[Plura-list] EFF offering legal referrals to protesters; The unsatisfying history of obscenity; A ride through of Elitch Gardens' Kaleidoscope; Big Tech is good at being big

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* EFF offering legal referrals to protesters: If your phone was seized
or you were targeted with electronic surveillance, they've got a list of
lawyers.

* The unsatisfying history of obscenity: "I know it when I see it" was
always a cop-out.

* A ride through of Elitch Gardens' Kaleidoscope: Meow Wolf's ride for
Denver's centuries-old theme park.

* Big Tech is good at being big: But that shouldn't get them a pass on
anti-monopoly law.

* Personalized, signed copies of Little Brother/Homeland: With an intro
by Ed Snowden!

* No fix for Chrome's Incognito Mode: What matters more: user privacy or
paywalls?

* DoJ seizes pro-BLM coronavirus masks: The Flu Klux Klan wants protests
to be death sentences.

* Science Fiction Writers of America on Black Lives Matter: Free dues,
travel and memberships for the Nebulas, and a reading list.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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✊🏿 EFF offering legal referrals to protesters

EFF has a "cooperating attorneys" list of hundreds of cyberlawyers who
care about keeping good people safe from legal harms.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/eff-offering-assistance-attorney-referrals-protesters

The organization is opening that list to "people facing legal troubles
as a result of their participation in the ongoing demonstrations,
especially those involving surveillance or devices such as phones."

"Protesters and reporters in need of legal assistance should reach out
to us at info at eff.org. We treat requests that come in to us as
confidential, and always protect the identities and information of those
that come to us for legal assistance."

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✊🏿 The unsatisfying history of obscenity

I have exactly one complaint about "Make No Law," Ken White's superb
podcast that explains the evolution of First Amendment law by
dramatizing and explaining pivotal Supreme Court cases: it doesn't come
out often enough.

On the other hand, absence makes the heart grow fungus, and so my heart
mushroomed with joy when I saw a new episode in my podcatcher this
morning: "I Know It When I See It," on the evolution of American
obscenity laws.

https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2020/06/i-know-it-when-i-see-it/

The episode features a deep dive into Jacobellis v. Ohio, the case that
birthed the infamous and unsatisfying cop-out standard for what is, and
is not obscenity: "I know it when I see it."

Critical First Amendment cases are always fascinating because they deal
with contentious expression, often artistic expression, and Jacobellis
is no exception.

It concerned a theater's exhibition of Les Amants, a 1958 French film
about an affair. What outraged the state of Ohio? A woman has an affair
without being condemned for it, and has a pleasurable experience when
her lover performs oral sex on her.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lovers_(1958_film)

White's delightful dive into the evolution of US obscenity rules takes
detours through film criticism and American puritanism, and delivers a
gripping seminar on the fine points of the law on the way.

Here's a direct MP3:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/makenolaw/MNL_episode_012.mp3

And here's the RSS for Make No Law.

http://makenolaw.ltn.libsynpro.com/rss

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✊🏿 A ride through of Elitch Gardens' Kaleidoscope

For *centuries*, Denverites have enjoyed the pleasures of their Elitch
Gardens, a pleasure park that opened 30 years after the founding of
Denver and has since evolved into a wonderful theme park.

https://www.elitchgardens.com/plan-a-visit/park-history/

One of the park's marquee attraction is "Kaleidoscope," created by Santa
Fe's Meow Wolf, the justifiably famous and beloved immersive experience
designers backed by George RR Martin.

Kaleidoscope is pure atmosphere, mixing cutting-edge projection-mapping
with traditional mechanical effects to create a surreal, psychedelic
experience - like if Disneyland's Alice ride was remade by Tim Burton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEeQnVPxRb4

The video ridethough is pure bonkers pleasure. I don't know when I'll be
able to fly again, but I am still technically the Guest of Honor for
Denver's Milehicon, next October, and if it happens, I'm definitely
sneaking off for a ride!

https://www.milehicon.org/

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✊🏿 Big Tech is good at being big

When I talk about how we should fight tech monopolies, I often make the
point that tech companies used to grow by making things, but now they
grow by buying them.

