Hello.
I got myself a manicure.
But stuff still happened.
So what's up?
Hey, you remember that song?
Thanks for the mammaries.
Wait.
I may have gotten the title wrong, but that's okay, because Twitch got their content policy wrong.
For approximately 24 hours, you could post nip on main.
Which is to say, Twitch rolled out a content policy that explicitly allowed nudity.
Artistic nudity, but nudity.
Said another way, boobs.
Well, specifically they said boobs, buttocks, and pelvic region.
The big three.
My favorites.
While yes, you can show a lot of your body on Twitch,
technically they don't allow you to show all of it.
But they changed their content policy, and then they were like, oops, never mind.
Everyone started just kind of posting everything.
And Twitch was like, wait a minute, this is, we didn't think this one through.
So like a day later, after posting the update to their content policy,
they posted another update saying, psych, you can't do that anymore.
Quote, moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity
won't be allowed on Twitch, regardless of medium.
So while this originally would have been good for people who do like art and whatnot,
never mind.
Just another reminder that the human body is icky and we should all be ashamed.
I will say, however, that they did cite AI as like a potential concern.
And I absolutely get that.
Rolling out saying, hey, yeah, you can post any kind of artistic nudity.
That includes like deep fakes and shit.
AI in huge air quotes artists would be able to just go on Twitch and be like,
nah, I'm making art.
Never mind that it's hyper realistic and looks a lot like the celebrity.
Anyway, I want to close this out by just saying I am exhausted
from reading content policies that reference, quote, female presenting nipples.
I thought we got past that after the Tumblr fiasco, but here we are again.
Google was and is a narc.
Google has recently updated the way that they store your location history from Google Maps.
They now do it directly on your phone.
And if it's going to go to their servers, it gets encrypted before it leaves your phone.
Previously, Google just stored all of your location data on their servers,
which is really convenient when cops want your information.
Now, Google has come out and been like, nah, we we made this change because we just care
so deeply about your privacy.
And this is this is for you.
Let's ignore the scathing Bloomberg report that came out a few months ago that said
that we've been cooperating with cops at an alarming rate.
According to the report from Bloomberg, Google got over 60000 requests for user data from cops last year.
That is twice as much as they got in 2019.
This is happening because Google is making a name for themselves among law enforcement officials
that they will cooperate and they will offer as much as they can.
Reportedly, Google is one of the best companies to go for because they can give you a nice list of who was where,
when and to be clear, this isn't just big bad criminals that are getting their data forked over to the cops.
It's anyone and you have no idea if it happened to you.
Perhaps you were just near where a crime happened.
Well, the cops could just go to Google and be like, give us everyone who is in this location.
Now they got your data. Now, perhaps you have nothing to hide.
That's a terrible argument. Stop using it.
If you don't agree with every single law on the books, you probably don't want the cops having access to all of your information.
For example, if you or a loved one wanted to get an abortion in a state where that's illegal,
I think you can fill in the blank. Law and morality are not the same thing.
And again, you could just get swept up from whatever investigation is going on.
It might not have anything to do with you, but if you're implicated by way of just being nearby, you're at risk.
And guess who was facilitating that risk? Yes, Google, using your location information from you using their services.
Now they have changed it, which is cool, but that doesn't mean they're going to stop complying.
They even go as far as to clarify in their announcement about this change that they don't sell your information to third parties or advertisers.
They don't sell your information. And you are here.
I have words because the people who are responsible for the love of my life, Karlak, are gone. Kind of.
I talked recently about how Hasbro, who now owns Wizards of the Coast, did a big layoff, like a 20% staff reduction recently,
and that affected a ton of people at Wizards of the Coast, the people who make Dungeons and Dragons.
Well, there was recently a small little game called Baldur's Gate 3 that won Game of the Year and basically shocked the entire video game market.
And that was all Dungeons and Dragons stuff.
Larian Studios, who made Baldur's Gate 3, are not a subsidiary of Hasbro. They were licensing D&D.
