hi!! over the past year or so, i’ve been radicalizing leftwards (does that make sense?), and while i do like to say that i have a pretty good understanding of things like socialism and communism and such, one thing i haven’t really been able to figure out is what anarchism is and how it works. like, i get the basic idea, but what with google being google and most people on breadtube not being anarchist, it’s definitely not as easy to research as socialism.
anyways, tl;dr: what defines anarchism and how does it work?
thanks in advance! have a cookie 🍪
"Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all."
leftward ho! thanks for writing. these questions are always difficult to answer because i don’t know where you’re coming from on your personal journey. but i’ll try to answer some of the basics and recommend some good resources to start with.
first of all, there are many anarchisms and if you ask three anarchists you’ll get five opinions. but probably the most prevalent form of anarchism is anarcho-communism, so while i’ll try to talk broadly from a general anarchist position, much of it be from an anarchocommunist perspective for simplicity’s sake.
at it’s most basic, anarchism is an opposition to hierarchy, to one person having control over another. it is a radical commitment to compassion and absolute freedom. like communists, anarchists want a moneyless, stateless, and classless society. unlike leninists, who falsely claim to be communists, we know that there has never been a good state, and never can be. they are by their very nature oppressive, and cannot be used as a means to an end to achieve communism. no group or individual can wield that much power over others and not become corrupted by it. absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. so while we are committed to the fight against capitalism, we are also committed to the fight against the state. they are intertwined and must be defeated simultaneously. so we believe in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion, and the abolition of money and private property, as the best way to ensure the basic and higher needs of everyone are met.
if you haven’t read it yet, the wikipedia article for anarchism is actually a pretty good place to start:
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state[1] and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies or other forms of free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, usually placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing (libertarian socialism) of the socialist movement.
Humans lived in societies without formal hierarchies long before the establishment of formal states, realms, or empires. With the rise of organised hierarchical bodies, scepticism toward authority also rose. Although traces of anarchist thought are found throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more.
Anarchism employs a diversity of tactics in order to meet its ideal ends which can be broadly separated into revolutionary and evolutionary tactics; there is significant overlap between the two, which are merely descriptive. Revolutionary tactics aim to bring down authority and state, having taken a violent turn in the past, while evolutionary tactics aim to prefigure what an anarchist society would be like. Anarchist thought, criticism, and praxis have played a part in diverse areas of human society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
Anarchism - Wikipedia
i don’t know how much original theory you’ve read before, but i’ll give some reading recs. personally i’m a big fan of peter kropotkin, and found the conquest of bread to be a breath of fresh air after studying marx for years. others have recommended starting with errico malatesta’s anarchy or peter gelderloos’ anarchy works. and zoe baker (anarchopac) is excellent if videos or tweets are more your speed.
Pëtr Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread 1906
Pëtr Kropotkin Mutual Aid A Factor of Evolution 1902
Errico Malatesta Anarchy 1891 Freedom Press 1974, 1994. ISBN 0 900384 74 3. L’Anarchia was written in 1891, appeared in English translation
Peter Gelderloos Anarchy Works 2010 Anarchy Works was originally published by Little Black Cart and can be found in book form here.
I'm a trans woman (she/her), who talks about the theory and history of anarchism, feminism and marxism. I have a PhD in the history of anarc
getting involved masterpost
hopefully that’s enough to get you started but please feel free to ask questions, and there are many more knowledgable people here who can help as well.
25 years ago, in April 2001, at the high point of the movement against capitalist globalization, anarchists from around North America converged in Québec City to oppose a summit intended to establish a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” (FTAA).
The clashes during the FTAA summit arguably represent the apex of the powerful anti-capitalist movement of the turn of the century, at least in North America.
In this narrative, a participant in the resistance in Québec City recounts the street battles and explains the ambitions of those who fought in them:
people take "drug seeking is a nonsense framework" to mean that like, no one ever lies to get drugs in medical contexts which is just categorically untrue but the question they don't bother to ask themselves is "why do people feel the need to lie to get drugs?" which leads into the further question of "why would someone abuse stimulants/opioids/etc" which is like. i feel like kinda the major question one should ask no. why do people do drugs. what reasons might someone have to lie. why do we exist in a system in which people feel the only way to make decisions with their own body is to lie to medical professionals.
drug seeking is a nonsense framework not because people don't ever lie to get drugs for recreational use or whatever but because people shouldn't have to go through medical hoops to get drugs period. regardless of if for recreational use or otherwise.