For example Google created 1.5 amazing products (a search engine and a
Hotmail clone) and then bought a bunch of companies. Its in-house
products - G+, Sidewalk Labs, smartwatches, Loon - are boondoggles,
vanity projects and failures.

A couple weeks ago, a Twitter commenter challenged me on this, asking
why Google's excellence when it comes to SCALE didn't qualify as
"innovation"? In some ways, making a hit product is the easy part -
keeping it running once it's a hit is the hard part.

I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. I'm a recovering systems
administrator. I know how hard scale is. I remember when Youtube was all
"buffering..." errors. Hell, I remember when Blogger crashed on a
near-daily basis.

Google's expertise in running reliable services at scale is humbling and
astounding.

But it's not enough. The argument is complex, so I wrote an essay about it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/technical-excellence-and-scale

The short version: doing things well at scale comes with the territory
for monopolists. Standard Oil pumped a lot of oil and the Rail Trust
moved a lot of rolling stock. If being good at scale gets you a pass
from anti-monopoly law, then anti-monopoly law is meaningless.

What's more, much of Google's expertise at scaling (as well as that of
other Big Tech, from Apple and Microsoft to Facebook) is the result of
still more acquisitions - from server companies to cluster-management
companies.

In a world of vigorously enforced anti-monopoly rules, those companies
would be standalones, selling products to anyone who wanted them - not
allowing monopolists to better manage the nascent competitors they've
gobbled up.

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✊🏿 Personalized, signed copies of Little Brother/Homeland

During this month's uprisings, I've heard from hundreds of people who
wrote to tell me that they're reminded of my novels Little Brother and
Homeland, books in which youth-led uprising meet overwhelming,
militarized force and high-tech surveillance.

Often, people praise me for some kind of prescience in writing these
books; but as with so much science fiction, what looks like prediction
is actually observation. Cops have been ratcheting up surveillance and
militarization for longer than I've been writing.

I find this trend every bit as alarming as you do. The closer I observe
it, the more worried I become, especially as the private sector becomes
more and more central to the totalitarian project .

At that point, you're not just fighting systemic racism and paranoia in
law enforcement. Private sector procurements turn that into a chimera
where gladhanding commissioned salesfores offer junkets, massages, cash
and gear to cops who buy spy tech.

They recruit sports stars as spokespeople (and offer them shares in the
company):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/eff-challenges-ring-spokesperson-shaq-over-privacy-concerns

Their billionaire owners threaten reporters who disclose their role in
helping governments violate human rights and use attack lawyers to
secure misleading "retractions."

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jun/14/yana-peel-uk-rights-advocate-serpentine-nso-spyware-pegasus

Periodically this boils over and I write a new Little Brother. The next
one, Attack Surface, is about a spy-tech hacker who realizes she's been
on the wrong side of things when her friend's Oakland BLM chapter is
targeted by the tools she developed.

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

In anticipation of that release, on Jul 7, Tor Books is publishing an
omnibus edition of Little Brother and Homeland, which Snowden - who
knows firsthand what it means to switch from spying on people to
defending them from spying - wrote an amazing intro for.

My local sf/horror/fantasy bookstore, Dark Delicacies, is offering
signed, personalized copies of the book, which you can preorder here:

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

They're hanging in there, despite having been kicked out of their home
of 25 years by a greedy landlord (who still hasn't managed to rent their
old space, and may he lose his shirt), and despite the pandemic. I'm so
pleased to be able to find a way to support them.

Dark Delicacies is also offering personalized, signed copies of my first
picture book, Poesy the Monster Slayer, which comes out the following week:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/04/cross-burnings/#pw

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✊🏿 No fix for Chrome's Incognito Mode

When you hit a newspaper's "soft paywall" and try to load the article in
Chrome's Incognito Mode (which promises to undetectably present your
browser to the site as a new user, with no cookies), the site often
complains that you're in private mode and balks.

