-thingswhatareawesome- * Di * aka livingflame * 50+, any pronouns, bi/grey-ace, genderqueer * hi o/ ∞∞∞ Currently: p5x • ffxiv (hiatus) • poltical because I have to be, not because I want to be • p5x: 60063758361 (nagisa kamisiro) / ffxiv: i'vann tia - (aether)cactuar / fo76: shinizero / discord: akseru • bsky: @livingflame.bsky.social • ao3: thingswhat • mastodon: @[email protected] ∞ I'm an introverted and shy socially awkward dork with mood swings from hell. I'm kind of a spammy reblogger. Fairies live in my hair. I'm somewhere between life, the universe, and everything and old bitch. Things are awesome; I am not.
Midwest Poultry Services has recalled nearly 1.6 million white and brown eggs due to potential salmonella contamination.
To their credit, nobody has gotten sick from it as of posting this. They found out through their own monitoring and this is a voluntary recall. That said:
The recalled eggs were sold in Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, Brookshire Grocery stores in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi, and at other smaller retail outlets, according to the recall report.
The eggs were also shipped to food service and retailers in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, the report states.
Don't try to give me that "Oh, the reason we care so much about Israel and not other human rights violators is because Israel is a a US (or UK, or European) ally and we send them weapons and tax money!" You know who else is a US ally we send money to for security cooperation? Fucking Pakistan. You got anything to say about them sending thousands of Afghan refugees back over the border to starve under the Taliban? Or their blasphemy laws? No? We don't give aid to the UAE or Saudi Arabia because they sure as shit don't need it, but we do sell them weapons and cooperate with them on intelligence and security. Any thoughts on the Saudi bombing and blockade of Yemen that was creating the world's biggest humanitarian crisis a few years ago? Or the UAE funding and arming the RSF's civil war in Sudan, including their Darfur genocide (the sequel), which has now overtaken it? Not to mention the abuse and enslavement of migrant workers! You want to set up an encampment at your university demanding they divest from the UAE or stop taking money from Qatar? It's all dirty fossil fuel money anyway! Don't you want to harass your political representatives and threaten them with death if they don't promise never to take money from Gulf Arab interests, and always to vote against weapons sales to them?
People love dead Jews but they also love dead Black Civil Rights leaders because if MLK hadn't been assassinated, the white left would be treating him like they treat Jim Clyburn right now.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the unrestricted collection, retention and processing of our data to a host of evils, from deepfake porn to phishing scams; from racial discrimination in hiring to ICE roundups of migrants; from targeted election interference to identity theft:
Why do data brokers exist? Because we let them. Congress hasn't passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals. All other acts of consumer surveillance are legal. Data brokers spy on us for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and we don't stop them:
Getting rid of data brokers wouldn't solve all our problems, but it sure would go a long way to solving many of them. Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads:
Data brokers produce mountains of raw material used for every form of scam and torture. It's data brokers who power the gig economy's "algorithmic wage discrimination" system, where nurses and other workers are offered less pay based on how much credit card debt they're carrying:
So the feds (both Congress and the executive branch) have surrendered, and that leaves states alone on the battlefield fighting the privacy wars alone. State legislatures have taken some big steps, but – crucially – they've stopped short of banning data brokers from operating within their borders. Having taken a ban on data brokers off the table, states are left with complex, often unworkable "compromises" that go nowhere.
This is where DROP comes in. DROP stands for "Delete Request and Opt-out Platform," and it's a new phase of California's privacy regime that kicks off next month. Under DROP, you fill in some paperwork and then the state requires every data brokerage operating in California to delete your data, as well as any inferences they've made about you based on that data:
Implementing DROP is nowhere near as good as banning data brokers. The idea that data brokers should be able to collect, retain and process your data unless you tell them not to implies that everyone starts off wanting to be spied on, and therefore data brokers should assume that unless they hear otherwise, we're delighted to be the subject of commercial surveillance. This is an incredibly stupid supposition, contradicted by all available evidence. For example, when Apple offered iPhone owners a one-click option to block Facebook from spying on them, 96% of iPhone owners clicked the button:
Indeed, given this fact, one wonders why Apple bothers with the "don't spy on me" button at all. Why not have a "do spy on me" button that is unchecked by default, and leave users to dig through their settings to find the option to opt in to being surveilled? Of course, then it would make the fact that Apple spies on its customers and uses the data to target ads (with no way to opt out) a little awkward:
In the absence of a ban on surveillance without explicit, opt-in consent, we are left with the bizarre fiction that most of us want to be spied on, a fiction that pervades the DROP process, making the entire procedure nearly impossible to complete.
To start the DROP process, you must first create a Login.gov ID. This is an incredibly invasive process that involves photographing multiple pieces of ID and taking several selfies using special apps and webpages that hijack your device's camera and processor in a bid to prevent bad actors from spoofing the process. There's a plausible reason for this rigmarole: Login.gov is the authentication system for multiple federal, state and local IT systems in the US, so a fake or stolen Login.gov ID could be used to access your IRS, Social Security, and other very sensitive accounts.
