Back in 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approved the most controversial standard in its long history: Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME,
which enabled Netflix and other big media companies to use DRM despite
changes to browsers extensions that eliminated the kinds of deep hooks
that DRM requires.
At the time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned
that, by approving its first non-unanimous standard, the W3C would give
control over browser design to the big browser companies, and two years
later, that warning has fully proven out.
First, Google – whose proprietary technology must be licensed in most cases if you want to make a new browser – stopped permitting open source browsers to use its DRM technology, effectively requiring all new browsers to be proprietary.
Now, Microsoft and Apple – the remaining two vendors who can also
supply the proprietary components that Google won’t license – have
effectively stopped answering the phone when small browser creators
call. Microsoft might let you license its tools if you pay them $10,000
to submit an application and then $0.35 for every browser you ship.
Samuel Maddock has been trying to create a rival “indie” browser, and has been to each of the EME DRM vendors and has been sent away by all of them.
The W3C’s mission is to create an Open Web Platform“
so that “everyone has the right to implement a software component of
the Web without requiring any approvals or waiving license fees.” When
EME was approved, we warned that they were effectively ending the Open
Web era by putting every future browser developer at the mercy of three
giant incumbent browser developers.
And here we are.
Next up: watch for lurking software bugs in EME that compromise user
security and privacy to go unreported while they are exploited by
criminals and spies. DRM laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA allow
software vendors to threaten whistleblowers who disclose bugs without
permission with both civil and criminal liability, and the W3C
specifically turned down every single proposal to make its
members promise not to abuse this power – even when those members
signalled that they viewed the power to decide who could criticize their
products as a feature of the EME process, and not a bug.
The W3C’s decision to hand these monopolists perpetual Internet
Domination Licenses was the gravest mistake in its history, just when we
needed its principled leadership the most. We are living in the
aftermath of that decision today and things will get worse long before
they get better.
Meanwhile, the W3C’s own page on EME is completely silent on the most controversial standarization process in the organization’s history.
No one in America explains the importance of good network policy than Susan Crawford (previously),
a one-woman good sense factory when it comes to Network Neutrality,
municipal fiber, and reining in the excesses of the goddamned ISP
industry. Her latest book is Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It,
a timely and urgent look at how America is sacrificing its digital
future, productivity, connectivity, social mobility, entrepreneurial
growth, education, and every other public good, thanks to rapacious
telcos, scumbag lobbyists, and negligent, cash-hungry politicians.
Crawford and her publisher, Yale University Press, were kind enough to
give us an excerpt (below) so you can get a sense of why you should be
reading this.
Fiber optic, as a category, is both old and new. The cables running
under the oceans and among the major cities of the world began to be
upgraded to fiber thirty years ago. And once a fiber optic cable is in
the ground, it lasts for forty or fifty years; it is essentially future
proof, because its information-carrying capacity can be almost
infinitely upgraded without digging up the cable, merely by swapping out
the electronics that encode and power the pulses of light that travel
within its walls. Most people in non-fiber countries (including the
United States) can’t even buy what in fibered countries counts as a
standard, modern internet connection. About 11 million American
households, out of 126 million total, are connected to last-mile fiber,
and that service is usually available only at very high prices from a
single unregulated provider. Meanwhile, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong,
and Singapore have virtually 100 percent fiber adoption at low prices,
and often scores of competitors.
This is a big problem.
Here’s why: Those hair-thin fiber strands, capable of carrying billions
of phone calls simultaneously, plus advanced wireless communications
that depend on that fiber extending into the last mile, will make
possible virtually unlimited, cheap communications capacity wherever you
are—which in turn will give rise to new businesses, new transport
capabilities, new ways of managing our use of energy, new forms of
education and health care, new ways of earning a living, and new forms
of human connectedness. For these things to happen, both fiber and
advanced wireless technologies need to be widely and competitively
available. Without these basic pieces of open infrastructure in place,
your country will be missing out on the future being lived and built
elsewhere.
Much of the world gets this. China is installing twenty thousand
last-mile fiber optic connections every single day. In June 2017, the South China Morning Post reported “China set to build the planet’s largest 5G mobile network for US $180b.” Listen to that: the “planet’s largest.”
Fiber plus advanced wireless capability is as central to the next phase
of human existence as electricity was a hundred years ago. Just as
countries that quickly ensured cheap access to electricity
revolutionized their economies and provided dramatically improved
quality of life for their citizens, countries that figure out how to get
fiber to everyone will have ever-increasing advantages over those that
do it slowly.
Take the 2018 Olympics in South Korea: Korea Telecom was smart to focus
on sports—and the Olympics in particular—in demonstrating its prowess.
Sports grab humans in real-time emotional ways, and the Olympics mark
the global pinnacle of inspiring athletic achievement. KT got the
world’s attention in 2018.
But KT’s display of its 5G fireworks is far more significant than any
Olympic event could possibly be. Korea is going through a phase change
in digital communications that has implications for almost every
occupation and source of economic power of which we’re aware today.
