It was never about security. It was always about collecting and selling high-value personal data. Here comes the proof...
It's hard to believe, in a world where tech platforms increasingly mandate two-factor authentication, that there could still be people in this world who believe it's all about our "security protection" rather than the tech industry's bank balance. Sadly, however, the misconception widely persists. So if you know someone who still thinks 2FA is a security measure, here's a list of ten things they urgently need to hear...
With this sly regime going into the wild next month, the phasing out of third-party cookies will be no loss to Google. In fact, it will be a net gain.
Have you been puzzled by Google's casual resignation to the dwindling life of third-party cookies? What about the brand's shrug at anti-tracking initiatives like Mozilla's Total Cookie Protection? I mean, Google is Mozilla's primary funder. So at a glance it makes no sense at all that Mozilla's Firefox browser would roll out a system which limits the very tracking cookies Google uses to serve targeted ads...
Well, as with every other seemingly good-natured gesture that grandstands its way out of Silicon Valley, it's a trick. Of course it is. Just weeks after Firefox finally provides a default shield against cross-site tracking cookies (something it could have done 15 years ago), Google waltzes in with a new behavioural ad-targeting regime which... Yep, you guessed... Doesn't need cross-site tracking cookies. Not that any of this is choreographed, you understand... Sigh, groan, sigh, shake of the head, roll eyes to fade.
Google has locked itself into a range of self-threatening behaviours, which correlate closely with behaviours exhibited by other huge brands whose fortunes took a nosedive.
When Google recently determined that approaching half of Generation Z think websearch sucks and use social discovery instead, it reached for the panic button.
Naturally, the primary solution it came up with was "more surveillance". No surprise there. But as I predicted in mid 2015, socially-driven discovery is now a dire threat to Google's future. And worse, the momentum appears unstoppable. If the generational apathy towards classic websearch continues, we'd expect to see Google drifting into a vault of irrelevance by the time Gen Alpha substantially comes of age.
Tech giants still insist that this is about marketing, but clearly, you do not need someone's retina-scans, fingerprints or digital forensics to sell them a food mixer. When corporations start angling for this kind of data its intended destination is a police database.
If you know your reggae history, you'll surely have noted the sly twist on the Bob Marley album title Babylon By Bus. Just in case anyone's unfamiliar with this particular context of the word "Babylon", it's a Rasta synonym for authoritarian forces of control and/or a generally corrupt system that works against the power of good.
Sometimes it refers specifically to the police. Sometimes to a collection of state agencies. Sometimes to an entire ecosystem of oppression, including all of its sympathisers. But it's a great term around which to build this article, because it so perfectly places all subjugative forces into one basket, and removes the distinction between government agencies and private corporations who play the exact same role.
Google's ultimate undoing will not be some grassroots Web3 uprising, but something we can sum up in one word: content. And the content crisis has already begun.
Are you watching? If you've blinked at all since the summer you might have missed at least part of Google's desperate, ongoing quest to recover some semblance of quality in its search results. In recent weeks we've seen an unprecedented series of major updates to Google's search ranking algorithms, and it looks like the Californian behemoth is not stopping until the results pages start looking like someone gives a hoot.
AI WOES
The problem of the moment? Among other things, artificial intelligence. AI is now so clever and widely available that spammers can simply scrape the Internet, automatically re-word what they find, and mass-publish it without any worries about plagiarism or duplication.
"On inspection, the Fediverse showed itself to have most of the same problems as mainstream social media, and its mistreatment of users was both widespread and historically-ingrained. Some elements of the Fediverse were in fact worse than mainstream social."
It's hailed as the hero's arrow that might one day slay the monster of mainstream social media. Could it? I'll leave that one for others to answer. What I want to ask is: if the Fediverse did destroy the now openly hostile gang of megasilos, would it really make the world a better place? Is it any better than its centralised rivals? Is it even decentralised? We shall see. But let me prime this article with a nugget of philosophy...
"It would not be an exaggeration to say that Wikipedia has done everything it could possibly get away with doing to deny the prosperity of its sources."
DEATH BY MM-WHAT?
If you web-search the acronym MMC, I'm sure you'll find every trivial meaning you could possibly conceive. What you almost certainly won't find, is the meaning that resonates above all others within the cybertech cartel.
Google and Startpage will lead you to a Wikipedia (where else?) disambiguation, citing nearly 70 possible interpretations for MMC, but mysteriously excluding the one that most matters to Wikipedia. The one which, indeed, defines Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo gives us a top result of Marsh McLennan, a couple of nice little plugs for Microsoft (obviously), and, oooh, a Free Dictionary rundown, giving us over 140 possibles. But alas, once again, the one we want is absent.
