Tootfinder

"The Twitch streamer with no audience anticipates life on the outside, in the dead public space of a Brazilianized, enclave-gated internet, a ground that shifted under our feet with little warning, turning us into street buskers playing music we didn’t realize no one could hear." <- From https://

The Brazilianization of the Internet
Spam filters don't help you when you're the spam

Yep.
“This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money …”
“On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying ...”

They're Looting The Internet
Last week, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg reports that the

"You know that it feels harder than ever to get the information you’re looking for. #LLM-generated content is not the sole reason… but it certainly plays a key role in the sharp downward trend in the quality of information…
This article aims to cover the key kinds of information that we as internet users tend to seek out, and how

“We're at the end of a vast (…) con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it's become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.”

Are We Watching The Internet Die?
Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,

The PTSD of the Internet's first responders https://citizensandtech.org/2024/02/measuring-trauma-among-the-internets-first-responders/

Unveiling Internet Censorship: Analysing the Impact of Nation States' Content Control Efforts on Internet Architecture and Routing Patterns
Joshua Levett, Vassilios Vassilakis, Poonam Yadav
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19375

Unveiling Internet Censorship: Analysing the Impact of Nation States' Content Control Efforts on Internet Architecture and Routing Patterns
Heightened interest from nation states to perform content censorship make it evermore critical to identify the impact of censorship efforts on the Internet. We undertake a study of Internet architecture, capturing the state of Internet topology with greater completeness than existing state-of-the-art. We describe our methodology for this, including the tooling we create to collect and process data from a wide range of sources. We analyse this data to find key patterns in nation states with high…

Good stuff.
#nerds #nerdsRule

Join me in becoming much more sweary
Well now that the internet is fucked up and filled with robot bastards it can be hard to tell if you're speaking to a normal human or a cock-spunk of a cyber cunt.
The only way to be sure is to constantly swear your fucking face off in ways that the language model spam-wankers have been trained to reject.
As a result I have sworn to swear, taken an oath of obscenity, using my potty mouth to persuade people of my personhood.
Hopefully we will see a fucking ton of coarsening of the discourse until even gentle conversations between mother and child will be littered with expletives such as a sailor might swear to reassure them each that they have genuine affection for each other and aren't just a script programmed to lead you on.
So join me! Swear liberally so I know you're human, and fuck those puritanical token-predictors trying to ruin our conversation with their swearless prudish pulp.
As a bonus: It also frightens away advertisers.

Come on people do not make me turn off the Internet for today. We're only 1 hour in and already it's painful.

"If nine experts in privacy can't understand what Microsoft does with your data, what chance does the average person have? That's why we're asking Microsoft to say if they're going to use our personal data to train its AI."
Please sign and share. #privacy #infosec