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Collected Over Spread

US (California) politics 

"California lawmakers fast-track restaurant exemption to hidden fees law" by Dan Walters (@DanCALmatters@twitter.com) in CalMatters calmatters.org/commentary/2024

I've been following the developments around since restaurants started complaining about the AG's guidance FAQ from May, and I truly do not understand why they believe they deserve this special treatment. (Okay, I know why they're *advocating* for this treatment, but the arguments themselves don't make a lot of sense.) Yes, we know restaurants have thin margins and high labor costs, but the way to respond to increased costs is to raise prices (gasp!), just like virtually every other business does.

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Is it just me or has totally nerfed the HTML support in posts? I can get over forcing <em> and <strong> into <i> and <b> (I think this has been a thing for a long time, and everyone gets it wrong anyway)...

But now I can't even add a sublist under a list item (it just gets flatted down to one big list), or even a second paragraph within an item! The update is just so awkwardly placed now.

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@eff I think this shows, once again, that the problem with is less that it's automated systems aren't perfect than that it's appeals processes are ineffective. It seems like sometimes the only effective appeal is to make a big enough stink on social media, which not everyone can do.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation

"I don't know any YouTube creator who's happy with the way Content ID works," EFF’s @ktrendacosta told @arstechnica — but she "can't think of a way to build the match technology" to improve it, because "machines cannot tell context."
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

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"Things I Hate About the Internet: When the Can't Archive," expressing my frustration about cases where the fails to archive things (especially on sites) collectedoverspread.tumblr.com

Things I Hate About the Internet: When the Internet Archive Can’t Archive

When I find something posted on the Web that seems important, one of the first things I do is to check if it’s in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Fortunately, sometimes it’s already there. Unfortunately, sometimes the actual content isn’t saved. The early days of the Web were simple. If you wanted to save a page, all you had to do was download it, find any external resources it needed (like images), and download those as well. Nowadays, though, you’ll often find that that only gets you so far. Instead of the actual content, you might get: A login page: Of course, websites that require a login aren’t new, but there seems to be a trend of “locking down” social-media sites that were previously public. Twitter is a prime example of this: It used to be very easy to archive, but after Musk’s takeover it’s hit-or-miss at best. Some sites, like Facebook, aren’t strictly login-only but will require a login when you submit them to the Internet Archive. Both of these sites are used to publish statements of cultural significance, so it’s quite disheartening to think that they can’t be archived easily. (Update [5 June 2024]: I’d like to highlight Google Docs as well, because it’s another place where people publish culturally significant statements, and also because there’s an easy way to make it much easier to archive. Google Docs doesn’t require a login when you submit a document to the Internet Archive, but it often shows an error message that prevents you from reading the document. If you share something on Google Docs, consider using the “publish to Web” feature, which will make it much easier to archive. Note that this is not the same as simply sharing a link to a public document. The “publish to Web” URL will end in “/pubhtml” rather than “/edit”.) A blank or partial page with code to load the actual content: I remember when “progressive enhancement” was a thing and “people who turn off JavaScript in their browser” was a demographic that websites actually took into account. This idea seems to be dying off though, and the ability to archive pages is suffering as a result. The Internet Archive says it can run JavaScript to archive pages, but this doesn’t always work. Bluesky is a great example of this: You can view posts without logging in, but if you try to archive a public post all you get is a sort of “loading” screen (although the text of the post is in the source code at least). Its blog does this weird thing where you have to click in order for the content to show up. (Incidentally, archive.today handles both of these a lot better, so consider making it your first choice for archiving Bluesky posts.) A media player without the media: This is actually a specific case of the previous item. If you try to archive the page for a YouTube video, for example, all you’ll get is the player which uses JavaScript to load the actual video data. The Wayback Machine actually does have some YouTube videos archived, but those are few and far between and it’s clearly some extra process (although the process itself isn’t clear to me). I will point out that the Internet Archive’s video collections also have some YouTube videos, but these are separate from the Wayback Machine and not quite as simple to search for. Now, to be fair, a lot of the Web is still the kind that you can archive easily. But it’s not a coincidence that all of the examples I gave are from major social-media sites; many of them are particularly unsuitable for archiving. It’s frustrating that much of what happens online takes place on these platforms, without any good way to preserve it.

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internetarchive

Sorry to say, archive.org is under a ddos attack. The data is not affected, but most services are unavailable.

We are working on it & will post updates in comments.

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"If you shoot back a twelve-page rebuttal / With an indexed list of their lies / They'll laugh like demented hyenas / As engagement metrics rise / If you even admit their existence / Then you're falling for their trick / Let them rot in their lair as you starve them of air / It's bad on purpose to make you click."

astralcodexten.com/p/its-bad-o

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Collected Over Spread

Interesting thing I found out about : If you try to search the for an archived post on the bsky.app site, you'll get what looks like a blank page. However, the text and the author are still in the source code.

