CoreDump

Stallman

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:

https://privacybadger.org/

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal.

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.

But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization

This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while

They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.

The horrendous orange spray paint is a humiliation test to expand submission to MAGA. They will enable anything. See: rape.

Warning: disturbing image

This man created his own Twitter!

He doesn't know anything he wouldn't want to know.

Facebook is, by 25%, the most popular social media system. It has 71% of American Adults. Meaning 30% of Americans aren't even using that. Fewer than that number watch Fox News.

So, a LOT of people get nothing but Facebook and Fox, or absolutely nothing. No news. No online engagement.

100 million Americans who only know what they hear second hand at work, or the bar.

The online world, your news ecosystem, etc ... they are not only curated bubbles for just you, they literally don't even exist for 1/3 of the country.

Trump is 80. He uses Truth Social and watches Fox, and neither is going to tell him his mascara is running.

The lovely Fei-Yen from Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram for Arcades!

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

Click it.

I have this in my playlist of vintage videos to play in the background on the CRT in the Kama Arcade! 😅💜🕹️

A thing that is funny about Max Headroom being used to hock Coca~Cola is that Max Headroom was a cyberpunk dystopia TV series written to criticize network television and the society that it was fostering.

Max Headroom was supposed to be the announcer for a British MTV channel. They made a show to introduce the character, and in that initial version he's left with Big Time, the pirate TV broadcasters, ostensibly to announce Reg's music videos.

Then, they decided to bring it to the US as a show. They sort of tricked a few different companies to fund it for different reasons and ended up getting a TV and Advertising deal. But, they had no real story beyond the idea of him existing.

So, they re-shot the initial show with mostly American actors, and cut the part where Max ends up at Big Time. But, the Coke deal was already signed.

THEN they had to come up with a story, and discovered that no one had really even asked what it was about outside of Max being a parody of a 'talking head'.

The satire of the networks and commercials came last, when they suddenly had no time to write scripts or shoot episodes.

The production was a mad dash, and so they sneaked all sorts of bullshit in. They'd deliver episodes to the censors minutes before the deadline, forcing them to rush to make cuts and only having time to do a single re-cut, allowing a lot to slip through.

The show hadn't been watched by almost a single network exec when it was greenlit for a second season. They just knew Max as a commercial property, not realizing he was taking the piss out of them week after week.

Finally, everything came crashing down. Ratings weren't making the cut, it was up for review, and someone at the network Finally tuned in to see what they'd been broadcasting.

It was shut down suddenly, in the middle of filming an episode.

There's a whole documentary, interviews with the cast, etc ...

There has never, in history, been a time where it is cheaper or easier to install Linux, and run an Open Source forum to invite friends to.