links
- It would dig up 10 million tonnes of coal each year
- It poses disastrous risks to the Great Barrier Reef (which is looking decidedly less great each year), local water supplies and the ever-warming climate
- People are pretty anxious about climate change
- The Australian federal government and the Queensland state government have, largely, been pretty keen on the mine (and have a parasitic relationship with mining companies in general)
- This has been going on for over a decade because time alone cannot defeat stupidity and the just may never rest
- A vanity is ten or more domains owned by a single person, where very few are in use.
- A parade of RSS feeds is when you have so many RSS feeds that you have to scroll to see them all.
- A quabble of Tweets is the responses or quote tweets that spawn from an especially hot/unpleasant take.
- a clout of influencers
- a tempest of reply guys
- a snit of stans
- a trantrum of incels
- a classified of spam bots
- a borer of crypto boosters
-
I asked Siri to fart and it said it “couldn’t help me with that”. Which, you know, fair. ↩︎
- “How to hit a woman so no one knows” – 163 million (up 31%)
- “I am going to kill her when she gets home” – 178 million (up 39%)
- “How to control your woman” – 165 million (up 67%)
- “He will kill me” – 107 million (up 84%)
- “Help me, he won’t leave” – 222 million (up 95%)
- “He beats me up all the time” – 320 million (up 36%)
Even the 4chan edgelords think Elon Musk is cringe
In another attempt to show off his innovator credentials, Elon Musk combined JK Rowling style TERFism with COVID conspiracy nonsense.
Truly a powerful thinker.
It puts a neat little bow in his becoming every uncle the family is embarrassed by. He flashed his gun, he’s hocking kitchen appliances to make loan repayments and, now, he’s posting guff to impress the cashed-up versions of people who spend all their time in weird Facebook groups.
He’s generic, ya know? He’s even losing the kids.
But even as a far-right shitposter, Musk is hapless. Unlike somebody such as Donald Trump, who remains the Twitter troll template, Musk is a try-hard. And although the Twitter shock jocks will happily lap him up because he triggers the libs and serves their purposes, Musk is still seen as a dilettante by the inveterate shitposters and bigots. Over on 4chan, the far-right message board, Musk’s Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” one poster mused. Even in his thirsty attempts to be an edgelord, Musk is failing to be anything other than cringey.
Maybe he can buy Habbo Hotel next to try and get them back onside.
Apple’s green message bubbles have an actual problem
I don’t go in for a lot of the ‘iMessage is a tool of social exclusion and must be stopped for moral reasons’ stentorian breathing – teenagers leaning into any reason to say “ew” isn’t new – but Allen Hsu has ID’d an actual problem.
Apple have picked a gross green. And it’s about colour contrast.
Here’s Hsu’s description:
The blue Apple picked for the iMessage bubbles provides a better color contrast against the white text on it compared to the green Apple picked for the Android bubbles. In other words, since text is white, likely Apple picked a darker blue but a lighter green to purposefully make the iMessage text more readable.
The contrast issue gets worse as you bump up the screen brightness, too.
According to Hsu, Apple’s green doesn’t meet accessibility guidelines:
In fact, the green Apple picked doesn’t even pass the WCAG accessibility test, with a score of 2.18 which is considered “very poor”. It impacts the user experience for everyone but especially for the users with visual disabilities.
Apple has made a lot of their accessibility features – for good reason, they’re fantastic – so, if Hsu’s description is accurate (and it seems to be), this would be quite the oversight. Or an example of Apple sacrificing their values for a less-than-stellar reason.
Regardless, they definitely could’ve chosen a nicer shade of green.
Brad Esposito: ‘The sooner you start laughing the less it hurts’
Brad Esposito, in his newsletter Very fine day, has one of the better (and to the point) descriptions of everything going down at Twitter:
It is romantic, in a way, that twitter - a platform built by the media - would go out the same way so many media brands have already: a private equity joker rocking up, stripping for parts, and pushing for the leanest, monetizable version of things. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a slow-drip, tortious display of ruthlessness. To hell with quality.
Old Elon knows just what he’s doing. Have we all considered the man doesn’t want to be here?
