In the past week, Europol and the French government’s L’Office Central
de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et
de la Communication (OCLCTIC) have sent 500 “terrorism” takedown
demands to the Internet Archive demanding the removal of tens of
millions of works: the entire archive of Project Gutenberg; an archive
of 15 million texts, the entire Grateful Dead archive, the Prelinger
Archive of public domain industrial films (much beloved by the MTV
generation as they were the source of the channels classic interstitial
animations), and the Archive’s collection of recordings from CSPAN.
The takedowns come in just as the EU is getting ready to vote on a
proposal that will force platforms to remove “terrorist” content within one hour or face censorship through national firewalls, fines, and criminal sanctions.
Even if it was possible for the Internet Archive to sift through tens of
millions of documents in a collection targeted by one of these
takedowns in one hour to figure out if the takedown notice is
valid, the timezone problem means that they would have to be ready to do
this in the middle of the night in San Francisco, when the EU agencies
most typically send their demands.
Even without this absurd law, the situation is dire. The French authorities gave the Internet Archive 24 hours to comply with its demand or face a nationwide block.
Update: The Internet Archive offers this correction: CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europol’s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the national IRUs’ assessment criteria of terrorist content.
And, as the Archive explains, there’s simply no way that (1) the site could have complied with the Terrorist Content Regulation had it been law last week when they received the notices, and (2) that they should have blocked all that obviously non-terrorist content.
The Internet Archive has a few staff members that process takedown notices from law enforcement who operate in the Pacific time zone. Most of the falsely identified URLs mentioned here (including the report from the French government) were sent to us in the middle of the night – between midnight and 3am Pacific – and all of the reports were sent outside of the business hours of the Internet Archive.
The one-hour requirement essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact.
It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure items on our site, but the EU IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value.
One thing that gets ignored a lot when it comes to mental illness is conflicting symptoms. I sleep both too much and not enough. There will be weeks or months where I’m averaging three to four hours of sleep on a weekday, but on weekends I sleep until 1 pm. Some days I don’t eat my first meal until 4 or 5 pm, while other days I comfort eat all day. All of those are symptoms of depression, and none of them invalidate each other. Manifestation of symptoms can change as a person ages, but it can also change day to do depending on other factors in a person’s life.
one of the key traits of mental illness is dysfunction. Even the same disorder can manifest very differently in different people and situations, but the presentations tend to have at least this in common: they get in the way of a balanced lifestyle. Things like sleeping too much, too little–such symptoms may be seen as ‘opposites’ but are in fact extremely similar, in that they are characterized by imbalance. Two sides to the same coin.
@botanyshitposts so what exactly is a quillwort, and what’s the big deal on this particular one?
imagine if there was a single remaining mammoth species on earth, and it only was able to get by into the modern era by sacrificing it’s status as a huge landscape-changing roaming herbivore to evolve into a small animal the size of a dog. it looks a lot like a dog, actually. people often mistake the tiny mammoth species as a dog, and will just casually say it’s a dog.
small-mammoth enthusiasts, however, will avidly remind people that they are not in fact a dog, and their organs, although shrunken to the size of a dog’s organs, are still wooly mammoth organs. you actually have to seek out special vets for the small wooly mammoths because even though it looks remarkably like a dog to the untrained eye, when you’re faced with the internal anatomy it’s so far deviated from anything living today that it’s difficult to understand and work with.
this is because there is, quite literally, no animal anatomy quite like the small woolly mammoth’s left alive on earth. this means that there’s no living approximation of how their organs work, or what the fuck is going on in there, even though they look like a dog from the outside. the closest living relative of the small woolly mammoth is so far deviated from it’s anatomy that’s literally of no help to anyone to compare the two, because the only thing they have in common is how they reproduce. scientists studying the wooly mammoth’s anatomy are forced to debate with each other constantly about what a certain organ might do, or what it at least used to do based on the fossils of the giant wooly mammoths that once dominated the landscape, but they just…have no idea.
so the small woolly mammoth is not at all like a dog, even though it looks like one. how it works, how it reproduces, how it functions on a basic anatomic level are so utterly and completely prehistoric that they’re not at all like any other living animals. this makes them the subject of infinite fascination to paleontologists trying to approximate the biology and ecology of the giant woolly mammoths that once lived…but it’s incredibly challenging. it’s also incredibly challenging to explain why they’re different to people who just don’t care, or just see them as dogs because they look like them, because the significance of something like it is so easily lost when something looks ‘normal’.
