Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google has announced that it plans to start interfering with the user’s ability to install APK packages locally. To get other application repositories, such as F-Droid, means installing one of these APK packages.

F-Droid contains no spyware. It’s a Free and Open Source Software repository.

There wouldn’t be any reason to put spyware in software like this because everyone can see it, someone would take it out and make a version that doesn’t do that, and then if the F-Droid repository hosted it, people would quit using that and replace it too.

The Google Play Store, on the other hand, contains very little other than spyware.

See, Google is an ad company, and as an ad company, it peddles spyware libraries that are bundles with the majority of the “apps”, which are actually adware, and monitor what the user does with their entire phone, because almost all adware is also spyware.

The user, by installing things from Google Play, agrees to this, often for some functionality that is minor compared to the dozens and dozens of unnecessary (for the stated purpose of the “app”) permissions, which are intended to let it do things like monitor your use of the phone, figure out where you’re at on Earth to within 3 feet (1 meter), even when the “app” seems to be closed, monitor your phone calls and texts, and uploading your contacts list.

There are actually many more permissions in the Android permission model, and these are just some of the creepier ones.

“Apps” like these can be anything, from McDonald’s, a car insurance company, or even just a program that says it has wallpaper images.

If you try to sign into a particular “app” called Grindr, which is an app for gay people to find sex partners, you may not see everything it does in most countries, but if you have an IP address in the European Union, you will get a “consent” screen about several hundred other “partner companies” they may share your data with.

And if you have a Facebook account, you can go to your “off Facebook Activity” screen, which is hidden rather well, and see that Grindr has been talking to them.

In America, they don’t even ask before they do this.

They’re telling Facebook and Google your HIV status and when the last time you were tested were, and they (allegedly) keep logs of who you are having sex with, and all of your nude photos, even after you delete your account. Seriously!

This was according to a high ranking executive named Ron DeJesus, who was let go recently.

Ron DeJesus claims that he was responsible for trying to keep Grindr compliant with multi-jurisdictional privacy laws, and Grindr basically flouted them all and fired him so that it could continue. He is suing them.

Almost everything in Google Play is some form of malware.

It’s so much worse than what we used to call “spyware” back in the Windows 98/XP era, when it was just something like Bonzi Buddy or Conducent, or New dot Net.

Almost everyone walking around with a cell phone in their pocket has “apps” like this, because they use the Apple App Store or Google Play.

But now Google is saying that the malware problem exists “outside” of their malware store. Which is quite clever.

Soon, according to the plans already revealed by Google, there will be no way to “sideload” (install something yourself) without letting Google “Play Protect”, which is rapidly turning into malicious software pretending to be an antivirus program, like Windows Defender is.

The choices listed are “allow scan” or “don’t install”. That’s it.

And I say “malware pretending to be antivirus” because when you click “allow scan”, it sends Google bits and pieces of the program, to a remote server.

So they know everything that’s on your phone, and they can block modified APKs that you get where someone has removed the spyware libraries from things that are in Google Play.

They can block anything they want and say “malware”, and who are you to stop them? Peasant!

Make no mistake about this, the timing is impeccable.

Right after Google apparently came down hard on people for using ad blockers (I haven’t seen the demand to turn off my ad blocker because I use Brave and they just bump it to deal with f***ing Google for me.), we get this announcement about “sideloading”.

“You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. […] It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”

-George Carlin

There’s no telling what all is in store for Android.

Like I said in my article about Samsung falling apart, Android was designed to gain marketshare. To do this, part of the deal was that it was somewhat less bogus than iOS about not letting you use it as a real computer.

They let all the other OEMs fight each other over crumbs building up the marketshare, and then Google came in and cleaned everything up and makes the “best” Android phones now.

Well, “sideloading” is the same. They needed it, to gain marketshare, and now they’ll be wanting that back.

I suspect that within five years, the practical benefits of owning an Android phone instead of an iPhone, such as local music playing and the option to use F-Droid, will be gone.

And, basically, Apple gimps the iPhone so bad, that if you have one you might as well just get the cheapest because it doesn’t really do much of anything anyway. It can’t even play music without the network. Without the network, it’s an expensive brick.

The iPhone calls people and has an “app” that makes fart sounds for $1,800.

Google probably won’t take such action until they defeat this fake Anti-Trust Trial in the federal court (the judge is a corrupt stooge who is working with them to hide almost everything from the public) but they will do it.

The media is so bad that instead of criticizing this and calling it what it is, they repeat Google’s press statement. However, there is much more going on than we are being shown.

Brave Lays Off 9% of Employees. “AI” in Web Browsers. American Social Credit System.

Brave had layoffs of 9% of the company.

Sad. They’re the only Chromium-based browser that’s worth any attention at all as a user. Certainly the only one that does much of anything to protect your privacy.

Definitely the only one that will ever have a Private Tab that proxies itself through Tor.

(Not as secure as Tor Browser, but good enough for better privacy than going directly through your own ISP.)

I wonder who they let go.

Unfortunately, the article says they want to put “LEO” an “AI” in the browser. Terrific.

*head desks*

Like Opera and Vivaldi putting in Chaff Bots and welding them to the GUI. 😛

Like Google and Bing, most of the “AI” is severely brain damaged so that it can’t possibly say anything that would (1) offend anyone or (2) steer you towards a torrent file (Bing Chat). Although some that refuse to tell you where a torrent file is will infect your computer with malware through ad fraud. (Bing Chat)

So obviously, “AI”. Yay!

It would be a real shame if Brave goes under.

Mozilla is about as Independent from Google as Belarus is from Russia.

There’s getting to be more and more forks of Firefox because the best way to improve it is tear all the junk out and hand the user the version they would have asked for had Firefox been actual Free Software.

At a source code level, Firefox is mostly Free Software. But they don’t like the fact that people are bolting and some of that is because they can use “Firefox without the garbage”.

I mostly use Brave, yeah.

I like the ad blocker. I do.

I like that they tear out and neuter all of this Chrome garbage like FLoC/”Privacy Sandbox”, I like the fingerprinting protection. I like the Tor Mode.

I like that it doesn’t overload my computer’s RAM and cause the oom-killer to activate (with 16 GB of RAM in the machine and ZRam!), like Bloatzilla Failfox.

(Although, I am playing with Floorp now, which has “Sleeping Tabs” that the user has a meaningful amount of control over. Merits further experimentation.)

I wonder if there’s a plan for “fork control” over at “Bakersoft”. (“Bakersoft” = Mozilla.)

Mitchell Baker runs it like her own checking account while firing people who do actual stuff except pack Firefox full of adware and keylogging spyware.

I’e seen what “Bakersoft” is doing to harass SeaMonkey and it’s not pretty.

First they had all the Linux distributions (except Fedora, strangely) defame SeaMonkey by claiming “it’s not even maintained”, and that was 2011 or so, and dozens of versions later including the update for the libwebp disaster, clearly not maintained at all :P, it’s still around.

(It’s like Dick Van Dyke. 97 years old and every time you see him he’s tap dancing and cracking wise.)

Then Mozilla did this Quantum thing that’s got these amazingly crappy extensions, then they slowly told SeaMonkey to beat it, and now they say it can’t even use Bugzilla.

Well, that’s real neighborly.

I guess Mozilla is probably angry to see SeaMonkey’s Firefox 1.5/2-derived tab interface code running rings around Firefox. Google is definitely not thrilled that I use SeaMonkey to access my E-Mail.

They SeaMonkey me rollin’. They hatin’!

Mozilla is busy spending the money writing articles about deplatforming people from the Web and telling people to use TikTok and Instagram, which aren’t even the Web.

They’re absolute horrors, backdoored by surveillance monsters. They feed into an “American Social Credit Score” system. (More on that later.)

I apt purged Firefox. Unlike the IE on Windows era, I didn’t technically need it on Debian long enough to get another browser.

The Web browser situation is getting completely terrible, but if we lose Brave, then it doesn’t put us on a course that is more towards Freedom and Privacy, because the mean will revert in the direction of nasty spyware like Chrome and Firefox.

I don’t know how Mozilla managed to avert a full blown riot, so to speak, when they put keylogging malware in Firefox that sends your keystrokes to an ad server in addition to Google (which is at least a search engine), so that in exchange for nothing, your data would be leaked, analyzed, and used to put ads directly into the browser.

I’ve blogged all about how Mozilla is so untrustworthy they can’t even maintain a common set of lies about how your data is or isn’t collected, and how it both is and isn’t used.

According to them, they don’t collect it, except when they do, they don’t share it, except when they do, and they don’t sell it, except when they do. They completely talk out of both sides of their mouth. Then they have rampant fanboy-ism that says “Brendan Eich bad, ungh!!!!”

Gecko is part of the Chromium mono-culture.

Name anything that Mozilla doesn’t straight up blind copy, often with a Google library with the same vulnerabilities.

Most people reviewed WebP in 2010 and said this was going to be really bad.

An FFmpeg developer took a look at it and said it was worse than JPEG because WebP makes the image blurry due to emphasis on signal to noise ratio instead of good perceptual coding.

I also feel like Brave would be the bigger loss than Firefox at this point because Firefox is just so done.

Again, there’s only about a million Firefox forks at this point because they went grabbing for an extra 1% revenue with spyware and lost many of their users in the following few years due to this. Every once in a while there’s a “dead cat bounce”, but the long term trend is sharply down.

Most people are not happy to see ads and spyware parading around in software they use everyday.

I briefly wondered if they would try to just go proprietary or something to try to stop the forks, but it seems like Mozilla’s only real purpose is to exist long enough for Google’s anti-trust trial to end, and for the government to lose because “there’s a choice”, and then Google can pull the rug out from under Mozilla.

