The whole net neutrality discussion seems to be focusing on download speeds and access to particular services, but does anybody remember back in 2006 when AOL got caught blocking people from sending or receiving emails that expressed criticism of AOL? There was no sign that it was happening, and the emails would appear to be delivered – AOL’s mail servers would even report a normal “accepted for delivery” status code – but they’d just never show up in the recipient’s inbox. Or how about the incident a year earlier where Telus imposed fake service outages for websites expressing support for the
Telecommunications Workers Union? Again, no indication that any blocking was taking place: just a error page falsely claiming the affected sites were down.
Under the proposed deregulations, this sort of thing would be explicitly permitted, and we know it’s possible because it’s been done. Now consider how much more communication happens via the Internet in 2017 than in 2005/2006. It’s not even email or websites; big chunks of the telephone network now pass through ISP-mediated VOIP channels, and those conversations would likewise be targetable by faked outages.
Like, this isn’t some dystopian sci-fi scenario; we’re talking about horseshit that major ISPs were getting up to on the sly over a decade ago, and are now about to be told can be engaged in without regulatory penalty.
This happened? That’s serious.
By the way, that kind of scenario is how censorship in China works. They don’t throw up a page saying the content is illegal, they just route it in such a way that the packets go around in circles and time out. ISPs could easily start pulling all kinds of tricks to demote things they don’t like – they have the option of not routing it correctly, slowing the bandwidth to a crawl, or just stopping the request and sending back a 404. We need to keep Net Neutrality.
Oh, yeah, it happened. The cited incidents aren’t even the half of it – they’re just a couple of the better known ones.
For example, there was the time that Comcast blocked Boston-area subscribers from accessing their GMail inboxes, and when folks called their support line to complain, they falsely claimed that it was a technical issue on Google’s end and tried to sell them a Comcast email account.
Or the time that Madison River Communications ended up getting fined for their VOIP-metering scheme when it turned out that they were interfering with 911 calls made by users in their service area.
Or the time Verizon started selectively blocking text messages sent by pro-choice advocacy groups, even to recipients who’d explicitly opted into them.
Again, none of this is hypothetical – this isn’t stuff we imagine major telecoms will do in the absence of strong net neutrality protections, but stuff they already have done, and in many cases only stopped due to regulatory pressure at the federal level.
My submission for ArtOrder’s Tiny Dragons project! This was made with my usual mess of watercolor, ink, and colored pencil on 8×8″ hotpress watercolor paper…this time I really tried to pin down the value structure of the whole piece, and I’m feeling good about that aspect of it. 😀
‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
–Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
FUCK OFF
Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.
They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.
Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.
Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.
It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.
Like seriously why the fuck y’all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.
also dont they eat like, basically anything?
YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.
That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour.
I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off.
how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?
…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”
Very carefully, I would imagine.
WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…
…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…
…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…
…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest – I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?
…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…
…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…
…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford,
more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in
the first a molet argent.
After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue
paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford
was on the winning side…
It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.
More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).
Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…
…and modern…
…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…
So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.
This post…it just really went places on me.
I hope you read this entire post, and that it made your entire day so much better, even if just for a few moments, like it did mine.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (previously) is planning to make good on his promise to kill net neutrality this weekend, under cover of the holidays, ushering in an era in which the largest telcoms corporations can extract bribes from the largest internet corporations to shut small, innovative and competitive internet services from connecting to you.
Under this regime, a company like Fox News or Google could pay a bribe to a company like Comcast, and in exchange, Comcast would make sure that its subscribers would get slower connections to their rivals. This is billed as “free enterprise.”
Net Neutrality was won in America thanks to an improbable uprising of everyday people who finally figured out that this boring, wonky policy issue would directly affect their futures, and the way they work, learn, raise their children, stay in touch with their families, start businesses, participate in the public sphere, stay healthy and elect their leaders. Millions of Americans called, wrote, marched and donated and won over the largest, best-funded corporations in America, beating them and forcing the Obama-era FCC to protect the free, fair, open internet.
Ironically, Trump owes his victory to the neutral internet, where insurgent racists and conspiracy theorists were able to gather and network in support of Trumpism without having to outbid mainstream political rivals. Across Trumpist forums, the brighter among his supporters are aghast that a Trump appointee is about to destroy the factors that made their communities possible.
Ajit Pai is planning to introduce his anti-neutrality fast-track vote over the holiday weekend in the hopes that we’ll be too busy eating or shopping to notice.
He’s wrong.
Thanksgiving is when students go home for the holidays to fix their internet connections and clean the malware out of their computers. Those students – awake to the Trumpist threat to their futures – will spend this weekend explaining to their parents why they need to participate in the fight for a neutral net.
Thankgiving is when workers stay home from the office, participating in online forums and social media, where they will have raucous conversations about this existential threat – because a free, fair and open internet isn’t more important than climate change or gender discrimination or racism or inequality, but a free, fair and open internet is how we’re going to win all those fights.