How is this possible? What happened to "undetectable?" Google updated
Chrome in 2019, promising to make it impossible for sites to distinguish
between incognito mode and new users.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/incognito-mode-detection-still-works-in-chrome-despite-promise-to-fix/

The way sites had previously made this distinction was by checking to
see whether they could write data to your browser's local storage;
Incognito Mode did not allow this. Chrome "fixed" this by capping
Incognito's local storage at 120MB.

So, of course, anti-Incognito scripts immediately appeared: all they had
to do was check to see whether available storage was precisely 120MB.
Sites like the New York Times rolled out this script right away.

A year's gone by and Google still hasn't fixed it. Google's caught
between different priorities here: on the one hand, it's been named in a
class action suit for tracking users in Incognito Mode.

On the other hand, news companies have pursued both litigation and
lawmaking (especially in the EU) against Google, and the company is
unwilling to pick a fight with companies that buy their ink by the barrel.

Caught in the crossfire are users, who want Incognito Mode to block
their identities from a wide range of spying activities, including
protesters looking to protect their identities from police surveillance.

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✊🏿 DoJ seizes pro-BLM coronavirus masks

The Movement for Black Lives had tens of thousands of dollars' worth of
coronavirus masks printed for protesters to wear, but these keep getting
seized by cops in the mail.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-lives-matter-coronavirus-protest-masks_n_5ed9a69bc5b68bc1a40159b9

Four shipments - from Oakland to NYC, DC, Minneapolis and St Louis -
were seized, and M4BL has been instructed to "contact the U.S. Postal
Inspection Service for further information."

The masks were produced by Movement Ink's Rene Quinonez, who said, "This
isn't a weapon. It's more about safety. We’re trying to figure out how
to keep our community safe."

The CDC - which, under Trump's direction, has put in one of the worst
public health responses on the planet - advises protesters to wear masks
and has warned that protests could be "seeding events" for covid outbreaks.

Here's a statement from The Movement for Black Lives's Chelsea Fuller:
"Police have rioted coast to coast, beating and gassing protesters who
have called for an end to police violence, with the explicit approval of
President Trump.

"Now, it appears they want to ensure that people who protest are
susceptible to the same deadly pandemic that they have failed miserably
at stopping. The continued surveillance and disruption of social
movements under this administration is as chilling as it is dangerous.
It should be roundly condemned."

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✊🏿 Science Fiction Writers of America on Black Lives Matter

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has published an
excellent statement on Black Lives Matter and the protests.

https://www.sfwa.org/2020/06/04/a-statement-from-sfwa-on-black-lives-matter-and-protests/

In it, they acknowledge that "SFWA has historically ignored and, in too
many instances, reinforced the injustices, systemic barriers, and
unaddressed racism, particularly toward Black people, that have
contributed to this moment."

Science fiction has had a large reactionary element literally from the
start, when leftist science fiction writers from the Futurian house were
excluded from the very first World Science Fiction Convention because of
their political views.

http://www.jophan.org/mimosa/m21/kyle.htm

SFWA's forums and message boards were slow off the mark to address
racist and sexist harassment, and white supremacist elements in the
field have tried to sabotage the Hugo Awards, picketed conventions, and
sent racist messages over SFWA's channels.

But SFWA underwent a sea change some years ago and has been making
meaningful strides towards inclusion ever since. In the new statement -
unanimously signed by SFWA's board - the organization acknowledges that
these measures are not enough.

