Notices by Jake Hamby (jhamby@chaos.social)

The 33 state attorneys general who are suing Meta for deceptive and unlawful practices make a lot of interesting points in their 233-page complaint (PDF link in page):

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-unredacted-federal-lawsuit-against-meta-%E2%80%9Cdamning%E2%80%9D

Ed Zitron is really on fire preaching against the general malaise we're all feeling from the Rot Economy and the enshittification of everything, like this recent post:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

#RotEconomy #facebook #instagram #dystopia

I decided not to open a #Bluesky account because I have my hands full here following a chronological feed on a variety of topics. I was able to transfer enough friends I knew from the old Twitter when I made this account to get going, and now I just follow anyone who posts anything I find interesting or insightful, to keep building a network.

#Mastodon is at heart a hobbyist platform, and that's okay. There's no imperative for growth at all costs, or even forcing consistency between instances.

I can only put 500 chars in a toot on this server, but I see others posting really long toots, the bulk of which is hidden for me behind a "Read more" link, thankfully.

I'm old enough to remember the BBS days, and this is not a whole lot different than FidoNet, UUCP, BITNET, or other federated forums of years past. Of course those systems had to be store-and-forward because instant high-speed Internet from anywhere at all times was science fiction and reality was often a 2400 baud modem.

To put that in perspective, "baud" is bits/second, but on an RS-232 serial link you have a start and a stop bit for each byte so you have to divide by 10 to get bytes/sec, not 8.

I'm just old enough to remember Commodore selling a 300 baud and a 1200 baud modem, and I was fortunate enough to have the $70 to buy the faster one. I still have it, although I'm not sure what it's good for. I have a lot of retro stuff I need to sell. I had a friend with the 300 baud one, so I know it was painful.

Quantum Link, or Q-Link, was an early online service that evolved into AOL. Q-Link had a special graphical client for Commodore 64 that you had to use to connect, so it wasn't impossible to use at 300 bps. But you'd be waiting a long time to read even short posts at 30 bytes/s.

Then came 9600 bps, but there were a lot of incompatible standards (MNP-5, U.S. Robotics):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcom_Networking_Protocol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics

BBS's would advertise which brand of modem they had to get >2400 bps speeds.

At the higher speeds of dial-up modem, things did eventually get standardized, and we got 14.4 kbps, 28.8 kbps, 33.6 kbps, and finally 56 kbps, which requires one end of the call to have a digital phone line (ISDN), not analog.

I digress. We ended up going through the same evolution of slower to faster speeds with 2G phones, 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G LTE, 5G. Things didn't get really interesting until 4G LTE, with high speed and low latency approaching the slower tiers of home broadband.

What I find fascinating about Meta is that they don't really care about the content of the slop they're serving to users, for better and worse. They're not trying to convert their users to any sort of ideology, except for consumerism, because they need to serve ads, and most ads are for products and services.

We don't really know what filters TikTok has in place to amplify or suppress topics for ideological reasons. And we can see now in Twitter/X what blatantly pushing an agenda looks like.

There's a huge problem with child sexual exploitation on Instagram in particular and Meta doesn't care at all that they have hordes of would-be child molesters ogling and DMing with children. That's a whole other 228-page lawsuit, actually.

https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/attorney-general-raul-torrez-files-lawsuit-against-meta-platforms-and-mark-zuckerberg-to-protect-children-from-sexual-abuse-and-human-trafficking/

That one was so bad that Meta had to put down a shareholder lawsuit that they had been misled on the topic of child safety.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-platforms-defeats-shareholder-lawsuit-over-child-safety-claims-2024-10-22/

The wonderful thing about these sorts of lawsuits is discovery. These state governments have been able to collect damning evidence, despite employees generally knowing to be discreet in terms of what's saved in legal holds. I worked at Google when internal chats could be "off the record" but maybe that's not the case with FAANG any more?

The stuff about getting 13- and 14-year-olds hooked on your platforms: when you find yourself sounding just like someone at Big Tobacco, that's a big red flag.

COPPA is a federal law that made it more difficult for social media sites to monetize and track US users under 13 years old, so Meta properties won't let you make an account, if you don't lie about your age, if you're under 13.

And lying about your age is easy to do, so Meta knows that they have young children using their site, and they take all of that into consideration in terms of growth and getting kids hooked, exactly like tobacco companies were/are doing with cigarettes and now vaping.

From the first lawsuit, Meta knows that teenagers and young adults are a "substantial and critical market".