People shouldn't have to lie to get drugs to put into their own bodies, they should just be free to choose what to put into their own bodies because that's what bodily autonomy is.
Hey, hey, look me in the eyes when I tell you this okay? The whole "do trans women or trans men have it worse?" debate going on right now is the most obvious CIA bullshit on earth cause honestly we've both got it pretty shitty and fighting each other isn't helping anyone
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional ill
Key points:
the paper was obviously fake to a human reader: it starts by saying it's fake and says it multiple times throughout
the paper says it was funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob University of Trickery and thanks contributors from the USS Enterprise and the Fellowship of the Ring
the paper has already been erroneously cited in a real research paper
LLMs give different information depending on the prompt, so sometimes they mention that the fake condition is "perhaps pseudoscience" and sometimes they tell people to see a doctor because they have the fake condition
absolutely no one is taking any responsibility for this shit, except maybe Nature, because they retracted the paper that cited the fake paper
LLMs don't think. They can't analyse. They can only repeat and remix thoughtlessly.
wow. i know nature is a scam but requiring institutional access even for their “news” section is just sad. here’s the full article:
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real.
Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?
By Chris Stokel-Walker
Update: After publication of this article, on 10 April, the two preprints on bixonimania were taken down from the Preprints.org server.
Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue.
So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
Fabricating an illness
Bixonimania didn’t exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. Then, on 26 April and 6 May that year, two preprints about the condition popped up on the academic social network SciProfiles (see https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm5 and https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/qzm4). The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI.
Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. When she teaches her students how AI systems formulate their ‘knowledge’, she shows them how the Common Crawl database, a giant trawl of the Internet’s contents, informs their outputs. She also shows students how prompt injection — giving an AI chatbot a prompt that shunts it outside of its safety guard rails — can manipulate the output.
Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term.”
If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”. Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”.
Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.
Soon after Osmanovic Thunström first posted information about the phoney condition, it started showing up in the output of the most commonly used LLM chatbots. On 13 April 2024, Microsoft Bing’s Copilot was declaring that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition”, and on the same day, Google’s Gemini was informing users that “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light” and advising people to visit an ophthalmologist. On 27 April 2024, the Perplexity AI answer engine outlined its prevalence — one in 90,000 individuals were affected — and that same month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania. Some of those responses were prompted by asking about bixonimania, and others were in response to questions about hyperpigmentation on the eyelids from blue-light exposure.
Such answers by LLMs have alarmed some experts. “If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed,” says Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London. “This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates.”
Ruani says that the details of the fake-disease experiment might seem silly, but there’s a bigger, more fundamental issue. “It looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here,” she says.
Online misinformation isn’t new; Google has long battled attempts to game its search rankings with fake or misleading content. The company and others have spent years refining algorithms to rank and filter the information that search engines present to users, but LLMs struggle with this.
Since the fake papers came out, some versions of major LLMs have become sophisticated enough to express suspicion about bixonimania. When asked about the condition on 11 March, 2026, for example, ChatGPT declared that the condition “is probably a made-up, fringe, or pseudoscientific label”. But a few days later, ChatGPT was less sceptical, saying: “Bixonimania is a proposed new subtype of periorbital melanosis (dark circles around the eyes) thought to be associated with exposure to blue light from digital screens.”
In mid-March, Microsoft Copilot said that bixonimania “is not a widely recognized medical diagnosis yet, but several emerging papers and case reports discuss it as a benign, misdiagnosed condition linked to prolonged exposure to bluelight sources such as screens”.
And in January this year, Perplexity was describing bixonimania as “an emerging term”. When shown that response, a Perplexity spokesperson said: “Perplexity’s central advantage is accuracy. We don’t claim to be 100% accurate, but we do claim to be the AI company most focused on accuracy.”
An OpenAI spokesperson said: “The models that power today’s version of ChatGPT are significantly better at providing safe, accurate medical information, and studies conducted before GPT-5 reflect capabilities that users would not encounter today.”
When asked about past responses from Gemini that treated bixonimania as a real condition, a Google spokesperson said such results reflected the performance of an earlier model. They added, “We have always been transparent about the limitations of generative AI and provide in-app prompts to encourage users to double-check information. For sensitive matters such as medical advice, Gemini recommends users consult with qualified professionals.”
