't interact directly with bothosters. This includes harassment and any attempts at doxxing/swatting. These individuals are bigoted and some are even criminals. They have no remorse for their actions and talking to them would be a fruitless endeavor. Refrain from mentioning their names/aliases, as they are fond of attention and are getting just about enough of it since #FixTF2 started.

6. Don't give up.

❓Where can I keep up with any news?❓

Here are accounts to start with if you want to follow any important proceedings regarding #FixTF2:

Weezy (One of the biggest voices for #FixTF2 and spearhead of the protest):

Weezy's Youtube Channel

Weezy's Twitter

TheWhat Show (Similar to Weezy, outspoken supporter and spearhead):

TheWhat's Youtube Channel

TheWhat's Twitter

Shork (Outspoken supporter and generally active in the fandom)

Shork's Twitter

MegaScatterBomb (Creator of the TF2 cheater database and attempting to make a working anti-cheat for casual)

Mega's Youtube

If you discover new information, inconsistencies, broken/repeated/wrong links, etc., please speak up! Use the comments section, reblog with a comment or DM me!

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm not upset that blu-rays are being phased out. Formats all become obsolete and then die out.

My worry is there is not an adequate replacement for physical media. If you stream a 4K movie, it is usually over compressed and has a lossy audio track. Usually the quality *improves* when you move on to the next thing. But in this case, only the convenience is improved.

And there is no way to truly own the media you buy online. Even on Amazon when you "buy" something, that just means you have indefinite access to the file on their server. But if they lose the rights to that content or decide to delete it for tax purposes, you lose it too.

There is a service called Kaleidescape. It allows you to download blu-ray quality movie files onto local storage. Unfortunately the service has way too many caveats. You can only play the movies on their proprietary equipment. If they go out of business you will lose all of your movie purchases. And while they have a lot of mainstream, big budget movies, their selection is far from vast.

Oh, and their hardware starts at $8,000 and each movie is between $10 and $30 to purchase. And if you want to save more than 125 movies, the cost balloons to nearly $20K for the hardware.

The quality issue will eventually solve itself. New codecs like AV1 and H.266 will allow files to be compressed without losing any quality.

But I have no idea what to do about being unable to truly own your media. No studio will agree to DRM-free downloads that you can store anywhere and play with any device.

Maybe they can create a system where you can register any device you own and be allowed to play the file on those registered devices. So you get a file you can download, but the DRM requires verification you own the device it is being played on.

Perhaps they could designate a few cloud storage services as approved download platforms. You are free to shift your media from cloud to cloud, but it must always stay on the cloud and be registered to you. That way if a cloud storage company bites the dust, you still have the option to move your media to another place.

It's not as good as DRM-free local storage, but I don't see studios agreeing to anything else.

In truth, people are probably never going to buy movies in the future. If you have the option to rent for $3 or buy for $20, people probably aren't going to see the value in spending that much to own a movie.

Maybe the solution lies in some kind of law. If a platform no longer wishes to host a show or movie and they can't sell it to another streaming service, then they must give up the rights and allow the Library of Congress to save and distribute it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

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

 -   

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

[twincitiesgemini]

We’re excited to share that both games this weekend will be live streamed for FREE at womenseliterugby.us/watch-online (link in bio)! Please note that this weekend’s matches will feature live game and ref audio from on-field mics. As we work through this transition period, we know that the quality of the feed may not yet match what we are used to, but we are doing everything we can to provide fans, friends, and family the opportunity to watch your favorite athletes compete. Thank you for sticking with us as we work to find solutions!

[dgehub]

A Course in Miracles Lesson 1 - Nothing I See Means Anything - David Hoffmeister

With English subtitles

A Course in Miracles Lesson 1 - Nothing I See Means Anything

A Course in Miracles - David Hoffmeister says:

"As we apply workbook lesson number one (“Nothing I see means anything”) to the perception of the world, this is the beginning of retraining our mind to see the world in a completely different way. This is the beginning of allowing the Holy Spirit to wash the mind free of judgments and preferences, hierarchies of thought. Free of belief that some things we perceive are more important than other things. This is the beginning of mind training; a very devoted practice to forgiving the world and awakening from the dream of sickness, pain, suffering and death. Of awakening from fragmented perception to true perception, and beyond to the Reality of the Kingdom of Heaven."

This recording of David Hoffmeister took place on July 30th 2015.

Mystic David Hoffmeister is a living demonstration that peace is possible. His gentle demeanor and articulate, non-compromising expression are a gift to all. David is world-renowned for his practical application of A Course in Miracles. His clarity about the function of forgiveness in spiritual Awakening and his radical use of mindful movie-watching in the release of judgment is unsurpassed. The purity of the message he shares points directly to the Source.

