Stories for Telling

A place for the stories I tell and the things I find important Some other places to find my writing: Archive of Our Own For all my fanfic Escritorian's Escritoire is my writing only blog with no reblogs that I'm very bad at updating regularly For a taglist and brief story descriptions of my original work, see the "My Writing" link above. Icon by https://digital-lich.tumblr.com/

[tricitymonsters]

Mastercard and visa have reported to a couple news outlets that they are currently being swamped with calls and complaints. Keep up the pressure and try to (politely) insist that you leave a complaint via phone instead of letting the rep direct you to emails. It's way easier to be overwhelmed by a much smaller number of calls so each one counts for a bit more!

[tricitymonsters]

This blsky thread has scripts and hotlines so if you wanna reblog this version instead that would be appreciated!!

[abbielauren2024]

Reblog if you’re grateful for your commenters <3

[arielsojourner]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[kasplode]

Organised by People’s Union, read more here:

Nationwide economic blackout on February 28: What to know about boycott

When Donald Trump reentered office, one of his first calls to action was to end several DEI initiatives in the federal government.

[dvasva]

'This won't work, this isn't widespread, nobody knows, we're in a bubble, blah blah blah' my mom, a 64 year old lady with no social media whose first language is spanish, told me about this before tumblr did, and said we are going to participate.

[librarychair]

I've seen flyers for this in real life. Do it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets”

This week only, Barnes and Noble is offering 25% off pre-orders of my forthcoming novel Picks and Shovels. ENDS TODAY!.

While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.

Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.

Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.

Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.

Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.

Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.

This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.

Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.

That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being…No wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. He’s their dream employee!"

The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers – the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far – were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).

There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous – if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.

This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson – that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them – of course.

But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:

https://gizmodo.com/unitedhealthcare-is-mad-about-in-luigi-we-trust-comments-under-a-doctors-viral-post-2000560543

UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.

This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg

Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:

https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-prior-authorizations

If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.

Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.

That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:

https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.

Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury

After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work":

https://bsky.app/profile/annamerlan.bsky.social/post/3lhepjkudcs2t

That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:

https://archive.is/yKhvD

"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate – it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole – he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:

https://prospect.org/world/2025-02-07-letter-between-friendly-nations/

Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather – as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism – he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/is-trump-serious-about-trying-to-close-the-private-equity-carried-interest-loophole.html

This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-06-crisis-actors-alex-jones-bankruptcy/

It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.

We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

[rubyvroom]

Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”. 

“Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas

“Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice

Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results

Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%

Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.

Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results

Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable

Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe

Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.

[rubyvroom]

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.

So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.

[feedyourdeadnametothevoidfish]

the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation

[rubyvroom]

It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies. 

Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another. 

[rubyvroom]

Hi everybody it’s eleven years later and just for fun I went and looked up the latest news on forensic science and guess what? It’s still bullshit.

They’ve made up entirely new fake techniques since the last time I posted about this. Like “9-11 Call Analysis” which is supposed to identify from a person’s voice on a phone call whether they are lying. Surprise surprise: it doesn’t work.

Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the technique, researchers who have studied 911 calls have not been able to corroborate [the original] claims. A 2020 study from the FBI warned against using 911 call analysis to bring actual cases. A separate FBI study in 2022 said applying 911 analysis may actually increase bias. And academic studies from researchers at Villanova and James Madison universities came to similar conclusions. Ultimately, five studies have not been able to find scientific evidence that 911 call analysis works.

There’s also something called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis – that examines the statements given to the police for falsehood. This one is actually kind of promising because it uses a real scientific analysis, a grammatical formula, to map out a written personal account kind of like using an AI algorithm to diagram a sentence which can reveal that actually no I’m lying it’s total garbage

Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?

The creator of Scientific Content Analysis, or SCAN, says the tool can identify deception. Law enforcement has used his method for decades,

ProPublica also describes a kind of “photo analysis” which is basically whatever a Hollywood movie writer expects to happen when the detective says ENHANCE and of course it doesn’t work either.

