Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

SNUFF to release new album “There’s A Lot Of It About” on Fat Wreck Chords, stream new track

Over a year in the works,Fat Wreck Chords can finally announce that the new SNUFF album, There’s a Lot of it About, will be released on September 20th! Head below to listen to a brand new song. “Dippy Egg” races with catchy hooks, horns, and non-stop melodies that exemplify just why they’ve survived for over […]

The post SNUFF to release new album “There’s A Lot Of It About” on Fat Wreck Chords, stream new track appeared first on Dying Scene.

The Reaganomics (punk) stream new demo songs from

In August The Reaganomics will be heading into the studio to record a new LP for Red Scare Industries and to get you properly stoked they’ve released a few demos, which you can stream below. Here’s what the band had to say about “The Jeff Sessions:” “In the spirit of the live action remake of Disney’s The […]

The post The Reaganomics (punk) stream new demo songs from appeared first on Dying Scene.

Dozens of Scientists Are Pushing the UN to Make Environmental Destruction a War Crime

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. War (huh!) what is it good for? Certainly not the environment. From the U.S. dropping the herbicide agent orange on jungles in Vietnam to Saddam Hussein’s damming marshes in Iraq, human conflict has often involved the intentional infliction of wounds […]

Judge Dismisses $250 Million Lawsuit From MAGA Teen

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a $250 defamation million lawsuit filed by Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student whose video confrontation with a Native American man at the January Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC sparked a firestorm of controversy. Sandmann had accused the Washington Post of negligently committing libel against him.  […]

I Went to a Climate Change Denial Conference. It Made Even Less Sense Than You’d Think.

There’s no need to worry about reducing the greenhouse gases driving climate change—all that carbon dioxide is actually “greening the planet.” The Green New Deal, on the other hand, would send the country back to the stone age, or at least the pre-industrial era. Those were among the eye-popping and often-conflicting views expressed yesterday at the Heartland Institute’s 13th International Climate Change Conference, a gathering of climate change deniers that took place at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House.

The vast majority of the world’s climate scientists agree that climate change could prove devastating to life as we know it unless we take swift and sweeping action to decarbonize the economy . But those “wild predictions have been pronouncedly exaggerated,” according to the British gadfly Lord Christopher Monckton, who holds the title 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.

One of the more colorful figures in the climate denial universe, Monckton ticked off a list of problems scientists have linked to climate change that Monckton says we really don’t need to worry about. According to him, the world is seeing less, not more, drought; sea levels are falling not rising; forest fires are causing less damage; hurricane activity is decreasing, too; and carbon dioxide is actually improving the global environment by “greening” places like Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. “That’s why we need more CO2, because it greens the planet,” he declared.

Other conference panelists joined Monckton in cycling through a series of theories long debunked by peer-reviewed science. Some believe, like Monckton, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are growing but provide more benefits than threats. (One Heritage Foundation official went so far as to suggest carbon dioxide emitters should get paid a subsidy rather than face the kind of carbon tax scheme policymakers have discussed; of course, the oil industry already does receive billions in subsidies.) Others argued that CO2 levels are in fact not rising, while still others say we should be more concerned about a coming ice age. 

“The real problem is we have a lot more to worry about with global cooling than with global warming,” said Rodger Bezdek, an energy analyst and Heartland policy advisor.

If the speakers and audience members don’t all agree on why we shouldn’t worry about climate change, the few hundred people assembled in a hotel ballroom yesterday do share a number of other ideas: chiefly, that the fossil fuel industry is under unfair attack and deserves public support, while the Green New Deal is a totalitarian communist plot to steal American liberties and cast the world into “energy poverty.”

Kevin D. Dayaratna, a senior statistician at the Heritage Foundation, told the audience the Left had already begun to take control of the country and would continue its authoritarian advance with a Green New Deal.

On the surface, times would seem to be good for Heartland and the climate change denial movement, with the world’s most prominent climate change denier living in the White House. President Donald Trump has run with many of this group’s longtime demands such as withdrawing the United States from the United Nations’ Paris climate accord and rolling back Obama-era pollution rules.

