Dumbassery and Self-Destruction at Bargain Prices!
@toacaldoric
Fuck just about everyone and everything, I'm not interested. I'm just enjoying the eternal present moment, until such time as I can upload my brain to the virtual realm and/or blast the FUCK off into space.
Anyway shoutout to John Williams, amazing composer and probably the one who made the other 50% of "holy shit amazing" soundtracks (Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Superman, and incidentally the original Harry Potter theme and score) who famously worked closely with the first openly transgender woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Angela Morley. He respected her, and so far as I can see, has never made transphobic remarks.
I absolutely blame Facebook for this shift. Words cannot describe how freaking WEIRD it was in the mid-00s when there was suddenly this popular website where you were required to use your real, brickspace name and encouraged to post photos of yourself. Every single bit of Standard Internet Safety prior to then said that you should never ever ever do either of those.
omg 2005/2006. When all our parents, who had been telling us for YEARS to never use our real names on the internet, suddenly all got facebook accounts and started using their real names on the internet like it was totally normal. Complete mental whiplash. Before then, it was WEIRD to use your real name on the internet. Like, people who did that were weirdos.
[Image Description: initial tweet by Mini Modu, @ MinModulation, that says "The idea of the internet as a third space for co-identities, 'avatars', 'pseudonyms', doesn't really exist for normies. They love selfies and I.Ds--the net is purely a marketing platform for their Face, like the mall. They lo..." the tweet gets cut off as it's retweeted by SuRge, @ SRG_Works, who adds "The fact that normies never embraced the idea that the 'net was a great place to have 'alter egos' and just be free from insane societal pressure really is wild. Instead they used the Internet to double down and make it for non-conformists to escape." End I.D]
It really is difficult to describe how bizarre that felt, isn't it?
Like imagine you spend most if not all of your childhood hearing "don't feed the bears" and all the reasons why that's a terrible idea. So okay you agree, while life might sometimes present the temptation to feed some bears it's a bad idea and you'll never do it. Still plenty of ways to enjoy nature, after all!
Then one morning you wake up and all the adults and organizations who spent so much time and energy on hammering home that you never, ever, ever feed the bears, are enthusing over this new Bear Feeding Park! Where all you do all day long is go feed bears! And absolutely you must get to the Bear Feeding Park and start hanging out there and throwing parties there and feeding bears, making sure all the important milestones of your life or even just mundane things feature, to some extent, a visit to Bear Feeding Park. Where you feed bears.
And you're like... well, if nothing else, is it somehow less dangerous to feed bears now? The answer to which is no. Not at all. Bear attacks skyrocket to an all-time high and stay there. Somehow this does not actually seem to deter anyone. You suggest that maybe this is a sign that Bear Feeding Park is a bad idea and people are like, oh no, we just need to find other ways to stay Bear Aware. We can't give up going to Bear Feeding Park, after all! You can't get hired unless you've got a good reputation at Bear Feeding Park!
Yeah I'm still not over it. What in the good goddamn fuck, actually.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
(Gently, and somewhat rhetorically given I'm not sure I'll get a solid answer...): Why do people so frequently seem to get upset at folks "being funnier than them" on this site? What ever happened to the comedy/storytelling principal of "Yes, and...!", where you work together to make something more hilarious than you could ever make alone? I've seen it done here before, yet I also see this...
For thousands of years humanity has selectively bred chickens to have larger breasts and to have to lay eggs constantly. We did it to get more meat and per chicken, but from the perspective of the domesticated chickens they’re sorta living in a very specific fetish scenario
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