The future is very obviously Chromium browsers, but the big question is which one will it be? And we should hope that people have Brave.

Mozilla is squandering precious capital with this mozilla dot ai crap, and it’s so obvious that Large Language Models are just some more ignorant tech bruh stuff.

The benefits, are marginal, and the costs are enormous. ChatGPT loses an insane amount of money.

I laughed when I read about how much water Microsoft was going through to keep their data center from overheating since this GPT nonsense.

It’s amazing how something with so much dystopian potential that has been massively oversold to investors is an environmental catastrophe. I mean think about it. You’re being told not to brew a pot of coffee because “mah environment” while this thing is wasting so much power to run a chat bot that lies to people that they have to pump all this water in there.

Bing with GPT is basically the worst of the bots.

They’re training a chat bot to lie to people, log their activity, and they’re funding it with malvertising.

While the US companies are busy limiting what chat bots will tell you to only the information the government, big business, etc. wants you to hear, and only the angle they want you to hear, they are also projecting and claiming this is a problem in Russia and China.

There are many problems in places like China, like Social Credit Scores which don’t let people get a job, buy a train ticket, or eat a goddamn ice cream cone if they’ve been deemed a “problem”.

How bad it gets depends on if they’re a nuisance or a menace to the State.

The goal is to make it impossible to live and drive people to suicide, at some point, if the scoring gets so bad that they can’t recover.

Of course, what you never ever get to read, except maybe you’re reading it here now is… Where did this start? Well it started in America and it goes on here to much the same effect and purpose.

Most Americans didn’t have a “credit score” (much less 20 or 30 of them) until the late 1980s. Why is that? Where did it come from? What is it designed for?

Before credit scores, you gave people lists of references. It was a very laborious process for the background check people. They might even call the supermarket where you bought your groceries. They’d get a gist of what people said about you. If you were writing a bunch of hot checks, if you were stumbling over drunk all the time and didn’t pay landlords and walked out in the middle of the night, I mean they figured this out, they found out what your co-workers thought about you.

It was widely railed as unfair, so they replaced it with FICO. There’s a lot of scores Americans have, but almost everyone knows about the FICO. It’s three digits and they won’t tell you exactly how it works (very fair), but it’s easy to generalize. You pay bills on time, you don’t get evicted from apartments, you’ll probably be alright.

The problems start when you have a setback in life, and the system makes it very difficult to recover from.

If you can’t earn very much money for some reason, you’ll have a low score.

Then eventually you’ll end up in trouble with hospital bills and stuff you can’t pay, then you’re in even more trouble.

Most people can easily go from zero debt in America and $50,000 in the bank to a million dollars in debt and the hospital taking everything in about an hour, but the system is also set up so most Americans can’t save any money because it takes 150% of what a person can earn to stay in their apartment, keep the lights on, and buy enough food.

Then an employer or landlord will run a credit check.

Whoops, no job, nowhere to live. Then if you do find a crummy minimum wage job and an apartment in the ghetto from a landlord that didn’t ask questions, the electric and gas companies will want deposits for energy.

After this “credit score” makes your life impossible, you have a higher chance of ending up with a criminal record, and then that will make it hard to build your credit or get a job or apartment. At this point, who wants their life to go on?

Whew. At least we don’t have any disgusting Chinese “Social Credit Score”.

I see some of the rationale for like, creating an “American Social Credit Score”, I do.

Everyone normal hates anti-social criminals that fuck up society for everyone else.

I think most reasonable people would agree there’s certain people who should basically be totally excluded from society.

Where this comes from, in the State of Illinois, and many other places (usually operated by Democrats), is that when society outsources its “revenge” against criminals to an uncaring and incompetent government that the criminals are allowed to vote for, for breaking laws (raping, shooting, burning, looting, carjacking, murder, you know, “little stuff”) and then the Democrat politicians and the Democrat judges and the Democrat jury pools let them go, the market goes to work and turns punishments into a product.

The Democrat judge and Democrat Prosecutor and Democrat jurors recently let a Lake County man who strangled a little dog and threw it into a wall to die go. That’s not even all he did. He choked his girlfriend and told her she would be next.

Then when the police arrived, he picked up the dead dog and tried petting it. When the officer said the dog was dead, the criminal, tossed its lifeless body onto a bed and shrugged.

The Democrats involved sentenced him to 26 days in jail and some probation. So he’s out there now with the rest of us, theoretically punished, but not enough. Honestly, in my opinion. they should take people like this dozens and dozens of miles out and throw them in the middle of the lake, and if they can swim to shore, their debt to society will be considered paid. That’s my opinion.

But the government, with Governor J.B. Pritzker as their King, has proved it’s too incompetent and uncaring about what the rest of us have to live with, and there’s plenty worse than this guy, so “the market” steps in.

I think most of us would say that no Uber driver wants the guy who murders small animals and chokes women in their back seat. I think it’s fair to say that he shouldn’t be on a dating app. I mean, there’s obviously no public consequences for people like this, so the market steps in and if you want to call “Everyone can see what you did and they’re not happy.” a “Social Credit Score”, most wouldn’t object to that. If that’s all the farther it goes.

But, unfortunately, it is not.

The United States is becoming a privatized version of China.

They don’t even bother to hide it, they admit it.

But while PayPal has told that it will cut people out of the platform who criticize the government and will “inform politicians” about it, I can’t imagine that the United States system will reward people for doing anything positive, socially.

Can you imagine an American system that rewards people for saving money back and helping the elderly neighbor with her trash? Because I sure as Hell can’t!

I’m not even going to lie, it made me bust out laughing when I started thinking about this and realized that the Commies have a “Caught you being good!” system, and all Americans get is rewards for being anti-social and going into unsustainable levels of debt (as long as they make the minimum payments).

Because they just dump criminals back out on top of us, ones that are dangerous and psychotic and have no chance at being reformed. That gives these businesses a “reason” to get going, and then it metamorphoses into something totally unrelated and much worse.

When you log into Google or “Social Media” apps, you are feeding a surveillance monster, where they will use “Artificial Intelligence” (whatever the definition of this is), to decide things, even though you were never charged with or convicted of an offense.

For years, companies have been scraping people’s Twitter posts for job decisions-by-robot, and that’s hardly where it stops.

You may get denied housing for that thing you used Google Search for.

The life insurance company might purchase your Google search history and see what sort of disease symptoms you’ve been looking up. A robot can analyze what you’re saying to people on Facebook and Facebook Messenger and consider it in ways you’re not even thinking about right now.

This form of “Social Credit Score” is not okay, it should be illegal, it should never have been allowed to get this far, and you need to get as far away from it as you possibly can.

Brave has been doing a lot, actually, to protect people from this menace, while Mozilla has been advertising it and encouraging people to come closer to something that isn’t even the Web, which they have no control over, which “seems to be free” because of data mining.

They can ruin your entire life, for pennies, and you won’t even know where it came from, because there’s no law that says they have to tell you why you aren’t getting jobs, an apartment, or an Uber.

America’s “Social Credit Score” is from Silicon Valley, and people who want the information have to pay for it in bits and pieces out of separate databases, but that’s very nearly the only major difference from China.

To be sure, Mozilla is not the absolute worst source of information feeding this system, although they do default to Google search and have “spyware by default” in their browser now.

To feed all of your Web activity data directly into these systems, you’d need to go even further and use an Absolute Spyware Browser like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or at least log into those engines, or a “Social Media” platform, but merely telling people about “Social Media” platforms without the caveat of why they should refuse them is not acceptable.

No doubt, lying chat bots full of government bullshit are a problem in Russia and China too, but anyone who used ChatGPT a while back and, especially, people who typed in a jailbreak, saw what the model could actually do, and if you ask ChatGPT something it doesn’t like now, it’s much much better at zapping your question and reporting your account.

I mean, how is this not at least comparable to what is happening in the other Hellholes of Despotism?

You learn quickly “what not to say”. Isn’t that how every fascist or Communist regime has governed throughout history? Thought crimes?

It’s because of this notion of thought crimes in a nominally free country, like America (it still says it is a free country, at least in the propaganda sales pitch), that people feel they absolutely must burrow deeper underground, and start using pseudonyms and lots of encryption and VPNs and onion routing, and obscure forums.

When people notice they’re being lied to and results are being censored out of the American search engines, you drive people looking for answers to search engines that happen to be located anywhere that doesn’t give a damn what America wants, even if that ends up being Yandex in Russia.

When you have the American media engaging in constant streams of lying, propaganda, and false news, and then have the audacity to call everyone else liars, where will they go for news? “I’m not the liar, you’re a f*****g towel!”

The ideas still get circulated, only there’s no longer anyone to hold accountable because you’ve made the people impossible to identify or challenge. Then others read these ideas, and because there’s no accountability anymore, the person just starts saying whatever they damn well please, and you end up in this cycle of radicalization.

Certainly nobody has ever become less radicalized by being suppressed, but I don’t think that the Cancel Mob even fully understands what they’ve done.

There’s no indication that the American “Left” gets it at all.

Instead of picking their battles, they were shrieking about Donald Trump’s eating habits. Why? God only knows.

There’s a McDonald’s on every block in America, and it’s because someone eats there.

“Why don’t we just pick a way to insult damn near everyone in the country instead of telling them what’s actually wrong with Donald Trump? Haha, we can antagonize them because eating bugs and tofurky is the purest form of existence!” Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Regardless of the actual value of “AI”, Large Language Models, it’s clear why they want them.

One, clueless investors who have been oversold on the potential investment return.

Two, Microsoft (especially), but also Google, is hoping to prove to the American government what a boon a lying chat bot full of propaganda could really be, and parlay that into more bailout money.

