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Resident of the world, traveling the road of life
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The world renowned Eurovision competition took place on May 11 in Malmo, Sweden, drawing attention from viewers all around Europe. Our statisticians were happy to pull the data again this year to see how the event altered traffic patterns. With so many countries involved, they were not surprised to see the drops, and the inevitable … Continue reading "Eurovision 2024 Traffic Insights"
The post Eurovision 2024 Traffic Insights appeared first on Pornhub Insights.
The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:
https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/
Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse
Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.
AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.
Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Never mind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?
A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:
The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs
This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins
Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):
https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/
But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:
a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and
b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and
c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.
AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.
Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags
These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.
Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.
Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
In Europe, Google's vast profits let it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.
Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.
Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.
This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm
When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.
AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"
The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":
https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260
That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; djhughman, CC BY 2.0; modified)
My Mother’s Letters Should Belong to Me — Not a Company That Works With Prisons https://truthout.org/articles/my-mothers-letters-should-belong-to-me-not-a-company-that-works-with-prisons/
Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead
#20yrsago Mayor dispatches cops to bust blogger-critic https://web.archive.org/web/20040605152433/https://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2004/05/a_french_blogge.html
#20yrsago England’s love affair with the utility bill https://web.archive.org/web/20040706124142/https://cede.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_cede_archive.html#108455091554008455
#20yrsago RIAA’s funny bookkeeping turns gains into losses https://web.archive.org/web/20040607052730/http://www.kensei-news.com/bizdev/publish/factoids_us/article_23374.shtml
#20yrsago Read this and understand the P2P wars https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=532882
#15yrsago Sarah Palin’s legal team doesn’t understand DNS https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crackhocom-sarah-palins-n_n_202417
#15yrsago Was 1971 the best year to be born a geek? https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/05/14/the-perfect-geek-age/
#15yrsago Charlie Stross on the future of gaming http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/05/login_2009_keynote_gaming_in_t.html
#15yrsago UK chiropractors try to silence critic with libel claim https://gormano.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-things.html
#15yrsgo The Yggyssey: Pinkwater takes on The Odyssey https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/15/the-yggyssey-pinkwater-takes-on-the-odyssey/
#15yrsago Sony Pictures CEO: “Nothing good from the Internet, period.” https://wwd.com/feature/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs-deyn-bad-internet-classic-martha-2136751-1496073/
#10yrsago FCC brings down the gavel on Net Neutrality https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/prepare-take-action-defend-net-neutrality-heres-how-fcc-makes-its-rules
#10yrsago IETF declares war on surveillance https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7258.txt
#10yrsago Rob Ford: a night of drunk driving, racism, drugs, beating friends and demeaning his wife https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/rob-ford-one-wild-night-in-march/article_7167c4f4-2a92-5444-b0d1-54d16a6a3f5b.html
#10yrsago Aussie politician calls rival a “c*nt” in Parliament, gets away with it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TsNL3uBw1g
#10yrsago Mozilla CAN change the industry: by adding DRM, they change it for the worse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/mozilla-and-drm
#10yrsago De-obfuscating Big Cable’s numbers: investment flat since 2000 https://www.techdirt.com/2014/05/14/cable-industrys-own-numbers-show-general-decline-investment-over-past-seven-years/
#10yrsago Nude closeups of people who are more than 100 years old https://web.archive.org/web/20140516055234/http://anastasiapottingerphotography.com/gallery/art/centenarians/
#10yrsago Cable lobbyists strong-arm Congresscritters into signing anti-Net Neutrality petition https://web.archive.org/web/20140527030122/http://www.freepress.net/blog/2014/05/12/tell-congress-dont-sign-cable-industry-letter-against-real-net-neutrality
