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t3rmit3

@t3rmit3@beehaw.org

He / They

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Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, U.S. lawsuit claims (arstechnica.com)

Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday....

t3rmit3 ,

Uh, as someone who does malware analysis, sandbox detection is not easy, and is certainly not something that a non-malware-developer/analyst knows how to do. This isn't 2005 where sandboxes are listing their names in the registry/ system config files.

t3rmit3 ,

There is leaked Windows source code online... Is that also freeware for me to train an OS-building model on?

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Hell yeah! Nothing good comes from their new model, nor the advertiser-friendly focus of SD3. They were good for pushing the open-source ecosystem forward, but clearly their Capitalist masters have come calling, and they're enshittifying.

t3rmit3 ,

Whales

t3rmit3 ,

If my brother were still there, I'd say, "yes, please".

t3rmit3 ,

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes...

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

The author focuses on the danger of startups dying out and therefore bricking your devices, but another major problem with startups is that they are VC-backed, and those VC investors are expecting the exact same unsustainable growth that the incumbent "market leaders" are chasing in their enshittification journeys. When the startups don't die, they will also 'have' to enshittify, to satisfy investors.

It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Sadly, this is the impossible part. Policymakers (at least in the US) will never prioritize consumers over companies.

Honestly, the best we can ever hope for is a law mandating that it's no longer illegal to modify your tech if the company who operates it dies, or shuts down the backend server infra, but this will be opposed by basically every company out there (including if not especially video game companies, who won't want to potentially have to allow people to develop and operate private servers for defunct MMOs).

t3rmit3 ,

Capitalist class when they're ending the world: "All right, you've got this!"

t3rmit3 ,

China is not Socialist, it's State Capitalist.

Firing older employees in order to pay less to newer employees to pad the bottom line is Capitalism 101, unless someone thinks all the big US companies (Microsoft, Cisco, Meta, Tesla, etc) that have been doing this same thing this past year are all Socialist.

t3rmit3 ,

Yep, people sadly are bad at extrapolating how restrictions on something they dislike can be cross-applied to limit things they don't dislike, by others.

t3rmit3 ,

People often decry accelerationism, but the reality is that the slow-boiled frog is the one that sits and dies. Chipping away at freedoms, consumer protections, product benefits, etc is all less likely to spark backlash than when they drop sharply in a short time.

That doesn't mean you should help to make things worse, but it does mean that you may want to reconsider constantly mitigating every bad thing that others are doing, rather than letting them shoot themselves in the foot. When people are being hurt, help them. When people are being inconvenienced, let them get angry.

t3rmit3 ,

"Israel uses the rescue of four of its civilians as cover to kill hundreds of non-Israeli civilians" more accurately conveys the intent here.

t3rmit3 ,

The EFF's response is right on the money, as usual:

Communications platforms are not comparable to unsafe food, unsafe cars, or cigarettes, all of which are physical products—rather than communications platforms—that can cause physical injury. Government warnings on speech implicate our fundamental rights to speak, to receive information, and to think.

There is no scientific consensus that social media is harmful to children's mental health. Social science shows that social media can help children overcome feelings of isolation and anxiety. This is particularly true for LBGTQ+ teens.

We agree that social media is not perfect, and can have negative impacts on some users, regardless of age. But if Congress is serious about protecting children online, it should enact policies that promote choice in the marketplace and digital literacy. Most importantly, we need comprehensive privacy laws that protect all internet users from predatory data gathering and sales that target us for advertising and abuse.

This warning label announcement just feeds into the right-wing "tech platforms bad, full of librul thought, must protect the kids by surveilling everyone and blocking the harmful (minority-focused) content" agenda.

Keep in mind that this is not happening in a vacuum; many states have already put in place age-verification for sites they deem 'harmful' (and California is considering one as well, so it's not just braindead red states getting in on the surveillance action), and this directly makes the argument that social media spaces (and the speech on them) are harmful, and should be subject to government approval.

t3rmit3 ,

Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn't trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there's a really positive community around its design.

Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.

t3rmit3 ,

They just need to gamify it. Have a "Verified Accurate Alt-Text Submissions" leaderboard or something.