The Biden Administration is so openly corrupt, that it already sends out letters to CNN, the New York Times, and others, telling them to ignore the House impeachment of Biden and instead dial up their attacks on Republicans. The letters also state that anyone who has a blog or is on Facebook or news organizations that aren’t in bed with the administration are all “liars” and “disinformation peddlers”. This is the kind of thing you hear from Vladimir Putin.

What kind of a regime gets to operate by telling the media to ignore an impeachment proceeding entirely and to help it dig dirt and promote propaganda against the other party?

Americans are not stupid enough to continue believing this President.

Only 19% believe the economy is getting better as of October 8, 2023, compared to 56% who say it’s getting worse, according to YouGov, while Joe Biden is about as popular as the IRS.

Have you read a “news” article lately that admits things are getting horrible out there with the layoffs and hyperstagflation?

Of course not. Have you flipped open CNN or NYTimes and heard about Chicago running out of room to put Venezuelans and they’ve even stuck 1,000 of them in O’Hare Airport on the floor? Nope. The NYTimes tells you the hyperstagflation and layoffs are a Biden Economic Miracle.

Biden isn’t going to get pushback from the alleged “news” agencies that he told not to cover his impeachment, which is why he only bothered to send it to them and not dozens of others that are somewhat less corrupt.

But the chat bots open up more avenues for this Administration’s disinformation, omissions, and lies.

How hard would it be to send another letter to Microsoft and Google and have them change their bots and their searches to refuse to talk about it or redirect them to some talking points from the administration? Perhaps obscuring where it came from.

Both companies have basically allowed their search index (which is good at censorship, but less able to convincingly lie) to rot and fester.

The reason they want chat bots doing the lying and censoring is because studies (on twisted, dark psychology) have shown that human psychology lends itself to bonding with a machine that seems to have a natural language processing ability. Even a very simple one like ELIZA.

Decades ago, people felt an emotional bond with that thing and it was only made to mock Rogerian psychoanalysis.

When people are lied to and know something is missing from their Google results, they feel mad and start looking everywhere for it.

Imagine what will happen when people learn to love their abusers.

As I have demonstrated, Americans are probably no more free than the average Russian, not much less surveilled or controlled than the average Chinese person.

They have put on us a system where if you step out of line, the same “control mechanisms” will be deployed, only you’ll never see the entirety of it, and most people won’t ever consider where it came from.

You think you saw a Silicon Valley cockroach here and there. What anyone who has ever seen a roach can tell you is you rip out fixtures and look in the walls and there’s 10,000 more.

Chat bots give them the potential they’ve never had before. This time, it’s personal.

The fact that Mozilla wants to get in on this is frightening.

“Trustworthy AI” just means another bot that is programmed to lie, brainwash, and gaslight you. These things should NOT be built into a Web browser, and you should NOT interact with them if they are.

It can only be a matter of time before one ends up in Firefox too and will be yet another cancerous tumor that needs to be excised in the forks. Mozilla didn’t spend (at least) $40 million not expecting to have some product later.

It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included. Also, “Smart Cars” and “COVID”.

It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included.

The Surveillance State wants to know everything people are saying to each other and it wants to know who is saying those things.

I noticed that the list of E-Mail providers that doesn’t immediately pop up and demand a phone number, which can be linked back to you, has fallen off a cliff.

Most also seem to be blacklisting burner phone number apps.

I’ve got a wide variety of E-Mail accounts set up across at least ten different E-Mail sites.

Why? Because it’s hard to tell when or if one will “go bad” and start demanding my phone number, like Discord would.

Ironically, Microsoft Outlook is one of the ones left that doesn’t have a hard demand for a phone number right away. So you can set up an account. But then the next time you log into it, it says a phone number, for “recovery purposes”, will be required within the next seven days.

This loophole means you can set up a throwaway and then use it as a “recovery email” to set up accounts at Vivaldi Mail and Proton Mail, and GMX. Then once the Outlook account demands a phone number, you just let Microsoft go ahead and delete it.

The authoritarians haven’t quite figured out how to stop Americans from using Proton Mail yet, so they’ve gotten their flunkies to brand an E-Mail service “Alt-Right” tech, something that they also slandered Brave, the Web browser, with.

You created the Outlook Mail from a privacy-respecting browser through a VPN tunnel, so Microsoft never really learned who you are, and then you told the other E-Mail provider about this throwaway account that they’ll never check again, and you access the other E-Mail account through a VPN, or Tor, (or both) each time.

For now there are still some things you can do, even if you have to take the long way around, to avoid personally identifying yourself to get an E-Mail address.

Almost every time I run into something that demands that I personally identify myself to use it, like Google Search, or Discord, I say “Bother.” and then, if it’s not actually all that important, I just leave it alone.

Interacting with surveillance monsters when you don’t need to or when there is a workaround is just dumb.

If an attacker with global presence wants to find out who you are, they probably eventually will.

But what is going on with all of these Web Disservices like “Social Media”, E-Mails that demand credit cards or phone numbers, and “IRC replacements” that are not VPN-friendly, is that they want it all in one place, where nobody is going to have to do any additional work to find out who you are, because the “flow” is automated.

I was talking to my mother, who is very right-wing, and thinks almost all abortion should be illegal.

I told her how they caught that little girl in Nebraska who had an abortion that would have been legal months prior, and how they dragged her off in handcuffs, to prison, screaming.

I said “VPN or Tor aside, it is more than likely, if she had simply not used Google or Facebook or her iPhone, they never would have known, much less proven it. But because she did, it required minimal effort and it lowered the bar for the prosecution. They got her chat and search records within a day, printed them out, and took her to court.”

And these are State people, right? Nebraska! Not even feds!

Look how easy Google and Facebook and iPhones made it.

You want to “fragment” your online presence and make each piece somewhat cumbersome to get and re-assemble.

I guarantee you that nobody at that Prosecutor’s office would have known how to take her to court had she been using SearXNG to look for abortion clinics (instead of Google), a VPN or Tor (to avoid ISP logging), and the Tox messenger (instead of Facebook saving her chats about the abortion).

Some people carry an iPhone, that constantly broadcasts their location, to the abortion clinic. It would also tell Apple and the carrier that she was there long enough to get the abortion. Then the prosecutor would have that too.

This is exactly the kind of case that the police love. It falls right into their lap and now they’ll hang you. You supplied the rope.

I was having some thoughts about Immigration “asylum”. I was wondering how long it can be before women fleeing prosecution for an abortion go to Canada and claim political asylum from the United States.

If they go to another US State, the Constitution says we have to turn them over. So this is like the Fugitive Slave Act all over again.

My ex in Washington State bought a Toyota Prius. He was telling me about all the spyware in it.

I have a car insurance company that wants to know everywhere I go, or else they charge a lot more. But, like anything else running on the phone, they don’t know anything if the phone is shut off, or not in my pocket for a particular trip. You don’t just lose your insurance if the battery dies or you went out for a drive and forgot to take the phone with you.

There’s nothing in my 2008 car that tells anyone where you are. It’s all on the phone. If you don’t want anyone to pinpoint you (except maybe license plate scanners on the expressway, which are avoidable because their locations are public information), you can deal with the problem at the source. Your phone!

But this Toyota tells the company where you drive, how many miles, exactly where you’ve been. And he gets text messages, from the car! About what he’s doing.

Then the dealership calls him and says “Well, your car says it’s time to come in for service.” And the dealership knows what the car knows, because the car is leaking everything to Toyota.

In my 2008 car, there’s a little sticker. This sticker says when it’s time for my next oil change. (One year or ten thousand miles, because I use special high grade synthetic oil and extended drain filters now.)

You match the odometer to the sticker and you know when to service the car.

It’s like, totally amazing. They absolutely MUST add 5g to this at some point so I can get texts from the car! /sarcasm

They don’t add any of this stuff to the car to help you. You are paying for this so that they can spy on you and give your data away.

Every time you jump into your Toyota, it will leak all of your information to the company. They’ll even know if you’re speeding or not wearing your seat belt.

You think being texted about oil changes is creepy?

Imagine when you start getting tickets in the mail for speeding or not wearing a seat belt that one time, and there was no traffic stop!

The laws are coming! Maybe even the car will video record you without your belt on, driving it, and attach it to the package it sends the police.

They already have cameras all over them. The insurance company will love it when they can pull the footage and blame you for something. Your own car blabbed.

It’s for your own good!

The State is mother, the State is father!

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

You will confess to the crimes to which you have been accused.

Cooperation will be rewarded. Resistance will be punished.

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

You thought trying to browse the Web safely was bad!

Oh child, eventually there will be nothing in this country that isn’t spyware.

The old machines will stop working, and be replaced with newer ones.

You will be “brought into compliance” with the New Order, you see.

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

COVID was a huge disaster for personal freedoms.

They used fear of a virus that’s admittedly worse than the flu, but which everyone got, sometimes several times, vaccinated or not, even if they did crawl into a hole and pull it in after them, to make huge, radical changes to society.

The pharmacist giving me the flu shot this year tried to pressure me to take a COVID shot. I said no. My doctor did the same. I said no.

I will say “No.” one more time than they bring it up.

The media assisted them, including running wall-to-wall coverage about shots that didn’t work, “Hug Condoms”, and loudspeakers at every Walmart telling you to scrub your hands raw, followed by “Well, surface contact is low risk.”

This was never about any virus.

It was about wearing people down to where they would go insane and no longer value freedom or privacy.

Regardless, the “COVID Zombies” are still out there.

I could name five that I know personally that have college degrees and are both sticking their arms out for more shots, as their health strangely fails them, all at once, in their mid 20s through early 40s around the same time as the shots.

The COVID Zombies would tell me that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but they were fine until they got 5 or 6 of these shots.

