A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement
ALT
I’m coming toDEFCON! On Aug 9, I’m emceeing theEFF POKER TOURNAMENT(noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on theBRICKED AND ABANDONEDpanel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I’m giving a keynote called “DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification” (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
Here’s a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations’ metaphorical “intellectual property” claims.
That’s a lot to unpack! Let’s start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers
wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services.
Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.
Now, rents: “rent” is the money a
rentier makes by
owning a “factor of production”: something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists
risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.
For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in
great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.
The “moral philosophers” that today’s self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo –
hated rents. For them,
profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.
When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can’t be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.
The “free markets” of Adam Smith weren’t free from
regulation, they were free from
rents.
The moral philosophers’ hatred of rents was really a hatred of
feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn’t merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of
profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the “free labor” who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).
But that doesn’t mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism
feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.
Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is
insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there’s always a young gun out there looking to “disrupt” their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that “creatively destroys” the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:
That’s a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:
So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with “moats and walls” – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:
Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over
ideas. The “patents royal” were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.
Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country’s number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:
But the 21st Century’s defining source of rent is “IP” – a controversial term that I use here to mean, “Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers”:
IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.
Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this “shared success”:
Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP’s triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now “technofeudalist” rather than “technocapitalist”:
Once you start to think of “IP” as “laws that let me control how other people use their real property,” a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make
terrible law.
“The possibilities that come from totalizing, universalizing, westernizing, heteropatriarchal, capitalist, and racializing dichotomies come from their cracks. These are the cracks of the dichotomies between either getting ourselves expelled from or included into a colonial system of oppression, or between the superiority/inferiority, white/brown-black, interiority/exteriority, inside/outside. However, cracks are often ignored, passed unseen, or forgotten “because of the myopic nature and naturalization of modern life and living”. It is our intent here to demodern ourselves and see the fissures of the totalizing concrete of westernized educational institutions in family therapy, from within. If we can see the cracks, the oppressive system is no longer totalizing. A nontotalizing system, in turn, makes it possible to recognize the value of western knowledge as one parallel to many other possible knowledges.
Through the ruptures, not destruction, of the system we see the hurt but also the light of possible allyships with white people and their accountability—from some of them, at least. I (marcela) can also see the meaningful life-changing learnings from white men mentors I came across during my doctoral studies; or the powerful encounters among the included people into the institution that might have otherwise never taken place as it would have been the case for us (authors). But to see the cracks and the light that shines through, a movement from epistemic obedience to epistemic mischief or insurgence toward epistemic liberation might be required. Such movement, in turn, requires learning to unlearn institutionalized universalist knowledge to relearn pluriversal knowledges that come from our communities and ancestries, as in the decolonial alternative.
– Decolonially Speaking, Sensing, and Thinking: Racialized Tuition-Based Family Therapists Learning Without Teaching, by marcela polanco, Pankaj Kumar (पंकज कुमार), Fraol “Frada” Olyad, and Claire Henry Enemark
America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups
It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on what’s important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those members’ experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.
The creator of the BITE Model considers abusive relationships to be two-person cults.
It’s important to note that almost every sect of evangelical christianity in the US today fails the BITE Model.
This was the post that lead to breaking my JW mindset. Been a while since I seen it.
I’m glad I could help in your deconstruction, if only a little bit. I wish you all the luck in your journey moving forward.
For some difference between a religious group and a cult, you could compare the Amish to Mennonites (Mennonites have very similar lifestyles and beliefs to the Amish, as the Amish were originally a splinter group of the Mennonites)
i met a large family (or two families?) while on a greyhound bus trip across the country and they were Mennonites and they seemed less culty than the Amish. I passed a fascinating hour talking to one of the middle-aged men of the group.
Basically, as far as i could tell from talking to this guy, where the Amish sort of believe that technology is from-the-devil evil, the Mennonites believe something more along the lines of: it is generally better to not live a life that requires things you cannot make or do for yourself.
