Kyriez

an old lady that unfortunately found out tumblr... will edit this description, promise.

[unpretty]

lmao at mozilla having to be like “not only did we not get rid of the fox in our logo but if all the people yelling at us actually use our browser they should have known that 🤔”

[unpretty]

this one’s real though

[ms-demeanor]

lol, i’d been wondering if i’d missed an update or something.

ANYWAY i fucking love how that firefox article discusses memes as a part of the misinformation news cycle. Good. Correct. 

Also please install firefox please, i’m begging you. The reason all of your school sites and work sites and whatever can insist on only working in chrome browsers is because there’s no diversity in the browser market and you should be using firefox because it is GOOD and on almost every computer it’s going to be as fast or faster than chrome (nearly TEN YEARS AGO there was an issue with firefox being somewhat slower but that isn’t the case anymore) and the extensions are wonderful and it now has native tracker blocking and you can import all your bookmarks and

!!!!!!! There is an extension called Auto Tab Discard that sleeps tabs you haven’t looked at in a set amount of time to save your computer’s resources!!!!!

And also firefox is free and open source and it is not a giant advertising engine, like, i posted the other day about the sponsored sites thing but you can turn that off with two clicks, how much fucking effort does it take to get chrome to stop pushing fucking google products at you fuck chrome FIREFOX IS SO FUCKING GOOD PLEASE USE IT AND HELP TO BREAK GOOGLE’S NEAR MONOPOLY ON THE BROWSER MARKET

Also you can install firefox mobile on your phone and put ublock origin on it and you can block browser ads in your phone like I have no idea why everyone isn’t already doing that I haven’t seen a browser ad in fucking YEARS (you can watch youtube in your browser ad free. Why are you still looking at ads? I’m so confused)

In Conclusion Please Use Firefox.

[ms-demeanor]

1 - to all of the people sharing desktop computers with parents and spouses and siblings I feel you. HOWEVER! Just because your mom is using chrome doesn’t mean you have to! Your computer is almost certainly capable of running two browsers at once and if that’s slowing it down you can set firefox so that it automatically reloads all your windows and tabs after you close it

2 - Seriously just run multiple browsers if you need chrome for school or whatever then use chrome for school only and don’t give google a second more of your day than you can absolutely help.

3 - I forgot to mention how amazing multi account containers are. Basically firefox lets you create account containers like “work” and “shopping” and “personal” so I’ve got my work’s amazon account open in one tab so that the behavior and cookies from that account don’t follow me all over the internet. I’ve got three different tumblr accounts logged in right now. Read all my free articles for [insert publication i’m certainly not going to pay for *cough* the atlantic *cough*] this month? Open in new container tab. Going on Facebook (disgusting) only in facebook container.

Also here are the basic extensions I use:

Ublock Origin - i like it better than adblock because it doesn’t whitelist ads

Mind the time - always good to know i’ve spent four hours and forty seven minutes on tumblr and should really log off

Multi Account Containers - See above

Facebook container - Put facebook and facebook products in facebook jail

Decentraleyes - keeps you from being tracked by content delivery networks (fuck google)

Privacy Badger - prevents tracking (fuck google)

Auto tab discard - sleeps tabs that aren’t in use; can be set to discard tabs after a certain period, saves computer resources

HTTPS Everywhere - ensures secure connections

Bitwarden - just a really fucking good open source password manager and the extension is great in firefox.

[unpretty]

if you share a computer that you can’t/don’t want to keep an install of your preferred browser on you can also use the portable edition and install it on a flash drive to keep with you at all times which i do so that i can have a separate virtual desktop open at work with discord and inoreader tabs i used to use it a lot at the university library so i could access my shit without logging in to my stuff in a strange browser on a strange computer

i also use firefox’s built-in pocket integration a lot because a lot of paywalled articles you can actually just. add to pocket. and read them there in their entirety. like idk if that’s how it’s supposed to work but for most of them it works.

also xkit for firefox is a thing and so is library extension

[void-milf]

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

[void-milf]

the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity.  make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged.  and strike. attack.

[37womenwieldingknives]

YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that

[afraidofamericans]

This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data

[queeranarchism]

Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.

[anarchopuppy]

Ooh I know this one!

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

@afraidofamericans

[mayflower-gal]

Boy it SURE would be a SHAME if this were SPREAD AROUND for everyone TO SEE

[tommyswiseau]

[wereralph]

I remember Brennan saying “laws are just structured threats made by the ruling socioeconomic class” during an episode of D20 and we truly just had to stan immediately

[uppity-hobbit]

How to DESTROY Trump's data harvesting machine by webdev data analyzer, steampunk fantasy author, and swordfighter/archer Claire Ryan:

Okay I want to talk about the TikTok/K-pop stan let’s-troll-Trump operation and specifically about the data gathering aspect of it.

