Hey, Apple, could you be a little more predatory on your customers?

See that trivial little cable to the right? That’s Apple’s proprietary iPhone charging cable, and that’s the widget that’s going to drive me right out of the Apple ecosystem.

We already pay a premium for Apple products, which is kind of OK because they are very good, reliable devices. On top of that, though, Apple also wants to lock us into their cables — power cables, peripheral cables, you name it — and our devices can detect whether the cable we use to plug in our phones is an Official Approved Apple™ cable, and if they aren’t, they’ll refuse to connect. And sometimes, when you most need it, your phone will decide that the cable you are using is no longer up to its standards.

My wife and I are now down to ONE (1) functioning cable between us. I had to take it away because I need my phone to connect to any university services (that’s another gripe I’ll put off to another day), and I can’t trust it not to fail on me. I have bought so god-damn many phone cables because I’ve got maybe an 80% success rate in seeing a new cable work at all. All I could do is throw a fistful of unlikely cables at my wife as I was going out to work and suggest she try them and see if one magically works now.

My new requirement for my next phone is that it have a basic USB-C charging connector. Goodbye Apple, hello Android.

Richest man in the world is a talking ass

I read that Elon Musk is currently the richest man in the world, which is as complete an indictment of capitalism as could imagine. Whenever he opens his mouth he exposes his ignorance, yet people still think he’s saying something worthwhile. He’s just a guy with an undeserved mountain of money that he uses to buy stuff, nothing more, and it’s a shame that his follies haven’t caught up with him yet, if ever — money seems to be a pretty effective cushion against the consequences of your actions.

A few years ago, he bought a company called Neuralink, which was supposedly working on brain-machine interfaces, but is actually 99% hype, and put an unqualified tech bro in charge. The real neuroscientists could tell the whole idea was a load of overstuffed bullshit, but the media stumbled all over itself in a rush to give him more press.

You would think that someone — the investors, the journalists, the people hoping for medical breakthroughs — would notice the similarities between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes, especially since the Holmes trial just wrapped up with a conviction, but noooo.

Now Neuralink is looking to find human guinea pigs for his overhyped technology.

The Silicon Valley company, which has already successfully implanted artificial intelligence microchips in the brains of a macaque monkey named Pager and a pig named Gertrude, is now recruiting for a “clinical trial director” to run tests of the technology in humans.

“As the clinical trial director, you’ll work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants,” the advert for the role in Fremont, California, says. “You will lead and help build the team responsible for enabling Neuralink’s clinical research activities and developing the regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.”

Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk.

“We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit.

“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.”

He is nowhere near that capability. He is lying. I know that here in America no one is going to care about the victims of irresponsible experimentation, but I would hope that someone would give a loving, concerned thought to the investors who are being taken to the cleaners by this fraud. Hope is not data. Appealing to the suffering victims of tragedy is one of the oldest tricks in the con artist’s toolbox.

That’s not all. Someone has confused science-fiction novels with reality.

Musk said that he thinks in the future we will be able to save and replay memories. “I mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode but yeah essentially if you have a whole brain interface everything that’s encoded in memory you could you could upload you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be weird one!” said Musk.

A “whole brain interface” — what’s that? How are you going to do that? You think you can skim off the totality of a person’s experience with a little chip you can pop on and off? Where are memories encoded so you can extract them? How are you planning to overwrite a brain’s structure and chemistry and connectivity so you can replace one brain’s identity with another?

I don’t think he’s going to have much luck hiring someone to oversee human experimentation in these areas, since Josef Mengele is dead. He’ll probably just hire some tech-dude with no qualifications and no sense of ethics — I hear those guys are sprouting up all over Silicon Valley.

The worst possible way to begin a weekend

Watch Dan Olson explain blockchain, bitcoin, ethereum, NFTs and what feels like hundreds of odd acronyms behind the latest series of scams. It’s 2 hours and 18 minutes of dense descriptions, all to expose the guts of a gigantic grift. It’s information-rich, but good god, how depressing. Keep that crypto away from me!

I learned a lot, but also forgot even more instants after it got machine-gunned into my ears. The gist of the story is that blockchain is bad and inefficient, and cryptocurrency relies on buying intangible assets on the basis of their potential, and that potential is simply the likelihood that later adopters will pay early adopters more for those hypothetical assets, and that NFTs are a gimmick with the sole purpose of selling more crypto. If you want the summary without all the painful background information, just listen to the last 5 minutes. What’s so attractive about crypto?