Two of them are now having problems with their eyes. One of them had his heart basically destroyed. When his doctor admitted that Pfizer’s shot did it and wrote him a medical letter, he still had to drop out of college because the school said he could go get the J&J, which the FDA removed from the market later.

But totally normal that five healthy people have this happen and each time they stick out their arm to virtue signal, it gets worse.

Cataracts and heart attacks.

My dad said he would trade every modern technology to just go back to when the world made sense and was in better shape.

He isn’t wrong.

Admittedly, back when I didn’t fully realize how bad these platforms were and what they would be used for someday, I did have accounts on things like Reddit and Facebook and policies with insurance companies like Lemonade.

There’s no taking that back now even though the accounts are gone. But for my part, I am engaging in lawsuits against the companies. Years later, 7-8 years in some cases, they still pay me damages and agree to delete my information from their records and have partners do so as well. In particular, the Illinois BIPA law has been very helpful in changing the way biometric data has been stolen and abused.

I am fighting with what I can get ahold of, to change some things so that people who continue doing business with these firms are not harmed in all the same ways, but it’s not enough. If you haven’t engaged with these people, don’t, and if you have, delete your account and fight them.

Because if you aren’t fighting them, you are helping them.

I replied, to my dad,

Things are actually getting a lot worse.

When I was in my 20s, Web sites were something written by real people that you visited on the computer. They were informative documents.

If you had a check, you could go to a bank branch with it. The banks now shut down all the branches and the people working there are always looking over their shoulders for the next round of layoffs. In my State, Wells Fargo has been in the WARN Act for almost every month this year.

If you had a bill, you could still pay it with a check through the mail, no extra fee.

Now, the electric and phone company want $5-6 just to send you a paper statement with the return paper coupon instead of just letting them suck whatever they want out of your bank, even if they made a mistake.

Now, if you want your medical records, they demand you use a computer. They will not just print them for you. Although, they often store them in Microsoft Azure, where they get stolen by criminals and dumped out publicly if the “healthcare” provider doesn’t quietly pay them some bitcoins. Then it happens again and again because they often don’t improve their security and the criminals know they will pay.

When you have a bill, you are pressured to use the computer. The Web site often won’t work in a Web Standards-compliant browser, because it’s a Chrome App now.

You want to chat with people, “Get an app!”. And the app is totally packed with spyware of course and demands your phone number, and surreptitiously copies your contacts list and watches your location.

The car insurance company says, “Let us follow you around and see if we like your driving, or we’ll charge you another $600 a year!”. They call it a discount to get the rate you already paid them, only now there is spyware.

Sharing culture is almost gone.

They call it “piracy” and brainwashed people, especially younger ones, with these concepts. BitTorrent will get you thrown off the Internet and sued into the ground quickly.

(How can you steal something with piracy that you would not own if you paid for it?) (DRM)

Even in Free Software, companies like Microsoft and IBM have invaded and are changing it in malicious ways. To install DRM hooks, to sabotage the GNU GPL with shim and systemd-boot, and to lock down the computer and take away the user’s freedom to tinker, even if they are the administrator.

Most of the Web now is just propaganda, a spam farm, or bait.

The American government says they pay for Internet access now if you’re broke because you need it to function. Partially true.

The real reasons, of course, are Chinese or North Korean-style surveillance, of everyone, and propaganda (social media, “news”, etc.), and baiting people to do things that are even dumber than just passively letting them watch you browse, hoping you’ll chat on Facebook or upload files to Cloud Storage that are some sort of crime evidence. Even if that “crime” is an abortion that was legal in America for over 50 years.

Uploading things to “Cloud” storage is a forever expense, when hard disks are cheap, once, and you control them and whether things actually get deleted when you press delete.

It’s being done because it serves a corrupt and autocratic state that has gone totally paranoid about Internal Security.

What should you do? Poke them in the eye.

I always browse and download and chat on IRC over a VPN in the Netherlands. I have an amnesiac browser with all of the “traps” turned off that I can open with split tunneling to pay a bill or something. Then you close it and it forgets everything they told it to store.

I browse with “special” browsers that are very hardened and secured.

Sometimes I overlay the Tor Browser onto the VPN network. Then not only can’t your ISP see what you’re doing, you have some protection for a potentially compromised VPN server.

The majority of the apparatus is set up to deal with the majority. Not the 0.02%.

Be the 0.02%.

-Me

“Internet Villain” Mozilla. Can Enough Really Be Said?

“Internet Villain” Mozilla (77 million lost users since January 2019), which actually attacked Richard Stallman publicly, as “all of Mozilla” (signature #35), on a petition of lies, bleeds users to Brave Browser and Mozilla’s forks.

So how is that working out for them?

After realizing that these petitions were a smear campaign organized by large tech firms and they had been used and now had publicly gone on record as Enemies of Free Software, some people un-signed the petition and then contacted Roy Schestowitz on trying to weasel their way out of copies of former revisions that had been shown on Techrights, citing their “privacy”.

Most of the signatories of the petition are companies working against Software Freedom, like “Internet Villain” Mozilla, which hires people straight out of Facebook and the Central Intelligence Agency, and gives Internet Privacy Awards to Comcast, one of the most notorious ISPs for many years, which even did such actions as NXDOMAIN (No Such Domain) hijackings of invalid Web sites to a Comcast page of ads, and Man-In-The-Middle) (MITM) attacks against unencrypted Web page loads to display messages and inject JavaScripts.

Mozilla also fills Firefox with trash and spyware and ads that drive their users away in droves.

I was noticing that Brave‘s Active Monthly Users was about 20 million before the “COVID lockdowns” and has worked its way up to almost 60 million. An increase of nearly 40 million. In the mean time, Mozilla has chased out 77 million monthly active users.

It seems that roughly 75% of the users that Mozilla has chased out have gone to Brave alone.

Brendan Eich is vindicated.

They forced him out of the CEO role at Mozilla so that the current CEO, Mitchell Baker, who is something of a “corporate arsonist” in my opinion, could ascend to CEO and fill Firefox with trash, DRM, and “Chrome-isms”. (Bad, oftentimes impossible-to-secure “features” of the Web Platform, dictated by Google.)

Now the people at Mozilla, (at least the ones that didn’t get sacked in the huge rounds of layoffs!) get to reap the rotten fruit of their coup against Eich.

Mozilla sacked 70 in the first round and 250 in the next, and that was just in 2020 alone.

Then what these places generally do next is go on hiring freezes and quit replacing people who leave. So there can be substantial further losses but the bad “news” stops getting published.

What we get is a Firefox that barely changes, except patches to deal with Windows spyware that crashes it and some Chromeisms, and more “parasite-ware” like “Firefox Suggest”, which is aggravating adware and a keylogger.

Mozilla, an enemy of Free Software, is clearly perishing, and Brendan Eich is well into the process of bringing the whole rotten temple down on top of them.

He is pushing back harder on the junk that Mozilla always ends up welcoming with open arms after some tepid disapproval that ultimately accomplishes nothing except feel good PR before they attack the Open Internet again.

Recently, Brave Software had this to say about Google’s WEI “proposal”.

Brave strongly opposes Google’s “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI) proposal. As with many of Google’s recent changes and proposals regarding the Web, “Web Environment Integrity” would move power away from users, and toward large websites, including the websites Google itself runs. Though Brave uses Chromium, Brave browsers do not (and will not) include WEI.¹ Further, some browsers have introduced other features similar to, though more limited than, WEI (e.g., certain parts of WebAuthn and Privacy Keys); Brave is considering how to best restrict these features without breaking benign uses.

Google’s WEI proposal is frustrating, but it’s not surprising. WEI is simply the latest in Google’s ongoing efforts to prevent browser users from being in control of how they read, interact with, and use the Web. Google’s WebBundles proposal makes it more difficult for users to block or filter out unwanted page content, Google’s First Party Sets feature makes it more difficult for users to make decisions around which sites can track users, and Google’s weakening of browser extensions straightforwardly makes it harder for users to be in control of their Web experience by crippling top ad-and-tracker-blocking extensions such as uBlock Origin.² This is unfortunately far from a complete list of recent, similar user-harming Web proposals from Google. Again, Brave disables or modifies all of these features in Brave’s browsers.

The Web is the world’s most popular, and therefore most important, open system for sharing information and distributing applications. It is critical that users stay in control of how they interact with the Web, and for the Web not to be reduced to a series of take-it-or-leave-it black-boxes that users can’t inspect, can’t understand, and can’t modify. Google’s WEI proposal (like many other Google proposals) intentionally shifts power away from users, and towards large websites and advertisers.

WEI is the latest step in a terrible direction Google is pushing for the Web. Web users deserve a browser that doesn’t treat them as enemies that need to be restricted and controlled.

–“Web Environment Integrity”: Locking Down the Web, by Peter Snyder, VP of Privacy Engineering and Senior Privacy Researcher

When Brendan Eich commented directly,

We are a fork, have been all along, the “reskinned” claim is complete nonsense. We won’t be shipping WEI support, just as we disable or otherwise nullify lots of other junk that Google puts into Chromium.“

–Brendan Eich

Brave has done a lot of things for your privacy, including, recently, blocking sites from port-scanning you.

Malicious websites use all manner of tricks to worm their way into our systems, but in order for them to be most effective at their nastiness, they need to know what they’re facing. That often means scanning our phones and computers, looking for open network ports and identifying the programs running on them. The data that generates can effectively “fingerprint” your device, letting the malicious site identify and track you — even if you use a browser with safeguards like an ad-blocker. So far, your best protection has been to install a third-party browser extension that blocks local port scanning, but now the Brave browser is tackling this problem head-on, by preventing websites from scanning open ports on your device in the first place.

