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15 Oct, 6 tweets, 6 min read
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PEOPLE mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/632010300…
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PEOPLE mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/632010300…
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PEOPLE mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/632010300…
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PEOPLE mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/632010300…
PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PEOPLE mckitterick.tumblr.com/post/632010300…

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
16 Oct
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Ferris wheel offices; UK to tax Amazon's victims; Amazon returns end up in landfills; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/luc…

#Pluralistic

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Tonight's Attack Surface Lecture: ​​SciFi Genre with Sarah Gailey and Chuck Wendig
eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctoro…

Full schedule: read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

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Ferris wheel offices: Well-ventilated, unbeatable views, sub-par toilets.



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Read 20 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
16 Oct
The @CBC hid GPSes and wireless cameras in Amazon returns to see what happened when Canadians sent their Amazon purchases back for refunds. Amazon claims it processes these returns responsibly, either restocking them or selling them to third-party jobbers.

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That matters: 30-40% of online purchases are returned (it's <10% for physical retail).

But those returns largely end up being destroyed. In just ONE facility, between one and five TRUCKLOADS of Amazon returns are shredded, mostly for landfill.

cbc.ca/news/canada/ma…

2/
Two thirds of the items that CBC bugged were destroyed.

The returns that DID make it back into peoples' hands travel hundreds, even thousands of kilometers before that happened.

3/
Read 4 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
16 Oct
Imposing penalties on cheating monopolists is hard and must be done with care, lest the companies turn new rules into a competitive advantage - rules they can afford to follow, but which their smaller customers cannot.

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For many years, Big Tech maintained the fiction that their digital sales were consummated somewhere in Irish-adjacent high seas or possibly in a basement in Lichtenstein and thus sales-tax exempt. This let Amazon sell books for 20% less than its non-cheating UK competitors.

2/
To fix this, the EU created a rule requiring digital retailers to collect two non-contradictory pieces of personally identifying info on each purchaser (including non-EU customers) to determine where they were for tax purposes.

3/
Read 14 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
15 Oct
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Dystopia as clickbait; Trail of Mars; Bride of Frankenstein and the Monster; The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto; Bricked Ferrari; The Dennis Ball Show; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/exp…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Tonight's Attack Surface Lecture: ​​Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History with Malkia Cyril and Meredith Whittaker app.gopassage.com/events/cory-do…

Full schedule: read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

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Dystopia as clickbait: Chris Brown on uncozy apocalypses.



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Read 18 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
15 Oct
A great hero of the copyright wars is @realdjbc, AKA Bob Cronin, creator of the amazing groundbreaking #Beastles mashups, a virtuosic combination of the Beastie Boys and The Beatles:

djbc.net/thebeastles/co…

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Cronin's new project is VERY different. He's hosting a Youtube channel starring a dad-joke-cracking tennis-ball puppet called The Dennis Ball Show.

2/
We recorded an episode last month that was nominally about my new book but swiftly became a discussion of the Haunted Mansion.



3/
Read 5 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
15 Oct
DRM is a system for prohibiting legal conduct that manufacturers and their shareholders don't like.

Laws like the US DMCA 1201 (and its equivalents all over the world) ban tampering with DRM, even if no copyright infringement takes place.

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That means that manufacturers can design products so that doing things that displease them requires bypassing DRM, and thus committing a felony. It amounts to "felony contempt of business model."

2/
The expansive language of DRM law makes it a crime to break DRM, to tell people how to break DRM, to point out defects in DRM (including defects that make products unsafe to use), or to traffick in DRM-breaking tools.

3/
Read 21 tweets

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