Making sense of a technologically mediated life. Now with enhanced ADD support thanks to Tumblr! Comments by Disqus. Contact me on Mastodon. Reddit profile here. Opinions posted here are solely my own.
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.
In my 23 years at EFF, I've been privileged to get a front-row seat for some of the most important legal battles over tech and human rights in history. There've been tremendous victories and heartbreaking losses, but win or lose, I am forever reminded that I'm privileged to work with some of the smartest, most committed, savviest cyberlawyers in the world.
These days, it's more of a second-row seat ā I work remotely, mostly on my own projects, and I rely on our Deeplinks blog as much as our internal message-boards to keep up with our cases. Yesterday, I happened on this fantastic explainer breaking down our most recent court victory, in our case against DOGE on behalf of federal workers whose privacy rights have been violated during DOGE's raid on the Office of Personnel Management's databases:
The post is by Adam Schwartz, EFF's Privacy Litigation Director. I've been campaigning on privacy for my entire adult life, but I still learn something ā something big and important ā every time I talk about the subject with Adam. His breakdown on EFF's latest court victory is no exception.
EFF was the first firm to bring a suit directly against DOGE, representing two federal workers' unions: the AFGE and the AALJ, and our co-counsel are from Lex Lumina LLP, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and The Chandra Law Firm. At the heart of our case are the millions of personnel records that DOGE agents were given access to by OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell.
The OPM is like the US government's HR department. It holds files on every federal employee and retiree, filled with sensitive, private data about that worker's finances, health, and personal life. The OPM also holds background check data on federal workers, including the deep background checks that federal workers must undergo to attain security clearances. Many of us ā including me ā first became familiar with the OPM in 2015, after its records were breached by hackers believed to be working for the Chinese military:
That breach was catastrophic. Chinese spies stole the sensitive data of tens of millions of Americans. The DOGE breach implicates even more Americans' private data, though, and while DOGE isn't a foreign intelligence agency, that cuts both ways. It's a good bet that a Chinese spy agency will not leak the records it stole, but with DOGE, it's another matter entirely. I wouldn't be surprised to find the OPM data sitting on a darknet server in a month or a year.
In his breakdown, Adam explains the ruling and what was at stake. We brought the case on behalf of all those federal workers under the 1974 Privacy Act, which was passed in the wake of Watergate and the revelations about COINTELPRO, scandals that rocked the nation's faith in federal institutions. The Privacy Act was supposed to restore trust in government, and to guard against future Nixonian enemies lists:
The Privacy Act's preamble asserts that the US government's creation of databases on Americans ā including federal workers ā "greatly magnified the harm to individual privacy." This is the basis for the Act's tight regulation on how government agencies use and handle databases containing dossiers on the lives of everyday Americans.
The US government tried to get the case tossed out by challenging our clients' "standing" to sue. Only people who have been harmed by someone else has the right ("standing") to sue over it. Does having your data leaked to DOGE constitute a real injury? Two recent Supreme Court cases say it does: Spokeo vs Robins and Transunion vs Ramirez both establish that "intangible" injuries (like a privacy breach) can be the basis for standing.
The court agreed that our clients had standing because the harms we alleged ā DOGE's privacy breaches ā are "concrete harms analogous to intrusion upon seclusion" ("intrusion upon seclusion" is one of the canonical privacy violations, set out in the Restatement of Torts, the American Law Institute's comprehensive guide to common law).
But the court went further, noting that DOGE's operation is accused of being "rushed and insecure," rejecting DOGE's argument that it only accessed OPM's "system" but not the data stored in that system. The court also said that it wouldn't matter if DOGE access the system, but not the data ā that merely gaining access to the data violated our clients' privacy. Here, the judge is part of an emerging consensus, joining with four other federal judges who've ruled that when DOGE gains access to a system containing private data, that alone constitutes a privacy violation, even if DOGE doesn't look at or process the records in the system.
So in ruling for our clients, the judge found that the mere fact that DOGE could access their records was an injury that gave us standing to proceed ā and also found that there were other injuries that would separately give us standing, including the possibility that DOGE's breach could expose our clients to "hacking, identity theft, and other activities that are substantially harmful."