Sneaking in major policy changes over the holiday weekend is a bad look. People are better at understanding procedural irregularities than they are at understanding substance. It’s hard to understand what “net neutrality” means – but it’s easy to understand that Ajit Pai isn’t killing it in secret because he wants to make sure you’re pleasantly surprised on Monday.
The “failure to observe regular order” is the hallmark of looters and crooks, and it foiled the GOP’s attempt to murder Obamacare and is about to kill their tax plan. Pai’s arrogance and incompetence are the epitome of the Randian delusion of supermanhood, the belief that no one can figure out what you’re up to because you are such a job-creating, 11-dimensional-chess-playing Galt.
– The OOOONNLY people benefiting from this possible rollback are corporate shareholders.
– The removal of NN would result in few if any new jobs whatsoever, so any argument that it would help the economy is null and void (btw, we’re not actually in a recession anymore, in case anyone still thought that. The US’s economy, while it has plateaued in actual growth at about 2%, it’s actually pretty high in the business cycle.)
– Limitation and partisan censorship is a major concern (I lied that one is what everyone is talking about)
– In fact it will HURT online businesses, which will damage the small business sector in general.
– And last but not least: It is going to have a majorly negative impact on the education system. I just finished highschool in May and let me tell you, even rural schools are getting more and more technology and internet dependent. Students frequently, if not regularly, are sent home with online assignments. How can students possibly be expected to finish an online homework assignment if they can’t even remotely begin to afford internet? This is already an issue in rural and poor and POC dominated areas, and should Net Neutrality be removed and access to the internet be placed back into money hungry corporate hands, it will be an even more massive and far worse problem that will only perpetuate low education levels in these areas. what if their assignment requires research on a website that their partisan provider has decided to censor? You get a zero. Especially if you’re a college student that can’t afford another $150 a month just to get ok-ish internet speeds.
– This gives me great concern for marginalized and outcast kids. The internet has been one of the very, very few places where LGBT+ and POC children and people in general can go and feel safe and accepted and loved and celebrated for how/who they are. Imagine that that’s the ONLY place you feel safe and okay and then that gets taken away from you. Early teen suicide rates are already high enough.
This is all just a disgusting money grab by the GOP and other politicians who are invested in cable and cellular companies. Call or message your congressional representatives to oppose. Drown them in resistance. I’ve already found several posts with links that let you do that.
Bloomberg News hired a lab to analyze samples of store brand aloe gel purchased at Wal-Mart, Target, and CVS. As the first or second ingredient (after water), all the products listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera. None of the samples contained any. From Bloomberg:
Paul Ryan says his tax plan will be great for the poorest and most vulnerable people in America, and he tweeted a hypothetical to help you understand how that works: “Meet Cindy: a single mom, making $30,000 per year, who hopes to one day get beyond living paycheck to paycheck. With a $700 increase in her tax refund each year under our tax bill, Cindy can start saving for her future.”
If Cindy is a single mom in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, where cruel austerity and attacks on trade unions and workers’ rights have caused a massive collapse in the state’s prosperity (while neighboring Minnesota is booming, thanks to redistributive policies), then she’s entitled to a $7.50 minimum wage. But as a single mother, she’d need to earn $23.62/h and get 40 hours’ a week worth of work to make a bare living wage.
But assume that Cindy decides to bank Paul Ryan’s $700 a year, instead of using it to avoid having to visit food pantries and turn off the furnace on cold nights (and never touch a cent for medical emergencies, childcare or debt repayment). In ten years, Cindy has amassed $7000.
Paul Ryan, who is worth $6.4 million, thinks that $58/month for starving Cindy and her malnourished child will make more of a difference than a living wage, or universal health care, or a state pension so that Cindy can have a few minutes to look for a better job, rather than tending to her aging mother’s bedsores.
WE HAVE ONE WEEK LEFT TO FIGHT THIS PLEASE HURRY! This is the URL to enter your phone number to call Congress and ask them to repeal. We NEED to fight this people!
I can’t tell if this is real or just a very surreal meme.
Unfortunately this is real.
It’s been moved to Dec 22. We now have more than a month to continue fighting. I’ve already gotten in contact with my reps and unfortunately only one of them gives a damn. I have informed the others I will considering their replacements when the time roles around. For those who think that does nothing, thats what they what you to think. Telling your reps that you will not vote for them in the coming elections DOES scare them. Call your reps and tell them.
PLEASE DO THIS! THIS IS OUR ONLY CHANCE TO STOP THEM!
I know for a fact I’d freeze up on the phone and I don’t see an option for signing my name for support, so I’ll give this a reblog for any of my followers who can handle this sort of call.
For those who can’t handle calls, you can check out ResistBot, which lets you send a fax to your Reps. via text message. And it’s not for a specific issue, it’s available for anything!
