20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:
But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:
Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":
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:
This is just something that I wrote while watching everything unfold. I do not seek to speak on behalf of those living in Afghanistan. But I hope this reminds myself and the rest of the world the fear and grief that is currently being faced over there.
I can only hope and pray that the Afghani people, especially the girls and women, can escape the repression and persecution of the Taliban regime. ♥️
Fuck this. Does everyone just not see the blood scrapes on some of their backs and faces???!!! Anyone, seriously, correct me if I’m wrong because this is making me upset af
Domesticated sheep need to be sheared because they don’t shed their coats on their own and it can be bad for their health if it gets too big.
Also, it looks considering how close they cut that it went fairly well. I see like 2 nicks maybe, but with the photo it’s hard to tell. I mean, unfortunately, you’re going to nick a few animals because they don’t understand the order of “stand still” very well.
Global advocates call for one-time, 99 percent emergency tax on billionaires’ pandemic windfalls to fund COVID-19 jabs for entire world.
The world’s billionaires have seen their wealth surge by over $5.5 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, a gain of over 68 percent. The world’s 2,690 global billionaires saw their combined wealth rise from $8 trillion on March 18, 2020 to $13.5 trillion as of July 31, 2021, drawing on data from Forbes.
Global billionaire total wealth has increased more over the past 17 months of the pandemic than it did in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Between 2006 and 2020, global billionaire wealth increased from $2.65 trillion to $8 trillion, a gain of $5.35 trillion.
Billionaires have reaped an unseemly windfall at a time when millions have lost their lives and livelihoods. The pandemic has supercharged existing global inequalities, with the wealthy profiteering from the shuttering of the main street economies around the world.
Global equality advocates are calling on national governments to levy a one-time 99 percent tax on these billionaire windfall pandemic gains, to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide a $20,000 cash grant to all unemployed workers. The analysis and proposal were released today by Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Patriotic Millionaires. The organizations are calling on governments to tax the ultra wealthy who profited from the pandemic crisis to help offset its costs.
The one-time emergency COVID-19 billionaire tax would raise $5.445 trillion and still leave the world’s 2,690 billionaires $55 billion richer than before the virus struck (an average of $37 million per billionaire). Governments across the world are massively under-taxing the wealthiest individuals and big corporations, which is undermining the fight against COVID-19 and poverty and inequality.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased by $79.4 billion during the pandemic, rising from $113 billion in March 2020 to $192.4 billion on July 31, 2021. An estimated 325 new billionaires joined the ‘3-comma club’ since the pandemic began ―equivalent to roughly one new billionaire minted every day.
Less than one percent of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine, while the profits made by Big Pharma have seen the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech become billionaires. The COVID-19 crisis has pushed over 200 million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020, equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries. At the same time, 11 people are now dying of hunger and malnutrition each minute, outpacing COVID-19 fatalities.
“With a 99 percent tax on billionaires’ COVID-19 wealth gains we are calling time on this age of greed,” said Njoki Njehu, Pan Africa coordinator of the Fight Inequality Alliance. “Billionaire wealth is not earned. Billionaires are profiting from working people’s hard graft and pain. It’s their money ’earned’ by your sweat ―and it’s high time that sweat began to pay off. Governments need to tax the rich for us to stand any chance of reversing the inequality crisis we’re in.” The Fight Inequality Alliance are convening the Festival to Fight Inequality, a two-day virtual gathering of thousands of activists from nearly 30 countries, will take place August 13-14. They will discuss solutions to the worsening global inequality crisis, including taxing the rich.
Bunjy a question, do you think any cryptids could plausibly exist?
at least one cryptid definitely does exist in the sense that it was an actual creature who encountered and really freaked out a couple of humans- Mothman!
<art src- Tim Bertelink>
it was a barred owl.
see, owls have a really bright eyeshine at night, and in a really unusual color- blood red.
and barred owls have the brightest eyeshine of them all- so bright you could swear you were looking at the oncoming headlights of the Hellfire Express!
at close range, the eyeshine of a barred owl would be almost blinding- like shining a bright flashlight directly into those bicycle spoke reflector things. like this:
and wouldn’t you know it, barred owls are found in the areas where Mothman was first sighted.
so what presumably happened was that several people had very close encounters with one or several barred owls, and the red hellfire glare of the owl was so bright that it made the owl’s eyes look the size of fucking softballs!
and since it was night and the owl was moving the shape of it was too indistinct to make out, so the humans’ brains extrapolated a body outline for this unknown creature that was MUCH bigger than the owl actually was! it’s also stupid difficult to judge distances in the sky at night so they may have thought the owl was further away when it was almost on top of them. and HEY PRESTO, A LEGEND WAS BORN.
but this doesn’t mean that Mothman was never real, quite the contrary! Mothman is real in the only place that matters,,,, in our hearts
support owl conservation efforts in your local area though, and you may someday see a Mothman of your own!
she should avoid school the next day. And the next. Every night, she should put on the exact outfit she had on that day, hose herself down until she’s completely drenched and stand in Jane’s yard. When Jane is home alone, she should approach the window, staring at her. Knock on it if you don’t have her attention.
That’ll get her back for killing you and trying to hide the evidence.
I second Satan's plan. A week should do the trick!
Then, show up to school like nothing happened. She will freak.
For extra measure, immediately afterwards place a recording device in Jane's bag (she will likely privately incriminate herself in the confusion). Retrieve said device (save multiple copies), and use it as collateral if Jane tries to threaten/harm you again.
she should avoid school the next day. And the next. Every night, she should put on the exact outfit she had on that day, hose herself down until she’s completely drenched and stand in Jane’s yard. When Jane is home alone, she should approach the window, staring at her. Knock on it if you don’t have her attention.
That’ll get her back for killing you and trying to hide the evidence.