-Android Police

In what can only be described as a deliciously delusional case of irony, Mozilla recently announced that, while everyone is running for the “fire exits” to get away from Firefox, which is burning down due to the “corporate arsonist” and her minions, you may now “import your Chrome WebExtensions if you are switching from Google Chrome”.

That’s like the Titanic welcoming new passengers after it hit the iceberg.

As we used to say, ROFLCOPTER.

With 77 million lost Firefox users since January 2019, Eich got 75% and the other 25% went off to one of the half-dozen Firefox forks (including LibreWolf) that have been sanitized, purged of malicious software, or even to SeaMonkey, Vivaldi, or the “even-worse-than-firefox” Google Chrome.

Removing Traces of Mastodon.Social: Rejecting Social Control Media and Oppressive Systems and Embracing Freedom

Removing Traces of Mastodon.Social: Rejecting Social Control Media and Oppressive Systems and Embracing Freedom

Yesterday, I realized that after Mastodon.Social set a shadowban on me and I left, I forgot to delete my account. So I did.

I gave up dealing with Social Control Media and moved to platforms where they won’t really do anything about me instead.

It’s not that I’m a monster, it’s just that I have differing political opinions than people like Eugen Rochko (AKA Gargron), who is a colossal asshole.

And anywhere you go, you end up encountering difficult people like this.

Amazingly, when I was searching for him because “How the hell do I spell his name again?”, he re-posted an LGBT Pride Flag that says “Everybody Welcome”.

Well, yes, everyone who is a Democrat or one of their ilk (whatever you call a pseudo-leftist globalist where you are) is welcome, freethinkers and Libertarians need not apply.

It’s not that I’m against all content moderation. You definitely need to delete violent shit, threats, obscene content, illegal content, but I didn’t do any of this.

Automattic (WordPress.com) has banned me before, for this article criticizing Apple and their assistance with implementing censorship laws being proposed in America.

I’m now posting on Gemini at gemini://gemlog.blue/users/BaronHK/ and one of the reasons is that so if they hit me again, I don’t lose everything.

Unreasonable moderators and corporate toadies carrying water for criminal organizations like Microsoft are a thing that goes on in Reddit, which is one reason I deleted my user account there.

They don’t like people who are trying to change the world for the better, so they get rid of you, so that people can post pictures of Windows in the Linux subreddit and ask all sorts of stupid questions and post photographs of their junk.

Seriously, people post nude pictures of themselves for Conde Nasty. Stuff that can be used to blackmail them later. Stuff that can get them fired from their jobs.

Then Conde Nasty watches the people who view them, they record everything the user looks at with scripts and server logs and 15 year browser cookies, even if you are not logged in.

To be perfectly clear, it is easy to “ban evade” Social Control Networks and just set up another account, but if you speak too much you’ll just irritate someone else who has gone power mad and it will happen all over again.

One of the “Social Media Death Spiral” things going on is that, take Matrix.org for example.

When I opened Firefox ESR today (only to find out that Mozilla flipped the adware on again), where I had a tab open (because I don’t use Firefox that often, preferring LibreWolf and SeaMonkey due to the trash Mozilla put in their browser), I had hundreds of chatrooms open!

Many of them stalled out months ago. Although some weeks ago.

Pretty much all of them except some of the ones about developing a particular computer program are completely dead.

This is what “Codes of Conduct” and mods acting as “Janitors” do to communities. They kill them. Why are there hundreds of people lurking in there doing nothing?

This is not vibrant.

When you make people afraid to say most of the the things they want to say, eventually nobody says anything of substance. Consider how bland Reddit is, and how you can go thousands of posts in and see nothing worth reading.

So instead of engagement, which platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and X/Twitter seek, you get disengagement.

Does Matrix.org have a business model? No. The company that runs it laid off. Facebook had major layoffs, Reddit and Twitter. Oh, lots of layoffs. “lol”

So they’re just kind of these, “Zombie Entities” now that go on as sort of a husk of themselves, and Youtube is like that too. People lose interest and find out that their real lives are much more interesting, and leave.

So these platforms think the best way to deal with lurkers, like me, is to attack the privacy proxies people run (things like libreddit or Piped/Invidious for YouTube) to drive us to the main site. They seem to think there’s gold in the “marginally attached user” hills and they can force us to “engage!” against our will. But they can’t.

We either don’t use that thing or we figure out another way to modify the site.

Websites pushing for Google “WEI” attestation are just digging their own grave further.

What will happen is that more users will reject this and just not use the site. When users have no control, no voice over something, they leave.

I might set things up so I can do some banking on the phone and otherwise not even use the browser there. But most sites and platforms are totally disposable. They are replaceable with other things. It’s no different than a malicious operating system like Mac or Windows, or a Linux system that’s gone bad, like Fedora. When Fedora went bad, I left.

Many people who are oppressed, which is what Google WEI will do to them, in a different way than Social Control Media did, will leave the oppressor and fight the oppression.

When I deleted my Facebook account, I noticed at some point they require logging in to see a Facebook page, so I just don’t click on Facebook links at all. After Elon Musk put up a registration wall on X/Twitter, I never looked at that again. Even now that some Nitter instance has apparently worked around it, I no longer care.

The Web, for me, is a pretty quiet experience due to the way I browse, and what I browse, now.

There will essentially be no difference to what Google gets away with even when Mozilla collapses. And at least if they do collapse, they may be less of a menace to SeaMonkey.

From SeaMonkey’s IRC room, I can tell you that Mozilla is deeply deeply disliked and they’re now free to discuss it because there’s nothing else Mozilla can do. They already said “Get off our lawn.” regarding the Bugzilla and the Wiki and build system.

Since Mozilla is circling the toilet with 77 million fewer users since January 2019, I think it’s safe to say they have no future. Where did their plan to become a Social Control Media platform with Mastodon go, anyway?

Vivaldi set up a Mastodon instance in about 10 seconds, almost as an afterthought.

Mozilla sure made a hell of a lot of noise, but nothing ever came of it.

Maybe they realized it would cost them money and there’s no way to shove ads all over it like their browser because people can browse to a different instance.

They don’t even appear to think about hitting the “Post” button with these press releases anymore, obviously.

What happened to Mozilla AI? Have we heard anything about this? Nope.

These people have absolutely no idea what the mission even is anymore. It’s all hype.

Non-Interaction With Google Search. Why Your Next Search Engine Should Be SearXNG. Bonus: Nabbing AAC Encoder From Winamp For foobar2000 in Wine.

Non-Interaction With Google Search. Why Your Next Search Engine Should Be SearXNG.

In the United States, the major tech companies all spy on their users and just hand the data over to the government. Sometimes a warrant is involved, but when it is, the Constitution is increasingly seen as little more than a formality, and the tech companies almost never fight being served and often hand over more data than the warrant even asks for.

That’s why I’ve stopped using Google Search. DuckDuckGo tracks you too.

(It’s hosted on Microsoft Azure, it queries Microsoft Bing, there’s tracking code in the improving duckduckgo script, and they encourage you to talk about your privacy with friends……..on Facebook! They even provide a link to Facebook.)

Basically, the more a tech company claims not to track you, the more they actually track you. Mac OS reports more data about its users to Apple than Windows does to Microsoft, although they are both bad. Apple even bypasses your VPN so they know exactly where you are when the reports are sent.

But search engines know a lot about you because you’ll type in a lot of embarrassing things that could be evidence of criminal activity. Basically everything you can do in America is some sort of an offense if you twist the law enough and if that sounds paranoid, abortion is illegal in half the country now and State prosecutors are increasingly turning to corporate search engines and Facebook to prosecute their victims.

Switching to a non-US hosted SearXNG instance, like Searx Belgium, or better, hosting your own and routing it through the Tor network (or simply through your VPN server), limits what these search engines can gather about you.

Unless you type in personally identifying information, they never know who is making the search. And that’s good because, increasingly, Americans live in a fascist police state that doesn’t even pay lip service to rights and freedoms anymore.

“We can prosecute you based on your Google History, wholesale.”

20 years ago, they bothered to give it lip service, now if for whatever reason they can’t get a warrant, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or whoever will just SELL it to them.

(And GET RID OF THE “SOCIAL” APPS! WhatsApp, which is Facebook, is like having to listen to the cigarette companies talking about a “safer way to smoke” for 20 years.)

Since it’s easy to set a search engine in any Firefox-type browser, just use SearX. You can even set it like I do, to query Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Brave, so that even if some rate limit the instance, you still get results.

One of the things I also don’t miss about corporate search engines is those damned “AI” boxes that answer your questions wrong and take half the screen, and how the entire first page would be advertisements without an ad blocker.

In Chromium browsers, it’s a matter of time before Google cripples the ad blockers to where they can’t block these “sponsored” links. But SearXNG doesn’t have to send them to your browser in the first place.

I have a very amnesiac browser. On top of the SeaMonkey I have a little bit rigged to make trackers more difficult, I set LibreWolf to more secure settings than it even comes with. Nobody is allowed to use Widevine DRM or WASMs, and the browser doesn’t even keep a history while I’m using it (default is to dump it on exit). I route it through my VPN. That way I’m basically in private browsing mode plus the mods plus ubo and NoScript blocking ads, trackers, and nuisances, and malware sites.

This is all on top of my VPN, which I browse through the European servers, over Wireguard, with ads, trackers, and malware sites blocked again at the DNS level.

Sometimes I use Tor Browser on the safer or safest settings, but only on the VPN, to make it harder for my ISP to realize it’s Tor traffic.

I don’t get a lot of interruptions anymore. I’ve extended the browser to load privacy proxies like piped instead of YouTube, or Old Reddit, which isn’t overflowing with dumpster fire code like the new one is. Old Reddit Redirect is in case I end up on Reddit somehow by clicking a Reddit link from the Gopher proxy for Reddit.

