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#drm
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“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
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20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war
Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/
20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:
https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership
Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":
https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n
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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:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
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Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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prokopetz · 2 months
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People getting mad about Firefox switching to using hardware acceleration for video playback because they think "hardware acceleration" is a form of DRM is basically the browser equivalent of people freaking out because some random social media platform's terms of service says they own your posts, then when you read what the ToS in question actually says it's literally just "you grant us the right to show your posts to other people".
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belovedrm · 3 months
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DRM … UR KIDDING ?! UR JOKING ?! OH MY GOD.
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jinx-blackout-84 · 8 months
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Okay so basically at the start of the August drama specifically, Tommy made a skit video. You might wanna watch it for context, and if you do, it's called if youtubers were honest.
Here's the part I will be talking about for the post, though
Also for more context, dream has admitted to sexually messaging underage fans, and still associates with George, who made openly sexist comments.
He had a section in there about how Dream handled the Qsmp situation and was basically just making fun of him.
After seeing this, Dream gets on Twitter and starts liking and unliking posts making fun of Tommy.
Inniters get mad, ofc.
Drm stans are ticked bc their precious baby pedo is being bashed, inniters are fighting back.
Drm stans are calling Tommy abelist for the way he portrayed dream, he was not being ableist, he portrayed every character similarly,and are saying he was joking about Dream getting doxxed, which he never did.
Inniters are pointing out that Dream has tried to take credit for Tommy's career before and that this is bot the first time Dream has behaved like a manchild.
And then the Drm stans go after motherinnit.
She fights back, we fight back, all out controversy, that brings us to where we are now.... awaiting Dream's twitlonger so we can watch Philza bash him and end his career. (This has yet to happen but the second it does I'll add it to the post)
Also, a helpful don't stop the party edit to help explain things too
Be careful though, it flashes.
@give-grian-rights
@uncertaininnit
@timetokrill
@uncalamar
@atlusreadsrandomshit
@girldiomedes
@kyromaniacc
@happyunknownunknown
@colorsystem-color
@milkforartist
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Scholastic Books and Disney are teaming up to develop a special paper so that physical books can be region locked to specific countries and cannot be copied, stopping book piracy and “lending.”
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autolenaphilia · 6 months
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Blu-ray DRM is really devilish. I use a program called makemkv to rip them, because there is no other way to play them on my laptop, and there are no legit linux options for blu-ray playback, you have to crack the drm to play them. The easiest solution is makemkv to rip the movies into files, it works out of the box.
But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.
"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."
And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.
I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.
And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.
And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware file name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.
So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.
This is why DRM is so bad, and anyone who uses it deserves all the piracy they are trying to stop with it. It's scummy to take someone's money and then interfere with their ability to use the copy of the products they own and paid for. It's such atrocious treatment of the customer that anyone who does it deserves to have their stuff pirated.
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pray4saint · 9 months
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how it was on your honeymoon with the dream team
masterlist & descrip. rated r. 16+. gn!reader, fem!reader & afab!reader. dreamwastaken, sapnap, and georgenotfound. smut. established relationships.
a/n. the sfw version can be found here
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dream - gn!reader, praise, fluffy smut, dream being obsessed with knowing you're married
”ugh, i forgot how hot it is here and how often my ears pop on the drive up from the airport.” you groaned, falling back on the bed in your b&b. clay chuckled, leaning over you. for awhile he didn't say anything, just watching you like he was completely out of it. you sit up, pushing on his chest so you don't bonk heads. ”you alright clay?” you stare at him, putting your hands on his stomach. you boyfriend– no, your husband smiled down at you, pushing a strand of hair from your face. ”m'just admiring my spouse.” his tone, and his smile, and his eyes, it made your stomach flip. sometimes it amazed you how even after all this time, he still gave you butterflies.