If you’ve been keeping up with the whole MO of the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, micro-targeting of demographics on social media shit etc etc, you’ll know that gathering people’s info in order to shill for donations is a HUGE revenue stream.

AFAIK that was the reason he ran. To campaign, get donations from the MAGAts, funnel vast lakes of money into his businesses.

Like, it was just that simple. Doesn’t take much to feed racists the messaging they want to hear and suck money out of them.

The Russians/GOP/various other factors caused him to win, which was not in the plan, but anyway Trump at least knows that firing up the base = MONEY.

Yes yes, donations from big GOP donors, but you have to understand - there was a vast lake of untapped racist small donations that Trump plugged a hose into back in 2016.

That hose is powered by data.

(For reference: I’m a senior web dev specializing in data processing and analysis so I sort of know what I’m talking about.)

Have you seen those spammy emails that Trump supporters get, asking for money? Yeah, they’re carefully tuned to get cash out of them.

(Side note, I used to work in online advertising.)

Your regular ad campaign that’s pitching, say, workout leggings uses a huge amount of data and A/B testing to determine what is effective. It’s advertising by statistics.

Part of the reason that FB is so goddamn big isn’t because it’s any good, it’s solely because you can advertise to users based on their bio details and their Likes. Having those signals to determine how likely a person is to buy a product is the stuff of an advertiser’s dreams.

Google works the same way TBH but at least Google’s core functionality is useful.

You think having personalized search results is creepy and invasive until you’re like me, a web dev looking for obscure code errors...

Like, Google is aware of the context of my searches and it always returns good results. If I’m looking for info on bash, for example, it’s not going to show me videos of street fights, I’ll get StackOverflow pages on the bash Linux shell.

Anyway: the thing about this stuff is that it runs on ACCURATE data.

The worst fucking thing about data analysis is when your data is corrupted or inaccurate, and you have no way of filtering it out. It means insights derived from the dataset are 100% junk.

Now, other thing to know is that zoomers and millennials are THE tech savvy people and I would hazard a guess that the vast majority know how internet advertising works. They know about the data tracking.

Probably not in any detail but the use of fake social media profiles and fake emails specifically to make advertising data worthless is a thing going back years.

So the troll operation in this case, by all accounts, used fake emails and temp Google Voice numbers.

And listen, people: you don’t know how fucking genius this is.

I will bet a month’s salary that some poor database admin is now staring at a dataset of over a million ticket reservations that they were going to use to shill for donations and feeling sick.

Not even just donations: I’d bet they were planning on using this data to cross reference against other sources and do additional micro-targeting.

Let’s say they were going to use it to ID moderates to advertise to them.

They might have planned to ID any Democrat trolls and just slide that particular subset on to someone who can fuck with voter registrations.

Or cross-reference signals on location, and determine how to direct their campaign spending based on that.

Anyway - point being, they were probably expecting some level of trolling but not this.

That dataset is probably complete junk. Any registration that doesn’t correlate somehow to known good information is now suspect.

Like, for voters who they have a profile on already, like committed MAGAts, they can probably select them out and add this data point to the profile for future use, but novel signups? The thing that Parscale was bragging about IIRC?

Junk.

You can’t tell the difference between a legit email/phone number and a fake email/Google Voice number.

By automated means, is what I’m saying. Obviously if the email is “[email protected]” that’s a pretty safe bet for being fake.

So at the very least, this means a TON of extra work for the marketing team at Trump HQ just to clean up the data (somehow) and make it usable.

At worst, it means they toss it.

And trust me on this: Trump may stiff contractors, but he ain’t stiffing them.

That team keeps the money hose working. They are absolutely getting paid.

So imagine if you spent a ton of money setting up a rally and getting the devops in place to collect marketing data (least you think those systems are cheap, they are not) and then...

A few hundred thousand tech-savvy teenage trolls showed up to ratfuck you.

I can’t think of any better example of the power of the people in the modern world than this.

So in conclusion, all the photos of the half-empty arena are nice, but the thing really making me giggle is the thought of Parscale staring at that database and wondering when he’ll be fired.

Quick PS to this thread: part of the reason that this is so genius is because Trump HQ likes to shill for donations by email.

Allow me to enlighten you to how much time and money you have to spend on good, large scale email campaigns in order to get results.

Answer: A FUCKTON.

And you live an die on the accuracy of your mailing list. Fake emails are the bane of your life.

