Rsync corrump linkdump
A roundup of stray but worthy links.
I’m coming to Defcon! On Aug 9, I’m emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, LVCC — L1 — HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I’m giving a keynote called “Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification” (noon, LVCC — L1 — HW1–11–01).
As per the uje, I’ve arrived upon a Saturday with a backlog of links that I have not managed to squeeze into the week’s newsletters/blogs, so it’s time for another linkdump, 22nd in an erratic series. Here’s the previous 21:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Let’s start with some seasonal material, and by “seasonal,” I of course mean Hallowe’en. Yes, August is the official start of Spooky Season, and yes, I am a monster for insisting on this, but being a monster is the point of Spooky Season (which is what differentiates Spooky Season pushers like me from the creeps who insist that you need to start prepping for Xmas in late September — they’re monsters, too, but Yule Monsters are bad) (with the exception of Krampus).
I was a monster kid and now I’m a monster adult. It all started when I was bitten by a radioactive Haunted Mansion at the age of six:
I am a sucker for all things monstrous, and so I was intrigued when I got a book of “creepy-cute” stickers in the mail from a publicist at Simon & Schuster:
“Creepy-Cute” turns out to be an official designation, embraced by the illustrator GaynorCarradice, who has created several books on these lines, featuring her chibi/monster crossover creations, which do exactly what it says on the tin, by which I mean, there’s some genuinely creepy stuff in the mix, along with the cute.
It’s when the cute pastels rub up against the gore, skulls, eyeballs and other visceral viscera that these illustrations really kick off some heat — I’ve rounded up a few of my favorites here:
https://craphound.com/images/creepycute.jpg
One of the surefire signs that Spooky Season is upon us is that the (sometimes NSFW) Tumblr account Halloweenlandmotherfucker emerges from dormancy with a stream of images of vintage Hallowe’en cards (these were a thing!), photos of people in costume and other delightful visual novelties:
https://www.tumblr.com/halloweenlandmotherfucker
Monster culture isn’t just for Hallowe’en, of course. The ancient and noble tradition of compiling and publishing bestiaries is alive and well, thanks to RPGs. In the beginning, there was the D&D Boxed Set, with its Monsters and Treasure booklet:
https://www.americanroads.us/DandD/ODnD_Monsters_and_Treasure.pdf
Then came the Monster Manual, the first hardcover D&D book, succeeded by the Fiend Folio, which featured Charlie Stross creations like the githzerai and slaad, Indeed, there was a whole, iconic library of hardcovers that fit perfectly in an oversized backpack that I dragged everywhere so that I could obsessively read and re-read them.
Eventually, these gave way to new hardcovers with new rules as well as new corporate owners (Wizards of the Coast, then Hasbro), culminating in the release of the Open Gaming License, an “open content” license that was a) grossly defective; b) largely irrelevant; and c) hugely controversial in 2023, when Hasbro terminated it:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/12/beg-forgiveness-ask-permission/#whats-a-copyright-exception
The Open Gaming License purported to license out game elements that weren’t copyrightable (rules, tables, etc), as well as material that you could likely use under copyright exceptions like fair use:
And worst of all, it was revocable, so games publishers who tooled up to publish supplements and sourcebooks based on the OGL could have the rug yanked out from under them at any time (that time turned out to be early 2023).
Hasbro’s OGL rug-pull had three salutary effects:
I. It gave gamers a crash-course in what was — and wasn’t — copyrightable in an RPG design;
- It encouraged game developers to look beyond D&D’s OGL rules and into truly open (and often superior) alternatives; and
- It inflicted so much reputational harm on Hasbro that, 20 months later, they announced that they would release a new set of D&D rules under the Creative Commons Attribution Only 4.0 license:
Now, CC BY 4.0 is a real-ass license. Notably, it corrects a defect in the earlier versions of the CC licenses that gave rise to a class of predatory copyleft trolls like the odious Pixsy:
If Hasbro follows through on their promise, the new CC materials will kick off with the 2025 release of the next edition of the Monster Manual:
https://dungeonsanddragonsfan.com/new-2024-dnd-monster-manual/
It’s wild to think that tabletop RPGs are now a cutting-edge way to learn about digital policy, but on the other hand, D&D arrived in my home around the same time as my Apple ][+, which was also around the time I first heard the name Ronald Reagan (rest in piss).
