jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
DNA Lounge: Wherein someone tries to sell our Prince scraps
There's someone on eBay trying to sell unused tickets to our 2013 Prince shows for $700 each. (I don't begrudge them the effort, but I'm still not linking to it -- and I realize that "asking for" is not the same as "receiving".) But what they don't know is, I have around 2,000 of those tickets left, and any time someone signs up for our Patreon and I mail them their membership card, I usually toss into the envelope a bunch of stickers and a Prince ticket or two.

So, you know, if someone were tempted to give this guy $700, maybe instead they could give DNA Lounge $20 or $30 a month. Then in addition to maybe getting a little souvenir while supplies last, they'd also be helping keep this place alive so that memorable shows like that can keep happening.

I've got uncut sheets of these things too, so if that's your jam, make me an offer...

The reason I have so many extras is because of how big printers work. Or worked, at the time, anyway. We needed like 3,200 tickets, but these things were stamped in large galleys, so if you ordered 3,200 they ended up printing 5,000 and threw the rest away. And for a show like this, we did not want those discards falling into the wrong hands and ending up on the scalper market, so we had them send us the entire batch from the print run.

A couple of years ago I asked the World's Biggest Prince Fan whether this stuff was worth anything, and their answer was (my loose interpretation) "Yes definitely, but only if you put a bunch of effort in to trying to act like an auctioneer, and are cagey about how much you have" and that sounded like a bunch of work and also kind of dirty, so I never bothered. (It would require more finesse and salesmanship than just dropping them on our merch page, in other words.)

But hey, literally nobody but me currently possesses one of these uncut sheets, sooooo... Scarcity!

[ Butterfly meme ] "Is this... Captialism?"

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Richard Stallman
Deform UK

The Deform UK party's latest deformation plan would throw hundreds of thousands of children into destitution, and many disabled people too.

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Richard Stallman
Carlitos Ricardo Parias

The case of journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias: *A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.*

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Richard Stallman
Sunrise Movement

Government secret agents have been persistently investigating the Sunrise Movement. They keep getting more and more evidence that it is committed to nonviolence (including nonviolent civil disobedience), but continue searching desperately for some violence in it somewhere.

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Richard Stallman
Trump's attack againts Iran

The bully's attack against Iran was a moral error and a grand-strategic mistake. In addition, it was a strategic military mistake which has caused the US to lose much of its power in the world.

Is that a bad thing? No, and yes. The bully has been using US power for evil purposes; now he has less capacity to do that. However, the countries that have gained power though that mistake have been even more vicious, for decades.

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Richard Stallman
Trump's tax cuts

The wrecker's tax big cuts were not just for billionaires. They also gave a handout to multimillionaires. As usual, at the expense of everyone else in the US.

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Richard Stallman
Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi

Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi, a married couple of professors who were permanent residents in the US, are in deportation prison because Hashemi's mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, is a supporter of the regime and participated in the occupation of the US embassy.

It is not impossible that they are somehow working with Ebtekar on a nefarious plot, but the persecutor's henchmen have not made such charges -- they have simply cancelled the family's residence permits arbitrarily and (according to Tahmasebi) aim to keep them in deportation prison for life.

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Richard Stallman
Mississippi ICE facility gas leaks

Prisoners in an overcrowded deportation prison (privately run by CoreCivic) in Mississippi (far south in the US) were forced sometimes to spend hours outdoors in bright sun, and at other times, to swelter in crowded cells, because of a power outage.

The prison kommandant held the prisoners incommunicado during that period.

Privatized prisons are a motor for inaccountability, and therefore for cruelty and gratuitious suffering; this makes them inherently unjust. We should abolish them all.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Panopticars
Parked Waymos actively record 360-degree video and audio even without passengers aboard. Waymo discloses no fixed data retention schedule, storing footage for a vague "reasonable" timeframe.

Armed with 29 external cameras, LiDAR, radar, and microphones, each robotaxi stays powered up between rides so it can respond to emergencies and reposition when needed. What Waymo won't say: how long that footage is stored, whether a residential street gets treated differently than a public plaza, and what "reasonably appropriate amount of time" actually means in practice. That phrase is doing enormous work for a very small amount of transparency. [...]