you returned a smile back to him before standing up and stretching out your arms. clay's arms linked around your middle and he pressed a small kiss to your collarbone. the feeling of his lips on your collarbone makes you laugh a little bit. ”you seem extra clingy today baby. did the flight tire you out?” your hands land on his shoulders and clay shakes his head no. ”is it so wrong to want to want to be close to and appreciate my forever person?” there's clear sarcasm and playfulness in his voice but there's something else in the way he finishes the question that you can't quite identify. ”i suppose not.” in response to your words, his hands wander down to the back of your thighs, gentle pinches pulled at them before you understand and jump up, letting him lift you from your thighs. with your legs wrapped around clay's middle, it really gives him the choice of where he wants to go with you. since the two of you had already eaten and really, there wasn't much else to do, except oh right, it's your first night as a married couple.
walking with you clutched onto him, at first he heads to the back porch, watching the sun begin to set to which you turn to watch it with him. the moment was sweet but it didn't last long simply because on kona the sun sets fast. ”well now what?” you ask, starting to feel a little like your husband should put you down. it's almost as if he can sense it, because he's quick to spin on his heels and walk back inside, letting you slide the door shut. ”well, my love, i've got a few ideas of what we could do.” he grins and it's quite obvious what he means, and yet still you take a second to register it in your mind, but once you do clay has already laid you back on the bed.
- ≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫ -
you'd had had sex with clay plenty of times but still, this was different, it was how he kissed at your shoulders and ear lobes while he pressed himself into you, how vocal he was in letting you know how good he felt with you wrapped around him, how his pupils almost appeared to you as hearts. it all made you realise just how in love the two of you were, and how in sync you two were; physically and emotionally.
”i love you so much baby,” he huffed out, and you moaned at the mix of his words and actions, your fingers digging into his shoulders. you'd gotten so close to drawing blood from his skin it made him moan out your name, whispering praises against your shoulder. ”you're so perfect m'love.” the words sent shocks to your lower area, pushing you closer to the edge. ”clay please-” your husband cuts you off with a sharp snap of his hips, ”you don't need to ask tonight baby,” he pauses to let out some more of those pretty groans you so love to hear, ”don't gotta ask your husband t'night.” you could feel how even his own mention of being your husband turned him on, his cock twitching inside you. ”i- fuck i love you babe.” you muttered out, feeling the small drop of blood from his shoulders around the pads of your fingers.
this slight pain only seemed to encourage him to rut into you faster, making you cross your legs over his middle, drawing him closer and binding your arms around his neck tight. he loved knowing the affect he had on you, your hole clenching around his cock, signalling how close you were.
clay was either really loud or really close to your ear, because all you heard was his breathing, his grunting n' groaning, his gorgeous moans. ”clay i'm gettin' so close.”
”you gonna cum for me hon'?” you nodded rapidly, pulling ever him closer to you as you came. he didn't miss a beat in telling you between ragged breaths, ”right behind you honey, m'gonna cum.”
sapnap - fem!reader, unprotected sex (wrap it b4 you tap it), mentioned creampie/cumming inside, breeding kink if you squint, reader absolutely jumping his bones
the first two weeks of being married, you and your husband didn't have sex. mainly this was because you spent the first two weeks around his family, in their home, and waiting so long to fuck your husband was starting to take its full effect. you'd touch yourself in the shower, or subconsciously hold sapnap's hand closer to your crotch while you were holding hands under the dinner table, and he noticed but he didn't do anything. it wasn't until you left his family in texas and off for three weeks in greece that you'd get any type of real relief.
your husband closed the door to the hotel room, letting out a heavy sigh before doing a quick head count of your bags. it took everything in you not to jump his bones right then and there, but you knew he was tired and hungry and probably wanted to shower, so you waited.
see, waiting wasn't so bad when you knew you'd get what you wanted once you got back to the hotel room.
”you know we can skip dinner darl'?” your husband offered the question and you shook your head no immediately, you needed him to have his energy or you were sure you wouldn't survive another day. ”no we can't, you need to eat.” still, your voice was sweet as ever, looking out for him like you always did.
- ≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫ -
”y/n i'm sorry we hav-” as soon as the door was shut you interrupted him, pressing a passion-filled kiss to sapnap's lips. you'd barely had time to close the door before you were jumping his bones, closing your arms and legs around him, hand tangled in his hair as your lips moved in sync. quickly, his hands reached around to the backs of your thighs, squeezing and he walked backwards to the bed.
sapnap gripped harder on your legs, spinning around to lie you back on the bed, crawling over you to cage you in. your husband pulled his lips from yours, pressing sweet, gentle along your neck. ”fuck sap– baby i need you. need you so bad.” you whine, hands falling from his head to his shoulders. ”i know princess i know. i'm sorry.” he remained slow with his kisses. ”sap, my love?” he looked up at you, eyes wide with interest. ”i love you and i appreciate your gentle touch but what i really need is for you to fuck me.” your words were clear and concise, your cheeks were pink and your eyes screamed at him to have his way with you. ”please sap, fuck me. please.” and he understood.
in a matter of what felt like two seconds, your husband had discarded both his clothes and yours, and after a minute of debating whether or not a condom was needed, pressed into your cunt, making you squeal at the intrusion. ”oh sweetheart... shit, y'so tight.” your legs tugged his middle closer to you and his head dipped down to your ear, groaning against your skin.
his pace started brutal, quick, hard, and his moans only turned you on further. ”shit, sap.” you struggled to get the words out between the beat of his skin pressing against yours. ”y'so perfect baby. y'know that?” his question was met with strewn out, broken moans, your arms squeezing his neck impossibly closer to you, and your pussy clenching down on his cock.
sapnap's hands laid on either side of your head as he fucked into you, grunting and groaning only getting louder.
”gettin' s-soo close baby, can i cum inside?..” you moaned against his neck at his sentence, the sudden question sparking the pool in your stomach to grow. you hummed against his skin, pulling at the skin of his shoulders. ”fuck– i love you so much..” he whispered the words, they were only for you, his wife. of course if you'd asked it of him, he'd scream it for you.
george - really short blurb, afab!reader, gentle riding, praise, slight dom!reader if you squint, domestic laughing during sex, cumming inside, self overstim (bc george wants so badly to make you cum)
the flights were long and had both you and george tired out. and when i say tired, i mean exhausted. neither of you wanted to go out and eat, shower, unpack, anything. then your phone went off, you turned it over to see notifications from your best friend.
ur bsf: how was ur flight?? ur bsf: respond whore ur bsf: mf are you guys are already banging holy shit
you laugh and turn your phone over to george and he smiles, a glint of recognition in his eyes. ”what?” you laugh almost nervously, you're both tired but you're not that tired.
”c'mere lovey.”
- ≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫ -
your hips ground against your husband's, his thumb flicking over clit while his other hand keeps a firm grip on your hip, provoking emphatic moans out of both of you.
your hands rest against his chest, his hand guiding you along his cock. ”you look so good my love,” he lets out a particularly loud groan as you press back down on him. ”so good on my cock like this.” the praise makes your cunt hug against his cock, his fingers digging into the flesh of your hip.
”god georgie.. you look, so fucking pretty under me..” your words pull him closer to his release. he begins to vault his hips up into you and you gasp, although the sound dies as he bucks up again, over and over. ”shit,” you both half-laugh at how you both mumble the word out in unison. you let yourself fall forward, hands grasping at his hair while his thumb moves faster over your clit. as much as he tries to catch his breath, he just can't. he can't stop how his hips move against you or how the grip his hand has on your waist will definitely leave marks or the speed at which he circles your clit. ”if i didn't know any better,” you start and he huffs, breaking your sentence with another piston up from his body, making you mewl his name, ”i'd say you were getting,” you sigh out quick, your breath fanning hot against his neck and his ear. ”gettin' close, huh georgie?” he responds with a simple hum, 'mhm', before he continues his pace fucking up into your cunt.