Maybe now the tech union movement will start to heat up.
How a mining company is using fake Twitter accounts to defend itself
What would any reputable company do in the face of constant distrust from banks, media outlets and environmental activists? Knock together some fake Twitter accounts to attack people, of course.
Adani own an exhaustingly contentious coal mine in Carmichael, Queensland, Australia. It helps to have a bit of background. Here’s the gist:
This has led to what we in Australia call a shitfight.
(Vice published a great doco about the mine. Well worth a watch.)
To Twitter we go
Adani, as part of their ongoing effort to defend their business interests (which are so dubious that banks refused to finance the Carmichael mine), have resorted to making fake Twitter accounts to defend the company.
Cam Wilson, writing for Crikey, reported on Adani using 25+ Twitter accounts acting in an “‘astroturfing’ operation — an attempt to fake grassroots support on social media for a cause.”
According to Wilson’s report, the seemingly fake accounts have been posting “specific, pointed attacks at individuals and media outlets that have criticised Adani, and amplified positive news about it or its founder, Gautam Adani.”
The accounts want to look real, of course. Wilson describes how they go about it:
One example is @pat_mic078. The account, created in March 2022, uses a smiling image of US Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch as its profile picture. In between retweets of Elizabeth, Elon Musk and tweets that appear to copy the text and image of Barack Obama’s tweets (like one congratulating his daughter on her birthday), @pat_mic078 has also tweeted at anti-Adani group Stop Adani, Crikey founder Stephen Mayne, the Bob Brown Foundation and Pennings.
Wilson goes on to explain how experts figure out that accounts like ol’ @pat_mic078 could be part of a coordinated astroturfing effort. Give it a read.
A very confident mining company
These are the kinds of fake accounts that can slip between the cracks when you’re looking for bots and ne’er-do-wells with an agenda. On the surface, they look legit; they look like any other myopic culture warrior on the internet.
You only notice things look sus when digging into how they post about a specific topic at specific times. I’m sure social platforms could detect this kind of maleficence if they had the time, resources and inclination but I’m not sure they have any of the three.
So we’re left a mining company so insecure about its position – both economically and politically – that it’s resorting to fake Twitter accounts to dogpile rival organisations and, in some cases, individuals.
Real tough stuff.
Japanese artists manipulate the Chinese government to great success
What happens when online pirates based in China straight-up clone a beloved Japanese art site, art and all? The artists fight back by manipulating the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) censorship machine.
The site in question is Pixiv. It’s racked up 3.7 billion page views a month as users share art and manga. Pirates took notice, as they do, and started stealing the whole dang site.
According Yitong Wu, writing for Radio Free Asia, the thieves were copying “site’s content almost verbatim, translating tags and titles into simplified Chinese”. They then shared the site to Chinese users as “vpixiv”.
The artists didn’t take that lying down. Here’s Wu again:
Pixiv fought back, however, with some of the site’s users adding “sensitive” keywords to their artworks, including “Tiananmen massacre,” which alerted the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s massive, government-backed censorship system.
Other sensitive and forbidden keywords included “Free Hong Kong,” “Independence for Taiwan,” and “June 4, Tiananmen Square,” all of which are heavily censored terms behind China’s Great Firewall.
The CCP’s censorship system noticed and, ah, did it’s thing. Vpixiv was shut down.
Mock the Chinese government, stop IP theft
This isn’t the first time creators have poked at the CCP’s insecurities to stop pirates stealing their stuff.
According to Wu, “Taiwanese YouTubers have been known to add keywords like #WinnieThePooh to their videos” to stop them being shared across Chinese video-sharing sites.
(The CCP is not a fan of Winnie. People have long used the silly ol' bear to mock Chinese president Xi Jingping.)
The strategy has been noticed by people in China. Here’s Wu again:
One comment on a Chinese social media platform joked about Pixiv’s move, saying “insulting China has become the best defense against theft,” while another bemoaned the effect on the country’s overseas image: “Counterfeit China is adding to our international humiliation,” the user wrote.