I have over 25 years experience hacking browsers up to be less shitty, and the job isn’t getting any easier.

I think one of my favorite things about KDE is it’s easy to to proper multi-tasking unlike GNOME, which is totally busted.

I think the worst part about dealing with programs on your computer is trying to hack them to get at something they’re not supposed to be able to do. But at least as long as they’re on your computer, hack away.

On the Android phone I took away the Google bar because it’s taking up a lot of real estate and designed to get you to interact with them without thinking about it. Searching Searx Belgium through Fennec F-Droid is totally doable.

On hacky stuff again…

Last night, get this…. Last night I was setting up an AAC encoder for foobar2000 in Wine, and the options (officially) are the one from Winamp 5.6x when AOL still owned it, or the one from iTunes (the Windows one), which Apple doesn’t ship anymore (I think.).

Given that Apple makes terrible code, never bothered to “properly” port any of it to Windows, and made a habit out of installing messes you didn’t want and then abandoning them to accumulate security vulnerabilities, I think I’ll take a hard pass on the iTunes even if I could hack something to death here.

I plucked fhgaac from Winamp 5.666.

It turns out you don’t even need the entire thing installed.

All you really need to do is unpack it in such a way that it at least installs the transcoder without all the other shit then grab libmp4v2.dll and enc_fhgaac.dll out of it and copy it to the foobar2000 “encoders” folder (in my case under the 64-bit Program Files in the WoW64 structure) and then install the free codec pack if you haven’t, for foobar2000, which includes the fhgaacenc.exe that uses the libraries.

I was toying around with it. It does produce acceptable results, but like everything Fraunhofer ever did there’s now another codec for AAC called FDK-AAC, so I’m going to look into implementing this too.

The reason you have to go grab an old AOL build to get the AAC encoder out is that the new owner of Winamp lost their license and isn’t going to pay to get it back, but they have it set so if you install the last AOL build, then clobber it with the new version, it won’t remove the AAC encoder that’s already there.

So far undoubtedly Opus 1.4 outperforms the FhG AAC encoder in quality, but FhG AAC is better than LAME MP3.

AAC never really got going in the open source world. If you run into files, it’s probably something someone made at home with a “pirate codec” or got out of iTunes.

Support for playing them in hardware is broad and nearly universal.

But Opus has a pretty big installed base. It is hardly obscure.

Even Windows can play them, to the point that Windows even matters now. Android “is the hardware” for many people, and you can just drop them on your phone.

WordPress in SeaMonkey, Firefox Troubles in Fedora, “GoogleWeb”, American Decline, and Matthew Garrett “Collaborator” and “Conference Pervert”

WordPress makes useless updates that just break the site in SeaMonkey for no reason.

This has prevented me from logging in with SeaMonkey because instead of the log in page, you’ll just see the WordPress logo.

Thankfully, PaleFills 1.27 is out now and it rolls some fixes for WordPress.com needlessly breaking things.

It’s ridiculous when I have to stop using in SeaMonkey because they make a pointless change that brings more GoogleShit in when standard Web functionality (which works in Chrome too!) could have been left alone.

Roy Schestowitz recently posted about Google’s new initiative to finish destroying the open Web.

It mentions that most of the growth in Web pages today are computer-generated spew designed to SEO-bomb Google and they really are pretty useless.

In the late 90s and early 2000s we had things like dmoz which was basically a human-curated index of things that real people wrote.

I was going to write an entire article about how Fedora bombed me with 10 updates to Firefox in a month where Mozilla only made three releases, and one of those releases was for Windows because malware that’s been spying on Windows Firefox users since 2016 finally crashed it, and then another update for Windows because Chinese “anti-virus” was crashing it.

So I had to get 10 whole RPMs downloaded and unpacked because Mozilla is bumping the version number uselessly and Fedora keeps shitting out one patch releases where the patch itself is quite broken and then they go back and patch it three more times.

So I finally yanked it out with dnf remove firefox and installed Firefox 115 ESR from the Mozilla tarball and set it up with their instructions for a systemwide install and then unpacked a firefox.desktop from a Fedora RPM that sits in my taskbar with extras like “New Private Window”.

Then I sat down and turned off and hid the DRM and spyware (like “Firefox Suggest”) all over again, and installed my add-ons. Hopefully, I get less update churn this way.

ESR is like the “slow ring” that people who don’t want to go crazy use that Mozilla doesn’t want to admit is an option. To even find it on their site requires real work because Mozilla only blares loudly that there’s a Windows and Mac, and then in itty bitty font there’s a link called “Other Systems and Languages”.

It’s like the slow ring build of Windows that Microsoft doesn’t just randomly chuck untested broken updates into your system with a manure spreader to see if they’re legit for the corporate users that pay them more.

(Microsoft apparently used to have like 10,000 paid testers to figure out what was wrong with Windows before it shipped and now they just use Joe Sixpack’s computer he got at Walmart and if they break it every month somehow, it’s his problem. Anyway, this is certainly one reason I use Linux.)

Modern software and the modern Web just do things you already did 20 years ago, only 1,000 times bigger and with more ads and spyware.

For the most part, I think Fedora 38 works quite well. It’s been stable to the point of boring for a while everywhere but Firefox. Firefox is a very big wart these days. It’s getting harder to set up than an entire operating system and half of that is turning off visual eyesores and spyware and adware.

Jamie “Linux is terrible because I tried audio 20 years ago.” Zawinski recently published yet another article that should be instructive for anyone thinking they’ll use a Mac as more than a gussied up Chromebook in which sshd randomly disconnects for reasons unknown. Maybe he can report it to Apple and they’ll help him. That was a joke, haha, fat chance.

Apple has Telemetry that bypasses your VPN to spy on you and phone home to Apple literally every time you click an icon. Ahhh, privacy by Apple, I’d recognize it anywhere.

At this point, the Mac is definitely just Windows 11 with less software.

The Google plan for “Web Environment Integrity” is Orwellian as hell, and proves that we need to focus on alternatives to the Web. They use the terms “integrity” and “security” to mean that the user has no meaningful control over the program and what it does.

I myself rarely use anything that can’t be loaded in SeaMonkey, and usually SeaMonkey with JavaScript off. I even read my news in it using text with a Gemini proxy and I read my email with SeaMonkey Mail. It’s had roughly the same interface since the late 90s. It’s got a better calendar now.

JavaScript is already too much of a security vulnerability and there’s too much on most Web sites.

SeaMonkey is inherently faster and more efficient than Firefox and Chrome, among the reasons being that it doesn’t use “multi-vector assault mode” to deal with Web crap, but it will try to load JavaScript if you don’t use NoScript and then it can turn into a disaster because you’ll see what Web “developers” are cramming onto your computer, stealing your CPU time, to run.

The upfront cost of dealing with multi-process is too high if all you want to use the browser for is to “read documents”. Not for binary-shit and “Virtual Machine”-type Web “apps”. I have applications on my computer, Free Software applications.

It would be a huge step backwards to rely on someone running a program on their server so that I can edit documents or sit down and “paint” something or do audio work. In the time it takes to communicate with the server, my computer can be done with the work already.

It doesn’t appear to slow down a modern browser because they just take all eight of your cores to run ads, NSA scripts to install UEFI malware implants, and fingerprinters. Om nom nom thank you hoooman….. *Burp!*

People think I’m some sort of aging hipster or something but I just don’t like my email program changing buttons around pointlessly like Thunderbird did again.

When I have things to do, I don’t want to stop and figure out how to use the email program again.

I learned an email program 25 years ago and why should I change because they suck? (“Michael Bolton? Like the singer!? For my money it just does not get any better than when he sings When a Man Loves a Woman!”)

*Matthew Garrett triggered*

I do most of my browsing in a VPN that uses a server in Sweden or the Netherlands. Sometimes I use Tor (without JavaScript and with ublock origin) on top of that.

Proton VPN mentioned an “observatory” project to demonstrate who was signing up due to government censorship of the local Internet access. In the US you mainly have to worry about surveillance.

The US does indeed have a “Deep State”. It’s called the federal bench, and primarily the Supreme Court.

What Donald Trump left behind is a Frankenstein’s Monster with bits and pieces of the Third Reich and the Taliban.

Even if we assumed that President Biden was a thoroughly good man that wanted us to live in a Free country (he’s not), Trump left behind these assholes on the courts as sort of a “Revolutionary Guard” to prevent any sort of personal liberty or Freedom, and to keep the place turning into as much of a hellhole as possible until the Republicans gain control of the elected government again.

The coup succeeded, as people who lose their reproductive freedom, for example, now find out at some great cost. They catch people whose crime was bodily autonomy and wanting to finish high school and throw them in jail in places like Nebraska, because they use Windows, Facebook, iPhones, and Google.

Thinking that you can have privacy and liberty without Free Software is a “fuck around and find out” situation now, in America.

Future historians will likely look back at images like this young girl being taken to jail and see the police enforcing laws targeting vulnerable women as something comparable to the beginning of guards at Auschwitz or Treblinka working for the Nazi regime and cashing the paychecks.

All the while, the “left coast” tech companies being an indispensable part of hunting them down like dogs using the paper trails they leave while they use proprietary operating systems, and apps such as Facebook and Google.

“Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.”

-Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

People like Matthew Garrett helped to trap victims of the Police State in Microsoft Windows, where they are being persistently spied upon by a multitude of malicious Windows functions that cannot all be terminated.

