i posted this on fb and got into a little discussion with somebody 💅💅💅☠️

share the discussion op

“There won’t be a puddle you can sail in between here and Nova Scotia except the River Styx.”

That is way too metal of a line to of come from a joke argument on Facebook about the difference between privateers and pirates.

[ID 1: a photo of an angry child with a pirate hat, an eye patch and earphones drawn on him in ms paint. text on top of the image reads: when the shanty ur listening to is talking about privateers not pirates but the fiddle goes hard

ID 2: a facebook comment that reads: Oi what you got against privateers. the comment has 35 replies that aren’t shown on the image, and someone reacted to it with the angry reaction.

ID 3-7: replies to the previous comment:

Nunki: I’m so angry abt this. Will reply later (someone liked this comment)

Sean: Least I got health insurance. Peg legs ain’t cheap.

Sean: “traitor” yes, as soon as the next sucker with a piece of paper comes by

Nunki: the friend of my enemy is my enemy SEAN

Sean: I ain’t got no friends but the deck of my ship

Nunki: pirates are defined by their opposition by a navy

Nunki: ok enjoy ur SLOOP you chump

Nunki: your government subsidized SLOOP

Sean: Sloop!??!?!? SLOOP!? I got myself a GALLEON, and a cool 38 million a year flipping Spanish gold- boats upside down. You’ve got what I can only assume to be some horrid mutation of scurvy and a sandbar for a port of call.

Nunki: >“I ain’t got no friends but the deck of my ship” >claims to own a ship w more than one mast

Nunki: have fun w that ‘galleon’ manned by an entire crew of capable pyrates who love the queen lol

Sean: Alright that’s it 10,000 doubloons for their head. There won’t be a puddle you can sail in between here and Nova Scotia except the River Styx.

Nunki: i should hope there aren’t any puddles i can sail in- unlike you sean my boat is more than 15 square feet of plywood and hardtack held together with tar, and i’ll pay the 10k out of pocket simply bc of how insulting a price that small is

Nunki: buy yourself something nice

Nunki: like a bigger sloop (someone reacted with an angry reaction to this comment)

Nunki: or some aloe vera

Sean: Say hi to God for me.

Nunki: (in all caps) say hi to the pope for me

ID 8 and 9: screenshots of flint and hornigold from black sails XIX, when hornigold offers pardons for flint’s crew. the captions were edited to say:

flint: 'enjoy ur SLOOP you chump. your government subsidized SLOOP’

hornigold: 'Sloop!??!?!? SLOOP!? I got myself a GALLEON, and a cool 38 million a year flipping Spanish gold- boats upside down. You’ve got what I can only assume to be some horrid mutation of scurvy and a sandbar for a port of call.’ end ID]

THAT'S what happened?! All those comedy websites years ago all shifted to doing videos and lost all their money at once because just Facebook tricked them with inflated video views?!

what????? what is this about

- so between 2014-2016 facebook launches a massive ‘pivot to video’ campaign to draw media orgs to their video-based features. zuckerberg’s doing rounds, saying that in the near future, newsfeeds will mostly be video, and that video is the future of media. to back this up, they release tons of wild viewership metrics for ads on facebook, enticing advertisers to prioritize video, and as a result, the media that relies upon advertisers for funding began to do the same.

- this had an industry-wide impact, and media orgs, from established news, to humor websites, to smaller creators, fire writers and those primarily focused on print, and direct resources to their video creation efforts.

- around 2016, it’s revealed that facebook completely fabricated their original numbers, likely inflating them between 150-900%. additionally, their viewership metric considered 3 seconds of a person watching to be a ‘view’ (whereas youtube had a 30 second requirement for the same metric).

-Having totally restructured in order to pivot to facebook video, many media orgs were unable to recapture hard won (and and sometimes decades old) audiences. College Humor, Funny or Die, MTV News, Vice, Mic, and Vox were among those that were seriously impacted.