Where Ring doorbells marked the first wave of consumer-grade street surveillance, autonomous fleets are the next layer -- and they connect. Waymo holds a research agreement with Nexar, the dash-cam network embedded in hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft vehicles. Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, previously explored accessing that same Nexar footage for its law-enforcement clients. That deal collapsed. The architecture still exists. Think of it less like a coordinated surveillance state and more like a surveillance potluck -- everyone brought a dish, nobody planned the menu, and you weren't invited.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Cop surveillance drones are going great
Handshake, not a drug deal: SFPD drone case falls apart:

DA officials did not say whether they agreed with Helvestine's argument that the footage showed only a handshake. But the DA's office subsequently motioned to dismiss the case ahead of its preliminary hearing, records show. That motion was granted on May 8 last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Michelle Tong. [...]

Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox, the head of the office's Integrity Unit, argued police officers regularly mischaracterize normal interactions as drug transactions, and that drones amplify those risks. [...]

"SFPD interprets otherwise innocent behavior as criminal because to a hammer, everything is a nail," said Cox. "Drones and other surveillance technologies simply give police more power -- and greater reach -- to do that." [...]

The police hub that deploys San Francisco's police drones is also backed by billionaires.

The Real Time Investigations Center, which helps the police department find suspects on the streets and aids arrests using drones and Flock Safety automatic license plate reading cameras, has bulked up through benefactors including Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel, and Michael Moritz's family foundation Crankstart.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Facebook's Pervert Glasses functioning as designed
Meta glasses are a workplace menace:

The two customers were, in fact, recording Hinkle, and the entire exchange was turned into content for social media. Another Target manager came across the video while scrolling online, without even looking for it. [...]

There's little recourse for those who have been unknowingly recorded. In one of the videos posted to social media that Hinkle is featured in, the Meta glasses wearer is seen chumming it up and dancing with a police officer who arrived at the Target store.

"You boys stay out of trouble," the cop says as he fist bumps the person recording. [...]

"Are your glasses blinking?" she asks.

He responds that he's recording her.

"Oh, could you not?" she says.

"That's what they're there for," he says, defiantly. "I'm here to watch you, and you're here to perform for me." The audience member refuses to stop filming even after being asked to. Rather than argue back and forth, Telesford cuts her set short and walks offstage. [...]

"We know that when people are being watched, they feel less free. They chill their behavior, they feel pressure to conform. They worry about even minor deviations from norms being used against them," he says. "It's just a sort of suffocating atmosphere to be a part of."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Netscape Navigator 3.0 was released 30 years ago today
As I mentioned in my post on the 2.0 anniversary, what you knew of as "3.0" had internally been slated to be the "2.1" bugfix release, to be soon followed by a 3.0 release based on the Collabra rewrite, but that new team face-planted so badly that we had to pretend this bugfix release was a feature release instead, and the Collabra shitshow eventually became the disastrous "4.0" release (with intervening "3.01" and "3.02" bugfix releases nearly a year after the 3.0 release!)

Anyway, go read that post instead for the juicy gossip. No need to re-hash it all here.

We can see from the release notes that 3.0 contained such exciting new features as background colors in table cells, the <FONT FACE> attribute, and <SCRIPT SRC>. Plus better uuencode support! For porn!

Oh yeah, and I think 3.0 was the first release with "Gold", the WYSIWYG HTML editor, but Gold only worked on Windows and Mac. This was the first violation of what had been, until then, two of our guiding principles, which I was unable to stop:

  • Simultaneous feature parity on all platforms;
  • Never allow C++ into the cross-platform code base.

You get one guess why there was no Unix version. If you listen carefully, you can hear Ghosts of JWZs Past howling down the cubicle farm hallways, "I fucking told you so, did I not fucking tell you??" But Lloyd thought the way you write cross-platform code was to write for Windows and then port it once you were finished. "It'll be fine," he said. (Narrator: It was not fine.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Amazon's Book Woodchipper Facility has a cartoonishly evil logo because of course it does
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. [...]

We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama." The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It's possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
The Orwellian Company Behind ICE's New Electric Shock Gloves
We can only hope that these lead to an epidemic of ICE goons accidentally burning their own dicks off.

"With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars." That makes it hard for victims to sue.

"In today's society, you know, everybody's filming everything, everybody has a cell phone," Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But "the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars."

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They've been described by groups like Amnesty International as "readily misused for torture." And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them. [...]

But local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves -- in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it. It's been successful "from the patrolmen to the jailers," Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. "It's been a great tool as far as mitigating liability," according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff's Department sung the GLOVE's praises, too: "I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that's looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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