In the crowded city of Seoul, for example, I met many twentysomethings
who did not distinguish between online life and “real” life; for them,
these are simply layers of life as a whole. This generation is so
accustomed to cheap, unlimited connectivity everywhere that they have
forgotten its existence—just as people in other countries forget the
existence of electricity until it is suddenly not there. South Koreans
are impatient. For them, going to almost any city in the United States
is a little like going off the grid.
In Seoul, I met Yeon Sung Choi, a professional e-sports player who is as
famous in his sport as Lionel Messi, the best goal-scorer in the world,
is in soccer. Yeon Sung, who now works as a coach for the SK Telecom T1
Starcraft II team (telecommunications companies are major investors in
the e-sports industry in Korea), told me he’d lived through the
transformation of Korea that took place following the installation of
high-capacity networks that permitted any number of people to play games
simultaneously. At age twenty, he realized he could beat just about
anyone. The essential factor in connectivity, he says, is latency, or
response time; any delay makes it very difficult to play. Some players
say latency starts to become obvious when there is a gap of 150
milliseconds or even less between pressing a button and a visual
response. Fiber connections generally have lower latency than cable or
copper wires. “In Korea the response time is really short,” he said,
laughing. He sees a bright future for the gaming industry in Korea, but
there is much more than gaming. The same technology will revolutionize
business, medicine, education, manufacturing, energy use, and real-time
translation functions between spoken languages.
Fiber is also revolutionizing cities themselves. Because the city of
Seoul years ago installed fiber optic last-mile connections throughout
the city and its subway system, it can provide free Wi-Fi, which means
the private sector can experiment with Internet of Things (IoT) services
that will improve its citizens’ lives. On the same trip that had me
clambering around the empty ice arena in Pyeongchang, I visited the
city’s IoT testbed office. Taejin Kim, director of the testbed, told me
that the city is testing its ability to provide personalized services to
elders, to provide data from road surfaces and public transit so that
navigation systems function well, and in general to “solve urban
problems, wherever they are.” The conference room next to the mayor’s
office houses an enormous dashboard that, fed by public data, allows the
mayor to see the site of an accident or fire, talk in real time to
public officials at the site, visually understand traffic congestion,
and manage the city’s budget. Because fiber is everywhere, this enormous
amount of data can be shipped whenever and wherever it is needed.
The next wave of applications making use of fiber and advanced wireless
services is likely to be in health care, education, or other fundamental
areas than has been seen so far in Korea and Japan. I am confident that
innovative American businesses will come up with services that use much
more significant amounts of bandwidth when there is a critical mass of
users with capacity. If and when the United States becomes a last-mile
fiber sandbox for this inventiveness, the huge market here will drive
those developments. We will also support our commitment to genuine
liberal democracy: the rising tide of cheap, ubiquitous, unlimited
connectivity needs to reach everyone in order for the country as a whole
to thrive.
yall look at this shit ad*be is tryna pull now on ppl who have outdated software:
(note for context: i’m all for piracy, but in this case my copy of CS6 was downloaded years ago when they were giving it away to students. i got it totally legally.)
so here is what NOT to do if you’re a loyal fan of adobe who has the cash to shell out for a newer and shittier version of the product you already paid for.
1) DON’T use your search bar to find and open the Run app
2) DON’T type in services.msc
3) DON’T find Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Services and right-click to get a dropdown menu, and don’t select ‘properties’
4) if you happen to click properties, DON’T use the startup type dropdown to locate the option to disable the program. be sure you DON’T click apply to finalize that change.
5) DO NOT do the same thing in order to also disable Adobe Genuine Software Monitor
if you do all of these things, this WILL disable adobe’s ability to monitor the software, and you will be forced to continue using the same older software that you already paid for instead of having to sign up for a newer, shittier version and pay more for it. so if you have lots of cash to spare and are cool with putting it the pockets of racketeering capitalists, definitely don’t do any of these things.
however, you SHOULD reblog this to spread the word, as we certainly want to make sure lots of people know what NOT to do :)
I’M SORRY MA'AM. I KNOW YOU’RE UPSET.
Pretend to be upset.
OP how could you
I hope none of my friends who use Adobe programs find this, follow your detailed instructions, and spread the word. That would be devastating!
Sauter’s insight in that essay: machine learning is fundamentally
conservative, and it hates change. If you start a text message to your
partner with “Hey darling,” the next time you start typing a message to
them, “Hey” will beget an autosuggestion of “darling” as the next word,
even if this time you are announcing a break-up. If you type a word or
phrase you’ve never typed before, autosuggest will prompt you with the
statistically most common next phrase from all users (I made a small
internet storm in July 2018 when I documented autocomplete’s suggestion
in my message to the family babysitter, which paired “Can you sit” with
“on my face and”).