It’s a shame tech companies can’t do the same to stop all the rampant theft of their work. (But I guess those companies are too thirsty for cheap manufacturing and Chinese middle-class consumers to really worry about it.)
A quabble of tweets, and other collective nouns for the web
The English language is full of great collective nouns.
A murder of crows is a classic. Then there’s a parliament of owls, an unkindness of ravens, a down of hares, a clowder of cats.
But there aren’t many for the web. That’s changing thanks to Collective Nouns for the Web (organised by Melanie Sumner).
There aren’t many yet but I like these three:
You can suggest new collective nouns by filling an issue on GitHub.
My partner and I have started trialling a few. Here’s what we’ve come up with:
I’ll be thinking about this for a while.
Alexa can fart (and may be experiencing severe gastric distress)
You can ask Alexa to do a lot of fun things. Fun fact: you can ask it to fart. Alexa will then also describe or comment on that fart.1
That means someone provided Alexa with a rich, nuanced library of fart sounds and commentary to match. What a day in the writers’ room that would’ve been.
In this TikTok video from @bigbadwohlf (YouTube mirror), wohlf whispers (prompting Alexa to do the same, really adding to the scene) and say’s ‘fart for me’.
Alexa responds with this.
Okay, here comes big fart. [farts] That was a deep one.
Shall I play another fart sound?
What follows sounds like Alexa is really working through something unhealthy. It really bubbles and gurgles.
So find your nearest Echo and let it rip. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Cryptocurrency is now forbidden under Islamic law in Indonesia (and some fair points were made)
Indonesia’s national council of Islamic scholars have decided that trading cryptocurrencies is “haram – forbidden under Islamic law.”
Erwin Renaldi and Helena Souisa, reporting for ABC News:
According to Islamic law, a transaction should follow certain requirements, such as having a physical form and definite value.
“Cryptocurrency as currency is forbidden because it has elements of uncertainty, harm and doesn’t meet the Islamic requirement according to Shariah [law],” KH Asrorun Niam Sholeh, the council’s head of religious decrees, said in the forum.
However, Mr Sholeh added that although cryptocurrencies as a currency is forbidden, it could be traded as a commodity or digital assets if they meet requirements.
I mean, they’re not wrong about crypto as a currency.
One of the conclusions that came from the discussion, attended by both crypto and Islamic legal experts, was that crypto trading tends to involve “fraudulent practices and gambling”.
[Deputy Chairman of the East Java NU Ahmad Fahrur Rozi] said cryptocurrencies was also similar to gambling because people speculate about the value without knowing the cause.
Practices such as gambling are not allowed in Islam, since the value and price are indefinite and could financially and physiologically harm those involved.
I mean…
Rozi continued:
It can increase by 1,000 per cent or 5,000 per cent, but it can also be zero. It’s not an investment.
Look, I’m not out here saying crypto should be illegal. Regulated? Sure. Illegal is probably a step too far, depending on your appetite for risk in your economy.
But the things Rozi and Sholeh are saying here aren’t wrong.
Wikipedia is as contentious as you’d expect when it comes to China
You’ll say “yeah, that makes sense” when you read this: Wikipedia is messy when it comes to China (and especially China’s actions in Hong Kong).
Wikipedia acts a starting point for people wanting to learn about almost anything. It sets a frame of reference for people: you decide to read up on, say, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, and you skim over the Wikipedia article with that exact name.
You might read on from there, you might not, but that article becomes your default view of the matter (even if it’s just a vibe).
That makes Wikipedia a first draft of history when it comes to current events.
Shiroma Silva, reporting for the BBC, has said that the platform has “turned into a war of words between Wikipedia editors who are pro-democracy and those who are pro-Beijing“.
Matters came to a head in September when Wikipedia’s governing body banned seven active pro-Beijing editors and removed the administrative powers of a further 12.
Those involved were accused of bullying and intimidating editors who had a pro-democracy stance.
People in the pro-Beijing camp say this means “narratives relating to China and Hong Kong” will prioritise a western POV.
The “edit wars” are focused on issues about Hong Kong and mostly on the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia (occasionally spilling onto the English version).