#10yrsago London property bubble examined https://timharford.com/2014/05/when-a-man-is-tired-of-london-house-prices/
#5yrsago A year after Meltdown and Spectre, security researchers are still announcing new serious risks from low-level chip operations https://www.wired.com/story/intel-mds-attack-speculative-execution-buffer/
#5yrsago Jury awards $2b to California couple who say Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller gave them cancer https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/business/bayer-roundup-verdict/index.html
#5yrsago AT&T promised it would create 7,000 jobs if Trump went through with its $3B tax-cut, but they cut 23,000 jobs instead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/
#5yrsago DOJ accuses Verizon and AT&T employees of participating in SIM-swap identity theft crimes https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3n3am/att-and-verizon-employees-charged-sim-swapping-criminal-ring
#5yrsago Collecting user data is a competitive disadvantage https://a16z.com/the-empty-promise-of-data-moats/
#5yrsago Three years after the Umbrella Revolution, Hong Kong has its own Extinction Rebellion chapter https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3010050/hong-kongs-new-extinction-rebellion-chapter-looks
#5yrsago Lawyer involved in suits against Israel’s most notorious cyber-arms dealer targeted by its weapons, delivered through a terrifying Whatsapp vulnerability https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/technology/nso-group-whatsapp-spying.html
#5yrsago The New York Times on Carl Malamud and his tireless battle to make the law free for all to read https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/us/politics/georgia-official-code-copyright.html
#5yrsago Alex Stamos on the security problems of the platforms’ content moderation, and what to do about them https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/15/alex-stamos-on-the-security-problems-of-the-platforms-content-moderation-and-what-to-do-about-them/
#5yrsago Axon makes false statements to town that bought its police bodycams, threatens to tase their credit-rating if they cancel the contract https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/may/09/algorithms-axon-fontana/
#5yrsago After retaliation against Googler Uprising organizers, a company-wide memo warns employees they can be fired for accessing “need to know” data <a article="" en="" href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-execs-internal-email-on-data-leak-policy-rattles'>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-execs-internal-email-on-data-leak-policy-rattles</a>
#5yrsago Discovering whether your Iphone has been hacked is nearly impossible thanks to Apple’s walled garden <a href=" https:="" its-almost-impossible-to-tell-if-iphone-has-been-hacked"="" pajkkz="" www.vice.com="">https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajkkz/its-almost-impossible-to-tell-if-iphone-has-been-hacked
#5yrsago Foxconn promised it would do something with the empty buildings it bought in Wisconsin, but they’re still empty (still no factory, either) https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18565408/foxconn-wisconsin-innovation-centers-factories-empty-tax-subsidy
#1yrago Ireland's privacy regulator is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
#1yrago Google’s AI Hype Circle https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/
Authorship in an Age of Monopoly and Moral Panics (SF), May 17
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/
Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
https://media-ecology.org/convention
HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
That Word Chat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY
Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
Residents of 21 cities in Utah have access to some of the fastest, most competitively priced broadband in the country, at speeds up to 10gb/s and prices as low as $75/month. It's uncapped, and the connections are symmetrical: perfect for uploading and downloading. And it's all thanks to the government.
This broadband service is, of course, delivered via fiber optic cable. Of course it is. Fiber is vastly superior to all other forms of broadband delivery, including satellites, but also cable and DSL. Fiber caps out at 100tb/s, while cable caps out at 50gb/s – that is, fiber is 1,000 times faster:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g
Despite the obvious superiority of fiber, America has been very slow to adopt it. Our monopolistic carriers act as though pulling fiber to our homes is an impossible challenge. All those wires that currently go to your house, from power-lines to copper phone-lines, are relics of a mysterious, fallen civilization and its long-lost arts. Apparently we could no more get a new wire to your house than we could build the pyramids using only hand-tools.
In a sense, the people who say we can't pull wires anymore are right: these are relics of a lost civilization. Specifically, electrification and later, universal telephone service was accomplished through massive federal grants under the New Deal – grants that were typically made to either local governments or non-profit co-operatives who got everyone in town connected to these essential modern utilities.
Today – thanks to decades of neoliberalism and its dogmatic insistence that governments can't do anything and shouldn't try, lest they break the fragile equilibrium of the market – we have lost much of the public capacity that our grandparents took for granted. But in the isolated pockets where this capacity lives on, amazing things happen.
