BC INTERNET
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/

 * data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/
* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/
Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/
Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the fraud.

https://t.co/4mKAB25rnY

5/
Time and again, everything in the ad-tech stack has been demonstrated to be fraudulent: fake audiences firing fake clicks at fake videos on fake sites that suck real dollars out of advertisers' accounts.

6/
This was masterfully elucidated in @timhwang's short 2020 book SUBPRIME ATTENTION CRISIS, whose thesis is: we must deflate the ad-tech bubble intentionally, lest we get a messy rupture that destroys many of the good things the parasite has colonized.

https://t.co/pmWMTNsPRp

7/
The ad-tech fraud is many-layered. On the surface, there's the counting frauds: fake clicks, fake sites, fake videos, etc. But there's a deeper fraud, a theory fraud, the fraud that with enough surveillance data and machine learning, ad-tech can sell anyone anything.

8/
That is: even if we count accurately, ads are still overvalued and underperforming. This is also a lesson whose examples are coming with increasing tempo, as when Ebay simply stopped buying Google search ads and saw NO decrease in sales.

https://t.co/eHL39RRRho

9/
In a piece for @Forbes, marketer-turned-antifraud-auditor @acfou rounds up some of the grossest things festering under the ad-tech log.

https://t.co/5mfJwONF0x

10/
Like that time in 2018 when Procter and Gamble - inventors of "brand marketing" - turned off $200m worth of ad-tech buys and saw no change to their sales. Or when Chase killed 95% of its advertising and kept all of its business.

11/
Most interesting is the tale of how @Uber allowed itself to be defrauded of $150m/year, for years, by ad-tech intermediaries. It's a story told in detail by former Uber head of "performance marketing" @kevin_frisch on the @themktgtoday podcast:

https://t.co/pWgXAeloqX

12/
It starts with the revelation that $50m of its annual spend on customer acquisitions - money paid when an ad leads to a new Uber customer downloading the app, entering payment details and taking their first ride - was fraudulent.

13/
Here's how that worked: scummy marketers fielded low-quality apps (like battery monitors) that requested root access. These apps spied on every app you installed. If you installed Uber, they "fired a click" to the system to report you as having been "converted" by an ad.

14/
After clearing $50m of fraud, Frisch continued to dig into the system. In the end, about $120m of the $150m was being stolen, pocketed for fake clicks on fake sites by fake users.

15/
In a fascinating turn, Frisch describes how his colleagues were indifferent or actively hostile to his efforts. Uber was in "growth mode," trying to beef up its numbers prior to the IPO where suckers would relieve its Saudi royal investors.

16/
Uber is a company that will never, ever be profitable. It, too, is a bezzle. It only "works" if outside investors - marks - can somehow be convinced to buy the insiders' stock, which requires the appearance of growth - AKA "A pile of shit this big MUST have a pony under it!"

17/
So execs like Frisch were required to "spend to budget" - to maintain the appearance of growth, including (especially) the growth of its "precision analytics" marketing, where ad-tech spends turned into directly attributable customer acquisitions.

18/
This is the story that keeps on giving, because it all starts with @slpng_giants's campaign to force Uber to stop advertising on Breitbart, and Uber's inability to get its ad-tech "partners" to definitively switch off Breitbart ads.

https://t.co/YsedrbEzSE

19/
The system's layers of misdirection - there to hide the fraud - meant that it behaved nondeterministically and couldn't fulfil simple requests, which triggered the search.

20/
There's a theory that the reason Big Tech spies on us so much is that they're really good at turning data into sales (and, by extension, influence, as in elections, referenda, etc). But it is increasingly apparent that Big Tech's spying is part of a bezzle.

21/
That is, we're being surveilled, doxed, placed under automated suspicion and digitally discriminated against all to put on a show that separates marks from their dollars.

This is the theme of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM:

https://t.co/Us0SPxlcmD

22/
Namely, that we are under constant surveillane because monopolies can get away with obviously fraudulent and dangerous conduct by mobilizing their monopoly profits to buy political outcomes that serve their ends.

