Notices by Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club), page 7
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 23:22:36 EDT 
Hattie Cat
DOJ demands Facebook information from 'anti-administration activists'
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/28/politics/facebook-anti-administration-activists/index.html -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 23:20:51 EDT
Hattie Cat
Facebook to circumvent cross-site tracking block with first-party cookie. (Like Google did with AdWords over a year ago.)
https://shitposter.club/url/2471504 -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:55:31 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Having said that, there is a thirst for "news" other than sensational clickbait or the National Enquirer would be more popular... -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:53:10 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono So you could well be right - one role of news is to entertain. A friend had a sort of breakdown a while back and started getting into lunatic conspiracy theories about pyramids and alien abductions etc. Said that one thing about following conspiracy theories was that they were nothing if not entertaining. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:46:22 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Now social media is giving people access to news that was previously suppressed and hard to find, the "establishment" is upping its game and co-opting FB and Google to embark on a censorship campaign against "fake news" that actually means suppressing anything that deviates from the state narrative (while allowing a small number to remain so it's not too blatant). Hence pro-NATO Atlantic Council partnering with FB. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:40:35 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Yes, I was just thinking it needs to be updated to account for the Internet and the stranglehold that Google and FB has on advertising. Even previously relatively respectable journals now turning into clickbait factories. Vicious downward spiral - need to cut costs because FB and Google eating your lunch, fire senior journalists and hire interns on zero-hours contracts, quality drops, readers desert. Rinse and repeat. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:38:01 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Not sure it's that simple. What about the role of advertising? Who controls advertising, controls the media. I eventually ditched a subscription for a magazine I'd subscribed to for just about forever when I finally twigged that they never published any critical articles but kept advertising the products and manufacturers who the articles were about. In the UK, there was a case of one journalist with integrity resigning from a major paper because his editors had told him to spike stories about criminality at a major bank, since they had a large advertising budget. Same bank had someone with no media experience whatsoever planted at the top of the BBC - instant suppression. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:20:46 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Interesting point. Another problem is sorting out what's happening in the world takes time and effort. Professional intelligence agencies do this all the time - take information from a wide variety of sources, collate it evaluating the veracity of each source and condense it. The mass media _should_ play that role but don't - for reasons proposed by Herman & Chomsky. Flak merchants know this so sometimes flood the media with information to drown out signal in noise. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:11:58 EDT
Hattie Cat
"Fascist Spain meets British punk: the subversive genius of Judge Dredd" RIP Carlos Ezquerra
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/03/judge-dredd-carlos-ezquerra -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:09:57 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Believe they're being mislead, that is. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:09:39 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono Weird thing I find if you point out media bias to colleagues, friends, whatever and some look at you sideways as a conspiracy theorist or nut. Almost as if people don't want to believe and remain in comfortable ignorance. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 19:05:42 EDT
Hattie Cat
As a techie I tended to dismiss 'media studies' and sociology as 'soft' and unrigorous, but since we live in 'interesting times' now reading Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky and Propaganda Blitz. More need than ever for the public to be aware of how the media works. Should be taught in schools. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 04-Oct-2018 16:27:13 EDT 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@cwebber @Technowix Another example I've encountered recently are "smart meters".
Electricity meters are incredibly basic analog electronics which can and does last for decades. The new mandatory digital "smart meters" seem designed for obsolescence and to have a short life cycle with a surveillance capital type of business model. -
ar.al🌻 (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 27-Sep-2018 04:05:31 EDT 
ar.al🌻
@hntooter Stop using Cloudflare. They are man-in-the-middle as a service.
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Sep-2018 07:04:10 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono > I mostly object to your accusation of the movie being misogynistic because it uses the
> virtual girlfriend trope and turns it on it's head.
A fair point. However, it must be said that most of the women in the film are depicted as either psychopaths or passive instruments, playthings to be disposed of when they have served their purpose (often violently). Hence the film felt somewhat misogynistic to me. Also, while Harrison Ford and Edward James Olmos have been allowed to grow old gracefully, an older Sean Young is not allowed to be presented - she's just reprised as a young sex doll in the virginal state to seduce Deckard, and is promptly shot in the head when he refuses to bite. (Contrast with the treatment of Princess Leia in the later Star Wars franchise films.) The only innocent characters in the film are arguably Joi and Deckard's daughter, who are basically prisoners unable to control their circumstances.
> I think it's reasonable to have people suspend their disbelief here though.
I don't mind suspending belief in hidden mechanisms that would be called magic in a fantasy film but are dubbed "science" in a film like Blade Runner 2049. But it's more problematic than that - the magic isn't even consistent with itself, which irritates the heck out of me. Either Joi is dependent on a back-end system somewhere, or she isn't. She claims that breaking the transmitter means that all memories on the back-end will be lost and she'll die for real if the terminal is broken. But that implies that if the terminal is broken (including transmitter!) and K hadn't broken the transmitter, she'd have been safe. How does that work? Belief in consistent magic is fine, but if it's not even self consistent it just seems lazy, like the writers just couldn't be bothered. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Sep-2018 18:21:49 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono I didn't say that and I think the opposite - if an AI is sentient and behaves like a human it should be treated accordingly. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Sep-2018 18:20:03 EDT
Hattie Cat
@mono
Thanks for the feedback.
> 1. absolutely nobody cares about whether or not a fictional hero consorts with prostitutes.
> This is 2017, not 1957.
You'd be surprised what Hollywood executives think its okay to portray or not to portray. We're allowed to see nudity up to but not including public hair in this film, despite the films graphic portrayal of violence, for example. Hollywood can be awfully (and frustratingly) prudish in certain respects.
Re the role of Joi, if you remove her the only consequence for the flow of the movie as a whole is that K has to procure a prostitute directly (and _her_ only role is to plant a bug on K) rather than have Joi do it for him. The "thin plot device" was alluding to the fact that the implementation of Joi's virtual terminal is so lazily written and full of holes that it clearly hasn't been properly though through - in other words, it appears that they couldn't be bothered. (They should have called her a variant of Alexa or Siri.)
I assume that if an AI is sentient and convincingly human than it should be given rights equal to humans too, regardless of whether it's a software implementation, wetware or hardware and that's part of the point of the film I guess. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Sep-2018 17:09:20 EDT
Hattie Cat
Blade Runner 2049. Visually spectacular, and was impressed at first glance. But thinking about it afterwards, it seems somewhat misogynistic.
"Virtual girlfriend" implementation is just dumb - mobile terminal with a "ringtone" that goes off at inopportune moments to let everyone know you have one (and K is too dumb to switch it to silent mode when out and about or change the default), and a "cloud backup" implementation that's (a) not client-side encrypted and (b) unrecoverable if you break the terminal so what was the point of it anyway? In any case, Joi is just a thin plot device to allow K not to procure a prostitute directly and so tarnish him in the viewer's eyes as a 'hero' (as if a cold-blooded killer and corpse mutilator would have any compunctions in that department).
Wouldn't enjoy watching it again. -
Brian Conway (blocknonip@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Sunday, 23-Sep-2018 09:23:41 EDT 
Brian Conway
Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine: https://ha.x0r.be/posts/chrome-is-a-google-service/
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