Today's links Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping": How to preserve the benefits of web-scraping while targeting the real harms. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (permalink) This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it: https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96 What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog). The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that was also written, and which was born in machine-readable form. This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/ The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way are often unreachable (anonymous or pseudonymous) or impractical to reach (because there's millions of them). The linguists who study this speech will go through institutional review board approvals to make sure that as they produce aggregate accounts of speech, they don't compromise the privacy or integrity of their subjects. Computational linguistics is an unalloyed good, and while the speakers whose words are scraped to produce the raw material that these scholars study don't give permission, they probably wouldn't object, either. But what about entities that explicitly object to being scraped? Sometimes, it's good to scrape them, too. Since 1996, the Internet Archive has scraped every website it could find, storing snapshots of every page it found in a giant, searchable database called the Wayback Machine. Many of us have used the Wayback Machine to retrieve some long-deleted text, sound, image or video from the internet's memory hole. For the most part, the Internet Archive limits its scraping to websites that permit it. The robots exclusion protocol (AKA robots.txt) makes it easy for webmasters to tell different kinds of crawlers whether or not they are welcome. If your site has a robots.txt file that tells the Archive's crawler to buzz off, it'll go elsewhere. Mostly. Since 2017, the Archive has started ignoring robots.txt files for news services; whether or not the news site wants to be crawled, the Archive crawls it and makes copies of the different versions of the articles the site publishes. That's because news sites – even the so-called "paper of record" – have a nasty habit of making sweeping edits to published material without noting it. I'm not talking about fixing a typo or a formatting error: I'm talking about making a massive change to a piece, one that completely reverses its meaning, and pretending that it was that way all along: https://medium.com/@brokenravioli/proof-that-the-new-york-times-isn-t-feeling-the-bern-c74e1109cdf6 This happens all the time, with major news sites from all around the world: http://newsdiffs.org/examples/ By scraping these sites and retaining the different versions of their article, the Archive both detects and prevents journalistic malpractice. This is canonical fair use, the kind of copying that almost always involves overriding the objections of the site's proprietor. Not all adversarial scraping is good, but this sure is. There's an argument that scraping the news-sites without permission might piss them off, but it doesn't bring them any real harm. But even when scraping harms the scrapee, it is sometimes legitimate – and necessary. Austrian technologist Mario Zechner used the API from the country's super-concentrated grocery giants to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. By assembling a longitudinal data-set, Zechner exposed the raft of dirty tricks the grocers used to rip off the people of Austria. From shrinkflation to deceptive price-cycling that disguised price hikes as discounts: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071627182734180 Zechner feared publishing his results at first. The companies whose thefts he'd discovered have enormous power and whole kennelsful of vicious attack-lawyers they can sic on him. But he eventually got the Austrian competition bureaucracy interested in his work, and they published a report that validated his claims and praised his work: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071673594791946 Emboldened, Zechner open-sourced his monitoring tool, and attracted developers from other countries. Soon, they were documenting ripoffs in Germany and Slovenia, too: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071485142332765 Zechner's on a roll, but the grocery cartel could shut him down with a keystroke, simply by blocking his API access. If they do, Zechner could switch to scraping their sites – but only if he can be protected from legal liability for nonconsensually scraping commercially sensitive data in a way that undermines the profits of a powerful corporation. Zechner's work comes at a crucial time, as grocers around the world turn the screws on both their suppliers and their customers, disguising their greedflation as inflation. In Canada, the grocery cartel – led by the guillotine-friendly hereditary grocery monopolilst Galen Weston – pulled the most Les Mis-ass caper imaginable when they illegally conspired to rig the price of bread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada We should scrape all of these looting bastards, even though it will harm their economic interests. We should scrape them because it will harm their economic interests. Scrape 'em and scrape 'em and scrape 'em. Now, it's one thing to scrape text for scholarly purposes, or for journalistic accountability, or to uncover criminal corporate conspiracies. But what about scraping to train a Large Language Model? Yes, there are socially beneficial – even vital – uses for LLMs. Take HRDAG's work on truth and reconciliation in Colombia. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a tiny nonprofit that makes an outsized contribution to human rights, by using statistical methods to reveal the full scope of the human rights crimes that take place in the shadows, from East Timor to Serbia, South Africa to the USA: https://hrdag.org/ HRDAG's latest project is its most ambitious yet. Working with partner org Dejusticia, they've just released the largest data-set in human rights history: https://hrdag.org/jep-cev-colombia/ What's in that dataset? It's a merger and analysis of more than 100 databases of killings, child soldier recruitments and other crimes during the Colombian civil war. Using a LLM, HRDAG was able to produce an analysis of each killing in each database, estimating the probability that it appeared in more than one database, and the probability that it was carried out by a right-wing militia, by government forces, or by FARC guerrillas. This work forms the core of ongoing Colombian Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, and has been instrumental in demonstrating that the majority of war crimes were carried out by right-wing militias who operated with the direction and knowledge of the richest, most powerful people in the country. It also showed that the majority of child soldier recruitment was carried out by these CIA-backed, US-funded militias. This is important work, and it was carried out at a scale and with a precision that would have been impossible without an LLM. As with all of HRDAG's work, this report and the subsequent testimony draw on cutting-edge statistical techniques and skilled science communication to bring technical rigor to some of the most important justice questions in our world. LLMs need large bodies of text to train them – text that, inevitably, is scraped. Scraping to produce LLMs isn't intrinsically harmful, and neither are LLMs. Admittedly, nonprofits using LLMs to build war crimes databases do not justify even 0.0001% of the valuations that AI hypesters ascribe to the field, but that's their problem. Scraping is good, sometimes – even when it's done against the wishes of the scraped, even when it harms their interests, and even when it's used to train an LLM. But. Scraping to violate peoples' privacy is very bad. Take Clearview AI, the grifty, sleazy facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos in order to train a system that they sell to cops, corporations and authoritarian governments: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that Likewise: scraping to alienate creative workers' labor is very bad. Creators' bosses are ferociously committed to firing us all and replacing us with "generative AI." Like all self-declared "job creators," they constantly fantasize about destroying all of our jobs. Like all capitalists, they hate capitalism, and dream of earning rents from owning things, not from doing things. The work these AI tools generate sucks, but that doesn't mean our bosses won't try to fire us and replace us with them. After all, prompting an LLM may produce bad screenplays, but at least the LLM doesn't give you lip when you order to it give you "ET, but the hero is a dog, and there's a love story in the second act and a big shootout in the climax." Studio execs already talk to screenwriters like they're LLMs. That's true of art directors, newspaper owners, and all the other job-destroyers who can't believe that creative workers want to have a say in the work they do – and worse, get paid for it. So how do we resolve these conundra? After all, the people who scrape in disgusting, depraved ways insist that we have to take the good with the bad. If you want accountability for newspaper sites, you have to tolerate facial recognition, too. When critics of these companies repeat these claims, they are doing the companies' work for them. It's not true. There's no reason we couldn't permit scraping for one purpose and ban it for another. The problem comes when you try to use copyright to manage this nuance. Copyright is a terrible tool for sorting out these uses; the limitations and exceptions to copyright (like fair use) are broad and varied, but so "fact intensive" that it's nearly impossible to say whether a use is or isn't fair before you've gone to court to defend it. But copyright has become the de facto regulatory default for the internet. When I found someone impersonating me on a dating site and luring people out to dates, the site advised me to make a copyright claim over the profile photo – that was their only tool for dealing with this potentially dangerous behavior. The reasons that copyright has become our default tool for solving every internet problem are complex and historically contingent, but one important point here is that copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away. For that reason, corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power than the company to sign away their copyrights. This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright (scope, duration, penalties), we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms. As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ Many creative workers are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement for scraping their data and using it to train a model. If those cases go to trial, it's likely the creators will lose. The questions of whether making temporary copies or subjecting them to mathematical analysis infringe copyright are well-settled: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market I'm pretty sure that the lawyers who organized these cases know this, and they're betting that the AI companies did so much sleazy shit while scraping that they'll settle rather than go to court and have it all come out. Which is fine – I relish the thought of hundreds of millions in investor capital being transferred from these giant AI companies to creative workers. But it doesn't actually solve the problem. Because if we do end up changing copyright law – or the daily practice of the copyright sector – to create exclusive rights over scraping and training, it's not going to get creators paid. If we give individual creators new rights to bargain with, we're just giving them new rights to bargain away. That's already happening: voice actors who record for video games are now required to start their sessions by stating that they assign the rights to use their voice to train a deepfake model: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence But that doesn't mean we have to let the hyperconcentrated entertainment sector alienate creative workers from their labor. As the WGA has shown us, creative workers aren't just LLCs with MFAs, bargaining business-to-business with corporations – they're workers: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/ Workers get a better deal with labor law, not copyright law. Copyright law can augment certain labor disputes, but just as often, it benefits corporations, not workers: https://locusmag.com/2019/05/cory-doctorow-steering-with-the-windshield-wipers/ Likewise, the problem with Clearview AI isn't that it infringes on photographers' copyrights. If I took a thousand pictures of you and sold them to Clearview AI to train its model, no copyright infringement