Hackers on Planet Earth

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of January, 2021.

My Experience at Apple January 01, 2021 (comments) (archive since the coward deleted it) An Internet posts the heartwarming story of having narrowly escaped a career working for Apple. Hackernews relates every bad workplace experience they've ever had. Later, Hackernews decides to attack the author of the original article, including deciding that the author must be insane. Hackernews' proof? Questionable typopgraphy.

How to overcome Phone Addiction January 02, 2021 (comments) Hackernews is now just voting up spam blogs, just so they can talk about their favorite smartphone software. Most of it consists of programs designed to inhibit the functionality of the device you bought. One Hackernews is mad that the Marines exist, which seems like a reasonable position. This seemed to be a reasonable position until it became evident that Hackernews had the United States Marines confused with murderous robots, when the proper reason to be mad that the Marines exist is that the Army already has a perfectly serviceable infantry.

Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend January 03, 2021 (comments) The headline is unclear: the numbers in question involve Uber's $150MM online ad budget. In addition, Uber was in fact defrauded out of 100% of their online advertising budget, because every dollar you spend on online advertising may as well have been flushed down the toilet. Since Hackernews' entire life revolves around using Uber to commute to their adtech day job, then using Uber to get to their kickball league with their adtech startup co-conspirators, then using Uber to get back to their loft, this story captivates Hackernews wholly. Half the comments are from Hackernews who are aware that online advertising is worthless and the other half are from other Hackernews insisting the first half is mistaken.

A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize January 04, 2021 (comments) A fraction of a percent of Google's employees build a labor union out of cardboard boxes and packing tape. Google managers begin carefully documenting all of the subpar work output and general behavior problems these employees will have demonstrated by the time someone gets around to firing them. Hackernews has some kind of emotional meltdown over the idea that anyone who knows how to type javascript into a computer would refuse to pretend they are uniquely irreplaceable golden children. Along the way, we are able to determine that Hackernews is not in fact positive what a labor union is, but is happy to tell us what they think other people assume labor unions are. No technology is discussed.

GitHub is fully available in Iran January 05, 2021 (comments) Microsoft expands the pool of lower-income nations they can exploit. A Microsoft arrives in the Hackernews comments to handle bug requests personally, both because there isn't anything better to do with Microsoft's time and because Hackernews comprises the majority of the population of people dumb enough to pay for Github Pro accounts. Hackernews relates every story they have ever heard involving Iran.

WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app January 06, 2021 (comments) Facebook continues the war on its own users. Hackernews is absolutely positive this is the most interesting and important thing to happen on January 6, 2021. There is nothing else that even comes close to being as important as this to talk about on January 6, 2021. Nothing else is even remotely this crucial -- it received 110% the votes of the next-highest-ranked story. A change in the terms of service of a fucking chat program is definitely, for sure, the most important event of January 6, 2021. What could possibly be as important as Facebook software policies? Nothing! Not on January 6, 2021, that's for damn sure!

No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees January 07, 2021 (comments) Gumroad (business model: "Uber for Etsy") explains why it's such a pain in the ass to interact with Gumroad in any meaningful way. Hackernews realizes this country doesn't provide health care and flips the fuck out. Then Hackernews realizes the author basically scammed some venture capitalists and gullible staff into building out a business that put the author firmly into the leisure class, and fights break out over whether this is evil, genius, evil genius, or just sort of a dick move.

Essere chiari è sicuramente uno degli elementi più importanti quando si spiega, si parla o si scrive.

In questo primo episodio de "La posta del Prof." rispondo a una domanda su questi temi.

Mes #TV Memoires

http://giss.tv/dmmdb/index.php?channel=vlax

#Watch :

en mi canal de Giss.TV hay #video clips producidos 7 años antes del coronavirus.

#culture

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of November, 2020.