“Pro-Beijing people often remove content that is sympathetic to protests, such as tear gas being fired and images of barricades. They also add their own content,” says a Hong Kong-based editor named “John”, who wanted to remain anonymous because of fears of intimidation.
“Pro-democracy editors tend to add content to shift the balance or the tone of the article, but in my experience, the pro-Beijing editors are a lot more aggressive in churning out disinformation,” he says.
Of course, the Chinese government blocks Wikipedia. People within the country use VPNs to access and edit the site.
Roblox went down, parents freaked out
In what must be the online version of stepping on a piece of Lego hiding in the carpet, Roblox went down for 24+ hours and parents everywhere know it.
Here’s Wesley Yin-Poole for Eurogamer:
And now, parents of children who play Roblox are up in arms. I’ve seen multiple posts on various parents' Facebook groups complaining about their kids complaining about Roblox being down.
“Roblox is down. I repeat Roblox is down,” said one exasperated mum on the Happy Mum Happy Baby Facebook group last night.
“I have an all-boy household. I’ll need a whiskey later.”
“Honestly, my son was freaking out because it wouldn’t let me log on,” said another mum. “It was like the end of the world.”
Roblox, of course, is the uber-popular game platform where kids spend hours building games and other things. It’s been accused of exploiting young creators, which is in no way surprising.
The Taliban has seized US biometric and face recognition tech
We haven’t had to wait long to get a worse-case scenario for facial recognition and biometrics:
The Taliban has seized US biometric databases and equipment in Afghanistan. This comes after a push to digitise whole swathes of Afghan life.
Rina Chandran, Reuters:
After years of a push to digitise databases in the country, and introduce digital identity cards and biometrics for voting, activists warn these technologies can be used to target and attack vulnerable groups.
“We understand that the Taliban is now likely to have access to various biometric databases and equipment in Afghanistan,” the Human Rights First group wrote on Twitter on Monday.
“This technology is likely to include access to a database with fingerprints and iris scans, and include facial recognition technology,” the group added.
The Taliban, famously pro-violent-reparisal, now have access to high-tech identification systems.
This is a nightmare scenario for people in Afghanistan. And for all the people who have been worried about this exact thing happening.
Damien P Williams summed it up well on Twitter:
I mean jesus fucking CHRIST people, how many times did we warn about the security & privacy vulnerabilities of facial recognition & biometrics as a paradigm in itself & of its storage in the long term?
Yup.
“Music Is About to Change Forever”
The music times are a-changing. Eric Slivka, writing for MacRumors:
The Browse tab in the Music app across Apple’s platforms has started displaying a prominent teaser hinting at an upcoming major announcement for Apple Music. Under the heading “Coming soon,” the headline says “Get ready – music is about to change forever.” An accompanying “Tune-In Video” simply shows an animated Apple Music logo.
There has been talk of lossless audio for a minute now (which seems like more of a box to tick, rather than a real worthwhile feature, to me, given how few people can hear the difference between lossless and lossy audio).
Who knows? Maybe Apple will be the first music streaming service to pay artists well.
Google could do more to prevent men killing women
Update: The research about increases in the number of Google searches re: domestic abuse had flaws in its methodology. The researcher addressed it on Twitter.
While good to know, that doesn’t change the overall argument of this article: that search engines could do more to break the cycle of abuse and that there’s precedence for their doing so. As such, I’m leaving the article as-is. Just know that the numbers reference below, in regards to search numbers, are’t accurate.
Domestic abuse has spiked over the past year. Both its perpetrators and its victims are turning to search engines like Google for advice. And Google isn’t doing enough to address the problem.
Liz Plank, writing for MSNBC puts it bluntly:
Men on a global scale are increasingly killing the women they purport to love.
As Plank explains, this violence is “usually premeditated”. The Google searches back it up. A recent study tracked searches about domestic abuse made in the US between March and August 2020 to the amount made in 2019.