So why are there even more forensics techniques that don’t work every few years? If forensics is fake science, why do we keep inventing more of it?

Well, because like I said way too many years ago why have I been here so long, forensics are not created by scientists, they’re created by police. And the justice system is interested in convictions, not uncovering the truth, and these techniques get you convictions. Many of them are wrongful convictions, but oh well.

Anyway in conclusion, John Oliver agrees with me and ACAB

[mariacallous]

The "um but the economy actually *isn't* that good" argument is a prime example of what the fuck is wrong - people are deliberately ignoring the majority of the facts to focus on one element and act like that completely negates the rest.

[afurioushawk]

Zoomers who were bitching about the economy and swearing we were in a recession despite all evidence otherwise are about to learn what a bad economy actually looks like in a couple of years.

Great Recession 2.0.

We Millennials know. A bad economy isn't "this business won't let me work remote," it's "businesses aren't hiring." A bad economy isn't "my Uber servant dares to charge me tips for delivering my burrito," it's "Chipotle lays off 25% of its workers and closes chains because supplies became too expensive due to tariffs and deporting the migrant farm workers."

[parentheticalaside]

They probably won't get to this point in the post because they don't know how to read long-form content (thank you, George W. Bush, for that one), but oh boy, do I remember the Great Recession!

Everything stopped. Companies collapsed left and right. Massive layoffs. No one was hiring. So many foreclosures*** (we're going to come back to this). Investment portfolios collapsed in value so that people who planned to retire could not because the money they were going to live on disappeared overnight -- so those possible job openings ceased to exist for younger people, even if anyone was hiring. Municipal budgets evaporated so public programs disappeared. City, county and state services were cut back brutally -- and many of those budgets still haven't been fully restored.

*** And construction just froze entirely. There were huge numbers of foreclosures across the country, but also all building stopped. There are still buildings now where the construction ceased mid-build and the buildings simply sat there, deteriorating, for years until people cobbled the money together to demolish the structure. Housing developments sat empty as the people who were foreclosed on became homeless. Those houses also deteriorated because you can't leave buildings untouched, unmaintained and exposed to the elements without them becoming uninhabitable and no one had the money to take care of buildings that no one could afford to live in anyway.

I'm making a bigger deal about this aspect of the Great Recession because the high housing costs we're dealing with now? That's because of the Great Recession.

Construction takes time. It takes years and a lot of money. When money stopped flowing during the financial crisis, projects not only stopped temporarily, but others were canceled entirely. And then it took years for that money to start moving again. By then we had a lag. We are still millions of housing units behind (this includes apartments) and the projection is that we won't build ourselves out of the current shortage for another decade at least.

The mortgage or rent you can't afford today and the house you can't buy because it's not on the market or doesn't exist is a direct result of the 2008 financial crisis. And there's no way to fix the shortage because construction takes time -- there is simply no way to magic millions of safe housing units into being in anything less than years. Any economic downturn, any slowdown in construction investment, any public programs that get canceled, any tariffs on building materials, will only make the situation worse.

[escritorian]

Slowdowns, incidentally, like ones already caused during the first Trump administration because of how his trade policies affected the price of wood and steel. We've already seen what it looks like, and it's not good

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If there's one thing I learned from all my years as an NGO delegate to UN specialized agencies, it's that UN treaties are dangerous, liable to capture by unholy alliances of authoritarian states and rapacious global capitalists.

Most of my UN work was on copyright and "paracopyright," and my track record was 2:0; I helped kill a terrible treaty (the WIPO Broadcast Treaty) and helped pass a great one (the Marrakesh Treaty on the rights of people with disabilities to access copyrighted works):

https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/

It's been many years since I had to shave and stuff myself into a suit and tie and go to Geneva, and I don't miss it – and thankfully, I have colleagues who do that work, better than I ever did. Yesterday, I heard from one such EFF colleague, Katitza Rodriguez, about the Cybercrime Treaty, which is about to pass, and which is, to put it mildly, terrifying:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/un-cybercrime-draft-convention-dangerously-expands-state-surveillance-powers

Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there's real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there's a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.