Inside Enclave Rabia Caracol — An Anarchist Community Center and Cafe in Tijuana, Mexico - UNICORN RIOT (unicornriot.ninja)

On a given day, the five story building (including basement and roof top rooms) houses a variety of projects and dozens of people pass through its open doors.“We have a café, we have a community kitchen where we prepare the free meals. We have a community bike shop in the basement and we have space for events,...

t3rmit3 ,

Glimpse

"GNU Laughably-Insecure Manipulator Prohibit Sexy Energy"?

t3rmit3 ,

Deez GNUs

t3rmit3 ,

Thing we're unnecessarily shoehorning AI into : Charging a battery

t3rmit3 ,

You left out the 'N' and the 'tscape Navigator'

German carmaker Volkswagen says forced labour in one of its sub-supplier's plants in China was not identified as 'no full supply chain transparency exists' (www.hrw.org)

- Volkswagen (VW) in 2023 commissioned a deeply flawed audit at a plant in China's Xinjiang province operated by a subsidiary of Volkswagen’s joint venture with SAIC, a Chinese state-owned carmaker....

t3rmit3 ,

VW can demand transparency (e.g. access to supply chain facilities by 3rd party auditors) as a prerequisite to doing business with a partner company. It is absolutely standard to demand that business partners have had 3rd party audits to prove they comply with laws and regulations. This is not some insane ask, this is everyday stuff in the business world.

If a company can't or won't get an auditor to validate that they comply with PCI-DSS, for instance, they're not going to be signed on for processing payment card information by other companies.

And slave labor is a tad bit worse than retaining too many data fields in a credit card for too many days.

t3rmit3 ,

They all could manage that, as they are already managing similar attestation requirements from suppliers e.g. ISO 9000-family controls.

t3rmit3 ,

True, but it is far better than just saying, "well we called but no one picked up welpguesstheresnothingwecando!"

t3rmit3 ,

The same conservatives that crow about abortion in one breath will echo Great Replacement rhetoric in the next, and talk about 'baby mommas' on welfare being paid by George Soros to 'churn out demon-rat voters' in the third.

The "pro-life" movement has been thoroughly coopted into the service of white supremacy (whether or not Christianity has always been that is a discussion for another time).

t3rmit3 ,

Joe Biden's defining feature is his paternalism.

He knows what's best for black people (like "sending social workers into the homes", since they don't know how to take care of their kids!).

He knows what's best for young people (his mind's not going to be changed when they protest something!). He's gonna hold onto that torch for a while longer.

And he loves children. And Israel is just a little underdog baby country, trying to hold it's own against the mean bad old (far too tan) men around it!

But don't worry, Biden knows what's best, and Bibi will come around, with some firm, paternal, "come to god" talkings-to.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

That is only true when supply outpaces demand, and buyers can choose not to purchase the shitty products, which is not the case for housing thanks to years of NIMBY and protectionist zoning regulations preventing housing development on the low end of the market.

Also, necessities completely upend the supposed "free market" dynamic by not being something buyers can opt-out of when no better option is available.

If you control necessities, people are trapped with you no matter how shitty your product is.

Going Dark: The war on encryption is on the rise. Through a shady collaboration between the US and the EU. (mullvad.net)

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been...

t3rmit3 ,

The EU has been good on privacy against other actors. The EU is very bad when it comes to personal privacy from its constituent governments.

Car makers BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by supplier with links to Chinese forced labour, U.S. probe says (www.bbc.com)

BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by a supplier on a list of firms banned over alleged links to Chinese forced labour, a US congressional report has said....

t3rmit3 ,

And we're opposed to that as well.

t3rmit3 ,

Always a helpful reminder.

t3rmit3 ,

Mini Cooper

Fuck.

t3rmit3 ,

Just hide the problem!

t3rmit3 ,

"Google, how do I calculate the circumference of a sphere?"

"Sign up for online math classes with University of Arizona today!"

t3rmit3 ,

Yeah, if you read Unicorn Riot or The Intercept, you oddly don't run into this issue... I wonder why?

t3rmit3 , (edited )

My news site list nowadays is

  • AP, whose coverage of Gaza and the protests has usually been well above a "passing grade" for me
  • Al Jazeera, who is obviously and very overtly biased, but has a wide range of world news, and has a lot of good opinion contributors
  • The Intercept
  • Unicorn Riot
  • The Hill, because I feel it's important for me to see how The State views itself and actions within it
  • Hacker News, for tech stuff
  • Gaming news sites

I used to check CNN and Fox to see 'what the enemy is doing', but frankly it's entirely predictable what stances they're pushing on any given subject, and it's frustrating to the point of exhaustion to read it without being able to scream at those responsible.

