Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA (26 Oct 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Podcasting "Microincentives and Enshittification" (24 Oct 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic (14 Oct 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Google's enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Saturday linkdump, part the sixth (09 Sept 2023)"
In July, the Federal Trade Commission announced a complaint against Amazon over the ways the company has tricked customers into subscribing to its paid Prime service. The Commission argues that Amazon discovered that its customers were accidentally signing up for Prime and were unhappy about it, and that the company nevertheless decided not to fix this confusion because it was making too much money from these accidental signups. To make things worse, Amazon deliberately made it harder to cancel Prime, and celebrated that the new, more complex process resulted in fewer cancellations.
This is historic. Prior to the current administration, the FTC had been in a 40 year decline: underfunded and timid. But the new chair, Lina M. Khan, has brought a muscular, take-no-prisoners approach, working in close coordination with her peers at the DoJ antitrust division and with other agencies to reawaken their long-dormant regulatory powers.
I have a confession to make: I am old. I turned 52 last month, the full deck of cards. I have two artificial hips. I have cataracts in both eyes. Iām old as dirt.
You may know that the AARP has a squad junk-mail ninjas that track you down on your 50th birthday to try to sell you a membership. Less well known is that the AARP also issues every 50 year old with a license to complain about how much worse things are today than they used to be in my day
I know that complaint is trite, but I think itās true when it comes to the internet. I think the internet used to be better, back before it turned into what the Kiwi hacker Tom Eastman calls āfive giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.ā
I miss the old, good internet. But this isnāt a talk about bringing the old good internet back. Itās a talk about what a new good web could be.
And why we donāt have it.
And how weāll get it.
Continue reading "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internetās Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Podcasting "Enshitternet" (22 August 2023)"
Last week, a US federal judge handed Americaās creative workers a huge labor win: Judge Beryl A Howell of the DC Circuit Court upheld a US Copyright Office ruling that works created by āAIsā are not eligible for copyright protection.
This is huge.
Some background: under US lawāāāand under a mountain of international treaties, from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS ācopyright is automatically granted to creative works of human authorship āat the moment of fixation in some tangible medium.ā
That is: as soon as a human being makes something creative, and records it in some medium (a hard-drive, magnetic tape, paper, film, canvas, etc), that creative thing is immediately copyrighted (the duration of that copyright varies, both by territory and by whether the creator was working on their own or for a corporation).
Continue reading "Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain"
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. –Socrates
Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. –Judge John Hodgman
Iām an official Old Person (I turned 52 last month). According to the AARP, that means that I am now officially entitled to complain that back in my day, things used to be better.
I am suspicious of this impulse! When I started dialing BBSes in the early 1980s, the Old Hands there told me that it was all downhill after acoustic couplers and that modems were degrading the noosphere into a fallen paradise.