"Fact-checkers" have managed to persuade us that we need to question everything we see on the internet, except for them. That slice of hypocritical dick-logic alone exposes the sham of "fact-checking", and tells us what these people really are."
Image by Bob Leggitt
Last August, when one of the internet's most eminent "fact-checkers" was outed as a liar, a sockpuppet and a thief, we, the discerning public, took one peep above our propaganda feeds, raised an eyebrow, and then promptly resumed linking to his site. Like "fact-checking" could still be worth something after the genre's top dude had admitted simply ripping off shit from news sites. Yes, news sites. As in "don't believe everything you read in the papers".
"Once they gain as much control over us as they currently have over their employees, what then? Do we not get to financially transact unless we sign up to Google Serum and take a shot of happy juice?"
What happens when the law stops working? When the lawmakers are not only ten years behind the technological curve, but also so open to bribery that they'll happily let Amazon write the statute?
What happens when regulators don't understand the technology they're regulating?
What happens when unelected commercial giants gain more power than governments? When a country's authorities are so desperate to retain the obscenely rich Facebook as a resident that they begin defending the lawbreaker instead of the citizens they're assigned to protect?
"In the end, there's way too much money in surveillance capitalism for any of these pathological stalkers to simply sit back and allow us to block them. They're on us today; they'll be on us tomorrow."
If you've ever installed a content-blocker (often known as a tracker-blocker) as a browser extension, you were probably pretty confident that it would block trackers. Like Domestos killing germs. One squirt, and it's goodbye bacteria. But blocking silent online trackers is a complex affair. Much more difficult than blocking adverts. And that means you're probably being watched by the bulk of Big Tech - even with the eminent extension uBlock Origin guarding your fort.
"The public tolerance for Big Tech as an unelected, global government has all but worn through. Big Tech is NOT the government and it needs to be restrained with laws. In the fullness of time, no one will stop those laws from being made, so it's time for us to lobby for our own interests - not the interests of psychopaths who regard us as 'dumb fucks'."
It's coming. Change is in the air. In the works: a new digital world in which large distributors of online content can no longer rely on naive, 1990s laws to absolve them of responsibility for the content's effects.
We can't yet feel its presence, but we can see the embryo of reform emerging. Instances of massive tech platforms self-serving on the back of third-parties' misbehaviour have been way too relentless to write off as some prolonged blip. There's a crisis of public tolerance, and far from cooling off, it's hotting up. Politicians are showing more determination than ever before to tackle Big Tech's systemic abuse of safe harbours like US Section 230 and the DMCA OCILLA Section 512.
"The Wayforward Machine is shocking only in its monumental hypocrisy and sick, shameless twisting of reality to push Big Tech's agenda of zero accountability."
If you haven't yet seen it, Wayforward Machine is the Internet Archive's latest fun toy.
You hop onto the site, enter your choice of URL, and the software will simulate the exact opposite of the Wayback Machine's renowned function. It will present the Internet Archive's vision not of our digital history, but of our digital future - circa 2046.
Except it's not a fun toy. The Wayforward Machine is a sick and twisted propaganda ploy by the Big Tech collective. We know from the involvement of the "digital rights" groups and usual suspects like Wikipedia and Mozilla, that this is a Big Tech lobby, not a game. And it's a propaganda campaign I predicted in my article Big Tech's Secret Fear: The
Disappearing Web. This is the sqwawk of petulance that proves cybertech is quaking in its boots about losing its unfettered stewardship of other people's content. As a prediction in Wayforward's timeline of doom puts it…
[UPDATE: I've since built an app to create content pods and other distributable writing formats totally offline. You can find out more and get the download links in Take The Web Offline With Lit.OTG.
I've left the original post below.
The Original Post...
"An HTML web page can be incredibly simple, and
it can be created entirely offline with something like Seamonkey
Composer. I'll move onto that shortly. In fact, I'll summarise the
whole creation process."
A portable, offline version of the NRGCult post "I am Suing the Feminist Metal-Bending Channel".
Content creators… Imagine producing a website or blog without the involvement of any remote service. Imagine completing the whole process on your local drive, without any signups, without any terms, and without any conditions. Imagine being able to send your DIY website, or collection of web pages, directly to people of your choice. By email. Or on CDs, or on DVDs.
Content consumers… Imagine being able to read content in total privacy. Imagine that content being delivered to you in a format that doesn't allow your interests to be profiled. Imagine that content being futureproof and immune to censorship. Imagine being the gatekeeper of that content, so you don't have to rely on a bunch of massive tech companies graciously allowing you to find and/or access it.If these ideals appeal to you, then let me welcome you to the world of portable content.