The corollary of this is the promise of Login.gov: once you create your ID (a lengthy, multi-stage process) you won't have to jump through lots of painful bureaucratic hoops to access a wide variety of government services.
DROP didn't get the memo.
After you log in to DROP via Login.gov, you are sent a text message – to the phone number in your Login.gov profile – with a link to access a "secure" website that takes over your camera to let you take a "secure" photo of the front and back of your California driver's license or your US passport. What if you don't have either of those? I guess that means you want to be spied on by data brokers.
Note that these are the same credentials you have to supply to get the Login.gov ID that you've just used to get to this step in the process. In other words, in order to get to the stage where they ask you to photograph your driver's license, you have to have already photographed and validated your driver's license.
Once you complete this (pointless, redundant) step, you're directed back to your computer, where the process continues. Here, you must fill in all kinds of biographical detail, as well as specialized pieces of information, including your car's VIN. This is a piece of information that most people don't have – but which the California DMV does have and could auto-feed into the system, given that you've repeatedly affirmatively identified yourself to the service.
You also have to provide your mobile advertising identifier, a long, unique number that you may or may not be able to extract from your phone, depending on the model and the OS version. If you can't get it that way, you can install an app like AAID, which comes with a long list of – you guessed it – permissions to extract, store and process your private information.
Here's the thing: the whole point of a mobile ad identifier is that apps can access it (this is how they identify and track you). That step, where the system made you switch to your phone and use your camera to photograph your driver's license? That step could have automatically pulled this data off your device. That's the whole fucking point of this exercise: that web-pages and apps can request your mobile ad identifier.
Instead, DROP wants users to dig through their phone's deepest settings and/or install an app to retrieve a 32-digit number, which they then must key into a webform on their computer or in a different app on their phone.
Once you've done this, you must fill in another page of biographical information, including information that you've already provided to Login.gov and information you've already filled in on previous screens.
On this screen, you must also verify your phone number by sending yourself a text and then pasting in a unique number the system sends to you. But remember how this whole thing started? The first step is that you authenticate with Login.gov, which sends a text to your phone so you can take a (redundant) picture of your driver's license. There is no way you could get this far in the process unless you controlled the phone number you've just "verified" with the system.
Next, you must verify your email address, by receiving an email with a unique code in it and keying or pasting that into the webform, too. Again, remember how this process started: with you logging in with Login.gov, using your email address, which the system has already treated as verified since the very start of this (very) long and (very) complicated process.
This whole thing is terrible, and it is predicated on the absurd premise that Californians have to be defended from the threat of strangers who pretend to be them in order to sneakily opt them out of surveillance. DROP requires stronger authentication than any other US government system I've ever interacted with. I file my tax returns with fewer authentication steps. I renew my car's DMV registration with fewer authentication steps. I became a US citizen with fewer authentication steps.
This is either a system with no coherent threat model, or (far more probably), its threat model is that people will use it. This is California's answer to "a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'":
It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
It's also instructive to compare this process to the steps a data broker has to take to spy on you and sell your data:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
Though there are many obvious ways this could be made better, I want to stress here that you shouldn't have to do this at all. It's entirely backwards. The process for not being spied on should look like this:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
If anyone is going to be forced to jump through hoops to participate in the mass collection and catastrophic mishandling of private data, it should be the data brokers, not the people they spy on.
This kind of malicious compliance is the inevitable outcome of a process that starts by taking the obvious best measure off the table. The answer to the problem of data brokers is banning data brokers, not creating a demented hairball of form-filling that maintains the fiction that data broker surveillance is consensual.
In its own way, this process reminds me of the whole "carbon credit" fiasco. The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
The commercial surveillance industry may not be a criminal enterprise (yet), but it is the source of a torrent of crime, a flood of crime, a tsunami of crime. Every piece of your information that a data broker possesses exposes you to the risk of being victimized by a criminal. For this reason, I strongly believe that you should go through the tedious, performatively difficult DROP process:
https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/
But let's not pretend that this is good – or even adequate. There is no demand for being spied on. There is no basis for taking such enormous care in making sure people aren't maliciously removed from surveillance databases. If these databases exist at all (they should not), then we should make spies go through all this paperwork, to prove that you do want to be spied on, and unless they manage it, then spying on us should be treated as the crime it is.
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 why I’ve been saying internet law is behind the times. So very, very behind the times. There was a time when we didn’t know what the outcomes of this or that business type would be. We know now, and it’s time to knock this nonsense off.
i really need people to be so fucking careful in and around discussions of literacy because stuff like "this culture didn't develop a written language ergo they are mentally inferior to us" and "people with this disability are unable to read ergo they are mentally inferior to us" have been eugenicist talking points for a very long time
1) On the one hand most of those in the USA who could be described as working class are neither white nor male, and on the other those who are telling us that the Hunt for the Working Class must take priority over all else tend to be middle-class white men when they're telling us we must give up our commitment to other issues – women's rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, climate action.
