That broken tech/content culture cycle:

Double down on funding the worst voices on your platform. Call it “free speech”, and make sure that nobody internally points out that truly defending free speech would have entailed protecting those early marginalized creators who made your platform credible in the first place. Definitely misuse “free speech” as a rhetorical bludgeon against people who are pointing out that you are both amplifying and sponsoring content, not merely making it available. Resolutely refuse to be intellectually honest about the difference between merely providing a platform to all, vs. making editorial decisions to promote and subsidize content that you have control over.

When asked about war in Ukraine, Trump launches into a bizarre anti-windmill rant | Boing Boing:

Even when he appears on an ass-kissing podcast and gets asked about the war in Ukraine, he launches into another anti-windmill rant instead of answering the question.

Lord Dampnut is stuck on this - His boss in Moscow doesn’t want people calling his invasion a war, but he can’t call it a special operation with Putin’s reasoning of defeating “nazis” in Ukraine without alienating his most stable base of US nazis.

(1) DIS on Twitter: “RT @deesnider: People are asking me why I endorsed the use of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” for the Ukrainian people and did not for the anti-m…” / Twitter:

People are asking me why I endorsed the use of "We're Not Gonna Take It" for the Ukrainian people and did not for the anti-maskers. Well, one use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is a infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer: Does the Edge Still Bleed? | Tor.com:

Fiction, even science fiction, is not about the future: I think everybody knows that. So what is the “future” that Gibson describes here? It’s a future that in some ways looks remarkably like the present: the US hegemony is fading, the poor have gotten even poorer than they were in 1984, and the truly rich have power that the rest of us can’t even imagine. Although often described as glorifying computer programmers as a cohort of romantically wild console cowboys, Neuromancer pushes back at the idea that technical advance always results in progress. This book is still surprising, still relevant, and it still deals with unanswered questions.

Elon Musk making unfunny Hitler jokes in support of the Canadian anti-vax trucker convoy | Boing Boing:

Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk keeps telling us who he is, but his fans refuse to listen. He is so mad that Canada is taking non-violent measures against the disruptive protest against commonsense, ie not letting them fund their action with crypto, that he is tossing around images of Hitler as favorable.

Bond villian in training.

Daring Fireball: Spotify Is Acquiring Two Major Podcast Surveillance Ad Tech Platforms:

Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re trying to usurp podcasting as we know it — one of the last and brightest bastions of the open, simple, private, transparent internet — and turn it into a privately-owned, gated, complicated, invasive, utterly closed platform. Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.

My Seatbelt Rule for Judgment:

One of my formative childhood lessons came when I was playing in the garage one day. I went into my mom’s car and put the seatbelt on (probably to pretend I was flying a plane). I realized at one point that I could still lean pretty far forward. Far enough that my head could touch the dashboard. How ridiculous! What’s the point of the seatbelt if it doesn’t actually stop me from going too far? I reveled in my discovery that seatbelts were useless.

New Research Across 200 iOS Apps Hints that Surveillance Marketing is Still Going Strong | URLgenius Blog:

If you work in advertising or marketing, you’re probably aware of Apple’s privacy efforts over the last year. Apple now requires apps ask customers if they want to 'opt-in' to allow behavioral data tracking. If you’re an Apple customer, you may also think you have control over which apps are tracking you around the internet.

Or do you? We did some research to find out if perceptions match reality.

The release of iOS 15.2 introduced a new Record App Activity feature that lets you see which apps communicate to various networks. Sometimes these contacts are to the app’s own domain, but more often these contacts are to third-party domains, and it’s not clear what data is being shared.

We used this new privacy feature to take a snapshot of network connections across 200 apps and 20 different app categories. Our goal was to glean some insight into where the industry is at this moment when it comes to tracking consumers around the internet while also trying to move to a non-PII framework.

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart - The Atlantic:

But truth be told, I’d already been mulling this subject for quite some time. When you’re in middle age, which I am (mid-middle age, to be precise—I’m now 52), you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They’re the flora and fauna in a life that hasn’t had much diversity, because you’ve been so busy—so relentlessly, stupidly busy—with middle-age things: kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba’s full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back; the children into whom you’ve pumped thousands of kilowatt-hours are no longer partial to your company; your partner may or may not still be by your side. And what, then, remains?

via - kottke.org

Legitimate Political Discourse: The TV show | Boing Boing:

Elon Musk accuses AP reporter of being a lobbyist, sets fans against him on Twitter over Tesla recall article - Electrek:

Elon Musk is accusing an Associated Press reporter of being a lobbyist over an article about NHTSA’s recall of Tesla vehicles in the Full Self-Driving Beta program. Now his fans are attacking the journalist on Twitter.

He’s almost as bad as Agent Orange, lord dampnut.

A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator | by Cory Doctorow | Jan, 2022 | Medium:

Here’s a supreme irony: the Creative Commons licenses were invented to enable a culture of legally safe sharing, spurred by the legal terror campaign waged by the entertainment industry, led by a literal criminal predator who is now in prison for sex crimes. But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.