So, like, this guy was in all handmade clothes made by people in his community, but when i asked about technology he pulled out a cell phone (simple flip phone) and explained that it was unconscionable to consider putting his family in the kind of danger that not having access to a cell phone might entail, but that it was only for real emergencies, and their practice was to do everything they could do without such technology.
He gave another example, on his farm he had an electric generator, but it was also only for emergencies – so if a bad storm came through and having a generator meant that animals or people would be safe, but they were in danger if they did
not use the generator, then the correct moral decision was to use the generator.
I asked about grey areas and slippery slope situations, like how do you decide what level of discomfort becomes danger (is the possibility of a tiny bit of frostbite on your fingertips enough to turn on the generator or do you turn it on at some point before that?) and he basically said that life is made of grey areas, and that such hypothetical situations were the subject of many discussions in his church, but ultimately a person had to decide in the moment what was appropriate.
Essentially, their point of view was something like “we get why TV is so compelling, but we just think there’s more value in telling stories and playing games with the people you love, and TV is SO compelling that if you don’t make conscious lifestyle choices to avoid it you might default to TV over stories and games with loved ones, and we think that kind of defaulting is usually bad”
It all seemed much more reasonable than i had thought it would, but the thing that really differentiated them from the more culty Amish for me was that
Mennonites don’t engage in shunning practices.
In other words, if they have a family member who leaves the church/community, that family member is still welcome in their home etc. They don’t cut ties or enforce any “us or them” ultimatums. The Amish DO shun their family members for breaking faith or whatever. And i think that is a huge difference.
Overall, this guy had a very “i’m happy with my lifestyle, and do not think there is any problem that you are happy with your lifestyle” kind of vibe that was at odds with what i was expecting of a Mennonite. He seemed to believe that the Amish were religious extremists in a way that he was not, while being aware that many people would also consider him to be a religious extremist.
Anyway, i do still think almost all evangelical christian sects are cults, but this was a very interesting look into the differences between the Amish, who are a definite cult, and other Mennonites, who may or may not be less culty.
Do you own a circular slide rule, or know someone who does? Maybe you have a box in the attic or a whole drawer of them.
I am working on an artist’s book with one chapter dedicated to circular slide rules.
If you would like to help me out and get a credit in a really cool book then please scan your slide rule(s) and submit via the form on my site or you can email me lharby@gmail.com.
She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal.
In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale: “She’s 7 years old! She will be a good mare!”
At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.
She had to recite passages from Virgil and Milton and some verses from the Bible, and she also had to vow that the poems she had composed were not copied. From a chair, she underwent her lengthy examination, until the court approved her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslaved, but she was a poet.
Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.
“There is a whole realm of what I have called “infrapolitics” because it is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity. The state has historically thwarted lower-class organization, let alone public defiance. For subordinate groups, such politics is dangerous. They have, by and large, understood, as have guerrillas, that divisibility, small numbers, and dispersion help them avoid reprisal.
"By infrapolitics I have in mind such acts as foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sab- otage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight. Why risk getting shot for a failed mutiny when desertion will do just as well? Why risk an open land invasion when squatting will secure de facto land rights? Why openly petition for rights to wood, fish, and game when poaching will accomplish the same purpose quietly? In many cases these forms of de facto self-help flourish and are sustained by deeply held collective opinions about conscription, unjust wars, and rights to land and nature that cannot safely be ventured openly. And yet the accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts can have massive effects on warfare, land rights, taxes, and property relations. The large-mesh net political scientists and most historians use to troll for political activity utterly misses the fact that most subordinate classes have historically not had the luxury of open political organization. That has not prevented them from working microscopically, cooperatively, complicitly, and massively at political change from below.”
Update: apparently theyre banning anyone who posts those leaks
Another update: Theres a disclaimer of “manipulated media” on posts about it now
because these kinds of twitter shots are easy to fake, and even if real don’t prove much, i just wanted to add a little extra from a quick internet search
so at least it’s not just a bunch of faked screenshots from some user. So i read a little from the Cyber Daily link, here’s an excerpt:
———————————————
According to another post on X, VX Underground was sent a direct message from a “throwaway” account that shared the Okta link and its screenshot with the group. The group then decided to pass the information on to “other people who are better fitted to do investigative research and journalism”.