But that's not what's in the Cybercrime Treaty.

Here's a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.

The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), "cybercrime" has come to mean "anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer." "Cybercrime" can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.

Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight "cybercrime" – however those nations define it. They'll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.

These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What's optional? The human rights safeguards. Member states "should" or "may" create standards for legality, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination, and legitimate purpose. But even if they do, the treaty can oblige them to assist in surveillance orders that originate with other states that decided not to create these standards.

When that happens, the citizens of the affected states may never find out about it. There are eight articles in the treaty that establish obligations for indefinite secrecy regarding surveillance undertaken on behalf of other signatories. That means that your government may be asked to spy on you and the people you love, they may order employees of tech companies to backdoor your account and devices, and that fact will remain secret forever. Forget challenging these sneak-and-peek orders in court – you won't even know about them:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/un-cybercrime-draft-convention-blank-check-unchecked-surveillance-abuses

Now here's the kicker: while this treaty creates broad powers to fight things governments dislike, simply by branding them "cybercrime," it actually undermines the fight against cybercrime itself. Most cybercrime involves exploiting security defects in devices and services – think of ransomware attacks – and the Cybercrime Treaty endangers the security researchers who point out these defects, creating grave criminal liability for the people we rely on to warn us when the tech vendors we rely upon have put us at risk.

This is the granddaddy of tech free speech fights. Since the paper tape days, researchers who discovered defects in critical systems have been intimidated, threatened, sued and even imprisoned for blowing the whistle. Tech giants insist that they should have a veto over who can publish true facts about the defects in their products, and dress up this demand as concern over security. "If you tell bad guys about the mistakes we made, they will exploit those bugs and harm our users. You should tell us about those bugs, sure, but only we can decide when it's the right time for our users and customers to find out about them."

When it comes to warnings about the defects in their own products, corporations have an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Time and again, we've seen corporations rationalize their way into suppressing or ignoring bug reports. Sometimes, they simply delay the warning until they've concluded a merger or secured a board vote on executive compensation.

Sometimes, they decide that a bug is really a feature – like when Facebook decided not to do anything about the fact that anyone could enumerate the full membership of any Facebook group (including, for example, members of a support group for people with cancer). This group enumeration bug was actually a part of the company's advertising targeting system, so they decided to let it stand, rather than re-engineer their surveillance advertising business.

The idea that users are safer when bugs are kept secret is called "security through obscurity" and no one believes in it – except corporate executives. As Bruce Schneier says, "Anyone can design a system that is so secure that they themselves can't break it. That doesn't mean it's secure – it just means that it's secure against people stupider than the system's designer":

The history of massive, brutal cybersecurity breaches is an unbroken string of heartbreakingly naive confidence in security through obscurity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

But despite this, the idea that some bugs should be kept secret and allowed to fester has powerful champions: a public-private partnership of corporate execs, government spy agencies and cyber-arms dealers. Agencies like the NSA and CIA have huge teams toiling away to discover defects in widely used products. These defects put the populations of their home countries in grave danger, but rather than reporting them, the spy agencies hoard these defects.

The spy agencies have an official doctrine defending this reckless practice: they call it "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us." As in: "No one but us is smart enough to find these bugs, so we can keep them secret and use them attack our adversaries, without worrying about those adversaries using them to attack the people we are sworn to protect."

NOBUS is empirically wrong. In the 2010s, we saw a string of leaked NSA and CIA cyberweapons. One of these, "Eternalblue" was incorporated into off-the-shelf ransomware, leading to the ransomware epidemic that rages even today. You can thank the NSA's decision to hoard – rather than disclose and patch – the Eternalblue exploit for the ransoming of cities like Baltimore, hospitals up and down the country, and an oil pipeline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue

The leak of these cyberweapons didn't just provide raw material for the world's cybercriminals, it also provided data for researchers. A study of CIA and NSA NOBUS defects found that there was a one-in-five chance of a bug that had been hoarded by a spy agency being independently discovered by a criminal, weaponized, and released into the wild.