But the evidence has never been stronger that climate change is already happening and will have increasingly catastrophic impacts on human civilization (not to mention other species) unless the world takes action. Meanwhile, the surprisingly fierce rise of children activists demanding climate action has boosted public concern worldwide and helped sweep progressive politicians supporting a Green New Deal into U.S. Congress.

This may be part of why climate denialists (who prefer to be called “climate realists”) appear to be struggling to remain relevant and attract younger followers. Yesterday’s speakers and audience members were overwhelmingly old, white and male. After the first panel session, there were so many white-haired men waiting for the men’s room that a long line snaked out the door, past the gold-plated trash bins embossed with the Trump name. The line for the women’s room, by contrast, was significantly shorter.

To recruit younger generations, one audience member suggested warning them that Green New Deal supporters want to take their iPhones away and return the country to a time before electricity—never mind that electricity, in the form of solar and wind, is central to the Green New Deal proposal. (Of course, panelists and audiences expressed extreme skepticism about renewables, as well.)

Not only does the climate denial movement appear in danger of aging out, raising funds is getting more difficult. Traditionally funded by fossil fuel companies, Heartland’s oil and gas money has dried up in recent years as the scientific consensus around climate change has grown stronger, putting oil and gas companies under pressure from shareholders and the public to stop funding groups that deny the problem.

Earlier this year the libertarian Cato Institute disbanded its climate denial program, the Center for the Study of Science. And yesterday’s Heartland conference had fewer than half the number of speakers and panelists as its first International Climate Change Conference in 2008. The number of sponsoring organizations has also fallen by more than half since 2008.

Despite these developments, climate change denialism continues to get more than its fair share of media coverage, according to an analysis by the Public Citizen published Wednesday to coincide with the conference. The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization found that media coverage of climate denial by Heartland, Heritage and three other think tanks increased from 2014 to 2018.

“The mounds of scientific evidence … should lead to a radical decline in the influence of climate deniers in the media,” Allison Fisher, outreach program director for Public Citizen’s climate program, said in a press release. “Amazingly, coverage of the deniers’ messages has risen over the past five years as the climate crisis has worsened, with much of it being uncritical.”

It seems possible to conceive of a time, not all that far off in the future, when the effects of climate change will become so evident and frequent that denying it’s happening will no longer be an option. But that’s hardly a comforting thought.

The First Labor Plans of the 2020 Campaign Just Dropped. Here’s What to Make of Them.

It was a tale of two cities’ mayors (with presidential ambitions) this week. South Bend, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg and New York’s Bill de Blasio—the two active-duty mayors among the 20 Democratic presidential candidates still on the debate stage—released their labor and workers’ rights platforms.

Both mayors include fairly robust proposals to overhaul and modernize our nation’s main labor law, the National Labor Relations Act.

But that should no longer be considered good enough. Given that Congressional Democrats’ official proposal right now, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, essentially overturns the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, adds card check under some circumstances and imposes meaningful financial penalties for employers who violate their employees’ rights, woe to the candidate who doesn’t propose to outdo it. Only one mayor, de Blasio, breaks new ground with his proposal; the other, Buttigieg, offers a survey course of think tank white papers and moderate reforms.

The Key to Safety Online Is User Empowerment, Not Censorship

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on “Protecting Digital Innocence.” The hearing covered a range of problems facing young people on the Internet today, with a focus on harmful content and privacy-invasive data practices by tech companies. While children do face problems online, some committee members seemed bent on using those problems as an excuse to censor the Internet and undermine the legal protections for free expression that we all rely on, including kids.

Don’t Censor Users; Empower Them to Choose

Though tech companies weren’t represented in the hearing, senators offered plenty of suggestions about how those companies ought to make their services safer for children. Sen. John Kennedy suggested that online platforms should protect children by scanning for “any pictures of human genitalia.”

It’s foolish to think that one set of standards would be appropriate for all children, let alone all Internet users.

