Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

How to Survive Climate Change

The dangers people are facing at every corner of the globe.

Apple wants to kill the ad industry. It's forcing developers to help. https://prismo.xyz/posts/a8479929-31a9-4b81-b7d2-363353a930e6

“Notorious” RBG Credits Brett Kavanaugh for Making Female Law Clerks The Majority

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh squeaked through his confirmation hearing last year after being accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault during a high school party. Women’s groups vigorously fought his confirmation and warned that his presence on the court would pose a significant threat to hard-fought legal rights for women. So it’s no small […]

James Stimson Answers My Questions About the Stimson Mood Index

Yesterday I wrote a post about the latest results of James Stimson’s national mood index, and I had a couple of questions about it. First, I wondered what it meant to say that a lot of people had a “liberal” view on something like inflation or the deficit. Second, I wondered if the increasing liberalness […]

The Images Coming out of Hong Kong Are Simply Jawdropping

More than a million people took to the streets in Hong Kong Sunday to protest a proposed law that would allow extraditions from the city to mainland China, a move critics say would give China power to remove political dissidents without input from local authorities and judges. Hong Kong’s judicial system is seen as far more […]

Learn #howto install, setup, and use the #security-focused QubeOS.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/weekend-reading-qubes

by @kyle

As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris’s Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse

Thanks to Kamala Harris's predecessor, the San Francisco DA's office had files on clergy sex abusers. But Harris refused to share them with victims.

The post As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris’s Office Stopped Cooperating With Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse appeared first on The Intercept.

The Real Origins of the Religious Right - POLITICO Magazine https://prismo.xyz/posts/4b5ec12a-d3be-4fe7-97d5-7613b38abe55

Support for Impeachment Has Nearly Doubled Among Independents

A small majority of Americans are now in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, censuring him, or continuing investigations into his actions, according to a new poll. And among key group, political independents, support for impeachment has nearly doubled in the past month. In April, when asked what Congress should do with the findings of […]

Trump Administration Suppresses Its Own Findings About Catastrophic Climate Change

The White House prevented State Department officials from submitting testimony to Congress that warns of climate change catastrophe. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that after reviewing the written testimony, White House officials tried to remove references to the government’s own scientific findings on global warming. The prepared statement included references to catastrophic damage due […]

Koch-Backed Tech Group Behind Tool Used to Push Union Opt-Out Campaigns - Documented https://prismo.xyz/posts/4fccb560-888e-4892-9af7-685191142d89

Public opinion is getting more liberal: Policy Mood at record left - Vox https://prismo.xyz/posts/bd9ac882-14f6-4a06-952b-e5c380001d53

The end of the Arctic as we know it | Environment | The Guardian https://prismo.xyz/posts/d859bbdb-4c28-4720-b20e-1c0b9e0a4499

Rapid retreat of Arctic coastline revealed in images from the air

Drone surveys have revealed extreme erosion on the Arctic coastline, highlight the ongoing change in the region in a warming climate.

Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies

Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows user relied on its Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc). Apple users—a small minority of computer users—who wanted to exchange documents with the much larger world of Windows users were dependent on Microsoft's Office for the Macintosh operating system (which worked inconsistently with Windows Office documents, with unexpected behaviors like corrupting documents so they were no longer readable, or partially/incorrectly displaying parts of exchanged documents). Alternatively, Apple users could ask Windows users to export their Office documents to an "interoperable" file format like Rich Text Format (for text), or Comma-Separated Values (for spreadsheets). These, too, were inconsistent and error-prone, interpreted in different ways by different programs on both Mac and Windows systems.

Apple could have begged Microsoft to improve its Macintosh offerings, or they could have begged the company to standardize its flagship products at a standards body like OASIS or ISO. But Microsoft had little motive to do such a thing: its Office products were a tremendous competitive advantage, and despite the fact that Apple was too small to be a real threat, Microsoft had a well-deserved reputation for going to enormous lengths to snuff out potential competitors, including both Macintosh computers and computers running the GNU/Linux operating system.

Apple did not rely on Microsoft's goodwill and generosity: instead, it relied on reverse-engineering. After its 2002 "Switch" ad campaign—which begged potential Apple customers to ignore the "myths" about how hard it was to integrate Macs into Windows workflows—it intensified work on its iWork productivity suite, which launched in 2005, incorporating a word-processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers) and a presentation program (Keynote). These were feature-rich applications in their own right, with many innovations that leapfrogged the incumbent Microsoft tools, but this superiority would still not have been sufficient to ensure the adoption of iWork, because the world's greatest spreadsheets are of no use if everyone you need to work with can't open them.

What made iWork a success—and helped re-launch Apple—was the fact that Pages could open and save most Word files; Numbers could open and save most Excel files; and Keynote could open and save most PowerPoint presentations. Apple did not attain this compatibility through Microsoft's cooperation: it attained it despite Microsoft's noncooperation. Apple didn't just make an "interoperable" product that worked with an existing product in the market: they made an adversarially interoperable product whose compatibility was wrested from the incumbent, through diligent reverse-engineering and reimplementation. What's more, Apple committed to maintaining that interoperability, even though Microsoft continued to update its products in ways that temporarily undermined the ability of Apple customers to exchange documents with Microsoft customers, paying engineers to unbreak everything that Microsoft's maneuvers broke. Apple's persistence paid off: over time, Microsoft's customers became dependent on compatibility with Apple customers, and they would complain if Microsoft changed its Office products in ways that broke their cross-platform workflow.