Since 2015, residents of Jackson County, KY – one of the poorest counties in America – have enjoyed some of the country's fastest, cheapest, most reliable broadband. The desperately poor Appalachian county is home to a rural telephone co-op, which grew out of its rural electrification co-op, and it used a combination of federal grants and local capacity to bring fiber to every home in the county, traversing dangerous mountain passes with a mule named "Ole Bub" to reach the most remote homes. The result was an immediately economic uplift for the community, and in the longer term, the county had reliable and effective broadband during the covid lockdowns:
Contrast this with places where the private sector has the only say over who gets broadband, at what speed, and at what price. America is full of broadband deserts – deserts that strand our poorest people. Even in the hearts of our largest densest cities, whole neighborhoods can't get any broadband. You won't be surprised to learn that these are the neighborhoods that were historically redlined, and that the people who live in them are Black and brown, and also live with some of the highest levels of pollution and its attendant sicknesses:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide
These places are not set up for success under the best of circumstances, and during the lockdowns, they suffered terribly. You think your kid found it hard to go to Zoom school? Imagine what life was like for kids who attended remote learning while sitting on the baking tarmac in a Taco Bell parking lot, using its free wifi:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/02/elem-s02.html
ISPs loathe competition. They divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "new world" and do not trouble one another by trying to sell to customers outside of "their" turf. When Frontier – one of the worst of America's terrible ISPs – went bankrupt, we got to see their books, and we learned two important facts:
Frontier knew that it could make a billion dollars in profit over a decade by investing in fiber build-out, but it chose not to, because stock analysts will downrank any carrier that made capital investments that took more than five years to mature. Because Frontier's execs were paid primarily in stock, they chose to strand their customers with aging copper connections and to leave a billion dollars sitting on the table, so that their personal net worth didn't suffer a temporary downturn:
ISPs maintain the weirdest position: that a) only the private sector can deliver broadband effectively, but b) to do so, they'll need massive, unsupervised, no-strings-attached government handouts. For years, America went along with this improbable scheme, which is why Trump's FCC chairman Ajit Pai gave the carriers $45 billion in public funds to string slow, 19th-century-style copper lines across rural America:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/
Now, this is obviously untrue, and people keep figuring out that publicly provisioned broadband is the only way for America to get the same standard of broadband connectivity that our cousins in other high-income nations enjoy. In order to thwart the public's will, the cable and telco lobbyists joined ALEC, the far-right, corporatist lobbying shop, and drafted "model legislation" banning cities and counties from providing broadband, even in places the carriers chose not to serve:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/
Red states across America adopted these rules, and legislators sold this to their base by saying that this was just "keeping the government out of their internet" (even as every carrier relied on an exclusive, government-granted territorial charter, often with massive government subsidies).
ALEC didn't target red states exclusively because they had pliable, bribable conservative lawmakers. Red states trend rural, and rural places are the most likely sites for public fiber. Partly, that's because low-density areas are harder to make a business case for, but also because these are also the places that got electricity and telephone through New Deal co-ops, which are often still in place.
Just about the only places in America where people like their internet service are the 450+ small towns where the local government provides fiber. These places vote solidly Republican, and it was their beloved conservative lawmakers whom ALEC targeted to enact laws banning their equally beloved fiber – keep voting for Christmas, turkeys, and see where it gets you:
https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map
But spare a little sympathy for the conservative movement here. The fact that reality has a pronounced leftist bias must be really frustrating for the ideological project of insisting that anything the market can't provide is literally impossible.
Which brings me back to Utah, a red state with a Republican governor and legislature, and a national leader in passing unconstitutional, unhinged, unworkable legislation as part of an elaborate culture war kabuki:
For more than two decades, a coalition of 21 cities in Utah have been building out municipal fiber. The consortium calls itself UTOPIA: "Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency":
https://www.utopiafiber.com/faqs/
UTOPIA pursues a hybrid model: they run "open access" fiber and then let anyone offer service over it. This can deliver the best of both worlds: publicly provisioned, blazing-fast fiber to your home, but with service provided by your choice of competing carriers. That means that if Moms for Liberty captures you local government, you're not captive to their ideas about what sites your ISP should block.
