This tumblr sometimes deals with adult topics. Please come back when you're 18 or older.
I'm Meret on AO3.
https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meret
I don't use ai, and never will!
Turtle Frog (Myobtrachus gouldii), family Myobatrachidae, Western Australia
These burrowing frogs dig forward, like a turtle, and not backwards into the soil, like most burrowing frogs.
After pairing up, a couple descends into a burrow, where they later mate, and lay eggs. The offspring go through the larval stage in the eggs (not having a free swimming tadpole stage).
The other day at the park I must have been kicking up small insects as I walked over the hills in the grass because the barn swallows which were already flying in low circles there started flying in tighter circles around me, sometimes as close as two feet away or closer so I could see their deep blue backs clearly and it felt like I might even walk into one.
Of course that could never happen. They are incredible aerial acrobats, creatures of speed and beauty and grace who constantly know where they are, where they're headed and where everything else is. That's why it felt amazing to be so close, to have one right in front of me, not once but time after time as if they were dancing for me there alone in the park.
I've seen where their mud nests are. I hope my walk across the park helped them feed those babies in the rafters of the pavilion.
The thing that Shane fully did not consider when he made the plan to start a Mental Health charity and present it as a Cause they Both Love that brought them together, is that, especially after Ilya talks publicly about his mom, people are going to start wondering why Shane Hollander is so passionate about mental health and suicide prevention. And Shane is probably unaware of most of the speculation. It’s like a year in and he’s just so focused on how The Plan is going great and then Hayden says something about how Shane can always talk to him if he’s feeling depressed. And then Shane has to suddenly confront the idea that he also possesses Mental Health, a thing he has been studiously ignoring for his whole entire life.
"Red?" Shane offered as he put the burgers on the grill.
Ilya blew a raspberry and shook his head. "So boring, Hollander."
Shane rolled his eyes as he looked over his shoulder at his husband. "You like boring, Rozanov. What about green?"
"Green is basic one. This is why you should just let me pick," Ilya responded, trying to sneak his hand beneath Shane's shirt to rest on the warm skin of his back.
Shane playfully smacked Ilya's hand away with the spatula before closing the lid to the grill. "Considering it's for me, it should be my choice. And green is not the basic one. From what I can tell, the orange and yellow ones are."
"Of course you know that, Mr. Research," Ilya joked, pleased with the knowledge that his husband was so dedicated even to the small things.
"I needed to look up reviews anyway. We already have blue and purple, but there are still so many options to try."
Ilya couldn't resist kissing Shane on the cheek, simply too endeared at the idea of his husband hunched over his laptop as he meticulously read through reviews for sex toys.
Both Shane and Ilya were startled at the sound of Hayden's voice, almost forgetting that they had the Pike couple over for dinner. "Are you two seriously fighting over which Gatorade flavor to buy?"
Ilya let out a cackling laugh while Shane's cheeks flushed as he ducked his head. Shane handed the spatula to Ilya so he could escape the back patio for a moment to go grab something from the kitchen.
As Shane walked inside without responding, Hayden sat up straighter with a scandalized look on his face. "You are talking about Gatorade, right? Shane? Shane!"
at some point after shane joins the centaurs, ilya overhears shane refer to him as 'roz' in the locker room and his head JERKS up but he doesn't even have time to be confused because he can already tell by the look on shane's face that he was trying something out and it will NOT happen again
Google’s new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme
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:
Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:
This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:
https://privacybadger.org/
Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal.
But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?
It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.
But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.
That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:
They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:
They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:
Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.
For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android – the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 – was presented as an "open" alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies – Google and Apple – Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's "walled garden."
There were always ways in which Google's "open" Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal "tying" arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors:
In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, they used commercial and legal strategies to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness.
But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely "de-Googled," blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data:
https://grapheneos.org/
And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The "resting heartbeat" of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company:
All that data has proved irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE:
So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's illegal commercial tactics to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked.
Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence.
Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure:
WEI was a form of "remote attestation." That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a "Technical Protection Module" or "TPM") or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a "secure enclave") to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins and settings you're running.
When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this "attestation" before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see.
Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad.
WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's efforts to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day:
These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, "How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?" with "How about 'Nah?'"
We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it.
These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads – they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or who (like me) suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so that we can safely and legibly access them.
WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely rat you out to the companies you connect to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them:
WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web – it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittogenic as the app hellscape.
Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental "reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification" that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device:
This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android:
This is a terrible idea – it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable.
I know i have already discussed this ad nauseum, but I love that Shane never talks down to Ilya because of his weaker english skills. especially at the beginning when he’s just moved from russia. he just talks like he would with anyone else.
similarly, i love that ilya never teases or laughs at shane when he misses obvious conversational cues (re: ilya asking shane four times in florida if he is still seeing rose). he obviously finds it endearing mostly but even when he starts to get frustrated and just asks outright he never makes shane feel lesser or aware of his misstep. he’s endlessly patient with it
they are both just so earnest with each other, sort of unintentionally??? they really are like fated mates hehe <3
Folks: you CANNOT censor trigger tags. When you block a tag, it doesn't block other "spellings" of it. Writing it as "r@pe" or "r4p3" means that someone who has "tw rape" as a blocked tag will still see that post because you didn't wanna say the word rape. You are hurting people. Do not censor words, because people do not have those filtered out.
And honestly if you can't even write the word rape to protect other people then you probably aren't old/mature enough to discuss the topic.
this. this shit INFRUIATES me. i have to block literally 10 different versions of the SAME FUCKING TAG because everyone does this 1337 speak bullshit for their tags.
sorry, if youre talking about shit not everyone is gonna wanna see or be mentally prepared for, TAG YOUR SHIT RIGHT!
prguitarman
areudirty
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
discoholicmusic