”m'cummin'..” it's the one warning you get before george's hips stop and both of his hands pull you down, his seed flushing out of his cock and into your pussy. the feeling of being so full induces loud noises from your mouth and your pussy pulsates around him as he rides out his high.
of course, you assume you're done and lie down on his chest, but all of a sudden it seems as if george has the stamina and energy of an animal because he moves his hands up to your waist and turns over to put you under him. ”huh?”
george's accent is thick with his next sentences. ”what? you didn't think i was gonna leave you unfinished did you?” as you open your mouth to speak he starts his pushing himself against your walls again, lewd noises pulled from both your mouth and your desperate cunt.
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pray4saint© do not copy, translate or repost my work without my express permission.
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xenticore · 4 months
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GOG winter sale has begun :] make sure you check it out before any other store (not optional). ends 2024-01-04!
games sold on GOG are free of DRM and come with completely offline installers! they’re yours to keep forever!
here are some newer games i recommend checking out!
Cult of the Lamb – US$14.99, Cultist Edition US$17.98, individual DLCs 25% off. Note: this game launched with “antipiracy” style DRM that causes a savebreaking bug, even on the GOG version. It was patched out, but its existence rightfully turned people off and it’s reflected in the reviews.
Rain World – US$9.99, Downpour US$11.99
Disco Elysium – US$9.99
Terraria – US$4.99
RimWorld – US$27.99, DLCs up to 10% off
The Outer Worlds – US$19.79, DLCs up to 45% off
System Shock (2023) – US$25.99
some classics i recommend as well!
RollerCoaster Tycoon – US$1.49 (expansions included)
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 – US$2.49 (expansions included), highly recommend these two and installing OpenRCT2
SimCity 4 – US$4.99 (Rush Hour included)
Deus Ex – US$0.97
System Shock – US$1.49, this is an enhanced edition for modern PCs that also includes the original unmodified game
System Shock 2 – US$2.49
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doomed-jester · 9 months
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Fucking hate always online DRM. The fuck you mean I need a wifi connection to play fucking Dead Space 3.
You know there's an entire sequel to Spore that is functionally lost media now because the server for the online DRM was shut down and they never patched it out? The game is entirely unplayable as far as I know.
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theftshrubbery · 4 months
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🕸️🕸️🕸️
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Tesla's Dieselgate
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Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband
The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us
Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:
https://elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat
Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles
That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/
That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50
But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html
All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.
This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.
When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.
Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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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:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
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This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
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Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]
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Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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temebrai · 4 days
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(Animation!) Dream locked Drista in the car with a spider *not my animation, obviously
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juneknight · 1 year
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Sweet Requitement
About this: wrote this ages ago for Miss 🧤 but never shared it because I don’t know that anyone will like this side of dorm room!Marc
The power on campus goes out; you and Marc stay warm. No warnings except maybe wine, hints at Marc’s abusive childhood; SFW.
*
“This should be illegal,” you chatter, hands tucked beneath your armpits for warmth. You and Marc stand at your kitchen island looking at the up-ended contents of the brown paper bag that your university had delivered only minutes ago. 
Inside is a fuzzy throw blanket—price reduced, judging by the sticker that someone had begun trying to remove and given up on; microwaveable hand-warmers; packets of hot cocoa—reduced fat.
And a note: Students in the dormitories are encouraged to come to the North Gymnasium where there will be free hot chocolate, blankets, and space heaters. This is recommended for any student with health conditions. 
“Do you want to go?” Marc asks you. He has a genuinely inscrutable way of asking questions, one which gives no hint at any personal preference of his own. 
“I would rather die, personally.”
Marc snorts softly. He crumples the note. “Think we can burn this as kindling?”
The two of you light candles around the apartment, though your RA has advised against it. Considering it is winter, the sun sets early, and neither of you are interested in sitting in the dark for half the night. Dressing in your warmest layers, hats and gloves and all, you chance opening the refrigerator long enough to snag one of your open bottles of wine and pass it back and forth, finishing it off. 