They announce a raft of new, concrete steps they will take to improve
the inclusivity and diversity of the field, including:

* Donating proceeds from June Nebula Conference ticket purchases to the
Carl Brandon Society and the Black Speculative Fiction Society

* Matching every Nebula ticket bought in June with a seat for a Black
writer at the event

* Waiving fees for Black writers at next year's Nebula event

* Offering travel subsidies to Black writers attending next year's Nebulas

* Waiving SFWA membership dues for Black writers for the next year

* Offering grant money to Black-led sf/f organizations

The organization also links to several reading lists, notably Ibram X
Kendi's "Antiracist Reading List":

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/books/review/antiracist-reading-list-ibram-x-kendi.html

And they provide links to several Black sf/f and literary organizations:

* Black Science Fiction Society

https://blacksciencefictionsociety.com/page/contact-us

* FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction

https://www.fiyahlitmag.com/support-us/

* Carl Brandon Society

https://carlbrandon.org/

* Black Tribbles

http://www.blacktribbles.com/

* People of Color in Publishing

https://www.pocinpublishing.com/donate

* I Need Diverse Games

https://ineeddiversegames.org/donate/

* We Need Diverse Books

https://diversebooks.org/fundraising/

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✊🏿 This day in history

#15yrsago Dilbert shills for the BSA
https://web.archive.org/web/20050607004841/http://www.bsaengineers.com/

#15yrsago Orwell Plaza in Barcelona has continuous CCTV recording
https://audioteletipos.livejournal.com/269506.html

#10yrsago Fish oil and snake oil
https://www.badscience.net/2010/06/the-return-of-a-2bn-fishy-friend/

#5yrsago CVS security guards sue: "they made us tail Black and Latino
customers"
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/0604/Shopping-while-black-lawsuit-a-first-by-employees-targets-CVS

#5yrsago Edward Snowden, two years later: the world rejects surveillance
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/opinion/edward-snowden-the-world-says-no-to-surveillance.html

#5yrsago After lying and covering up, Facebook finally changes rules for
inmates' pages
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/facebook-reforms-inmate-account-takedown-process

#5yrsago Connecticut teacher fired for reading Allen Ginsberg poem to AP
class
https://ncac.org/news/blog/terminated-for-reading-an-allen-ginsberg-poem

#5yrsago Utah cop executes unarmed man who was listening to headphones,
gets away with it
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/06/03/1390285/-Shocking-new-video-shows-unarmed-Utah-man-was-listening-to-headphones-when-killed-by-police

#1yrago AOC condemns solitary confinement for Paul Manafort
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1136320114335391744

#1yrago New Jersey law would force Verizon to pay the taxes it avoided
for a decade
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/06/verizon-stiffed-towns-on-millions-in-taxes-but-might-have-to-pay-it-back/

#1yrago Russia adds Tinder to the list of apps that have to release user
data to its cops and spies on demand, without a warrant
https://www.zdnet.com/article/russia-says-tinder-must-share-user-data-private-messages/

#1yrago The best Joker is the woman Joker who snaps after a lifetime of
being told to "smile, baby" by shitty men
https://everywhereist.com/2019/06/i-tweeted-about-the-joker-being-a-woman-who-was-tired-of-this-shit-and-it-now-feels-auto-biographical/

#1yrago 68% of "ordinary Facebook investors" voted to fire Zuckerberg
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6

#1yrago LA's new homelessness stats reveal a crisis that is only
worsening
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-06052019-story.html

#1yrago Patronscan wants cities to require bars to scan your ID with its
service so it can maintain a secret, unaccountable blacklist
https://onezero.medium.com/id-at-the-door-meet-the-security-company-building-an-international-database-of-banned-bar-patrons-7c6d4b236fc3

#1yrago Leaked UK military "Extreme Right Wing" checklist: "using the
term 'Islamofascism'", adding "-istan" to place names
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/29/army-guide-spot-right-wing-extremists-warns-identify-patriots/

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✊🏿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Dan Howland (https://twitter.com/ridetheory/),
Deeplinks (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 534 words (23706
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances:

* Cogx, Jun 8, "Freedom and Civic Duties: How to beat surveillance
capitalism and reclaim your privacy" 9AM Pacific. Free registration via
https://ti.to/cogx/cogx-2020/en/discount/SPCXSFP100

* Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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