We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/18/ragbag/#reading-pornhub-for-the-articles
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Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages. From now on, only Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and the faceless mere centimillionaires running companies like Match.com will be able to directly harvest Americans' most private, sensitive kompromat.
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The People's Liberation Army will have to build their dossiers on Americans' lives the old fashioned way: by paying unregulated data-brokers who will sell any fact about you to anyone and who know everything about everyone.
After all, the reason the American market matters so much to Tiktok is that America is the only rich, populous country in the world without a federal privacy law. That's why an American is the most valuable user an ad-tech company can acquire.
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Keep your wealthy Norwegians: sure, they're saturated in oil money and thus fat prizes for ad-targeting, but they're also protected by the GDPR.
If you're an American (or anyone else, for that matter) who wants to use Tiktok without being spied on, Privacysafe has you covered: their Sticktock tool is a private, alternative, web-based front-end for Tiktok, with optional Tor VPN tunnelling:
https://sticktock.com/
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As Privacysafe's Sean O'Brien explains, Sticktock is an free/open utility that's dead easy to use. Just change the URL of any Tiktok video from tiktok.com/whatever to sticktock.com/whatever, and you're have a private viewing experience that easily penetrates the Great Firewall of America:
https://bitsontape.com/p/sticktock-share-tiktok-videos
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O'Brien - founder of the Yale Privacy Lab - writes that Privacysafe built this because they wanted to help Americans continue to access the great volume of speech on Tiktok, and because they knew that Americans would be using ad-supported, spyware-riddled VPNs to evade the Great Firewall.
Sticktock is a great hack, but it only defends your privacy while you're using Tiktok. For other social media, you'll need to try something else.
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For example, Mark Zuckerberg is the last person you want to entrust with your data, and always has been. Never forget that as soon as Zuckerberg's Harvard-based nonconsensual fuckability-rating service TheFacebook was up and running, he started offering copies of all his users' data as a flex to his buds:
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Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Just ask
I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
What? How'd you manage that one?
People just submitted it.
I don't know why.
They "trust me"
Dumb fucks
Don't be a dumb fuck! Lots of people can't manage to leave Meta platforms because they love the people there more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, and Zuck knows it, which is why he keeps turning the screws on his users.
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That doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Over the years, various law enforcement and regulatory agencies have forced Meta to add privacy controls to its services, and though the company has implemented these as a baroque maze of twisty little malicious compliance passages, all alike, it is possible to lock down your data if you try hard enough.
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My EFF colleague Lena Cohen has a walkthrough of Meta's privacy settings, AKA the world's worst dungeon crawler, which will see you through safely:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/mad-meta-dont-let-them-collect-and-monetize-your-personal-data
If this kind of thing interests you, you can spend a whole weekend learning about it, chilling and partying with some of the most fun-loving, fascinating weirdos in hackerdom this summer.
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https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope_16
I keynoted HOPE last year and it was every bit as much fun as I remembered. Sure, DEF CON is amazing, but you can't really call a 40,000-person gathering in the Las Vegas Convention Center "intimate."
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HOPE is a homebrew, homely, cheap, cheerful and delightfully anarchic hacker con with deep history and great people.
Speaking of weird ancient history, my pal Ada Palmer - sf writer, librettist, singer, and Renaissance historian - blew my mind this week with her article on the tower-cities of medieval proto-Italy during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars (1125-1392):
https://www.exurbe.com/the-lost-towers-of-the-guelph-ghibelline-wars/
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Once upon a time, Italian city-states were forested with tall towers, like miniature Manhattans. Rich families built these stone towers as a show of wealth and a source of power, since the stone towers were taller than nearby homes and far less flammable, so the plutes of the day could drop flaming garbage on their neighbors, burn them out, and emerge triumphant.
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This ended with cities like Florence banning towers above a certain height, forcing their warring oligarchs to decapitate their fortresses down to compliance levels.
The images need to be seen to be believed. Ada's got a new book about this, Inventing the Renaissance, "which shows how the supposed difference between a bad 'Dark Ages' and a Renaissance 'golden age' is 100% propaganda, but fascinating propaganda with a deep history":
https://www.adapalmer.com/publication/inventing-the-renaissance/
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Palmer is one of the most fascinating writers, thinkers, performers, and speakers I know. This is the book for every history nerd in your life, and also a magic artifact with the power to transform normies into history nerds.
Speaking of scholars finding nontraditional ways to do technical communication to the general public.
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This week, 404 Media's Emmanueal Maiberg reported on Zara Dar, an OnlyFans model who's racked up millions of Pornhub views for videos that consist of detailed, accessible, fully clothed explanations of machine learning:
https://www.404media.co/why-this-onlyfans-model-posts-machine-learning-explainers-to-pornhub/
Dar's videos cover a variety of poorly understood, highly salient mathematical subjects, like this introduction to probability theory:
https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=65cfae54411b9
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Dar's got a pretty straightforward reason for posting her explainers to Pornhub - it pays about 300% more than Youtube does for the same amount of viewership ($1,000 per million views vs. Youtube's $340 per million). But it comes at a cost. Other platforms like Linkedin have banned her for discussing the economics of posting videos to Pornhub, without explanation or appeal.
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The reason Dar's in the news now is that the Supremes didn't merely ban Tiktok this week, they also heard arguments about the red state "age verification" laws, in which Alito asked if looking at Pornhub was analogous to reading Playboy, which was famous for interleaving softcore pornography with hefty, serious reporting and editorials. Can you really look at Pornhub "just for the articles?" Seems like the answer is a resounding yes.
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These "age verification" laws are jaw-droppingly reckless. Red state lawmakers - and ALEC, the dark money org that wrote the model legislation they're pushing - envision a system where each person who looks at porn is affirmatively identified as a named adult, and where that identity information is indefinitely retained.
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The most common way of gating services to adults is to demand a credit-card, which means that these weirdos want to create highly leakable databases of every one of their constituents' sexual kinks, which can be sorted by net worth by would-be blackmailers. Remember, any data you collect will probably leak, and any data you retain will almost certainly leak. Good times ahead.
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Of course, it wasn't all gruesome policy malpratice this week. In the final days of the Biden admin, antitrust enforcers from multiple agencies launched a flurry of investigations, cases, judgments, fines and sanctions against companies that prey on the American public. The FTC went after John Deere for its repair monopoly:
https://www.404media.co/ftc-sues-john-deere-over-its-repair-monopoly/
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@pluralistic Readers who like what we're doing with the https://sticktock.com #TikTok frontend should follow these accounts, as we have been shipping free web apps for the public weekly
@privacysafe
@ivycyber
@bitsontape
@nursecherise
Next up is a client-side password and passphrase generator.
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@pluralistic
^ Several of the interesting items mentioned in this thread come from people on Mastodon:
@adapalmer
@matthew_d_green
@profdiggity
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text/gemini