would take place – and you'd still be screwed. Clearview has a privacy problem, not a copyright problem. Giving us pseudocopyrights over our faces won't stop Clearview and its competitors from destroying our lives. Creating and enforcing a federal privacy law with a private right of action will. It will put Clearview and all of its competitors out of business, instantly and forever: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy AI companies say, "You can't use copyright to fix the problems with AI without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right. But what they fail to mention is, "You can use labor law to ban certain uses of AI without creating that collateral damage." Facial recognition companies say, "You can't use copyright to ban scraping without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right too – but what they don't say is, "On the other hand, a privacy law would put us out of business and leave all the good scraping intact." Taking entertainment companies and AI vendors and facial recognition creeps at their word is helping them. It's letting them divide and conquer people who value the beneficial elements and those who can't tolerate the harms. We can have the benefits without the harms. We just have to stop thinking about labor and privacy issues as individual matters and treat them as the collective endeavors they really are: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/ Here's a link to the podcast: https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/ And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever): https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450_-_How_To_Think_About_Scraping.mp3 And here's the RSS feed for my podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast (image: syvwlch, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Dumping 2 Million Tires In The Ocean To "Help" Fish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB2AVbUwkQ (h/t Salim Fadhley) Writers Strike Ends: WGA, AMPTP Agree to Deal After 146-Day Strike https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/writers-strike-ends-wga-amptp-deal-2-1235733452/ This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Epic micropayments rant https://web.archive.org/web/20031002104152/http://slumbering.lungfish.com/index.php?p=chargingpeople.1064271013 #20yrsago Michael Moore’s comprehensive response to criticisms of Bowling for Columbine https://web.archive.org/web/20050205011453/http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ #20yrsago WKRP in Cincinnati redacted to save on license fees https://web.archive.org/web/20031001172254/http://members.allstream.net/~jacjud/wkrpmusic.html #15yrsago Rockbox 3.0: revive old iPod with free/open software https://ostatic.com/blog/rockbox-3-0-released-quietly #15yrsago Judge says that “attempted copyright infringement” is bogus https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/09/capitol-v-thomas-judge-orders-new-trial-implores-c #15yrsago HOWTO Make a giant spherical metalamp out of dozens of cheap Ikea lamps https://www.instructables.com/Big-lamps-from-Ikea-lampan-lamps./ #15yrsago China’s IP address shortage, two perspectives https://www.chinatechnews.com/2008/09/23/7595-cnnic-chinas-internet-will-be-short-of-ip-addresses-soon #15yrsago World’s largest wargaming table art installation https://web.archive.org/web/20080927032126/http://www.ethanham.com/blog/2008/09/worlds-largest-wargaming-table.html #10yrsago More details, new video showing Iphone fingerprint reader pwned by Chaos Computer Club https://www.heise.de/ratgeber/Der-iPhone-Fingerabdruck-Hack-1965783.html #10yrsago Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl: fast YA novel with wonderful characters https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/24/not-your-ordinary-wolf-girl-fast-ya-novel-with-wonderful-characters/ #10yrsago Godspeed You! Black Emperor condemns music contest they won, vows to use money to buy instruments for prisoners https://web.archive.org/web/20130925144621/http://cstrecords.com/statement-from-godspeed-you-black-emperor-on-polaris/ #10yrsago Love Song for Internet Trolls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjmBQZNG8L0 #10yrsago Adding some evidence to copyright’s “evidence-free zone” https://archives.cjr.org/cloud_control/empirical_ip.php?page=all #10yrsago Beijing’s “mystery rooms”: single-room funhouses https://kotaku.com/escape-from-chinas-mystery-rooms-1369688560 #10yrsago Easyjet tells law professor he can’t fly because he tweeted critical remarks about airline https://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/09/25/easyjet-under-fire-after-claims-it-refused-let-drum-columnist-mark-leiser-board #10yrsago The Coldest Girl in Coldtown: dangerous, bloody vampire YA novel https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/25/the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown-dangerous-bloody-vampire-ya-novel/ #5yrsago Big Tech is building a $80B capex wall around its empire https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/tech-companies-spend-80-billion-building-a-competitive-edge #5yrsago A CRISPR-based hack could eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/24/650501045/mosquitoes-genetically-modified-to-crash-species-that-spreads-malaria #5yrsago There’s a literal elephant in machine learning’s room https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.03305 #5yrsago To fix Canadian copyright, let creators claim their rights back after 25 years https://theconversation.com/everything-he-does-he-does-it-for-us-why-bryan-adams-is-on-to-something-important-about-copyright-103674 #5yrsago The world’s richest families got MUCH richer, thanks to the stock market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/ultra-rich-families-ride-surging-stocks-to-double-annual-returns #5yrsago DNA ancestry tests are bullshit https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9912822/DNA-ancestry-tests-branded-meaningless.html #5yrsago Incredibly sensible notes on software engineering, applicable to the wider world https://medium.com/s/story/notes-to-myself-on-software-engineering-c890f16f4e4d #5yrsago Hank Green’s “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing”: aliens vs social media fame vs polarization https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/25/hank-greens-an-absolutely-remarkable-thing-aliens-vs-social-media-fame-vs-polarization/ #5yrsago Jewelry in