“They should have just given us all some wine,” you say, cheeks warm. “I don’t feel cold at all.” 
“It’s making us colder, actually,” Marc says. He’s got his head leaning back against the wall, turned to face you. He reaches out and traces one of your cheeks with the buttery-softness of his leather glove. “It dilates the veins in our skin which brings blood and warmth to the surface. Away from our vital organs. But those aren’t important.”
“No way,” you tease, batting away his hand. “Who needs lungs. Or a brain.”
“Or a heart,” Marc says softly. 
“Definitely don’t need one of those,” you mutter, the mention of that specific vital organ reminding you how close you sit next to the person who makes your heart pound. Skip beats. Stutter. Ache. Soar. Your best friend.
You glance towards Marc and he is already staring at you. He smiles, slow, eyes a little lidded from exhaustion more likely than the half bottle of wine. Your best friend-cum-roommate (and nothing more!) had not been sleeping well. Sometimes when you were awake before him, you’d see him ashen and sweating, twitching in his dreams. More often, Marc just refused to sleep. 
“Marc?”
He hums. 
“What do you dream about at night?”
Marc’s eyes shut. You see them flicker beneath his eyelids, like he is remembering. He says, simply: “Growing up.”
“Growing up really sucked, huh.”
He doesn’t laugh, but his eyes open, and you see the laughter in them, in the curve of his full mouth. Then his eyes shut again. His body has begun to bow towards yours, and soon if you were to leaning down a little you’d be able to brush your lips against the crown of his head.
“Are you about to fall asleep on me?” You wonder quietly.
“If you’d stop talking.” 
You swallow. “Well maybe we should actually lay down to do that. You know? We’re getting old. You threw out your back opening that bag of Doritos last week—“
“I did not throw out my back—,” Marc grumbles sleepily. “—they’re making those bags harder and harder to open—“
“Come on, tiger, let me tuck you in.”
You fold back Marc’s blankets and watch him slip beneath them. It is strange taking care of him when so often he is the one taking care of you. Strange, but welcome. Even more welcome when his glove wraps around your wrist softly.
“We’re sharing tonight,” he slurs. “It’s too cold not to.”
It isn’t the first time you’d have shared a bed…but it will be the first time you’ll be cuddling for warmth. Usually when you ask to sleep with him, Marc tucks you beneath the covers and then sleeps on top of them. But Marc is right; it is cold enough already, and only going to get colder. 
You slip into the bed and let the blankets fall over you both. 
“C’me here,” Marc whispers into your beanie. “Can I hold you?”
You nod, not trusting your voice as Marc gathers you close, looping his arms around your waist. You can’t tell because of the numerous layers, but you know Marc’s body: hard, lightly muscled, lean. You shiver and he squeezes you tighter.
“There’s another way we could keep warm,” Marc says. His voice is low, slow. It rumbles through you, makes goosebumps rise on your neck that have nothing to do with the cold. 
“Yeah?” you ask breathlessly. 
“If you wanted—only if you wanted,” he promises.
And fuck, you want. You ache. You spent so many nights with your face buried in your pillow, rubbing the wet needy slit between your legs thinking about this very thing while you listen to his quiet breathing on the other side of the room. Yeah. You want.
Sometimes, you even think that Marc wants. He has never overstepped a boundary with you. He has been with you when you’re drunk, high, cross-faded. Deliriously heartbroken because your latest Marc substitute broke up with you. Naked, in just your underwear, in just your underwear and one of his shirts. But Marc is the definition of respectful. You could pull out both tits at the breakfast island and Marc’s eyes would never waver from your own. 