Since Pages' launch, document interoperability has stabilized, with multiple parties entering the market, including Google's cloud-based Docs offerings, and the free/open alternatives from LibreOffice. The convergence on this standard was not undertaken with the blessing of the dominant player: rather, it came about despite Microsoft's opposition. Docs are not just interoperable, they're adversarially interoperable: each has its own file format, but each can read Microsoft's file format.

The document wars are just one of many key junctures in which adversarial interoperability made a dominant player vulnerable to new entrants:

Hayes modems
Usenet's alt.* hierarchy
Supercard's compatibility with Hypercard
Search engines' web-crawlers
Servers of every kind, which routinely impersonate PCs, printers, and other devices

Scratch the surface of most Big Tech giants and you'll find an adversarial interoperability story: Facebook grew by making a tool that let its users stay in touch with MySpace users; Google products from search to Docs and beyond depend on adversarial interoperability layers; Amazon's cloud is full of virtual machines pretending to be discrete CPUs, impersonating real computers so well that the programs running within them have no idea that they're trapped in the Matrix.

Adversarial interoperability converts market dominance from an unassailable asset to a liability. Once Facebook could give new users the ability to stay in touch with MySpace friends, then every message those Facebook users sent back to MySpace—with a footer advertising Facebook's superiority—became a recruiting tool for more Facebook users. MySpace served Facebook as a reservoir of conveniently organized potential users that could be easily reached with a compelling pitch about why they should switch.

Today, Facebook is posting 30-54% annual year-on-year revenue growth and boasts 2.3 billion users, many of whom are deeply unhappy with the service, but who are stuck within its confines because their friends are there (and vice-versa).

A company making billions and growing by double-digits with 2.3 billion unhappy customers should be every investor's white whale, but instead, Facebook and its associated businesses are known as "the kill zone" in investment circles.

Facebook's advantage is in "network effects": the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it (because more users increase the likelihood that the person you're looking for is on Facebook). But adversarial interoperability could allow new market entrants to arrogate those network effects to themselves, by allowing their users to remain in contact with Facebook friends even after they've left Facebook.

This kind of adversarial interoperability goes beyond the sort of thing envisioned by "data portability," which usually refers to tools that allow users to make a one-off export of all their data, which they can take with them to rival services. Data portability is important, but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you're in the process of migrating away from.

Big Tech platforms leverage both their users' behavioral data and the ability to lock their users into "walled gardens" to drive incredible growth and profits. The customers for these systems are treated as though they have entered into a negotiated contract with the companies, trading privacy for service, or vendor lock-in for some kind of subsidy or convenience. And when Big Tech lobbies against privacy regulations and anti-walled-garden measures like Right to Repair legislation, they say that their customers negotiated a deal in which they surrendered their personal information to be plundered and sold, or their freedom to buy service and parts on the open market.

But it's obvious that no such negotiation has taken place. Your browser invisibly and silently hemorrhages your personal information as you move about the web; you paid for your phone or printer and should have the right to decide whose ink or apps go into them.

Adversarial interoperability is the consumer's bargaining chip in these coercive "negotiations." More than a quarter of Internet users have installed ad-blockers, making it the biggest consumer revolt in human history. These users are making counteroffers: the platforms say, "We want all of your data in exchange for this service," and their users say, "How about none?" Now we have a negotiation!

Or think of the iPhone owners who patronize independent service centers instead of using Apple's service: Apple's opening bid is "You only ever get your stuff fixed from us, at a price we set," and the owners of Apple devices say, "Hard pass." Now it's up to Apple to make a counteroffer. We'll know it's a fair one if iPhone owners decide to patronize Apple's service centers.

This is what a competitive market looks like. In the absence of competitive offerings from rival firms, consumers make counteroffers by other means.

There is good reason to want to see a reinvigorated approach to competition in America, but it's important to remember that competition is enabled or constrained not just by mergers and acquisitions. Companies can use a whole package of laws to attain and maintain dominance, to the detriment of the public interest.

Today, consumers and toolsmiths confront a thicket of laws and rules that stand between them and technological self-determination. To change that, we need to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, , patent law, and other rules and laws. Adversarial interoperability is in the history of every tech giant that rules today, and if it was good enough for them in the past, it's good enough for the companies that will topple them in the future.

Older forests resist change, climate change, that is

Older forests in eastern North America are less vulnerable to climate change than younger forests, particularly for carbon storage, timber production, and biodiversity, new research finds. The study analyzed how climate change is expected to impact forests across the eastern US and Canada. It found that increased forest age reduces the climate sensitivity of forest carbon, timber, and biodiversity to projected increases in temperature and precipitation.

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in May

The American economy gained 75,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a terrible -15,000 jobs. At the same time, the March and April numbers were revised downward by 75,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained at 3.6 […]

Fertilizer plants emit 100 times more methane than reported

Emissions of methane from the industrial sector have been vastly underestimated, researchers have found.

A fantastic curated list of open-source game clones:

https://osgameclones.com/