This conservativeness permeates every system of algorithmic inference:
search for a refrigerator or a pair of shoes and they will follow you
around the web as machine learning systems “re-target” you while you
move from place to place, even after you’ve bought the fridge or the
shoes. Spend some time researching white nationalism or flat earth
conspiracies and all your YouTube recommendations will try to reinforce
your “interest.” Follow a person on Twitter and you will be inundated
with similar people to follow. Machine learning can produce very good
accounts of correlation (“this person has that person’s address in their
address-book and most of the time that means these people are friends”)
but not causation (which is why Facebook constantly suggests that
survivors of stalking follow their tormentors who, naturally, have their
targets’ addresses in their address books).
My latest Locus Magazine column is “Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me,”
and it analyzes how Big Tech has been able to “disrupt” incumbent
industries, but has repurposed obscure technology regulations to prevent
anyone from meting out the same treatment to their new digital
monopolies.
I cite the example of Uber and Lyft, which have gutted the (often
corrupt and rentier-riddled) taxi industry, but which can’t be similarly
cannibalized my driver co-ops without risking legal retaliation through
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act.
When I worked at Amazon a microwave fell from five layers up in the racking and broke the arm of an order picker.
They were an agency temp so Amazon called the agency to let him go and have another temp sent *before* they called an ambulance, when he tried to put in sick days they turned around and told him “Sorry you’d already been let go before the accident was logged anywhere”
I will kill every ceo
I will help
Please also read this Atlantic article (in partnership with Reveal) about the complete disregard for worker safety inside Amazon warehouses
When people choose not to buy via Amazon, it’s for reasons like this
The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a
concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever
the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new
partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the
government of China.
ByteDance owns the video-sharing app TikTok, and has established a
joint venture with a Chinese state media group, official registration
documents show.
“The joint venture will focus on partnership in the digital rights of short videos,” a ByteDance spokeswoman told Reuters in response to inquiries about the deal:
A family in DeSoto County, Mississippi, bought a Ring security camera so
they could keep an eye on their three young girls in their bedroom.
Four days later, they learned that a hacker had broken into the camera
and subjected their children to continuous bedroom surveillance,
taunting the children through the camera’s built-in speaker.
Ring blamed the break-in on the failure of the family to turn on
two-factor authentication, using a weak password, and failing to change
passwords (these are all good ideas, except for frequently changing
passwords, which just leads to weaker password quality – but they’re
also things that almost no one does).
Motherboard identified several crime-forums where hackers were trading
automated tools to break into Ring cameras, using credential-stuffing
attacks (previously),
which involve trying a succession of leaked username/password combos
until you find one that has been recycled on the service you’re trying
to break into. These tools sell for as little as $6.
Other Ring camera owners have faced similar privacy invasions, including
a family in Florida that was subjected to a string of racial abuse
through their cameras’ speakers.
Using good passwords and 2FA is good advice, but better advice is to
never put networked cameras or microphones in your home, ever.
so, i’ve been gaming a lot of ps4 recently and i’m noticing that the games that do have inclusive characters have a lot of crappy colorism. right now, i’m playing man of medan (an anthology) and I’m only on the first level, so idk if i’m just speaking too soon, but there are about 4 black characters the situation. the three black characters who aren’t antagonists are light-skinned. the one other black character is sort of like a kidnapper/thief and he’s the darkest of all three of them. he’s even made to look really scary.
I’m also playing telltale’s the walking dead the final season. from the very beginning, i knew they had problems with colorism. the main character, clem, is black and from the very start, she’s made to look racially ambiguous. both of her parents are also black, but she has a very light-skinned mom. just as colorism has taught us, the only ones allowed to be darker-skinned are all of the black men in the game. one other darker-skinned girl i’ve seen was christa, but i’m not sure if christa was supposed to be a non-black poc or what. she was just dark-skinned. either way, she never reappears. and there’s that one girl in season 3, but i’m not sure if she was supposed to be black either.
all of the other darker-skinned black women introduced have all been demonized. there was the one dark-skinned girl who tried to rob clementine and she accidentally kills one of clementine’s friends. either way she doesn’t last a second and shes killed. then were was Tavia, who was from the DLC. The story is set in a way to mislead us into thinking she has good intentions, when in reality she shows up in the sequel and turns out to be very, very bad. in fact, she helps enslave people. then there are other black girls who show up…but they don’t look black at all. they’re all light-skinned or white-passing. in the third one, there a woman named rebecca who’s very light-skinned but her husband is dark. then in the fourth one, we have rebecca’s son, AJ who has grown a couple of years. AJ took after his dad, so he reads as black, has a cute little fro and everything. then there are three other black characters, all guys. one of them has a sister who’s been missing and when we finally see her…she looks straight up white as well. it’s all bothering me. in conclusion, the amount of dark-skinned black women in video games is very unfair and i’m just calling it as i see it. i might even writing a critical think piece on it. because every black woman i’ve end up seeing in video games must be light-skinned or white-passing. it’s like we associate light skin with beauty and feminity or something???