the shape of gerrymandered US congressional districts https://web.archive.org/web/20191005193414/https://gerrymanderjewelry.com/ #5yrsago Facebook reminds America’s cops that they’re not allowed to use fake accounts https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/facebook-warns-memphis-police-no-more-fake-bob-smith-accounts #5yrsago Record numbers of people have downloaded and used the Democrats’ mobile app for doorknocking canvassers https://www.wired.com/story/2018-midterms-democrats-mobile-canvassing-records/ #5yrsago Canada’s legal weed stock-bubble is a re-run of the dotcom bubble https://www.wsj.com/articles/wall-streets-marijuana-madness-its-like-the-internet-in-1997-1537718400 #1yrago Billionaire grifters hate her: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Ida M Tarbell https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/24/shithole-billionaires/#tarbells-everywhere #1yrago McKinsey and Providence colluded to force poor patients into destitution https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/25/criminal-conspiracy/#payment-is-expected Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Plausible Sentence Generators https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/ Upcoming appearances: Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2 https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8 https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis), Oct 15 https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16 https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/ 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (Charleston, WV), Oct 19 https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/ Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25 https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances: Words, Images, & Worlds https://spotify.link/RECCqzeHkDb Against Enshittification | Medium Day 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSeBelDVrgE The Jim Rutt Show https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-2/ Latest books: "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023 The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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Today's links Down in the (link)dumps: A link sundae for a fall Saturday. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Down in the (link)dumps (permalink) Back when I was writing on Boing Boing, I'd slam out 10-15 blog posts every day, short hits that served as signpost and public notebook, but I rarely got into longer analysis of the sort I do daily now on Pluralistic. Both modes are very useful for organizing one's thoughts, and indeed, they complement each other: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/ The problem is that when you write long, synthetic essays, they crowd out the quick hits. Back in May 2022, I started including three short links with each edition of Pluralistic, in a section called "Hey look at this" (thanks to Mitch Wagner for suggesting it!): https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump But even with that daily linkdump, I still manage to accumulate link-debt, as interesting things pile up, not rising to the level of a long blog-post, but not so disposable as to be easy to flush. When the pile gets big enough, I put out a Saturday Linkdump: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ All of which is to say, it's Saturday, and I've got a linkdump! First up, a musical interlude. I've been listening to DJ Earworm's amazing mashups since 2005 and while I've got dozens of tracks that shuffle in and out of my daily playlist, the one that makes me wanna get up and dance every time is "No One Takes Your Freedom," a wildly improbable banger composed of equal parts Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, George Michael and Scissor Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaboIeW1A_4 I defy you to play that one without bopping a little. I think it's the French horn from "For No One" that really kills it, the world's least expected intro to a heavy dance beat. Moving swiftly on: let's talk about fonts. I remember when Wired magazine first showed up at the bookstores I was working at in Toronto, and my bosses – younger men than I am now! – complained that the tiny, decorative fonts, rendered in silver foil on a purple background, was illegible. I laughed at them, batting my young eyes and devouring the promise of a better future with ease, even in dim light. Now it's thirty years later and I'm half-blind. Both my my decaying, aging eyes are filmed with cataracts that I'm too busy to get removed (though my doc promises permanent 20:20, perfect night-vision, and implanted bifocals when I can spare a month from touring with new books to get 'em fixed). Which is to say: I spend a lot more time thinking about legibility now than I did in the early 1990s, and I've got a lot more sympathy for those booksellers' complaints about Wired's aggressively low-contrast design today. I'm forever on the hunt for fonts designed for high legibility. This week, Kottke linked to B612, a free/open font family "designed for aircraft cockpit screens," commissioned by Airbus. It's got all the bells and whistles (e.g. hinting) and comes in variable and monospace faces: https://b612-font.com/ B612 arrived at a fortuitous moment, coinciding with a major UI overhaul in Thunderbird, the app I spend the second-most time in (I spend more time in Gedit, the bare-bones text-editor that comes with Ubuntu, the flavor of GNU/Linux I use). A previous Thunderbird UI experiment had made all the UI text effectively unreadable for me, causing me to dive deep into the infinitely configurable settings to sub in my own fonts: http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css The new UI is much better, but it broke all my old tweaks, so I went back into those settings and switched everything to B612, and it's amazeballs. I tried doing the same in Gedit, but B612 mono was too light for my shitty eyes, so I went back to Jetbrains Mono, another free/open font that has 8 weights to choose from: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ Love me a new, legible font! Meanwhile, a note for all you designers: the received wisdom that black on white type is "hard on the eyes" is a harmful myth. Stop with the grey-on-white type, for the love of all that is holy. This isn't 1992, you aren't laying out type for Wired Issue 1.0. Contrast is good, actually. Continuing on the subject of software updates: Mastodon, the free, open, federated social media platform that anyone can host and that lets you hop between one server and another with just a couple clicks, has released a major update, focusing on usability, especially for people unfamiliar with its conventions: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/ Included in this fix: a major overhaul to how you interact with posts on servers other than your home server. This was both confusing and clunky, and the fix makes it much better. They've also changed how sign-up flow works, making things simpler for newbies, and they've cleaned up the UI, tweaking threads, web previews and other parts of the daily experience. There's also a lot of changes to search, but search still remains less than ideal, with multi-server search limited to hashtags. This is bad, actually. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for Mastodon devs to decide to fix it, because Mastodon is free and open, which means anyone with the skills to code a change, or the money to pay techies to do it, or the moral force to convince them to do it, can effect that change themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/ Case in point: Mastoreader, a great new thread reader for Mastodon: https://mastoreader.io/ Every time that guy who owns Twitter breaks it even worse, a new cohort of users sign up. Not all of them stay, but the growth is steady and the trendline is solid: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/ It's the right call: while there are other services that promise that they will be federated someday, promises are easy, and there's world of difference between "federateable" and "federated." As GW Bush told us, "Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again": https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/ One big difference between the kind of blogging I used to do in my Boing Boing days and the long-form work I do today is the graphics. When you're posting 10-15 times/day, you can't make each graphic a standout (or at least, I can't). But I can (and do) devote substantial time to making a single collage out of public domain and Creative Commons graphics every day: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/ I am not a visual person – literally, I can barely see! – but my daily art practice has slowly made me a less-terrible illustrator. I got in some good licks this week, like this graphic for the UAW's new "Eight-and-Skate" work-to-rule program: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule That graphic was fun because all the elements were from the public domain, or fair use. I love it when that happens. I've spent years amassing a bulging folder of public domain clip art ganked from the web and this week, it got a major infusion, thanks to the Bergen Public Library's Flickr album of high-rez scans of antique book endpapers. 86 public domain textures? Yes please! (Also, the fact that Flickr has one-click download of all the hi-rez versions of every image in a photoset is another way that it stands out as a remnant of the old, good web, not so much a superannuated relic as an elegant weapon of a more civilized age): https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/albums/72157633827993925 Speaking of strikes: there are strikes! Everygoddamnedwhere! After 40 years in a Reagan-induced coma, labor is back, baby. The Cornells School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Labor Action Tracker is your go-to, real-time observation post as hot labor summer turns into the permanent revolution. As of this writing, it's listing 968 labor actions in 1491 locations: https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu There's no war but class war and it was ever thus. Brian Merchant's forthcoming book Blood In the Machine is a history of the Luddites, revisiting that much-maligned labor uprising, which has been rewritten as a fight between technophobes and the inevitable forces of progress: https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/ The book unearths the true history of the Ludds: they were skilled technologists who were outraged by capital's commitment to immiseration, child slavery, and foisting inferior goods on a helpless public. You can get a long preview of the book in Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/90949827/what-the-luddites-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-big-tech Merchant also talked with Roman Mars about the book on the 99 Percent Invisible podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/transcript/ If that's piqued your interest and if you can make it to Los Angeles, come by Chevalier's Books this Wednesday, where Brian and I are having a joint book-launch (I've just published The Internet Con, my Luddite-adjacent "Big Tech Disassembly Manual"): https://www.eventbrite.com/o/chevaliers-books-8495362156 Where is all this labor unrest coming from? Well as Stein's Law has it, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." 40 years of corporate-friendly political economy has lit the world on fire and immiserated billions, and we've hit bottom and started the long, slow climb to a world that prioritizes human thriving over billionaire power. One of the most tangible expressions of that vibe shift is the rise and rise of antitrust. The big news right now is the (first) trial of the century, Google's antitrust trial. What's that? You say you haven't heard anything about it? Well, perhaps that has to do with the judge banning recording and livestreaming and not making transcripts available. Don't worry, he's also locking observers out of his courtroom for hours at a time during closed testimony. Oh, and also? The DoJ just agreed that it won't post its exhibits from the trial online anymore. You can follow what dribbles of information as are emerging from our famously open court system at US v Google: https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22 If the impoverished trickle of Google antitrust news has you down, don't despair, there's more coming, because the FTC is apparently set to drop its long-awaited suit against Amazon: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftc-poised-sue-amazon-antitrust-163432081.html Amazon spent years blowing hundreds of millions of dollars of its investors' cash, selling goods below cost and buying up rivals until it became the most important