“Facebook has taken the name of my open source project ” November 15, 2020 (comments) A webshit and a larger webshit both suck at naming projects. There are about a million shitty opinions on display from Hackernews, the most prevalent of which is "this is not Facebook's fault, but instead the fault of the person Facebook paid to do it, as well as the fault of those other Facebook employees who contributed to its production," as though Facebook were some remote entity only tangentially involved with the activities of the people it hires. Several pages of misapprehensions about copyright law follow, none of which even approaches the core lesson from this tale: Github is a garbage platform designed and operated by people who still have no idea how to manage their primary product.

YouTube-dl's repository has been restored November 16, 2020 (comments) Faced with massive outcry moderate disappointment widespread awareness two or three bloggers whining about the removal of the source code for a popular web utility being removed from one (1) source code hosting platform, Microsoft decides to post nearly two thousand words describing their heroism in not only pressing the 'undelete' button on their admin interface, but also taking on the staggeringly selfless community-building work of "actually reading incoming messages to see if they make sense before acting on them." Hackernews doesn't know what prompted this change, but that doesn't stop them from endlessly speculating on the minutes of whatever disinterested corporate Zoom call contained the decision. Most the rest of the contents are Hackernews offering "helpful" summaries of the events to date, which are gratifyingly unburdened by excessively strenuous adherence to fact or even comprehension.

Servo’s new home November 17, 2020 (comments) Having been kicked out of its parents' basement, a detachment of the Rust Evanglism Strike Force wanders into a nearby abbey for shelter, setting up the plot of Season 2, wherein they discover the charity is coming from their actual competitors. One of the foot soldiers arrives in the comments to declare enthusiasm for the current situation; Hackernews wants to know what the plan is from here, but receives only silence. Hackernews, accustomed to a goals vacuum in the world of Rust development, happily spitballs possible outcomes, while the rest of the Rust Evanglism Strike Force circulates in other threads and insists that anyone gives a shit about Servo.

DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster November 18, 2020 (comments) A business dispute goes public. Hackernews recognizes the names of both sides of the dispute, and so it is time to dust off the law degrees from WIkipedia University and litigate this in the Court of Forum Comments. Predictably, the result is pages of Hackernews incorrecting one another on copyright law, accounting, the specific facts of this dispute, and the nature of intellectual property itself. No technology is discussed.

Beirut Port Explosion November 19, 2020 (comments) Some analysts explain that the April explosion of a building in Beirut occurred because safety protocols were not enforced, which is obvious, but also which safety protocols and how they were violated, which is useful. Hackernews appreciates a good set of 3D models, but is more interested in either bitching about the quality of oversight from the government of Lebanon (a country which almost none of the commenters could point to on a map) or the idea that social media has obviated the need for state-level intelligence agencies. Hackernews is approximately equally qualified to defend either position.

Cover Your Tracks November 20, 2020 (comments) In accordance with their tradition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a new website to tell us how fucked we are by advertisers, while containing almost no advice for fixing any of it. The website assesses the information your web browser sends to their servers, and then tells you to install their browser extension. Hackernews despairs of ever solving this problem, either because the attackers are too well-funded to ever truly fall behind in a privacy arms race or because Hackernews are the ones implementing the user tracking at their day job. Nonetheless, Hackernews spends a pleasant afternoon fucking with browser settings to try to get the high score.

I Miss Working from the Office November 21, 2020 (comments) An Internet would like the COVID-19 pandemic to end. Hackernews blogs about the difference between working from home and working from work; the satisfaction with the former overall seems to depend entirely on housing costs where Hackernews lives. The solution, says Hackernews, is to move some place cheaper, because fixing problems is impossible.

Tomb 2.8 : El sepulturero criptográfico

gestión simple de directorios cifrados bajo #GNU Linux.

herramienta 100% libre y de código abierto enfocada a la portabilidad y respaldo de archivos personales.

https://nitter.cattube.org/DyneOrg/status/1328704812310016004#m

![via geocities at archive.org](https://dia.so/4HD

Su mecanismo es simple pero efectivo: Tomb genera archivos cifrados de almacenamiento que se abren y cierran utilizando archivos-llave que son protegidos por contraseñas elegidas por los usuarios.

