Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK
@doctorow
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Author/activist/journalist. New novel: THE BEZZLE, a thriller of hi-tech fraud and the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve @pluralistic @mamot .fr
Beautiful Downtown Burbank
Joined March 2007
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Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).
NOTE: I DID NOT BUY A BLUE-TICK. IT WAS NONCONSENSUALLY ADDED TO MY ACCOUNT.
Inside: The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home; and more!
Archived at:
#Pluralistic
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So there's a great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood called Kiin. Yesterday, I searched for their website to order some takeout. Here's the Google result.
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Dutch resistance members celebrate at the moment they heard of Adolf Hitler’s death over the radio, May 1945. (Colorized)
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My new hobby: finding public domain images that Getty sells for $500, locating hi-rez scans of their original publications, cropping and cleaning them up, adding metadata, and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.
First one:
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This is fucking wild. Norton "Antivirus" now sneakily installs cryptomining software on your computer, and then SKIMS A COMMISSION.
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It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is. 1/
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And why the actual FUCK is
@GoogleAds
accepting these scam artists' ads for a business that they already have a knowledge box for?! Google KNOWS what the real KIIN restaurant is, and yet they are accepting payment to put a fake KIIN listing two slots ABOVE the real one.
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I got duped. I placed an order with the fake site. The fake site then placed the order - in my name! - with the real site, having marked up the prices by 15%.
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"Hitler's only kidding about the antisemitism" New York Times, 1922
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Alan Dean Foster is an sf legend - a writer who produced a shelf of original novels but also made a reputation novelizing movies and TV from Star Wars to Aliens, turning out books that transcended quickie adaptations, becoming beloved bestsellers in their own right.
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How the actual FUCK did these obvious scammers get an Amex merchant account in the name of "KIINTHAILA" by after supplying the phone number for a website hosting company? What is Amex's
#KYC
procedure? Do they even call the phone number?
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Kiin clearly knows they're doing this (presumably by the billing data on the credit card the fakesters use to place the order). They called me within minutes to tell me they'd cancelled the fakesters' order.
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Amex and Google and Wix should be able to spot these creeps FROM ORBIT.
Holy shit do we live in the worst of all possible timelines. We have these monopolist megacorps that spy on and control everything we do, wielding the most arbitrary and high-handed authority.
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Back in November, we learned that Disney had pulled a breathtakingly criminal wage-theft manuever on one of science-fiction's most beloved authors, Allan Dean Foster, an elderly cancer-patient caring for his sick wife.
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To be fair to these scammer asshole ripoff creeps who are trying to steal from my local mom-and-pop, single location Thai eatery, they're just following in the shoes of Doordash and Uber Eats, who did the same thing to hundreds (thousands?) of restaurants during lockdown.
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Sometimes it's hard to know why prices are going up. Between the oil shock, a tight employment market and the climate polycrisis, is it even possible to tell if companies are using the widespread *belief* in inflation to hike prices? Uh, yeah, we *absolutely* can. 1/
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These parasites have turned themselves into landlords of someone else's home, collecting rent on a property they don't own and have no connection to.
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When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.
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Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it.
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Super Smash Bros. Melee is a 20-year-old Nintendo game with a huge cult following; it's considered one of the best fighting games of all time. Nintendo abandoned it years ago, but the fans have kept it alive.
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I've just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I've yet to encounter. 1/
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And yet they do NOT ONE FUCKING THING to prevent these petty scammers from using their infra as force-multipliers to let them steal from every hungry person patronizing every local restaurant.
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Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends.
Uber's time is up.
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Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a "utopian socialist." He lies about being a "free speech absolutist." He lies about which companies he founded:
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12% of Americans live in California - but 30% of homeless Americans, and 50% of unsheltered Americans, call California "home." This prompts endless schadenfreude from "red state" partisans, and is waved as proof of the failure of liberal policies.
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It cannot be repeated too much: You live your own blooper reel and experience everyone else's highlight reel.
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There's NEVER just one ant. I guaran-fucking-tee you that these same creeps have 1,000 other fake Wix websites with 1,000 fake Amex merchant accounts for 1,000 REAL businesses, and that Google has sold them ads for every one of them.
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The idea that the Democrats' path to victory requires abandoning abortion, gender minorities, racial justice, unions, health care and fair immigration policy is just wild. There's *already* a party that holds those positions: Republicans.
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An abandoned potato sorting station near Krasnosilka, Ukraine with a unusual, cantilevered design. The concrete block at the end forms the counterweight of the structure, creating the impression it floats over the fields.