Buy in now, buy in early, and you could be the high tech future boot. Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect and sabotage, and our leaders seem at best complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on a fractional token sold via micro-auction, that’s not it. A different system does not inherently mean a better system. We replace bad systems with worse ones all the time. We replaced a bad system of work and bosses with a terrible system of apps, gigs, and on-demand labor. So it’s not just that I oppose NFTs because the foremost of them are esthetically vacuous representations of the dead inner lives of the tech and finance bros behind them, it’s that they represent the vanguard of a worse system. The whole thing, from OpenSea fantasies for starving artists to the buy-in for Play to Earn games, it’s the same hollow, exploitive pitch as MLMs. It’s Amway, but everywhere you look, people are wearing ugly-ass ape cartoons.

Yeah, you to can start your weekend with a dystopian vision of the future, where Elon Musk and Peter Thiel increase their wealth at your expense and by marketing your privacy.

It’s good to be a vegetarian

I had no idea that there was another epidemic here in the US: a food safety problem, the spread of a strain of multi-drug resistant salmonella through domestic poultry. I thought the combination of CDC and USDA oversight was effective in keeping our food safe, but I guess not.

With a public health threat unfolding across the country, you might have expected federal regulators to act swiftly and decisively to warn the public, recall the contaminated poultry and compel changes at chicken plants. Or that federal investigators would pursue the root cause of the outbreak wherever the evidence led.

None of that happened.

Instead, the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closed the outbreak investigation nine months later even though people were continuing to get sick. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry, was not only powerless to act but said nothing to consumers about the growing threat. So supermarkets and restaurants continued selling chicken tainted with drug-resistant infantis.

And they continue to do so today.

An eight-month ProPublica investigation into this once rare, but now pervasive form of salmonella found that its unchecked spread through the U.S. food supply was all but inevitable, the byproduct of a baffling and largely toothless food safety system that is ill-equipped to protect consumers or rebuff industry influence.

It’s a good if rather distressing article, but I have to warn you that even without thinking about salmonella, the graphics of commercial chicken processing are…well, um, graphic. Where I live, I’m surrounded by chicken and turkey farms that look rather innocuous as we drive by — long low sheds packed full of birds hidden from sight where, apparently horrors take place. It will definitely put you off chicken.

The other night I fixed chicken tikka masala, without the chicken. We used tofu instead. I think it was a wise choice.

We vegetarians are just totally safe, except for the lettuce and Listeria and E. coli. Yeah. No worries at all.

I see a horrifying future of … marketing

One of the advantages of small town living is that I won’t get this crap until at least 20 years after those of you in the big cities. It’s called anamorphic advertising.

No. Just no. I don’t want this anywhere. Fortunately, it’s somewhat limited in that it only works when viewed from a small range of angles, but still, as the article points out, this can get obnoxious and distracting fast.

The trend could make advertising more dynamic and fun, giving us giant digital playspaces anytime we step outside. “When you literally have things popping out of a billboard at you, it feels inviting in all kinds of new ways,” said Greg Coleman, Prime Video’s global head of marketing and franchise.

It could also turn our public commons into obtrusive brand exercises, making advertising literally something we can’t avoid. Anyone who has ever endured a too-popular meme knows it’s a short jump from virality to annoyance.

“This is exciting and it’s attention-getting,” said Arun Lakshmanan, an associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management and an expert in immersive advertising. “It also could really start getting intrusive.”

I don’t know about you, but I was already prepared to hang all the marketing professors. I’m imagining driving down I94 to the twin cities, and now in addition to all the Jesus billboards and baby heartbeat billboards, I get to see Kris Lindahl flapping his arms all over the place. Yuck.

When blogs ruled the internet…

Once upon a time, there was a different way to view content on the web, but then something happened. People were and still are producing content, but the right people weren’t making money from it. In the distant past, people would write stuff, and it would be theirs, and they could choose to monetize it or give it away.

Then Facebook hoovered it up. You could write stuff, and post it on this handy medium that all your friends were subscribed to, and they could splatter ads all around it, and the revenue from those ads would go to…Facebook. Not the people writing it. And Facebook realized that they could be in charge of curating it and organizing it anyway they wanted and splicing in stuff from people you never heard of and learned to dislike (spawning more “interaction”) with more ads and ‘sponsored content’, and you’d read it anyway, trawling through all the trash strewn about to get at the gems you were looking for. And thus was doomscrolling born, and Facebook’s coffers grew ever more swole.

