From doctorow at craphound.com Tue Oct 1 10:00:01 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2024 07:00:01 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Tor Books has just published two new, free "Little Brother" stories: "Vigilant," about creepy surveillance in distance education: https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/ And "Spill," about oil pipelines and indigenous landback: https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords: Put Wall Street landlords up against a wall. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords The American Dream, such as it is, used to be *two* dreams, one based on work and solidarity, the other on asset appreciation and disconnected individualism. We killed the first one. As the New Deal gave way to the post-war social safety net, Americans discovered two paths to social mobility: they could join a union, and they could buy a home. Joining a union meant that your wages would rise with productivity, and that the democratic ideal that you were meant to approach once every two years at the ballot-box could follow you into the building you spent more waking hours in than any other: your jobsite. Labor unions used their political power to win labor *rights*, so that even workers who weren't a union couldn't be arbitrarily fired, or maimed on the job with impunity, or harassed or abused. And while the labor movement was mired in the same racist legacy that every American institution brought forward out of genocide and slavery, where racialized people started unions of their own or demanded representation from the unions who nominally represented them, they thrived. Then there were houses. On the one hand, owning your home insulated you from the petty tyranny of the landlord, the threat of eviction, rent hikes, indifferent or dangerous building maintenance, and all the other miseries that arise when you think of a building as your home and someone else thinks of it as an asset, and the board is tilted so that they win every argument. But homeownership wasn't just sold as a way to get out from under scumbag landlords: it was primarily sold as a way to build intergenerational wealth. Your house wasn't just a place to live: it was an asset, and it *appreciated*. And if the dividends of labor protection were unevenly distributed between white people and racial minorities, the dividends of home ownership were almost *entirely* hoarded by white families. Federal policies - redlining - combined with racist lending at the local level, meant that Black families and other racialized groups were stuck in tenancy, while white families build wealth thanks to federal subsidies: https://web.archive.org/web/20170220005558/https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Asset%20Value%20of%20Whiteness.pdf Those were the two American dreams: a good job and your own home. We killed the first one, and the second one devoured us whole. Without a strong labor movement, wages stagnated. Corporate power waxed, and with it, the power to pollute, to poison, to maim and to defraud. The labor movement wasn't strong enough to stop Reagan from killing free UC tuition when he was governor of California. It wasn't strong enough to hold back spiraling health care prices. It wasn't strong enough to block the business lobby from neutering antitrust and ushering in four decades of market concentration, market capture and corruption. Workers couldn't save their defined benefits pension and were railroaded into market-based 401(k)s, forcing them to play the stock casino against their bosses, ever the sucker at the poker table. With stagnant wages and out of control medical, educational and end-of-life bills, homeownership - the thing you do as an individual, where your gain is someone else's loss - became the American secular religion. Your house wasn't just a place to sleep and keep your photo albums: if it appreciated enough, you might be able to liquidate it on your deathbed and pay off your eldercare, your healthcare, your kids' college debt, and leave enough left over for your kids' downpayments. And so every American who had a home became the enemy of every American who didn't - including one another's children. Every home built threatened your own property values. The racist, batshit American school funding formula, which sees schools funded out of property taxes, meaning the richest kids get the best schools, turned out to be a great way to increase your property values. Protections for tenants, meanwhile, threatened the entire American way of life - the American dream itself. Every protection a tenant got - protection from eviction or rent hikes, the legal right to a safe and well-maintained home - reduced the value of every home in town. After all, the better a landlord has to treat their tenants, the less money a landlord can make from a rental property. The less money a landlord can make from a rental property, the less they'd bid on a house like yours if it went up for sale. And since anyone planning to buy your house to live in it has to outbid a landlord who might want to rent it out, giving tenants any protection threatened everything - the one asset you owned, which was your plan a, b and c for paying off all that health, education, and assisted living debt: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ Today, the house-as-asset scam is breathing its last. There are millions more people who need homes than there are homes available. Sure, homelessness is a fantastically complex problem, but you could address every aspect of it - addiction, mental illness, joblessness - and millions of people would *still* be homeless, because there aren't enough homes for them to live in: https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/myths-about-homeless-people-with-dr-margot-kushel 70% of all inflation in 2024 came from the cost of housing; a quarter of *that* came from illegal collusive behavior by landlords to hike rents: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental-inflation Wall Street landlords have raised gigantic war-chests and are buying up homes at a rate never before seen, converting every available single-family home in many cities from an owner-occupied home to a rental. Private equity and hedge fund landlords have elevated charging junk fees to an absurdist theater project: you pay a "convenience" charge for paying your rent in cash. But also for paying your rent by direct transfer. Oh, and also for paying in cash. When Wall Street is your landlord, your home is a slum, dangerously undermaintained, sometimes lethally so: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords Capitalists hate capitalism. The best thing to sell is something your customer can't live without, and that no one else has for sale. That's why "the market" loves private prisons so much: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch The vast sums Wall Street is putting into buying up all of America's available housing stock is a bet that they can establish regional monopolies over *having a home*, and charge all the market can bear. That's the plan at Invitation Homes, a company that was just targeted by the @FTC for a slate of eye-watering crimes against the tenants in the 80,000 single-family homes they've acquired: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-takes-action-against-invitation-homes-deceiving-renters-charging-junk-fees-withholding-security Invitation Homes purchases homes as they come on the market, and they're also a leading customer of the "build-to-rent" housing industry, a fast-growing segment of new housing starts. Writing about the FTC's enforcement action against Invitation Homes, Matt Soller brings in Starwood Capital Group, who manage Invitation Homes properties, and own 14,000 more homes in the sunbelt. Invitation and Starwood *hate* the anti-monopoly movement, and Barry Sternlicht, Starwood's billionaire CEO, *really* hates FTC Chair Lina Khan: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corporate-slumlords The FTC complaint lays out a suite of just comically sleazy things ways that Invitation abuses its tenants, starting with false advertising. The company lists its houses at relatively low rents, then charges a large fee to apply to live there. When you pass the application process, you're told the rent is actually much higher, and if you walk away from the deal, you forfeit your application fee. That scam's netted Invitation $18m since 2019. Stoller *really* hates junk fees, calling them "convenience fees without any convenience, service charges without any service performed." He lays out Invitation's long list of junk fees, which honestly sound like a list that Chatgpt would spit out if you prompted it for fifty junk fees that wouldn't pass the giggle-test: "utility management fees" "Lease Easy bundle fees," "air filter delivery fee," "smart home technology fees," etc etc. "Smart home technology fee?" Yeah, Invitation's gone in hard for Internet of Shit smart home tech. The SVP who oversees Invitation's smart home fee program was ordered to "juice this hog" (you guys, juice doesn't come from hogs). After decades of recruiting everyday American homeowners to demand anti-tenant policies that benefit giant corporations, American tenants have few rights on paper and even fewer in practice. That's left the door wide open for Invitation to abuse their tenants in a myriad of dismal and unimaginative ways: stealing their deposits, trashing their credit reports to retaliate against complaints, illegal evictions, busted appliances, mold, vermin, insects - the whole slumlord playbook. As Stoller writes, there's a twist: "this landlord isn?t just a random slumlord, it?s one of the biggest Wall Street players in housing." There are vast fortunes to be made in converting the human right to housing into an asset class, but those fortunes end up in the hands of a very small number of billionaires. On their own, they wouldn't have the political power to dismantle protections for tenants. Realistically speaking, most kids who grew up in their parents' owner-occupied homes are going to end up tenants, thanks to undersupply and housing inflation. But those kids' parents have spent decades demanding policies to make their homes as valuable as possible - including mortgage tax breaks (but not rent tax breaks!), looser eviction laws, and less enforcement of what few protections tenants have. Middle class homeowners are the useful idiots and human shields of the billionaires who are determined to force every American under 40 raise their kids in a rented slum full of spiders, ratshit and black mold, which will still cost 60% of their take-home salary. That's why the FTC's action against Invitation Homes is such a big deal. And as Stoller points out, Chair Khan is really just implementing Kamala Harris's campaign promise to get Wall Street out of the landlord business. Wall Street's raid on your bedroom and kitchen has inspired a generation of "finfluencer" copycats who buy and flip apartment buildings, sucking ever-larger amounts of cash out of them until they're unfit for human habitation, with mountains of rat-infested garbage ringing their crumbling walls: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston Any future worth living in is going to get housing right. We need to stop thinking of housing as an asset and realize that it is, first and foremost, a human right. That's the premise of my 2023 solarpunk novel *The Lost Cause*, which just came out in paperback: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause You can't protect yourself from rising seas or rising healthcare bills through individual home-ownership. Solidarity - the kind of solidarity that once powered the union movement, and that is powering it again - is the only way to defeat the housing profiteers. The New Deal wasn't perfect, which is why whatever we do next has to be bigger, further reaching, and more inclusive than what FDR did almost a century ago. The only minority that should be excluded from the next New Deal is *billionaires*. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Hey look at this * Georgia Voter Registration Check https://georgia.keepthevote.org * If you have ever used Uber Eats, you can't sue Uber when they crash one of their cars into you https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/09/if-you-have-ever-used-uber-eats-you-cant-sue-uber-when-they-crash-one-of-their-cars-into-you/ * The Past, Present, and Future of Software Evolution https://moscow.sci-hub.st/3119/c99d2042ae9743e7326ed57ba9c5ef75/godfrey2008.pdf#navpanes=0&view=FitH (h/t Gus Thomas) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? This day in history #20yrsago India: Your IP is NG for us https://web.archive.org/web/20041011200232/http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2004-October/006992.html #20yrsago Bruce Sterling: Marry the UN and the Net https://web.archive.org/web/20041012070928/http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001314.html #15yrsago HOWTO make scary guts out of expanding foam insulation https://web.archive.org/web/20091211220737/http://www.halloween-haunted-house.com/how.html#guts #15yrsago Liar: YA suspense novel that elevates the unreliable narrator to a new level https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/01/liar-ya-suspense-novel-that-elevates-the-unreliable-narrator-to-a-new-level/ #10yrsago Finance industry profiteers exploit prisoners? families https://time.com/3446372/criminal-justice-prisoners-profit/ #10yrsago No Such Thing: spooky (not scary!) picture book https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/01/no-such-thing-spooky-not-scary-picture-book/ #10yrsago Hundreds of US police forces have distributed malware as ?Internet safety software? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/computercop-dangerous-internet-safety-software-hundreds-police-agencies #10yrsago Chinese security forces administer rectal probes to 10,000 pigeons https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/10/1/chinese-security-body-searches-10000-pigeons #5yrsago Europe?s Right to Repair rules have passed, and will take effect in 2021 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49884827 #5yrsago Make: a Halloween ?Useless Machine? with a skeleton inside it https://www.instructables.com/RIP-Skeleton/ #5yrsago Zuckerberg: President Warren would ?suck? for Facebook https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings #5yrsago Consent in Gaming: a guide for GMs and players to difficult subjects for amazing games https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/288535/Consent-in-Gaming #5yrsago ?The Tragedy of the Commons?: how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend #5yrsago Surveillance camera hallucinates face in the snow, won?t shut up about it https://twitter.com/kcimc/status/1099934485301276673https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment-a9123181.html #5yrsago Stock buybacks: how Wall Street has created ?profits without prosperity? https://worth.com/stock-buybacks-threaten-economic-growth/ #1yrago How the Writers Guild sunk AI?s ship https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Upcoming appearances * Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? David Graeber Institute (Remote), Oct 3 https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsduuprjgpG9C4SAenCK4jOsawnkxDrY_-#/registration * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Recent appearances * Rethink: Is the internet getting worse? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r * Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0 * DEF CON 32 - Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 782 words (56197 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Latest podcast: Vigilant (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ???? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Wed Oct 2 08:14:32 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2024 05:14:32 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Tor Books has just published two new, free "Little Brother" stories: "Vigilant," about creepy surveillance in distance education: https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/ And "Spill," about oil pipelines and indigenous landback: https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist: Clinical needs sacrificed to profit maximization. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are *required* to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend *two* hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR. How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in *The American Prospect*, Epic may be a *clinical* disaster, but it's a profit-generating *miracle*: https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/ At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency." In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno - a pregnant biologist - drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency - comparable to a major heart-attack - and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition *and* the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60. Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don?t you think it might be a 3?" Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for *The New England Journal of Medicine*, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI. The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes - they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated - track health outcomes - but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight. But there was one group that *loved* EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/ The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent...the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased": https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is *great* at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool - it takes *18 keystrokes* just to enter a prescription: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481 Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero." Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes. The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event - such as a medical exam - into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/ The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time - not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians." EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient?s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/ Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver. Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity - and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether. One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data. But Epic's approach - anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties - is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital - a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach - say, from Uber or a transit system - can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions. The fact that anonymized data can - will! - be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmits responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated *sixty* papers in *Nature* in a matter of months. Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom - from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels - and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse. Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something *has* to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves. Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ?Soul of the Internet? https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/internet-archive-major-label-music-lawsuit-1235105273/ * Alleged Tax Dodger Says It?s a ?Legitimate Snail-Farming Operation? https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/10/alleged-tax-dodger-says-its-a-legitimate-snail-farming-operation.html * Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney renews blast at ?gatekeeper? platform owners https://venturebeat.com/games/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-renews-blast-at-gatekeeper-platform-owners/ (h/t Slashdot) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago George Soros blogs https://web.archive.org/web/20041009162245/http://georgesoros.com/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Home #15yrsago Zombies Calling: snappy popcult zombie comic in the Scott Pilgrim mold https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/02/zombies-calling-snappy-popcult-zombie-comic-in-the-scott-pilgrim-mold/ #10yrsago Keurig sued for anti-competitive K-cup tactics https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/keurig-coffee-sued-for-600m-by-ontario-based-club-coffee-1.2783633 #10yrsago Directors? commentary for ?In Real Life? https://web.archive.org/web/20160331041746/http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2014/directors-commentary-cory-doctorow-jen-wang-talk-in-real-life/ #10yrsago David Cameron raps the Tories? nasty party manifesto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU #10yrsago Hong Kong and America: two systems, one corruption https://web.archive.org/web/20141006033919/http://www.lessig.org/2014/10/we-should-be-protesting-too/ #10yrsago World Intellectual Property Organization in shambolic chaos https://www.keionline.org/22621 #10yrsago Why the UK middle class should be rioting in the streets https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11109845/Why-arent-the-British-middle-classes-staging-a-revolution.html #10yrsago Human beings are the gut flora of immortal, transhuman corporations https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/02/human-beings-are-the-gut-flora-of-immortal-transhuman-corporations/ #10yrsago Daughter of Hong Kong leader thanks ?taxpayers? for diamonds on Facebook https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/Hong-Kong-leaders-daughter-creates-controversy-with-Facebook-post/articleshow/44115995.cms #10yrsago Nobody wants to host the 2022 Olympics https://sports.yahoo.com/why-no-one-wants-to-host-the-2022-olympics-225450509.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory #5yrsago IRS admits it audits poor people because auditing rich people is too expensive https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor#168476 #5yrsago Elizabeth Warren proposes an ?excessive lobbying tax? that would fund independent Congressional experts and public participation in policy https://medium.com/@teamwarren/excessive-lobbying-tax-fca7cc86a7e5 #5yrsago Apple bans an app because Hong Kong protesters might use it to avoid the murderous, out of control police https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/02/apple-bans-an-app-because-hong-kong-protesters-might-use-it-to-avoid-the-murderous-out-of-control-police/ #5yrsago The complicated, nuanced story of how racialized French people fought to save their local McDonald?s https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/758048712/libert-galit-and-french-fries ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? David Graeber Institute (Remote), Oct 3 https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsduuprjgpG9C4SAenCK4jOsawnkxDrY_-#/registration * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * A Book Talk with Cory Doctorow and Woodrow Hartzog at BU Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkt9dlTX-gs * Rethink: Is the internet getting worse? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r * Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 834 words (57028 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Latest podcast: Vigilant (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Oct 3 12:36:12 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:36:12 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Prime's enshittified advertising Message-ID: <94ffe33e-43c5-4fc9-8c82-a0bdf8fcdaed@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Tor Books has just published two new, free "Little Brother" stories: "Vigilant," about creepy surveillance in distance education: https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/ And "Spill," about oil pipelines and indigenous landback: https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Prime's enshittified advertising: Don't touch that dial. No, seriously, DON'T. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Prime's enshittified advertising Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-is-getting-more-ads-next-year/ The cruelty isn't the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you - your time, your attention - to the company's shareholders. That's the crux of enshittification. Companies don't enshittify - making their once-useful products monotonically worse - because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can't monetize your attention). This isn't new. The internet has always been dominated by intermediaries - platforms - because there are lots more people who want to *use* the internet than are capable of *building* the internet. There's more people who want to write blogs than can make a blogging app. There's more people who want to play and listen to music than can host a music streaming service. There's more people who want to write and read ebooks than want to operate an ebook store or sell an ebooks reader. Despite all the early internet rhetoric about the glories of disintermediation, intermediaries are good, actually: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/ The problem isn't with intermediaries *per se*. The problem arises when intermediaries grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they connect. The problem with Uber isn't the use of mobile phones to tell taxis that you're standing on a street somewhere and would like a cab, please. The problem is rampant worker misclassification, regulatory arbitrage, starvation wages, and price-gouging: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible There's no problem with publishers, distributors, retailers, printers, and all the other parts of the bookselling ecosystem. While there are a few, rare authors who are capable of performing all of these functions - basically gnawing their books out of whole logs with their teeth - most writers can't, and even the ones who can, don't want to: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation When early internet boosters spoke of disintermediation, what they mostly meant was that it would be harder for intermediaries to capture those relationships - between sellers and buyers, creators and audiences, workers and customers. As Rebecca Giblin and I wrote in our 2022 book *Chokepoint Capitalism*, intermediaries in every sector rely on chokepoints, narrows where they can erect tollbooths: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ When chokepoints exist, they multiply up and down the supply chain. In the golden age of physical, recorded music, you had several chokepoints that reinforced one another. Limited radio airwaves gave radio stations power over record labels, who had to secretly, illegally bid for prime airspace ("payola"). Retail consolidation - the growth of big record chains - drove consolidation in the distributors who sold to the chains, and the more concentrated distributors became, the more they could squeeze retailers, which drove *even more* consolidation in record stores. The bigger a label was, the more power it had to shove back against the muscle of the stores and the distributors (and the pressing plants, etc). Consolidation in labels also drove consolidation in talent agencies, whose large client rosters gave them power to resist the squeeze from the labels. Consolidation in venues drives consolidation in ticketing and promotion - and vice-versa. But there's two parties to this supply chain who *can't* consolidate: musicians and their fans. With limits on "sectoral bargaining" (where unions can represent workers against *all* the companies in a sector), musicians' unions were limited in their power against key parts of the supply chain, so the creative workers who *made* the workers were easy pickings for labels, talent reps, promoters, ticketers, venues, retailers, etc. Music fans are diffused and dispersed, and organized fan clubs were usually run by the labels, who weren't about to allow those clubs to be used against the labels. This is a perfect case-study in the problems of powerful intermediaries, who move from facilitator to parasite, paying workers less while degrading their products, and then charge customers more for those enshittified products. The excitement about "disintermediation" wasn't so much about *eliminating* intermediaries as it was about *disciplining* them. If there were *lots* of ways to market a product or service, sell it, collect payment for it, and deliver it, then the natural inclination of intermediaries to turn predator would be curbed by the difficulty of corralling their prey into chokepoints. Now that we're a quarter century on from the Napster Wars, we can see how that worked out. Decades of failure to enforce antitrust law allowed a few companies to effectively capture the internet, buying out rivals who were willing to sell, and bankrupting those who wouldn't with illegal tactics like predatory pricing (think of Uber losing $31 billion by subsidizing $0.41 out of every dollar they charged for taxi rides for more than a decade). The market power that platforms gained through consolidation translated into *political* power. When a few companies dominate a sector, they're able to come to agreement on common strategies for dealing with their regulators, and they've got plenty of excess profits to spend on those strategies. First and foremost, platforms used their power to get *more* power, lobbying for even less antitrust enforcement. Additionally, platforms mobilized gigantic sums to secure the right to screw customers (for example, by making binding arbitration clauses in terms of service enforceable) and workers (think of the $225m Uber and Lyft spent on California's Prop 22, which formalized their worker misclassification swindle). So big platforms were able to insulate themselves from the risk of competition ("five giant websites, filled with screenshots of the other four" - Tom Eastman), and from regulation. They were also able to expand and mobilize IP law to prevent anyone from breaking their chokepoints or undoing the abuses that these enabled. This is a good place to get specific about how Prime Video works. There's two ways to get Prime videos: over an app, or in your browser. Both of these streams are encrypted, and that's *really* important here, because of a law - Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act - which makes it *really* illegal to break this kind of encryption (commonly called "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). Practically speaking, that means that if a company encrypts its videos, no one is allowed to do anything to those videos, *even things that are legal*, without the company's permission, because doing all those legal things requires breaking the DRM, and breaking the DRM is a *felony* (five years in prison, $500k fine, for a first offense). Copyright law actually gives subscribers to services like Prime a *lot* of rights, and it empowers businesses that offer tools to exercise those rights. Back in 1976, Sony rolled out the Betamax, the first major home video recorder. After an eight-year court battle, the Supreme Court weighed in on VCRs and ruled that it was legal for all of us to record videos at home, both to watch them later, and to build a library of our favorite shows. They also ruled that it was legal for Sony - and by that time, every other electronics company - to make VHS systems, *even if those systems could be used in ways that violated copyright* because they were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" (letting you tape shows off your TV). Now, this was more than a decade before the DMCA - and its prohibition on breaking DRM - passed, but even after the DMCA came into effect, there was a *lot* of media that didn't have DRM, so a new generation of tech companies were able to make tools that were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and that didn't have to break any DRM to do it. Think of the Ipod and Itunes, which, together, were sold as a way to rip CDs (which weren't encrypted), and play them back from both your desktop computer and a wildly successful pocket-sized portable device. Itunes even let you stream from one computer to another. The record industry hated this, but they couldn't do anything about it, thanks to the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling. Indeed, they eventually swallowed their bile and started selling their products through the Itunes Music Store. These tracks had DRM and were thus permanently locked to Apple's ecosystem, and Apple immediately used that power to squeeze the labels, who decided they didn't like DRM after all, and licensed all those same tracks to Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store, whose slogan was "DRM: Don't Restrict Me": https://memex.craphound.com/2008/02/01/amazons-anti-drm-tee/ Apple played a funny double role here. In marketing Itunes/Ipods ("Rip, Mix, Burn"), they were the world's biggest cheerleaders for all the things you were allowed to do with copyrighted works, even when the copyright holder objected. But with the Itunes Music Store and its mandatory DRM, the company was *also* one of the world's biggest cheerleaders for wrapping copyrighted works in a thin skin of IP that would allow copyright holders to shut down products like the Ipod and Itunes. Microsoft, predictably enough, focused on the "lock everything to our platform" strategy. Then-CEO Steve Ballmer went on record calling every Ipod owner a "thief" and arguing that every record company should wrap music in Microsoft's Zune DRM, which would allow them to restrict anything they didn't like, even if copyright allowed it (and would also give Microsoft the same abusive leverage over labels that they famously exercised over Windows software companies): https://web.archive.org/web/20050113051129/http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39124642,00.htm In the end, Amazon's approach won. Apple dropped DRM, and Microsoft retired the Zune and shut down its DRM servers, screwing anyone who'd ever bought a Zune track by rendering that music permanently unplayable. Around the same time as all this was going on, *another* company was making history by making uses of copyrighted works that the law allowed, but which the copyright holders *hated*. That company was Tivo, who products did for personal video recorders (PVRs) what Apple's Ipod did for digital portable music players. With a Tivo, you could record any show over cable (which was too expensive and complicated to encrypt) and terrestrial broadcast (which is illegal to encrypt, since those are the public's airwaves, on loan to the TV stations). That meant that you could record *any* show, and keep it forever. What's more, you could *very* easily skip through ads (and rival players quickly emerged that did *automatic* ad-skipping). All of this was legal, but of course the cable companies and broadcasters hated it. Like Ballmer, TV execs called Tivo owners "thieves." But Tivo didn't usher in the ad-supported TV apocalypse that furious, spittle-flecked industry reps insisted it would. Rather, it *disciplined* the TV and cable operators. Tivo owners actually sought out ads that were funny and well-made enough to go viral. Meanwhile, every time the industry decided to increase the amount of advertising in a show, they also increased the likelihood that their viewers would seek out a Tivo, or worse, one of those auto-ad-skipping PVRs. Given all the stink that TV execs raised over PVRs, you'd think that these represented a novel threat. But in fact, the TV industry's appetite for ads had been disciplined by viewers' access to new technology since 1956, when the first TV remotes appeared on the market (executives declared that anyone who changed the channel during an ad-break was a thief). Then came the mute button. Then the wireless remote. Meanwhile, a common VCR use-case - raised in the Supreme Court case - was fast-forwarding ads. At each stage, TV adapted. Ads in TV shows represented a kind of *offer*: "Will you watch this many of these ads in return for a free TV show?" And the remote, the mute button, the wireless remote, the VCR, the PVR, and the ad-skipping PVR all represented a *counter-offer*. As economists would put it, the ability of viewers to make these counteroffers "shifted the equilibrium." If viewers had *no* defensive technology, they might tolerate more ads, but once they were able to enforce their preferences with technology, the industry couldn't enshittify its product to the liminal cusp of "so many ads that the viewer is *right on the brink* of turning off the TV (but not quite)." This is the same equilibrium-shifting dynamic that we see on the open web, where more than 50% of users have installed an ad-blocker. The industry says, "Will you allow this many 'sign up to our mailing list' interrupters, pop ups, pop unders, autoplaying videos and other stuff that users hate but shareholders benefit from" and the ad-blocker makes a counteroffer: "How about 'nah?'": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah TV remotes, PVRs and ad-blockers are all examples of "adversarial interoperability" - a new product that plugs into an existing one, extending or modifying its functions without permission from (or even over the objections of) the original manufacturer: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability Adversarial interop creates a powerful disciplining force on platform owners. Once a user grows so frustrated with a product's enshittification that they research, seek out, acquire and learn to use an adversarial interop tool, it's really game over. The printer owner who figures out where to get third-party ink is gone *forever*. Every time a company like HP raises its prices, they have to account for the number of customers who will finally figure out how to use generic ink and *never, ever send another cent to HP*. This is where DMCA 1201 comes into play. Once a product is skinned with DRM, its manufacturers gain the right to prevent you from doing *legal* things, and can use the public's courts and law-enforcement apparatus to punish you for trying. Take HP: as soon as they started adding DRM to their cartridges, they gained the legal power to shut down companies that cloned, refilled or remanufactured their cartridges, and started raising the price of ink - which today sits at more than $10,000/gallon: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches Using third party ink in your printer isn't illegal (it's your printer, right?). But *making* third party ink for your printer *becomes* illegal once you have to break DRM to do so, and so HP gets to transform tinted water into literally the most expensive fluid on Earth. The ink you use to print your kid's homework costs more than vintage Veuve Cliquot or sperm from a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred. Adversarial interoperability is a powerful tool for shifting the equilibrium between producers, intermediaries and buyers. DRM is an even more powerful way of wrenching that equilibrium *back* towards the intermediary, reducing the share that buyers and sellers are able to eke out of the transaction. Prime Video, of course, is delivered via an app, which means it has DRM. That means that subscribers don't get to exercise the rights afforded to them by copyright - only the rights that Amazon permits them to have. There's no Tivo for Prime, because it would have to break the DRM to record the shows you stream from Prime. That allows Prime to pull *all kinds* of shady shit. For example, every year around this time, Amazon pulls popular Christmas movies from its free-to-watch tier and moves them into pay-per-view, only restoring them in the spring: https://www.reddit.com/r/vudu/comments/1bpzanx/looks_like_amazon_removed_the_free_titles_from/ And of course, Prime sticks ads in its videos. You can't skip these ads - not because it's technically challenging to make a 30-second advance button for a video stream, and doing so wouldn't violate anyone's copyright - but because Amazon doesn't permit you to do so, and the fact that the video is wrapped in DRM makes it a felony to even try. This means that Amazon gets to seek a different equilibrium than TV companies have had to accept since 1956 and the invention of the TV remote. Amazon doesn't have to limit the quantity, volume, and invasiveness of its ads to "less the amount that would drive our subscribers to install and use an ad-skipping plugin." Instead, they can shoot for the much more lucrative equilibrium of "so obnoxious that the viewer is *almost* ready to cancel their subscription (but not quite)." That's pretty much *exactly* how Kelly Day, the Amazon exec in charge of Prime Video, put it to the *Financial Times*: they're increasing the number of ads because "we haven?t really seen a groundswell of people churning out or cancelling": https://www.ft.com/content/f8112991-820c-4e09-bcf4-23b5e0f190a5 At this point, attentive readers might be asking themselves, "Doesn't Amazon have to worry about Prime viewers who watch in their browsers?" After all browsers are built on open standards, and anyone can make one, so there should be browsers that can auto-skip Prime ads, right? Wrong, alas. Back in 2017, the W3C - the organization that makes the most important browser standards - caved to pressure from the entertainment industry and the largest browser companies and created "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME), a "standard" for video DRM that blocks *all* adversarial interoperability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership This had the almost immediate effect of making it impossible to create an independent browser without licensing proprietary tech from Google - now a convicted monopolist! - who won't give you a license if you implement recording, ad-skipping, or any other legal (but dispreferred) feature: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/ This means that for Amazon, there's no way to shift value away from the platform to you. The company has locked you in, and has locked out anyone who might offer you a better deal. Companies that know you are technologically defenseless are endlessly inventive in finding ways to make things worse for you to make things better for them. Take Youtube, another DRM-video-serving platform that has jacked up the number of ads you have to sit through in order to watch a video - even as they slash payments to performers. They've got a new move: they're gonna start showing you ads while your video is paused: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/20/youtube-pause-ads-rollout/75306204007/ That is the kind of fuckery you only come up with when your victory condition is "a service that's *almost* so bad our customers quit (but not quite)." In Amazon's case, the math is even worse. After all, Youtube may have near-total market dominance over a certain segment of the video market, but Prime Video is bundled with Prime Delivery, which the *vast* majority of US households subscribe to. You have to give up a *lot* to cancel your Prime subscription - especially since Amazon's predatory pricing devastated the rest of the retail sector: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola Amazon's founding principle was "customer obsession." Ex-Amazoners tell me that this was more than an empty platitude: arguments over product design were won or lost based on whether they could satisfy the "customer obsession" litmus test. Now, everyone falls short of their ideals, but sticking to your ideals isn't merely a matter of internal discipline, of willpower. Living up to your ideals is a matter of *external* discipline, too. When Amazon no longer had to contend with competitors or regulators, when it was able to use DRM to control its customers and use the law to prevent them from using its products in legal ways, it lost those external sources of discipline. Amazon suppliers have long complained of the company's high-handed treatment of the vendors who supplied it with goods. Its workers have complained bitterly and loudly about the dangerous and oppressive conditions in its warehouses and delivery vans. But Amazon's customers have consistently given Amazon high marks on quality and trustworthiness. The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn't that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over. But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it's shooting for "keeping customers so angry that they're *almost* ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)." You see this in the steady decline of Amazon product search, which preferences the products that pay the biggest bribes for search placement over the best matches: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens And you see it in the steady enshittification of Prime Video. Amazon's *character* never changed. The company *always* had a predatory side. But now that monopoly and IP law have insulated it from consequences for its actions, there's no longer any reason to keep the predator in check. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Hey look at this * Who Are the ?Undecided?? https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-02-who-are-the-undecided/ * PC Floppy Copy Protection: An Interview With Robert McQuaid https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-interview.html (h/t Jos'h) * You can now download over 33,000 sound effects from the BBC archive https://djmag.com/news/you-can-now-download-over-33000-sound-effects-bbc-archive (h/t Hacker News) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? This day in history #15yrsago HOWTO make a packing tape ghost https://makezine.com/article/craft/how-to-packing-tape-ghost-sculptures/ #10yrsago Animation explains the dangers of Computercop, the malware that US police agencies distribute to the public https://web.archive.org/web/20141003115913/http://fusion.net/video/19094/who-needs-the-nsa-anyone-could-spy-on-your-kids-thanks-to-computercop/ #10yrsago Mobile malware infections race through Hong Kong?s Umbrella Revolution https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/year-of-the-rat-chinas-malware-war-on-activists-goes-mobile/ #10yrsago Larry ?Wide Stance? Craig busted (again) https://www.loweringthebar.net/2014/10/larry-craig-cant-catch-a-break.html #5yrsago Straws are a distraction: how the plastics industry successfully got you to blame yourself for pollution https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/plastics-industry-plastic-pollution/ #5yrsago Resource Generation: rich kids who are determined to give away their parents? money and make America more fair and equal https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a29008841/rich-kids-revolution-resource-generation/,/a> #5yrsago CN Tower?s management company claims that any picture of the landmark building is a trademark violation https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/03/cn-towers-management-company-claims-that-any-picture-of-the-landmark-building-is-a-trademark-violation/ #5yrsago What happened to the 2008 bailout money? https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-was-11-years-ago-were-still-tracking-every-penny #5yrsago Tiktok?s internal policies are both weird and terrible https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-time/ #5yrsago ?I just love to solve problems?: how people who work at predatory lenders avoid thinking about the pain they inflict https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-five-years-justified-piling-debt-poor-customers #5yrsago Adversarial Interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability #1yrago Google's enshittification memos https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics Upcoming appearances (permalink) * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme Recent appearances (permalink) * A Book Talk with Cory Doctorow and Woodrow Hartzog at BU Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkt9dlTX-gs * Rethink: Is the internet getting worse? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r * Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0 Latest books (permalink) * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 750 words (57779 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 Latest podcast: Vigilant (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Oct 7 08:28:30 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2024 05:28:30 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ On October 23 at 7PM, I'll be in Decatur, presenting my novel *The Bezzle* at Eagle Eye Books: https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor: There's no such thing as a backdoor that only works when 'good guys' use it. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor State-affiliated Chinese hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others; they entered their networks and spent months intercepting US traffic - from individuals, firms, government officials, etc - and they did it all without having to exploit any code vulnerabilities. Instead, they used the back door that the FBI requires every carrier to furnish: https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink In 1994, Bill Clinton signed CALEA into law. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every US telecommunications network to be designed around facilitating access to law-enforcement wiretaps. Previous to CALEA, telecoms operators were often at pains to design their networks to *resist* infiltration and interception. Even if a telco didn't go that far, they were at the very least indifferent to the needs of law enforcement, and attuned instead to building efficient, robust networks. Predictably, CALEA met stiff opposition from powerful telecoms companies as it worked its way through Congress, but the Clinton administration bought them off with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to acquire wiretap-facilitation technologies. Immediately, a new industry sprang into being; companies that promised to help the carriers hack themselves, punching back doors into their networks. The pioneers of this dirty business were overwhelmingly founded by ex-Israeli signals intelligence personnel, though they often poached senior American military and intelligence officials to serve as the face of their operations and liase with their former colleagues in law enforcement and intelligence. Telcos weren't the only opponents of CALEA, of course. Security experts - those who weren't hoping to cash in on government pork, anyways - warned that there was no way to make a back door that was only useful to the "good guys" but would keep the "bad guys" out. These experts were - then as now - dismissed as neurotic worriers who simultaneously failed to understand the need to facilitate mass surveillance in order to keep the nation safe, *and* who lacked appropriate faith in American ingenuity. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a security system that selectively fails when a cop needs it to, but stands up to every crook, bully, corporate snoop and foreign government. In other words: "We have faith in you! NERD HARDER!" NERD HARDER! has been the answer ever since CALEA - and related Clinton-era initiatives, like the failed Clipper Chip program, which would have put a spy chip in every computer, and, eventually, every phone and gadget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip America may have invented NERD HARDER! but plenty of other countries have taken up the cause. The all-time champion is former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who, when informed that the laws of mathematics dictate that it is impossible to make an encryption scheme that only protects good secrets and not bad ones, replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia": https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-australia-will-trump-the-laws-of-mathematics-turnbull/ CALEA forced a redesign of the foundational, physical layer of the internet. Thankfully, encryption at the protocol layer - in the programs we use - partially counters this deliberately introduced brittleness in the security of all our communications. CALEA can be used to intercept your communications, but mostly what an attacker gets is "metadata" ("so-and-so sent a message of X bytes to such and such") because the data is scrambled and they can't unscramble it, because cryptography actually *works*, unlike back doors. Of course, that's why governments in the EU, the US, the UK and all over the world are *still* trying to ban working encryption, insisting that the back doors they'll install will only let the good guys in: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/ *Any* back door can be exploited by your adversaries. The Chinese sponsored hacking group know as Salt Typhoon intercepted the communications of hundreds of millions of American residents, businesses, and institutions. From that position, they could do NSA-style metadata-analysis, malware injection, and interception of unencrypted traffic. And they *didn't have to hack anything*, because the US government insists that all networking gear ship *pre-hacked* so that cops can get into it. This isn't even the first time that CALEA back doors have been exploited by a hostile foreign power as a matter of geopolitical skullduggery. In 2004-2005, Greece's telecommunications were under mass surveillance by US spy agencies who wiretapped Greek officials, all the way up to the Prime Minister, in order to mess with the Greek Olympic bid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305 This is a wild story in *so many* ways. For one thing, CALEA isn't law in Greece! You can totally sell working, secure networking gear in Greece, and in many other countries around the world where they have not passed a stupid CALEA-style law. *However* the US telecoms market is so fucking *huge* that all the manufacturers build CALEA back doors into their gear, no matter where it's destined for. So the US has effectively exported this deliberate insecurity to the whole planet - and used it to screw around with *Olympic bids*, the most penny-ante bullshit imaginable. Now Chinese-sponsored hackers with cool names like "Salt Typhoon" are traipsing around inside US telecoms infrastructure, using the back doors the FBI insisted would be safe. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Hey look at this * Juice Rescue ??? https://juice-rescue.org * Privacy and security in your messages https://opcandado.citizensandtech.org * The Fed Took $3k From You and Gave it to Jamie Dimon https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-fed-took-3k ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? This day in history #20yrsago How the NSA broke crypto, and created civilian crypto industry https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html #20yrsago Brewster Kahle: Universal access to all human knowledge is possible https://craphound.com/kahleweb20.txt #20yrsago HOWTO break Google Print DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20041011120549/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/weblog/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2004/10/07/2 #15yrsago Japanese court overturns Winny ruling, says file-sharing software is legal even if used for infringement https://web.archive.org/web/20091009232138/http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20091008p2a00m0na016000c.html #15yrsago Robert E Howard collection, HEROES IN THE WIND: revisit your heroic past https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/08/robert-e-howard-collection-heroes-in-the-wind-revisit-your-heroic-past/ #15yrsago The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn?t want you to see! https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-ralph-lauren-doesnt-want-you-to-see/ #15yrsago Scott Westerfeld?s Leviathan: kick-ass young adult steampunk series starts with a bang, a hiss and a clank https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/06/scott-westerfelds-leviathan-kick-ass-young-adult-steampunk-series-starts-with-a-bang-a-hiss-and-a-clank/ #10yrsago Profile of Daniel Pinkwater, ?Pynchon for kids? https://forward.com/culture/206667/how-daniel-pinkwater-became-my-own-personal-guru/ #10yrsago Sore losers: How casinos went after two guys who found a video poker bug https://www.wired.com/2014/10/cheating-video-poker/ #10yrsago Fixing the unfixable USB bug https://www.wired.com/2014/10/unpatchable-usb-malware-now-patchsort/ #10yrsago 20 meaningful things you can do about climate change http://thischangeseverything.org/twenty-things-you-can-do-to-address-the-climate-crisis/ #10yrsago 10% of Americans have 10 or more alcoholic drinks every day https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/ #10yrsago $35 Firefox OS smartphone ? back to the drawing board https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/ #5yrsago For the first time ever, taxes on the 400 richest Americans were lower than taxes on everyone else https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html #5yrsago Supreme Court greenlights lawsuit over Amazon?s wage-theft from warehouse workers https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-supreme-court-rejects-amazon-warehouse-worker-wage-appeal-idUSKBN1WM1FI/ #5yrsago Bernie Blindness: a subreddit for noting the way press narratives ignore or smear Bernie Sanders https://www.reddit.com/r/bernieblindness/top/ #5yrsago Checkm8: an ?unstoppable? Iphone jailbreaking crack https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/developer-of-checkm8-explains-why-idevice-jailbreak-exploit-is-a-game-changer/ #5yrsago After an injunction against Pacifica radio, New York?s WBAI is back on the air https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786 #5yrsago How the ?Varsity Blues? admissions scam punished deserving, hard working kids so that mediocre kids of the super-rich could prosper https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/08/how-the-varsity-blues-admissions-scam-punished-deserving-hard-working-kids-so-that-mediocre-kids-of-the-super-rich-could-prosper/ #5yrsago Facebook?s 2016 election billboards: Buy all your elections with us! https://twitter.com/MarietjeSchaake/status/1180166896294887424 #5yrsago Podcast: Why do people believe the Earth is flat? https://ia601006.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_311/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_311_-_Why_do_people_believe_the_Earth_is_flat.mp3 #5yrsago The cloud vs humanity: Adobe terminates every software license in Venezuela, keeps Venezuelans? money https://helpx.adobe.com/la/x-productkb/policy-pricing/executive-order-venezuela.html #5yrsago How this fine gentleman convinced me to donate $300 to Elizabeth Warren https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/06/how-this-fine-gentleman-convinced-me-to-donate-300-to-elizabeth-warren/ #5yrsago The corrupt Brazilian prosecutors who locked up Lula now want to release him, to make him less sympathetic https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/06/the-corrupt-brazilian-prosecutors-who-locked-up-lula-now-want-to-release-him-to-make-him-less-sympathetic/ #5yrsago Hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map https://ia803109.us.archive.org/7/items/disneylandmap1968_201910/DisneylandMap1968Full.jpg ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming appearances * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Recent appearances * Go Fact Yourself https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/ * The great decline of everything online (Lately podcast) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-cory-doctorow-podcast-interview/ * A Book Talk with Cory Doctorow and Woodrow Hartzog at BU Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkt9dlTX-gs ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? Colophon Today's top sources: Matt Blaze (https://www.mattblaze.org/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: words ( words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ?? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Tue Oct 8 12:39:34 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2024 09:39:34 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Google's new phones can't stop phoning home Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ On October 23 at 7PM, I'll be in Decatur, presenting my novel *The Bezzle* at Eagle Eye Books: https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Google's new phones can't stop phoning home: The call is coming from inside the house. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Google's new phones can't stop phoning home One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people *like* commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn't like spying, they wouldn't opt into being spied on. This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would *ever* permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/11/sxsw-facial-recognition-biometrics-surveillance-panel The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face." This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to *economic* ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations. Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that *can't* be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially *power*. The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they *chose* to do so - to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved. Conservatives hate this idea. They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of *choice*. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power. Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband. Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button. In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in *three* places and was *still* being tracked: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog Multiple googlers complained about this: they'd gone through dozens of preference screens, hunting for "don't track my location" checkboxes, and *still* they found that they were being tracked. These were people who worked under Chai *on the location services team*. If the head of that team, and her subordinates, couldn't figure out how to opt out of location tracking, what chance did you have? Despite all this, I've found myself continuing to use stock Google Pixel phones running stock Google Android. There were three reasons for this: First and most importantly: security. While I worry about Google tracking me, I am as worried (or more) about foreign governments, random hackers, and dedicated attackers gaining access to my phone. Google's appetite for my personal data knows no bounds, but at least the company is serious about patching defects in the Pixel line. Second: coercion. There are a *lot* of apps that I need to run - to pay for parking, say, or to access my credit union or control my rooftop solar - that either won't run on jailbroken Android phones or require constant tweaking to keep running. Finally: time. I already have the equivalent of three full time jobs and struggle every day to complete my essential tasks, including managing complex health issues and being there for my family. The time I take out of my schedule to actively manage a de-Googled Android would come at the expense of either my professional or personal life. And despite Google's enshittificatory impulses, the Pixels are reliably high-quality, robust phones that get the hell out of the way and let me do my job. The Pixels are Google's flagship electronic products, and the company acts like it. Until now. A new report from Cybernews reveals just how much data the next generation Pixel 9 phones collect and transmit to Google, without any user intervention, and in defiance of the owner's express preferences to the contrary: https://cybernews.com/security/google-pixel-9-phone-beams-data-and-awaits-commands/ The Pixel 9 phones home *every 15 minutes*, even when it's not in use, sharing "location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry." Additionally, every 40 minutes, the new Pixels transmit "firmware version, whether connected to WiFi or using mobile data, the SIM card Carrier, and the user?s email address." Even further, even if you've never opened Google Photos, the phone contacts Google Photos? Face Grouping API at regular intervals. Another process periodically contacts Google's Voice Search servers, even if you never use Voice Search, transmitting "the number of times the device was restarted, the time elapsed since powering on, and a list of apps installed on the device, including the sideloaded ones." All of this is *without* any consent. Or rather, without any consent beyond the "revealed preference" of just buying a phone from Google ("to opt out, don't have a face"). What's more, the Cybernews report probably *undercounts* the amount of passive surveillance the Pixel 9 undertakes. To monitor their testbench phone, Cybernews had to root it and install Magisk, a monitoring tool. In order to do that, they had to disable the AI features that Google touts as the centerpiece of Pixel 9. AI is, of course, notoriously data-hungry and privacy invasive, and all the above represents the data collection the Pixel 9 undertakes *without* any of its AI nonsense. It just gets worse. The Pixel 9 also routinely connects to a "CloudDPC" server run by Google. Normally, this is a server that an enterprise customer would connect its employees' devices to, allowing the company to push updates to employees' phones without any action on their part. But Google has designed the Pixel 9 so that privately owned phones do the same thing with Google, allowing for zero-click, no-notification software changes on devices that you own. This is the kind of measure that works well, but fails badly. It assumes that the risk of Pixel owners failing to download a patch outweighs the risk of a Google insider pushing out a malicious update. Why would Google do that? Well, perhaps a rogue employee wants to spy on his ex-girlfriend: https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/ Or maybe a Google executive wins an internal power struggle and decrees that Google's products should be made shittier so you need to take more steps to solve your problems, which generates more chances to serve ads: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Or maybe Google capitulates to an authoritarian government who orders them to install a malicious update to facilitate a campaign of oppressive spying and control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine) Indeed, merely by installing a feature that can be abused this way, Google *encourages* bad actors to abuse it. It's a lot harder for a government or an asshole executive to demand a malicious downgrade of a Google product if users have to accept that downgrade before it takes effect. By removing that choice, Google has greased the skids for malicious downgrades, from both internal and external sources. Google will insist that these anti-features - both the spying and the permissionless updating - are *essential*, that it's literally impossible to imagine building a phone that doesn't do these things. This is one of Big Tech's stupidest gambits. It's the same ruse that Zuck deploys when he says that it's impossible to chat with a friend or plan a potluck dinner without letting Facebook spy on you. It's Tim Cook's insistence that there's no way to have a safe, easy to use, secure computing environment without giving Apple a veto over what software you can run and who can fix your device - and that this veto *must* come with a 30% rake from every dollar you spend on your phone. The thing is, we know it's possible to separate these things, because *they used to be separate*. Facebook used to sell itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace, where they would *never* spy on you (not coincidentally, this is also the best period in Facebook's history, from a user perspective): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362 And we know it's possible to make a Pixel that doesn't do all this nonsense because Google makes other Pixel phones that don't do all this nonsense, like the Pixel 8 that's in my pocket as I type these words. This doesn't stop Big Tech from gaslighting* us and insisting that demanding a Pixel that doesn't phone home four times an hour is like demanding water that isn't wet. *pronounced "jass-lighting" Even before I read this report, I was thinking about what I would do when I broke my current phone (I'm a klutz and I travel a lot, so my gadgets break pretty frequently). Google's latest OS updates have already crammed a bunch of AI bullshit into my Pixel 8 (and Google puts the "invoke AI bullshit" button in the spot where the "do something useful" button used to be, meaning I accidentally pull up the AI bullshit screen several times/day). Assuming no catastrophic phone disasters, I've got a little while before my next phone, but I reckon when it's time to upgrade, I'll be switching to a phone from the @calyxinstitute at mastodon.social. Calyx is an incredible, privacy-focused nonprofit whose founder, Nicholas Merrill, was the first person to successfully resist one of the Patriot Act's "sneek-and-peek" warrants, spending 11 years defending his users' privacy from secret - and, ultimately, unconstitutional - surveillance: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/depth-judge-illstons-remarkable-order-striking-down-nsl-statute Merrill and Calyx have tapped into various obscure corners of US wireless spectrum licenses that require major carriers to give ultra-cheap access to nonprofits, allowing them to offer unlimited, surveillance-free, Net Neutrality respecting wireless data packages: https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunnel-that-runs-underneath-the-phone-companies-and-emerges-in-paradise/ I've been a very happy Calyx user in years gone by, but ultimately, I slipped into the default of using stock Pixel handsets with Google's Fi service. But even as I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of Google's Android and Pixel programs, I've grown increasingly *impressed* with Calyx's offerings. The company has graduated from selling mobile hotspots with unlimited data SIMs to selling jailbroken, de-Googled Pixel phones that have all the hardware reliability of a Pixel, coupled with an alternative app suite and your choice of a Calyx SIM and/or a Calyx hotspot: https://calyxinstitute.org/ Every time I see what Calyx is up to, I think, *dammit, it's really time to de-Google my phone*. With the Pixel 9 descending to new depths of enshittification, that decision just got a lot easier. When my current phone croaks, I'll be talking to Calyx. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster * Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.html * Frogger Walkable City https://woe-industries.itch.io/frogger-walkable-city (h/t Boing Boing) ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago HOWTO censor the net with a Hotmail account https://web.archive.org/web/20041023150004/http://www.bof.nl/docs/researchpaperSANE.pdf #20yrsago Pratchett?s ?Going Postal?: Graft, hackers, and a semaphore Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/09/pratchetts-going-postal-graft-hackers-and-a-semaphore-internet/ #20yrsago Both Presidential candidates arrested while serving papers on CPD https://web.archive.org/web/20041009213011/https://badnarik.org/supporters/blog/2004/10/08/michael-badnarik-arrested/ #15yrsago Marc Laidlaw?s ?Sleepy Joe? ? sf story comic podcast about war, cable access and human bombs https://escapepod.org/2009/10/08/ep219-sleepy-joe/ #15yrsago Junky Styling: a manual for thrift-shop clothes-remixers https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/09/junky-styling-a-manual-for-thrift-shop-clothes-remixers/ #10yrsago Kids who sext more likely to be comfortable with their sexuality https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/47/Supplement_1/229/78000/The-Relationships-Between-Adrenal-Cortical?redirectedFrom=PDF #10yrsago SWAT team murders burglary victim because burglar claimed he found meth https://www.techdirt.com/2014/10/08/swat-team-raids-house-kills-homeowner-because-criminal-who-burglarized-house-told-them-to/ #10yrsago Malware needs to know if it?s in the Matrix https://web.archive.org/web/20141009164227/http://thestack.com/mimicry-in-malware-giovanni-vigna-081014 #5yrsago After banning working cryptography and raiding whistleblowers, Australia?s spies ban speakers from national infosec conference https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/09/melbourne-cyber-conference-organisers-pressured-speaker-to-edit-biased-talk #5yrsago SQL Murder Mystery: teaching SQL concepts with a mystery game https://github.com/NUKnightLab/sql-mysteries #5yrsago Washington establishment freaks out as Modern Monetary Theory gains currency https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-07/economists-worry-that-mmt-is-winning-the-argument-in-washington #5yrsago Hunter Biden?s Ukraine gig was corrupt, just not in the way Republican conspiracists claim it was https://theintercept.com/2019/10/09/joe-hunter-biden-family-money/ #5yrsago Gamers propose punishing Blizzard for its anti-Hong Kong partisanship by flooding it with GDPR requests https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/df0zx5/upset_about_blizzards_hk_ruling_heres_what_to_do/ #1yrago How Google's trial secrecy lets it control the coverage https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Go Fact Yourself https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/ * The great decline of everything online (Lately podcast) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-cory-doctorow-podcast-interview/ * A Book Talk with Cory Doctorow and Woodrow Hartzog at BU Law https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkt9dlTX-gs ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 752 words (60068 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Oct 10 14:58:29 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:58:29 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked Message-ID: <99cf537b-0201-4250-8c98-1a0a96886116@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ On October 23 at 7PM, I'll be in Decatur, presenting my novel *The Bezzle* at Eagle Eye Books: https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked: "Software-based car" is a warning, not a slogan. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked There are few phrases in the modern lexicon more accursed than "software-based car," and yet, this is how the failed EV maker Fisker billed its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed, shut down its servers, and bricked all those "software-based cars": https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/ Fisker billed itself as a "capital light" manufacturer, meaning that it didn't particularly make anything - rather, it "designed" cars that other companies built, allowing Fisker to focus on "experience," which is where the "software-based car" comes in. Virtually every subsystem in a Fisker car needs (or rather, needed) to periodically connect with its servers, either for regular operations or diagnostics and repair, creating frequent problems with brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, locking and unlocking the doors: https://www.businessinsider.com/fisker-owners-worry-about-vehicles-working-bankruptcy-2024-4 Since Fisker's bankruptcy, people with even minor problems with their Fisker EVs have found themselves owning expensive, inert lumps of conflict minerals and auto-loan debt; as one Fisker owner described it, "It's literally a lawn ornament right now": https://www.businessinsider.com/fisker-owners-describe-chaos-to-keep-cars-running-after-bankruptcy-2024-7 This is, in many ways, typical Internet-of-Shit nonsense, but it's compounded by Fisker's capital light, all-outsource model, which led to extremely unreliable vehicles that have been plagued by recalls. The bankrupt company has proposed that vehicle owners should have to pay cash for these recalls, in order to reserve the company's capital for its creditors - a plan that is clearly illegal: https://www.veritaglobal.net/fisker/document/2411390241007000000000005 This isn't even the first time Fisker has done this! Ten years ago, founder Henrik Fisker started another EV company called Fisker Automotive, which went bankrupt in 2014, leaving the company's "Karma" (no, really) long-range EVs (which were unreliable and prone to bursting into flames) in limbo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma Which raises the question: why did investors reward Fisker's initial incompetence by piling in for a second attempt? I think the answer lies in the very factor that has made Fisker's failure so hard on its customers: the "software-based car." Investors *love* the sound of a "software-based car" because they understand that a gadget that is connected to the cloud is ripe for rent-extraction, because with software comes a bundle of "IP rights" that let the company control its customers, critics and competitors: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ A "software-based car" gets to mobilize the state to enforce its "IP," which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics (who can, in turn, be price-gouged for licensing and diagnostic tools). "IP" can be used to shut down manufacturers of third party parts. "IP" allows manufacturers to revoke features that came with your car and charge you a monthly subscription fee for them. All sorts of features can be sold as downloadable content, and clawed back when title to the car changes hands, so that the new owners have to buy them again. "Software based cars" are easier to repo, making them perfect for the subprime auto-lending industry. And of course, "software-based cars" can gather *much* more surveillance data on drivers, which can be sold to sleazy, unregulated data-brokers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon Unsurprisingly, there's a large number of Fisker cars that never sold, which the bankruptcy estate is seeking a buyer for. For a minute there, it looked like they'd found one: American Lease, which was looking to acquire the deadstock Fiskers for use as leased fleet cars. But now that deal seems dead, because no one can figure out how to restart Fisker's servers, and these vehicles are bricks without server access: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-major-speed-bump-as-fleet-sale-is-now-in-question/ It's hard to say why the company's servers are so intransigent, but there's a clue in the chaotic way that the company wound down its affairs. The company's final days sound like a scene from the last days of the German Democratic Republic, with apparats from the failing state charging about in chaos, without any plans for keeping things running: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/east-germany-stasi-surveillance-documents/ As it imploded, Fisker cycled through a string of Chief Financial officers, losing track of millions of dollars at a time: https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/31/fisker-collapse-investigation-ev-ocean-suv-henrik-geeta/ When Fisker's landlord regained possession of its HQ, they found "complete disarray," including improperly stored drums of toxic waste: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/05/fiskers-hq-abandoned-in-complete-disarray-with-apparent-hazardous-waste-clay-models-left-behind/ And while Fisker's implosion is particularly messy, the fact that it landed in bankruptcy is entirely unexceptional. Most businesses fail (*eventually*) and most startups fail (*quickly*). Despite this, businesses - even those in heavily regulated sectors like automotive regulation - are allowed to design products and undertake operations that are not designed to outlast the (likely short-lived) company. After the 2008 crisis and the collapse of financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, finance regulators acquired a renewed interest in succession planning. Lehman consisted of over 6,000 separate corporate entities, each one representing a bid to evade regulation and/or taxation. Unwinding that complex hairball took *years*, during which the entities that entrusted Lehman with their funds - pensions, charitable institutions, etc - were unable to access their money. To avoid repeats of this catastrophe, regulators began to insist that banks produce "living wills" - plans for unwinding their affairs in the event of catastrophe. They had to undertake "stress tests" that simulated a wind-down as planned, both to make sure the plan worked and to estimate how long it would take to execute. Then banks were required to set aside sufficient capital to keep the lights on while the plan ran on. This regulation has been indifferently enforced. Banks spent the intervening years insisting that they are capable of prudently self-regulating without all this interference, something they continue to insist upon even after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout The fact that the rules haven't been enforced tells us nothing about whether the rules would work if they *were* enforced. A string of high-profile bankruptcies of companies who had no succession plans and whose collapse stands to materially harm large numbers of people tells us that *something* has to be done about this. Take 23andme, the creepy genomics company that enticed millions of people into sending them their genetic material (even if you aren't a 23andme customer, they probably have most of your genome, thanks to relatives who sent in cheek-swabs). 