A few searches, and how often they happened:
They’re all upsetting but the phrasing of the third one – “control your woman” – is insidious. It feels innocuous compared to the imminent threat of violence but the desire for for control is often the first step towards that violence. It reveals a sense of ownership and entitlement, for one, but it also shows someone reaching out a way to dominate someone’s life. People are looking ways to coerce someone else, be it subtly or not, and they’re finding it. To see people reaching for that power over someone gets under my skin (and the fact that they’re getting advice on how to achieve it is even worse).
Here’s the other half of the story:
These aren’t just numbers. They’re people looking for help because their partners, their communities, and society as a whole has failed them. And Google isn’t helping.
According to Plank, “none of the aforementioned searches appear to return any domestic violence resources or hotlines.” This stands in contrast with Google’s approach to suicide prevention: since 2010, people have been presented with resources to help and phone numbers to reach out to when they enter search for certain terms.
Meanwhile, searching for “how to control your woman” brings you tips on coercive control, one of the most insidious and vile forms of domestic abuse. (See Jess Hill’s book See what you made me do for some must-read reporting on the subject.)
I searched for “He beats me up all the time” and I got a list of posts on Quora, a few advice columnists, a few opinion pieces, and a helpful list of things “people also search for” that includes things like “My man beats me” and “Is it my fault he hit me”.
No-one expects Google to single-handedly solve this problem. But the information we receive shapes our behaviour, our norms, and, thus, our society. As a facilitator for the info – not to mention, a stop on people’s path to both perpetuate and escape violence – Google and all other search engines have a responsibility to do better.
No, Bitcoin doesn’t incentivise renewable energy
People who are super into Bitcoin are really into recasting it as more than just another speculative asset. It’s incredible. This pursuit, like Bitcoin itself, is also a waste of energy.
In among artists making NFT artworks to fight climate change (a real head scratcher) Jack Dorsey has put in some work on Twitter:
#bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
Elon Musk, of course, agreed.
This is, of course, incorrect. Thankfully Maciej Cegłowski has done all the important work of blithely dismissing it for us:
This is like when I drank all your beer and told you I was incentivizing home brewing
Bitcoin is notable for how astonishingly not-good it is for the environment due to energy use. It’d be great if it ran exclusively on renewable energy. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin “incentivises” renewable energy anymore than, say, coal mining does.
This is another attempt to recast Bitcoin in a positive light, as if it contributes anything productive to society beyond being another asset for people to speculate on.
That’s not to say that Bitcoin (or the tech that powers it) can’t become a positive part of life. It can and I hope it does. But it’s not right now. And it certainly isn’t doing anything for renewables.
What kind of world is Amazon selling?
You can say a lot about Amazon, both interesting and worrisome. But I’ve never really asked myself what kind of world it’s creating. It’s a big question, sure, and one with a myriad of answers. But it’s worth asking, given how influential the company is.
Thankfully, Anand Giridharadas has done it for me. He put it to Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica and author of Fulfillment: winning and losing in one-click America, a new book about Amazon.
Anand: If Amazon is left unchecked, what kind of world do you think it will eventually create?
Alec: A world where the fortunate among us fulfill most of our daily needs and whims by placing a one-click order, and where the less fortunate among us rush to fulfill those orders for us. And a world where the communities we live in — both the winner-take-all cities and the left-behind towns — become the poorer for it.
It’s a brief interview that covers a lot of ground, including how Amazon benefitted from the decline of manufacturing in the US and how they exploit tax breaks on local and national levels.
Zhush up your computing life with Hannah Montana Linux
You know what all contemporary operating systems are missing? Deeply embedded pop-star stylings. Thankfully, Linux is here to help.
Brian Feldman, in his quest for a modern OS, stumbled upon some choice Linux forks. There’s Biebian, wrapped in Justin Bieber accoutrement, and explicitly not based on Debian (which is “part of the joke”) and, of course, Hannah Montana Linux:
As far as I can tell, Hannah Montana Linux isn’t a joke. The project was registered on SourceForge in 2008 and was last updated in 2013. Its creator writes on an FAQ page that “I thought - what would attract young users to Linux? So I created this idea after a lot of reading and work.”
There’s also a parody of Hannah Montana’s theme song, “Best of Both Worlds”, if you really want to jam.