As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, Utahns in UTOPIA regions have their choice of 18 carriers, and competition has driven down prices and increased speeds. Want uncapped 1gb fiber? That's $75/month. Want 10gb fiber? That's $150:
UTOPIA's path to glory wasn't an easy one. The dismal telco monopolists Qwest and Lumen sued to put them out of business, delaying the rollout by years:
https://www.deseret.com/2005/7/22/19903471/utopia-responds-to-qwest-lawsuit/
UTOPIA has been profitable and self-sustaining for over 15 years and shows no sign of slowing. But 17 states still ban any attempt at this.
Keeping up such an obviously bad policy requires a steady stream of distractions and lies. The "government broadband doesn't work" lie has worn thin, so we've gotten a string of new lies about wireless service, insisting that fiber is obviated by point-to-point microwave relays, or 5g, or satellite service.
There's plenty of places where these services make sense. You're not going to be able to use fiber in a moving car, so yeah, you're going to want 5g (and those 5g towers are going to need to be connected to each other with fiber). Microwave relay service can fill the gap until fiber can be brought in, and it's great for temporary sites (especially in places where it doesn't rain, because rain, clouds, leaves and other obstructions are deadly for microwave relays). Satellite can make sense for an RV or a boat or remote scientific station.
But wireless services are orders of magnitude slower than fiber. With satellite service, you share your bandwidth with an entire region or even a state. If there's only a couple of users in your satellite's footprint, you might get great service, but when your carrier adds a thousand more customers, your connection is sliced into a thousand pieces.
That's also true for everyone sharing your fiber trunk, but the difference is that your fiber trunk supports speeds that are tens of thousands of times faster than the maximum speeds we can put through freespace electromagnetic spectrum. If we need more fiber capacity, we can just fish a new strand of fiber through the conduit. And while you can increase the capacity of wireless by increasing your power and bandwidth, at a certain point you start pump so much EM into the air that birds start falling out of the sky.
Every wireless device in a region shares the same electromagnetic spectrum, and we are only issued one such spectrum per universe. Each strand of fiber, by contrast, has its own little pocket universe, containing a subset of that spectrum.
Despite all its disadvantages, satellite broadband has one distinct advantage, at least from an investor's perspective: it can be monopolized. Just as we only have one electromagnetic spectrum, we also only have one sky, and the satellite density needed to sustain a colorably fast broadband speed pushes the limit of that shared sky:
https://spacenews.com/starlink-vs-the-astronomers/
Private investors love monopoly telecoms providers, because, like pre-bankruptcy Frontier, they are too big to care. Back in 2021, Altice – the fourth-largest cable operator in America – announced that it was slashing its broadband speeds, to be "in line with other ISPs":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/immortan-altice/#broadband-is-a-human-right
In other words: "We've figured out that our competitors are so much worse than we are that we are deliberately degrading our service because we know you will still pay us the same for less."
This is why corporate shills and pro-monopolists prefer satellite to municipal fiber. Sure, it's orders of magnitude slower than fiber. Sure, it costs subscribers far more. Sure, it's less reliable. But boy oh boy is it profitable.
The thing is, reality has a pronounced leftist bias. No amount of market magic will conjure up new electromagnetic spectra that will allow satellite to attain parity with fiber. Physics hates Starlink.
Yeah, I'm talking about Starlink. Of course I am. Elon Musk basically claims that his business genius can triumph over physics itself.
That's not the only vast, impersonal, implacable force that Musk claims he can best with his incredible reality-distortion field. Musk also claims that he can somehow add so many cars to the road that he will end traffic – in other words, he will best geometry too:
Geometry hates Tesla, and physics hates Starlink. Reality has a leftist bias. The future is fiber, and public transit. These are both vastly preferable, more efficient, safer, more reliable and more plausible than satellite and private vehicles. Their only disadvantage is that they fail to give an easily gulled, thin-skinned compulsive liar more power over billions of people. That's a disadvantage I can live with.