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I mean, what's the point of letting these robber-barons run the entire show if they're not even COMPETENT?
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Best Defcon talk so far, how a high school senior Rick rolled his entire school district, hijacking every projector, locking out their remotes, disabling their physical off switches, and pwning every PA speaker in every building in the district.
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Periodically, some dimbulb will pop up and say, "Hey, you love unions but you hate police brutality - so how about police unions, huh? Ever think of that? Huh? Huh?"
Yeah, I know. Thing is, police unions aren't "unions" in the traditional sense.
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Today in "Cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion" news, Amazon has released a landlord edition of its Alexa surveillance speaker that can be forced upon tenants.
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They stole something for you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
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Despite what you may have heard, cops have a relatively safe job. Cops are injured and killed with less frequency than roofers, truckers, fishermen, and pizza-delivery people.
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On Saturday, I sat in a crowded ballroom at Caesar's Forum in Vegas and watched
@sickcodes
jailbreak a John Deere tractor's control unit live, before an audience of cheering
@Defcon
30 attendees (and, possibly, a few undercover Deere execs, who often attend Sickcodes's talks). 1/
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In November 2020,
@SFWA
came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
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A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed *magic* - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
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The fact that people raised on neoclassical econ can't tell the difference between "addressing a distributional problem" and "making it worse but also letting rich people buy their way out of it" is basically the core problem with the world today.
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A monopolist's first preference is always "don't regulate me." But coming in at a close second is "regulate me in ways that only I can comply with, so that no one is allowed to compete with me."
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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.
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Kellogg's wants to break their strike by hiring 1400 permanent workers, instead of negotiating with their striking workers in good faith. Don't let them do it! Show your solidarity with the workers and boycott these brands.
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Doubtless you've heard that "we all get the same 24 hours in the day." Of course it's not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. 1/
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Foster's case is a gross injustice. He has cancer and his wife is ill. He wrote these books, Disney bought them. They're making money from them. They owe him money. Period.
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Here's a media literacy rule of thumb: any time you hear about how the courts have done something outrageous and absurd to some poor, long-suffering, gigantic, wildly profitable corporation...*dig deeper*. 1/
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In case you would like to know what it’s like working at Starbucks
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Byju's is a titan of the Indian ed-tech market, and its flagship program, The Learning App, has 40m users and 2.8m paid subscribers; its valuation is about to climb to $21b; it's been on a spending spree, buying up competitors in Asia and the USA.
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#Netflix
has unveiled the details of its new anti-
#PasswordSharing
policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger
@Netflix
's automated enforcement mechanisms:
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In the window of an indie bookstore
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Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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Here is how
#platforms
die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. 1/
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*Pretty good detailing in that British cartoon
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That top result (an ad)? It's fake. It goes to , which is NOT the website for Kiin.
The *third* result is real:
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The really remarkable thing isn't just that
#Microsoft
has decided that the future of
#search
isn't links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a
#chatbot
who happens to be a habitual liar - even more remarkable is that
#Google
agrees. 1/
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Uber is (still) a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). And every bezzle - *every* bezzle - ends. 1/
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You know that free-floating sense that multinational corporations are above the law, able to buy their way out of consequences for even the most blatant, heinous crimes?
There's a (nearly) unbelievable, highly concrete example of it underway right at this moment.
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"Rush Limbaugh, the sex tourist and drug addict whose four marriages, mockery of people after their deaths and overt racism and misogyny made him a beloved icon of American conservatism, is dead at 70." -
@Beschizza
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It's a zombie economy. For 40 years, we've eroded the wages of workers and transfered their share of profit and productivity to owners of capital. This is a problem, because people need money to buy things, and if they run out of money, they stop buying and profits vanish.
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Disney now owns a bunch of these books, thanks to their acquisitions of Lucas and Fox, and these books continue to sell briskly. Disney not only isn't paying Foster any royalties for these books - they're refusing to even issue him royalty statements.
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When Oxford University began work on its covid vaccine, it promised that the resulting work would be patent-free, with an active tech-transfer assistance program so that developing nations could manufacture their own supplies.
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There's always a leaked memo.
@repmarkpocan
1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.
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We are living in a golden age of predatory capitalism, in which businesses that generate real value and stable employment are being destroyed by deep-pocketed quasi-tech firms that lose money on every transaction but hope to make it back by securing monopolies.
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At least twice, Sean Spicer has accidentally tweeted the password for official White House spokesman Twitter account
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Disney made a LOT of...uh, problematic...movies, but none quite so indefensible as Song of the South, a Reconstruction movie in which a formerly enslaved man tells a young, wealthy white boy about how nice things were during the slavery era.