- after a 2018 class action lawsuit, facebook (who maintain that the whole ordeal was caused by a simple error in calculation) was made to pay 40 million in damages, which 1, is a paltry sum when we consider the 22 billion they made in profit that same year, and 2, does nothing to bring back the jobs, audiences, and media orgs they destroyed. to make matters worse, many still posit that it was never the public, but rather advertisers that preferred video over text, meaning that facebook intentionally deceived everyone involved specifically to secure more advertising dollars. so yeah, fb is evil and… probably should be stopped

I was on facebook during this time and the weirdest part of it was that meme pages started posting memes as videos of static images with little floaty sparkles and patterns drifting around. I think it was because the algorithm favored videos so much, but idk.

Hey, do y’all remember how Tencent said they were developing faceID AI to identify people in riots, and then they suddenly created an AI art generator to turn your selfies into anime?

Do y’all remember that time that someone discovered facial recognition cameras couldn't see through Juggalo makeup, then Facebook had a fun “see what you'd look like with Juggalo makeup” thing, and then facial recognition cameras could suddenly see through Juggalo makeup?

Do y’all remember how, on Twitter, Elon started a tirade against artists who ask for credit when their art is reposted, and he suddenly he created one of the first big art AI programs?

Do y’all remember how AI destroyed the field of freelance translation, despite the inferiority of the machine translations, because companies didn’t care about the quality of the translations? They just wanted it done for free?

Do y’all know how companies will see a lot of money going into a New Tech Thing (like, say, AI art apps) and will jump to try and implement that New Tech Thing into their tech? For example, how it felt like every big company and celebrity had an NFT to sell?

Just wondering.

slides im sharing w my family this week bc it pains me to see how they manage their passwords. and also easy steps they can take to protect their privacy (firefox mainly). if u have any questions let me know.

also. uBlock origin is better than adblock plus bc: it allows NO ADS (ABP will allow certain ads and let bigger companies thru - its "acceptable ads" program) + is more lightweight and easier on your computer's resources than ABP.

im seeing a pick up in rbs for this -- a new and pertinent addition is that chrome is planning to switch from manifest v2 to manifest v3 soon. this means ad blockers will no longer work in chrome.

switch to firefox if you want to preserve your ad blocking abilities and your data privacy!!

Text in images, with punctuation by me:

I'm begging you all to please get a password manager .pptx

No not the one in Google Chrome. Please don't give Google your logins.

For real, I'm worried about your digital security.

Also, I want to make your lives easier.

PowerPoint subtopics:

Why are you telling me this.

Why Bit warden is the shit

Firefox <3

OK I'll get Firefox!! What plugins do I need?

End text.

[Image Description: A tweet from Shiv Ramdas (@.nameshiv) that reads: After threatening to do it for years, my dad made a Facebook account yesterday, read like, 6 posts, turned to sister and said, “This is just the same garbage as the TV but I have to remember a password to hear it,” and deleted his account & I think I want to be him when I grow up. /End Image Description.]

Being on Tumblr is less a matter of “why?” and more a matter of “what exactly is the alternative?”. Like, Twitter is a glorified advertising platform, Reddit manages to capture all the vices of Web 1.0 forum culture and absolutely none of its virtues, Facebook is fundamentally hostile to human life, and Pinterest is a digital scrapbooking service wearing a social media app as a hat. What’s left?

Something I saw on Twitter.

TL;DR

Trump signed a law that sues companies for any assistance to sex trafficking. Websites like Facebook and Tumblr are banning any sex related work in order to be clear of this law.

[ID: a Twitter thread by Cookie Cyboid @CookieCyboid, posted on 07/12/2018

"'Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so overzealous about it? It's all Apples fault!' Etc ect

I can explain all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.

Here's an article about them, but in short these laws make websites responsible for third party content related to sex work. They can be sued for having full service sex work ads on their platforms EVEN IF THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT

I'll get to Tumblr and Facebook but first just lemme take a second to tell you these laws don't do what they are designed to do. They don't stop trafficking, they actually make it harder to find victims. Turns out the easiest way to find victims is online.

Also it turns out that if you remove sites used to screen clients, pimps spring up offering safe clients lists. Removing advertising also forces sex workers out onto street corners

These laws were passed in April and we saw a lot of sites dissapeare overnight. So why are Tumblr and Facebook acting now?