Trump HQ now have to face whether they can drop $insert-ridiculous-money-here to run an email campaign on this dataset that is almost certainly 90% worthless and for which they may not be able to filter out the real registrations.

Again: without known good data to use as a filter, they can’t tell which is a fake registration and which is one from a voter they haven’t got on their lists yet.

And Trumpikins desperately needs to get to those voters.

Like I can’t even tell you how much this whole thing makes me both smile and just internally clench because I know what it feels like to stare down the barrel of a billion records you spent excessive time/money compiling and it’s all fucking wasted.

Other devops/data analysts will know that feeling. :P

Anyway I might be going viral and I don’t have a soundcloud, so get out and vote, Nazis fuck off, support #BlackLivesMatter, and give all the money and power to women of color and trans people

CLAIRE OUT

__________________

LINK TO COMPLETE THREAD

additional thoughts from me...

Y'all were doing this by screwing up some survey on the Trump campaign's website

But the suggestion was to fill out the forms with obvious fake email addresses and names. Revised suggestion: Use realistic email addresses and names. Don't use your real identity, but make it hard for them to filter out the noise.

Caveat: you know they'll be collecting whatever info they can from your device: IP, location etc-- and cross-correlating it with Facebook data or whatever they have trying to suss you out. I'm a Gen Xer who knows enough to be wary what I share online, so I'm hesitant to click on Trump campaign ads. But a lot of Gen Z knows how to use VPN and other tools to block spyware.

GO GO GO GO

🌸 Hit Cambridge Analytica Like a Swarm of Murder Hornets! 🐝

[ferrousferrule]

I collected a bunch of "haha I don't have 2020 vision" "oh God not like that" posts

[allthecanadianpolitics]

This is a good counterpoint to people who say “You can’t defund the police, I need them to protect me!!!”.

Turns out cops are really bad at their job.

https://twitter.com/WpgPoliceHarm/status/1269723686292070404

Tagging: @politicsofcanada @abpoli 

[kermitlesbian]

Tallsbian saga(so far!) in order! 

[kyriez]

I'm so happy for them!!! <3

[rapeculturerealities]

How to Safely and Ethically Film Police Misconduct

Know your rights.

While people are inclined to whip out their phones and film when they see something alarming happening, those videos are not always recorded in a way that can be used as evidence in a legal proceeding or to support advocacy tactics.

At the human rights organization WITNESS, where I work as the senior U.S. program coordinator, we’ve learned that video has a greater chance of making an impact when it’s filmed ethically and strategically, and released in coordination with advocacy and legal efforts. Using the camera in your pocket can be a valuable way to ensure the world bears witness to abusive policing and systemic racism, help hold authorities accountable, and advocate for the real safety of our communities.

[white-throated-packrat]

Teen Vogue still hitting it out of the park, I see.

[shutyourmoustache]

HOLY SHIT. This was extremely informative. Please everyone READ THIS!!!

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada’s top billionaires are getting richer thanks to COVID-19 — and donating a pittance

They’ve donated just 1 per cent of the wealth they’ve gained since March to recovery efforts

Billionaires in the U.S. are making out like bandits amid the COVID-19 crisis, but what of the super-rich in Canada?

Thanks to a new report released today by TaxCOOP, a Quebec-based non-profit dedicated to promoting international tax cooperation, we now have some answers.

Canada’s five richest billionaires — David Thomson, Joseph Tsai, Galen Weston, David Cheriton and Mark Scheinberg — saw their wealth increase by 9 per cent between March 16 and May 16, 2020, an increase of $5.5 billion. In this same period, cash donations to fight COVID-19 from these five billionaires represented 0.09 per cent of their wealth.

That means Canada’s richest billionaires have donated roughly 1 per cent of the money they have made during this pandemic.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @abpoli @politicsofcanada

[fueltransitsleep]

Reminder that Thomson Reuters, the media corporation that David Thomson chairs, helps US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) track and detain migrants.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Henry’s soft-spoken authority -- she’s on TV every day, often repeating her mantra, “Be kind, be calm, be safe” -- won over British Columbians.

The outbreak came early to British Columbia, in January, and public health officials braced for the worst. Now the Canadian province has one of the lowest death rates in North America.

“I thought we were going to be dealing with something unprecedented in that region specifically, but then it didn’t happen,” said Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba.

British Columbia’s success story shows how tried-and-true methods – when paired with strong public health agencies – can have sweeping impact, according to Kindrachuk and other scientists. Many governments embraced technology, with the U.K. using drones to help police enforce lockdowns and South Korea tapping location data from mobile carriers and credit-card transactions to track infections.