Also, kudos to Time for publishing actual student coverage of the protests.

t3rmit3 ,

Setting aside the sad man that is Peterson, this rhetoric has always existed in some form throughout history as a way to shut down criticism.

Whether through 'whatabout-ism' (which points out issues on the side of the criticizer in order to assert their lack of ground to criticize), or through claims of lack of experience or knowledge (which must be 'made up for' to whatever extent the dismiss-er feels is warranted before they will accept criticism, which is probably never), this rhetorical device is just a trick to discount and dismiss.

The CurrentAffairs author seems to be taking this claim at face value, insomuch as they spend much more time attempting to validate Marx, rather than discussing the bad-faith employment of this argumentation.

Instead of devoting a whole article to attempting to somehow disprove the relevance of literal cleanliness to political acumen or the 'right' to speak on politics, it might have been better spent examining the purpose of these types of claims, or the mechanisms by which they function. There is one line- the literal last line of the article- in which "ad hominem" is said; it should not take that long, or require that much prefatory work, to name "I (selectively) don't listen to you because your room/body/desk/life is dirty" as such.

t3rmit3 ,

God fucking dammit.

Moreover, as with all so-called artificial intelligence taking over consequential tasks and decision-making, the technology has the power to obscure human agency. Police officers who deliberately speak with mistruths or exaggerations to shape the narrative available in body camera footage now have even more of a veneer of plausible deniability with AI-generated police reports. If police were to be caught in a lie concerning what’s in the report, an officer might be able to say that they did not lie: the AI simply mistranscribed what was happening in the chaotic video.

Computer systems like ShotSpotter are already given undue defference by courts, who don't actually understand how inaccurate they are. I can't wait to see how much cops and courts abuse this tech.

t3rmit3 ,

I legit have been considering buying a minidisc player, just for the sheer cool factor of them. Sometimes truly special form is lost as function evolves.

t3rmit3 ,

With Thursday’s party-line vote, the FCC redefined internet service as similar to legacy telephone lines, a sweeping move that comes with greater regulatory power over the broadband industry.

Leading FCC officials have said restoring net neutrality rules, and reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the agency’s congressional charter, would provide the FCC with clearer authority to adopt future rules governing everything from public safety to national security.

“Broadband is a telecommunications service and should be regulated as such,” said Justin Brookman, director for technology policy at Consumer Reports. “The Title II authority will ensure that broadband providers are properly overseen by the FCC like all telecommunications services should be.

“These 400-plus pages of relentless regulation are proof positive that old orthodoxies die hard,” said Jonathan Spalter, CEO of USTelecom, a trade association representing internet providers.

My god the fucking irony. The trade association made up of Broadband ISPs, arguing that they shouldn't be regulated as Telecom providers, is literally called... USTelecom.

"Don't treat us like ducks!" said the trade association representative from USDucks.

t3rmit3 ,

If insurance providers were not legally bound to pay out for plans, and if failure to pay wouldn't see customers flee, they never would.

Nowhere is safe from climate change, but insurers will continue to sap up as much money as they can, and pay out as little as they can, before they finally shut down and leave the government to pick up the mess. They'll charge premiums for decades, and then right as the disasters those premiums are supposed to cover folks for start to ramp up, they'll close up shop and laugh their way to the bank.

Private insurance is a cancer that should be cut out.

t3rmit3 ,

I am not a huge fan of generative AI, but even I can see it's potential (both for good and for harm). Today I found out about Suno in another thread on here, and tried it out. As a mid-millennial (1988) who grew up with CD players and still thinks MiniDiscs and ZIP discs are the coolest cartridge formats, aesthetically, that thing absolutely blows my mind.