Which makes it so much more noticeable when he does waver. Like once when the two of you had gotten soaked by rain coming back to the dorm from class. He had let you duck into the bathroom first to change into your warm, ugly clothes (comfortable clothes, thanks!), stood there shivering and wet on the linoleum waiting his turn. And when he had come out of the bathroom ten minutes later dressed in his own warm comfortable clothes (nothing ugly about the way his pajama pants sit low on his hips and cling to his thick thighs)—when he had come out and found you with his leather jacket spread out on the kitchen island, dabbing at it with a dry cloth because ‘Google says rubbing it dry could remove the natural oils and ruin it!’ 
Then—right then he gives you a look. Like he wants. His eyes (so dark and pretty and expressive) drop to your mouth. It is the buildup to a movie-worthy first kiss, and then it is gone as he gently takes the cloth to take over and tells you to go get under a blanket before you catch a cold. 
Yes, sometimes you are nearly positive that Marc wants you. This moment solidifies it.
“I could make you feel good,” Marc promises, voice still slurring and slow from his exhaustion. “I’d be so good to you, I promise. I’d take such good care of you.” 
Take care of you—yes, that’s what you were trying to do right now with Marc, wasn’t it? You let him continue to murmur his pleas beneath his breath, his body shaking against your own.
“We shouldn’t tonight,” you whisper, your voice easily loud enough in this little den of blankets that surround you both. “You’re exhausted Marc. Your eyes aren’t even open. You’re so tired.”
Marc sighs. His lashes flutter. “Yeah, ‘m tired. Tired of pretending. Pretending like I’d need anything but you to keep my heart warm. Pretending…”
You are breathless, but you prompt him: “Yeah? Marc?” 
Marc just hums. His mouth goes a little slack. After a few minutes, his eyes begin to flicker beneath his lids. He has fallen asleep. 
You relax into the blankets, into the loving cage of his arms, nearly buzzing. Marc said he didn’t need anything but you to keep his heart warm! If it wouldn’t wake him, you might have shrieked with glee, with triumph, with the sweet requitement of your affections. How you expect to sleep, you’ll never know. 
But the next time you wake, it is to Marc thrashing beside you. You’re sure for a moment that it’s a nightmare—some terrible memory about growing up—but then you realize he is throwing blankets off of you both, tugging the hat from his head (curls riotous and sweaty). Fuck, it is hot. 
The electricity is back on, and so is the heat. 
“Oh my god this is hell,” you whine, kicking at the blankets. You unzip your coat even as Marc pulls a hoodie off from over his head. Your shirt is sticking to your body, and you peel it off as well since you have a tank top on beneath. 
Finally the two of you face each other in nothing but your essentials, sweating, candles burned to nothing all around the room. A glance at the window shows only a pale blue glow of early dawn. 
Marc can’t meet your eyes. If there was any doubt that he remembered his words from last night, that doubt is gone now. Your heart twists. 
“Marc?” you ask, voice small and quiet.
Marc hums. 
“What now?”
Marc finally looks at you. He’s wearing only his boxers, chest slick with sweat from being buried beneath the blankets once the heat had returned. His hair is a mess from the winter hat he had worn to bet. 
You love him like this. You love him. 
“Now,” says Marc, voice delightfully raspy with disuse. “We lay in your bed.”
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belovedrm · 22 days
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*takes a nap here*
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yesterdays-xkcd · 7 months
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If you think the purveyors of DRM simply want to protect artists, check out chapters 13 and 14 in Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Their goal is the elimination of all culture they don't control.
Content Protection [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
Content Protection System: [Megan sits on a couch watching a large flat-panel television, connected to a box labeled HDMI. The screen is labeled with "Approved screen" The cable is labeled with "Approved connection" The HDMI box is labeled with "Approved player" Megan's head is labeled with "Approved content"]
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megsbr · 5 months
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+ = smut, ^ = fluff, * = angst
✰ dream
fly to me + ^
quickie +
✰ sapnap
sweet and sour +
baby boy +
love you from a distance *
✰ punz
made up story *
i think he knows +
housewife +
distraction +
hotel room +
✰ foolish
starlight ^
✰ blurbs
threesome w/ sapnap & punz +
punz +
punz +
punz +
punz ^
punz ^
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