channel for every kind of manufacturer to reach their customers. Now, Amazon is turning the screws. A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance details the 45% Amazon Tax that every merchant pays to reach you: https://ilsr.org/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023/ That 45% tax is passed on to you – whether or not you shop at Amazon. Amazon's secretive most favored nation terms mean that if a seller raises their price on Amazon, they have to raise it everywhere else, which means you're paying more at WalMart and Target because of Amazon's policies. Those taxes are bad for us, but they're good for Amazon's investors. This year, the company stands to make $185 billion from junk-fees charged to platform sellers. As David Dayen points out, Amazon charges so much to ship third-party sellers' goods that it fully subsidizes Amazon's own shipping: https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-21-amazons-185-billion-pay-to-play-system/ That's right: as Stacy Mitchell writes in the report, "Amazon doesn’t have to build warehousing and shipping costs into the price of its own products, because it’s found a way to get smaller online sellers to pay those costs." Now, one of the amazing things about antitrust coming back from the grave is that just the threat of antitrust enforcement can moderate even the most vicious bully's conduct. Faced with the looming FTC case, Amazon just canceled its plan to charge even more junk fees: https://www.reuters.com/legal/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-ftc-lawsuit-looms-bloomberg-news-2023-09-20/ But despite this win, Amazon is still speedrunning the enshittification cycle. The latest? Unskippable ads in Prime Video: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-22/amazon-prime-video-content-to-include-ads-staring-early-2024 Remember when Amazon promised you ad-free video if you'd lock yourself into shopping with them by pre-paying for a year's shipping with Prime? The company has fully embraced the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further." That FTC case can't come a moment too soon. This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Pinhole skull-camera https://web.archive.org/web/20080924121957/http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/pinhole-camera-fashi.html #15yrsago New media formats revealed by the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20080923124739/http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=479&doc_id=164252& #15yrsago How Children Learn: classic of human, kid-centered learning https://memex.craphound.com/2008/09/23/how-children-learn-classic-of-human-kid-centered-learning/ #15yrsago DHS invests in mind-reading anti-terrorist technology — and staff phrenologists to interpret the results https://web.archive.org/web/20080924083517/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,426485,00.html #10yrsago Floppy ROM: distributing software on flexidiscs https://web.archive.org/web/20130926014255/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-floppy-rom-software-distributed-on-records/ #5yrsago Since 2007, debt-haunted grads have been doing public service to earn loan forgiveness, which they won’t get https://www.vice.com/en/article/kz5zew/youre-probably-not-getting-that-loan-forgiveness-youre-counting-on #5yrsago #MeToo meets the #FightFor15 as McDonald’s workers walk out over sexual harassment https://jacobin.com/2018/09/mcdonalds-strike-metoo-sexual-harassment-organizing #5yrsago Exploring the ruins of a Toys R Us, discovering a trove of sensitive employee data https://hackaday.com/2018/09/17/exploring-an-abandoned-toys-r-us/ Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Jason Kottke, @abcderian@techhub.social, Naked Capitalism, Slashdot. Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Plausible Sentence Generators https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/ Upcoming appearances: Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2 https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8 https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis), Oct 15 https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16 https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/ 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (Charleston, WV), Oct 19 https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/ Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25 https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances: Against Enshittification | Medium Day 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSeBelDVrgE The Jim Rutt Show https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-2/ How to Take Back the Internet (Wired Have a Nice Future) https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-21/ Latest books: "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023 The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ (Latest Medium column: "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d) Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Today's links Apple fucked us on right to repair (again): "Parts-pairing" is a scam. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Apple fucked us on right to repair (again) (permalink) Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through. Why does Apple hate repair so much? It's not that they want to poison our water and bodies with microplastics; it's not that they want to hasten the day our coastal cities drown; it's not that they relish the human misery that accompanies every gram of conflict mineral. They aren't sadists. They're merely sociopathically greedy. Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple: https://www.inverse.com/article/52189-tim-cook-says-apple-faces-2-key-problems-in-surprising-shareholder-letter So Apple does everything it can to monopolize repair. Not just because this lets the company gouge you on routine service, but because it lets them decide when your phone is beyond repair, so they can offer you a trade-in, ensuring both that you buy a new device and that the device you buy is another Apple. There are so many tactics Apple gets to use to sabotage repair. For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on the subassemblies in its devices. This allows the company to enlist US Customs to seize and destroy refurbished parts that are harvested from dead phones by workers in the Pacific Rim: https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/ Of course, the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That's why Apple's so-called "recycling" program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks Shredding parts and cooking up bogus trademark claims is just for starters, though. For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). DMCA 1201 is an "anti-circumvention" law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control." That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some Digital Rights Management (DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal – even if the thing itself is perfectly legal. When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories. In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country. But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products – or even subassemblies in their products – in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III. Welcome to Act III. Today, it costs about a quarter to add a system-on-a-chip to even the tiniest parts. These SOCs can run DRM. Here's how that DRM works: when you put a new part in a device, the SOC and the device's main controller communicate with one another. They perform a cryptographic protocol: the part says, "Here's my serial number," and then the main controller prompts the user to enter a manufacturer-supplied secret code, and the master controller sends a signed version of this to the part, and the part and the system then recognize each other. This process has many names, but because it was first used in the automotive sector, it's widely known as VIN-Locking (VIN stands for "vehicle identification number," the unique number given to every car by its manufacturer). VIN-locking is used by automakers to block independent mechanics from repairing your car; even if they use the manufacturer's own parts, the parts and the engine will refuse to work together until the manufacturer's rep keys in the unlock code: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon VIN locking is everywhere. It's how John Deere stops farmers from fixing their own tractors – something farmers have done literally since tractors were invented: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ It's in ventilators. Like mobile phones, ventilators are a grotesquely monopolized sector, controlled by a single company Medtronic, whose biggest claim to fame is effecting the world's largest tax inversion in order to manufacture the appearance that it is an Irish company and therefore largely untaxable. Medtronic used the resulting windfall to gobble up most of its competitors. During lockdown, as hospitals scrambled to keep their desperately needed supply of ventilators running, Medtronic's VIN-locking became a lethal impediment. Med-techs who used donor parts from one ventilator to keep another running – say, transplanting a screen – couldn't get the device to recognize the part because all the world's civilian aircraft were grounded, meaning Medtronic's technicians couldn't swan into their hospitals to type in the unlock code and charge them hundreds of dollars. The saving grace was an anonymous, former Medtronic repair tech, who built pirate boxes to generate unlock codes, using any housing they could lay hands on to use as a case: guitar pedals, clock radios, etc. This tech shipped these gadgets around the world, observing strict anonymity, because Article 6 of the EUCD also bans circumvention: https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again Of course, Apple is a huge fan of VIN-locking. In phones, VIN-locking is usually called "serializing" or "parts-pairing," but it's the same thing: a tiny subassembly gets its own microcontroller whose sole purpose is to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget. Parts-pairing lets Apple block repairs even when the technician uses new, Apple parts – but it also lets Apple block refurb parts and third party parts. For many years, Apple was the senior partner and leading voice in blocking state Right to Repair bills, which it killed by the dozen, leading a coalition of monopolists, from Wahl (who boobytrap their hair-clippers with springs that cause their heads irreversibly decompose if you try to sharpen them at home) to John Deere (who reinvented tenant farming by making farmers tenants of their tractors, rather than their land). But Apple's opposition to repair eventually became a problem for the company. It's bad optics, and both Apple customers and Apple employees are volubly displeased with the company's ecocidal conduct. But of course, Apple's management and shareholders hate repair and want to block it as much as possible. But Apple knows how to Think Differently. It came up with a way to eat its cake and have it, too. The company embarked on a program of visibly support right to repair, while working behind the scenes to sabotage it. Last year, Apple announced a repair program. It was hilarious. If you wanted to swap your phone's battery, all you had to do was let Apple put a $1200 hold on your credit card, and then wait while the company shipped you 80 pounds' worth of specialized tools, packed in two special Pelican cases: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/ Then, you swapped your battery, but you weren't done! After your battery was installed, you had to conference in an authorized Apple tech who would tell you what code to type into a laptop you tethered to the phone in order to pair it with your phone. Then all you had to do was lug those two 40-pound Pelican cases to a shipping depot and wait for Apple to take the hold off your card (less the $120 in parts and fees). By contrast, independent repair outfits like iFixit will sell you all the tools you need to do your own battery swap – including the battery! for $32. The whole kit fits in a padded envelope: https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-x-replacement-battery But while Apple was able to make a showy announcement of its repair program and then hide the malicious compliance inside those giant Pelican cases, sabotaging right to repair legislation is a lot harder. Not that they didn't try. When New York State passed the first general electronics right-to-repair bill in the country, someone convinced New York Governor Kathy Hochul to neuter it with last-minute modifications: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/weakened-right-to-repair-bill-is-signed-into-law-by-new-yorks-governor/ But