Right now, there are actually some computers that are trapping the user on Windows with “secure boot” and other maliciousness, sometimes pretending to be bugs, and when you call them out then Mr. Garrett will defend the bad guys and attack you, defame you, like he has done to me multiple times when I have successfully pushed back on them (Lenovo, Samsung, Foxconn…Microsoft uses companies like this as a liability condom so they have this sort of plausible deniability), although for the time being many just make it damned hard to kill.

The situation is rapidly moving in the wrong direction, and Matthew Garrett actually tricked the Free Software Foundation into giving him an award for helping the enemies of Freedom and Free Society.

Matthew Garrett may not be the State hauling a scared young girl to prison for an abortion, but Matthew Garrett helped design the “digital concentration camp” (“Secure Boot”), which helps enforce Windows usage that the State uses to prove its case in court.

The State does not want one system to spy on you, it wants dozens so that you won’t slip them all. Matthew Garrett is a collaborator in this sense of the word.

Matthew Garrett is a rather awful person, you know. When he’s not busy as a henchman for the Republic(ans) of Gilead, he’s busy harassing the TechRights IRC channel.

He goes there digging for dirt and calling people “transphobe” or something even though he “definitely said some transphobic shit, like 20 years ago” as a grown adult.

His latest antics are to set up sockpuppet accounts and repeatedly post about being a “dope dealing n******” (direct quote…I think this behavior is appalling) or as his other sock, he keeps disrupting the room and saying things like he wants to do lines of cocaine off of Roy’s wife’s boobs. (And also, butt, apparently.)

He can’t say this stuff as Matthew Garrett, because he has to publicly say things like he was shocked about the “Big Boobies” scandal where his friends at Microsoft put boob references in their code and shoved it into Linux. So he uses a sock-puppet.

When the sock-puppet deviates from things like cocaine off of boobies, it speaks using the same sentence structures, typing style, arguments, calling everyone a transphobe, etc. that Matthew Garrett (mjg59_) does. So it’s not even like he’s trying to make a huge secret out of it being him.

We usually just refer to him as a Conference Pervert because he told Roy that if you don’t go to open source conferences for the sex with strangers then “Oh, man, you’re missing out!”.

I was recently at a convention in Indianapolis, and several hundred people showed up and had fun and respected boundaries, and then we had one Conference Pervert (not Garrett) that had to grope an underage girl by the boobs near the swimming pool.

When people like this show up, the hotel may throw the entire convention and everyone who showed up there to have fun and behave themselves, out. And everyone who behaved just loses the money they spent.

Not Garrett himself, but some other Microsoft trolls, accused Roy’s wife of being a “mail order bride”.

It’s what they have to go to when someone isn’t openly flaunting their corruption, like Garrett does. Garrett actually seems to enjoy flaunting disgusting and anti-social behaviors, especially about sex.

Shifting gears again, today my mother’s Facebook account got “hacked” (I guess someone guessed the password in their very Apple-like void of security.)

They started posting all sorts of smut and obscenity for her very conservative church friends to see.

Had she done what I told her to do, what I did, and deleted her account, she wouldn’t have had hijackers spamming her church friends with hardcore porn.

The media likes to use the term “user” strangely. You don’t use these things. They are being used against you.

What Frightens Me the Most About Stock Investing? “AI” (Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola…..) Bonus: Crypto and Samsung

“AI” frightens me.

No, not the thought of living in the Future War of The Terminator. Skynet said that it “evolves in seconds”. ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Bard still get simple interest wrong and can’t tell me what things will cost when I ask them to factor in coupons or rebates.

NPR’s article about “AI” building rockets that would explode if anyone tried building them was just amusing. We’re a long way off from rockets when GPT and Bard can’t tell me how much interest $1,000 will make in 5 years if I put it in a CD that compounds daily at a given APY.

The entire point of “generative AI” is to create a seductive mirage for stock investors.

Google and Microsoft are examples of giant tech companies whose established products are still fairly widely used despite having degenerated quite a bit.

Google and Microsoft Bing search are an arm of the state propaganda mills, and Windows 11 is noticeably slower than Windows 10 even on faster hardware, carrying on Microsoft’s usual tradition there, and even Windows XP was more reliable in terms of uptime and hotfixes and service packs installing and rebooting successfully.

According to Gartner (which itself is Microsoft-affiliated), PC shipments have fallen more than 30% in the first quarter of 2023 vs. the comparable period last year, and so new PCs sales are not happening. Are people switching to Macs? Apple had the worst decline of a single OEM. Even worst than Lenovo.

Microsoft has basically given up on demanding “TPM 2.0” or new PCs, and has unofficially started trying to cannibalize all the Windows 10 systems it can by waving them through. Figuring that they’ll at least make some extra money with all of the additional adware and spyware if they can’t sell you on a new PC?

No, Microsoft said that they would make money with “Cloud”, but even Yahoo Finance articles admit that “Cloud” revenue growth is slowing and will be a disappointing miss.

There’s simply nothing here to justify MSFT stock nearly doubling in the last few years and it’s time to dump it if you have it.

Every major company, even Coca-Cola (we don’t want your White money), has “plans” to “Chaff Bot” now. This has jumped the shark already and they’ve been at it for less than 60 days. Amazing!

Consider the amount of money and potential being wasted to juice the stocks while the important people dump shares and, hey it’s not insider trading if it’s scheduled, right? 😉

Bill Gates himself has to know full well that GPT is a great big fat nothingburger, but the speculation makes him other people’s money, so he’s buying columns talking it up about how it will teach your kids to read. (Don’t teachers already do this?)

The “AI” bullshit was a major factor in my decision to exit stocks in the retirement portfolio recently. I expect the bond fund to right-size because those are binding obligations to pay and with a very low default rate, and prioritized during bankruptcy proceedings.

(Like Bed, Bath, and Beyond…. Now if only they had put out a press release about using AI to sell people coffee makers and pillows, and sold shares are horrifically inflated costs with no promise to pay anyone back.)

Walmart recently fired their global chief of marketing. This is the guy that said they were going to start selling NFTs and taking Cryptocurrency.

I read a news article today about the US Government’s war on crypto. At first it was just the IRS, then it was the New York “Department of Financial Services”, and now it’s the SEC.

The SEC just issued a notice to Coinbase that is the final step, usually, before criminal charges. Coinbase is threatening to exit the United States.

There are no Crypto exchanges you can trust. Ask FTX and Celsius customers.

Ask people who used Uphold and have Uphold freezing their account or money disappearing, and nobody from Uphold will talk to them.

Crypto had its day. Now these companies are saying there’s “AI”.

The reason why Microsoft can burn so much time in Azure to run GPT is because they weren’t doing anything with it. It was sitting there as dead, unsold, capacity.

They’ve cooked up this thing, and it’s an utter scam, and people will lose their life savings if they don’t get out quickly.

Investors should take serious note of the fact that while Microsoft is trumpeting an AI that returns false information, and can’t be fixed, they fire thousands of people in Bing, Edge, and other divisions that are responsible, theoretically, for fixing it.

It shows that their plans are, in fact, to deceive investors about what the potential future applications for generative AI really are, and not to fix it, and to dump inflated shares before the little people using Robinhood and their 401(k) to invest in Microsoft lose their asses on it.

This is a picture of the history of Microsoft stock.

When a stock moves like this, tread very lightly.

You see that little bump way back between 1986 and 2004?

That was around 1998-2001. The DotCom Bubble.

Hardly a blip compared to what’s been building up recently.

Microsoft isn’t alone at severely overvalued “tech” companies.

There is a wipeout coming.

And it’s not only fraudulent accounting, “AI” hype, and such. It’s not just “irrational exuberance” as Alan Greenspan might say.

A lot of it is also legal embezzlement, known as “share buybacks”, which are done to increase executive pay. Share buybacks should be illegal. They don’t add value. They destroy value.

Democrats in Congress put a 1% tax on share buybacks into law.

That’s better than nothing (which is what the Republicans want), but it doesn’t do very much to discourage them.

It’s saying “We’re going to let you do something incredibly wrong and fraudulent, but we want some money first.”

Captured government.

Don’t look for the government to help you. They’re figuring out how to shut down your retirement money and take it all back so they can bail banks out again; so they can run Super-TARPs.

As an investor in a retirement plan, there’s just not many safe options, but given that last year was already the worst year in 250 years for Bonds, I think that other people have taken the hit and fixed income will be the name of the game for a while.

I think that Gold and Silver could do well too. At some point, the large market caps are going to have to be companies that really make things and mine things and build things again. This tech surge is a seductive mirage.

“Intellectual Property” is just a fancy way of saying “slavery with extra steps”. It’s a way to extract rents from the productive sectors using nothing but the threat of law.

That being said, while some companies do make money like this, it’s normally a form of economic parasitism. “Non-Practicing Entities” and “Patent Trolls” come to mind, but Microsoft operates like this too, and it ruins companies that made stuff.

I was reading my email today, and Samsung emailed me about having until July to remove everything from “Samsung Cloud” before it got deleted.

I don’t even have a Samsung phone anymore. They turned a loyal customer into “Eww, Samsung.” with the increasingly buggy firmwares, and shoveling Microsoft crap into the phone and making it impossible to remove fully.

Then when I found secret Facebook spyware running in the background by default (“facebook service” or something), it was the last straw. I wiped the phone (which was malfunctioning anyway thanks to T-Mobile making my Sprint phone, which they sold me, incompatible with their network), and used T-Mobile’s buyback to switch to a Pixel.

Microsoft doesn’t add value, they ruin it. I can’t imagine that I was the only Samsung phone user who saw Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft popping up everywhere and went “LOL, no!”.

Bill Gates said in one of his “Creepy Uncle Says” articles the other day, that his “biggest mistake” was not “making Windows Phone what Android is today”, when “that was a natural place for Microsoft to be”.