However, someone leaked the images before the investigation could conclude, with people now sharing the news of the leak and its list of alleged “protected users” on X and beyond.
What VX Underground did say was that the URL included in the leak could not be connected to, and instead, it returned 403 or 404 errors. Cyber Daily has tested the URL – http://protected-users.twitter.okay.com/1721835914 – and confirmed that it indeed 404s.
“We have no way to accurately assess if the information is accurate,” VX Underground said in a post dated 7:35am on 25 July.
While some believe the leak to be true, other commentators are not so sure. For one thing, there are several typos in the screenshot of the user list, and some have pointed out that the configuration of the alleged list makes no sense.
“Okta doesn’t do multilevel subdomains. Okta API’s don’t operate like this at all. The URL is all wrong,” said X user @scriptjunkie1.
“Data access always requires auth. They use other data formats. Anyone who’s worked with Okta config knows this is a very lazy fake, and it’s irresponsible to share.”
Several users of the Hacker News site were also leary of the list’s authenticity.
“Why would they use Okta to pass such a list of ‘protected users’ to the clients?” one user asked.
“This is obviously fake. As tech-savvy users, you should easily be able to verify this,” said another.
“The subdomain cannot resolve as it does not have a valid cert, and okta does not have an API to do this.”
Cyber Daily has not reached out to X for comment, as Elon Musk admitted in March of last year that all comments directed at the company by the media are ignored.
A journalist with better contacts, Leonard Bernardone, is saying that X has said “the images being circulated are fake”.
For now, however, X’s heavy-handed banning of the account sharing the original leak is leaving some to believe it must be, in some way, true. That said, there’s currently no way to confirm the leak is real, and it should probably be taken with a grain or two of salt, no matter how believable it may be.
———————————————-
i was unable to quickly ascertain who owns Cyber Daily or what biases they have, but i do like a “lets wait for real proof” point of view.
My main take away is that if this does turn out to be true? exactly zero of us will be surprised, which is a solid indication of the public perception of twitter (none of us are ever going to call it x, right?) and that in and of itself shows where twitter is as a platform.
I am not convinced this one is real tho. It very well could be, but i’d like more solid evidence
ICJ, Security Council and What the ICJ Ruling Means
I want to start by saying that the recent ICJ ruling isn’t enforceable, but we can make it useful if we choose to. It’s a landmark decision in international law that we can mobilise for our activism. We’ve now seen Britain resume funding of UNRWA. And this ruling is something that is much more tangible for trying to convince governments to place diplomatic and economic sanctions on Israel, demanding ceasefires, recognising Palestine etc.
More on that below but I’m now going to explain a bit more about that and some of the UN bodies/structure stuff as I saw a couple of reblogs on this post have questions about what this means and what the ICJ’s powers really are. (This post responding to a question about the original post has some information as a much shorter read)
There’s a lot of flaws with the United Nations System (the General Assembly, Security Council, UN Secretariat, International Court of Justice, Trusteeship Council, and the Economic and Social Council), it acts as a tool of neocolonialism for the interests of the global powers, especially the Western powers, its binding/enforcement status makes it superficial, is often arguably undemocratic, and has a poor separation of powers. In this long read (I’m sorry) I’m mainly going to be talking about the Security Council and International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The Security Council technically has greater enforcement powers than the ICJ and can technically apply them to ICJ rulings if they’re taken to the Security Council. But the five permanent members of the UN Security Council USA, UK, China, France, and Russia have veto powers.
This has been justified for reasons like maintaining international political stability and to ironically prevent US domination but it has been understandably criticised for being undemocratic and also for preventing action to stop crimes against humanity and war crimes as this veto means that the UN can’t take action against these permanent members and their allies.