The US government repeatedly argued that we weren't accusing them of disclosing our clients' records, every time they did this, the judge pointed to our actual filings, which plainly assert that DOGE agents were "viewing, possessing and using" our clients' records, and that this constitutes "disclosure" under the law, and according to OPM's own procedures.
The judge found that we were entitled to seek relief under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which proscribes the conduct of federal agencies ā and that our relief could be both "declaratory" (meaning a court could rule that DOGE was breaking the law) and "injunctive" (meaning the court could order DOGE to knock it off).
Normally, a plaintiff can't ask for a judgment under the APA until an agency has taken a "final" action. The court found that because DOGE's actions were accused of being "illegal, rushed, and dangerous," and that this meant that we could seek relief under the APA. Further, that we could invoke the APA here because the remedies set out in the Privacy Act itself wouldn't be sufficient to help our clients in the face of DOGE's mass data-plundering.
Finally, the court ruled that our claims will allow us to pursue APA cases because OPM and DOGE were behaving in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner, and exceeding its legal authority.
All of this is still preliminary ā we're not at the point yet where we're actually arguing the case. But standing is a huge deal. Ironically, it's when governments violate our rights on a mass scale that standing is hardest to prove. Our Jewel case, over NSA spying, foundered because the US government argued that we couldn't prove our clients had been swept up by NSA surveillance because the details of that surveillance were officially still secret, even though Snowden had disclosed their working a decade earlier, and our client Mark Klein (RIP) had come forward with documents on illegal mass NSA spying in 2006!:
So this is a big deal. It means we're going to get to go to court and argue the actual merits of the case. Things are pretty terrible right now, but this is a bright light. It makes me proud to have spent most of my adult life working with EFF. If you want to get involved with EFF, check and see if there's an Electronic Frontier Alliance affinity group in your town:
https://efa.eff.org/allies
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:
so international space station astronauts apparently dropped a tool bag during a spacewalk. and if you look outside when the ISS is in your region, you can see it with binoculars
The tool bag is now orbiting our planet just ahead of the ISS with a visual magnitude of around 6, according to EarthSky. That means it is slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun. As a result, the bagā ā āofficially known as a crew lock bagā ā āis slightly too dim to be visible to the unaided eye, but skywatchers should be able to pick it up with binoculars.Ā
To see it for yourself, first find out when you can find spot the space station over the next few months (NASA even has a new app to help you). The bag should be floating two to four minutes ahead of the station. As it descends rapidly, the bag is likely to disintegrate when it reaches an altitude of around 70 miles (113 kilometers) over Earth.Ā
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All thatās left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
-The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles
I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me Iām pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say ābut SURELY you agree Iād be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!ā bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetablesāitās hard bc theyāre more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but theyāre what we evolved eating the most of so theyāre what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you donāt do it, it isnāt doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is āmakes you less likely to do it again in the future.ā
You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Donāt waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.
And ONE MORE THINGālisten. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factorsāfactors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollutionāthere is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studiedāand many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. Youāre not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeisterās work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) Youāre fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they donāt care if you die.
So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Donāt wait until youāre thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) itās okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.
Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.
Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.
We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.
Cringe started as a verb describing a physical reaction, i.e.: "I cringe when I see [x]."
Modern slang has turned cringe into an adjective describing anything to which a person might have such a reaction.
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This shift in language is illustrative of a shift in culture.
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For a while there, in the early 2000s, there was this big sex positivity movement and we talked openly about kink and queer sexuality and creating a culture of consent that broke away from traditional conservative ideas of moral respectability.
And now we are in the midst of this giant purity culture backlash, this giant push for rigid conformity all over the internet. Anything that deviates from the norm even remotely is ridiculed.
And this cultural shift is perfectly encapsulated in this singular linguistic shift, this verb becoming a noun.
The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers
That's what "cringing" is. It's pearl clutching.
When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don't want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.
They are saying, "My disgust isn't the fault of my own backwards prejudices. It is YOU who are inherently disgusting. My inability to cope with even the slightest deviation from norm is not the problem here. YOUR refusal to rigidly conform is the problem. I am not the one who is cringing. YOU are the one who is cringe."
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatās a big deal! Iāve never thought about it before but now that I have, itās ridiculous to me that thatās not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donāt we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itās July 20th. Thatās the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iām ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iām going to have a goddamn potluck. Youāre all invited.
On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.
Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.
Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".
This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.
What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.
Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.
This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.
What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.
I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.
Code of Federal Regulations on Gifts from Outside Sources
From Title 5, part 2635.201:
(b)(1): Every employee has a fundamental responsibility to the United States and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. An employee's actions should promote the public's trust that this responsibility is being met. For this reason, employees should consider declining otherwise permissible gifts if they believe that a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts would question the employee's integrity or impartiality as a result of accepting the gift.
(b)(2): An employee who is considering whether acceptance of a gift would lead a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts to question his or her integrity or impartiality may consider, among other relevant factors, whether:
(i) The gift has a high market value;
(ii) The timing of the gift creates the appearance that the donor is seeking to influence an official action;
(iii) The gift was provided by a person who has interests that may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the employee's official duties; and
(iv) Acceptance of the gift would provide the donor with significantly disproportionate access.
Geoff Greer did a great review of Internal Combustion (ICE) cars powered by gasoline. It's generally a balanced view about the advantages and shortcomings of ICE cars, though it doesn't say much about the need for frequent maintenance and the high cost of ownership.
The article nicely touches upon something that is rarely mentioned: How badly matched ICE engines are to the needs of a moving vehicle. Because ICE engines rely on a previous intake /compression cycle, they are unable to start turning from a stop. In current ICE car designs, many ironically use an electric motor to start the ICE engine every time you start moving, and even then. a heavy, complex, and inefficient transmission is needed to match the ICE engine output to the torque needs of the wheels.
It also omits some other things that bother my engineering sensibilities: There's a lot of parasitic weight driving the operating inefficiencies of ICE cars. For example, there is a complex lubrication mechanism to prevent the reciprocating engine from grinding itself to metal filings, instead of the simple sealed bearings used on electric motors.
Even more ironically for a heat engine: Though an ICE engine burns gasoline to produce heat to turn the engine, it generates so much heat that it has to carry a tank of water called a radiator to throw some of the heat away. It's no wonder ICE car owners are always upset about fuel prices.
Geoff's conclusion sums it up well:
But no matter how enjoyable a gas car is at its best, itās just not compelling for daily use. Compared to the status quo a gas car is inconvenient, slow, noisy, smelly, and dangerous. I think a few enthusiasts and hipsters will enjoy tooling around in these things, and rich people might have one for special occasions (along with their horses and sailboats), but the vast majority of people are better served with a normal car.
Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline.
A certain percentage of the Twitter exodus were always bound to return. This is perfectly normal: new services always experience āscallopedā growth. Thatās where an outside event ā a positive narrative about the new service, or a catastrophe affecting the old one ā drives a surge of new users.
Some of those users try the new service, decide itās not worth it, and leave ā but not all of them. Each event triggers a high tide of new signups, but the low tide that follows is still higher than the old level. Surge after surge, the number of users steadily builds, despite the normal ebb and flow.
Despite the completely predictable dropoff in users after the initial Twitter surge, journalists have published (equally predictable and decidedly premature) obituaries for Mastodon and the Fediverse with titles like āThe Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slumpā and āElon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon ā but many arenāt sticking around.ā
As Mike Masnick points out, these stories arenāt just lazy, they are actively misleading, omitting the fact that the users who stayed on Mastodonās shores after the tide went out are incredibly active:
[A]ctual usage of the fediverse continues to increase month by month, including through January, meaning that while some people signed up and never used it, those who are using it, are using it more and more.
Of Course Mastodon Lost Users: Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline.
Mastodon has seen some ups and downs in activity in my experience, but Twitter activity has been steadily down. Metcalfeās law is definitely in reverse on Twitter.
Use the link above, and click about where you are. what is your "bortle" number, aka, how light polluted is your area
Class 8-9
Class 7
Class 6
Class 5
Class 4
Class 3
Class 2
Class 1
Voting ended onFeb 7, 2023
if you're worried about the website finding out where you live. dont worry. it already knows where you are just by you opening the page, this goes for every website btw. As always reblog for higher sample size
This cross-national comparison of health care systems assesses U.S. health spending, outcomes, status, and service use relative to 12 other high-income countries.
When you reach a certain age, the issue driving automation is not how much time you spend doing something, it's the time spent trying to remember or look up how to do it. Automate to reduce cognitive load, not just time reduction.
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