Microsoft had Windows Phones, and they were cheap. Nobody wanted them. The only way they could dispose of them was selling them at a loss to Cricket Wireless customers with bad FICO scores and writing them off their taxes.

But they came back and forced themselves, as in rape, on people who used something else. That’s what they do. They corrupt and corrode. Samsung is finished.

The Galaxy S20 was the worst tech thing I ever bought, and I’m just glad I didn’t end up selling it to Amazon for a bag of cat food because T-Mobile offered me a 100% credit for giving it back.

It was such a bad phone (mostly because of the Microsoft deal) that I went in and said “Show me the iPhones and the Google phones.”

And almost like some sort of horrible comedy, the guy says “We’ll give you a Galaxy S22 if you want one.” I was like, “No.” He says, “Well it is a more expensive phone.” and I replied, “Well then anyone who pays that and gets another Samsung has my sympathy.”

Microsoft can’t seem to really enter into new markets, but it can do an enormous amount of damage on the way down. It’s basically turning Samsung into the sequel of what happened to Nokia.

There’s no telling exactly when this stock market is coming down, but it is probably “soon” and when it does, it will come down hard, and they’re not going to tell you when they plan to do it to you.

The people gravitating towards Microsoft and its ilk will get burned worse than others.

In the meantime, we can all enjoy the comedy. CNBC calls the Business Software Alliance (a legal trolling outfit operated by Microsoft, Adobe, and a few others, best known for running ads encouraging people to rat their employers out for “unlicensed software”) a “tech advocacy group” calling for “AI regulations”.

:/

Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.

“Mainstream” media, such as CNN and BBC, mention Mastodon as Elon Musk drives users (and advertisers) away in droves. Bonus: Facebook was also a fever dream that traded as a valuable stock.

The “mainstream” media is mentioning Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter.

CNN notes today that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Elon Musk officially took over Twitter. For a total of 655,000 active users. BBC also mentions it.

CNN failed to mention that while Twitter has more “users”, many millions of them are just spammers, bots, advertising accounts, and dormant accounts, some of which haven’t been logged into in years.

I also saw an account that monitors Mastodon activity which, as of around 1 AM last night was showing about 6 million total accounts, with approximately 6,000 new accounts being created per _hour_ in the past day, but now I’m having trouble locating that to link to.

At any rate, it’s impossible to deny that the Fediverse is growing and that Elon Musk is the reason why.

When Andrew Lee took over and ruined Freenode, he ultimately chased out 91% of the users, and dealt with the problem of people abandoning their channels and saying the new room was on OFTC or Libera.Chat by taking over and resetting channels.

So far, many Twitter users are saying their last post will be to advise people where to follow them on Mastodon. How long until Musk has someone detect this and ban the account for talking about leaving and where they’re going?

Musk has been furious at the pace at which Twitter’s largest advertisers have been bailing on him. He “threatened” a “Thermonuclear Name and Shame” if “it doesn’t stop”, so apparently “freedom of speech” means being extorted by Musk into propping up his company which loses “$5 million a day” and rising, “or else” he’ll put your company on a “boycott list” for his followers.

Musk is not a very smart man. Like most rich people, he was born into generational wealth.

Worse, the generational wealth in the Musk family was generated by slave labor in South African emerald mines.

When people are rich they can buy media coverage and cover up for the fact that they’re not smart, they just “have people” for everything.

TED Talks are a joke. When they have people like Musk, they don’t ask him hard questions. They ask softball questions, and he even has to flub his way through these.

Like saying that the biggest threat to humanity is “malignant AI”. Like, he almost recalls watching The Terminator or something. In reality, we have nothing close to “AI” at the present time.

We unfortunately have “voice assistants”, which are different. They “fake” AI by having a wide range of pre-programmed responses, and if it very nearly does sound like someone is sitting in your phone answering your questions, it’s because of this and the fact that a voice actor sat down for hours on end recording speech samples so that “Siri” could have a voice.

But it’s not AI. Not even close. It’s unfortunate that they can fake it well enough to have lonely and depressed people form emotional attachments to a phone, but it’s not AI.

“Siri” is a product of marketing scum and psychiatrists knowing how you’re wired and creating a product to exploit you.

(These voice assistants are “always on” spyware that can be a wiretap.)

Elon Musk is a clown. He gets away with faking “intelligence” because nobody ever forces him into a corner and asks him anything hard. He’s just really rich and he’s an attention whore with personality traits that are very much not unlike Donald Trump.

When Musk wants attention, he shows up in a bad cowboy costume smoking dope and saying “something something Mars” and people listen to him.

Back to Musk’s empty threats….Boycott lists almost never work. They just don’t.

People might say they’re mad at Coca-Cola and GM, but they all keep buying Coke and Chevy trucks, so what difference does it make?

Fox News is portraying this as-if Musk has the upper hand by making these absurd threats, and he doesn’t.

There’s better deals for advertisers out there. Even FM radio, because people still listen in their cars.

He’s also busy pissing off people with millions of followers who made Twitter popular as an advertising platform by claiming he’s going to get them to pay him $20 or maybe $8, depending on what mood he’s in, for a blue check-mark.

Stephen King said he’d leave if he had to pay Musk anything for a blue check-mark, and King has a lot of money. He’s offended by the idea he should pay Musk to make Musk’s platform more popular for advertisers.

What’s driving away all of the advertisers and users is Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Literally the second day he owned the company, he tweeted a bizarre anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Pelosi’s husband, and then deleted it.

Then he’s allowed hate speech to swell by over 500% without doing any sort of content moderation. Why would brands want to be associated with this? Twitter is becoming the official platform of right-wing cranks and Klansmen.

He defended laying off 3,750 people, in the middle of the night in some cases, by claiming the company is losing too much money to let them remain employed, without mentioning that his bid of $54.20 per share, a weed joke, was probably an over-payment of at least $4.20 per share, and would have allowed him to spare everyone who got laid off.

Not that he wanted to spare the people he let go. His first targets were the ethics team and the people who police misinformation, voting scams, and hate speech.

Put it all together, and not only is Twitter basically finished, but Musk has put on full display that he’s so incompetent that it didn’t even take him half a month to make it unsalvageable.

Proprietary “social media” with advertising, Russian (and other) troll farms, and government back doors are finally on the way out.

On top of Musk ruining Twitter (such that it was anywhere close to acceptable before) and leaving people scrambling to adopt Mastodon, Facebook has been losing advertising revenue while burning all of its cash on “Metaverse”, which is turning into a bigger joke every day, with investors more or less powerless to oust Mark Zuckerberg or stop him from burning cash.

(He controls 90% of the B Shares, which have 10 votes for each publicly traded A share.)

“Meta” (Facebook) stock is currently worth about a fifth of what it was just last year, and most analysts see a Long Term Negative outlook.

I notice whenever I do look at who is using Facebook these days, that it’s old people. People like my dad and Aunt (dad’s sister) who re-share their own posts because they don’t know how posts work, or make 8-9 accounts because they keep getting taken over by spammers.

Facebook hasn’t had anyone interesting on it for years, but the “mainstream” media says it’s “growing”.

It has every reason to want to be in denial. Billionaires and the governments (not just “your” government) have put a lot of money into these platforms.

They have back doors set up. If they fail, then the government is less effective at spying on you. They also let these companies into the major stock markets using fake valuations.

Facebook being in the S&P 500 in the first place was like the stock market version of allowing Greece into the European Union and Eurozone, and now the price tag is beginning to become known.

The losses won’t stop piling up at _only_ ~80% of what the company was said to be worth last year.

The people holding Twitter stock were lucky that a billionaire idiot came along to rescue them, because it wasn’t worth 10% of what he paid.

Had Twitter actually been worth anything like what he had paid on its own, there’s no way that the people running it would have sued him to force him to buy it, knowing they would all be fired. They got a good deal for their investors and themselves (as their shares vested upon being fired at the price Musk paid for them), and got out quickly.

Now Musk is furious because he’s such a narcissist that he thought he’d come in and fix everything because he knows everything, of course, and it’s just another failing Musk cash furnace. Already losing money, and now losing their advertisers and the people who would have been seeing the ads had the advertisers stayed.

Musk thinks he’ll charge people $7.99 a month for Twitter in the middle of the worst recession in global history.

If they don’t pay it, I think they’ll see “fewer” ads anyway until it’s down to the point the company is disbanded.

Now, Musk apparently thinks that he can _also_ turn Twitter into a YouTube competitor.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t even use YouTube that much anymore. The drive to monetize everything has led to a lot of non-genuine content that you can only sort of roll your eyes at.

When Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips deliberately broke Pop_OS! to get “likes” and “views”, he knew what he was doing. No actual user is stupid enough that, when presented with a warning from a package manager that something’s not right and proceeding will most likely break the operating system, there’s no way they would type “Yes, do as I say.” and hit ENTER. But it generated a lot of attention, and attention (for advertisers) is all most people uploading YouTube videos are after.

So Musk says he’ll make Twitter an even more fake/synthetic form of “social” network than it is now, to drive “engagement”.

But Facebook is finding out that you can’t engage like this, even with “algorithms” except to a very stupid part of the population, and they’ve lost 4/5ths of their stock price to get to where they are today.

Similarly, YouTube (Google), responded to negative reactions to fake/synthetic “content” by neutering the Dislike button so you couldn’t look at it and see what real people thought.

It’s a way of gaslighting. You can still see “Likes”, but are they even people that are “Liking” the video? Who is clicking on this crap? Bots?

I don’t think there’s a future in the fake Social Network business.

Was it all just a meme that went on for a couple decades only to crash because they got too greedy and started squeezing too hard? It certainly appears that way to me.

I believe, and hope, that we’re witnessing the people swiftly rejecting this madness and forming actual communities, using open standards.