Today in "Finding Out"

eBay to Pay $3 Million in Connection with Corporate Cyberstalking Campaign:

eBay was charged criminally with two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement. Pursuant to the agreement, eBay admitted to a detailed recitation of all the relevant facts about its conduct and agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $3 million, which is the statutory maximum fine for these six felony offenses.

Previously: eBay exec gets 5 years for sending spiders and cockroaches to online critics. "I can't believe that rich white fratboys would do something like this", says prosecutor.

The seven convicted eBay employees and contractors include Baugh, who was sentenced to 57 months in prison in September 2022; David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022; Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, who was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022; Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021; Stephanie Stockwell and Veronica Zea, a former Manager of Global Intelligence and a contract intelligence analyst, respectively, who were each sentenced to one year in home confinement in October and November 2022. Brian Gilbert, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

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Trump's 2024 Calendar

Worst board game ever.

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"Electronics gives us a way of classifying things"

Bill "640 KB ought to be enough for anybody" Gates, whose company MICROS~1.EXE now owns spicy-autocomplete bullshit-fountain vendor OpenAI, explained to Terry Pratchett in 1996 how social media would make misinformation impossible.

But I won't let that change my opinion of him.

TP: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

BG: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.

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Twitch


The only Twitch that I acknowledge.
So, Twitch just laid off 500 people, over 1/3rd of their staff: "For some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today."

And gosh, I'm all broken up about it. Here, let me re-post something I wrote about Twitch back in 2020, when they were having their moment in the sun due to the lockdown:


Since none of the clubs are open, you figured you'd just DJ on Twitch, huh?

<Nelson-voice> "Haaa, ha."

Twitch streamers are getting blindsided by years-old copyright notices

The claimant was listed as the RIAA, and the infringing material was mostly recorded clips of old live broadcasts. And that's a problem because it's stated very clearly in the Twitch terms of service that if your account is dinged with three of these strikes, you get permabanned from Twitch.

The clips themselves were sometimes years old, too, which is a bigger headache because streamers who have been on the platform long enough have accumulated tons of these and now have a backlog rights holders can mine to file takedowns. Twitch doesn't have the tools yet to let creators bulk delete clips, let alone sift through hundreds at a time that may or may not contain copyright infringing content.

This is why we don't use Twitch, people.

See, Twitch used to be called Justin.TV, and for several years we used them as our video streaming host, because the price was right (free). But then they "pivoted" their business from "stream anything" to "stream video games only" and became Twitch. And on the day they announced that, they shut down Justin.TV to anything that wasn't gaming, leaving us and all of their other users in the lurch. Literally less than 24 hours notice.

Well, a few years later, they decided to expand from "only games" back to "pretty much anything", and they came sniffing around DNA Lounge again. "Hey, we'd love to have your Compelling Content our our site. Of course we're going to put pop-up ads all over your shit, and by the way, you can't ever webcast a burlesque show, because we're a Family Friendly Company."

Photorealistic in-game murder, sure. A pastie? Hey now, think about the children.

Twitch's terms of service now explicitly exclude DJ sets, karaoke, lip-sync, and even cover songs. So that's pretty much the end of that.

So Twitch was already not-to-be-trusted, for sure, but the real problem here is that the Content Mafia has bullied the tech industry (and by tech industry I mean Google, because nobody else matters) into making the process of asserting copyright infringement trivial, fast, and easy to automate; while making the process of making an appeal on the grounds of Fair Use, or any other reason, damned near impossible.

Everything is terrible, is what I'm saying, and getting worse.


Do Zoom next.

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DNA Lounge: Wherein we have had a second ATM stolen

This time it was by what appear to be a pair of slithering fucking Jawas. I guess our efforts on hardening our front doors was successful, because this time they pried up the pizza roll-up door, which (until yesterday) I would have characterized as "extremely difficult".

Unlike the last guy, they didn't pose for a selfie for us.