2) God knows there was troubling information enough about [Platner] who was made up entirely of red flags and white male fantasy [...].
3) But Jesus said ["Let him without sin cast the first stone"] while preventing a crowd from stoning to death a woman accused of adultery, aka taking a stand against violence against women.
4) [W]omen's rights are very important to progressive men, just not as important as anything else.
Honestly the amount of people I've talked to who formed an opinion on the geopolitics of the middle east who were suprised to learn that hezbollah is not the elected government of Lebanon, and the elected government is seperate and hates hezbollah is shocking.
If you do not know that basic fact, you should be shutting the fuck up!
[…] There’s a film going viral saying violence lives in Israeli DNA.
The film is about Israeli families in an Italian valley. Liberals who marched against their own government and left because they feared for Israel’s democracy. The film convicts them anyway. Their anti-Netanyahu politics and anti-war activism don’t matter. Their blood does.
One other film in history was built this way. Nazi Germany, 1940. Same world maps of Jewish migration. Same theory of inherited violence.
Neither film can say what a Jew could ever do to be innocent.
Four weeks ago the mayor of that Italian valley got a bullet in the mail.
And the channel asking you to fund its “independence”? Licensed inside a Qatari government media zone.
Everything documented. The families are still in that valley.
This woman is saying that Israelis who dislike the Israeli government and leave the Middle East out of protest are colonizers.
So, let's be honest about what she's saying because it's very clear: she is saying that the only thing an Israeli can do right is die.
Because Israelis literally leaving Israel and condemning the state isn't enough. Them living anywhere in the world is "colonialism." They are tainted by "Zionism."
It's Jew hate. She's not being subtle so I won't be either. She's using buzzwords to spread her medieval age hate to a "progressive" audience and it's disgustingly obvious.
“(((They))) are colonizing the world.” Israelis and Jews aren’t allowed to live in Israel, yet they aren’t allowed to live anywhere else either. sounds like the only way she believes they’re acceptable is if they’re dead.
meanwhile, also in Italy:
Rome's antisemitism czar puts end to Google form that drew condemnation from government officials, including Senate leader who said 'profoun
A plan to track the movements of Jewish and Israeli tourists would take the country ‘back to the 1930s,’ community figures have warned
An online campaign calling on people to surveil and report the whereabouts of Jewish and Israeli tourists, or anyone suspected of having ties to “Zionists,” has sparked anger among Israeli diplomats, local Jewish leaders and Italian politicians.
The anonymous campaign, focused in Milan, and spread via social media and messaging apps, involved a link that opened to a Google document.
It asked questions to identify the exact locations of Jewish and Israeli individuals, including specific hotels, vacation rentals, and commercial establishments, to create what it called “a mapping of Zionist tourism”.
The information would be used for unspecified future initiatives, the form said.
"This form is intended to record cases of Zionist tourism, property purchases, and, more generally, Zionist neo-colonisation in Italy,” according to the document. “The data collected will be received by the Global Sumud Movement and will remain protected and confidential."
The Global Sumud Movement, which organises anti-Israel activities in Europe, including the recent “freedom flotillas” to the Gaza Strip, denied any involvement in the campaign following the backlash.
"I think we're going back to the 1930s, to the hunt for Jews," Milan Jewish Community President Walker Meghnagi said. "Mapping where Jews are is extremely serious."
He called on the judiciary to intervene and for all parties to take a stand against the campaign.
Undersecretary of State to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Alessandro Morelli, a member of the conservative League Party, a junior partner in Italy's ruling coalition, condemned the form as "abhorrent," harking back to "the dark ages of Nazi fascism".
He also called for the unanimous political condemnation of the "racist initiative".
"We're essentially talking about blacklists. We're returning to the extremely dangerous climate that preceded the racial laws," said Italian Senator Graziano Delrio of the Democratic Party, the main opposition party, referring to a series of antisemitic and segregationist decrees enacted by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime between 1938 and 1943.
Israeli Ambassador to Italy Jonathan Peled posted to X on Sunday, saying: "The initiative to map Zionist tourism in Italy is an abominable action that highlights the alarming growth of antisemitic hatred in Italy and reveals, once again, the extremist and discriminatory drifts of the Pro-Pal movement."
The European Jewish Congress, the main umbrella organisation for Jewish communities across Europe, said of the questionnaire: "Presented as a 'mapping of Zionist tourism,' the initiative effectively encourages the identification and targeting of individuals based on their actual or perceived Jewish identity or nationality.
“Such attempts to single out individuals based on their identity create fear, fuel hatred and place Jewish communities at greater risk.
"The Italian authorities must act swiftly to ensure those responsible are held accountable and that such dangerous practices are stopped immediately.
the natural lifespan of a fandom is unlimited. when well tended a fandom can be functionally immortal. and yet everywhere you look you see newly bred fandoms withering and dying when they’re barely a year old. barely even six months old. fans are looking at their six month old fandoms and saying i think it’s on its last legs, should i euthanise it? when with the proper care that fandom could outlive them for decades. it’s sad. sad state of affairs we’re in.
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