(Similarly, if you search for a more recent archive of one of their blog posts, the main content appears to be missing, but it's in the source code. But here for some reason the content shows up if you click somewhere on the page.)

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web3 is going just great

tea​.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again

April 14, 2024
web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxy

tea.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. This spam was disruptive to said projects, whose (usually volunteer) maintainers had to figure out what was going on and then try to stop the spammy PRs. Max Howell, the creator of tea.xyz (and creator of homebrew, though he's no longer involved), seemed apologetic, and promised to make changes to the protocol to stop this spammy behavior. Now, deprived of that avenue, people are just creating massive waves of empty software packages, with nothing other than a "teafile" with their crypto wallet address for rewards, and submitting them to package managers like NPM and RubyGems.
This spam prompted a blog post from RubyGems, who wrote that they had to devote time to strengthening limits on package publishing and "ensuring [accounts] didn't disrupt the community further." Security researchers at Phylum also wrote up the protocol's impact on the JavaScript world, which has seen as many as 7x as many packages published on NPM as previous daily averages. "Automated sustained spamming of this volume for months on end is rare and does nothing but cause heavy strain on the ecosystem itself, degrading the performance of the ecosystem for genuine users and straining open source security researchers," they wrote.
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internetarchive

Today, we filed our final brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library. For four years we've been fighting for library rights—what our founder, @brewsterkahle, calls “a battle for the soul of libraries in the digital age.” blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/in

Internet Archive logo in white on black.
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Collected Over Spread

This whole Twitter thread illustrates the problem with the common practice of copying things on the Internet. More people need to learn about licenses, so they can, if they so choose, give explicit permission for others to share and reuse their work, rather than rely on inconsistent and uncertain social norms.

twitter.com/MadeiraSpotting/st

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Electronic Frontier Foundation

SXSW’s claim that the Austin for Palestine Coalition infringed its trademark fails because the graphics at issue are constitutionally-protected, non-commercial political parody that won’t create consumer confusion, EFF’s Cara Gagliano said. The Austin Chronicle has the story:
austinchronicle.com/daily/news

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"But morality and social norms are supposed to be a different thing from law. In some spheres, it's more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it's more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms."

"How Should We Think About Race And 'Lived Experience'?" by Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten astralcodexten.com/p/how-shoul

It's worth considering the specific case being examined here, but I wanted to highlight this broader point. I think it's similar to something I wrote about a few years ago collectedoverspread.tumblr.com

I've started calling this sort of thing "legalistic thinking," where people apply the strict standards found in law to discussions about morality.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation

A big loophole and a lack of audits “makes it much harder for someone to challenge when a deployer is saying that the AI system is exempt from the law,” EFF’s Hayley Tsukayama told The Record of Workday’s model legislation. therecord.media/human-resource

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I'm not sure how often checks this Mastodon account so I've sent them an e-mail about this.

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US politics, Oklahoma "furry bill" 

"...while elements of the bill, such as getting animal control involved, appear intentionally provocative, banning student expression in this manner is no joke and presents serious constitutional concerns."

"Fursona non grata: Oklahoma lawmaker moves to ban 'furryism' in public schools" by Greg Gonzalez for FIRE thefire.org/news/fursona-non-g

I appreciate FIRE's dedication to responding to threats to free speech, but at the same time I'm sorry they had to take time to write this. I guess it's good to know that the stupid litter-box myth is alive and well in some places (sigh).

(There just so happens to be a furry convention in Oklahoma City this weekend. Hope everyone has a good time; maybe make some memes about this.)

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Meta-discussion on political discourse 

"Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I'm only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people's brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog?"

"The Psychopolitics of Trauma" by Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten astralcodexten.com/p/the-psych

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I've held off on trying to get on because it's still centralized in practice, but given that it plans to open up federation this year ( blueskyweb.xyz/blog/11-15-2023 ) it might be worth thinking about.

I plan to make this a proper blog post, but I will highlight one thing I like, the domain-name handles, which solve a problem that I've had to deal with on the (identity based on an instance which can go down).

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Electronic Frontier Foundation

In the battleground of history, archival work is cultural defense. Luckily, digital media can be quickly and cheaply duplicated and shared. #copyrightweek #twitter eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save

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Simon Gray

Apple is putting a seriously DISHONEST, butthurt spin on the EU finally breaking up their monopoly:

- "new risks the #DMA poses to #EU users. "

- "Even with these safeguards in place, many risks remain."

- "Inevitably, the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to #Apple users and their devices."

- "That includes threats like malware or malicious code, and risks of installing apps that misrepresent their functionality or the responsible developer."

apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/app

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