The legacies of the 80s — RPGs, digital technology and Reaganomics — cast a long shadow. Last month, many of us discovered the hard way that Reaganomics — specifically, the embrace of monopolies as “efficient” — has produced a world of unimaginable brittleness. Millions of people around the world found themselves cut off from ATM cash, flights, hospital care, and many other essentials thanks to the Crowdstrike Blue Screen of Death outage. While many of the explainers have focused on how Crowdstrike fatfingered a software update that crashed all those computers, there’s been a lot less commentary about how it is that one company had it in its power to do so much harm.
Writing last week for EFF’s Deeplinks blog, my colleague Rory Mir tackled that (far more important) issue:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/crowdstrike-antitrust-and-digital-monoculture
Market concentration — monopoly — is the common thread wound around so many of our daily horribles. Think of the tech billionaires who threw in their lot with Trump last month. How did they get to be billionaires? Monopoly power. Remember back in 2017, that notorious photo of the tech industry meeting at the top of Trump Tower, with Peter Thiel at Trump’s left hand?
https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/donald-trump-meets-with-tech-leaders/
People were appalled that this group of corporate leaders, who between them controlled virtually all the technology in our lives, would debase themselves by paying fealty to this buffoonish would-be dictator.
But far more consequential was the fact that you could fit everyone who controlled all of our technology around a single table. Once everyone important to an industry can fit around a single table, it’s only a matter of time until they find a table to sit around, and that’s when it all starts to go wrong. As the Communist firebrand Adam Smith once wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Enshittification starts with market concentration. This is a subject I’m going to be going very deep on next Saturday, when I give my Defcon keynote, “Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification”:
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861
When I give that talk — and afterwards at my book signing — I will be wearing an N95 mask, just as I did last year. Why am I wearing a mask? Two reasons: first, Long Covid is a horror. One of the best writers I know — a living legend — recently told me that their book-writing days are likely done because of Long Covid brain fog.
A new Lancet article gets deep into the science of Long Covid:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014067362401136X
The principle author of the Lancet article is Oxford health professor Trish Greenhalgh, who gave an excellent lay summary in her newsletter:
https://independentsage.substack.com/p/long-covid-a-dystopian-game-of-pinball
In particular, Greenhalgh describes why some people don’t get Long Covid, and some people do — and, most important, explains why the fact that you didn’t get Long Covid last time doesn’t mean you won’t get it next time:
https://independentsage.substack.com/p/long-covid-a-dystopian-game-of-pinball
So I don’t want to get covid, and so I’m gonna wear a mask. Because masks fucking work. A new study reveals just how well they work:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(24)00192-0/fulltext
The study shows that wearing any mask, even without knowing how to fit it well, offers substantial protection against both contracting and transmitting covid. Even better: wearing an N95 (even without paying attention to correct fit) offers “near perfect” protection against covid:
https://today.umd.edu/n95-masks-nearly-perfect-at-blocking-covid-umd-study-shows
I didn’t get covid at Defcon last year, and I didn’t get it at HOPE, and I didn’t get it on our family vacation in July — all events where friends got sick. The difference? I wore a mask. Which works.
OK, I need to go work on my Defcon speech some more, so I’m gonna sign off, but I will leave you with just one more link, the wonderful new public domain image search tool, Public Work, which crawls and indexes the Met, the NYPL, and other sources:
I rely on public domain, CC and other freely usable clip art to make the collages that accompany this newsletter/blog’s stories. While I have very little talent in the visual arts, I’m getting steadily better. I mean, look at this amazing image I womped up for last week’s story on Bitcoin bros’ election campaign finance fraud:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53893519593/in/album-72177720316719208
You can see a collection of my recent collages in my Flickr gallery for them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208?sd
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