They come into force next month. Next month any website with a US presence can be sued if it allows, even unknowingly, sexual solicitation.

To my mind, Tumblr saw Apple removing the Tumblr app from their store and went 'eh, we needed to ban porn anyway, we'll just act early'

Their algorithm sucks because training an algorithm to spot lewd content is incredibly difficult.

Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like 'I'm looking for a good time tonight'.

The reason they're so overzealous isn't because they're screaming 'somebody think of the children'

It's because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they've decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.

These laws come into force next month. At that time I expect Twitter to also crack down on sex work. I don't expect we'll be warned, Twitter will just remove our accounts overnight.

'Why don't you start your own website, you aren't US based, just do that'

There are a myriad of reasons why I can't do that,

Go to PornHub!

Mate I've made my opinion on that hellsite very clear. I don't need another storefront. I need a place to communicate with queer communities with and advertise. PornHub fucking sucks.

Sesta/Fosta are an attempt to limit not only sex work, but queer expression online. Queer relationships are seen as inherently sexual to some. We need to be fighting this, because it's not just a stick to hit sex workers with.

To my mind these laws are were always about stopping consensual sex work, whilst also punching at queer people, and sexual expression. This is a censorship bill.

Yell at your elected representatives America. Make them realize what this is, because it was sold on stopping sex trafficking. The optics on it were so good that all the democrats voted for it too. Liberals are just as much at fault here.

I know there is a lot happening, and it's hard to keep up with it all, but this is important. Sesta/Fosta needs to be repealed" End ID.]

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

App Store Privacy Reports

Apple recently started forcing apps to report what information they collect and how they use it.

It’s really detailed and really easy to read.

And the difference between [tumblr] and the other platforms is… extraordinary.

TikTok Privacy Report for iOS

Facebook Privacy Report for iOS

Tumblr Privacy Report for iOS

Some take-aways

And this is just the summary from each app. Apple actually breaks this stuff down in detail. Go to the App Store and see for yourself.

Apple’s surveys are typically self-interested (does anyone believe Apple cares about people’s privacy?) but this is certainly a valuable contrast to have. It’s indeed stark how unusual tumblr is in its continued resistance to identity data-mining, although it’s not surprising given tumblr’s history of resistance to advertising generally (tumblr didn’t even start advertising until 2012!). tumblr’s practices are all the more remarkable in 2121 given the extent to which datamining has become totally naturalized across platforms and internet services more generally. Alternative ways of generating income are rarely even acknowledged, as if they are somehow not possible. 

#i cannot believe that i lived long enough to see tumblr become the best social media site #what the actual fuck #like to be fair it’s not much of a competition when the competition is trying to saw your legs off but #i remember when tumblr being a broken mess was a mark against it #now it’s a key selling feature #holy shit

Stand with Banned Anarchist Publishers

#NoAnarchistBan

Facebook has banned crimethinc.com, itsgoingdown.org, and other anarchist publishers solely on the basis of the roles that they play in covering protest movements. 

If there is no response, this will set a precedent for more bans, and embolden the state and fascists to engage in other forms of repression.

—Use the hashtag #NoAnarchistBan

—Spread the word: cwc.im/BannedonFacebook

—Use the support avatar: cwc.im/avatar

—Subscribe to crimethinc.com on RSS: cwc.im/feed

—Follow us on Twitter: @crimethinc

Via @iamdylancurran (Twitter)

I’ll repost this whenever I see it on my dashboard.

fuck…

So, one thing you can do is use Firefox instead of Chrome. Another thing you can do is use duck duck go instead of google search. In fact you know what let me get on desktop and make a proper reply, give me about an hour and I’ll hook y’all up with some privacy

ok I took a bit more than an hour, I have time blindness don’t @ me.

Step one, download and install Firefox.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

It will ask if you want to import all your bookmarks and saved passwords from your current browser/s. Do that. It will also ask if you want to make it your default browser. Do that too.

You will be given the option to create an account, but it’s not mandatory. It’s just a convenience service if you want to access your bookmarks and saved passwords on different devices.

Firefox has a load of built-in privacy protections but we’re going to install some addons to make it EVEN BETTER. Don’t worry they’re all free and once you’ve installed them you don’t have to think about them again.

First, Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials. Firefox does still set your default search engine to Google, we don’t want that. You could manually change it but the Duck Duck Go addon gives you some tracker blocking, encryption, private searching, all set up and ready to go

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox

Next you need an ad blocker. ABP went stupid, so here’s uBlock

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Do you use farcebook or any related product like instagram? Facebook Container automatically puts those in a little quarantine pen so they can’t follow you around and spy on what else you’re doing

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/

If you have multiple accounts (eg. work/school, family, public, personal, private) you can use Firefox Multi-Account Containers to manage them and keep their footprints separate

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere are published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and those people are serious as a heart attack when it comes to online privacy.

Privacy Badger sends a do not track signal, and also breaks link tracking by sites like facebook, twitter, etc.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17

HTTPS Everywhere is… ok there’s a lot to explain here, and we’re already longposting so just, every time you connect to any page it makes it more secure.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/https-everywhere/

If you want to learn a bit about how this works and why it’s good to have, might as well start with the HTTPS page on wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS

You could stop here, that’s pretty good. But you can do more. You could install NoScript. A big warning with this one, it can break half the internet. It’s a LOT more user friendly than it used to be but if you can’t figure shit out by fucking around you should probably skip it. It blocks scripts from running without permission, protecting you from drive-by scripts that give your computer herpes, but also sometimes protecting you from script-heavy sites working at all.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

Lastly an honourable mention for Ghostery. Ghostery has been a solid privacy addon for years, and now has adblocking powers. Honestly I haven’t used it in ages, a long time ago it conflicted with something else I deemed more important so I removed it and I never got around to picking it back up, but it has a great reputation and is trusted by a lot of people who I trust.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/

Now, this all only covers your browser activity, which is a lot but you will still need to manually adjust privacy settings on your google/gmail/youtube account/s if you have any, your facebook/instagram account/s if you have any, and your actual gotdamn operating system if you use windows. I know it seems like a lot of effort, I’m a lazy bitch too, but it’s very set-and-forget, you only need to do it once, and then just review it a couple of times a year.

Here’s some stuff about Windows 10 privacy settings

https://pixelprivacy.com/resources/windows-privacy-settings/

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/5-privacy-settings-to-change-in-windows-10/

And some stuff about google privacy settings

https://mashable.com/article/google-privacy-setting-you-should-enable-now/

And some stuff about facebook privacy settings

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/facebook-privacy-settings-2939307

And here’s an honest explanation of what a VPN really does and does not do, why you don’t actually need one, and the few real reasons you might ever want one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

And  a bit about password managers

https://www.cnet.com/news/best-password-managers-for-2020/

This is by no means the limit of the steps you can take to secure your online privacy, if you want to go deeper you definitely can. But if you don’t want to or don’t have the time or aren’t very technically minded, this will still put you way ahead of the pack. It won’t make you The Most Private but it will make you Much More Private Than Most, and it should take you less than an hour or two, depending on how many accounts you have on predatory datenkraken sites.

Now go hide your panties from the evil empire.

How the fuck has this site become so bearable. This place was a shit show a few years ago but now it's actually good and not full of instant discourse the way Facebook and Twitter are

everyone is just tired

That or we got used to the discouse and learned to deal with it better and curate our own experiences

My mother didn’t believe me when I said the reason her phone keeps displaying ads for dog car harnesses is because it eavesdrops on her spoken conversations.

“Watch this,” I said. “I want to buy a wetsuit. I need a wetsuit. Where can I get a wetsuit? Bring me a wetsuit. Wetsuit size small. Women’s wetsuits. Wetsuits for children. Wetsuits for dogs. Discount wetsuits. Hot single wetsuits in my area? Sexy wetsuits. Wetsuits for sale. Purchase me a wetsuit. We need to get a wetsuit. Spend money on a wetsuit! I want to get a wetsuit. Where did you get that wetsuit?”

Her phone is now advertising wetsuits.

Former web developer, AI/UI dev, and data analyst for various things (including targeted marketing on social media) here.