Sen. Kennedy’s idea is a good example of how lawmakers sometimes misunderstand the complexity of modern-day platform moderation, and the extreme difficulty of getting it right at scale. Many online platforms do voluntarily use automated filters, human reviewers, or both to snoop out nudity, pornography, or other speech that companies deem inappropriate. But those measures often bring unintended consequences that reach much further than whatever problems the rules were intended to address. Instagram deleted one painter’s profile until the company realized the absurdity of this aggressive application of its ban on nudity. When Tumblr employed automated filters to censor nudity, it accidentally removed hundreds of completely “safe for work” images.

The problem gets worse when lawmakers attempt to legislate what they consider good content moderation. In the wake of last year’s Internet censorship law SESTA-FOSTA, online platforms were faced with an awful choice: err on the side of extreme prudishness in their moderation policies or face the risk of overwhelming liability for their users’ speech. Facebook broadened its sexual solicitation policy to the point that it could feasibly justify removing discussion of sex altogether. Craigslist removed its dating section entirely.

Legislation to “protect” children from harmful material on the Internet will likely bring similar collateral damage for free speech: when lawmakers give online platforms the impossible task of ensuring that every post meets a certain standard, those companies have little choice but to over-censor.

During the hearing, Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute provided an astute counterpoint to the calls for a more highly filtered Internet, calling to move the discussion “from protection to empowerment.” In other words, tech companies ought to give users more control over their online experience rather than forcing all of their users into an increasingly sanitized web. We agree.

It’s foolish to think that one set of standards would be appropriate for all children, let alone all Internet users. But today, social media companies frequently make censorship decisions that affect everyone. Instead, companies should empower users to make their own decisions about what they see online by letting them calibrate and customize the content filtering methods those companies use. Furthermore, tech and media companies shouldn’t abuse copyright and other laws to prevent third parties from offering customization options to people who want them.

Congress and Government Must Do More to Fight Unfair Data-Collection Practices

Like all Internet users, kids are often at the mercy of companies’ privacy-invasive data practices, and often have no reasonable opportunity to opt out of collection, use, and sharing of their data. Congress should closely examine companies whose business models rely on collecting, using, and selling children’s personal information.

Some of the proposals floated during the hearing for protecting young Internet users’ privacy were well-intentioned but difficult to implement. Georgetown Law professor Angela Campbell suggested that platforms move all “child-directed” material to a separate website without behavioral data collection and related targeted advertising. Platforms must take measures to put all users in charge of how their data is collected, used, and shared—including children—but cleanly separating material directed at adults and children isn’t easy. It would be awful if a measure designed to protect young Internet users’ privacy made it harder for them to access materials on sensitive issues like sexual health and abuse. A two-tiered Internet undermines the very types of speech for which young Internet users most need privacy.

We do agree with Campbell that enforcement of existing children’s privacy laws must be a priority. As we’ve argued in the student privacy context, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should better enforce the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the law that requires websites and online services that are directed to children under 13 or have actual knowledge that a user is under 13 to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children for commercial purposes. The Department of Education should better enforce the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which generally prohibits schools that receive federal funding from sharing student information without parental consent.

EFF’s student privacy project catalogues the frustrations that students, parents, and other stakeholders have when it comes to student privacy. In particular, we’ve highlighted numerous examples of students effectively being forced to share data with Google through the free or low-cost cloud services and Chromebooks it provides to cash-strapped schools. We filed a complaint with the FTC in 2015 asking it to investigate Google’s student data practices, but the agency never responded. Sen. Marsha Blackburn cited our FTC complaint against Google as an example of the FTC’s failure to protect children’s privacy: “They go in, they scoop the data, they track, they follow, and they’ve got that virtual you of that child.”

While Google has made some progress since 2015, Congress should still investigate whether the relevant regulatory agencies are falling down on the job when it comes to protecting student privacy. Congress should also explore ways to ensure that users can make informed decisions about how their data is collected, used, and shared. Most importantly, Congress should pass comprehensive consumer privacy legislation that empowers users and families to bring their own lawsuits against the companies that violate their privacy rights.

