Hey so I just wanted to say John Oliver on Last Week Tonight has once again gifted us a way to fight for Net Neutrality, which supports free speech online and enables us to shitpost at top speed as well as keep large corporations from stifling small internet businesses (example: Google paying to slow down all duckduckgo searches or Facebook paying to slow down all social media but it)
John Oliver has made a new tool for us to easily leave comments which are now publicly available on the FCC forums to fight back and say that we specifically want Title II oversight of ISPs (explained why this is what we want in his Last Week Tonight video here)
Then you will arrive at a forum to input your comment. You are required to put down name and address but it appears email is optional. Then you can write your comment. Here is my example comment below
Thank you and please help support Net Neutrality!
TO ALL OF MY AMERICAN FOLLOWERS, THIS IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT! SPREAD THIS PLEASE!
Can I have your attention for a minute? I feel like I have an important(ish?) thing to bring up here.
Y’all know that all too familiar feeling when scrolling along here that you feel like everyone is the same age?
That’s not the case. And it can be a dangerous mindset.
Just a friendly -scary- reminder that I’m actually a grown ass adult, turning 21 in a month or so. And whilst my intentions are not predatory in the least, I want everyone to feel safe in thier online environment.
If y’all don’t want me, a grown ass adult to be following you; that is okay. This is supposed to be your safe space.
Please know that its okay if y’all wanna ask me politely to unfollow. I won’t be offended- I am completely aware of the age gap and I want y’all to feel comfortable.
And to my fellow older peeps- if you get offended when a 13-15ish person asks you to hit unfollow? Y’all should probably ask yourselves why that is the case. These are kids we’re talking about. We should want them to feel safe.
Aight. With that out of the way, feel free to go on your merry way.
It’s important to add: you don’t have to ask politely. Just ask. Or block, whatever works best for you. It’s not a minor’s job to coddle their adult followers. Not at all.
I CANT BELIEVE IM LOOKING AT A COSPLAY OF THAT ONE BIRD GIF
omg
IT’S NOT JUST A BIRD GIF IT’S A VERY IMPORTANT BIRD OF PARADISE CALLED THE SUPERB BIRD OF PARADISE, IT IS FAMOUS BECAUSE OF BBC’S PLANET EARTH HOSTED BY DAVID ATTENBOROUGH OKAY
JESUS
IT STARTS THE DANCE AT 2:05
THE COSPLAYER DOES A SPLENDID JOB OF PERFORMING THE MATING DANCE AS SCRIPTED AND I THINK THAT’S VERY IMPORTANT
The species has an unusually low population of females, and competition
amongst males for mates is intensely fierce. This has led the species to
have one of the most bizarre and elaborate courtship displays in the
avian world. After carefully and meticulously preparing a “dance floor”
(even scrubbing the dirt or branch smooth with leaves), the male first
attracts a female with a loud call. After the curious female approaches,
his folded black feather cape and blue-green breast
shield springs upward and spreads widely and symmetrically around its
head, instantly transforming the frontal view of the bird into a
spectacular ellipse-shaped
creature that rhythmically snaps its tail feathers against each other,
similar to how snapping fingers work, whilst hopping in frantic circles
around the female. The average female rejects 15-20 potential suitors
before consenting to mate.
THIS COSPLAYER HAS TRULY CAPTURED THE SPIRIT OF THE BIRD AND ITS DANCE AT EVERY LEVEL
shout out to people on tumblr with no squads or group chats with weird names or people who just don’t get messages. the internet is a strange place i hope you can all still enjoy yourselves & if not u are not alone!
and you know what, shout out to people who don’t have any good friends irl either. i know it seems lonely right now but it won’t be forever there is a friend out there for you! i believe in you!
the worst thing about spending your life on the internet is that when you’re playing a game like cards against humanity at a party you’re the person who has to explain what things like bukkake are
I’m the guy who literally explained what felching is to his linguistics class (and then had to clarify that no, gerbils are not involved, no that is not a real thing, wtf) as well as the guy who had to explain furries to his working group in a professional meeting.
I once had to explain to colleagues what teabagging is when a discussion of the Tea Party went awry.
I used to work customer service for an MMO dealing with reports of players violating the ToS; everything from hacks to harassment to using banned language. The team was international and sometimes people didn’t know why something was reported as offensive, and I was always the one in the group chat trying to be professional while saying things like “it refers to hairless female genitalia” or “it’s a word for a sex act best not described here.”
you know sometimes it shocks me too but google really is free and it’s right there in your hands
I love that this post is both a really wide-eyed appreciation for the amazing time we live in and a really sarcastic passive-aggressive way to tell people to just fucking google shit
Guys, this is really important. Until now, Google collected your data, but did not attach your name to it. Now, they can, and will. This new thing they’re doing will allow them to collect your data across searches, your email, Youtube, Maps, Google+, and all their affiliates, and build a complete profile of YOU.
If that doesn’t bother you, maybe this will: they own and can sell all that data, including anything you create and send (artists and writers, take note).
