I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle! Full schedule here.
Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country's continued operations, huh?
In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump's DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE's roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites:
Apple and Google capitulated. Apple also capitulated to Trump by removing apps that collect hand-verified, double-checked videos of ICE violence. Apple declared ICE's thugs to be a "protected class" that may not be disparaged in apps available to Apple's customers:
Of course, iPhones can (technically) run apps that Apple doesn't want you to run. All you have to do is "jailbreak" your phone and install an independent app store. Just one problem: the US Trade Rep bullied every country in the world into banning jailbreaking, meaning that if Trump (a man who never met a grievance that was too petty to pursue) orders Tim Cook (a man who never found a boot he wouldn't lick) to remove apps from your country's app store, you won't be able to get those apps from anyone else:
Now, you could get your government to order Apple to open up its platform to third-party app stores, but they will not comply – instead, they'll drown your country in spurious legal threats:
Of course, Google's no better. Not only do they capitulate to every demand from Trump, but they're also locking down Android so that you'll no longer be allowed to install apps unless Google approves of them (meaning that Trump now has a de facto veto over your Android apps):
For decades, China hawks have accused Chinese tech giants of being puppeteered by the Chinese state, vehicles for projecting Chinese state power around the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese state has declared war on its tech companies, treating them as competitors, not instruments:
When it comes to US foreign policy, every accusation is a confession. Snowden showed us how the US tech giants were being used to wiretap virtually every person alive for the US government. More than a decade later, Microsoft has been forced to admit that they will still allow Trump's lackeys to plunder Europeans' data, even if that data is stored on servers in the EU:
Microsoft is definitely a means for the US to project its power around the world. When Trump denounced Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for indicting Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft obliged by nuking Khan's email, documents, calendar and contacts:
This is exactly the kind of thing Trump's toadies warned us would happen if we let Huawei into our countries. Every accusation is a confession.
But it's worse than that. The very worst-case speculative scenario for Huawei-as-Chinese-Trojan-horse is infinitely better than the non-speculative, real ways in which the US has killswitched and bugged the world's devices.
Take CALEA, a Clinton-era law that requires all network switches to be equipped with law-enforcement back-doors that allow anyone who holds the right credential to take over the switch and listen in, block, or spoof its data. Virtually every network switch manufactured is CALEA-compliant, which is how the NSA was able to listen in on the Greek Prime Minister's phone calls to gain competitive advantage for the competing Salt Lake City Olympic bid:
CALEA backdoors are a single point of failure for the world's networking systems. Nominally, CALEA backdoors are under US control, but the reality is that lots of hackers have exploited CALEA to attack governments and corporations, inside the US and abroad. Remember Salt Typhoon, the worst-ever hacking attack on US government agencies and large corporations? The Salt Typhoon hackers used CALEA as their entry point into those networks:
US monopolists – within Trump's coercive reach – control so many of the world's critical systems. Take John Deere, the ag-tech monopolist that supplies the majority of the world's tractors. By design, those tractors do not allow the farmers who own them to alter their software. That's so John Deere can force farmers to use Deere's own technicians for repairs, and so that Deere can extract soil data from farmers' tractors to sell into the global futures market.
A tractor is a networked computer in a fancy, expensive case filled with whirling blades, and at any time, Deere can reach into any tractor and permanently immobilize it. Remember when Russian looters stole those Ukrainian tractors and took them to Chechnya, only to have Deere remotely brick their loot, turning the tractors into multi-ton paperweights? A lot of us cheered that high-tech comeuppance, but when you consider that Donald Trump could order Deere to do this to all the tractors, on his whim, this gets a lot more sinister:
Any government thinking about the future of geopolitics in an era of Trump's mad king fascism should be thinking about how to flash those tractors – and phones, and games consoles, and medical implants, and ventilators – with free and open software that is under its owner's control. The problem is that every country in the world has signed up to America's ban on jailbreaking.
In the EU, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. In Mexico, it's the IP chapter of the USMCA. If Central America, it's via CAFTA. In Australia, it's the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. In Canada, it's 2012's Bill C-11, which bans Canadian farmers from fixing their own tractors, Canadian drivers from taking their cars to a mechanic of their choosing, and Canadian iPhone and games console owners from choosing to buy their software from a Canadian store:
These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.
But today, these laws have created clusters of deep-seated infrastructural vulnerabilities that reach into all our digital devices and services, including the digital devices that harvest our crops, supply oxygen to our lungs, or tell us when Trump's masked shock-troops are hunting people in our vicinity.
It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe.
The world signed up to these laws because the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't do as they were told. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone. The US told the world to pass America's tech laws or face American tariffs.
When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, he inadvertently pushed the EU to accelerate its solarization efforts, to escape their reliance on Russian gas, and now Europe is a decade ahead of schedule in meeting its zero-emissions goals:
Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works.
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:
Germany has started implementing article 17 (formely known as article 13)
Back in 2019,the EU Copyright Directive passed by a slim margin in Parliament,the very same Directive containing Upload Filters and Link taxes.And now its on its way.
AO3 made an entry explaining clearly what are the stakes,and how the current language of the bill endangers non commercial sites such as AO3 itself,as well as Wikipedia.
Please refer to the original post for the entire information:
https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/19550
If you are German,I beg you to contact your representatives like indicated
Explains how this threathen freedom of speech and creativity during fair use,and how parodies,caricatures,postiche,etc should not be subjected to this.