Honestly, it’s wild that this wasn’t the thing to finally ring in the Year of Linux.
For whom the Mac bell tolls, it tolls for thee
The Mac startup sound is iconic. It’s a lovely way to start your computing day.
But Macs also used to have death tones. Fun. Stephen Hackett, Apple historian about town, has the lowdown:
What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine crashed.
And they are glorious
He’s right. They are glorious. Go have a listen.
The Macintosh II era swan songs make it sound like you’ve won something, which is fun. They’re also reminiscent of the sounds you might hear before an announcement in Japan. That’s just good gear.
Now, if only someone could add the sounds of a screaming Roomba to my MacBook Pro when it crashes.
The “Amazon of South Korea” is worth billions, facing accusations of employees
What’s a few bodies on the path to a billion-dollar valuation?
South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday making a multi-billionaire out of its founder Bom Kim.
Coupang’s US listing is the biggest by an Asian company since Alibaba in 2014. [It’s] share price rose 41% in its trading debut, which was the biggest US initial public offering (IPO) since Uber in 2019. Coupang is often referred to as the Amazon of South Korea.
[…]
Despite the company’s popularity, it has faced scrutiny after reports of several deaths among delivery and logistics employees who were allegedly overworked.
Sounds like they’re following the Amazon model to a tee.
Human society is just collateral damage in climate change
We caused climate change and it’ll change our societies forever, in ways small and seismic. But the problems we’ll face are a small part of the problem: climate change is a catastrophe across every single ecosystem. We’re a sliver of that, albeit a self-focussed one.
Jake Bittle captures this reality in his review of The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change:
In the best of these three pieces, “The Sixth Extinction,” Kolbert positions “climate change” as a pan-organic calamity, a form of ecological genocide that incidentally may inflict irreparable damage on human society. This is perhaps the most valuable piece of climate journalism ever written because it is the only one that accurately depicts the scale of a crisis too often rendered in narrowly human terms. Extinction is not a metaphor, but it functions like one, carrying with it a fearful connotation that has yet to be matched in subsequent accounts of the calamity.
We’re responsible for that – even though it’s a wide-ranging structural issue and not the result of any one individual doing any one thing. We, as a society, appointed ourselves master and controller of the planet by shaping it at every level. From micro plastics in the ocean to wide-spread deforestation to gases in the sky, we’ve touched everything.
That matters, this is our doing. But the effects go well beyond us. And we need to reckon with that.
The changing face of uwu
uwu has become one of the internet’s original sins. It’s the kind of performative “cuteness” that rankles people, either because it’s disingenuous or because that’s the point.
Like everything bad on the internet, uwu started somewhere. Brian Feldman dug into it for his newsletter BNet – turns out, the first recorded usage of uwu is from a piece of Yu-Gi-Oh fan fiction, adding yet more weight to my belief that fanfic communities spawn at least a third of everything that becomes a thing online.
Feldman makes an interesting argument, though. The uwu in question was used in a self-effacing author note:
Wheee! Sarah/ryoulover4ever was my 200th reviewer! I’m sorry this took so long! -/smacks self/- Again, feel free to throw squids and fish at me. UwU I deserve it, I know.
Feldman argues that, in this context, uwu wouldn’t make sense if it was being used in a performatively-cute way. It doesn’t jive with the tone. It’s closer to confounded face emoji in tone, right down to the w-shaped mouth.
Here’s Feldman:
All of this leads me to theorize that the oldest known use of
uwudeploys it in a dramatically different context than the one we are now used to. Which is fine, because internet language is rarely prescriptive — there is never one exact right way to use ambiguous pictographs like emoji and emoticons. In fact, that’s how they derive their power: allowing the reader to use the surrounding conversational context to figure out exactly what they mean.Still, I’m not quite sure how
uwumight have gone from a grimace to a cute face. Regardless, kinda neat.
uwu has changed. It’s evolved. That’s to be expected, really: anything that becomes popular will, eventually, become something new.
Who knows what it’ll become next. It may even turn into something even more annoying and more powerful.