Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

It's #linkdump time! Saturday has arrived and I once again find myself with a zillion tabs' worth of things that I couldn't squeeze into this week's newsletters. This is lucky linkdump number 13 - here's the previous dozen installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/16/hotchpotch/#judge-not-lest-ye-be-bribed

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linkdump – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Let's ease into it with some whimsy: a #DeathMetal cover of #JohnCage's 4'33" from Dead Territory. Warning, once you hear them perform this banger, it'll be stuck in your head all day, especially in those quiet moments of reflection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEG4JiOqew

Those guys go *hard*. You know who else goes hard? *Billionaires*. Especially when they're bribing judges.

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John Cage - 4' 33'' Death Metal Cover by Dead Territory

YouTube

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

The #ClarenceThomas/#SamuelAlito bribery scandal prompted the Supremes to proffer an entirely ornamental and toothless code of conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/17/red-team-black-robes/#security-theater

It takes a *lot* of work to create an accountability mechanism than the system that other federal judges answer to. The #JudicialConference oversees the rest of the federal bench, and it's far too flimsy to qualify as a paper tiger - maybe a toilet-paper kitten?

https://www.propublica.org/article/judicial-conference-scotus-federal-judges-ethics-rules

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Pluralistic: Red-teaming the SCOTUS code of conduct (17 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Here's how weak the ethics code for non-SCOTUS federal judges is: 100 members of the US federal judiciary enjoyed 251 luxury junkets paid for by two billionaire-controlled dark money orgs:

https://www.levernews.com/billionaires-are-bankrolling-judges-luxury-travel/

The #AntoninScaliaLawSchool ("the finest in legal education") funneled money from its wealthy backers to judges on 152 occasions, paying for transport, meals and/or lodging. The #FederalistSociety did the same on at least 99 occasions.

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Billionaires Are Bankrolling Judges’ Luxury Travel

Two deep-pocketed conservative organizations paid to send federal judges on 251 trips in 2021 and 2022 — far more than any other source.

The Lever

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Gifts from these two orgs constitute 42% of all judicial disclosures from the entire judiciary. While some of these trips took judges to GMU's campus, the majority of these junkets were sited at tropical beauty-spots at fancy resorts.

No other organization does anything remotely similar and not every judge gets to enjoy Fedsoc and GMU hospitality - just the ones who produce rulings favorable to the organizations' backers.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Oligarchy takes many forms, but it is a single project: the transfer of wealth and power from the many to the few. This isn't an easy sell. The manifest problems of organizing our society to benefit a few wealthy people at the expense of the rest of us mean that the system's legitimacy is constantly crumbling and must be continuously shored up.

Take the US "health" system, unique on the world stage for how much it costs and how little it delivers.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

As with other American pathologies (like, say, internet access), US health care is more expensive and less effective than rivals (however, it is more *lucrative* than those systems).

And yet...the US health insurance system keeps finding new depths of sleaze to plumb. From #PatrickMRucker, #DorisBurke and #DavidArmstrong for #CapitolForum and @ProPublica: a deeply reported story of the worst doctors in America and their indispensable role for insurers:

https://www.propublica.org/article/malpractice-settlements-doctors-working-for-insurance-companies

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Doctors With Histories of Big Malpractice Settlements Now Work for Insurers

Doctors working for health insurers can rule on 10,000 or more requests for care a year. At least a dozen were hired by major insurance companies after being disciplined by state medical boards or making multiple or outsized malpractice payments.

ProPublica

Doctors are overwhelmingly highly trained, ethical professionals who want to help their patients. But they are often thwarted by insurers, who deny their recommended treatments as unnecessary. When patients complain that corporate bean-counters are overriding their medical professionals' advice, the insurers insist that nothing of the sort is taking place.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Your claims aren't being denied by an algorithm or an accountant - rather, they're being individually reviewed by another qualified MD, who's helping you avoid #AllopathicRisk by offering a second opinion and keeping you safe from unnecessary interventions.

It's true that insurance companies pay trained doctors to assess (and deny) claims - but *which* doctors do they employ?

Absolute fucking *butchers*.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

*Propublica* found that insurance companies are the preferred second act for MDs who have lost their medical licenses and their malpractice insurance after repeatedly, egregiously maiming and killing their patients. These doctors bumbled their way out of the ability to see patients, and now they get paid big bucks to *review 10,000 cases per year* and override the judgments of their competent, still-practicing peers.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Only in America! These docs killed with scalpels and prescription pads, and now they get to continue to hurt the sick and injured with a DENIED rubber-stamp.

Oligarchy makes everything worse - even Twitter, a thing that was objectively *very bad* before it was acquired by a fool who found greater fools to bankroll his folly. An excellent package in *The @verge* lays out a timeline of bad-to-worse, leavened with some of the better moments:

https://www.theverge.com/c/23972308/twitter-x-death-tweets-history-elon-musk

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The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge

Twitter was many things: a news accelerator, a harassment engine, and an infinite joke machine. It will be missed.

