humanist + humorist

Peak irony, no notes: guess where the “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” ad music came from. “But then, in 2007, he bought a Harry Potter DVD and to his surprise, there was his music in the anti-piracy ad at the beginning. His composition had been taken and used without his permission. In fact, it had been illegally used on dozens of movie DVDs, both in Holland and overseas. You probably have one at home right now.”

Wattpad is on a fanfic-deleting spree, apparently targeting (but not exclusive to) NSFW and/or queer-centric fics. Seems to be a profit-driven move after they got bought by Naver (the same site that owns Webtoon) a while ago. Reddit is passing around advice about how to move to AO3.

Facebook deletes, suppresses, and flags posts about climate change: “Since August 2018, Facebook has limited the visibility of my page,” she writes, “labelling it as ‘political’ because I talk about climate change and clean energy. This change drastically reduced my post views from hundreds to just tens, and the page’s growth has been stagnant ever since.”

The previous article got a heck of a publicity boost when Facebook started auto-blocking everything from the local news site that posted it: “Until approximately 4pm ET Thursday afternoon, whenever people attempted to share any link at all to the Reflector, they were unable. In screenshots shared with The Handbasket, the warnings varied from saying the content was reported by others as being “abusive,” to labeling the link as spam, as well as a simple upload error.”

That said, rahaeli (Denise from DW) breaks down how this is genuine collateral damage from spam-filtering: “People keep claiming that if this were a false detection we’d hear about it happening all the time, but they genuinely do happen all the time.” And “The number of people who do not understand the sheer volume of garbage on the internet is either absolutely depressing as fuck or proof that we all do our jobs a lot better than people think we do.”

Dreamwidth story (featuring a guest appearance by an anon community, possibly FFA?): “For no particular reason, a story about weird detection systems: we don’t use a lot of automated detection or filtering, but we do some…”

Meanwhile, in software: “As the fallout of the Xz backdoor continues to rock the open source software community, people working on open source software are realizing (and reiterating) that a culture in which people often feel entitled to constant updates and additional features from volunteer coders presents a pretty large attack surface.”

There are a lot of comments described as “bullying” that…do not strike me as bullying. No personal insults, no dramatic hyperbole, definitely no threats. Just frank, fact-based project criticisms that could easily have been made in good faith. And then the critics would volunteer constructive help! It’s easy and obvious to say “don’t be horrible to volunteer coders,” but the world needs to take the next step and be supportive to volunteer coders…and how can you provide support that’s helpful and stress-reducing, after “support” was used as a major attack vector?

It’s a mess. I don’t know.