Not every government has the wherewithal to staff its own defect-mining operation, but that's where the private sector steps in. Cyber-arms dealers like the NSO Group find or buy security defects in widely used products and services and turn them into products – military-grade cyberweapons that are used to attack human rights groups, opposition figures, and journalists:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom

A good Cybercrime Treaty would recognize the perverse incentives that create the coalition to keep us from knowing which products we can trust and which ones we should avoid. It would shut down companies like the NSO Group, ban spy agencies from hoarding defects, and establish an absolute defense for security researchers who reveal true facts about defects.

Instead, the Cybercrime Treaty creates new obligations on signatories to help other countries' cops and courts silence and punish security researchers who make these true disclosures, ensuring that spies and criminals will know which products aren't safe to use, but we won't (until it's too late):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/if-not-amended-states-must-reject-flawed-draft-un-cybercrime-convention

A Cybercrime Treaty is a good idea, and even this Cybercrime Treaty could be salvaged. The member-states have it in their power to accept proposed revisions that would protect human rights and security researchers, narrow the definition of "cybercrime," and mandate transparency. They could establish member states' powers to refuse illegitimate requests from other countries:

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-briefing-eff-partners-warn-un-member-states-are-poised-approve-dangerou

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/23/expanded-spying-powers/#in-russia-crime-cybers-you

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/cybercrime-2024-2b.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[spooksier]

young artist posting your work online, heed my warning. im holding your face so gently in my hands, you have to stop caring about numbers right now and start caring about making the weirdest and most self-indulgent art you possibly can

[spooksier]

STOP listening to the demon of capitalism and START listening to the angel of hedonism, i love you i believe in you keep making what you love forever ok?

[dduane]

At Ebooks Direct...

The current sale has been extended to August 31st. Yay!

This is because the "Whole (Ebooks Direct) Store For $44" offer's being made available elsewhere online at the moment. But, frankly, if you feel like ducking in from the Tumblresque end of things to pick up the DRM-free 36-book package, the store won't try to talk you out of it. It's much too well-mannered for that. :)

So feel free to drop in and take advantage of us by grabbing the "Get The Whole Store Deal" bundle at a truly ridiculous price!*

(And would you perhaps consider reblogging this for others who might be interested? Thanks very much.) :)

*That's sort of $1.22 per book. (Or a really long repeating decimal version of $1.22, if you get out the calculator...)

[dduane]

A middle of the night bump...

[onetwothreemany]

FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

[walkingnorth]

✨Love and Gravity (the print edition of Always Human season 2) is out, in bookstores, tomorrow!✨

Like last time, I have cool goodies to give out.

The release campaign is running through to the end of August, please go to https://alwayshumanbooks.carrd.co/ for more information and to submit your receipt! There's a Q&A on the site and hopefully that answers most questions. If you have further questions, please ask here and I will answer :)

[walkingnorth]

I've seen a bit of confusion in the tags - just want to clarify that the Always Human book is season 1 of the webtoon (chapters 1 to 37) and the Love and Gravity book is season 2 of the webtoon (chapters 38 through to the epilogue). Together, they're the full story :)

[cmdrtpol]

on a serious note regarding the wga strike and (as of 1:50 AM PST 7/13) upcoming sag-aftra strike, dsa-la has a fundraiser called The Snacklist which provides snacks and water on the picket lines here in LA. right now the funds they have will not last through the end of the summer, especially given the current and upcoming heatwaves necessitating more supplies. if you have a couple of dollars to spare it's a great way to directly support the writers (and potentially the actors) during this difficult time!

[cmdrtpol]

happy first sag-aftra strike in 60 years to all who celebrate.

if you are an enjoyer of media (which i will guess based on your presence on tumblr that you are) please consider donating to the snacklist (linked above) or to any of the following mutual aid funds that directly support striking actors/writers, IATSE and teamster union members who are also out of work and by and large refusing to cross the picket lines, and nonunion PAs and assistants (like yours truly) who are directly impacted by the work stoppage. everyone in this industry works unbelievably hard to bring you the shows, movies, webseries, and variety programs that you enjoy and every worker deserves a fair contract. any support you can give is extremely meaningful.