Nicaragua v. United States of America[1986] was one of the biggest ICJ cases. It ruled that the US has violated international law by supporting the Contras (right-wing rebellion group) in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and mining of the Nicaraguan harbours. The ICJ ordered the US to pay reparations to Nicaragua, which the US refused to do. Nicaragua then took their case to the Security Council to try and make them enforce the ICJ’s ruling. To no one’s surprise, the US used their veto powers and vetoed this at the Security Council. It then went to the UN General Assembly and passed as a non-binding resolution urging US to follow the rulings.
Recently, we saw the US use their veto power earlier in the year to block immediate ceasefire resolutions from other countries.
The ongoing case
South Africa v. Israelwith South Africa accusing Israel of being in violation with the Genocide Convention. The Genocide Convention is an international treaty that basically says as a state, you have obligations to prevent, stop, and not commit genocides and if you do, there are consequences. The Genocide Convention was born from the atrocities that happened during World War II with the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide etc. Genocide became a crime against international law in 1946 and the Genocide Convention was signed in 1948 but became effective in 1951.
The scope of the Genocide Convention has been raised as an issue in a few cases. And cases of genocide taken to the ICJ are pretty complicated with the findings. It’s something they find very hard to find a state guilty of and are hesitant to do. There’s a few different reasons for that but this post is already super long and I’m trying to keep it short. One of the first cases that was submitted to the UN as an alleged violation of the Genocide Convention was the ‘
We Charge Genocide’ paper written by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which accused the United States of America of genocide against black Americans under the genocide convention, the CRC paper cited lynching, police brutality, inequalities in health, disenfranchisement of black people in the south (it was over a decade after this paper did black women get the right to vote in 1965), and legal discrimination. It was rejected by the UN for being a misuse and was laughed at by the US government and Press, accusing it of being exaggerated and even as an attempt to advance communism. It’s a paper that’s worth a read and also has an interesting history and legacy worth looking into. The US was never a really big fan of the Genocide Convention, they signed 30+ years later and have since withdrawn.
In
Bosnia and Herzegovnia v Serbia and the Montenegro[2007], the ICJ found that the Srebrenica massacre was a genocide but the ICJ did not find that the Serbian government was responsible or complicit in the genocide. They were still found in breach of the convention though for not cooperating with UN bodies and for failing to prevent the genocide and acquitted Serbia. The ICJ rejected Bosnia’s request for reparation repayments.
These two papers/cases are some of the bigger ones that I think show how the ICJ is hesitant to and struggles to define and hold states accountable with violations of the Genocide Convention.
The findings of the recent ICJ ruling and their ordering of Israel to return land, leave settlements and remove settlers, are not binding. Israel does not need to comply! And with a refusal of this, the ICJ ruling could potentially be taken to the Security Council to try and make it more enforceable, but it is likely that if that situation happened, the US would veto that resolution.
This current ICJ ruling is still a landmark for International Law and carries political weight. Since this ruling we’ve seen the British government say they will resume funding to UNRWA (they stopped this after Oct 7th).
I said it before but the ruling isn’t enforceable but we can still make it useful. It carries the political weight of
We need to continue advocating so that there is a free Palestine in the lifetime of every single living Palestinian, they deserve it and we owe it to them.
Israel and its supporters now have international law saying that what they’re doing is wrong, they can no longer hide behind grey legal matter. This is political and justice ammunition that we can mobilise for activism to put pressure on our governments, especially those of us with western governments, governments who have been complicit, tried to play both sides etc. We need to use this to pressure out governments, contact our head of governments, different representatives and ministers to place economic and diplomatic/political sanctions on Israel, recognise the state of Palestine, withdraw recognition of the state of Israel, demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, create and approve Palestinian visas, increase Palestinian aid funding etc.
The west no longer has grey legal matter to continue what they’re doing, especially with plausible deniability and the narrative they’ve been subscribing to. They can’t hide behind this grey area as what they’re doing directly contradicts and violates international law.