isoetes –Quillworts– are that tiny wooly mammoth. their ancestors lived 400 million years ago and included the giant prehistoric spore-reproducing trees lepidodendron, which made up the bulk of massive prehistoric forests that were eventually compressed into the coal we’re still using today. they’re so old that the roots aren’t roots, they’re leaves, and it took botanists 100 years of bickering to finally confirm this. they’re so old that the change that weeded out all the giant 100+ foot tall members of the lineage was literally the original shifting of the continents, as in, like, when pangea split. they’re so old that it reproduces through ENORMOUS spores contained in spore packets on it’s leaves. they’re so old that we just have no fucking idea how to process it.
quillwort anatomy is, quite literally, that of a comically small 400 million year old spore tree with the trunk squished into a woody structure so small that you could miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for on a dissection. the anatomy of this genus doesn’t function like any other modern plant genus on earth. quillworts have organs and cell structures that we still don’t understand in the year 2019.
quillworts are incredibly valuable finds to paleobotanists because they’re so easily passed over in botanical surveys, and their habitats are constantly being threatened, making a great deal of species endangered. although they’re still around on almost every continent– see the earlier point on them evolving before the continents split– there are a lot fewer of them out there now; like anything, they can be more common in some areas than others, but my state has only found one recorded colony in the past 50 years to give an idea of what we’re dealing with here.
My 26 yr old sister still says things out loud like ‘ermagerd’ and ’___ ALL the things!’ Like…is that what’s gonna happen to me?am I going to be 30 still saying stupid shit like O shit waddup! Are all the youngins gonna be embarrassed by my use of outdated memes….how long until I myself am not Hip With It….how long until I am no longer a trendy memer…
my greatest fear honestly
Listen, I am 40. I was around for the early internet of webrings and hamsterdance. Homestarrunner. Those little cats in the boat singing to Immigrant Song. Longcat. Ceiling cat. Radiskull. Powerthirst.
So to me anything that is funny on the internet is, and always will be, cutting-edge and hilarious. If it’s funny the first time, it’s funny the eleven thousandth time. No exceptions.
I accumulate memes. Social media sites form actual strata in my soul, revealing my geological age in layers: Geocities, Myspace, Livejournal, Tumblr. Memes encrust me, like jewels, just layer on layer of reaction gifs and shitposts, some of which I barely understand, but I refuse to let go of. I cling to them, they are ever-relevant, undying.
You callow youths, who think in your innocence that that memes come and go, you are tepid fools who still smell of milk.
I am where memes go to die. I am where memes go to live eternal.
Someday, if you are lucky, you will join me. Bring your breadsticks meme, your Spiders Georg, your Bode, your big mood, your Supernatural gifs, your oh worm. Come with me and rejoice in pointless in-jokes and long-forgotten references. Embrace your encyclopedic knowledge of comedy sites ca 2006 and come share the knowledge with us. Come with me and lik the bred.
You gotta.
“You callow youths, who think in your innocence that that memes come and go, you are tepid fools who still smell of milk.”
Put this on my headstone, underneath a picture of Ceiling Cat.
all your base are belong to us
It’s almost like nobody expects nearly 50 year old memes
listen, memes never die, they just start getting called quotes and references
Since I’m not seeing her name nearly enough on the press, let’s give the attention Katie Boumandeserves. Thanks to her, we are now possible to see the first ever image of a black hole, something that people talked 200 years ago for the first time. It’s no longer a myth. We are girls and we can be whatever we want to be. Einstein would be proud of you, Katie. Thank you!
Here you can see a huge stack of hard drives she used for Messier 87’s black hole image data.
to clarify, these are two different young girls pulling two different swords from two different lakes, about a year apart. strange women in ponds will continue to distribute swords
Listen maybe Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a good basis for a system of government.
I teach my 7th graders about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
I bring in a graduated cylinder of it and we talk about how it’s used in nuclear power plants and gmo crops. How inhaling even the small amount I’m holding can lead to suffocation or even death. It’s found in vaccines and cancer cells, but also in infant formula and pet food. It is a huge component of acid rain, can cause severe burns, and has been found in places that were thought to be the most pristine and unpolluted locations on earth.
We talk about how there are little to no regulations on this chemical. No bans, no warning labels, and most manufacturers don’t even have to disclose their use of it in their products.
My students are outraged. We talk about what we can do. Create posters and flyers to spread awareness. Contact our senators with petitions to ban DHMO. Spread this information all over social media.
Then I explain that the real problem with dihydrogen monoxide is that….when I am thirsty…there is just nothing else as refreshing, and then I watch their looks of absolute shock and horror as I drink the entire vial down.
I. Fucking. Love. This.
This is how misinformation works. How propaganda works. How manipulation works.
may our education be stronger than fake news
Amen.
To those who don’t get it:
“Dihydrogen monoxide” is the chemical name for water, AKA H2O.
another important element of understanding the joke is understanding how pH levels work
yup. that’s a higher number alright.
“Everyone who has ever touched or consumed this chemical has died”