##### Guia -> https://lab.dyne.org/TombEs

Descarga versión 2.8 -> https://files.dyne.org/tomb/Tomb-2.8.tar.gz

Registro de cambios (ENG) -> https://files.dyne.org/tomb/ChangeLog.txt

#tomb #sofware #softwarelibre #privacidad #seguridad #dyne

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of November, 2020.

EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf] November 08, 2020 (comments) The European Union feels sorry for the United Kingdom, and tries to help by doing everything it can to make Brexit seem like a good idea in retrospect. Hackernews is outraged that a massive transnational government body has the temerity to advise computer nerds on how to do anything. After all, there is no way anyone involved with the government can possibly have any idea how computers work. Fortunately, a web forum full of computer nerds know everything there is to know about governing, and we are graced with several lectures on the topic. Midway through the conversation, the "Hacker" "News" moderator decides to replace the thoughtful, nuanced article with a press release. There is no way to know which commenters are talking about what article. Hackernews declares an intent to reward this behavior.

Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection November 09, 2020 (comments) As usual, the best quality products come from the mom & pop shops. Hackernews have all earned online epidemiology degrees from Wikipedia University, and confidently proclaim all kinds of random shit. Because they all learned everything they know at different times, the Wikipedia pages that served as their instructors had different vandalism or lies embedded into them for each Hackernews. Hackernews, therefore, writes over one thousand comments incorrecting each other about all possible aspects of biology, medicine, public policy, the entire pharmaceutical industry, and Donald Trump.

Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says November 10, 2020 (comments) The United States Government sternly warns a multinational telecommunications company to stop lying about encryption. Hackernews knows a lot of other companies that lie about this, but isn't interested in doing anything to fix it, because it's easier to darkly hint that it's the government's fault. Some Hackernews demand that everyone stop using Zoom and use Google services instead. The rest of the comments are Hackernews speaking in generalizations about what everyone else is (or should be) doing. No actionable information is contained in the article, and none is presented in the comment thread.

Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro November 11, 2020 (comments) Fans of meaningless strings of numbers rate Apple's new laptop very highly. Hackernews vomits one thousand comments bikeshedding the crowdsourced number stations. Some Hackernews try to make excuses for the computers with bad numbers, and other Hackernews express a feverish desire to acquire the computer with good numbers.

macOS unable to open any non-Apple application November 12, 2020 (comments) Apple continues the war against its own users. In this attack, Apple attempts to equalize performance metrics across their product line by enabling their Startup Delay as a Service platform. Another thousand Hackernews comments arrive in due course, all of which are delighted to finally have an explanation for why their computers suddenly stopped working properly. Hackernews trades tips and tricks for simple and quick software methods to subvert the security software they paid for. Later, Hackernews issues a stark warning to Apple, insisting that Hackernews is the tastemaker that will bring down the Mac OS hegemony, holding up as an example that time they drove Google to bankruptcy by completely refusing to use some subset of their free services. The rest of the comments are Hackernews trying to convince each other that anyone would notice if they boycotted something.

So you've made a mistake and it's public November 13, 2020 (comments) Wikipedia hosts a web page explaining how to graciously admit when you are wrong. The page has a disclaimer at the talk explaining to the reader that nobody associated with Wikipedia will ever, under any circumstances, acknowledge being wrong, or demonstrate the slightest hint of grace, but will in fact continue bickering in edit history comments until the very last Wikipedia editor is at last arrested for whatever bizarre sex crime they're hiding from on the internet. Hackernews wrestles with the possibility of admitting mistakes, but in the end decide it's not worth it, and it's best to just charge ahead with the next mistake.

