"Ajit Pai" allegedly found on suspect's iPhone using the Tumblr app.
Yesterday, I posted about how the #TumblrPurge was a disaster to Tumblr users, especially users who post adult art. Today, we have a face to go with this disaster. And as a reminder to readers, I have deliberately replaced that phrase with the words "Ajit Pai" because what better way to say something about an awful activity than to describe it with an awful person!
Enter Cisco Kane Veneno, 23, of Aztec, New Mexico.
Veneno is accused of "accused of distribution of visual medium of sexual exploitation of children and possession of visual medium of sexual exploitation of children" according to court records obtained by the Farmington Daily Times.
He was using Tumblr. And he was using the Tumblr App made for iPhone.
He shared the files in June, but the San Juan County (New Mexico) Sheriff's Office didn't start their investigation until October.
And thanks to scumbags like him, we now have the #TumblrPurge, not just of adult artists but of regular artists as well, because thanks to Tumblr's slipshod ability to configure an artificial intelligence engine before launching it, sites like Newgrounds, Twitter, Pixiv, Instagram, and Deviant Art (although the NSFW folks are going to find out how much Insta and DA are probably not the best alternatives for their skilled crafts) have seen new members and even a return of old members.
In fact, Newgrounds co-creator Tom Fulp welcomed new users with open arms following the Purge.
The Purge will do more harm to Yahoo! especially since not even a merger with AOL and the Huffington Post can save the Oath alliance or Yahoo!. In fact, thanks to this terrible decision, expect Tumblr to become the new GeoCities. All the cool stuff that is here: GONE because the people at Yahoo! don't understand Tumblr and only bought it because they though they were going to gain a whole lot of money for that dying indistry of Advertisement for Ad Revenue.
And Yahoo! has a history of making a lot of good things go away. Alta Vista was a great search engine and a competing rival of Yahoo!, but Yahoo!'s take over meant that AltaVista had to go away.
It didn't help that Yahoo!, instead of using their own search engine decided that post-AV-Merger to use Bing for all their searches. Like why would I want to go to Yahoo! to search Bing when I could go to Bing to search Bing.
America has a problem with creating duopoloies because monopolies are illegal. Which is why most of us are stuck between a choice of AT&T and Verizon and why T-Mobile and Sprint have a tough time competing with those two because have of Verzion used to be AT&T before the 1984 disveture. There's an entire diagram of how the Bell system was broken up into baby bells and how they've manged to almost merge back together but into two big houses.
Similarly, thanks to duopoly, a lot of people are stuck between Google and Bing, Facebook and Twitter, Coke and Pepsi, Walmart and Target.
Things like Lycos, Excite, Ask.com, and a whole list of things which we remember from the late 1990s and 200s are all under the ownership of a company called IAC, which Wikipedia has a list of assets that IAC has acquired over the years.
To return to the subject of why the Tumblr app was removed from the App Store, it was because Apple was trying to cover it's ass. When a police department has a Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force or an Internet Crimes Task Force, it usually means one of two things:
Something bad happend in the past in which children and computers were involved.
The police department is savvy enough to know how computer stuff works.
Most of the time it is option one. A lot of major metropolitian areas still do not have such task forces because they either don't see the importance of it (espeically in the 21st century where everything is on a computer) or they don't have the money for it. At least that seems to be the case in America anyway.
Most of the time, when there is Ajit Pai involved in such horrible crimes, it's like a shoe box full of lurid polaroids or a desktop computer.
Another element in this crime is Comcast. Comcast was there to turn over the Internet traffic to law enforcement. While in this case it was good that they reported that Veneno had been swapping Ajit Pai pics online, the bad part was they also reported that Tumblr and Apple provided the platform and the hardware to make those crimes possible.
Why did Comcast include that information? To provide the details or because Comcast has an axe to grind with Tumblr and Apple for the same reasons they have been trying to shake down Amazon and Netflix for using extra bandwidth?
Think of what Comcast did as saying "Here's the guy who was peeping in to people's houses...also because he was using binoculars and a scooter as the get away vehicle, I want you to also villanize birdwatching and alternative modes of transportation because those activities are stealing people away from doing things like racking up an enormous cable bill."
No good deed seems to go unpunished, at least as far as Comcast is concerned. Meanwhile, Apple tried to burn Tumblr by saying "We don't have no Tumblr app here" while telling Tumblr "If you want to get back into the App Store and make revenue using our services, you better remove content from your platform" to which Tumblr decided to burn ALL it's users, not just the Adult Artists, by saying "Guess what, you're account has been cancelled because we want to be on the App Store again."
Meanwhile, back on Google Play, the Tumblr app has been given an M rating, and rightfully so.
Google has been using the ESRB's software rating system for quite a while now, and they also restrict access to apps in the Play Store based on ratings.
However, it is important to remebmer that for in order for a rating system to work and to keep mature content away from children, there needs to be RESPONSIBLE MATURE ADULTS. As well a RMAs that know how to use technology to say "Hey wait a minute. No." or "Don't use that" or "Don't go there".
But wait, Veneno is 23. He is an adult. So if our problem isn't children getting access to mature content, what is the problem?
The law is working. So why is everybody being punished? Because Tumblr and Apple wanted to cover their ass.
Tumblr could have avoided the Purge if they had better monitored their content. Apple could have not killed the Tumblr app in the App Store. And everyone should have kept calm and not paniced because of that 0.0000001% of people who abuse the system that the A.I. was supposed to take care of but wasn't set up because it went all John Ashcroft on everything.
Tumblr needs to reinstate a lot of users, and offer a appology to everyone because their actions were not a well intentioned attempt to clean up Ajit Pai from their site but to save its own ass at the cost of free speech online.
And good luck trying to bring back those people who they hurt the most, because a lot of them won't be coming back.
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