All Your Favorite Cartoon Characters Are Black: I see it - I agree with nearly every example they gave.

jwz: On blocking, and the coinsplaining cryptobros:

Basically, I block someone if they have said something stupid enough to make me want to hit reply and frustratedly explain it to them. We all know that there is no future in sending that reply, but as I said, the struggle is real. So instead I block them, because the chance that this person will ever say something I want to hear is... not large.

Google ‘colluded’ with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy • The Register:

The alleged Jedi Blue partnership between Google and Facebook, outlined in the initial complaint, is explained in more detail in the latest filing. The two companies, it's said, have been working closely to help Facebook "recognize users in auctions and bid and win more often."

“For example, Google and Facebook have integrated their software development kits (SDKs) so that Google can pass Facebook data for user ID cookie matching,” the amended complaint says. “They also coordinated with each other to harm publishers through the adoption of Unified Pricing rules…"

Don’t be… Something? That sounds familiar, but who was it about…

Southlake school leader tells teachers to balance Holocaust books with ‘opposing’ views:

SOUTHLAKE, Texas — A top administrator with the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News.

Gina Peddy, the Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, made the comment Friday afternoon during a training session on which books teachers can have in classroom libraries. The training came four days after the Carroll school board, responding to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a fourth grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom.

Actual nazi behavior.

Tik Tok shows how social media uses transphobia as a gateway to further radicalization | Boing Boing:

Media Matters has found that Tik Tok's algorithm has identified that interest in transphobic videos is a signal that showing right-wing GQP style videos will generate even more views, incidentally, this helps radicalize folks.

Evangelical White Fragility in action – WIL WHEATON dot NET:

And yet, as happens so frequently when I write something that right wing authoritarians get angry about, I’ve been locked out of my Facebook account, again, for what they claim is hate speech and bigotry. Clearly, someone or group of someones brigaded my post, and Facebook responded as it always does.

They should at least be honest, and call it what it is: White Evangelical Fragility can’t handle someone like me expressing these feelings and beliefs. It threatens everything they hold dear, and we just can’t have that, not in White Jesus America.

I realize it’s not an option for everyone, but everything from the past few days makes me more glad I stepped off from Facebook.

19 of the top 20 Facebook page for American Christians are run by Eastern European troll farms | Boing Boing:

MIT Technology Review received an internal Facebook report from 2019 and learned that Eastern European troll farm "content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages."

A talk show host on why rich republicans want us to hate the word “antifa” in witty video | Boing Boing:

While Republicans have turned "antifa" into a dirty word, with such success that most on the left won't go near it, the San Francisco KGO commentator does the opposite, embracing it with gusto. He reminds us what fascists are (when the rich sector of a party "changes the law, making it impossible for you to vote"), then points to the poor sector of the same party: "Now these Republicans, I don't know what the fuck they're thinking." This group, he explains, are bamboozled by the anti-anti-fascist movement of the right to their own demise."

Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Change That Blocks Watchdogs from Gathering Data – The Markup:

The Markup has found evidence that Facebook is adding changes to its website code that foils automated data collection of news feed posts—a technique that groups like NYU’s Ad Observatory, The Markup, and other researchers and journalists use to audit what’s happening on the platform on a large scale.

The changes, which attach junk code to HTML features meant to improve accessibility for visually impaired users, also impact browser-based ad blocking services on the platform. The new code risks damaging the user experience for people who are visually impaired, a group that has struggled to use the platform in the past.

Facebook is the AOL of 2021 | ZDNet:

Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.

This thought terrifies Facebook, but they already have the backup plan where they’re the Cyberspace that noone can escape… Where they’re the app store, the advertising, the provider of everything… They’re building it through their Oculus Quest products and there’s really little on the horizon that is attempting to compete there… And the “platforms” that are closest to competing are Fortnite and Roblox, both horrendous in their own rights.

Online Trolls Also Jerks in Real Life: Aarhus University Study:

Instead, their data pointed to online interactions largely mirroring offline behavior, with people predisposed to aggressive, status-seeking behavior just as unpleasant in person as behind a veil of online anonymity, and choosing to be jerks as part of a deliberate strategy rather than as a consequence of the format involved.

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps | Ars Technica:

I have tried nearly every stage of this, hoping to see Google bring back something like the “golden age” of federated, open-standards communication of it’s original Google Talk (RIP). I don’t think Google is capable of that thinking anymore, and it poisons every interaction I have with their products.

The Google Talk saga is a case in point. It feels like it's for a company that doesn't exist today. When Google Talk launched, there was an assumption that Google would dominate messaging, because back then, Google was seen as a disrupter and a company that put effort behind the new markets it entered. Today, no one assumes Google will be successful in a new market. And it's because of what we outlined here, a list of so many low-effort projects.

Covid: Most popular Facebook link in US spread vaccine doubt - BBC News:

The paper alleged the report had not been shared because of fears that it would "look bad for the company". The most-viewed link was an article published by a mainstream US newspaper reporting that a doctor had died two weeks after getting a Covid-19 vaccine. The link attracted nearly 54 million views.

The first quarter report also revealed that the 19th most popular page on the platform belonged to the Epoch Times, which has been accused of spreading right-wing conspiracy theories.