(Image: 4028mdk09, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)
The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly https://www.404media.co/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-john-deeres-tractor-repair-monopoly/
Porter's five forces analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter's_five_forces_analysis (h/t Bernardo Malfitano)
#15yrsago How kids use the net now, from danah boyd https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/16/answers_to_ques.html
#15yrsago Danger Mouse’s EMI-killed CD will be released as a blank CD-R, just add download https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8053471.stm
#15yrsago Chicago Alderman vandalizes public art depicting CCTVs https://web.archive.org/web/20090520083519/http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34234
#10yrsago Cloud computers are computers you can only use with someone else’s permission https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/16/cloud-computers-are-computers-you-can-only-use-with-someone-elses-permission/
#10yrsago Photo of NSA technicians sabotaging Cisco router prior to export https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/
#5yrsago Watch: Tim Wu debates trustbusting with Tyler Cowen, who just wrote “a love letter” to Big Business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Jp-GJ9LM0
#5yrsago A report from the Christchurch Call, where the future of “anti-extremist” moderation was debated at the highest levels https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/05/christchurch-call-good-not-so-good-and-ugly
#5yrsago Lent: Jo Walton’s new novel is Dante’s Groundhog Day https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html
#5yrsago EPA Inspector General Report finds massive waste from Trump’s Pruitt flying business class, staying in swanky hotels https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/documents/_epaoig_20190516-19-p-0155.pdf
#5yrsago Under Trump, immigrants who serve in the armed forces are finding it harder to attain citizenship than those who do not serve https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article230269884.html
#5yrsago California set to legalize eating roadkill https://www.kqed.org/science/1941435/eating-roadkill-is-illegal-in-california-but-maybe-not-for-long
#5yrsago Florida Governor says the FBI told him how the Russians hacked Florida voting machines, but swore him to secrecy https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/05/14/which-florida-counties-had-election-hacks-russians-fbi-and-now-gov-ron-desantis-all-know-but-we-dont/
#5yrsago Grifty “information security” companies promised they could decrypt ransomware-locked computers, but they were just quietly paying the ransoms https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/16/grifty-information-security-companies-promised-they-could-decrypt-ransomware-locked-computers-but-they-were-just-quietly-paying-the-ransoms/
#5yrsago Luna: Moon Rising, in which Ian McDonald brings the trilogy to an astounding, intricate, exciting and satisfying climax https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/16/luna-moon-rising-in-which-ian-mcdonald-brings-the-trilogy-to-an-astounding-intricate-exciting-and-satisfying-climax/
#1yrsago Rent control works https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset
Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
https://media-ecology.org/convention
HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
That Word Chat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miwEy_mACEY
Come sfuggire al “Merdocene” e costruire un Internet migliore (Torino Biennale Tecnologia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NC2EZCYBg
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: Precaratize Bosses https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/28/precaratize-bosses/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
Falls das mal jemand von euch gebrauchen kann.
A DIY glass bottle cutterpic.twitter.com/0DeLjDgbhD
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 16, 2024
Es vergeht doch kaum ein Tag, an dem man nicht über irgendwas stolpert, was vorher komplett an einem vorbei gegangen ist. Heute die Vox Discotape Unit aus dem Jahr 1967, ein sehr frühe DJ-Konsole, die auch heute noch ganz geil aussieht. Mehr Informationen dazu hier und hier. Würde ich ja gerne mal antesten wollen.
Schöne Zusammenfassung aus vielen Animes, die uns jede Menge Vintage-Technologien zeigt, mit denen viele von uns aufgewachsen sein dürften. Da kann es einem schon mal ein wenig nostalgisch werden.