that kind of trick only works once. When California's right to repair bill was introduced, it was clear that it was gonna pass. Rather than get run over by that train, Apple got on board, supporting the legislation, which passed unanimously: https://www.ifixit.com/News/79902/apples-u-turn-tech-giant-finally-backs-repair-in-california But Apple got the last laugh. Because while California's bill contains many useful clauses for the independent repair shops that keep your gadgets out of a landfill, it's a state law, and DMCA 1201 is federal. A state law can't simply legalize the conduct federal law prohibits. California's right to repair bill is a banger, but it has a weak spot: parts-pairing, the scourge of repair techs: https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-independent-repair Every generation of Apple devices does more parts-pairing than the previous one, and the current models are so infested with paired parts as to be effectively unrepairable, except by Apple. It's so bad that iFixit has dropped its repairability score for the iPhone 14 from a 7 ("recommend") to a 4 (do not recommend): https://www.ifixit.com/News/82493/we-are-retroactively-dropping-the-iphones-repairability-score-en Parts-pairing is bullshit, and Apple are scum for using it, but they're hardly unique. Parts-pairing is at the core of the fuckery of inkjet printer companies, who use it to fence out third-party ink, so they can charge $9,600/gallon for ink that pennies to make: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer Parts-pairing is also rampant in powered wheelchairs, a heavily monopolized sector whose predatory conduct is jaw-droppingly depraved: https://uspirgedfund.org/reports/usp/stranded But if turning phones into e-waste to eke out another billion-dollar stock buyback is indefensible, stranding people with disabilities for months at a time while they await repairs is so obviously wicked that the conscience recoils. That's why it was so great when Colorado passed the nation's first wheelchair right to repair bill last year: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair California actually just passed two right to repair bills; the other one was SB-271, which mirrors Colorado's HB22-1031: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB271 This is big! It's momentum! It's a start! But it can't be the end. When Bill Clinton signed DMCA 1201 into law 25 years ago, he loaded a gun and put it on the nation's mantlepiece and now it's Act III and we're all getting sprayed with bullets. Everything from ovens to insulin pumps, thermostats to lightbulbs, has used DMCA 1201 to limit repair, modification and improvement. Congress needs to rid us of this scourge, to let us bring back all the benefits of interoperability. I explain how this all came to be – and what we should do about it – in my new Verso Books title, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con (Image: Mitch Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0; Kambanji, CC BY 2.0; Rawpixel; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Book giveaway for The Bezzle (Martin Hench #2) https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/371380-the-bezzle-a-martin-hench-novel West of House https://brokenneedle.gumroad.com/l/westofhouse (h/t Wil Wheaton) T-Shirts Now Available! http://www.imagineeringdisney.com/blog/2023/9/19/t-shirts-now-available.html This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago New voting machines are criminally bad https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/ #15yrsago Your chance to mark up the Wall Street bailout bill https://web.archive.org/web/20080929041702/http://publicmarkup.org/ #15yrsago Hank Paulson’s bailout 419 letter https://web.archive.org/web/20080923194140/https://www.thenation.com/blogs/jstreet/363133/bailout_satire #15yrsago Stanford and Harvard b-school profs vs. free/open source software https://news.slashdot.org/story/08/09/22/2254228/stanford-teaching-mbas-how-to-fight-open-source #15yrsago Sexist pigs earn more than normal men https://www.science20.com/news_releases/old_fashioned_men_make_more_money_study #15yrsago Corrupted Science: the history, cause, effect and state of bad science https://memex.craphound.com/2008/09/22/corrupted-science-the-history-cause-effect-and-state-of-bad-science/ #10yrsago Chaos Computer Club claims it can unlock Iphones with fake fingers/cloned fingerprints https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2013/ccc-breaks-apple-touchid #5yrsago Anonymous stock-market manipulators behind $20B+ of “mispricing” can be tracked by their writing styles https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3198384 #1yrago Twitch does a chokepoint capitalism: "Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run the business via Amazon that it has no choice but to take more money from streamers." https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/22/amazon-vs-amazon/#pray-i-dont-alter-it-further Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Plausible Sentence Generators https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/ Upcoming appearances: DIG Festival (Modena, Italy), Sept 22 https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/ Launch for Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You," Book Soup (LA), Sept 22 https://www.booksoup.com/event/justin-c-key Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2 https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8 https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis), Oct 15 https://moonpalacebooks.com/events/30127 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16 https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/ 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities (Charleston, WV), Oct 19 https://festivallcharleston.com/venue/university-of-charleston/ Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25 https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances: Against Enshittification | Medium Day 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSeBelDVrgE The Jim Rutt Show https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-2/ How to Take Back the Internet (Wired Have a Nice Future) https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-21/ Latest books: "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023 The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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