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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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merge-conflict · 1 year

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Rereading the horror-story-as-wikipedia-article "Lena" again as inspiration for my next cyberhanami prompt and boy oh boy it is just as gut-wrenchingly awful (complimentary) as I remember. If you're into the struggle of autonomy and self-control parts of cyberpunk the game (e.g. the Relic and the accompanying contract people sign with Arasaka), you may enjoy checking it out as well: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

#the implications rising from the format of this piece alone are their own entire story #all the vocab that has no further explanation #tbh i've been toying with the idea of doing something similar for a 'fic' but haven't quite worked out the shape of it #'unauthorized bread' is another good story if you like this one #'lena' is the name of the image that got used heavily as a standard for photography tech #without the consent of the subject #for background context on this piece

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thesmpisonfire · 11 months

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brunim was a VAMPIRE??? forever was a mostly-unwilling bloodbag??? what the heck happened there wow

Stonkscraft (1-3) is so out of pocket JANDNSMDNS

Season 1 was basically Forever being head over hills for Brunim and being reciprocated, they are practically married but the ceremony didn't happen because the season ended, but they even had the church built

Season 2 had then this whole break between the two as Brunim became a vampire and now they were on opposite sides of a war, but Brunim wouldn't let Forever go and kept stalking him to drink his blood unauthorized

(thats him with an axe :D ngl this scene is funny as fuck in Portuguese bc forever keeps yelling "ILLEGAL SUCKING ILLEGAL SUCKING" while Brunim keeps saying "You Like It™, I'll give you some bread after")

#forever player

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bedrock-to-buildheight · 2 years

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I normally don't rec stuff out of the blue but I'm in a sharing mood so

This is a pair of short but amazing stories about technology, one about the past, and one the future

The Graphing Calculator Story by Ron Avitzur (this one's real)

A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow. A story about an immigrant who hacked her smart toaster, in the corporate-owned, Internet of Things near-future

“You see,” she said at last, as a realization came out of the blue to her and left her wonderstruck and thunderstruck, feeling like a revelating prophet. “You see, if someone wants to control you with a computer, they have to put the computer where you are, and they are not, and so you can access that computer without supervision. A computer you can access without supervision is a computer you can change

#this has been sitting in draft for over a year as I want this to be a longer list #but nothing quite hit like these two

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jenny-from-the-bau · 3 months

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i'm so glad i've found other mgg haters bc everyone on tiktok acts like he's the best thing since sliced bread. i actually liked spencer when i watched the show but i'm starting to dislike him simply because of how insufferable his and mgg's fanbase are. i keep getting videos of his unauthorized docs on tiktok and all the comments are about how quirky and funny and hot he is but to me it just comes across like he is irritating, unfunny, and not the kind of person i would want to spend any time around at all. like he seems so full of himself like he knows he's hot and he's got an army of teenage girls and it inflates his ego or something. also other people have mentioned it but all the stuff with aj's pregnancy in the unauthorized doc just rubs me the wrong way especially the comment ab "has anyone noticed that aj's getting rlly fat" like ik it's a joke about her being pregnant but that's like not the kind of comment you should make about anyone ever -🐙

No, I'm an MGG hater forever and all my friends are too lmaooo He's got such a big ego and he thinks he's so fun and quirky, but it's so cringy and bad. Like an army of teenage girls doesn't make you cool fr fr

Also yeah, I'm anti-fat jokes in general, but also specifically for women in hollywood who have to deal with that all the time!

#ask #anon #🐙 anon

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rikalovesrice · 2 years

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The Eternal Day : Tales of Arcadia - Epilogue

Previous Chapter

Epilogue

Two Years Later

Saturdays were usually easygoing. Online classes Monday through Friday, and Sundays brought the dismay of doing it all over again. But Jim was moving quicker this morning while fixing brunches. Their monthly tradition happened to fall on the same day as the ceremony so he had to hustle.

The television murmured in the background.

“Eepa is the first troll youngling to be enrolled in an elementary school,” the news anchor said. “Some members of the staff have voiced their concerns, but the kids are nothing but thrilled.”

“Towns and cities all across the globe are finally being restored to their former glory, with many thanks to neighboring troll communities for their donations and reconstruction contributions.”

“Last week an unauthorized man was caught trying to chip off a piece of Harmonia’s Heartstone but was promptly arrested, and rescued, by human law enforcement.”

“Later this evening, we’ll be joined by Commander Zadra of Akiridion-5 as we further discuss the prospect of a new Earth ambassador and the future of galactic relations.”

“A tragic update for the ladies as Master Wizard Douxie Casperan, one of the leaders of the True Order, was recently seen with a ring and new pink tattoos on his left hand.”

“According to members of the True Order, Nari of the Eternal Forest still has yet to return.”

“The Great Eternity, father of the ancient wizards who called themselves the Arcane Order. Interesting enough, it seems the vast majority of Magickind had no idea who he was or that he even existed.”

“Wet socks and moldy bread. What do they really taste like on the troll palate? Food scientists and enthusiasts reveal their recent culinary crimes in their quest to understand. Some theorize it’s just a weird mythical-magic thing. After all, eyeballs and raw livers are a common snack among magic practitioners…….”

Jim glanced at the clock. Three hours.

“Okay, we’re good, we’re good,” Jim mumbled as he stepped out of the kitchen and rounded the corner to his parents’ bedroom. They always kept their door slightly ajar, Walter’s snore humming in the short hallway. Jim gently bumped the door wider with his hip and slipped two plastic wrapped plates of bacon and spinach omelets on the nightstand. He stepped back, taking a moment to gaze at Walter and Barbara sleeping in each other’s embrace, and smiled softly. “See you guys in a bit.”

He grabbed his phone, keys, and garment bag on the way out, hitting a button on the wall to open the garage door. Bits of morning light glinted off the silver sheen of his vespa. Jim hopped on, carefully folding the bag behind him, turned the key, then rolled out onto the driveway before cruising down the road towards town, admiring the sunrise.

Neighbors waved and smiled as he passed by, including the troll couple who’d recently moved into the chiseled stone abode four blocks down. The mail truck made its rounds while a Stalking followed above, digging rolled up magazines out of a pouch and tossing them onto doormats.

“Morning, Champion!” it squawked.

“Hey, Hookwing!” Jim said, then nodded at the mailman. “Good to see you, Hank!”

Arcadia Oaks Square bustled with townsfolk heading to work and opening up shop. Benoit’s had finally reopened a month ago, the line up for coffee, breakfast sandwiches, and pastries already wrapped around the building. A troll strolled out while gobbling down five lattes, cupholders and all. Kids played kickball and jumped rope in lots between structures, left empty for whatever reason after being cleared of debris, though some were blocked off and displayed signs promising department stores and new restaurants. Others were turned into quaint flowerbeds with wooden benches, birdbaths, and the occasional arrangement of glowing gemstones.

Jim rode past the dewy park where people jogged and walked their dogs, sidestepping bunches of gnomes haphazardly trimming the grass with scissors. Up ahead was Trollmarket Street, evident by the Heartstone getting bigger and closer. Jim went straight for another five minutes then made three turns, the last carrying him through the threshold onto Brilliant Avenue, the roads lined with multicolored crystal clusters, and the town opened up into a different world.

Brickwork and townhouses became cobblestone dens and smooth rock towers all studded with glittering jewels and rainbow sediments. Trolls went about their morning, pushing barrels of geodes, selling and buying wares, crafting totems and charms at their posts. Jim was greeted with waves and laughter as he made his way to the base of the Heartstone, where his friends were all waiting.

“There he is,” Douxie said.

“Good morning, Master Jim,” Blinky said.

“Sorry I’m late,” Jim said, parking his vespa at a big geode fountain then jogging over.

“You’re fine. We all just got here, too,” Claire said. She took his hand. “Come on.”

They gathered around and faced the base of the Heartstone where a great golden statue had been erected, showcased on a wide pedestal of faceted glass and intricate granite marble. It depicted four beings standing tall and proud. A troll in the center, an Akiridion on its left and a wizard with a staff on its right. In the troll’s hands was a sculpture of Earth. The Akiridion cradled stars between their fingers. The wizard balanced the sun and moon in his palm. Risen behind them was a dragon, roaring at the sky with its wings fully spread in a protective stance. Inscribed upon the pedestal were hundreds of thousands of names. The names of every person and creature who’d died that day.

Every month for the past year and a half, the Champions of Daylight met here to be still and silent. As always, they lingered on the names that stood out to them.

Nomura.

Every now and again, Jim and Barbara would find Walter listening to classical music and zoning out. Pieces by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Edvard Grieg. Nomura’s favorites. Sometimes he would start crying, then they would settle down and weep with him.

Charlemagne the Devourer.

They all missed his stories and bloodberry pies and awful puns. Douxie and Archie had gotten to the point where it didn’t hurt as much. They could even joke about it at times, their “father issues.” But now it wasn’t just Douxie periodically waking up with tearstained eyes and an aching heart. Those nights, he held Archie close with all the love and comfort he’d been given.

Elijah Pepperjack.

Steve knocked his fist against the lettering and bent forward. He always tried to keep it together, always thought the next time would be a little easier, give him a little more peace. Instead his heart would hurt that much more, and the void left in his life would hollow out his bones. Aja hugged his shuddering back. Krel touched his shoulder, sobbing, too.

A few passerbys stopped to pay their respects as well. The crying and sniffling gradually quieted. Douxie and some kept their eyes closed, while Zoe and others fixed their pensive eyes on the statues. Jim skimmed over each name. Aja folded her hands over her chest as if praying. Toby leaned into Aaarrrgghh’s side, weeping softly.

After a long while, Jim checked his phone.

“Crud, we better get going guys,” he said, wiping his face.

Everyone cleared their throats and shook themselves back to the present. Tears were dried and tight embraces were exchanged among them, tender smiles breaking out.

“It’s time, little brother!” Aja giggled. They’d both gone with their human forms today.

“Best go and get ready then,” Blinky said to Jim and Toby.

“Big day,” Zoe said, patting Claire’s cheek.

“Yup. Actually can’t believe it’s happening.” Claire conjured a shadow portal before joining Jim on his vespa.

“Make us proud,” Douxie chuckled. He mounted his shiny black motorcycle, streaks of blue flashing as he revved the engine. Archie settled around his shoulders and Zoe climbed on after them. “See you in a bit!” They tore out of Trollmarket Street, tails of magic streaming behind them.

Jim rolled his eyes. “Show off.”

Toby, Steve, and Krel hopped through the portal first before Jim accelerated into the darkness. They warped to the parking lot of the school’s sports field then booked it to the outdoor restrooms to change. Soon students were showing up in droves, some fixing their hair and makeup and others bumbling with garment bags to also get ready on sight.

“Chop, chop, lemme see some hustle!” Coach Lawrence shouted.

“Ten more minutes, children!” Ms. Janeth said, counting heads with her pen. “Oh you all look stunning!”

The students filed into the lines they’d rehearsed, fidgeting in their gowns and fixated on the crowded bleachers and the rows of empty chairs set up in front of a constructed stage. Principal Uhl took his place at the podium. At his cue, whoever was the mascot today started thumping out chords on a keyboard and the procession began. They marched across the field to the hundreds of folding chairs and fumbled to their assigned seats. Jim glimpsed the left stack of bleachers. Barbara watched eagerly from the middle section with Blinky and Aaarrrgghh. The Blanks were a row down, armed with cameras and a cardboard cutout of Krel’s human face. Varvatos and Nancy Domzalski sat beside them, smiling sweet and holding hands. Douxie, Zoe, Archie found seats right above Barbara. Aja hurried to sit with them, playfully bumping against Zoe’s arm. When the mascot’s performance became too much, Principal Uhl coughed into the microphone.

“Uh…Wonderful. Yes, thank you,” Uhl said. Everyone clapped, either halfhearted or with questionable overenthusiam. The mascot stood and skipped to stand at attention behind Uhl with Coach Lawrence, Ms. Janeth, and Walter, nearly running into the table stacked high with diplomas. Uhl shook his head then adjusted the mic. He smiled. “Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for joining us on this momentous day. We’ve seen our fair share of global catastrophes. Our town is still recovering, but we’ve pushed through. And now, I’m proud to present this graduating class at last.” Uhl glanced at Jim, Claire, Toby, Steve, and Krel. “Well done to you all. You’ve truly earned it. The first row of students may rise and come up. Excellent. When I call your name, please come forward...”

Students claimed their diplomas and snapped photos with Uhl in alphabetical order, whoops and hollers buzzing on the packed bleachers. Seamus Johnson puffed his chest and grinned awkwardly at the camera. Shannon Longhannon squealed and did a jig off the stage. Darci Scott and Mary Wang took selfies with their teachers.

“Tobias Domzalski!”

“Wingman!” Aaarrrgghh cheered.

“That’s my Toby Pie!” Nancy said.

Toby snapped his finger guns and attempted to moonwalk down the stage ramp.

“James Lake Jr.!”

Barbara and Blinky jumped to their feet, clapping and shouting. Jim waved at them, then looked back at his stepdad and smiled. Walter nodded back, arms crossed and eyes soft with pride.

“Claire Nunez!”

“That’s my baby!” her dad yelled. Her mom hurrayed while bouncing a giggling Enrique on her hip.

“Way ta go, sis!” NotEnrique laughed.

“Steven Palchuk!”

Aja bounced on her heels and screamed in delight. Coach Lawrence clapped Steve on the back before squeezing him to his side. Red as his face was, Steve couldn’t help but grin.

“Krel Tarron!”

Lucy went ham on the camera, the flash strobing like crazy as she took hundreds of pictures in a matter of seconds. Ricky waved Krel’s cardboard face high.

“That’s my little brother!” Aja shouted.

“Glorious!” Varvatos bellowed. “The King In Waiting has received his paper certificate of great knowledge!”

Krel received the diploma, smiling big and bright. Uhl hugged him to his side.

When all the students returned to their seats, a quiet fell over them. Uhl stepped back to the mic, breathing deep as his eyes went glossy.

One more name.

“Elijah Pepperjack.”

A beat of stillness. Then heads turned as Eli’s parents approached the stage, Mr. Pepperjack rubbing his crying wife’s shoulders. Ms. Janeth sobbed and honked into a tissue. The moment Eli’s diploma passed into his parents’ hands, Steve rose from his seat, his fellow graduates and everyone on the bleachers following, and the entire field erupted in heartbroken applause. The Pepperjacks made small smiles and bowed their heads in gratitude before tearfully returning to their reserved seats.

“Your son was one of our brightest students,” Uhl said, voice cracking. “He was such a kind boy. And we know now that he was also very, very brave. He lost his life protecting this world. Arcadia Oaks will never forget him. And I’m sure he knows how proud all of us are to have known him.”

Steve buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t have agreed more.

After tassels turned and caps were thrown, the ceremony came to a close. The table, podium, and keyboard were replaced with a drum set, two big amps, and a much better keyboard. Three long white tables were set up and loaded with trays of catered food. Students stripped off their gowns before skipping and hurrying back to the field with their loved ones, all dressed for a party.

Feedback screeched through an amp. Cheers and squeals burst forth as Douxie and Zoe took the stage, testing levels and tuning their instruments. Archie squatted at the drums and Claire plunked out chords on the keyboard.

“Congratulations to all you lovely graduates!” Douxie said into the mic, getting a cacophony of excited, praising shouts in response. He grinned wide and leaned on the mic stand with both hands. “We’re Ash Dispersal Pattern. Most of you have seen me and my beautiful soulmate’s face before.” He gestured to Zoe, heart full to bursting when he glimpsed her left hand, the ring on her finger and sky blue soulbond mark swirling over her knuckles. Zoe did a lighthearted eye roll. “But I’m thrilled to announce our guest performer. C Bomb herself, our very own Claire Nunez on keys!”

Claire waved sheepishly at their claps and cheers.

Archie hit four counts on with his drumsticks and the stage amps boomed the melodic screech of Douxie’s guitar. The crowd roared and jumped to the wild, energetic tempo. Douxie belted lyrics into the mic before shredding his expert fingers all along the frets, throwing his head back in rapture. Zoe headbanged next to him, then she popped off her bass and sang the next verse, Jim and the others awestruck at her amazing, passionate tone they’d heard so much about. Douxie played along with her voice, his gaze gravitating right to her. Zoe caught him staring and smiled. The two stepped back and rocked out at each other, eyes locked, hearts and improvised riffs synchronized. Their harmony crescendoed with Claire’s accompaniment and Archie wailing on on the toms and cymbals. He beat out a spirited final lick and the audience went wild with applause. Not even a second later they were chanting for an encore.

“Thank you, thank you everyone!” Douxie breathed a laugh. “Don’t you worry, we’re nowhere near done yet. If I could have your attention for just a moment…” Everyone settled down. As he looked out at all their faces, his heart thrummed with care. “We were facing some pretty dark times two years ago. None of us were sure if we’d make it to tomorrow, let alone to a high school graduation.” His eyes found each of his friends, all of them sharing his sadness. “We lost so much. Too much. At one point, we didn’t know if we could keep going.”

Douxie thought about Nari, just as he had every day since they’d parted ways.

“The Earth is calling for me. I must go away now to bring my healing, and to show Bellroc and Skrael the beauty of life. But I will come back to you again, I promise.”

“But the thing about darkness is that all it takes is a single spark, just a glimmer, and the room is lit,” Douxie said. “That’s the power of hope and love and… believing. When we were scared and angry and hurt and confused…there was still hope. It’s what got us through. It’s what brought us back to,” he gestured around, “this!”

“I don’t know what many of you are facing right now, the pain and darkness you’re dealing with. Maybe you feel like the world is on your shoulders. But just as the sun never stops shining, even in the worst of storms, hope is never truly lost. And if you can’t find the light now, that’s alright. I believe one day you will, cause it’s not going anywhere. Have faith. Hold on to hope. Keep love in your hearts and always let it win. Rise to the occasion, just as you are. Take care of each other.” Douxie took a breath. Another look at his friends brought tears to his eyes. “Yeah. Take care of each other. Then I think we’ll be alright.”

There was hardly a dry eye left in the crowd when Douxie finished. A few found the strength to clap while the rest blew their noses and dabbed their faces. Douxie took a moment to rub his own tears away. Zoe swiped his cheek with her thumb.

“Right then,” Douxie said, going back to the mic. “We have more tunes for you today. But we do have one more surprise.” Zoe and Claire moved a table on stage, complete with a multicolored soundboard, two more amps, a laptop, and twin electric blue turntables. Smoke machines shrouded the stage in a rolling mist. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the one, the only, the nuclear and lively, DJ Kleb!”

Krel burst through the haze with the blare synths, layering his set up with holographic bright blue discs of buttons, volume sliders, and fluctuating sound waves. Headphones on and body grooving, Krel spun out slapping beats in time with Douxie banging out new chords, hyping the crowd right back up. The field reverberated with delighted, raucous shouts as a medley of synthetic rock electrified their eardrums, fans bouncing high on the balls of their feet to the infectious rhythm. The performers all looked at each other, beaming and laughing at the awesomeness, the music fueling their souls like the air they breathed.

They played like they could go for hours on end.

Danced like they’d never have to stop.

◇

Pink and orange flushed the sky as the sun drifted behind Camelot’s towers. Beneath the shadow of the castle, the Champions of Daylight spread out on the soft grass of the Bluff, finishing up hamburgers and potato salads, chatting and laughing while reclined on picnic blankets.

Walter turned off the grill while Barbara and Jim went around picking up plates. Claire, Aja, and Zoe went for more tacos from Stuart’s truck. Steve and Toby chilled on Aaarrrgghh’s back, debating about the worst actors in sci-fi movies. Darci brought over the last helpings of Nougat Nummie pie, to which Toby slid off his Wingman’s back to smooch her on the cheek. Varvatos and Nancy snuggled and made eyes at each other under a tree before being disrupted by Ricky and Lucy rattling off recommendations for honeymoons. Jim, Krel, and NotEnrique tossed a frisbee, which ended up flying right into Luug’s mandibles and being horked down. While Jim fetched the spare, Luug flopped after Archie in endless circles until Douxie rescued him. Chompsky looked between Zoe and his Sally Go-Back wife, sputtering at the resemblance. She glanced perplexed at Blinky, who just shook his head and shrugged.

An early moon made its appearance, a full spherical ghost hanging low and shepherding the first smattering stars through the falling evening.

Another hour or two past, Douxie and Zoe singing softly while he strummed a gentle melody. Lovers held one another close, enjoying the sweet music. Walter and Barbara did a tiny waltz. Jim hugged Claire to his side and kissed her hair. Steve rested back against Aja’s embrace, her four arms wrapped snug around him. Toby held and kissed Darci’s knuckles. Varvatos pressed his lips to Nancy’s forehead. Chompsky fell asleep in his plastic wife’s lap and the Blanks swing danced to an entirely different tune.

When the sun began to dip below the treeline, Aja and Steve stood with their hands linked.

“I think it’s time,” Aja said. On cue, an Akiridion vessel crested the cliff, a ramp extending into the grass from its bottom hatch. “Little brother?”

Krel nodded, sniveling. Everyone took turns hugging him close.

“You sure you can’t stay?” Douxie said as he pulled away.

“It’s time for me to become King,” Krel said, gazing at each of his friends with a sad smile.

“What a glorious King you will be,” Varvatos declared.

“I second that,” Douxie said.

Zoe and Claire bundled Aja into their arms.

“We’ll miss you, girl,” Zoe said.

“And we’ll miss you,” Jim said, clasping Steve’s hand to pull him into a hug. “What’re we gonna do without our Creepslayer?”

“Beats me,” Steve said. “You nerds will just have to hold the fort while I’m busy being an ambassador. Just don’t do anything cool while I’m gone.”

“You got it.”

“Oh my sweet little Toby Woby…” Nancy cupped her grandson’s cheeks. “Remember to check that note I left, it has everything including ointment for your rashes and the soap I use for your underw—”

“Thanks, Nana!” Toby blurted, cheeks going scarlet. But within seconds he was smiling and hugging her close. “Thanks, Nana. I love you.”

“Oh I love you, too, so much Toby Pie.”

Varvatos and Nancy boarded the ship hand in hand. Aja collected Luug in her arms before facing her friends with Krel and Steve.

“Don’t be strangers, you here?” Barbara said.

Krel smiled. “This is our home. We could never be strangers.”

“If you ever need us, just send the word. We’ll be there,” Aja said.

And with that, they turned and embarked up the ramp. The Blanks looked on with fondness shining in their artificial eyes, all while comforting a crying and snotting Stuart. Their friends waved and shouted final messages.

“Love you guys!” Toby said.

“See you later!” Claire called.

“Safe travels!” Douxie shouted.

“I’ll save a spot for you at Hex Tech for when you come back, Krel!” Zoe hollered.

The ship rose into the air, its passengers waving and calling back before the ramp retracted and the hatch slid closed.

Douxie hooked his arms around Jim and Claire’s shoulders. Ricky ruffled Toby’s hair and Lucy gave his cheek a light pinch. Zoe crossed her arms and leaned against Aaarrrgghh, Archie settling around her shoulders. Blinky came up behind Walter and Barbara to place his hands on their backs.

They watched with tears and smiles on their faces as the Akiridion ship rotated and rocketed towards the clouds, looping through the darkening skies before vanishing in a blip of cyan light.

“What’s next for you guys?” Douxie asked Jim.

Jim smiled, tired but content. “College.”

“A job,” Claire added. Archie flew into her arms and bunted her chin.

“And most likely saving the world again at some point,” Toby finished.

“Sounds about right,” Zoe chuckled.

“We’ll be with you when it happens,” Douxie said.

They all wrapped each other up in a group hug.

That night, Douxie and Zoe stood on their bedroom balcony, resting against the cool stone parapet beneath glittering specks of starlight. The Heart of Camelot whirred softly below the castle, its brilliant blue glow dusting the surrounding stretch of midnight woodland. From here, they took in their restored little town of Arcadia Oaks in the distance, bathed in the full moon’s silver and Trollmarket’s luminous prismatic hues. The vivid Heartstone rose high above the rooftops, its warm fiery crystals blooming in the night, a towering bonfire chasing away the darkness.

Zoe turned in Douxie’s arms, smoothing her hands over his chest. She went on her toes to kiss him.

“I think I’ll turn in for the night,” she said.

“Sound,” Douxie said, running his hands down her sides. “Be there in a minute.”

A gentle breeze fluttered over the castle as he marveled at the intersecting light sources for another serene moment. Douxie closed his eyes and breathed in the night one more time before turning to head to bed. Just as he did so…

Glowing spring green flecks drifted into his vision, first a pinch, then lambent clusters. They coalesced into dazzling flowers, shades of forest, jade, emerald, chartreuse, and mint falling all around him.

Tears flooded his eyes as a petal kissed his palm, and her sweet voice reached him.

“Douxie.”

Breathless, he turned around…and smiled.

⁕

❖

◆

❁

◇

◈

⁕

Author’s Notes : Did...Did I actually do it? Did I actually finish this fic? o__o

I never thought I’d get back into writing again. But my love for the Tales of Arcadia franchise and unbridled hatred for that gross excuse of a “grand finale” (truly ROTTen, amirite?) summoned old author Rika lol

This has been such a journey for me as a creative. I’ve learned so much about myself as a writer and I want to continue to do so.This has to be one of most draining self-inflicted experiences I’ve embarked on, but believe me when I say that it’s been a blast. This was so much fun, and I’m so blessed, thankful, and blown away by how many people actually wanted to read it. And people who’ve actually, like, enjoyed it haha

I will say, though, that past month has been really rough on my health, emotionally and physically. Even as I write this now, I’m like...really lightheaded rip But! I wanted to see this project through to the end and I hope was able to craft an ending that did this incredible series and my children these amazing characters even a smidge of justice. If not, well, I sure did try :’) Regardless, I’m so thankful to the Lord and for everyone’s support that got me through to the finish line. I’d love to hear your thoughts and even answer any questions you may have! Headcanons galore >w<

Rika’s gonna take a nice long break now lol

God bless and thank you all so much again for reading.

Until the next one ~

Previous Chapter

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cpastry · 1 year

Text

youtube

Grandma’s Chocolate Bread Recipe

Recipe Serves 16

Ingredients:

4 Cups /500g Sifted flour 2.5 oz/70g Sugar 0.3 oz/8g Dry Yeast 170 mL Water 2 Large Eggs 2.5 oz/70g Butter RT 1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract 0.4 oz/10g Salt

Steps:

1-Mix flour, sugar, and yeast on low speed 2-Add water and eggs and increase the speed to medium low 3-Add vanilla extract 4-Add butter 5-Add salt and mix until all ingredients are well combined 6-Knead on medium low until the dough is smooth 7-Place the dough in lightly oiled bowl 8-Oil brush the dough and cover it 9-Place it to rest in room temperature for an hour 10-Gently knock the dough to remove air pockets 11-Spread it evenly and shape it into a rectangular 12-Brush the dough with butter 13-Evenly spread the chocolate filling 14-Apply pan spray to bundt pan 15-Roll the dough into a cylinder 16-Shape it evenly to fit the bundt pan 17-Cover and place it to proof for an hour 18-Spray the dough with water and bake at 355 F°/180 C° for 40 minutes 19-Let it cool 20-Dust it with powdered sugar

Filling Ingredients:

0.5 oz/15g Cacao Powder 50 mL Vegetable Oil 5.3 oz/150g Sugar 0.5 oz/15g Sifted Flour 3 oz/ 85g Crushed Dark Chocolate

Steps:

1-Combine cacao powder, vegetable oil and sugar and mix 2-Add flour and chocolate and mix until all is well combined

By following the step by step instructions of the recipes you should be able to succeed. Please let me know and comment down below. I will be posting a new video every Saturday so please join and subscribe to my channel.

Thank you for your support! Enjoy.

[email protected]

All rights and ownership reserved to Cpastry. Unauthorized use of my videos or 2nd edit and re-upload is prohibited.

#Youtube

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azspot · 1 year

Quote

The villains of Cory’s books aren’t really people; they’re systems. They wear punchable Human faces but those tend to be avatars, mere sock-puppets operated by the institutions that comprise the real baddies. In Little Brother the enemy was the Surveillance State, jacked up and hypertrophied on post-911 paranoia. “Unauthorized Bread” takes on ubiquitous DRM; For the Win ports sweat-shop economics and union busting into digital ecosystems. With Red Team Blues it’s Crypto, the paramount tech-bro wet dream of recent years (which would probably still be the paramount tech-bro wet dream if they hadn’t all got distracted by chatbots last month). It’s your typical Doctorow novel; entertaining, educational, contemptuous of realpolitik and all the greater-good rationalizations our rulers invoke to protect the status quo. It doesn’t come with Little Brother‘s appendix explicitly instructing readers on available countermeasures, but you’re not going to finish this book without understanding at least the basics of crypto and its associated dark sides, from security holes to carbon footprints.

Red Team Blues

#books

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thoughtportal · 2 years

Link

"Unauthorized Bread"—a tale of jailbreaking refugees versus IoT appliances—is the lead novella in author Cory Doctorow's Radicalized, which has just been named a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national book award, the Canada Reads prize. "Unauthorized Bread" is also in development for television with Topic, parent company of The Intercept; and for a graphic novel adaptation by First Second Books, in collaboration with the artist and comics creator JR Doyle.

#fiction #science fiction #short story #short stories #novella #cory doctorow

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russianprotesters · 5 months

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Exactly at five in the morning I was taken to the stage from the Moscow pre-trial detention center "Bear". The captain asked to stand against the wall and turned on the chest-mounted video recorder.

- Are you ready to go in general?

- Certainly.

The employee clicked a button and a mechanical voice said: “Recording stopped.”

***

After many hours of waiting at the assembly line, a tedious search and shaking in a paddy wagon, our group of prisoners was taken to the station. In the compartment of the Stolypin carriage, everyone quickly got acquainted and organized a small table. A couple of chocolate bars, sausage, a handful of nuts appeared on the spread newspaper...

- Chief, will there be boiling water?

- Yes, yes... Wait.

The guard, wrinkling his brow, checked the lists and waved his hand to someone, ordering them to heat the kettle.

***

A large guy with a red beard sits next to me and looks at those around him from under his brows. He doesn't look like a criminal at all.

- What article? - I ask, breaking bread.

“I think you can guess,” the bearded man grins.

I take a closer look. People's 228th? Or some kind of household stuff? He is laughing.

- No, it’s all over. Unauthorized abandonment of a part. It’s also almost folk already.

It turned out that the guy was an artillery lieutenant, who was dropped off near Kupyansk almost immediately after training. His unit occupied a forest belt: forty soldiers, seven Grad MLRS vehicles. We stood there for three days and came under attack from the Hymers. Result: 15 corpses, everyone else was wounded, the cars were burned.

The lieutenant's entire body was cut by shrapnel, and he spent a month and a half in the hospital. When he recovered, they came for him and said that he had to go back to the war.

“I answered them: to hell, I’ve had enough.” I didn’t want to go the first time either, because no one needs this war to hell. And so he miraculously survived... I’d rather sit in prison as a human being than lie there as a piece of meat.

The court gave him three years. The term is short - under this article the punishment is usually more severe. The injury was taken into account.

In Bryansk, another man came into our compartment. He looks about 45 years old. Stubbled, strong. I asked for a cigarette.

- What's your problem?

- Bouquet. 222nd and 228th.

The bored guard at the bars heard the conversation out of the corner of his ear and perked up noticeably.

- Wow, weapons and drugs! Are you a gangster or something?

But no, it was not a gangster at all. About three years ago, a man dug up a carbine from the Second World War in the forest. I cleaned it, repaired it, and threw it in the barn. And in the garden he grew a marijuana bush. For personal use, he says. When does gout bother you?

In the summer, someone wrote a denunciation against the man, and the officers who arrived with the search discovered this entire “criminal set”. The court sentenced him to five years in prison.

- Why did they bend me over so hard? - the convict scratches his head. - It would be worth it... But now they give everyone a lot. So that they go to war.

He finishes his cigarette thoughtfully.

- Well, I’ll probably go too. What to do?

The conscientious lieutenant looks up at him.

- Think again, brother.

***

The most unusual character in our company is a stuttering old man with a crutch. Before his arrest, he was relatively healthy, but a year and a half in prison left its mark on his life with two strokes. And this is not surprising, given that the FSB was involved in the old man’s case and almost declared him a Ukrainian spy.

My grandfather worked at a factory and one day, out of old habit, he stole a part from there, hoping to sell it to someone.

- I'm a man of the old school. How were we taught in the USSR? Bring every nail from the factory, you are the master here, not the guest.

In general, the old man found a buyer in Gomel, where he was just going: to visit his relatives. However, at the border he was accepted by the opera. The “buyer” turned out to be an FSB officer, and the stolen piece of hardware turned out to be a dual-use part suitable for use in military equipment.

For several months, the poor fellow was shaken during interrogations, finding out whether he had friends or relatives in Ukraine. Out of fear he suffered a stroke. It was one step away from being accused of espionage - but I was lucky. The intelligence services nevertheless decided not to make statistics on the disabled man, and he got off with two years for theft. He has a couple of months left before his release.

***

I look into the face of this old man with a crutch and can’t help but think that he reminds me of someone.

- Listen, father, have you ever been told that you look like...

- Yes exactly! The spitting image of Putin! Only the old one! - the lieutenant interrupts me. - I’m sitting thinking about it myself.

Grandfather chuckles.

- Old man, admit it! What are you, a double written off due to expiration dates?

The general laughter is interrupted by the guard. Quiet, please. An inspector will enter the carriage soon.

I lean back against the wall and look at my grandfather with pleasure. How nice it is to see Putin in the Stolypin carriage. At least this.

#ilya yashin #political prisoners #russia #prisoners #prison #stories #putin #war #google translated #telegram

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tokai-ulina · 6 months

Text

[10] The Journey Begins (Part 3)

Ava: "...Chantonsy. How do you suppose we get to this super secret friend of yours? We're surrounded by patrol bots all along the coast."

Ava: "And even then, we have to travel all the way to Haravenia without being discovered!"

Chantonsy: "Well... the robots are only patrolling for unauthorized boats... meaning that they'll let a cargo ship pass unimpeded!"

Chantonsy: "And after we sail to Honeygoo..."

"It's just a matter of catching a plane using the IDs we've fabricated."

Frogious: "But what if were spotted?" Cargo Ships have a lot of staff you know."

Noelani: "Don't worry. We have been cooking up some prime disguises."

Ava: "Ah, great to hear..."

Ava: "And Chantonsy. My guy. Please wear a watch. Baking cookies shouldnt take 2 days."

Chantonsy: "Noted! I promise the toaster is now a bread only zone."

Ava: "Great? Let's get ready for tonight."

#storyline #ulina

0 notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

Orphaned neurological implants

The startup world’s dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don’t show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company’s products.

You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning — poof! All gone.

Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc.

All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug.

But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.

A startup’s physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don’t exactly hold their value, and there’s not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses.

Wily investors are more interested in intangible assets: user data and patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling.

If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there’s a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business — and a much larger chance that it end up in a troll’s portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. Patent trolls are parasites, “businesses” whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses.

The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. There’s no point in investing in sustainability — good information security, robust systems, good HR — if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff.

Your excellent processes won’t help you when your investors shut you down, so a “lean” startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff — or get sold to a Big Tech firm — then you can fix all that stuff.

And if the far more likely outcome — failure — comes to pass, then all the liabilities you’ve created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else’s problem. Limited liability, baby!

Combine these three dirty secrets and it’s hard to understand why anyone would use a startup’s product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of closed source and patent trolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it.

Think of Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, Spiral Toys, had a successful IPO — and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents’ phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys’ speakers.

But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms.

By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys’ share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. The data — 2.2 million intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents — just hung out there, free for the taking:

https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/

Data leakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever — after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead.

Data breaches are permanent. Filling a startup’s sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches.

It’s not just your data that goes away when a startup folds — it’s also the money you invest in its hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That’s bad enough when it’s a home security device:

https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761

But what about when the device is inside your body?

Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants — which allow blind people to see — lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

Nano Precision Medical, the company’s new owners, aren’t interested in maintaining the implants, so that’s the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus’s “bionic” eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.

Having a bricked eye implant doesn’t just rob you of your sight — many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to “do our best to provide virtual support” to people whose Argus implants fail — but no more parts and no more patches.

Second Sight wasn’t the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. Last week, Liam Drew told the stories of other neural abandonware in “Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure” in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html

Among that abandonware: ATI’s neural implant for reducing cluster headaches, Nuvectra’s spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain, Freehand’s paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance.

Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: “long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage.” In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business.

A better answer: standardization. “If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under.” 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach.

But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a Case Western biomedical engineer: open hardware. “Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. ‘Then people can just cut and paste.’”

This isn’t just the best answer, it’s the only one. There’s no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people’s nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how.

This is the case that Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully and I made at our Defcon panel this year: “Why Patients Should Hack Medtech.” Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i1BF5YGS0w

This is the principle that animates Colorado’s HB22–1031, the “Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act,” landmark Right to Repair legislation that was signed into law last year:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: The staring eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Centered in it is a medieval anatomical engraving of the human nervous system, limned in a blue halo.]

#pluralistic #neurology #medtech #unauthorized bread #body horror #regulatory capture #bodily autonomy #floss #medical implants

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