This is calling into question whether we should even have ATMs at all. We have to run some reports to be sure, but if there's now going to be a multi-thousand dollar burglary tax a couple of times a year, it's not obvious to me that the money we make in ATM service fees covers that any more.

This is very annoying to me, as someone who pays for everything in cash when possible (partly out of a reflexive-but-futile do-not-track instinct, and partly because I'd rather that all of the money go to the business instead of around 3.5% of it going to parasitic middlemen in fees).

Also extremely annoying: three weeks ago I put out a call for donations, as the DNA Lounge financial situation has again gotten extremely dire. We got a few thousand dollars in donations, which, while not enough to keep the lights on, was definitely helpful, and means a lot to us.

And now that money and more just walked out the fucking door on Sunday night.

This constant "two steps forward, six steps back" shit is just exhausting.

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I feel either extremely seen or extremely called out by this cartoon and I'm not sure which.

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Jungle

"I can't accept Drum & Bass. We need jungle, I'm afraid."


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Hostile Architecture Survey

The Mission's response to homelessness: More than 2,000 planters:

There are some 2,078 planters across the neighborhood, according to a block-by-block count conducted by Mission Local reporters. About 200 of these are the large metallic containers and another 400 are wooden barrels. There are 155 wooden troughs. The remaining 1,307 are a mixture of receptacles ranging in size from tiny clay pots to massive sidewalk gardens filled with an assortment of vessels.

Kudos to the web designers for making this article be both: an interactive scrolling 3d-ish map thingy; and also, completely legible in Reader Mode! One usually does not get both.

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THE BLOOP, unmasked

Was the Bloop from secret underwater military exercises, ship engines, fishing boat winches, giant squids, whales, or a some sea creature unknown to science?

As the years passed, PMEL researchers continued to deploy hydrophones ever closer to Antarctica in an ongoing effort to study the sounds of sea floor volcanoes and earthquakes. It was there, on Earth's lonely southernmost land mass, that they finally discovered the source of those thunderous rumbles from the deep in 2005. The Bloop was the sound of an icequake -- an iceberg cracking and breaking away from an Antarctic glacier! With global warming, more and more icequakes occur annually, breaking off glaciers, cracking and eventually melting into the ocean.

PMEL's Acoustics Program develops unique acoustics tools and technologies to acquire long-term data sets of the global ocean acoustics environment, and to identify and assess acoustic impacts from human activities and natural processes on the marine environment.

Wikipedia: List of unexplained sounds.

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My dinosaur just threw up in its mouth a little

Long story short, Mozilla found that they had just Too Much Money from the firehose of cash that Google had been spraying at them as antitrust-enforcement insurance, so to launder that money, they fissured themselves into at least three interlocking shell corporations. But what to spend the money on? Well, they decided to cosplay as Y Combinator and re-invent themselves as some kind of off-brand "startup incubator".

Get ready for Clippyzilla in your browser.

"Open source, at least in a spiritual sense":

"In the last year and a half, we've been focused on making a pretty dramatic shift at Mozilla -- to make it about not just more than the browser but also more than our kind of activist personality and build out a kind of portfolio that sets us up -- and sets others up -- to go and take our values into the AI era, or to the next era of the internet, however you want to talk about it." [...]

Mozilla AI [has] a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them. [...] While Mozilla did do some press around launching its AI efforts, we haven't actually seen a lot of movement in that area from the organization since. Surman told me that the leadership team had been planning these efforts for almost a year, but as public interest in AI grew, he "pushed it out of the door." But then Draief pretty much moved it right back into stealth mode to focus on what to do next. [...]

"I think that's what you'll see from us, over the course of the next year, is how do you use the browser as the thing that represents you and how do you build AI into the browser that's basically on your side as you move through the internet?" He noted that an Edge-like chatbot in a sidebar could be one way of doing this, but he seems to be thinking more in terms of an assistant that helps you summarize articles and maybe notify you proactively. [...]

"The question that we're asking ourselves now is: What's the pop-up blocker for the AI era?"

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