We are like, 5 years into generative AI as a widely-available technology, and I can use it to generate entire songs on the fly based on just a couple sentences, complete with singing. I can use it to create logos and web graphics on my laptop in a matter of seconds, as I build a webpage. I can use it to help me build said webpage, also running locally on my laptop.

And it's still accelerating. 10 years from now, this stuff could be generating entire movies on-demand, running on a home media box.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

I have a deep love of change, just intrinsically. I have medical issues which have meant that since I was a kid I've been accutely aware of my significantly shorter prospective lifespan, and I think that really drives the desire in me to witness major changes and historical events, sort of like truly internalizing that I (literally) can't afford to wait for slow change.

That doesn't mean I want to see changes that cause suffering, like wars, it means I want to see incredible changes that have the potential to better peoples' lives, like electric vehicles, space exploration, ^socialistrevolution^, advancements in healthcare, etc. I am hopeful that the wide-ranging availability of AI, beyond just corporations, means it has the potential to be one of those changes (I'm also wary that it may end up just being subsumed by Capitalism into enriching the already-wealthy even further).

I still feel that desire that many tech-folks do, to buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and just raise llamas and serve artisanal coffee to the parents of the kids that come to play with the llamas, and never look at a computer again, but I still want the world to be out there advancing and getting better even if I don't engage with every new advancement directly, myself.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Enshittification happens due to greed and power; It's just the process of removing the false mask of mutually-beneficient business that Capitalism uses to hide its true self.

First you make users think you're beneficial to them, so they get locked in,

then you make businesses think you are beneficial to them, and get them locked in,

then you give up that facade and admit you don't care about benefitting anyone but yourself.

You can enshittify something even as an individual; it's not being publicly traded that makes it easier or more likely, it's that being a large enough business to be able to successfully enshittify without losing all your customers probably means you're publicly-traded.

t3rmit3 ,

Private companies still have investors and board members they're accountable to.

t3rmit3 ,

Corporations are inherently the vehicle of non-mutually-beneficial capitalist profit-seeking. They cannot really be anything else. That's what differentiates them from e.g. a profitable 'mom-and-pop' grocer.

The purpose of incorporating as a business is to limit liability by separating the assets and incomes from the owners and investors, in order to allow profits to be gained without actually engaging in a good-faith exchange with prospective business partners/customers (since corporate bankruptcy limits their ability to recoup losses from the individuals running the business).

Weapons are a means to do harm, but they are not something that the mere ownership of implies a threat from; most people do not being their guns everywhere. If they do bring it somewhere, that indicates an adversarial stance towards the place or persons who they're meeting. Put another way, "gun ownership" is very different than "having a gun present at all times with which you could threaten someone".

Corporations, on the other hand, are at all times and in all business dealings leveling that threat of one-sided liability/risk, because it is intrinsic to them as corporations. You can own a gun without threatening to shoot anyone with it. You can't operate a corporation without threatening to evade rightful liability.

So it's possible to be a "responsible assault rifle owner", but it's not possible to be a non-exploitative corporation.

t3rmit3 ,

Flamethrowers have been legal and very easily and publicly available for a looooooong time. This thing is not going to change that.

t3rmit3 ,

This is a bad move. They're asking the same price as Dropout, but with 1/30th the content, especially in back-catalog. They already had a very profitable Patreon, and switching to a sub model is just going to lose them a lot of viewers.

t3rmit3 ,

How would this factor into November? Neither Biden nor Trump will acknowledge Palestinian statehood.

t3rmit3 ,

Yes, but she's not going to be part of this election, for all sorts of reasons both cultural (misogyny, Democratic fear-based-voting pushing people to only unify behind the Party candidate even when they can't win, her anti-doctor statements [1], etc), and structural ones like primary and debate rules being set by the Party to favor its candidates.

Check my post history if you think I'm pro-Biden; I am most assuredly not.

[1] she has insisted she is anti- pharma-industry, which is totally correct to be, but many of her statements are not actually attacking just pharma companies, but doctors for prescribing things like antidepressants. It's one thing to question the influence of pharma in medical decisions, but attacking whole classes of treatments is the same as attacking the doctors doing them, and she's not qualified to be making those kind of statements based on her personal experience with depression.

t3rmit3 ,

Yep, sadly government contractors are heavily dominated by Right-wing and pro-authoritarian chuds.

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