Thanks for reading this far if you made it, I will answer genuine questions but I will delete, report and block any comments and asks that are anti-Arab, zionist, Islamophobic, racist, and/or antisemitic.
nachvollziehen (v.) – to understand, but less empathetic. i.e. i see the steps that brought you to that conclusion, but i don’t
understand you.
doch (interj.) – you’re wrong and really it’s the opposite of what you said. often said with a healthy dose of sass. i.e. “this isn’t a good movie.” “
doch. (it is)”
frech (adj.) – somewhere between naughty and sassy and silly. when you’re being a bit of a brat, you’re being
frech.
dreist(adj.) – audacious, but far more colloquial. when you have the goddamn audacity, you are dreist. i.e. to park that far over the line is
dreist as hell
heimat (n.) – home, but stronger. a home is wherever you have built a life, but heimat is where your roots are.
heimat is where you feel pangs of nostalgia when you go to visit your family for christmas and see the shop at the corner.
weltschmerz (n.) – literally ‘world-pain’. the world sucks and sometimes you just sit and feel the pain of it all. that’s
weltschmerz.
existenzberechtigung (n.) – the right to exist, often in a comedic context. i.e. pineapple on pizza has absolutely no existenzberechtigung.
fernweh (n.) – literally 'far-ache’. the opposite of homesickness, the desire to go far away. i guess
wanderlust is similar, but that is also a german word, and this is more painful and visceral
schweigen (v./n.) – the act of not speaking. silence, but more deliberate. the palpable feeling that people are withholding their voice.
verschlimmbesserung (n.) – when an update with the intention of making something better actually just made it worse. looking at you @staff
People always get so weird about my participation in the Flat Earth Advocacy Group. For the last time, we aren’t cranks, we aren’t conspiracy theorists, we’re definitely not geocentrists, and our policy think tank is
fully aware of what shape the planet
currently is
The amount of people in the notes going “yeah sure it may not be the answer for you but it absolutely is for me,” is honestly concerning. It’s very much like that one “I’m sorry your hubris was your doom but I’m built better” post that lives rent free in my head. These guidelines are there for a reason ya’ll. (Also I’m not removing the wierd caption.)
When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.
The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.
Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.
So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.
This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply
cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.
If there’s one thing I learned from all my years as an NGO delegate to UN specialized agencies, it’s that UN treaties are
dangerous, liable to capture by unholy alliances of authoritarian states and rapacious global capitalists.
Most of my UN work was on copyright and “paracopyright,” and my track record was 2:0; I helped kill a terrible treaty (the WIPO Broadcast Treaty) and helped pass a great one (the Marrakesh Treaty on the rights of people with disabilities to access copyrighted works):
It’s been many years since I had to shave and stuff myself into a suit and tie and go to Geneva, and I don’t miss it – and thankfully, I have colleagues who do that work, better than I ever did. Yesterday, I heard from one such EFF colleague, Katitza Rodriguez, about the Cybercrime Treaty, which is about to pass, and which is, to put it mildly,
terrifying:
Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there’s real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there’s a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.
But that’s not what’s in the Cybercrime Treaty.
Here’s a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.
The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), “cybercrime” has come to mean “anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer.” “Cybercrime” can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.
Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight “cybercrime” – however those nations define it. They’ll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users’ private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.
These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What’s optional? The human rights safeguards. Member states “should” or “may” create standards for legality, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination, and legitimate purpose. But even if they do, the treaty can oblige them to assist in surveillance orders that originate with other states that decided not to create these standards.
When that happens, the citizens of the affected states may never find out about it. There are
eight articles in the treaty that establish obligations for
indefinite secrecy regarding surveillance undertaken on behalf of other signatories. That means that your government may be asked to spy on you and the people you love, they may order employees of tech companies to backdoor your account and devices, and that fact will remain secret
forever. Forget challenging these sneak-and-peek orders in court – you won’t even
know about them:
April, 1985, 50,000 feet over the Irish Sea, this is the only picture ever taken of a Concorde flying over Mach 2. The photo itself was taken by Adrian Meredith, a prestigious British photographer, from a Panavia Tornado, a British fighter of the Royal Air Force. Meredith had to be quick and precise, because flying that high he had less than 4 mins to take the shot. The fighter couldn’t keep up with the Concorde beyond that time. If you look at the horizon, the Earth’s curvature begins to show
More than 18,000 flights were delayed or canceled across the USA on Friday, following a global tech outage that affected more than 8.5 million Windows devices. While many flights were rescheduled after the IT issue was discovered, thousands of disruptions have continued throughout the weekend and into this week. Delta Air Lines, which had its crew scheduling software impacted by the outage, has canceled more than 5,500 flights since early Friday.
