Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Oct 15Pluralistic: Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! (15 Oct 2025)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/
"Adversarial interop" is a *mouthful*, so at @eff, we coined the term #CompetitiveCompatibility, or #comcom, which is a lot easier to say and to spell.
Scratch any tech success and you'll find a comcom story. After all, when a company turns its screws on its users, it's good business to offer an aftermarket mod that loosens them again.
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"- motivated reasoning ripples through all of Silicon Valley's top brass, producing what Anil Dash calls "VC QAnon," the collection of conspiratorial, debunked and absurd beliefs embraced by powerful people who hold the digital lives of billions of us in their quivering grasp..."
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
#tech #business #CoryDoctorow #privacy #DRM #AdversarialInteroperability #CompetitiveCompatibility #ComCom @pluralistic
I really liked Dubal's legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control *them*. #AdversarialInteroperability (AKA #CompetitiveCompatibility or #ComCom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
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“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoperability is just the...
III. Pro-twiddling laws for users: Interoperability (both mandatory and adversarial - AKA #CompetitiveCompatibility or #ComCom):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/05/time-for-some-game-theory/#massholes
Monopolists and their handmaidens - witting and unwitting - want you to believe that their dominance is inevitable (shades of #Thatcher's "#ThereIsNoAlternative"), because the great forces of history, the technical characteristics of digital technology, and the sorcerous mind-control of dopamine-hackers.
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When Netflix was getting started, it could freely #interoperate with the #DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used #AdversarialInteroperability (AKA #CompetitiveCompatibility or #ComCom) to launch its business:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
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“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.But interoperability is just the...
Episode 004 of EFF’s How to Fix the InternetCory Doctorow joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how large, established tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook can block interoperability in order to squelch competition and control their users, and how we can fix this...
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