The Verge

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Musk didn't inaugurate Twitter's #enshittification, but he sure speedran it. The sudden platform collapse syndrome he brought to the hellsite prompted a mass exodus, with millions of ex-Twitterers landing on Mastodon. Of course, not all of them stayed on Mastodon, which is a totally normal pattern for platform growth:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/

Far more interesting are the people who *wanted* to leave Twitter, but didn't.

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Of Course Mastodon Lost Users – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Bootlicker economists will tell you that your continued presence on a platform you loathe is a "#RevealedPreference," As David Roth says, the job of a neoclassical economist is to come up with new ways to say, "Actually, your boss is right."

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Meanwhile, *tech bros* will tell you that the reason you keep using their products despite professing a deep loathing for them is that they are dopamine-hacking evil sorcerers, a claim that doubles as a salespitch to credulous advertisers who love the idea that they can rent time on a mind-control ray and use it to trick you into buying their garbage.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

But there's a simpler explanation for platform stickiness, one that neither gaslights you by insisting that you like things you hate, nor does it validate the self-serving claims of delusional high-tech Rasputins. The reason you use platforms you hate is because you love the people there. The reason *they're* using the platform is that *you're* there. You have a #CollectiveAction problem: you all want to go, but you can't agree on when to depart or where to go.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

You're like the residents of Anatevka in #FiddlerOnTheRoof, who, despite getting six kinds of shit kicked out of them by Cossacks on the reg, all stay put in their village because they can't bear to part with one another:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/when-the-town-square-shatters/

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When the Town Square Shatters – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

A scholarly analysis of which communities left Twitter supports this thesis. "Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon," published in @Nature, finds that the looser a community was - the less important its members were to one another - the easier it was for them to up sticks and move from Twitter to Mastodon:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7

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Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon - Scientific Reports

The migration of Twitter users to Mastodon following Elon Musk’s acquisition presents a unique opportunity to study collective behavior and gain insights into the drivers of coordinated behavior in online media. We analyzed the social network and the public conversations of about 75,000 migrated users and observed that the temporal trace of their migrations is compatible with a phenomenon of social influence, as described by a compartmental epidemic model of information diffusion. Drawing from prior research on behavioral change, we delved into the factors that account for variations of the effectiveness of the influence process across different Twitter communities. Communities in which the influence process unfolded more rapidly exhibit lower density of social connections, higher levels of signaled commitment to migrating, and more emphasis on shared identity and exchange of factual knowledge in the community discussion. These factors account collectively for 57% of the variance in the observed data. Our results highlight the joint importance of network structure, commitment, and psycho-linguistic aspects of social interactions in characterizing grassroots collective action, and contribute to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that drive processes of behavior change of online groups.

Nature

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

In other words, if the people you hung out with on Twitter weren't that important to you, then switching to Mastodon wasn't a big deal. You would find equally satisfying people to hang out with there. Ironically, this made it easy for the community to remain intact, because its members could trickle from one platform to the other without undue suffering during the transitional phase.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Your ability to change your technology habits is ultimately governed by #SwitchingCosts - the things you have to give up when you go switch vendors. When a company can hold something you value hostage - the people you love, the data you rely on, or even access to your front door locks - then can treat you worse and you'll still stick around. The "revealed preference" here is that you like your family photos more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

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Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs

Update, October 1, 2021: The original version of this essay incorrectly stated that Metcalfe's Law dictated that the number of connections in a network doubled with each new user; that has been corrected, below.When the FTC filed its amended antitrust complaint against Facebook in mid-August, we...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

If we're going to make a new, good internet that *stays* good, we have to keep switching costs low. One way to do that is to decentralize our services through #federation, like Mastodon does. But federation is just table-stakes. For full decentralization, you want #PeerToPeer, in which our devices talk directly to one another. #P2P was once the new hotness, but copyright lawsuits chased P2P design underground for a generation.

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Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Now, it's reemerging. New P2P systems are popping up and popping off. My @eff colleague @ross breaks down the promise of two of these - @spritelyproject and @VeilidNetwork - the latter having taken last summer's #Defcon by storm:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/meet-spritely-and-veilid

Moving the locus of control to your own device is critical to staving off abusive conduct. If you want to make sure a company *won't* hurt you, then make sure it *can't* hurt you.

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Spritely and Veilid: Exciting Projects Building the Peer-to-Peer Web

While there is a surge in federated social media sites, like Bluesky and Mastodon, some technologists are hoping to take things further than this model of decentralization with fully peer-to-peer applications. Two leading projects, Spritely and Veilid, hint at what this could look like.There are...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

High-tech guns on the mantelpiece in Act I will blow your face off in Act III. Last week, I wrote about Polish security researchers who discovered that NEWAG, who make locomotives, had boobytrapped them with remote killswitches that shut them down if they were independently serviced:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

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Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

It's a wild story, and it keeps getting wilder. This week, @404mediaco's @jasonkoebler got deeper into the story, surfacing juicy technical details and connecting the scam to his years of excellent reporting on #RightToRepair:

https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-repaired-trains-the-manufacturer-artificially-bricked-now-the-train-company-is-threatening-them/

The dirty tricks used to brick locomotives to punish disloyal customers are widespread in heavy equipment, but they started in personal devices.

