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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

16 Feb

Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

vice.com/en/article/j5w…

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Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your camera.

vice.com/en/article/43k…

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That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

16 Feb

In late 2020, a coalition of predatory, money-losing, private-equity backed companies ran a $200m disinformation campaign that resulted in the passage of California's #Prop22, legalizing worker misclassification and mass-scale labor law violations.

pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/fin…

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Almost immediately, the passage of #Prop22 led to the loss of unionized jobs paying a living wage and offering basic worker protections, especially for people of color - only to have them replaced by "gig work" that lacked any of the above.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/man…

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One of the primary funders - and beneficiaries - of Prop 22 was Uber, which pioneered worker misclassification. Uber is now pushing the EU to "harmonize" its regulations in a game of transatlantic pingpong where each volley makes things worse.

cnbc.com/2021/02/15/ube…

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

15 Feb

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: ADT insider threat; Billionaires think VR stops guillotines; Privacy Without Monopoly; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/15/uly…

#Pluralistic

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This Wednesday, I'm giving a talk called "Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future" for the Purdue University CERIAS Program:

cerias.purdue.edu/news_and_event…

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1361365103795335169

ADT insider threat: If you build it they will spy.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1361365103795335169

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

15 Feb

@EFF

This week on my podcast, a spoken-word version of "Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability," a major new white-paper that Bennett Cyphers and I co-authored for @EFF.

craphound.com/news/2021/02/1…

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It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.

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I read the first half of it this week - about 40 minutes' worth - and I'll finish it next week. If you don't want to wait, you can dive in with the written version straightaway:

eff.org/wp/interoperab…

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

15 Feb

The pandemic has afforded all of us a refresher course on the five stages of grief, a theoretical and controversial framework for describing how people cope with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stag…

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A far slower-moving unfolding of these stages can be seen in the reactions of the super-wealthy to the breakdown in neoliberal orthodoxy, the tale that says that inequality results from meritocracy, and makes us all better off:

pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/dat…

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Denial came out in the "rationalist" view: the world is better off than ever - richer, less violent, healthier, and any discontent you feel with your plummeting fortunes and the contracting possibilities for your kids is just your tunnel vision. Lack of perspective.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

15 Feb

Self-control isn't merely a matter of eliminating your own weaknesses. Self control is primarily about compensating for those weaknesses. When you go on a diet, you don't just commit yourself to eating well - you also throw away the Oreos so you won't be tempted.

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This manoeuvre has a name: a Ulysses Pact, named for the passage in the Odyssey in which Ulysses pilots his ship through the sirens' sea, eschewing wax-stoppered ears so that he could hear their song, protecting himself by lashing himself to the mast.

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Ulysses knew he would face a moment of weakness in the future, so he used his strength in the moment to guard against his future self.

Tech was built on a Ulysses Pact: the irrevocable free software license: once a hacker applies the GPL, they can't unchoose it.

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