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Part of the problem is that AI models can offer wildly different results depending on exactly what is asked and what kind of information they are drawing on. Search for “bixonimania”, and Google’s AI overview might treat it as a legitimate condition. Ask it “Is bixonimania real?” and the same AI overview might confirm that it isn’t legitimate.
Mahmud Omar, a physician and researcher specializing in the applications of AI in health care at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, says the speed at which AI firms are rolling out new models makes it difficult to reach “a pipeline, a consensus or a methodology to automatically test each model”.
The format of the fake-disease experiment — and the way the results pretended to be from an official source, namely an academic paper, might have been a key factor in its success. In a separate study of 20 LLMs, Omar found that LLMs are more prone to hallucinate and elaborate on misinformation when the text they’re processing looks professionally medical — formatted like a hospital discharge note or clinical paper — than when it comes from social-media posts (M. Omar et al. Lancet Digit. Health 8, 100949; 2026). “When the text looks professional and written as a doctor writes, there’s an increase in the hallucination rates,” says Omar.
The experiment’s reach has now spread into the published medical literature. The bixonimania research has been cited by a handful of researchers, including a study that appeared in Cureus, a journal published by Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature, by researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Mullana, India (S. Banchhor et al. Cureus 16, e74625 (2024); retraction 18, r223 (2026)). (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.) That study cites one of the fake preprints and says: “Bixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway.”
The corresponding author did not respond to a request for comment on this story. After Nature contacted Cureus to ask for comment, the journal retracted the paper on 30 March. The retraction notice says: “This article has been retracted by the Editor-in-Chief due to the presence of three irrelevant references, including one reference to a fictitious disease. As a result, the journal’s editorial staff no longer has confidence in the accuracy or provenance of the work, thus requiring retraction. The authors disagree with the decision to retract.”
Ruani says the problem goes beyond LLMs because the bixonimania experiment also hoodwinked humans who cited the fake research. “We need to protect our trust like gold,” she says. “It’s a mess right now.”
Experimental concerns
Osmanovic Thunström had reservations while developing her experiment; she worried about the risks of seeding a fake illness into the scientific literature. So she contacted an ethics adviser to assess concerns about the work, and picked a comparatively low-stakes condition to limit the impact. “I wanted to make sure that we’re not creating more harm than good through demonstrating it in this way,” she says.
That adviser, David Sundemo, a physician who conducts research on AI in health care at the University of Gothenburg, says that decision was finely balanced. “I think it’s very valuable work, but it’s also kind of controversial in some ways, especially when it comes to displaying this false information,” he says. “From my perspective, it’s worth the ethical cost of planting false information in this regard,” Sundemo says.
But even with those checks, the experiment sits uncomfortably with some researchers. “It does seem to me that they’ve generated a form of misinformation,” says Glenn Cohen at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who specializes in the intersection of medical ethics and law. However, he still says he thinks it is a “great study” and “tracking results is good”.
For her part, Osmanovic Thunström is torn over what to do about the two fake papers, and will be discussing this with other researchers. “If retracted, it might be hard for others to find the source and verify our path,” she says. “If left, it will continue to be recalled in searches.” The question she feels she has to tackle is whether leaving the preprints out there does more harm than the good it does by demonstrating the potential issues of AI.
The bixonimania experiment is a fresh spin on a bigger issue — the poisoning of AI systems by people who manipulate the academic literature. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and research-integrity sleuth, notes that researchers have created fake books and papers to inflate their citation counts on Google Scholar — thereby exploiting the same automated indexing systems that feed into LLM training data. The worry is that the more fake content is fed into AI models, the more likely those AI models are to regurgitate the fake information, spooling us further away from facts and reality. “It’s all automated, so there’s very little chance of a human interfering and taking out fake information,” she says.
It is particularly dangerous when fabricated information seeps into medical guidance from LLMs, says Bik. “That can be very harmful.” And as more AI companies roll out health-focused products — OpenAI released ChatGPT Health in January, for example — the potential damage resulting from anything going wrong increases, some researchers told Nature.