If you have accounts like Facebook and Google +/Gmail, or any app that requires permissions to read & write your surface settings, then this is why it happens. Your default settings for location and other permissions (mic and camera) are enabled for constant read-write.

What does this mean?

You can toggle your permissions for these apps for conditions like Never or While Using App. Keep in mind that if you have apps opened up in the background of your phone, then you're technically using them. Make sure to close them out completely when you don't want to use them.

But why?

When you have your location permissions enabled for apps, this data is collected and used for targeted marketing. Google is the biggest offender.

Example of how to stop active data collection

You can pause permissions on Google accounts:

You can toggle app settings for surface permissions off:

Friendly Reminder

The more you create accounts by using your Google or Facebook to login, the more active data collection you offer to these companies. Unfortunately, Facebook will never not offer you the chance to not have ads showing on your newsfeed. However, you can shut off channels of active data collection by signing up with an email address and a good ol' password instead of using SSO (single sign on) with Google or Facebook.

This cyberpunk future is so lame

interesting that it’s social networking sites with/associated with primarily female users that are stepping up where Facebook and Twitter won’t

Worth noting that Ravelry was inspired by the tabletop gaming forum RPG.net, to the point of almost wholesale adopting (and crediting) rpg.net’s own policy regarding support for Trump. Also worth noting that the moderation staff for RPG.net has multiple members that identify as female or within the LGBT coalition. And that the site has a very progressive moderation policy.

[Image 1: headline, "The tech giant fighting anti-vaxxers isn't Twitter or Facebook. It's Pinterest". Text continues, "While the social media world scratches its beard about content moderation, Pinterest proves it doesn't have to be all that hard."

Image 2: headline, "Pinterest has banned the massively popular anti-abortion group Live Action"

Image 3: tweet by Ravelry @ravelry "We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. More details: revelry.com/content/no-tru..."

/End description.]

Holy shirt Instagram is owned by F*cebook wtf???

Are straight white people okay????

What is this?!

People like this exist. Interesting.

this story has a part 2

THERE IS A PART 3 WITH GUEST RESPONSES I REPEAT THERE IS A PART 3 THIS IS NOT A DRILL

I thought things couldn’t get more horrifyingly amusing than the woman who wanted people to pay $1000 each to go to her wedding so she could “feel like a Kardashian for a day” and had a Facebook breakdown about it saying she was gonna go backpacking in Peru to “find herself” after being “betrayed” by her friends who didn’t want to partake but here we are

I thought it was the same person ngl.

I’m in the wedding shaming group and saw both this and the Peru post before it went viral. Love it.

THERE’S AN UPDATE

Stephanie is a true hero.

my favorite thing about this update is that the fact that we are even SEEING this means there’s AT LEAST one other snitch in the party that she hasn’t caught yet

A dude I know on FB is trying to have a conversation about how unorthodox views can be beneficial but he keeps bringing up examples of how his church was ‘open to listening to members of different churches whose views could damn our eternal souls’  and I can’t manage to explain to him that this doesn’t mean shit to anyone outside his religion, and that it isn’t a valid analogy to why universities should let racists speak.

“Do you think the pastor caused harm by giving a platform to people expressing ideas that he believed could damn our immortal souls?” …no because first off I don’t believe in your religion and second off I don’t even know what those ideas were but there’s a high probability one of them was that queers like me aren’t evil and I’m kinda biased there you see.

Facebook done hecked up big time

Oh hey literally everyone, this is not a drill. 🔥🚨🚨🚨🚨

Facebook just messed around with their security and if you’ve ever added your mobile phone number to your account (even if it was only for 2-factor-security) it is now PUBLICLY SEARCHABLE.

And it’s visible to EVERYONE by default. You cannot opt out of it, you can only toggle it to be viewable by friends. YOU CANNOT DISABLE IT. It looks like the only way you can stop it is by removing you mobile number entirely (and if you’re using 2-factor-security you can’t do that).

I am not exaggerating, this is is not scaremongering, this is a very real big thing that just happened.

So please check your settings because I don’t think I need to explain why this is an issue (and please signal boost it to vulnerable people because Facebook just gave everyone the keys to your private life).

Privacy setting: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=privacy&view

Mobile number tab: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=mobile