23andme is now bankrupt, and its bankruptcy estate is shopping for a buyer who'd like to commercially exploit all that juicy genetic data, even if that is to the detriment of the people it came from. What's more, the bankruptcy estate is refusing to destroy samples from people who want to opt out of this future sale: https://bourniquelaw.com/2024/10/09/data-23-and-me/ On a smaller scale, there's Juicebox, a company that makes EV chargers, who are exiting the North American market and shutting down their servers, killing the advanced functionality that customers paid extra for when they chose a Juicebox product: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/2/24260316/juicebox-ev-chargers-enel-x-way-closing-discontinued-app I actually owned a Juicebox, which ultimately caught fire and melted down, either due to a manufacturing defect or to the criminal ineptitude of Treeium, the worst solar installers in Southern California (or both): https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here Projects like Juice Rescue are trying to reverse-engineer the Juicebox server infrastructure and build and alternative: https://juice-rescue.org/ This would be much simpler if Juicebox's manufacturer, Enel X Way, had been required to file a living will that explained how its customers would go on enjoying their property when and if the company discontinued support, exited the market, or went bankrupt. That might be a big lift for every little tech startup (though it would be superior than trying to get justice *after* the company fails). But in regulated sectors like automotive manufacture or genomic analysis, a regulation that says, "Either design your products and services to fail safely, or escrow enough cash to keep the lights on for the duration of an orderly wind-down in the event that you shut down" would be perfectly reasonable. Companies could make "software based cars" but the more "software based" the car was, the more funds they'd have to escrow to transition their servers when they shut down (and the lest capital they'd have to build the car). Such a rule should be *in addition* to more muscular rules simply banning the most abusive practices, like the Oregon state Right to Repair bill, which bans the "parts pairing" that makes repairing a Fisker car so onerous: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed Or the Illinois state biometric privacy law, which strictly limits the use of the kind of genomic data that 23andme collected: https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004 Failing to take action on these abusive practices is dangerous - and not just to the people who get burned by them. Every time a genomics research project turns into a privacy nightmare, that salts the earth for future medical research, making it *much* harder to conduct population-scale research, which *can* be carried out in privacy-preserving ways, and which pays *huge* scientific dividends that we all benefit from: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership Just as Fisker's outrageous ripoff will make life harder for *good* cleantech companies: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps If people are convinced that new, climate-friendly tech is a cesspool of grift and extraction, it will punish those firms that are making routine, breathtaking, exciting (and extremely vital) breakthroughs: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/10/08/norways-national-football-stadium-has-the-worlds-largest-vertical-solar-roof-how-does-it-w ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * Wait Til Daddy Gets Home: America's Sad, Craven, Masochistic Relationship with the Republican Party https://catvalente.substack.com/p/wait-til-daddy-gets-home-americas * Molly White at XOXO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c * FTC Findings on Commercial Surveillance Can Lead to Better Alternatives https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/ftc-findings-commercial-surveillance-can-lead-better-alternatives ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #15yrsago Hallowe?en is safe https://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/goodbye-halloween-hello-safety/ #15yrsago Big Entertainment?s century-long technophobic binge https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-fearing-technologyin-its-own-words/ #10yrsago Laura Poitras?s Citizenfour: the real story of Edward Snowden https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/nyff-edward-snowden-doc-citizenfour-740060/ #10yrsago There?s no back door that only works for good guys https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/09/crypto-wars-redux-why-the-fbis-desire-to-unlock-your-private-life-must-be-resisted #10yrsago Buzz Lightyear cited in legal brief https://www.loweringthebar.net/2014/10/how-to-cite-buzz-lightyear.html #5yrsago Bruce Schneier makes the case for ?public interest technologists? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2jn4pXDZn0 #5yrsago Computer historians crack passwords of Unix?s early pioneers https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/87bluxpqy0.fsf at vuxu.org/ #5yrsago Apple?s capitulation over Hong Kong protest app isn?t new; and the NBA is racing it to the bottom https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/10/apples-capitulation-over-hong-kong-protest-app-isnt-new-and-the-nba-is-racing-it-to-the-bottom/ #5yrsago The Sacklers come to Sesame Street as a muppet is revealed to have had an addicted mother https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news-other-healthcare/465124-sesame-street-to-reveal-muppets-mom-suffered/ #5yrsago Verizon dumps another Oath property for peanuts: RIP, Mapquest https://searchengineland.com/a-eulogy-for-mapquest-322945 #5yrsago Hiding secrets in online text with zero-width characters https://web.archive.org/web/20200516062538/https://git.planetrenox.com/inzerosight/browser-extension #5yrsago Ikea?s founder was a Nazi, and never stopped praising the Nazi leader he called ?Best Brother? https://lithub.com/on-the-far-right-past-of-ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea/ #5yrsago Kelly Link and Gavin Grant have bought a bookstore! https://www.bookweb.org/news/author-kelly-link-gavin-j-grant-open-book-moon-easthampton-massachusetts-574432 #5yrsago Part two of my novella ?Martian Chronicles? on Escape Pod: who cleans the toilets in libertopia? https://escapepod.org/2019/10/10/escape-pod-701-martian-chronicles-part-2/ #5yrsago ?13 years later, World of Warcraft is STILL telling queer guilds they?re not allowed to advertise their queerness https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/11/%E2%80%8B13-years-later-world-of-warcraft-is-still-telling-queer-guilds-theyre-not-allowed-to-advertise-their-queerness/ #5yrsago Fatboy Slim mashes up Greta Thunberg?s UN speech https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1181950192960131074 #1yrago Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#inclusive-scabbing #1yrago Underground Empire: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's must-read account of "How America Weaponized the World Economy" https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties Upcoming appearances (permalink) * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ Recent appearances (permalink) * Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE * Go Fact Yourself https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/ * The great decline of everything online (Lately podcast) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-cory-doctorow-podcast-interview/ Latest books (permalink) * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 840 words (61666 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Oct 11 13:58:54 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2024 10:58:54 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party - and America Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/ Today's links * Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party - and America: Is the Harris administration committed to the American people, or billionaire donors? * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party - and America On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election - that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters. In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to *40%* of the Federal judiciary: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store: https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs: https://antiidlereborn.com/news/ To the entire news sector: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long police of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is *Google*, the perennial antitrust *defendant*. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/ Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is *global*. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid - *again*: https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/ What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get *ugly*. A new, excellent long-form *Bloomberg* article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership - billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC. The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How *dare* the FTC do things?!" And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was - in the quoted words of Tim Wu - "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams). But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was *timid*. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled *technician*, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency *and* determined to use them: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is *narrative*. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. *Bloomberg* recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won?t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more." When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees. The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where *no* workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright - the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations. After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told *Bloomberg* that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America. Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US - and global - movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters - not "the economy" or "the forces of history" - are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble. Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world - they want to be *praised* for it: * "Private equity?s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital; * "We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn?t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo * "Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176 When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001 Writing in *The Guardian*, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they *do* understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today. What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans - firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers - have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't *possibly* fix *anything* (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.'" This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently *proves your point*. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even *imagine* that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account - not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery. The fact that successive neoliberal governments - including Democratic administrations - acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold. Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids. Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/ If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be *more nihilism*, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we *also* think governments can't do anything" party. In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins. There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl": https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155 And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history": https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652 In other words: Lina Khan as a posse. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Hey look at this * The Age of Depopulation https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt (h/t Hacker News) * Wealth distribution in the United States https://www.righto.com/2024/10/wealth-distribution-in-united-states.html (h/t JWZ) * Cards Against Humanity Pays You to Give a Shit https://www.apologize.lol ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrsago Entertainment companies bent on wholesale slaughter of Betamax, puppies https://web.archive.org/web/20041010092552/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001987.php #15yrsago What?s wrong with Search Engine Optimization http://https://powazek.com/posts/2090 #15yrsago Gag order blocks Guardian from reporting on Parliament https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament #15yrsago Copyright vs. folk music https://web.archive.org/web/20091016014623/https://freemusicarchive.org/member/stevenarntson/blog/The_Absent_Second_An_Explanation #15yrsago xkcd: volume 0 https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/12/xkcd-volume-0/ #10yrsago Chinese Supreme Court makes service providers liable for ?human flesh search engine? https://archive.shine.cn/national/Rules-to-protect-personal-rights-online/shdaily.shtml #10yrsago NSA agents may have infiltrated the global communications industry https://web.archive.org/web/20141011080630/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/10/core-secrets/ #10yrsago Librarians on the vanguard of the anti-surveillance movement https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/03/librarians-wont-stay-quiet-about-government-surveillance/ #5yrsago AT&T hikes business customers? bills by up to 7%, charging them to recoup its own property taxes https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/att-raises-prices-7-by-making-its-customers-pay-atts-property-taxes/ #5yrsago Google continues to funnel vast sums to notorious climate deniers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers #5yrsago Mayor accused of failing to fullfil road maintenance promises is dragged through the streets by angry voters https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49984987 #5yrsago CBC sues Canada?s Conservative Party for using short debate clips in campaign materials https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2019/10/cbc-sues-the-conservative-party-of-canada-for-copyright-infringement-citing-campaign-video-posting-debate-excerpts-on-twitter/ Upcoming appearances (permalink) * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ Recent appearances (permalink) * Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia) https://digitalia.fm/744/ * Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE * Go Fact Yourself https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/ Latest books (permalink) * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 758 words (62424 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_0x9026DBBE1FC237AF.asc Type: application/pgp-keys Size: 3650 bytes Desc: OpenPGP public key URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: From doctorow at craphound.com Sat Oct 12 12:57:26 2024 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2024 09:57:26 -0700 