Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 2

But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.

Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer.

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Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.

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Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers.

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An HP rep once told me they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists its ability to push iOS updates revoking functionality is about keeping mobile users safe - not monopolizing repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let it add valuable features to its products.

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Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."

These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits *without* the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that *you could bypass*, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone.

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Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates - and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.

Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "#LocalFirst" computing is possible, and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

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The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" - the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about #accessibility and IoT gadgets.

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Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an #ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."

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But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."

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The problem with the "bionic eyes" that #SecondSight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see - it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical - it's commercial.

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Why #BigTech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/surveillance-state-big-tech/

The Wit and Wisdom of #GeorgeWBush (a very slim volume)

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

#Facebook #Twitter #Bluesky #Threads #Rugpulls #NonconsensualFuckabilityRatingService

Fool Me Twice We Don't Get Fooled Again: There's a crucial difference between federatable and federated.

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

#Bluesky #Threads #Mastodon #Fediverse #Federation #SwitchingCosts #UlyssesPacts

Herr Doktor Docktor Professor Doctorow

#trawna

Stonewall was a riot

#LGBTQ #NYC #Pride

Competition is just a click (and $45b) away
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download

> #Google pays $45 billion a year for contracts to lock out rivals, signing deals with “Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb— to secure default status for its general search engine and, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google’s counterparties from dealing with Google’s competitors.”

Beyond Wil's narration, there's the subject matter. The hero of *Red Team Blues* is a hard-charging forensic accountant who's untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west.

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Now, at 67, Marty is ready to retire, but a dear old friend - a legendary cryptographer - drags him back for a last job - locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that's worth more than a billion dollars.

That's the starting gun for a "grabby next-Tuesday thriller" that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation.

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Marty's final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers' libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.

It's a pretty contemporary story, in other words.

I wrote this one before #SVB, before #SamBankmanFried and #FTX - just like I wrote #LittleBrother before #Snowden's revelations.

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It's not that I'm prescient - fortune-telling is a fatalist's delusion - rather, these phenomena are the most spectacular, most recent examples in a string of ghastly, increasingly dire scandals.

*Red Team Blues* blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as #bossware turned our "work from home" into "live at work."

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