Don't use third party auth to sign in November 14, 2020 (comments) An Internet warns us not to trust third-party authentication services, and then invites you to use four of them to leave a comment on the article. Hackernews has strong opinions regarding webshit security, and would like to sell you several dozen products and services that do everything just right. All of these services are great, continues Hackernews, but you really also need to follow a separate long-ass list of nerd shit to do, resulting in a total expenditure of several hundred dollars of annual expenditure and in the process smearing your attack profile across eight or twelve vendors. The final step, says Hackernews, is to point all this shit back at Google's servers and keep using GMail anyway. Sure, nothing meaningful has changed, and you're spending a lot more money, but the important thing is that you're still sending all your data to Google.

As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: of the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever “program”, in the multiple senses of that term.

In its idiosyncratic track, our responses to memes in the new decade demand an analogous virtuality. Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, memes have passed the post-digital threshold and entered new theoretical, practical, and geographical territories beyond the stereotypical young, white, male, western subject.  While academic scrutiny has largely lagged behind memetic production, online-facing media has tended to uncritically relay or clutch its pearls in ways that malicious actors tactically exploit. These conditions demand an approach that matches the deterritorializing violence of memes: their ability to abstract and frame, deduce and reduce, to distill and hide, and to alter our perception and behavior through contagious spectacle and cognitive terraforming.

Lastly, what will become of the meme that has been declared dead yet refuses to go away? Does the very notion of a meme become redundant once it is all-pervasive, like any successful cultural technology? Yet we also seek to revisit old territories: what can we salvage from these affective and aesthetic ruins to re-enchant our present appreciation of memes and meme culture? How can we (re)theorise the meme as something between a semiotic surface and asignifying network (or something else entirely)? How can we apply the meme (as it is now/as it will be) as a hermeneutic for the study of other online phenomena like the spread of conspiracy narratives? How are memes made and deployed beyond spaces of (sub)cultural production and what are the implications of this? 

What is it to see oneself in a meme? 

We invite authors from a variety of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds to contribute manifestos, essays, interviews, fictions, artworks and other speculative interventions in our understanding of what memes are, or will be, in the process of becoming.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

(Re)theorising the meme (between semiotic surface and asignifying network)

Non-anglophone & local meme cultures (Pepe in Hong Kong, meme-driven moral panics in India, anti-censorship memeing in China, Japanese imageboards)

Meme genealogies and web histories (usenet, Something Awful, YTMND)

New approaches to online visual culture (archive.org, altpedias, image analysis)

Artistic appropriations of memetic styles and tactics

Unfunny memes & attendant notions of influence, manipulation, gamification, and war (in propaganda and political campaigning, armed conflict, population control, genocide, global intelligence, viral marketing) 

Memes and online identity politics (gender, race, class)

Memetic subjectivities and political affects (zoomers, doomers, Karens, Chads, Wojaks)

Conspiracy theories as memetic narratives

Normiefication and its counter-responses (ironic/post-ironic, wholesome, surrealist, dank, meta memes)

Proposals/abstracts should be around 300-500 words. Send these to criticalmemereader[at]networkcultures.org by 16 December 2020. Final texts should be 500-5000 words and submitted by 10 March 2021.

So true. Strange times.

Mouseover reads: She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [adds thumbtacks and string to wall]

Source: https://xkcd.com/2384/

#Randall #Munroe #xkcd

Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities just launched and can be found online!

“Hospitality is central to the question of political frontiers where admittance and refusal across state borders may be a matter of life or death, and also touches on the fundamental ethical question of the boundaries of the human, the constitution of the subject, how and why we set these up, and ways in which we can attempt to bring them down. A majority of migrants today now seek refuge in cities rather than in camps, prompting us to reconsider the way in which we need to rethink urban space to accommodate newcomers more long-term. Who has the right to belong? And on what terms? As we can no longer separate cityscapes from mediascapes, we need to also reconsider how these now almost indistinguishable ‘-scapes’ constitute ‘connected’ places of exclusion and belonging. In this dilemma of who is in or out, the political unwillingness and inability of dealing with the notion of the Other, the blame has been assigned to those who are assumed to “unprogrammable” within national narratives, which resulted in the ad nauseam repetition of the term “refugee crisis”.