23/
This is also what happened with #Prop22, the most expensive ballot initiative in US history: Uber didn't spearhead a $200m campaign to legalize worker misclassification to become profitable.

Uber will never be profitable.

24/
All that money was spent to maintain the fiction, the fraud, the bezzle - it was an appeal to rescue the wholly fictional pony underneath that gigantic pile of shit.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
@doctorow
It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/


Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/
ALL
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/


First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/
TRADING , STOCK MKT
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight; How apps steal your location; Understanding /r/wallstreetbets; Knowledge is why you build your own apps; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/6BOyhL3tEj

#Pluralistic

1/


Join me this afternoon for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

2/


Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight: First Nations treaties do not sign away electromagnetic franchises.

https://t.co/BBsxXuGQe3

3/


How apps steal your location: A deep dive into the murky depths of surveillance markets.

https://t.co/mV7u2FYylT

4/


Understanding /r/wallstreetbets: More than a bull run, a symbiosis of a market maker and market destroyers.

https://t.co/7zr1N4vkjV

5/
TRADING
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/


While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/

Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/

But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/
BUSINESS

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A thread of resources for aspiring & new Product Managers:

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(oh, and pls also share *your* favorite resources below)

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Linux code injection paint-by-numbers.

Can we launch a process that looks one way to (superficial) auditors but is, in fact, entirely different? (Think process hollowing and the like on Windows).

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Control will return from fork() to both process instances. In the child process, the return value will simply by 0, in the parent it will hold the pid of the child.

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Facebook -- having taken out full-page ads in the NYT, Washington Post, and WSJ -- is generally seen as the primary victim of the new app privacy controls coming in iOS14. But Google is perhaps even more vulnerable to ATT. Why has Google remained silent? (1/X)

2/ First, background: here's a high-level overview of how ATT / IDFA deprecation impacts advertisers and ad networks, and why this whole ordeal has put advertisers and ad networks into a state of panic:

3/ Google is equally as susceptible to harm from ATT as Facebook. Google's UAC product -- esp its tROAS and tCPA campaign objectives -- relies as much on IDFA-indexed monetization and engagement data as FB's mobile product does. But Google has one big weakness wrt ATT: YouTube

4/ Broadly, view-through attribution accounts for a disproportionate % of conversions from YouTube app install impressions. This means: user sees the YT ad, doesnt click, downloads app later, & Google is able to claim it by reconciling IDFA seen at impression to IDFA seen in app

5/ View-through attribution is nonexistent in the ATT paradigm as it relies on the IDFA; some significant portion of YT's attributed conversions will evaporate. So why isnt Google vocally opposing ATT? Two reasons: consumer optics and its duality as ad network / mobile platform
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and 2/2


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In the first skandh, the importance of Vedvyas


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It also discusses the evolution of universe.( https://t.co/2aK1AZSC79 )

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I was a dumb 18-year-old. I thought I had the world figured out. I didn't.

I stayed up till the wee hours. Drank every liquor invented.

Partied non-stop. Woke up after noon.

Surfed the web aimlessly.

Read BS self-help.

Repeat.

If I could do it all over again, here's 18 things I would do...

PHASE ONE: GET MY MIND RIGHT

ACTION #1: Break the chains - I wish I made the decision earlier. I didn't. I was scared. Anxious. Nervous. I knew once I made the decision, there was no going back.

Don't be like me.

Make the decision at 18. The decision to pave your own path in life. To go against the herd. To choose your own adventure. To commit to whatever sets your heart on fire.

ACTION #2: Cut off every negative person in your life.

Scroll through the contacts in your phone...

Notice how the names make you feel.

Delete any and all names that fill you with doubt and negativity.

ACTION #3: Condition your mind to embrace the producer mindset instead of the consumer mindset.

Consume 20% of the time. Produce 80% of the time.

Case closed.

ACTION #4: Set an intention to make $10k a month and write it out every MORNING and NIGHT as if you already achieved it (in the past tense).

Visualize yourself already having the money as you write.

Cheesy?

Yes.

Does it work?

Yes.

PHASE TWO: EDUCATION
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