Don't forget Gaza people!

Source: Sofiasamarah Instagram.

hello google chrome refugees

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

please get off chrome google is currently being investigated for being an Illegal Monopoly so get outta there okay love you bye

Rather than using plugins I prefer to edit my hosts file directly (Mac) to block offending domains at their source. You have complete control over the list because it's managed locally on your computer, instead of through a third party who might be doing questionable things with your traffic anyway.

A great starter blacklist is https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist , but you can blacklist any domain you want in your hosts file: just add a line that reads

That tells your computer, "Hey, whenever you see something from the domain domainyouhategoeshere.com, or any domain that has domainyouhategoeshere.com somewhere in it, try to load from the IP address 0.0.0.0 instead." That IP address leads nowhere, so nothing will load.

Note that a hosts blacklist won't stop the passing of query information to whitelisted domains, like https://www.tumblr.com/username/12345/this-is-a-post?source=share or https://youtu.be/l8ahglaH3?si=kjaf82hAl . Anti-link converters like Don't Track Me Google or Firefox's anti site tracking features are helpful in that regard.

But in cases where those websites are trying to pass your information on to blacklisted domains (like afs.googleadservices.com) from the browser side, a hosts blacklist should block that, and of course it will prevent the loading of any information (including images and pixels) from those domains in the first place.

Alternatively, if you're more comfortable with networking and/or VPN settings, I would recommend Pi-hole, which can operate as a DNS and apply a similar blacklist to all devices on your network, including smartphones.

Fans' attitudes toward AI-generated works

Irina Cisternino, a PhD candidate of Stony Brooke University, is writing their research on topics related to technology, art and fandom. You can participate by filling out a survey and additionally, signing up for an interview. The survey is expected to last until at least the end of April, those, who signed up for the interview, will be contacted later. You need to be at least 18 years old to participate in either, be able to understand and speak English and identify as a fan.

After the completion of the research, it will be accessible as the dissertation of the researcher. If you have further questions, you can contact Irina Cisternino at irissa.cisternino@stonybrook.edu or Lu-Ann Kozlowsky at lu-ann.kozlowski@stonybrook.edu.

this headline is so fucking horrible why is it whenever indigenous people are murdered everyone avoids saying they were murdered

it’s so important to show solidarity with indigenous people right now and remember that this was a hate crime. rising hearts is an indigenous run organization and they’re asking everyone who can to braid their hair on monday regardless of if you’re native american or not

this is so on the nose

THERE’S A TERM FOR IT?!?!?

When you apply this thinking to the outcomes of rape trials you will understand making women feel and be legally worthless is THE POINT

the Ukrainian documentary "20 days in Mariupol" was nominated for an Oscar in the "Best Documentary" category.

the film tells the story of a journalist who was trapped in Mariupol for 20 days. all these filmed horrors and pain caused by russia are, unfortunately, only a small part of all the tragedies and acts of genocide that have been happening in Ukraine for ten years.

I encourage you to watch this film and tell others about it, share it and bring attention to this story. this documentary deserves this award and worldwide recognition!

cause the sea doesn’t like to be restrained #FreePalestine🇵🇸

Here’s some links where you can donate to organizations providing aid to Gaza

Below is the 🔗 to Care for Gaza on Twitter/X—they are a legit non-profit charity providing food and aid to people in Gaza

https://x.com/careforgaza?s=21&t=CfmEPl-ybz9Act5fdXo4CA

If anyone knows of any other verified and reliable organizations and/or charities for Palestine, please reblog/comment them down below. Thank you🇵🇸

This is a sort of study from a photo of the Palestine Sunbird

The week-long global strike for Gaza will end soon, but the fight for the rights and lives of Palestinians remains

If you can, please send aid to the people of Gaza:

Well, see you, friends

https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/

Don't go after staff members because of this, for what I know they weren't even informed until later in the process. You know who this comes from.

full article, for those who don't want to sign up for an account:

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. 

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent. 

Gage wrote:

“the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:

- private posts on public blogs - posts on deleted or suspended blogs - unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered) - private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public) - posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know) - content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.”

Gage’s post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.

Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states that “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.” 

404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldn’t share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI, but did not immediately hear back from the company. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either.

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?”

Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.” Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, “I'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.”

Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live post says, “i've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.” At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gage’s original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads “Cyle.” Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. 

Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that it’s “in the early stages of monetizing [its] user base” by training AI on users’ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.

OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment. 

who would even want to opt in anyway?

Like great on giving the option i guess but as soon as it drops I can't imagine that anyone is going to pick any other option but opt out.