What I argue is that it is not the refugee, migrant or immigrant who is in crisis. If we shift the lens to include host societies as part of this so-called crisis, my suggestion is that we instead call it a “crisis of hospitality”, where host societies are equally implicated in this dilemma. What we lack in political and media discourses is a language of hospitality, a way to properly name these issues and these subjects if we are to act politically towards emancipatory politics of the right to the land, the right to the city, the right to belong, and the ethical responsibility towards the Other.

Considering that politics, urban planning and media platforms are unable to resolve this dilemma, in Satellite Lifelines, I turn to philosophy and art instead.  Satellite Lifelines is a the same time philosophical inquiry, a historical survey of divided cities and politics of urban exclusion, and artistic research. I take the reader to a multiethnic suburb in Sweden, where a participatory art installation on satellite dishes on modernist façades become a surface for understanding host-guest relations. In working closely with residents in a co-generative capacity, notions of belonging through transnational media and multiple reflections on what it is we call home flourished. Is it the vibrations from television broadcasts from faraway homelands resonating in large TV screens in living rooms while in exile? Is it the notion of community building from the ground up, which provides the grounds for social, urban and media justice movements? Or can home be found in the essential meeting with the Other through the face, as Emmanuel Lévinas suggested? Questions about being trapped in eternal guesthood also came to the surface, and suggestions as to how art projects through a “hospitable turn” can open pathways for the right to host.”

– Isabel Löfgren

Download or order a copy of the book here:

STS scholars offer the atmosphere as an antidote to the homogenizing Anthropocene. They teach us that atmospheres are good to think because they are both diffuse and differential; they reflect the scale of planetary problems without forgetting that those problems manifest unevenly. The atmosphere has, then, become a useful tool for theory work. But it is also being picked up on the ground as a model for grassroots coalition building. This article follows one group we might call an atmospheric coalition, which coalesced to fight a trash incinerator proposed in south Baltimore City. That incinerator would have had a major impact on the local air, particularly due to heavy-metal toxics that land close to their source. But it also would have affected a large regional airshed and released thousands of tons of greenhouse gases. Taking a cue from these multi-scalar impacts, the coalition to stop the incinerator both used the medium of air to trouble insider/outsider dichotomies and valued an uneven distribution of power, letting youth from the frontline community lead. Participants, in other words, built a flexible alliance—and they utilized its flexibility. Sometimes it was advantageous to call the incinerator “everyone’s problem.” Sometimes it was necessary to underscore its differential effects on local people. And sometimes the transience of atmospheric claims worked to transfer jurisdiction over the plant from one group to another. In the process of exploring these maneuvers, I argue that activists used the atmosphere to define a problem-space with pliant parameters of authority and vulnerability.

This essay examines the Super Bowl and the smart city as conjoined spectacles. A focused case study on Super Bowl LIII and its staging in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019 allows us to investigate how the use of cutting-edge smart technologies, including cameras, sensors, artificial intelligence, image recognition, and data collection techniques to secure Mercedes Benz stadium naturalizes a broader anticipatory logic of state and corporate intervention, often evoked in the name of public safety and terrorism-prevention. Together the spectacles of sport and smart technologies gloss over systemic inequality and legitimize security infrastructures as well as related ideas that social problems such as a lack of affordable housing, police brutality, and environmental degradation are best addressed through technological solutions. Foregrounding the conjoined spectacles of the smart city and Super Bowl problematizes seemingly necessary security processes and social relations among people, events, technologies, and cities, inviting further research and discussions necessary for strengthening critical interventions and theorizing in these areas.