"Meta and their advertisers want to attract young people because they are more likely to: (1) be influenced by advertisements; (2) become lifelong customers; and (3) set trends that the rest of society emulates."

Of course that's true for every other social media site that's advertiser-supported, which is nearly all of them (and we know Bluesky will end up turning on ads at some point).

In case you were wondering about Meta's estimated lifetime value of (profit from) a 13-year-old child: $270 per teen.

So they're doing all of this heinous stuff to impressionable young minds, knowingly and willfully, because they know Mark Zuckerberg demands the metrics go up at all costs, in order to squeeze a few extra $ from a revenue model where they could offer a non-ad-supported tier for a few $ per month and come out ahead *and* they wouldn't have to get their users hooked on their apps.

In the internal email from Sep. 2018 that gave the $270 per teen "lifetime value" (LTV), the author also says that it's critical to keep this number in mind because you don't want to spend more than the LTV of the user attracting that user or providing anything of value to them.

So Meta's thinking is 100% on Cory Doctorow's enshittification journey because they want to spend the least amount of money possible on supporting their ad-supported teen and pre-teen audiences across their whole lives.

I worked at Google from 2010 to 2014 and my opinion of the company's goals changed radically from the fairy-tale version that I believed into they're basically the same sort of evil as Meta.

I'll cut YouTube some slack in that they've made the best of the creepy model of wanting to replace TV for mindless #brainrot content, a high bar considering how hooked the populace is on TV.

YouTube realizes quality content takes time and money and shouldn't be rushed, and they need to pay creators well.

Google's "New Coke" moment when they really lost the plot was the decision to kill the beloved Google Reader (thereby making RSS feeds much less useful to anyone who wanted to browse them without installing an app), in order to attempt to foist Google+ on the world.

When they had Orkut and Google Reader and Android etc. all doing their own things, it was easy for every division to take deserved pride in not compromising for the AdWords / DoubleClick / AdMob juggernaut of attracting eyeballs.

The other thing I observed during that exact period of time was the sudden deceleration of new ideas until it reached the stage we've been in now for as long as 10 years, for basic tech. I used to use an iPhone 6 Plus.

Sure, the gamer laptop I bought for $700 has a Ryzen 7 and some NV RTX GPU, and that means I can play the same games at good frame rates with a higher level of detail. It's nice, but not earth-shattering.

Sony and Xbox have the same problem. Compare PS4 vs. PS5 to PS1 vs. PS2.

I bought the Lenovo laptop to have something portable with 16 GB RAM and a decent CPU to run VirtualBox VMs, but also I didn't want it to be a slouch at gaming. Dual-booted Linux like a champ, too. Gotta love generic x86 architecture and CPU duopolies.

I eventually upgraded to an iPhone 12 because the 6 Plus had only 1 GB of RAM so app switching was painful, and Apple stopped supporting it with new iOS updates, which meant I was forced to upgrade to run new apps).

I got the iPhone 12 for free.

I got a monthly contract plan with Metro and the iPhone 12 was free, the 13 was some small amount, and the 14 another increment. At the time, the big carriers didn't have deals on the iPhone 14's they were pushing.

It's a sign of how little I cared about anything past the iPhone 12 (which added 5G) that I didn't think twice about splurging on the 13 or 14.

I may sound like an old man extolling the virtues of hand-crank windows as "one less thing to break down", but I haven't had any trouble.

I'm pretty happy with the Lenovo Ryzen 7 7435HS gaming laptop that I bought on a Black Friday sale at Best Buy. This is my first AMD CPU in a while. No one ever got fired for buying x86_64, esp. for running VMs of arbitrary OS's.

If you're going to run VirtualBox on Windows 10/11, you really need to disable the hypervisor so VirtualBox doesn't have to try to run (poorly) on top of Hyper-V. That takes a few steps. The OpenVMS folks have the best guide I found. https://wiki.vmssoftware.com/Windows_host_compatibility_settings_for_OpenVMS_on_x86_VirtualBox_guests

The x86_64 port of OpenVMS won't even boot if the VM doesn't have XSAVE, while other guest OS's I've tested are sluggish at best. There's a little green turtle icon in the VirtualBox status bar if it's running on Hyper-V instead of natively (a little counterintuitive since green usually means "go").

I also got Ubuntu installed on the laptop as a dual boot after turning off BitLocker (the installer wasn't happy with just disabling it, but at least now I can see my NTFS partition from Linux).