Undermining Section 230 Won’t Improve Companies’ Practices

At the end of the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) turned the discussion to Section 230, the law that shields online platforms, services, and users from liability for most speech created by others. Sen. Graham called Section 230 the “elephant in the room,” suggesting that Congress use the law as leverage to force tech companies to change their practices: “We come up with best business practices, and if you meet those business practices you have a safe haven from liability, and if you don’t, you’re going to get sued.” He followed his comments with a Twitter thread claiming that kneecapping liability protections is “the best way to get social media companies to do better in this area.”

Don’t be surprised if the big tech companies fail to put up a fight against these proposals.

Sen. Graham didn’t go into detail about what “business practices” Congress should mandate, but regardless, he ought to rethink the approach of threatening to weaken Section 230. Google and Facebook are more willing to bargain away the protections of Section 230 than their smaller competitors. Nearly every major Internet company endorsed SESTA-FOSTA, a bill that made it far more difficult for small Internet startups to unseat the big players. Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill to address supposed political bias in content moderation makes the same mistake, giving more power to the large social media companies it’s intended to punish. Don’t be surprised if the big tech companies fail to put up a fight against these proposals: the day after the hearing, IBM announced support for further weakening Section 230, just like it did last time around.

More erosion of Section 230 won’t necessarily hurt big Internet companies, but it will hurt users. Under a compromised Section 230, online platforms would be incentivized to over-censor users’ speech. When platforms choose to err on the side of censorship, marginalized voices are the first to disappear.

Congress Must Consider Unintended Consequences

The problems facing young people online are complicated, and it’s essential that lawmakers carefully consider the unintended consequences of any legislation in this area.

Companies ought to help users and families customize online services for their own needs. But congressional attempts to legislate solutions to harmful Internet content by forcing companies to patrol users’ speech are fraught with the potential for collateral damage (and would likely be unconstitutional). We understand Congress’ desire to hold large Internet companies accountable, but it shouldn’t pass laws to make the Internet a more restrictive place.

At the same time, Congress does have an historic opportunity to help protect children and adults from invasive, unfair data-collection and advertising practices, both by passing strong consumer privacy legislation and by demanding that the government do more to enforce existing privacy laws.

This Summer, Take Some Time to Stand Up for Net Neutrality

As we head into the August, Congress will be on recess and most of your senators and representatives will be heading back to their home states. That means it’ll be easier for you to reach out and talk to them or their staff and ask them to act on important legislation. Earlier this year, the Save the Internet Act—a bill which would restore the net neutrality protections of the 2015 Open Internet Order and make them the law of the land—passed the House of Representatives. The Senate needs to be pressured into following suit.

To help you do that, we’re updating and relaunching our Net Neutrality Defense Guide. Last year, the Defense Guide was focused on using a vehicle called the Congressional Review Act (the CRA) to overturn the FCC’s repeal. Since the Senate voted for the CRA with a bipartisan majority vote, last year’s guide focused on getting the House of Representatives to vote.

This year, we have the opposite situation. Since the House has voted for the Save the Internet Act and the Senate has not, and our guide has been updated to reflect the new bill, the new target, and the new arguments we’ve heard for and against the Save the Internet Act.

Net neutrality means that ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon don’t get to block websites, slow speeds on certain sites, or make deals that give faster speeds to some content and not others. It means that you—and not your ISP—control your experience online. A free and open Internet depends on net neutrality to maintain a level playing field, which disappears once ISPs are free to do whatever they want with your traffic. Established players—or companies under the same umbrella as the ISP (like, say, HBO and AT&T)—shouldn’t get to leverage their money and connections to get to customers more easily than competitors with better products, but less money.

We can prevent that by passing strong net neutrality protections, like those in the Save the Internet Act. The Senate needs to know that this is an important issue, supported by a majority of Americans, and that we want them to vote on this bill.