B.C. stuck to old-fashioned basics, alerting primary care doctors by fax about how to be on the lookout for the novel pathogen and tracing potential transmissions through interviews. Data compiled on May 13 show the province’s Covid-19 death rate was 3 per 100,000 residents, better than almost anywhere in North America and much of Europe.

Local officials would be the first to say that luck surely played a role. But British Columbia also had stockpiles of equipment along with the benefit of a public-health system making communication and coordination smoother than in U.S. states. And it had a provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, with the power to order doctors and hospitals to take certain steps, such as canceling elective surgeries, which she did early on to free up beds.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada​ @abpoli​ @pnwpol​

[dank-morpork]

It’s the only province with an NDP government.

[ebookporn]

Local Bookstores Have A New Weapon In The Fight With Amazon

In the book industry, Amazon is Goliath, the giant who overshadows everyone else. But there’s a new David on the scene, Bookshop.org.

It doesn’t expect to topple the giant, but it has launched a weapon that could make Amazon’s shadow a little smaller, and help local bookstores fight back.

Bookshop.org, a website that went live at the end of January and is still in beta mode, is designed to be an alternative to Amazon, and to generate income for independent bookstores. And, perhaps more importantly, it seeks to give book reviewers, bloggers and publications who rely on affiliate income from “Buy now” links to Amazon a different option.

Profit from books sold through Bookshop will be split three ways, with 10% of the sale price going into a pool that will be divided among participating bookstores, 10% going to the publication that triggered the sale by linking to Bookshop.org, and 10% going to Bookshop.org to support its operations.

READ MORE

[batmansymbol]

y’all, Bookshop is amazing. i got an email about them from my local indie store, and they’re so excited about it. please oh please use this place instead of Amazon!!

with every purchase, they tell you how much you’re putting toward independent booksellers, which is fun and cute:

it’s also amazing for authors! i’ve been asked a couple times about the best way to support my books. this site is now the answer. it reports sales figures to the NYT and Bookscan, a type of tracking that helps authors hit bestseller lists. and even better, authors can set up affiliate pages, and if you buy through those pages, we get an additional 10 percent of each sale on top of royalties. this is a massive deal!!!

for reference, many royalty rates are in the 6-8 percent range. so if you buy through Bookshop author affiliate pages, authors get more than twice as much from sales of their books, with no additional cost to you.

the site is still in beta, but it also has a fun interface where you can make book lists for favorites or recommendations, sort of like goodreads (except better, because goodreads is owned by amazon).

this is my Bookshop page. if you ever buy one of my books, i pray u will do it from this site! (or from your local indie :D)

[blacklightco]

@thebibliosphere @vampireapologist @glumshoe

[awed-frog]

WHOA

[dulcewhisperlea]

[tywysogannwn]

this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to translate on the fly 😭 monoglots just don’t understand and think you’re bad at the source language 😟

[kyriez]

Yes! The visual language presentation I always needed!!!

[nocontextjohnoliver]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Helps says it’s “not good enough” to be sheltering people outside in the midst of a pandemic.

Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps wants the B.C. government to use its emergency powers to requisition empty hotel and motel rooms for people without homes during the COVID-19 outbreak.

In a motion going to committee of the whole today, Helps and councillors Sarah Potts and Jeremy Loveday urge the province to take immediate action to get people off the streets or, failing that, to allow the city to declare a local state of emergency.

Helps told reporters Wednesday that the city has “hit a wall” after working hard on the issue with B.C. Housing and Island Health for the past month.

She said B.C. Housing requires increased powers to secure the rooms, while Island Health needs more resources to provide supports to people once they move off the street.

“It is absolutely naive to think that COVID-19 will not hit the unsheltered population in our city, and when it does, those people are going to be using the same hospital beds and acute-care beds that everybody else will,” she said.

Helps has appealed directly to provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry as well, writing that Victoria is in a “crisis situation.”

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada @abpoli @pnwpol

[everythingmatters]

[kyriez]

my entire weekend be like

[azelmawhite]

Young eraser and mic

[trinuviel]

chinese couture visionary guo pei's sculptural creations are shot in otherworldly environments

guo pei’s richly bejeweled creations are characterized by an artisan craftsmanship and theatrical fantasy which is often compared to that of alexander mcqueen and sarah burton’s. HOWL collective has shot the designer’s creations in a series of fairy tale set ups, which have been published by rizzoli in the first major monograph of china’s leading couture visionary.

[kyriez]

I.AM.HERE.FOR.GUO.PEI!!!