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Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them

After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.

404 Media

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Apple, in particular, has been an endless innovator of fuckery, finding all kinds of nasty ways to control how you use your device after you buy it:

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

Inevitably, Apple insists that it's engaging in these dirty tricks to protect it customers. That's the rhetoric the three trillion dollar tech giant rolled out last week when they smeared #BeeperMini:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/without-interoperability-apple-customers-will-never-be-secure

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Pluralistic: Apple fucked us on right to repair (again) (22 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Beeper Mini is an Andoid #iMessage app, which independently re-implements Apple's iMessage end-to-end encryption so that Apple customers' data isn't left unprotected and unencrypted when they communicate with Android users. Apple's message to its customers is that if they want security, they should confine themselves to communicating with other Apple customers. If that's not good enough, Apple says, you should buy your Android-using friends iPhones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

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Tim Cook says ‘buy your mom an iPhone’ if you want to end green bubbles

Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the question of iMessage and how it doesn’t work well with Android phones, saying his users aren’t asking for Apple to support RCS, and recommended buying an iPhone.

The Verge

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

This is of a piece with Apple's antirepair rhetoric. Apple claims that they're taking away your right to get your phone repaired by the depot of your choosing in order to protect you from unethical repairers who steal your data. That really *is* a risk:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-computer-repair-shops-customers-personal-data/

But it's a risk that can be mitigated. Google just announced a new #RepairMode for Android devices - this lets technicians boot and test your phone without accessing your data:

https://gizmodo.com/google-pixel-8-phone-self-repair-1851102537

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Ontario computer repair shops accessed customers’ personal data, women affected most, study shows

University of Guelph study sent 12 laptops to repair shops in three Ontario cities. In some cases, private information such as passwords and revealing photos were copied to external devices

The Globe and Mail

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

It's nice to see Google guarding its customers' backs every now and again, even from its depraved enshittified depths. Google also just announced that it will move GMaps' location data storage to your device. That means that it will no longer be able to use Maps data to answer #GeofenceWarrants (AKA #ReverseWarrants), where the cops demand the identities of everyone in a location - say, all the participants in a #BlackLivesMatter demonstration:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/end-geofence-warrants

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Is This the End of Geofence Warrants?

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been asking Google to implement for years.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

As with Repair Mode, this is a best of all worlds solution. Maps users can still get access to their location history, but Google can't. Google's also end-to-end encrypting Maps data backups, so you can store your Maps data in the cloud and recover it if you lose your device, but Google can't see that data and use it to answer law enforcement demands.

It's a marker of how far Google has moved on #LocationalPrivacy.

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glyn Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic Thanks for this, but please could you tell me why you prefer these extended threads to a long-form post?

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

@underlap https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

glyn Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic Thanks! Nice you are willing to cross-post for your readers' sakes.

"Every thread I post to Mastodon is simultaneously published as a blog post, ..." - is that still the case? I couldn't see the train hacking thread as a post on your blog.

Cory Doctorow Dec 16, 2023

Yup - https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/

Pluralistic: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” (08 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

happyborg Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic been saying this for years: the #fediverse is the lifeboat but #p2p will be the shore.

P2p projects are coming but they must be easier to use than the alternatives.

Can we do this? Technically yes, because businesses have to do things that make life difficult even though they know that hurts usability.

Will we do it? 🤷‍♂️ we must try real hard.

P2p needs to be sustainable, so don't reject economics using tokens. Look for better than Blockchain, and universality.

Peter_Panther Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic
@afouxenidis
@Nature

Peter_Panther Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic
@afouxenidis

tinydoctor Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic @verge I read some the verge stuff but the layout is extremely annoying so I gave up.

CassandraVert Dec 16, 2023

@pluralistic
For my husband's back (spine) surgery, they asked a hand surgeon. These areas are supposedly similar enough that they should understand each other's work. They do not.

texanarchy Dec 17, 2023

@pluralistic I’ll never forget seeing this doctor verbally ream the insurance MD over the phone. As an RN case mgr I had heard Drs bitch about “Managed” Medicare but I had never seen one go off like this. “What kind of fucking Dr are you?” “ What happened to the oath you took?” It was glorious. Patient was stil denied. 😡

David LaFontaine Dec 17, 2023

@pluralistic here’s the pitch: “Hey, we noticed you’ve got a dozen malpractice suits pending and are about to lose your license and maybe go to prison.

Howzabout we unleash our corporate lawyers on your behalf and all your problems just … go away.

In return, you come work for us. You’ll love it! Easiest job you’ll ever have - all you gotta do is say No all the time to the patients, who, let’s be honest, you dont really give a shit about anyway.”