I do not know when or if other EU countries will also start implementing article 17 on their own.
I do know there is a lawsuit from Poland ongoing trying to strike the Directive down
(But it is extremely slow process,so its best to contact MEPs right away before too much damage is done under this Directive)
Not only that,but TERREG (not part of the directive) which is the “anti terror law”) has been adopted without a plenary vote on a EU scale,which means that under one hour,certain sites will have to take down any content deemed as “terrorist” to governement’s eyes,without the control of a judge to see if its fair or not.
So sites will have to resort to Upload Filters as the short time theyre given to take content down is ridiculously short.
Terreg can be sued,but only if we see misuse,which isn’t really enough.
If you read this,I’m begging you to REBLOG AND SPREAD THIS LIKE WILDFIRE.
Even if you’re not from the EU.
Tweet about this,get Youtubers to talk about,anything to get the word out.
Don’t let governements and greedy assholes censor our Internet.
Y'all might have heard about the EU's article 13, you know, the one that's supposed to adapt rules about copyright and ownership to the 21st century but actually turned into a load of bullshit and facilitates big tech with their big money that comes from not paying taxes? Yeah, that one.
It's currently going through the process of being adapted and entered into german law and there's a passage in there that could impact us fanfiction writers on Ao3 and other noncommercial sites by ruling they need to pay copyright fees so that work can be uploaded (Vergütungspflicht für Karikatur, Parodie und Pastiche).
My legal speak is not the greatest, there's another point to this, BUT it's explained in an understandable way in the petition to the Bundestag by the OTW.
Please sign the petition. I don't want to make another facebook account in order to be able to post stuff.
Rechtssicherheit für Fanfiction in der Urheberrechtsreform
Demand that the U.S.A. denounce the EU for passing Article 13 and demand they overturn it
Another petition in the fight against the Copyright Directive by the EU Parliament and Council.
“But it’s only an European issue, why drag the US into it?”
Because the Internet is GLOBAL, attempting to censor it in one end WILL affect GLOBALLY. Not to mention the Copyright Directive will only inspire the American leaders who already had hardons for ACTA and SOPA and other attempts in the past to censor the Internet. If the EU pulls this through, US will follow. Once you lost connection to European users and content creators, you won’t stay safe for long.
Article 11, the link ban, is going to break the internet. And it’s going to break people. How many ‘SIGNAL BOOST’ posts have I seen, people stuck, in danger, in poverty- important information people need to know- things you can do to stop from self-harming- suicide hotlines. “Reblog to save a life”. Anon asks have been posted about yes, the post did save their lives. The post covered in links, links to save people. Copyright Directive isn’t just a meme ban. It’s a law for murderers.
Article 13. The meme ban. This one is harder to take seriously. But it destroys gen z culture. And if you start by stopping memes, then what else will you stop? The US Constitution has the right for free speech. That’s what racists, phobes, just plain horrible people, have been using to defend their actions, it’s true. But it goes the other way. When will it stop?
I want to say something. But if this law comes into effect... I can’t.
The new copyright directive of the EU just passed the final vote. With all the bad articles 11, 12 and 13...
This won’t mean immediate change since the various countries have about 2 years to implement the stuff into their national laws...
But in 2 years... who knows what will happen.
The sites (every site there ever is with user generated content) must do all what’s in their power to prevent copyright infringement. And if a copyright claim is made and someone finds their efforts were not strong enough they get sued (as well as the person uploading because seriously... who believes the uploader is out of the question is nuts...).
So... how to prevent uploads? By filters most likely because everything else is unrealistic. You could also license everything there is... good luck trying. And filters will overblock just to be “safe”...
Filters don’t understand memes and remixes and fan-generated content.
The EU doesn’t have a “fair use” concept...
Nobody is against copyright... but not like this. Not for the sake of free speech because, let’s face it. This filter mechanism has all the best potential to be used to filter content you don’t want to go public. Censorship!
I don’t know what will happen in 2 years... I have no idea how fanart and fanfic will be effected...
I am truly angry and sad because EU politicians seem 90% lobby-bought and don’t care about anything the people want. They never even listened to any of the arguments and suggestions of people who know how the internet works...
And countless experts (real experts) told them the thing is a bad idea... but big publishers just want to “YouTube/Google and Facebook need to pay more”... while YouTube and Facebook will be the winners in the end (they already have the filter technology and can sell it to others) and they have the money to implement more...
They managed to make me refuse the idea of the EU...
A new law passed in European Parliament Wednesday could change everything you know about using the internet. Here's what you need to know.
The European Parliament voted to adopt an extremely controversial copyright reform on Wednesday that could have profound ramifications for how the internet works. (And, yes, maybe make memes illegal.)
The reform is called the Copyright Directive and it was first proposed in 2016. On Wednesday, members of European Parliament voted 438–226 in favor of adopting the directive. The law is meant to be an overhaul of copyright rules, aimed at making sure publishers and artists are compensated by platforms like Google or Facebook.
The directive has been in the works since July, when it was announced that parliament would move forward with the copyright legislation. Wednesday's vote was the last chance for any amendments.
The controversial directive contains two articles that open internet and free speech advocates believe could fundamentally alter the way the internet works. Here's what they mean.