The Net Neutrality Defense Guide is built to empower both regular people and local organizations to make themselves heard on this issue. It includes:

A how-to on setting up in-person meetings with senators
Tips on how to get press coverage and place op-eds in local papers
A sample letter to send to senators
A sample call script for calling local and DC offices of senators
Basic talking points and counters to common arguments against net neutrality
An image pack you can use and remix for your own campaigns

The guide is located here, along with a downloadable pdf version. Get out there and make yourself heard!

SysAdmin 101
A collection of #sysadmin articles by @kyle.

This ebook is #free to download. No email or anything required. Enjoy! https://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1340386
#SysAdminDay #sysadminday2019

Inside the Courtroom Where Every Asylum Seeker Gets Rejected

In February 2018, in a small courtroom in rural Louisiana, an Eritrean man was fighting an impossible battle. The man, whom I’ll call Abraham—he asked that his real name not be used—was trying to convince immigration judge Agnelis Reese that he should receive asylum in the United States. He told Reese he had been imprisoned for […]

The Secret History of Why Soda Companies Switched From Sugar to High-Fructose Corn Syrup

In a mesmerizing recent article, Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy recounts the surprising backstory of one of corporate marketing’s greatest flops: Coca-Cola’s quickly aborted 1985 effort to tweak its formula and convince consumers to accept “New Coke.” Tim Murphy is on this week’s episode of Bite, talking about New Coke and doing a blind taste-test: The […]

You’re Going Places, Kid

How to make art: A step-by-step guide.

Ohio Republicans Balked at a Nuclear Bailout, so the Industry Elected New Republicans — and Walked Away with $1.1 Billion

A newly elected state legislature, backed by a dark-money effort linked primarily to the nuclear industry, overcame years of opposition to pass the bailout.

The post Ohio Republicans Balked at a Nuclear Bailout, so the Industry Elected New Republicans — and Walked Away with $1.1 Billion appeared first on The Intercept.

I’m Not Your Anti-Vaxxer Scare Tactic

An autistic child is not a burden, nor a reason to not vaccinate.

Amy Klobuchar Was Grilled About the Eric Garner Case at the NAACP Forum. Her Answer Didn’t Go Over Well.

At an NAACP forum for presidential candidates in Detroit on Wednesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar was asked whether she believed federal prosecutors should have pressed charges against a New York police officer who killed Eric Garner in 2014 after putting him in an illegal chokehold. “That is for the justice system to decide,” she said, and […]

Fixed? The FTC Orders Facebook to Stop Using Your 2FA Number for Ads

Since academics and investigative journalists first reported last year that Facebook was using people’s two-factor authentication numbers and “shadow” contact information for targeted advertising, Facebook has shown little public interest in fixing this critical problem. Subsequent demands that Facebook stop all non-essential uses of these phone numbers, and public revelations that Facebook’s phone number abuse was even worse than initially reported, failed to move the company to action.

Yesterday, rather than face a lawsuit from FTC, Facebook agreed to stop the most egregious of these practices.

The Victory

In one of just a few concrete wins in an overall disappointingsettlement, Facebook agreed not to use phone numbers provided for any security feature (like two-factor authentication, account recovery, and login alerts) for targeted advertising purposes.

Until this settlement, Facebook had been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes for targeted advertising, contrary to those user’s expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements. Revelation of this practice seriously damaged users’ trust in a foundational security practice and undermined all the companies and platforms that get two-factor authentication right.

The FTC’s order that Facebook stop using security phone numbers for targeted advertising is, hopefully, a first step toward rebuilding users’ trust in security features on Facebook in particular and on the web in general.

The Loose Ends

But the FTC didn’t go far enough here, and Facebook continues to be able to abuse your phone number in two troubling ways.

First, two-factor authentication numbers are still exposed to reverse-lookup searches. By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication to find that user’s profile. Problems with this search functionality have been public since at least 2017. Facebook even promised to disable it over a year ago in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but left open a loophole in the form of contact uploads. For people who need two-factor authentication to protect their account and stay safe, Facebook’s failure to fill this loophole forces them into an unnecessary choice between security and privacy. 