Portable content is not attached to any specific web service. You choose how you want to deliver or receive it. It's extremely difficult for Big Tech to censor, suppress or ban, and it's totally impossible to interfere with when it's distributed on disc media at functions or in other offline situations.
There's only one reason why we're implored or forced to keep software "up to date", and it's not "security". It's so the tech industry has an instant push system for each new Big Brother powerplay as it's released. "Up to date" has never been a real necessity. It's a manufactured necessity. A brainwash.
Remember a time before browsers blocked important pages? The more updates you accept, the more freedom you lose...
"Unsupported browser - access denied!"… "Your security is at risk - access denied!"… "Your TLS version is out of date - access denied!"… "Your system is too slow - access denied!"… "Certificate invalid - access denied!"… "Page data cannot be authenticated - access denied!"… "Your connection is unsafe - access denied!"… "Your device has exhibited unusual behaviour - access denied!"… "This site cannot verify that you are human - access denied!"…
Do you ever get the feeling that someone's throwing obstacles at your attempts to use the internet?
That's because they are. The inexhaustive range of artificial barriers I've cobbled together above illustrate just how much our agency to freely roam the internet is waning. More and more, we're finding that software and hardware needs the approval of powerful data companies in order to function properly in cyberspace. Among other things, that means we can no longer use the technology we want to use. We have to use what we're told to use.
And the end game? Our submission to 24/7 surveillance. If a piece of technology doesn't afford tech powers the means to spy on us, it gets blocked from the internet. Most often, the block is not the decision of individual websites. It's a collusion between the browser providers and a range of immensely powerful tech corporations who have appointed themselves as the Internet Police. A besuited, shiny-shoed middle-mafia has formed between you and the sites you seek to visit. And if either you or the sites ain't playin' ball with the whims of Big Tech, more now than ever, it's access denied.
Beneath the hard wall of blocked access, there's then a wider-reaching soft wall. A wall in which search engines - the tools we use to source relevant content - are algorithmically pushing us towards the "right kind of content", and away from the "wrong kind of content". Anyone who thinks I'm chasing some wack conspiracy theory should check this…
"But remember what the original Reddit team revealed back in 2005 about the purpose of downvotes, and remember that forcibly-displayed popularity totals are a form of branding. Like hot-ironed grades on the backs of livestock."
Their goal is to play us off against each other, for their ultimate benefit. The butter-wouldn't-melt authoritarians behind Web 2.0 strive to create in us a level of status-anxiety which will drive us to serve their needs.
They force us into a giant league table, in which we're constantly compared, and comparing ourselves, to others. We're devalued as people; reduced to scores. And the only way we can improve as “a score”, is to help Zuck, Dorsey, or any of the other tech moguls, increase their imcomprehensible wealth. The system was designed that way.
Imagine what it would be like if inflation topped 100%… Imagine pumping double the amount into your entertainment budget this year, as compared with last - and getting a worse experience. I'm sure you wouldn't be very happy. And yet that may be happening to you right now, without you even noticing.
In the data economy, 100%+ inflation is already a very real scenario. And the primary reason for this out-of-control data-sucking spiral is that most of us have no idea how valuable our data is. Indeed, critically, we have almost no control at all over the spread of our data, once we've given it up. Access to our data can be sold again, and again, and again. Far from being able to stop this happening, we're most unlikely even to know about it. In other words, we are buying online services for an unspecified and upwardly dynamic price. We are handing Big Tech a blank cheque.
Do you let out a sigh when you hear the word “telemetry”? What about “session recording”? “Data points”? “Data log”? “Canvas fingerprinting”? “Cloudflare”? The “third-party data-piggyback loophole”? “JavaScript enforcement”? “Unauthorised human A/B testing”? “Unauthorised human psychological profiling?” “Unauthorised human intelligence testing”? “Unauthorised human labour-tasking”?…
It's hardly news these days, but our attention spans have been in drastic decline, and there are stats to prove it. Masses of them. The Internet PLC tells us we're looking at more stuff, for less time per item, and certainly on social media, it's pretty easy to see that's true.
But is this a problem with us, as people? I mean, did human evolution suddenly, around the start of the 2010s, enter some bizarre phase of plummeting natural attention capacity? Or was there something that the Internet PLC did to rewire our brains?
"Why would both Facebook and Twitter ignore 99.99% of successful startup ideas, but suddenly jump aboard with newsletters? On closer inspection, the answer is obvious..."
The World Wide Web is slowly disappearing. No, really. It is! I mean, obviously, it's all still around somewhere. It's just that with every week that goes by, a little more of it closes off unconditional access. And the conditions are getting more demanding as the hourglass runs down.