Subject: [Plura-list] Quinque gazump linkdump Message-ID: <90e66391-fdd0-4f61-8ff5-6cda71b5b83b@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/12/pasticcio/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ On October 23 at 7PM, I'll be in Decatur, presenting my novel *The Bezzle* at Eagle Eye Books: https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ Today's links * Quinque gazump linkdump: A sprinkling of inklings for the weekend. * This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2023 * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Quinque gazump linkdump It's Saturday and any fule kno that this is the day for a linkdump, in which the links that couldn't be squeezed into the week's newsletter editions get their own showcase. Here's the previous 23 linkdumps: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ Start your weekend with some child's play! *Ada & Zangemann* is a picture book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandst?tter of Free Software Foundation Europe, telling the story of a greedy inventor who ensnares a town with his proprietary, remote-brickable gadgets, and Ada, his nemesis, a young girl who reverse engineers them and lets their users seize the means of computation: https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html *Ada & Zangemann* is open access - you can share it, adapt it, and sell it as you see fit - and has been translated into several languages. Now, there's a cartoon version, an animated adaptation that is likewise open access, with digital assets for your remixing pleasure: https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann//movie Figuring out how to talk to kids about important subjects is a clarifying exercise. Back in the glory days of SNL, Eddie Murphy lampooned Fred "Mr" Rogers style of talking to kids, and it was indeed very funny: https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Robinson But Mr Rogers' rhetorical style wasn't as simple as "talk slowly and use small words" - the "Fredish" dialect that Mr Rogers created was thoughtful, empathic, inclusive, and very effective: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/09/the-nine-rules-of-freddish-the-positive-inclusive-empathic-language-of-mr-rogers/ Lots of writers have used the sing-songy fairytale style of children's stories to make serious political points (see, e.g. *Animal Farm*). My own attempt at this was my 2011 short story "The Brave Little Toaster," for *MIT Tech Review*'s annual sf series. If the title sounds familiar, that's because I nicked it from Tom Disch's tale of the same name, as part of my series of stolen title stories: https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/ My *Toaster* story is a tale of IoT gone wild, in which the nightmare of a world of "smart" devices that exert control over their owners is shown to be a nightmare. A work colleague sent me this adaptation of the story as part of an English textbook, with lots of worksheet-style exercises. I'd never seen this before, and it's very fun: http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/bravetoaster.pdf If you like my "Brave Little Toaster," you'll likely enjoy my novella "Unauthorized Bread," which appears in my 2019 collection *Radicalized* and is currently being adapted as a middle-grades graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti for Firstsecond: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/ Childlike parables have their place, but just because something fits in a "just so" story, that doesn't make it true. Cryptocurrency weirdos desperately need to learn this lesson. The foundation of cryptocurrency is a fairytale about the origin of money, a mythological marketplace in which freely trading individuals who struggled to find a "confluence of needs." If you wanted to trade one third of your cow for two and a half of my chickens, how could we complete the transaction? In the "money story" fairy tale, we spontaneously decided that we would use gold, for a bunch of nonsensical reasons that don't bear even cursory scrutiny. And so coin money sprang into existence, and we all merrily traded our gold with one another until a wicked government came and stole our gold with (cue scary voice) *taaaaaaxes*. There is zero evidence for this. It's literally a fairy tale. There is a rich history of where money came from, and the answer, in short is, governments created it *through* taxes, and money doesn't exist without taxation: https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/ The money story is a lie, and it's a consequential one. The belief that money arises spontaneously out of the needs of freely trading people who voluntarily accept an arbitrary token as a store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange (coupled with a childish, reactionary aversion to taxation) inspired cryptocurrency, and with it, the scams that allowed unscrupulous huxters to steal billions from everyday people who trusted Matt Damon, Spike Lee and Larry David when they told them that cryptocurrency was a sure path to financial security: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho It turns out that private money, far from being a tool of liberation, is rather just a dismal tool for ripping off the unsuspecting, and that goes double for crypto, where complexity can be weaponized by swindlers: https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/ We don't hear nearly as much about crypto these days - many of the pump-and-dump set have moved on to pitching AI stock - but there's still billions tied up in the scam, and new shitcoins are still being minted at speed. The FBI actually created a sting operation to expose the dirtiness of the crypto "ecosystem": https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267098/fbi-coin-crypto-token-nexgenai-sec-doj-fraud-investigation They found that the exchanges, "market makers" and other seemingly rock-ribbed institutions where suckers are enticed to buy, sell, track and price cryptos are classic Big Store cons: http://www.amyreading.com/the-9-stages-of-the-big-con.html When you, the unsuspecting retail investor, enter one of these mirror-palaces, you are the only audience member in a play that everyone else is in on. Those vigorous trades that see the shitcoin you're being hustled with skyrocketing in value? They're "wash trades," where insiders buy and sell the same asset to one another, without real money ever changing hands, just to create the appearance of a rapidly appreciating asset that you had best get in on before you are priced out of the market. This scam is as old as con games themselves and, as with other scams- S&Ls, Enron, subprime - the con artists have parlayed their winnings into social respectability and are now flushing them into the political system, to punish lawmakers who threaten their ability to rip off you and your neighbors. A massive, terrifying investigative story in *The New Yorker* shows how crypto billionaires stole the Democratic nomination from Katie Porter, one of the most effective anti-scam lawmakers in recent history: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster Big Tech - like every corrupt cartel in history - is desperate to conjure a kleptocracy into existence, whose officials they can corrupt in order to keep the machine going until they've maximized their gains and achieved escape velocity from consequences. No surprise, then, that tech companies have adopted the same spin tactics that sowed doubt about the tobacco-cancer link, in order to keep the US from updating its anemic privacy laws. The last time Congress gave us a new consumer privacy law was 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rental history to newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act By preventing confining privacy law to the VCR era, Big Tech has been able to plunder our data with impunity - aided by cops and spies who love the fact that there's a source of cheap, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that would be illegal for them to collect. Writing for *Tech Policy Press*, the Norcal ACLU's Jake Snow connects the tobacco industry fight over "pre-emption" to the modern fight over privacy laws: https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it/ In the 1990s, Big Tobacco went to war against state anti-smoking laws, arguing that the federal government had the right - nay, the *duty* - to create a "harmonized" national system of smoking laws that would preempt state laws. Strangely, politicians who *love* "states' rights" when it comes to banning abortion, tax-base erosion and "right to work" anti-union laws suddenly discovered federal religion when their campaign donors from the Cancer-Industrial Complex decided that states shouldn't use those rights to limit smoking. This is *exactly* the tack that Big Tech has taken on privacy, arguing that any update to federal privacy law should abolish muscular state-level laws, like Illinois's best-in-class biometric privacy rules, or California's CPPA. Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has "funded front groups, hired an armada of lobbyists, donated millions to campaigns, and opened a firehose of lobbying money," with the goal of replacing "real privacy laws with fake industry alternatives as ineffective as non-smoking sections." Whether it's understanding the origin of money or the Big Tobacco playbook, knowing history can protect you from all kinds of predatory behavior. But history isn't merely a sword and shield, it's also just a *delight*. Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman is road-tripping around America, and in August, he got to Columbus, IN, home to some of the country's most beautiful and important architectural treasures: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/29/road-trip-the-company-town-and-the-corn-fields/ The buildings - clustered in within a few, walkable blocks - are the legacy of the diesel engine manufacturing titan Cummins, whose postwar president J Irwin Miller used the company's wartime profits to commission a string of gorgeous structures from starchitects like the Saarinens, IM Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, C?sar Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore. I had no idea about any of this, and now I want to visit Columbus! I'm planning a book tour right now (for my next novel, *Picks and Shovels*, which is out in February) and there's a *little* wiggle-room in the midwestern part of the tour. There's a possibility that I'll end up in the vicinity, and if that happens, I'm definitely gonna find time for a little detour! ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? This day in history #20yrago Monsanto stole patented wheat from Indian farmers https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/archive/2004/7403-monsantos-indian-wheat-patent-withdrawn-in-europe-4102004 #15yrsago Meet the 42 lucky people who got to see the secret copyright treaty https://www.keionline.org/39045 #15yrsago Airlines that charge fees lost more money than airlines that didn?t https://joe.biztravelife.com/09/042309.html #15yrsago EFF comes to the rescue of Texas Instruments calculator hackers https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/10/13 #10yrsago How state anti-choice laws let judges humiliate vulnerable teens https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/teen-abortion-judicial-bypass-parental-notification/ #10yrsago One weird legal trick that makes patent trolls cry https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/13/one-weird-legal-trick-that-makes-patent-trolls-cry/ #10yrsago Hong Kong?s pro-democracy websites riddled with malware https://www.volexity.com/blog/2014/10/09/democracy-in-hong-kong-under-attack/ #1yrago Microsoft put their tax-evasion in writing and now they owe $29 billion https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming appearances * ?Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza? (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12 https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/ * OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18 https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/ * SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22 https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn * Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23 https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow * TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10 https://tusconscificon.com/ * International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24 https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme * ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18 https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Recent appearances * Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia) https://digitalia.fm/744/ * Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE * Go Fact Yourself https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/ ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Latest books * The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html * "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) * "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html * "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Upcoming books * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 * Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? Colophon Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/), Hayley Tsukayama (https://www.hayleytsukayama.com/), Dave Maass (https://twitter.com/maassive). Currently writing: * Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Friday's progress: 768 words (63193 words total). * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/ This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. 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. ^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^ ? How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla