I’ve wondered for years when the copyright cartels would start going after VPN users.

Looks like that time has arrived.

Never mind all the legitimate uses of VPN. Governments and many corporations who spy on you already hate it as it prevents them from doing that, so it’s a natural target.

VPN won’t go away, though. It can’t. However in the future, it will require licensing and also your traffic to be monitored by using a government-mandated man-in-the-middle attack. (That is without getting too technical your traffic will be required to go through a proxy of sorts “for your safety” where it will then be examined.)

The licensing scheme will basically mean a private user without a company sponsorship won’t be able to sign up for a VPN account. This is the future, alas. It’s the only way they can keep control, so they will do it.

It would have been worth the geek racist outrage if every single role in The Hunger Games films had been a person of color.

That would have been so much fun, and not only for that reason – but that’s a damn fine one.

Years ago, when I was but wee naïve young tyke skipping merrily through the flowered fields of my youth, I believed that people would have no choice but to accept climate change when their communities were inundated with rising water.

I was wrong.

The town revolted. Like many local residents, Wanda Thornton, the town’s representative on the Accomack County board of supervisors, accepts that the sea is rising, but is skeptical that climate change and its effects have anything to do with the erosion of the beach. As a result, “I’m just not convinced that it requires the drastic change that some people think it does,” she said.

This one article didn’t convince me that I was mistaken; no, I realized that quite a while ago as well. But rarely do you see it laid out so starkly and so head-slappingly.

The plain truth is that a vast number of people will be standing in the skyscrapers of former NYC looking down at the surging tides swamping Fifth Avenue and be utterly unconvinced that climate change had anything at all to do with it.

Yes, the Great Filter is ahead of us I can confidently say.

Why is dystopian fiction so popular now, especially among teenagers and young adults?

Seems obvious, really.

The popularity of that sort of fiction is always concentrated in the portion of society that is likely to be most affected by the worsening – real or imagined — of the world that lies in their future.

Right now, the future light cone for the millennials and younger doesn’t look that bright. Median wages are decreasing along with job prospects. Inequality is off the charts. Their elders are doing fuck-all about potentially civilization-ending quandaries like climate change and resource depletion. More importantly, all of that seems to be getting worse instead of better.

In the 1950s, the dystopianism was aimed at an older audience as they mostly held the fears about the nuclear-tipped precariousness of the world and the resulting paranoia, hence all the films such Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and the mutant creature features —  all monsters therein mutated of course by radiation – such as Them!

Contemporary dystopian novels and cinema now concern themselves with severely restricted choices in a world of limited resources (The Hunger Games), utter society-mandated conformity (Divergent) and a combination of all three (Uglies).

This is no mistake. When a culture sings, everyone joins the tune. They can’t help it.

Criticizing readers and movie watchers – especially young ones – for consuming fiction that helps them deal with emotionally and to some extent understand intellectually the milieu into which they’ve been thrown without choice adds unnecessary insult to already-grievous injury.

After all, this dystopian fiction would not even exist if the current stewards of the world that these young people will inherit had not utterly and inexcusably botched the job.

About the release of celebrity nudes,  I’ve seen increasing calls for censoring the internet.

First of all, this won’t help.

Second, when the left and the right agree on something, it’s nearly always utterly flawed as it’s usually something big businesses want, or it’s desired by other interests inimical to the public good.

While the person or persons who hacked the phones and cloud accounts of the celebrities who had their private data stolen should be prosecuted, the call to censor the internet plays into the hands of the many, many groups who already wish to do so anyway.

Which will make it worse for everyone and not actually help with the problem.

It’s funny that we repeat the same mistakes over and over again as most people seem driven by momentary passions and propaganda. Not that I am some paragon of logic and deliberation, but I at least prefer a real fix rather than the symbolic gesture that lets all your friends know that you are the bien pensant  rubber stamper that they’re expecting.

To the extent that it ever was useful, Twitter is about to become the opposite of that.

One of the reasons I don’t hitch my digital wagon to online services such as Twitter and Facebook is that their whole businesses rely on manipulating you and infringing on your privacy. As many have pointed out, you are the product.

I run my own domains (though hosted), where I could migrate all my data very easily elsewhere at any time.

Twitter’s changes will as Nina points out make it utterly useless for news or digital activism. Which, of course, is the point because as Twitter sees it, the less controversial a platform can make itself the more money it can bring in. And just as important the more it can force you to look at what it wants you to see, the more cash for them.

I never used Twitter for just these reasons. Same reasons I never used Facebook, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and any of those other platforms. I don’t like being the product and avoid it if at all possible.

(This is not an implied criticism of those who do use those services. I understand the reasons. They just aren’t good enough for me.)

And also for the people who say, “Katniss can’t have looked like she did! Her mother had blonde hair and blue eyes, and so did her sister.”

Well, here’s a photo with Q’orianka Kilcher and her full, biological brother, Xihuaru Kilcher:

Notice anything about it? What all ya’ll say now?

Looking smart and being smart are two different things.

Because in The Hunger Games, Black people were the backdrop. Not the main characters.

Because white authors have a fixation in writing futuristic totalitarian dystopian stories in which only white people exist and are being oppressed by other white people.

This person clearly did not actually read The Hunger Games. Katniss was mixed-race. She is clearly described as having olive skin. Gale was also mixed race as were most of the people in The Seam, who are clearly described several times as being the result of races mixes over hundreds of years (implied).

Rue of course was black, as were quite a few other characters.

Yep, the movies were whitewashed. Not the fucking books.

Read the books before you comment on them, mmmkay? It destroys your argument — even if the argument itself is sound — when you get basic facts completely and utterly wrong.

This is a pretty good representation of how Katniss looked as described in the novels:

Yeah, not fucking white.

I see people say things like, “I was still just a dumb kid at 25” and such.

Do people really believe that? Is that really true? I can’t imagine that. I’ve felt and acted like an adult since I was 10 or 11 years old.

I guess I was just forced into it by circumstances, and natural proclivities. I didn’t in a lot of ways have any other choice. I was precocious by nature. I had no interest in the childhood world my peers inhabited.

People do seem to mature at radically different rates – my mother was more childish than me for her entire life that I knew her – but it seems self-belittling to speak of one’s self in that way.

One of the main reasons I got into trouble with adults from about 10 years old onward is because I insisted on interacting with them at or above their level and they punished me severely for it.

I never stopped, though, and am very glad I did not.

If you want an ad blocker that works with all browsers and yet won’t bloat your browser with add-ons, try this one.

I tested it in a VM and it works fine and doesn’t seem to do anything malicious after a basic bit of packet sniffing.

I’m sticking with AdGuard for now, but if you’re a Windows user this looks like a good alternative.

If you see articles claiming that V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, ignore them. He did no such thing, unless he invented when it he was two years old in 1965.

“Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on the same computer was called SNDMSG.”

And the first email sent over ARPANET occurred in 1971, seven years before he claims to have “invented” email.

Hell, my grandfather was sending and receiving email at Purdue in the early- to mid-1970s.

In truth, no one person invented email. It was developed over time from very basic beginnings, building on older things as all tech does, and evolved with said technology.

Nearly all email conventions, practices and technologies, however, had already been developed by 1978. Ayyadurai had nothing to do with it.

There is no such thing as the unbiased view. I was thinking about that as I was reading this article, “The New Scientism.”

It’s most prevalent among engineering types, but even in science there is the belief that there is some platonic ideal viewpoint from which to make decisions and to pursue paths of inquiry.

This is a fiction; there is no human realm free of bias or of politics.

Even choosing what to study itself is a result of bias, of unconscious prioritization, and of what one has been taught is important to see.

This isn’t a groundbreaking insight or anything. It is rather obvious. However, rather obvious things are often not convenient for corporations and their lackeys, as well as governments, their solons and their pencil-pushers, so are often denied by large portions of the population.

Propaganda, after all, is extremely effective and promulgating the idea that there is just no other way to do things is one of the most effective pieces of such mind control ever devised.

A month ago at the Bank of the West Classic, Germany’s Sabine Lisicki hit a serve 131 miles per hour—the fastest ever recorded in women’s tennis.

And that’s faster than most men on the pro tour hit, too.

I’ve long thought the the very best women in women’s tennis could consistently beat the middle- and lower-ranked men if they were allowed to play together. And these women would probably only lose 60-40 to the top men. This offers some empirical support for that contention.

If you are in a TL;DR mood, the reason is that the very, very best female athletes are shunted away from other sports (baseball, etc.) that are not financially remunerative to them and into tennis. And there is far more egalitarianism in that sport so they receive equal training and opportunity.

In fact one of the reasons that I’ve always liked tennis because women are treated far less unequally there than in other sports. If you turn a TV on, you are as likely to see a women’s match as a men’s. That’s true of no other major sport.

The women’s game had until a few years ago been more cerebral and less about punishing ground attacks,  but that is changing and I like it a little less than I used to for that reason.

However, if you want to see the very top female athletes in the world do cool shit you can’t do, tennis is the place to look. Funny how much of the “natural” gender disparity disappears when you treat everyone more equally, isn’t it?*

*I am not arguing that women are not on average a bit less strong. It is true that in many sports, top women will always be dominated by top men. There is a thing called “biology.” However, treating everyone as if they belong and caring about their achievements is always better to me than the alternative.

Interesting bit about authorial intent.

Rather than trying to resolve the unresolvable and aligning creators’ intentions with our own feelings, I think we ought to try to do something different: learn to live with ambiguous stories, and to embrace conflicts between authorial intent and our own interpretation.

I mostly do not care about authorial intent. It’s interesting as a measure, as the article points out, but the world and a work is broader and more diverse than any creator can imagine when making something.

Here’s another piece partially on authorial intent that even more succinctly states how I also feel about it.

Movies – like TV, literature, painting, culture – are orphans. They have parents who produce them and nothing more; their effect upon those who meet them later – the audience – is determined by all kinds of other factors. What an artist intended with a piece of art is mostly irrelevant, because what a work of art is is not defined by that intent.

Authorial intent and listening to what authors say about their works is to me kind of like the parent who hears their three-year-old opine that “the dog probably tastes like Pop Tarts.”

The usual response, “That’s nice, honey” works here too.

Authors are not omniscient nor are they omnipotent. Often, they are not even aware of the deeper meanings of what they write, surrounded by culture as are all the rest of us are, and many authors despite being very good are fairly ahistorical.

That is to say, once they unleash a work on the world, it is no longer theirs. Their opinion of it and interpretation thereof is no more valid than anyone else’s.

About the latest celebrity photo theft, here’s a clue about the security of cloud services: they aren’t secure.

By nature, by immutable facts of the universe, anything stored on a network out of your control is less safe than never putting it there in the first place.

That will always be the case, no matter what security is put into place. It’s just as true of your vital business documents, your banking details, your medical records as it is of your nude selfies.

One of the main reason “cloud” everything is being pushed is specifically because it makes things less secure. Always remember that.