The Entertainment Community Fund provides emergency financial assistance to anyone in the entertainment industry who is unable to pay their immediate basic living expenses such as housing, food, bills, and healthcare.

The Union Solidarity Coalition has been formed by members of the wga, sag, and the dga to help cover the cost of healthcare for IATSE and teamsters who will not get enough work hours to qualify for their coverage this year due to their refusal to cross a picket line.

The Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund (also run by the Entertainment Community Fund but separate from the above link which supports all film and tv workers) offers assistance to tv and film support staff and assistants who are not protected by a union and have been displaced from low or entry level positions.

Drive 4 Solidarity is an IATSE organized event in August raising funds for all union and guild members. Tickets are available for those in socal but donations are being taken as well.

Humanitas Groceries for Writers fund provides WGA members with grocery gift cards.

Green Envelope Grocery is a grocery fund for all workers in the entertainment industry regardless of union status.

[griseldajane]

Glaze is out!

Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?

Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.

I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.

[digitaldiscipline]

Art thieves already hate it:

[fierceawakening]

Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.

[spooky-octagon-deactivated20240]

The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222

[esoanem]

As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu

&

GLAZE: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Models

Recent text-to-image diffusion models such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion threaten to displace many in the professional artist community

[sliceosunshine]

A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:

The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)

It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).

Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).

It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.

The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).

It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)

It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)

IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).

Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)

The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)

When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.

Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)

The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles

From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)

You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

[theomnipotentfox]

Images only, link to original Twitter at the bottom of post.

Full🧵 here:

[curds-and-wheyface]

I think a fundamental part of online friendships that people ‘outside’ fail to understand is how comforting it is to have friends right there in your pocket who will keep you company in good times and bad, listen to your rants, let you vent, be supportive whilst offering outsider perspective…

Need to be alone but need support too? Pocket friends.

Something awful just happened and there’s nobody around for you to tell? Pocket friends.

Need to let your feelings out but don’t want people to see you ugly-cry? Pocket friends.

Keep being amazing, pocket friends. You couldn’t possibly imagine how important you are.

[escritorian]

Question, is the cat's name Gremlin or Criminal? I'm nearing the end of my wakefulness cycle so I'm not that good at brain work.

Oh, haha, neither! Her name is Liliana, or Lilly, for short. She just happens to be both a gremlin and a criminal

[pomrania]

For the entirety of August 2021, I want to draw pictures of your pets. During that time, reblog this post with a photo of your pet – make sure to read the rules below and abide by them – and I will draw every single one of those requests I get.

To make a request, reblog this post with a photo of your pet. In the body of the post, include the pet’s name. If you don’t have that text in the body of the post, it makes it hard to find, and I might not notice that you added anything at all in that reblog. Valid requests will be drawn in the order they come in, with some rare exceptions (generally when I’m tired or I need a warm-up).

(If you were here for what I did in April, these are the same rules and methods, only now I’m hoping they’re written out a bit more clearly. Black lives matter, and trans right are human rights.)

Only one photo per request, and only one pet per request. Do not include multiple photos and tell me to pick one. If you give me a photo that has multiple animals in it, be very clear about which one you want me to draw.

Only one request at a time (but see number 5).

It has to be your pet, present or past; I won’t draw just random pictures you found online.

Vertebrate pets only.

If you want multiple things drawn, pick one to start with; wait until your first request is done, and then put in another. That is, you can only have one request “active” at a time.

Once it is no longer August 2021, I won’t be accepting requests reblogged on this post.

Black cats are good, and sleeping cats are good, and curled-up-in-a-ball cats are good; but sleeping curled-up-in-a-ball black cats just look like a black circle. Find a different photo for me to draw.

Answers to common questions are found below the read-more. You don’t need to read this before requesting, but if you have a question, check this out before asking me.

Keep reading

[escritorian]

That’s so kind of you!  Here is a picture of my very lovely gremlin criminal.  I hope you enjoy drawing her!  Thank you!