Second, the FTC’s settlement misses a whole additional category of phone numbers: “shadow” contact information, which refers to a phone number you never gave Facebook but which your friends uploaded with their contacts. In other words, even if you never directly handed a particular phone number over to Facebook, advertisers may nevertheless be able to associate it with your account based on your friends’ phone books.

This shadow contact information remains available to advertisers, and inaccessible and opaque to users. You can’t find your “shadow” contact information in the “contact and basic info” section of your profile; users in Europe can’t even get their hands on it despite explicit requirements under the GDPR that a company give users a “right to know” what information it has on them.

No Fix

Throughout this year, we have been demanding that a handful of companies fix some of their biggest privacy and security problems. For Facebook, we have taken aim at its tendency to use phone numbers for purposes contrary to what users understood or intended. While the FTC’s order may seem like a fix, it does not go far enough for us to consider it a complete victory. Until Facebook takes the initiative to address the reverse-lookup and shadow contact information problems described above, users can expect that its reckless misuse of their phone numbers will continue. And we’ll continue watching and putting pressure on them to fix it already.

Underwater glacial melting is occurring at higher rates than modeling predicts

Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up to two orders of magnitude.

Adblocking: How About Nah?

For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from the FTC, foot-dragging from the browser vendors and outright hostility from the big online media companies mean that setting Do Not Track in your browser does virtually nothing to protect your privacy.

Do Not Track grew out of widespread public concern over invasive "behavioral advertising" that relied on tracking to target ads; despite a generation of promises from the ad industry that consumers would welcome more relevant advertising, the consistent result has been that users are freaked out by "relevant" ads because they understand that relevancy is synonymous with privacy invasion. Nothing is so creepy as ads for a product you looked into earlier following you from site to site, then from app to app, as you are tracked and retargeted by a desperate vendor's algorithm.

Internet users didn't take this situation lying down. They wanted to use the Web, but not be tracked, and so they started to install ad-blockers. A lot of ad-blockers, and more every year.

Ad-blockers don't just stop users from seeing ads and being tracked (and indeed, some ad-blockers actually track users!). They can also stop the publishers and marketers who rely on tracking and ad-clicks from earning money. Predictably, industry responded with ad-blocker-blockers, which prevented users from seeing their sites unless they turned off their ad-blocker.

You'll never guess what happened next.

Actually, it's obvious what happened next: users started to install ad-blocker-blocker-blockers.

The Biggest Boycott in History

The rise and rise of ad-blockers (and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers) is without parallel: 26% of Internet users are now blocking ads, and the figure is rising. It’s been called the biggest boycott in human history.

It's also something we've seen before, in the earliest days of the Web, when pop-up ads ruled the world (wide web), and users went to war against them.

In 1994, Hotwired (the defunct online adjunct to Wired magazine) displayed the first banner ad in Internet history. Forty-four percent of the people who saw that ad clicked on it. At the time, it felt like advertising had taken a great leap, attaining a conversion rate that bested print, TV, direct mail, or display advertising by orders of magnitude.

But it turned out that the click-rate on that Hotwired ad had more to do with novelty than any enduring persuasive properties of banner ads. Even as Web companies were raising millions based on the fabulous performance of early ads, the efficacy of those ads was falling off a cliff, with clickthrough rates plummeting to low single digits.

This created a desperate situation, where publishers needed to do something -- anything -- to goose their clickthrough rates.

Enter the Pop-Up Ad

That's when Ethan Zuckerman—then an employee at Tripod—invented the pop-up ad (he has since apologized). These ads spawned in new windows and were much harder to ignore—for a while. Human beings' response to stimulus tends to regress to the mean (the refrigerator hum gets quieter over time because you adapt to it, not because the decibel level decreases) and so pop-up ads evolved into ever-more virulent forms—pop-under ads, pop-ups with fake "close" boxes, pop-up ads that respawned, pop-up ads that ran away from your mouse when you tried to close them...

At the height of the pop-up wars, it seemed like there was no end in sight: the future of the Web would be one where humans adapted to pop-ups, then pop-ups found new, obnoxious ways to command humans' attention, which would wane, until pop-ups got even more obnoxious.