Along came Twitter, which at least had the advantage of pandering to short attention spans. People, you will write teeny-tiny bon mots and Twitter will organize them for you and lay them out in an ever-flowing smorgasbord of hot takes, and, oh yes, ads. The revenue from those ads would go to…Twitter. Not the people writing it.

I think there might be a theme here. Get other people to do the creative work that the corporate entity will profit from.

Twitter has succeeded despite

Adding another kink. /1

You have to string /2

Your thoughts together /3

Into multiple tweets /4

In order to assemble /5

A more complex story. /6

We willingly do this despite the fact that there’s another way to do this that’s more organic and straightforward, and that doesn’t funnel profit away from the creator and to a big corporation. It’s these things called blogs.

So why don’t people just switch to reading blogs? There are still plenty of us out there. The problem is that there used to be a popular, easy-to-use way to curate and organize your collection of interesting blogs called RSS — Really Simple Syndication — and there were these things called RSS readers that organized a list of blogs you liked and would highlight new entries for you, so you’d just scroll through a list that you assembled (unlike Facebook) and that you could choose to see either a quick synopsis (like Twitter) or the full length text (unlike Twitter). But that didn’t remunerate Zuck or Jack, so it died or was discouraged. Google killed their popular Google Reader app in 2013.

And thus we ended up here, where Facebook can poison the culture and make loads of money from it, while Twitter is a forum for blipverts where Trump-like loons can thrive. There were loons in the blog age, too, but at least corporations didn’t make billions by promoting the idiots and throwing them in the faces of everyone else.

But maybe they could come back.

Most existing blogs retain a relic of bygone days, an alternative access point through an RSS feed. It’s still there — Pharyngula has one at freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/feed/, but if you read it without an RSS reader it’s an ugly mess of XML code.

So get one. There are ways to patch together readable RSS access to lots of services like blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and even Twitter — here’s a list. With a little work you can reconstitute the capabilities we had in 2005, and also get access to the writings of human beings without supporting a corporate parasite.

There are other options on the horizon. Google may be adding RSS subscriptions to Chrome.

twitter.com/apf/status/1446503789586894850

(Oh look. It’s on Twitter rather than in a blog I could link to.)

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me at all, yet. It’s a work in progress, and right now setting it up on systems where it does work is rather awkward.

twitter.com/apf/status/1446503798604664840

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had more control, and if Mark Zuckerberg weren’t profiting off the actual creative work of writers and video makers?

Shouldn’t the lesson be, “don’t put your conspiracy online”?

If you’re plotting something and want to recruit a horde of fellow conspiracy theorists to join you, the go-to company you call to provide “confidential” web services is Epik.

Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.

Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

They also host anti-abortion groups, including that prolifewhistleblower page (which has since been removed). You’d think someone would realize that if your group requires support from an organization that also supports Nazis and Proud Boys and kooks and violent militias, maybe you should question the company you’re keeping.

It’s a notorious den of villainy, as you can tell. But maybe not anymore…would you trust your evil plan to a company after this?

But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.

Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.

“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”

The founder of Epik, Robert Monster (surely one of the most appropriate names ever) is busy denying that any leak happened and is pretending that it’s all business as usual. Everyone else, however, is laughing at their incompetence, except maybe the far-right individuals who trusted them. They’re probably too busy trying to hide their trail.

Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public.

The files include years of website purchase records, internal company emails and customer account credentials revealing who administers some of the biggest far-right websites. The data includes client names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords left in plain, readable text. The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

This is going to be so entertaining. Probably also disappointing as the bodies are unearthed, and the American justice system does nothing.

I’ll just say that the only individuals who have ever been trusted with my Grand Elaborate Scheme to Rule the World are the spiders I whisper to, and they’ll never crack. It’s going to be such a surprise!

A cure for arachnophobia? On your phone?

You may have noticed that I abstain from showing photos of spiders here, because when I do I get so many piteous complaints from people who are grossed out and terrified by innocent little spiders. And here I was working with my lovely crop of over a hundred babies yesterday!