We also figured out—the hard way—that the ancients probably cut each layer of linen to the proper shape before gluing them together. For our first
linothorax, we glued together 15 layers of linen to form a one centimeter-thick slab, and then tried to cut out the required shape. Large shears were defeated; bolt cutters failed. The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.
The thing they don’t tell you about getting really into one specific historical period is that very quickly every conversation turns into an attempt to avoid sounding like the “horribly wet in wexford today but not as bad as in the 690s” tweet
Me whenever someone’s random comment can be connected to one of my special historical guys in some extremely tenuous way for real
Petrographic thin-sections of titanite (Ttn), muscovite (Ms) and calcite (Cal) grains intergrown with larger plagioclase (Pl) crystals in plane-polarized light (A,C) and under crossedpolarized light (B,D); corundum (Crn) intergrowths with margarite (Mrg) and plagioclase crystals (E,F), plane-polarized light. (source)
Taking us on a journey through the history of sacred art and architecture, Sacred Sites explores the myriads of ways in which we imbue our environments with profound and enduring meaning. From our early designation of nature and the body as temple to our futuristic embrace of imaginary realms, we travel the vast and mystical landscapes of myth, religion, and imagination.
Library of Esoterica series, Sacred Sites, by TASCHEN. A visual pilgrimage through holy mountains, great pyramids, and golden shrines,
Sacred Sites celebrates the ways we transform the world around us through ritual, creativity, and worship. Essays, interviews and more than 400 images explore spaces ranging from ancient temples to modern works of spatial art.
“The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
As climate change pushes summer temperatures ever higher and for longer stretches, and with more Americans moving into rapidly expanding cities in the Southwest, more people are suffering serious burns from contact with hot outdoor surfaces. For some, the burns are so extensive that they prove fatal, according to burn experts.
In 2022, the Arizona Burn Center at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, the largest burn center in the Southwest, admitted 85 patients for contact burns over the summer. Last year, as Phoenix sweltered through 31 straight days of temperatures above 110 degrees, that number climbed to 136 patients, 14 of whom died. This year, the center has already treated 50 patients, and four of them died.
“The people that are dying from these types of burns are not people who just end up with some blistering on their feet,” said Clifford C. Sheckter, surgeon and a burn prevention researcher at Stanford University.
“Your body just literally sits there and cooks,” Dr. Sheckter added. “When somebody finally finds you, you’re already in multisystem organ failure.”
Syed Saquib, medical director of the burn care center at University Medical Center, said before he moved to Las Vegas from Jacksonville, Fla., eight years ago, he had never known about the problem. Now, his center admits one or two such patients daily in the summer.
“I think to myself, ‘These patients are going to require a lot more work and a lot more extensive care than the other types of burn injuries,’” said Dr. Saquib, whose hospital has also seen admissions rise in recent years. Last Thursday, about half of the 31 patients hospitalized with burns had suffered pavement burns.
This bookmark can also be folded and used to temporarily fix a wobbly table or chair (especially when you are using that table or chair to read a book).
Roland Barthes,
The Pleasure of the Text,trans. Richard Miller
[ID: A screenshot of text reading, “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones” (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.“ /end ID]
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two human hands making a cat’s-cradle string figure, in the style of a helpful how-to-do-it diagram”
Well, that’s Bing Copilot/ OpenAI ChatGPT4 at work today, but when it comes to hand-anatomy and understanding three-dimensional space, clearly I’m still asking way too much here.
ALT