But that's not how it happened. Instead, browser vendors (beginning with Opera) started to ship on-by-default pop-up blockers. What's more, users—who hated pop-up ads—started to choose browsers that blocked pop-ups, marginalizing holdouts like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, until they, too, added pop-up blockers.

Chances are, those blockers are in your browser today. But here's a funny thing: if you turn them off, you won't see a million pop-up ads that have been lurking unseen for all these years.

Because once pop-up ads became invisible by default to an ever-larger swathe of Internet users, advertisers stopped demanding that publishers serve pop-up ads. The point of pop-ups was to get people's attention, but something that is never seen in the first place can't possibly do that.

How About Nah?

The Internet is full of take-it-or-leave-it offers: click-through and click-wrap agreements that you can either click "I agree" on or walk away from.

As the online world has grown more concentrated, with more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, it's become increasingly difficult for Web publishers to resist advertisers' insistence on obnoxious tracking ads.

But Internet users have never been willing to accept take-it-or-leave-it as the last word in technological self-determination. Adblockers are the new pop-up blockers, a way for users to do what publishers can't or won't do: demand a better deal from advertisers. When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"

Adversarial Interoperability

Adversarial interoperability occurs when someone figures out how to plug a new product or service into an existing product or service, against the wishes of the company behind that existing product or service.

Adblocking is one of the most successful examples of adversarial interoperability in modern history, along with third-party printer ink. When you visit a website, the server sends your browser a bunch of material, including the code to fetch and render ads. Adblockers throw away the ad parts and show you the rest, while ad-blocker-blocker-blockers do the same, and then engage in an elaborate technological game of cat-and-mouse in a bid to fool the server into thinking that you are seeing the ads, while still suppressing them.

Browsers have always been playgrounds for adversarial interoperability, from the pop-up wars to the browser wars. Thanks to open standards and a mutual disarmament rule for software patents among browser vendors, it's very hard to use the law to punish toolsmiths who make adblocking technologies (not that that's stopped people from attempting it).

Adversarial interoperability is often a way for scrappy new upstarts to challenge the established players—like the company that got sued by IBM's printer division for making its own toner cartridges and grew so big it now owns that printer division (!).

But adversarial interoperability is also a way for the public to assert its rights and push back against unfair practices. Take-it-or-leave it deals are one thing when the market is competitive and you can shop around for someone with better terms of service, but in highly concentrated markets where everyone has the same rotten deal on offer, adversarial interoperability lets users make a counteroffer: "How about nah?"

But for How Long?

Concentration in the tech industry—including the “vertical integration” of browsers, advertising networks, and video content under one corporate umbrella—has compromised the Internet's openness. In 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium published its first-ever "standard" that could not be fully implemented without permission from the giant tech and media companies (who have since refused that permission to anyone who rocks the boat). In publishing that standard, the W3C explicitly rejected a proposal to protect adversarial interoperability by extracting legally binding nonaggression promises from the companies that make up the consortium.

The standard the W3C published—Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), for restricting playback of video—comes with many dangers for would-be adversarial interoperators, notably the risk of being sued under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans tampering with “access controls” on copyrighted works and holds out both criminal and civil liability for toolsmiths who traffic in programs that let you change the rules embodied by EME.

One driving force behind the adoption of EME was the ever-tighter integration between major browser vendors like Google, video distributors, and advertising networks. This created a lopsided power-dynamic that ultimately ended up in the standardization of a means of undoing the configurable Web—where the user is king. EME is the first crack in the wall that protected browsers from those who would thwart adversarial operability and take "how about nah?" off the table, leaving us with the kind of take-it-or-leave-it Web that the marketing industry has been striving for since the first pop-up ad.

Car Industry Goes Behind Trump’s Back, Cuts Mileage Deal

Oh my, what will Donald Trump do now? Four automakers from three continents have struck a deal with California to produce more fuel-efficient cars for their U.S. fleets in coming years, undercutting one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive climate policy rollbacks. The compromise between the California Air Resources Board and Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and […]