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Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

@propublica

If you're still scraping your jaw off the floor after @propublica's monster story on tax-dodging among the ultra-wealthy, then buckle up, because they're not anywhere close to reporting out that leaked data.

pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leo…

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Today's story from #TheSecretIRSFiles is about Tali Farhadian Weinstein, the ultrawealthy frontrunner candidate for the Democratic primary for DA of Manhattan.

propublica.org/article/leadin…

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Farhadian Weinstein and her husband - hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein - earn stupendous amounts of money ($107m in 2011!) and pay virtually no tax.

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Read 12 tweets

Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Suing all of ad-tech; Interop Sci-Fi; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/06/16/ins…

#Pluralistic

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https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1405189603343011840

Suing all of ad-tech: Will an EU country finally enforce the GDPR?

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1405189603343011840

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1405202245470212103

Interop Sci-Fi: Inside the Clock Tower, my interoperability sf for Consumer Reports.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1405202245470212103

Read 17 tweets

Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

The most anti-science-fiction political leader of all time was Margaret Thatcher. Her motto - "There is no alternative" - was a demand masquerading as an observation, and what she really meant was "Stop trying to imagine an alternative."

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This idea - that our world is inevitable, not the result of human choices, and it cannot be altered through human action - is well-put in the quote attributed to Frederic Jameson "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

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In that light, science fiction can be a radical literature indeed. Depicting a future where our bedrock assumptions of our interpersonal, political and commercial relations are different implicitly denies that our present is inevitable or immutable.

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Read 11 tweets

Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

The degree to which commercial services like locksmithing, window cleaning and general handyman work have been dominated by scammy referral businesses that use SEO to crowd out actual businesses is extraordinary.

I once spent an hour trying to find the name of an actual neighborhood locksmith I had driven past dozens of times, with every search redirecting to a referral scammer that would send out an unqualified asshole to drill out my lock and charge me $300 to replace it.

Today I went looking for a local business to apply UV film to our house windows. The top results - not ads, but "organic" results - on both Google and Duckduckgo are scammers whose addresses turn out to be PO boxes.

Read 5 tweets

Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (#GDPR) has been a mixed bag, but at its core is an exemplary and indisputable principle: you can't give informed consent for activities you don't understand.

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Since the dawn of online commercial surveillance, ad-tech sector maintained the obvious fiction that we agreed to allow it to nonconsensually suck in our private information, either by clicking "I Agree" on a garbage novella of unreadable legalese, or just by using a service.

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GDPR exposes this "consent theater" for a sham. It says, "Look, if you think users are cool with all this surveillance and data-processing, you've got to ASK THEM. Lay out each use of data you want to make, one at a time, and get consent for it."

onezero.medium.com/consent-theate…

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Read 20 tweets

Cory Doctorow AWAY UNTIL JUNE 19

@doctorow

16 Jun

“I need a Sino-logic 16, Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator and Thompson Eyephones.”

– Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/654102163…