Background Music used in this video: Extension center meditation 1 by Jason Press (jasonpress.bandcamp.com)

If you have enjoyed this David Hoffmeister video please like, share and subscribe!

To be the first to know about upcoming events and inspiring opportunities to connect with David, join our mailing list: https://bit.ly/LM-mailing-list

Search David's Audios by Topic and Question:

https://acim.me

David Hoffmeister Events: https://circle.livingmiraclescenter.org/events

Follow David Hoffmeister on:

Facebook ▶  / acim.acourseinmiracles 

Twitter ▶  / acim_youtube

Pinterest ▶  / mysticspiritone

Visit David's website at:  

Read A Course In Miracles for free at:  https://acim.biz/a-course-in-miracles-book-acim/

Discover the amazing Mystical Mind Training program at: 

Search and Read A Course In Miracles for free at:  https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/

Listen to David read ACIM Text, WB Lesson 1, and his commentary at:    • A Course In Miracles Daily Lesson 1 "...  

Watch ACIM WB Lesson 1 video with David's voice as background: 

   • A Course in Miracles Lesson 1 - Nothi...  

Huge audio collection of David's Talks

David's Spreaker channel of audio mp3s from around the world

David helps the mind soar beyond a mere "intellectual grasp" that is taught by many teachers, as his life of trust and Divine Providence and consistent peace of mind demonstrate.  ACIM is not a play of ideas, and is meant to be used by the Holy Spirit and Jesus to lead the sleeping mind to accept the Atonement and Awaken.  David's clarity and demonstration is unsurpassed, and the Presence of Light and humor stream through his thoughts and words and actions and attitudes.  Many times David and his Awakening Mind & Living Miracles communities around the world have been described as the "fast track to Enlightenment."  Check out his teachings and his witness over the last 3 decades, and you will discover the Light within yourself reflected and demonstrated through David.

Introductory David Hoffmeister Youtube Videos:

   • David Hoffmeister & Patrick Kicken: U...  

   • ✨ You need to relax! A Course in Mira...  

   • Going Deeper with A Course in Miracle...  

   • Mastery through Love Full Talk by Dav...  

   • Escape Into Happiness - David Hoffmei...  

ACIM lesson 1 Nothing I see means anything - A Course in Miracles (also referred to as ACIM or the Course) is a 1976 book by Helen Schucman

ACIM Lessons - A Course In Miracles Lessons

Results 1 - 48 of 1044 - A COURSE IN MIRACLES Helen Schucman Welcome 

Experience the fully Re-imagined A Course in Miracles The Movie: Special Edition

acim video lesson 1 earl purdy nothing i see means anything a course in miracles.

acim daily lesson 1 "nothing i see means anything" plus text with david hoffmeister. a course in miracles lesson 1 nothing i see in this room means anything.

acim daily lesson - david hoffmeister begins a journey through the spiritual classic a course in miracles by reading from chapter 1 section: revelation  time  and miracles followed by lesson 1 from the workbook "nothing i see means anything". A Course In Miracles (ACIM) is a unique spiritual self-study program designed to awaken us to the truth of our oneness with God and Love acim lesson 1 nothing i see means anything.

[yardsards]

do you love streaming tv shows and movies on free (perhaps even shady) websites but hate how many of them are inaccessible to you due to lack of subtitles?

i have a solution!

get the browser extension "substital"

it's available for firefox and chrome for desktop, as well as firefox. it even works on the chromium mini-browser in hyperbeam if you like watching with friends (tho i haven't figured out if/how i can make it run srt files in hyperbeam or android)

to use it:

you first navigate to your streaming website of choice.

then click play and then pause on your video (this is necessary on some streaming sites to make the video visible to the extension, idk why)

then click the substital icon (it looks like an S in a square) in your browser extension list. then the name of your video should pop up.

then click the name of the video

you'll see a popup with two boxes: one that says "search subtitles" and one that says "upload your own subtitles file"

you're gonna wanna try the "search subtitles" box first. look up the name of the episode or movie you want to watch. if you find an option in your language, then just click it and you'll be good to go

if you can't find the right subtitles in their database (or the ones in their database suck/are broken) the unfortunately you're going to have to use the "upload your own subtitles file" option. (and to do that, you're gonna first need to go find and download an srt file of your desired show/movie and language from a 3rd party website. (my favorite subtitle souce is addic7ed.com, another common source is opensubtitles.com)). then you can either click and drag the srt file from your downloads folder, or click the "upload your own subtitles file" and find where you have the set downloaded at like that.

now that you have your subtitles on your video, you may find that you want to change the size or colour of the subtitles for easier viewing. or that the subtitles are a few seconds behind or ahead of the audio/video. to fix that, just click the little S icon that will appear on the bottom of the video alongside the play/pause and time bar and volume and whatnot, and the options will appear to fix that.

happy streaming everyone!