Anime List:
[00:00] Megazone 23 III 1989
[00:05] Megazone 23 II 1986
[00:16] Megazone 23 III 1989
[00:22] Megazone 23 II 1986
[00:23] Megazone 23 III 1989
[00:24] Martian Successor Nadesico 1996
[00:26] City Hunter 1987
[00:28] Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 1998
[00:30] Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac 1986
[00:32] Dirty Pair 1985
[00:36] Blue Seed 1994
[00:39] Mobile Police Patlabor TV 1989
[00:42] The Vision of Escaflowne 1996
[00:46] Nineteen 19 1990
[00:48] Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day 1988
[00:50] Angel Cop 1989
[00:55] Sailor Moon S 1994
[00:57] Sailor Moon 1992
[01:00] Cowboy Bebop 1998
[01:04] Yawara! 1989
[01:07] Burn Up W 1996
[01:09] Here is Greenwood 1991
[01:11] Anyway, It Doesn’t Matter 1987
[01:13] Old Man Z 1991
[01:18] Buttobi!! CPU 1997
[01:19] Alice in Cyberland 1996
[01:22] My Dear Marie 1996
[01:26] Kimagure Orange Road 1987
[01:36] Psycho Diver: Soul Siren 1997
[01:38] Riding Bean 1989
[01:41] Anyway, It Doesn’t Matter 1987
[01:46] Video Girl Ai 1992
[01:49] Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko 1996
[01:57] AD Police Files 1990
[01:59] Twilight Q 1987
[02:02] Oh My Goddess! 1993
[02:10] Neon Genesis Evangelion 1995
[02:15] Golden Boy 1995
[02:17] Cleopatra D.C. 1989
[02:19] Harmagedon 1983
[02:20] LoGH Gaiden: Spiral Labyrinth 1999
[02:22] Maison Ikkoku 1986
[02:26] Wounded Man 1986
[02:27] Gall Force: Eternal Story 1986
[02:29] Sunny Ryoko 1987
[02:31] Kaze o Nuke! 1988
[02:34] Sunny Ryoko 1987
[02:36] Aim for the Ace!: Another Match 1988
[02:38] Urusei Yatsura Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer 1984
[02:40] Urusei Yatsura Movie 4: Lum The Forever 1986
[02:47] Urusei Yatsura Movie 5: The Final Chapter 1988
[02:50] Revolutionary Girl Utena 1997
[02:51] Violence Jack: Evil Town 1988
[02:52] You’re Under Arrest 1996
[02:55] All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku 1992
[02:59] Bounty Hunter: The Hard 1996
[03:00] Burning Blood 1990
[03:03] City Hunter 2 1988
[03:05] City Hunter 3 1989
[03:07] DNA² 1995
[03:10] Crimson Wolf 1993
[03:11] Dragon Ball: Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle 1987
[03:12] If I See You in My Dreams 1998
[03:13] JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure 1993
[03:15] His and Her Circumstances 1998
[03:19] Key the Metal Idol 1994
[03:22] Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo 2: Satsuriku no Deep Blue 1999
[03:23] Child’s Toy 1996
[03:27] Magical Angel Creamy Mami 1983
[03:30] Magical Stage Fancy Lala 1998
[03:32] Mahou no Tenshi Creamy Mami: Curtain Call 1986
[03:35] Ace wo Nerae! Final Stage 1989
[03:44] Mighty Space Miners 1994
[03:46] Miyuki 1983
[03:55] Ranma ½ 1989
[03:56] Sailor Moon Sailor Stars 1996
[04:01] Neo Ranga 1998
[04:03] Crest of the Stars 1999
[04:04] Iczelion 1995
[04:05] Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie 1994
[04:09] Tobira wo Akete 1986
[04:11] Touch 1985
[04:16] Weather Report Girl 1995
[04:18] Only Yesterday 1991
[04:20] Patlabor 2 the Movie 1993
[04:27] Patlabor the Movie 3: WXIII 2002
[04:44] Patlabor the Movie 1989
[05:04] Patlabor 2 the Movie 1993
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