Our Boing Boing partner Cory Doctorow—activist and author of Chokepoint Capitalism, Attack Surface, and, of course, Little Brother, among other books—is interviewed in The New Yorker! The freewheeling and informative conversation with Christopher Byrd spans the "mediocre monopolists" of Big Tech, the salience of cyberpunk, the danger of pseudonymity, and his experience of Fingerspitzengefühl for computers. — Read the rest
Evan Greer is trans-femme indie punk songwriter as well as an activist and the Deputy Director for the digital rights group Fight For The Future. Also, her new album — out this Friday 4/9, and delightfully titled Spotify is Surveillance — totally fucking rips. — Read the rest
Cory Doctorow's new short book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, was just published in its entirety on OneZero. Below is Cory's Twitter thread that summarizes his argument that the problem with surveillance capitalism isn't that it big tech has AI-enhanced power to brainwash people, the problem is that big tech uses its monopoly power in ways that lead to totalitarian control over our lives. — Read the rest
Princeton computer science researchers Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan (previously) have just published a new paper, Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis, which documents the state of online tracking beyond mere cookies — sneaky and often illegal techniques used to "fingerprint" your browsers and devices as you move from site to site, tracking you even when you explicitly demand not to be track and take countermeasures to prevent this.
Wanda Sykes is knocking on the door of syndication with a new series that features videos taken from Ring doorbells.
The comedian is to host Ring Nation, a new twist on the popular clip show genre, from MGM Television, Live PD producer Big Fish Entertainment and Ring.
Once again, the FBI is putting pressure on Apple to help them break into the phone of a mass shooter. And once again, Apple has been largely resistant to the effort. Which is good, because a government having control over a private company that gives them secret backdoor access into people's personal technology devices is an authoritarian wet dream waiting to happen. — Read the rest
This is my last day at my desk until Labor Day: tomorrow, we're driving to Burning Man to get our annual dirtrave fix! If you're heading to the playa, here's three places and times you can find me:
Every now and again, a company will come up with a product "innovation" that seems to deprive people of their free will, driving great masses of internet users to look for Pokemon, or tend virtual farms, or buy now with one-click, or flock to Upworthy-style "You won't believe what happened next" stories, or be stampeded into buying something because there are "only two left" and "14 people have bought this item in the past 24 hours."
AT&T has come a long way from the supernormative, feel-good messages of its You Will ads; now CEO Randall Stephenson predicts a future where his company will dynamically alter your TV ads based on what it thinks you will buy; and chase you with that ad from your TV to your computer to your phone, and then spy on your location to see whether you go to a retailer to buy the thing you've had advertised to you; and use that intelligence to command high advertising rates from advertisers.
Writing in Wired, Zeynep Tufekci (previously) echoes something I've been saying for years: that the use of Digital Rights Management technologies, along with other systems of control like Terms of Service, are effectively ending the right of individuals to own private property (in the sense of exercising "sole and despotic dominion" over something), and instead relegating us to mere tenancy, constrained to use the things we buy in ways that are beneficial to the manufacturer's shareholders, even when that is at the cost of our own best interests.
Northeastern grocery chain Stop & Shop has been goosing its profits at its workers' expense, increasing their healthcare costs, reducing company pension contributions, and reducing holiday and Sunday overtime pay; the United Food & Commercial Workers, who organize the Stop & Shop employees called for a strike nearly two weeks ago, and since then, 31,000 workers from 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have been off the job.
In 2017, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan turned the antitrust world on its ear with her Yale Law Review paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan's antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago's economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers' rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.
Amazon is building out its ad-targeting program to allow for ad-buys like "people near a physiotherapist's office who've bought a knee-brace," and reports that the ads are incredibly successful.
A new report from Betterley Risk Consultants, shared with The Intercept, reveals that many of the world's largest insureres will no longer conside whole industries for "employment practices liability insurance" (EPLI), which covers liability from "sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and other employee claims."
(Neither Boing Boing nor I have received any compensation for this post: Libro.fm asked me to post this and I did so because I want to see them succeed -Cory)
Libro.fm (previously) is an independent audiobook store that sells all the same audiobooks you can get on other platforms like Audible, Google Play, Apple, Downpour, etc, but unlike the industry leaders at Audible and Apple, they are DRM-free, and unlike all of their competition, they work with independent booksellers.
The fight against surveillance capitalism and mass state surveillance has reached a tipping point, the peak-indifference moment, when new privacy advocates are self-radicalizing as they witness firsthand the undeniable risks of overcollection, over-retention, and secret manipulation of personal data.
Five years ago, I coined the term "peak indifference" to describe a moment when a public health problem — like climate change, tobacco use, surveillance capitalism, or monopolism — reaches a tipping point: the moment when the consequences of actions taken a long time ago and very far away start to be felt so widely that the number of people who believe there is a problem starts to grow of its own accord. — Read the rest