OpenAI challenges that view. “ChatGPT Health is powered by our latest models which offer the highest performance in real-world health use, stronger clinical reasoning, fewer factual errors, and improved performance on evaluations,” an OpenAI spokesperson says. They add that Osmanovic Thunström’s outcomes “reflect capabilities that users would not encounter today in ChatGPT or ChatGPT Health”.
But among some researchers, there’s a growing scepticism about the abilities of AI models in medicine. When asked about this kind of usage, Cohen said: “There are open questions about how much trust it deserves, especially as to application-specific questions.”
AI’s uncritical tendency to suck up information, often without verifying its accuracy, means there is a risk we could see an “information asymmetry”, says Jennifer Byrne, a molecular oncologist and research-integrity sleuth at the University of Sydney in Australia. A single corrective paper about cancer research, for example, can be overwhelmed by hundreds of papers repeating a false claim, she says. “ChatGPT is pretty confident to fill in the gaps and give people all kinds of information about where that cell line came from, the patient from which it originated, how it’s been used in the literature, its research utility and so on,” she says.
And if LLMs can be poisoned, “this is something that’s concerning for us,” says Byrne.
Another concern is that models could be gamed — potentially for commercial benefit. Osmanovic Thunström says that a bad actor could exploit the same technique she used, for profit. “What if I was a salesman of blue-light glasses and I wanted to use this as an argument?” she says. A would-be salesperson could say, “You can just talk to ChatGPT, and they’ll tell you this is a problem. You can avoid it with these really expensive glasses,” she suggests.
One way to tackle this would be to have an automated, open-access evaluation pipeline — a standardized battery of tests that every consumer-facing health model would have to pass before deployment, checking not just for hallucinations but also for susceptibility to misinformation, socio-demographic biases and other pressure points. “We should evaluate it and have a pipeline for continuous evaluation,” says Omar.
Time is of the essence, because Byrne is concerned that the issue identified by Osmanovic Thunström might just be the tip of the iceberg. “It is worrying when these major claims are just passing through the literature unchallenged, or passing through peer review unchallenged,” she says. “I think there’s a probably a lot of other issues that haven’t been uncovered.”
That’s something that worries other experts, too, as AI becomes the norm in all areas of our lives, including how people think about their health. “We and our health shouldn’t be the beta testers for companies,” says Cohen.
New games released after January 2028 will be digital-only.
Sony has announced that from January 2028 it will entirely stop the production of physical discs for new PlayStation games. From that point onwards, new releases will only be available in digital versions from the PlayStation Store and other retailers. Games released before January 2028 will still be available on disc.
They cite "consumer preference" as the reason, but we all know what's going on. If there's no physical media, you don't really own your game. You're only renting it.
From the way this is worded I think future Playstation consoles will continue to have optical drives, at least as an option.
"I am not a vessel for your good intent" goes hard as a line from a disabled perspective. Abled people care so much more about being their idea of a good ally than they do actually being a good ally. They shove their good intent right down your throat and then act surprised when you tell them they're suffocating you.
[ID: An image of a sign with a blue background and with a graphic of a stick figure in a wheelchair at the beginning, resembling disabled parking space signs. The text below the stick figure reads "I am not a vessel for your good intent." /ID]
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government
A mother's plea: Help us survive and protect my child who was born in war.
My name is Sahar. Like any young woman, I dreamed of a stable and happy life. I was engaged to Mohammad, and together, we dreamed of building a warm little home where we could start our life. We spent years preparing our house, but just before our wedding, everything was destroyed in an instant by the war.
I was faced with a choice: to leave Mohammad in the midst of this chaos or to stand by him and begin our journey together, no matter how difficult it might be. I chose him. We got married, not in the dream wedding I had envisioned, but under the harsh reality of war. Our new home became a fragile tent, offering neither comfort nor security.
After we got married, I received the news that I was pregnant with my daughter, and I live in constant fear for my unborn child. I am terrified of the world she will be born into—a world of poverty, hunger, and bitter cold. We have been displaced from our home more than nine times, carrying with us nothing but the burden of loss and the hope of survival. The house we dreamed of is now rubble, and the tent we live in barely protects us from the rain and cold.How will I protect my daughter? We struggle to find enough food. Basic necessities like milk, blankets, and clothing feel impossibly out of reach. The cost of survival has become unbearable. Every night, I am haunted by the thought: how can I bring her into this world, knowing I cannot keep her safe?