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EFF's full-page Wired ad: Dear tech, delete your logs before it's too late
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There's a hell of a zap that neoclassical economics puts on your head. After being brainwashed to think that markets "naturally emerge" wherever a shortage occurs, a certain kind of evil asshole will take it upon themselves to "create markets" and thus "solve the problem"
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In 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from Cominform, the Soviet information agency, in retaliation for its "non-aligned" status; deprived of information-processing capacity, the country created its own IT industry from scratch.
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#Facebook
is a rotten company, rotten from the top down, its founder, board and top execs are sociopaths and monsters, committers of non-hyperbolic, no-fooling crimes against humanity. They lie, they cheat, they steal. They are some of history's greatest villains.
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Club of Rome founder Frits Böttcher was the Netherlands' leading climate denier. He died in 2008. Investigative journalists combing through his papers, discovered that he was paid €500K by Shell and others to sow doubt about climate change.
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Here's your periodic reminder that evolutionary psychology is a cesspool of unfalsifiable and self-serving hypotheses that often take the form, "I, a person with some power, only abuse that power because it is inevitable, given the imagined lives of early hominids."
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In response,
@SFWA
has joined forces with the
@romancewriters
, the
@horrorwriters
, the
@paythewriter
,
@SINCnational
and the
@AuthorsGuild
to form a coalition called Writers Must Be Paid.
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After failing to make progress with private negotiations, they went loudly public, launching the
#DisneyMustPay
campaign. The good news is, the campaign was successful, and Foster has been paid.
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As SFWA president
@MaryRobinette
says, this theory could absolutely upend the nature of copyright itself. Any publisher that wanted to go on making money from an author without paying them could simply sell the rights to a sister company, which then denies any obligations.
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I hated Facebook from the start and couldn't wait for it to die. That was a pretty reasonable thing to expect. After all, I'd watched social networks from Sixdegrees on crash and burn as the network effects that drove their growth also drove their precipitous collapse. 1/
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It's run by an oligopoly of wildly profitable companies that coerce academics into working for free for them, and then sell the product of their labors back to the academics' employers (often public institutions) for eye-popping sums. 2/
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Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't pay a cent. 1/
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I spend a lot of time looking in detail at abusive situations where tech plays a starring role: stalkerware, bossware, remote proctoring, etc. But nothing I'd read really prepared me for the tale of
@arisevsinc
, an abuser without parallel.
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Hey, Americans! This is your periodic reminder that you have the worst healthcare in the developed world.
Today, my orthopaedist prescribed generic Celebrex for my bilateral hip arthritis. It's an inexpensive, well-tolerated antiinflammatory.
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This is a wild, hopeful story: grad students at
@Northeastern
successfully pushed back against digital workplace surveillance, through fearless solidarity and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the
#ShittyTechnologyAdoptionCurve
. 1/
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This is Disney's theory: When they bought Lucas and Fox, they acquired the copyright licenses that enabled them to sell the Foster's books - but not the liability, the legal obligation to pay him for his books.
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During a 2007 trip to NYC, while taking long walks from one indie bookstore to the next, lugging increasingly heavy bags of pressed vegetable matter, I stumbled on Simon Lovell's HOW TO CHEAT AT EVERYTHING at the St Mark's Bookshop.
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My next book is *Chokepoint Capitalism*, co-written with
@rgibli
: it's an action-oriented look at how tech and entertainment monopolies steal creators' incomes, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and pay artists:
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Q-Nuts: "It's the Great Storm, Charlie Brown"
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The theory behind carbon offsets is that markets created the climate emergency, so markets will solve it. It's a kind of high-stakes denialism, like a lifelong smoker switching to "light" cigarettes after learning they have stage four lung-cancer.
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If you e-file your US tax using
@HRBlock
,
@TaxAct
or
@TaxSlayer
, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with
@Facebook
, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don't use FB. 1/
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The Department of Fisheries in Hyderabad, India, is shaped like a fish.
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Something amazing is happening in Berlin. Next month, Berliners will vote in a referendum to force Germany's largest publicly traded landlords to sell 240,000 homes to the state, whereupon those homes will become publicly owned housing.
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To be fair, Disney DID offer to meet with Foster, but demanded that he sign an NDA PRIOR to any negotiation. This is Not Normal. Sometimes the OUTCOME of a negotiation is confidential, but you don't go into a negotiation under NDA.
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