Its a linkblog. Politics, technology, & design.
Inside the Booming ‘AI Pimping’ Industry:
Elaina St James, an adult content creator who promotes her work on Instagram, said she and other adult content creators are now directly competing with these AI rip-off accounts, many of which use photographs and videos stolen from adult content creators and Instagram models.
How is BlueSky, today, more resilient to being purchased by a billionaire?
In what ways are AT Protocol open?
These are two questions that I cannot find direct answers to by the BlueSky team or evangelists, despite searching for them, and flat out asking.
I ask because both claims are major selling points of the BS experiment, and both have been repeated by journalists. But no one has thought to ask how?
What am I missing?
How cloud computing became a global monopoly - Investors' Chronicle
Computational Power and AI - AI Now Institute
AOL Pretends to be the Internet - The History of the Web
The Internet and Engaged Citizenship | American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Great read on the history of the World Wide Web.
Liberals declaring Defund the Police as “political poison,” do so as if they aren’t the ones who got to decided if defunding police brutality was a worthy pursuit.
So often, Liberals will play the role of political saboteur, then swap hats to become the political pundit observing their sabotage.
Democrats' ‘Fund the Police’ Plan Backfired, Gave Trump Power
The belief persists against all logic: Four years of proudly Backing The Blue, at a minimum, failed to help Democratic voter turnout—and likely depressed votes from progressives. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s mythical moderate Republican voters, whom the party molded its entire platform to pursue, did not arrive to carry the party to the finish line. Instead, the pro-cop platform seems to have done nothing but legitimize Republican grievances and hand Trump a bolstered police and surveillance state
Democrats' election abortion strategy falls flat:
Abortion-rights advocates did receive some wins Tuesday night — in the form of several abortion ballots that would enshrine protections around reproductive freedoms into state constitutions, which passed in Arizona, Maryland and more, while failing in Florida and others. Yet abortion itself didn’t necessarily translate into a winning issue up the ballot for candidates who needed it most.
Before we rush to agree with political pundits that Democrats should continue scooching right, know what sacrifice our party intends on making.
This is rhetoric matches what was floating around news blogs just before Democrats ditched trans rights and police reform to appeal to moderates.
We’ve thrown every other marginalized identity into the moderate-conservative volcano. Bodily autonomy is the only remaining progressive issue on the Dem platform.
Judge To Zuckerman: Release Your App First, Then We’ll Talk Section 230 | Techdirt:
This part of the law (Section 230) almost never comes up in litigation, but Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent years trying to inspire a better internet (partly as penance for creating the pop-up ad), along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, tried to argue that this section means that a platform, like Meta, can’t threaten legal retaliation against developers who are offering third party “middleware” apps that work on top of a platform to offer solutions that “restrict access to material” on a platform.
Donald Trump expected to try to halt TikTok ban, allies say - The Washington Post:
ByteDance recognized months ago that a Trump victory was its best chance to retain control of TikTok, said one person familiar with the firm’s internal discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.
But less than 15 years ago we had TV hosts like Jon Stewart and bands like Green Day who were able to make progressivism feel just as relevant and countercultural as Trumpism feels to young American men now.
The problem is, we killed progressivism. The left hates Stewart now because he speaks about trans rights and criticizes Dems. We don’t want a lib Joe Rogan. We want Joe Rogan as he is, minus the Trump endorsement.
In killing progressivism, we killed populism. In killing populism, we created a counterculture vacuum that the right was all to eager to fill.
We trotted out the Cheneys and Taylor Swift (no offense) and the most “lethal military in the world” and we called it Brat.
The people rightfully desperate for change, made a poor choice and either stayed home or voted Trump. We can blame voters, sure. Do that if it makes us feel good. But we can’t expect anything to change as a result.
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t dress up centristism with a funky 808 and hope no one notices. We have to stand up to the well-to-do who behind closed doors asked democrats to ditch the progressive movement. That, or we die as the establishment.
Stephen Miller Expected to Be Named a Trump Deputy Chief of Staff - The New York Times:
The plans include restricting legal and illegal immigration in a number of ways, including rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the United States and detaining them in camps before they’re expelled from the country.
Spent most of my day on Threads pushing back against disinfo and election fraud conspiracies. 🙃
The conspiracies have spread to X and TikTok now. Bigger, more trustworthy accounts are just spreading baseless claims.
It’s like half of the libs are blue pilled and the other half are just sort of ignoring that it’s happening. I’m at a loss.
Not only is Threads not suppressing political content all of a sudden, it’s actively promoting election fraud conspiracies in the FYP.
Should we ask him to turn Fediverse sharing on?
‘Libbing out’ is the latest irony-fueled coping mechanism
“Libbing out" is an ironic embrace of mainstream Democratic politics, often by disillusioned young progressives. It is the process of abandoning all cynicism and wholeheartedly accepting the elitist, corporate-owned, deeply out of touch Democratic party, even if only for a moment.
Today, we are all Rachel Maddow.
The Misery Index of Little Treats:
The more miserable the situation gets out there, the more expensive our little treats become in here.
Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics:
The demonstration, performed by a group of privacy advocates that gained access to the tool and leaked videos of it to 404 Media and other journalists, shows in the starkest terms yet how Locate X and other tools based on smartphone location data sold to various U.S. government law enforcement agencies, including state entities, could be used to monitor abortion clinic patients.
The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway - POLITICO:
He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose Trump as the next president.
“Three-year-old young lady.“ is diabolical.
Convinced that the average editor has no idea what the reader experience is like on their own websites.
I’m in the middle of an engaging article—swatting away pop-ups, and adjusting for the constant skipping—and the site just reloads, tossing me to the top of the page again.
The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved webpages are back online - Ars Technica:
Last week, hackers defaced the Internet Archive website with a message that said, “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
Shocking revelations about teens in redacted TikTok documents : NPR:
Officials at TikTok discovered that there was “a high” number of underage streamers receiving a “gift” or “coin” in exchange for stripping — real money converted into a digital currency often in the form of a plush toy or a flower.
(8) Updates LIVE: Deadly fire rips through tents after Israeli attack on Gaza hospital:
Footage from the scene shows a raging fire tearing through tents, with the bodies of other victims being engulfed by the flames.
Heard about this from a TikTok mutual. When I went to search the source, I had to check dates because there were multiple hospital bombing stories.
TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show : NPR
TikTok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. After that, according to state investigators, a user “is likely to become addicted to the platform.”
This whole article is damning.