I don’t know if it really works, but there’s an augmented reality app called Phobys that you can download that uses your phone’s camera to generate images of cute little spiders in familiar places, using exposure therapy to help you adjust. I downloaded it to see — screenshot below the fold — and the “test” to see if you’re arachnophobic is free. I’m not. The “training” module to get increasing exposure levels is $5, and I didn’t pay for it. I can find real spiders anywhere, so I don’t need virtual ones.

Also, though, I’m not worried about it. It’s not like the COVID-19 vaccine — no one dies of arachnophobia, and you can even live a perfectly normal life with it, unless it’s a pathologically extreme case.

You’re just missing out on some of the beauty and wonder in the world.

[Read more…]

Facebook has been lying to us? Say it ain’t so.

Is anyone surprised by these revelations?

Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.
In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

I’ve noticed. Some people get to say anything they want, especially if it’s disinformation about medicine or politics, while others (you know, the peons) get slammed if they post a selfie that looks funny. It’s not just me that sees the inequity, though — it’s Facebook’s own self-examination.

A 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting practices, marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and “not publicly defensible.”
“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Note: internal review. This wasn’t some competitor trying to take an axe to the company, it was their own lawyers.

Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite Congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.
Sometimes the company held back for fear of hurting its business. In other cases, Facebook made changes that backfired. Even Mr. Zuckerberg’s pet initiatives have been thwarted by his own systems and algorithms.

Gosh. Sure sounds like a tobacco company. They’re not going to fix anything, because it might hurt their revenues. I use Facebook to keep in touch with family, but half my feed is click-bait and ads for things I don’t care about.

One area in which the company hasn’t struggled is profitability. In the past five years, during which it has been under intense scrutiny and roiled by internal debate, Facebook has generated profit of more than $100 billion. The company is currently valued at more than $1 trillion.

What’s weird there is that they rake in all this money, but their CEO still can’t get a haircut that makes him look human.

Break them up, nationalize the social media services, and hand Zuckerberg $50 and directions to a barber shop that doesn’t cater to androids.

Shut down Facebook, please

It’s a nightmare already. Where do the hapless goobers among our citizenry get their bad ideas? Facebook. The whole damn company is an engine of disinformation, and it wants to grow, like some kind of cancerous tumor. The latest great idea to come out of Zuckerberg’s stinking maw is an implementation of the metaverse. Sounds like it could be fun, right? If you grew up on Snow Crash and Jennifer Government and Ready Player One and failed to notice that those are all horrific dystopias. Zuckerberg read them and saw his future dream. He’s been putting together his version of the metaverse, or zuckerverse, or suckerverse, and some have seen it.

First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an idealised immersive successor of the internet – a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the Metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite, meets virtual reality, meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the Meatspace. What matters is that Metaverse is now the buzzword du jour, and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.

Time and again over the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the Metaverse’s ability to increase “f​​ocus time and individual productivity”. He coined the dreary formula “infinite office”, a supposedly desirable scenario in which Metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the Metaverse’s potential for organising VR office meetings.

If anyone could make Zoom meetings worse, it’s Zuckerberg, the dead-eyed corporate zombie. It can’t be that bad, you might think, but then you just have recall the wasteland of ads and trolls and endless lies that he turned a social service to connect friends into. Or if you don’t believe that, see for yourself what the metaverse will look like if Facebook has its way.

Oh hell no.

You know, while Facebook is working hard on the VR interface that Satan will love, a right wing terrorist drove up to Washington DC with a truckload of, he claims, potassium nitrate and detonators, and parked by the Library of Congress, demanding to speak to President Biden, or he was going to blow everything up. The Capitol has been evacuated. He has been live-streaming his threats and rants over Facebook.

It has taken Facebook three hours to notice and shut him down.

That’s a rapid response from the company that has allowed fascists, quacks, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers to thrive for over a decade. They will not get better. This is what they do: provide a profit-making forum for the very worst, most sensationalist ideas, so don’t wait for them to do anything that might harm the bottom line.

We’re going to have to do something. The good news is that the FTC has reopened their antitrust case against Facebook.

“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said Holly Vedova, Acting Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition.

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but the company said on Twitter that it was reviewing the case.

The filing is also the most high-profile action to date under the agency’s new Democratic majority, helmed by Big Tech critic Lina Khan. Khan inherited the Facebook case from the previous Trump-appointed chair, but her ability to see it to a successful conclusion could define her legacy as an antitrust enforcer.

Burn them down, please. And then nationalize a simple communications service that allows me to chat to family and friends without having to wade through the offensive glop the kooks flood everyone with.