The rumour mill within ex-employees say they already sent the data to openAi, but I can't validate if that's exact or not

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.

Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.

Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)

Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.

(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)

Everyone reblog! Spread the word so more and more artists learn that in addition to Glaze that coats art against ai scraping mimicry there's also an offensive tool now, able to skew and poison data pools.

Now poisoning will need many artists to nightshade their art and it's most important to get this ou to those the most at risk of being scraped. Reblog!

The second week of The Wolf That Only You Can See.

(For the month of November I am posting a drawing of a Wolf That Only You Can See once a day on my twitter, then at the end of the week I put them on Tumblr.)

I am enjoying this project so much.  (You can see the first week of the Wolf That Only You Can See right here and here third week is right here and the fourth week.)

I know a lot of us are taking the opportunity to rest and spend time with people we care about this weekend. Personally, I can't without thinking about all the people in Palestine who haven't been able to do rest or spend time with loved ones for even a few hours at a time for months on end now. Every time I eat food, every time I get clean water from the tap, every time I use the toilet, every time I take my meds, every time I lie down in my bed to go to sleep, every time I ignore a plane passing by overhead, I think about all the millions (millions!) of people I've been watching through my screen who can't do any of those things right now.

But despite that I'm seeing more and more people getting news fatigue and/or turning away in favour of posts about Christmas and shopping. And like, I get it. Being on 24/7 anxiety alert is exhausting and arguably not even helpful. But turning away completely or falling silent is terrible too.

So I'm asking everyone who has even five free minutes over the next few days to please check the action items on this site (or this site, or this site, or this site, there are so many out there) and see if you can do just one. Some of them are really quick, I promise. More is better obviously, but a bunch of people taking just one action each is better than only a couple people trying to do everything and burning out, or even more people not taking any action at all because they feel overwhelmed.

I know it feels useless sometimes but we have been seeing better results than if people hadn't been protesting, petitioning and boycotting. There's a lot more I could get into about the attitudes and responsibilities of the west regarding this crisis, but experts have been saying it louder and better than I can.

Five minutes. Just one action. And then if you can take another later, even better. Put it in your calendar. Find a time slot. I'm sure you've got at least one.

Because I don't think any of us can do this alone.

I know a lot of us are taking the opportunity to rest and spend time with people we care about this weekend. Personally, I can't without thinking about all the people in Palestine who haven't been able to do rest or spend time with loved ones for even a few hours at a time for months on end now. Every time I eat food, every time I get clean water from the tap, every time I use the toilet, every time I take my meds, every time I lie down in my bed to go to sleep, every time I ignore a plane passing by overhead, I think about all the millions (millions!) of people I've been watching through my screen who can't do any of those things right now.

But despite that I'm seeing more and more people getting news fatigue and/or turning away in favour of posts about Christmas and shopping. And like, I get it. Being on 24/7 anxiety alert is exhausting and arguably not even helpful. But turning away completely or falling silent is terrible too.

So I'm asking everyone who has even five free minutes over the next few days to please check the action items on this site (or this site, or this site, or this site, there are so many out there) and see if you can do just one. Some of them are really quick, I promise. More is better obviously, but a bunch of people taking just one action each is better than only a couple people trying to do everything and burning out, or even more people not taking any action at all because they feel overwhelmed.

I know it feels useless sometimes but we have been seeing better results than if people hadn't been protesting, petitioning and boycotting. There's a lot more I could get into about the attitudes and responsibilities of the west regarding this crisis, but experts have been saying it louder and better than I can.

Five minutes. Just one action. And then if you can take another later, even better. Put it in your calendar. Find a time slot. I'm sure you've got at least one.

Because I don't think any of us can do this alone.

watching white people prostrate themselves like "oh my God how are we meant to continue on knowing there's a literal genocide?!?" is so frustrating. I know they mean well and it's honestly so heart-warming that people are waking up to the anti-colonial fight. but I need white people and non-Indigenous people to understand that your friends of colour, and especially your friends who are Indigenous, have carried the grief and anguish you're feeling for their whole lives. "intergenerational trauma" aren't buzzwords. It's this. It's that rage, hurt, and anguish that we carry from our parents, grandparents, great grandparents because they went through some kind of genocide just like these. so it's only by sheer luck we exist at all and we're born furious from it. because we live in the world so many white people are only just now seeing. we've lived in it our whole lives. "how are we meant to continue on as if everything's normal?" sorry but this is normal. This has been normal for a very long time. but I'll let you in on a secret, if you figure out how to harness that anger sustainably into action, this doesn't have to be normal.