doodlebug-qt:

The FCC: Why would you want to save the internet?

ME:

imperialimpala:

do you ever just ‘there’s probably something medically wrong with me but i’m just gonna ignore it and hope i don’t die’?

prokopetz:

gacorley:

prokopetz:

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.

whimsy-by-joja:

abyssalcorvid:

helloitsbees:

i’m sick of doom-and-gloom, 2edgy4u urban fantasies with angsty Chosen Ones™ and constant hard darkness and entirely too many werewolves. so here’s a list of kinder urban fantasy things:

• pharmacies run by faeries who can tell what you need with a single touch and who are tipped with dollar coins and drawstring pouches of sugar (don’t worry, they have human employees to handle the iron supplements)

• dryads who tend to the parks and sidewalk trees and have the ability to purify little patches of air for asthmatics who have difficulty breathing in the polluted city air

• tiny water sprites living in public fountains who use the coins people make wishes with to buy thimblefuls of coffee– once they’ve granted the wish to the best of their ability, of course

• sphinxes who guard libraries and only ask riddles at the level each passing person is capable of answering

• and werewolves too, I suppose, but they don’t sit around angsting all day about being monsters because there’s a monthly bus service that takes them to special parks just outside the city where they can spend the night running around and roughhousing without hurting anyone. they also get the next two days following the full moon off from work since wolfing is very tiring.

because while cities can be hard, dark, unfriendly places, they’re also vibrant and bright and full of all kinds of wonderful people

@editorincreeps

@thesilverqueenlady - reads as if you thought this up. I’m such a fan of your fairytales.

gentle-reminder:

please be considerate of those who find the holiday season hard - not everybody likes the end of year holidays, not everybody has family or friends to see or that they want to see, and not everybody can afford to buy nice gifts