There is a way you can opt out of this ridiculousness. It’s described in the link, but if you’re still not sure about it, please ask me and I’ll guide you through how to turn all this off.
This is my wake-up call. I’ll be locking down my devices and scaling back what I put through the big Google machine, which means you may see less of me across social media. I’m going to keep researching this, but it may mean in order to keep the rights to my creative work, I’ll have to keep it out of Google’s hands. And that may take some doing.
Duckduckgo is a nontracking search engine….may be worth a try.
So according to the article there is an opt out for this. Instructions are I the last paragraph. I’m on mobile so I’ll edit this more later. EDITED TO INCLUDE OPT OUT INSTRUCTIONS
To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls on Google’s My Account page, and uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services.“ You can also delete past activity from your account.
Interesting
Yeah ok, that’s the last wake up call I needed. Getting out of your prying, sweaty little hands now.
Donald Trump has called for a shutdown of the Internet in certain areas to stop the spread of terror.
In a speech at the U.S.S. Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina,
on Monday, Trump referenced the use by ISIS of social media as a
recruitment tool. He recommended a discussion with Bill Gates to shut
off parts of the Internet.
“We’re
losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” Trump said. “We have to
go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand
what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas,
closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of
speech, freedom of speech.‘ These are foolish people. We have a lot of
foolish people.”
Some totalitarian governments do it
The notion that the Internet could be shut off is not completely off
base. North Korea does it. Some countries have been known to shut off
Internet service to their citizens in times of crisis. Egypt restricted
the Internet during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.
Other
countries block certain Internet services and sites. China is the most
famous example, forbidding most social networking sites as well as
websites that deal with subjects the government doesn’t want its
citizens to know about.
Most Western countries, including the
United States, regulate the Internet very loosely. There are few
restrictions about what American citizens can do and say on the
Internet. Child pornography is one example of forbidden Internet
activity in the United States – Google is barred from linking to it,
and websites cannot display images of it.
Why the United States can’t do it
But a full-on “closing up” of the Internet “in certain areas” would be
an impossible task. There are so many players with so much redundancy
built into the system, that the Internet is not just something that can
be turned off with a wave of a magic wand.
Virtually every part in the United States has multiple Internet service provider options.
Comcast, (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) and the other major broadband companies don’t overlap much. But Verizon (VZ, Tech30), AT&T (T, Tech30), Sprint (S) and T-Mobile (TMUS)
all provide the same service to roughly the same areas. Satellite
companies also provide Internet to most parts of the country.
Removing Internet service in certain areas of the U.S. would require
those companies to turn off their cell towers and fiber networks, and to
restrict satellite access to people living in those regions.
America can’t shut off the Internet overseas either
Shutting down Internet service in foreign countries could be even more difficult.
Despite a common belief to the contrary, the United States does not
control the global Internet. Servers on foreign soil serve up the Web
and other Internet services to people living abroad.
So foreign
Internet infrastructure would need to be disrupted or shut down to turn
off service in certain areas – already a tricky task made even harder
if the countries and companies controlling those servers and cell towers
abroad don’t cooperate.
Whatever, Donald Trump wouldn’t want the Internet shut off anyway. Then he couldn’t tweet.
While Trump clearly doesn’t know the first thing about how the
internet works (outside of his Twitter account), don’t let “it couldn’t happen in America” blind us to some
very real ways in which the internet can be made less free, less
accessible, and less useful for things other than government propaganda
and surveillance. And don’t doubt that President Trump (and his party)
would be happy to implement them.
the time honored tool of every dictator, censorship is one of the first things out of trump’s mouth. this is real censorship, as opposed to when someone tells you you’re wrong on twitter.
it should come as no surprise whatsoever that 45′s pick for FCC commissioner, ajit pai, is SUPER excited to strip net neutrality from american citizens. if you didn’t know, net neutrality is the principle that currently allows you to access whatever internet site you want, at the same speed as all the other sites, without your ISP spying on you TOO much. the US regulations that protect you in this way are an annoying speed bump for ISPs in their quest to wring you like a wet dishrag until all your money falls out, and of course Team Spraytan works for them, not you.
and hey, if they do want to enact the fuckin lunatic censorship proposed in the article above, getting rid of these protections will be their first stop. what’s the most likely target of this anti-internet offensive? obviously, it’ll be american activists, scientists, and anybody who’s ever used the phrase “tiny hands” – or, as all those folks will be called in newspeak, terrorists.
just one more thing you should keep on your list of Horrible Things To Yell At Representatives About.
Signal boosting the hell out of this. Because awareness is the best defense against hackers, thieves and assholes (and asshole thieving hackers).
Important for anyone on gmail!
Details:
You get an email from a familiar address
It has an attachment which also looks familiar and trustworthy, because that person has sent it to you before
You try to open the attachment and are shunted to a very realistic gmail login screen to “log back in”
If you do, your account is compromised.
To verify the incorrect login screen, check the url (shown above). The green lock symbol does not appear, and the actual url has spaces after it and extends way, way out into a string of more text.
Basically, if you’re logged in and click on something and are prompted to log in again, don’t do it.
Steel Phoenix Studios 