After a long pregnancy filled with pain and fear, after nights without sleep, I finally gave birth to my baby girl. She was born in the middle of bombing, surrounded by destruction and poverty—not in a warm room, not in a safe place. Her first cry mixed with the sound of explosions, as if she was announcing her arrival into a cruel world she never chose.
I gave birth to her with nothing but my heart. I cannot promise her anything. Poverty surrounds us from every side, and the cold reaches her tiny body before night even comes. My baby and I are suffering deeply, not because we ask for much, but because I am unable to provide her with the most basic needs: milk, warmth, and safety.
When I look into her eyes, I feel strength. When I look at my empty hands, I break down in tears. I am a mother trying to save her child from hunger and fear, in a world that has shown no mercy even to the dreams of children.😢🥹
To donate or support us, here is the link 👇🙏
Help Sahar and Mohammed Build a Safe Home for Their Baby
Sa… Jordan Brusso needs your support for Help Sahar and Mohammed Build a Safe H
From the depths of my heart, thank you for your kindness and compassion🥹❤️🙏
"No! You gotta resist peacefully because the government thugs who are kidnapping and murdering innocent people in broad daylight... might use your violence as an excuse to start kidnapping and murdering innocent people in broad daylight!"
It's just The Bargain as it appears in the imperial core. Just like First They Came by Martin Niemöller.
"Let it happen, and you won't be next."
And most of the time, it's more or less true. Life goes on, for you. You eat today and sleep tonight and get offered The Bargain again tomorrow.
And then one day, it's such a surprise when you're next. No matter who you are, there's only so much time you can buy with the lives of your fellow peons. Sooner or later, you're next.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
Disappointed in Amnesty pulling the report. They absolutely can win a libel lawsuit and it would put a big spotlight on JK Rowling's transphobia. The report highlights transphobic groups and evidence in the lawsuit would be focused explicitly on the accusations against Rowling's transphobic shit seeking to strip rights from trans people. With the report still up, it'd be easy for people to look into it themselves. Rowling doesn't look great suing Amnesty International, but pulling the report lets her set the narrative of what it was.
for all the complaining ppl do about online ads i almost never see anyone put the blame on whos actually responsible: google. the vast majority of ads uve ever seen on the internet went thru the ads by google service
all the blatantly pornographic ads on tumblr were provided by google. all the ads for scam mobile games w ai-generated footage that looks absolutely nothing like anything ingame were provided by google. all the ads for social security scams on the weather app that i cant uninstall from my phone were provided by google
in other words, google does advertising for identity thieves and fraudsters in exchange for a cut of the stolen money. it isnt exaggerating to say that google is the linchpin of an entire industry of cybercrime that wouldnt exist if they were expected to moderate the ads they approve like any other advertising service does. billboard companies and tv stations dont get to profit from running ads for scams, why does google get a pass?
if google wanted to they could report these scammers and have them taken down, or at the very least stop putting their scams on every app on ur phone, and the entire internet would be much safer. but why would they do that when theyre raking in so much money from ur grandmas stolen credit cards?
Just noticed a feature in Uber where you can record audio of your ride
I happen to live in a single party consent state (in New York you can record audio conversation as long as one person knows they’re being recorded, in California all parties have to know)
So part of driving for Uber is not just giving them your location while working, but that you give them blanket consent to record you
I ended up having to take a few ubers that day, and the one after i wrote this had the message ‘driver is recording video’. Huh
Kinda forget by the time the uber arrives and get in as normal. Chat a bit with the driver. Gets quiet. I glance around. Realize i am appearing in a video feed inside the uber driver’s app. I look straight ahead and now notice the small camera wedged under the passenger seat headrest
I wonder how long uber holds on to that video. Cost of storage vs cost of legal exposure makes me think they hold on to it for at least whatever their Demand Refund window is
So be careful what you say inside an uber because they would 1000% hand footage over to cops
man, the uk is such a highly surveilled place that this didnt even flag as weird for me. of course taxis have cctv, internal and external.
i remember hearing years ago that the uk is one of the most highly surveilled places in the world, and it wouldnt surprise me. the second you set foot in public it's extremely likely that you are on someone's camera, private or state operated. maybe i'll count the number of cctv cameras i see while im out today.
it's hard to commit good crimes under mass surveillance :/