EDIT: apparently hyperbeam recently stopped allowing browser extensions :(((

EDIT EDIT: apparently on hyperbeam if you use the old chrome webstore it works but not the up to date one???

also apparently substital recently introduced a 5 subtitle daily limit (which applies to ones you get from their database but you can still upload your own as many times as you want) which is fucked up and annoying.

[exploreknowledgehub]

With English subtitles

A Course in Miracles Lesson 1 - Nothing I See Means Anything

A Course in Miracles - David Hoffmeister says:

"As we apply workbook lesson number one (“Nothing I see means anything”) to the perception of the world, this is the beginning of retraining our mind to see the world in a completely different way. This is the beginning of allowing the Holy Spirit to wash the mind free of judgments and preferences, hierarchies of thought. Free of belief that some things we perceive are more important than other things. This is the beginning of mind training; a very devoted practice to forgiving the world and awakening from the dream of sickness, pain, suffering and death. Of awakening from fragmented perception to true perception, and beyond to the Reality of the Kingdom of Heaven."

This recording of David Hoffmeister took place on July 30th 2015.

Mystic David Hoffmeister is a living demonstration that peace is possible. His gentle demeanor and articulate, non-compromising expression are a gift to all. David is world-renowned for his practical application of A Course in Miracles. His clarity about the function of forgiveness in spiritual Awakening and his radical use of mindful movie-watching in the release of judgment is unsurpassed. The purity of the message he shares points directly to the Source.

Background Music used in this video: Extension center meditation 1 by Jason Press (jasonpress.bandcamp.com)

If you have enjoyed this David Hoffmeister video please like, share and subscribe!

To be the first to know about upcoming events and inspiring opportunities to connect with David, join our mailing list: https://bit.ly/LM-mailing-list

Search David's Audios by Topic and Question:

David Hoffmeister Events: https://circle.livingmiraclescenter.org/events

Follow David Hoffmeister on:

Facebook ▶  / acim.acourseinmiracles 

Twitter ▶  / acim_youtube

Pinterest ▶  / mysticspiritone

Visit David's website at:  

Read A Course In Miracles for free at:  https://acim.biz/a-course-in-miracles-book-acim/

Discover the amazing Mystical Mind Training program at: 

Search and Read A Course In Miracles for free at:  https://acourseinmiraclesnow.com/

Listen to David read ACIM Text, WB Lesson 1, and his commentary at:    • A Course In Miracles Daily Lesson 1 "...  

Watch ACIM WB Lesson 1 video with David's voice as background: 

   • A Course in Miracles Lesson 1 - Nothi...  

Huge audio collection of David's Talks

David's Spreaker channel of audio mp3s from around the world

David helps the mind soar beyond a mere "intellectual grasp" that is taught by many teachers, as his life of trust and Divine Providence and consistent peace of mind demonstrate.  ACIM is not a play of ideas, and is meant to be used by the Holy Spirit and Jesus to lead the sleeping mind to accept the Atonement and Awaken.  David's clarity and demonstration is unsurpassed, and the Presence of Light and humor stream through his thoughts and words and actions and attitudes.  Many times David and his Awakening Mind & Living Miracles communities around the world have been described as the "fast track to Enlightenment."  Check out his teachings and his witness over the last 3 decades, and you will discover the Light within yourself reflected and demonstrated through David.

Introductory David Hoffmeister Youtube Videos:

   • David Hoffmeister & Patrick Kicken: U...  

   • ✨ You need to relax! A Course in Mira...  

   • Going Deeper with A Course in Miracle...  

   • Mastery through Love Full Talk by Dav...  

   • Escape Into Happiness - David Hoffmei...  

ACIM lesson 1 Nothing I see means anything - A Course in Miracles (also referred to as ACIM or the Course) is a 1976 book by Helen Schucman

ACIM Lessons - A Course In Miracles Lessons

Results 1 - 48 of 1044 - A COURSE IN MIRACLES Helen Schucman Welcome 

Experience the fully Re-imagined A Course in Miracles The Movie: Special Edition

acim video lesson 1 earl purdy nothing i see means anything a course in miracles.

acim daily lesson 1 "nothing i see means anything" plus text with david hoffmeister. a course in miracles lesson 1 nothing i see in this room means anything.

acim daily lesson - david hoffmeister begins a journey through the spiritual classic a course in miracles by reading from chapter 1 section: revelation  time  and miracles followed by lesson 1 from the workbook "nothing i see means anything". A Course In Miracles (ACIM) is a unique spiritual self-study program designed to awaken us to the truth of our oneness with God and Love acim lesson 1 nothing i see means anything.