But the head of Larian Studios recently tweeted that virtually everyone that they worked with to get Baldur's Gate off the ground and work out the licensing stuff is gone now.
Quote, it is a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there's almost nobody left.
I hope you all end up well. I want to remind you Baldur's Gate 3 just won like every award.
Like they just swept everything, right? D&D and also Magic the Gathering are doing really, really well right now.
They are profitable, but Hasbro made giant cuts to them regardless.
And it's deeply upsetting because like it just doesn't have to be this way.
Like this is entirely corporate crap. It has nothing to do with like a lack of performance or people not being good fits for the job.
It's just corporate reduction, destroying things that people truly care about.
Stop it. Hello, Europe. Welcome to Threads. Threads is in Europe now.
Yes, the Zuckerberg powered competitor to Twitter Threads is actually kind of working out a little bit.
I got to I have to I have to admit while it's still clunky, it still doesn't have a whole lot of features.
It's they're making some weird decisions with it.
It actually kind of feels like a place now and it recently opened up to users in the EU.
This comes just a few months after making a big stink about how the European regulations are going to make it basically impossible for them to operate there.
Wow, seems truly impossible.
So that's pretty interesting. But they're also doing another step, which is starting to test out their integration with Activity Pub.
Bear with me. What is Activity Pub?
It is a social network protocol. The idea is that using Activity Pub, different social networks can interact with each other.
You may have heard of Mastodon. Mastodon is one of the most popular networks that uses Activity Pub.
Any network that uses Activity Pub can interact with Mastodon.
There are already a bunch of these networks that interact with each other doing various things.
Mastodon is like Twitter. There's an app called Pixel Fed that's like Instagram.
And all of them can talk to each other.
This interconnected web of services is referred to as the Fediverse, a federated universe, if you will.
And so the idea, and they've said this from the start with Threads, is that they're going to support Activity Pub,
which means that anybody on Threads could follow anybody on Mastodon and vice versa.
Additionally, Activity Pub allows you to move from different networks to other networks.
So in theory, you could go from Threads to Mastodon and vice versa.
In theory. If they actually get there, we shall see.
This is cool and spooky. It's cool because one of the issues with social networks is the fact that it's locked in, right?
Once you're using it, you can't really leave. All of your friends are there. You can't go elsewhere.
You don't like Zuckerberg? Well, fuck you. Deal with it.
But if they support Activity Pub, you could use whatever network you want to use that supports Activity Pub
and still interact with everybody who's using Threads.
It breaks down barriers from having to be in walled gardens. And that's a good thing.
The scary part is that anybody who pays attention to tech knows that giant corporations embracing an open source protocol
usually spells death for the protocol.
There's a concept called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
And it's essentially the notion that a big company comes in and says, wow, this big open concept is great.
We're going to be a part of it. And then they're going to build on top of it.
And we're going to do all this cool stuff.
And now that we did all this cool stuff and you depend on us, we're going to close it off.
Essentially embracing the thing, building on top of it, and then getting rid of the original thing.
If you were still mad at Google for getting rid of Google Reader, that's what that was.
Anyway, I'm going to do a whole ass video on Macedon and stuff on my YouTube eventually.
So follow me there. Cool.
On this day in 1958, the SCORE satellite was launched into space by the US.
SCORE stood for Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment.
And it was the first satellite that was purpose built to do communications.
But what kind of communications?
Well, it was a tape recording of then President Dwight Eisenhower being like, hey, it's my voice, but from space.
And so the satellite went up into the space place and then they hit play on the tape recorder.
And Eisenhower's voice was like, hey, yo, it's space.
Lightning round. 1200 tons of dead sardines washed up on the shores of Japan.
Which one of you did that?
The US House of Representatives has voted to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden
for just the dumbest reason you can possibly imagine.
Not because of the whole supporting a genocide thing, because they're beefing.
Etsy is laying off 11 percent of their workforce, about 225 people.
A fertility doctor was caught impregnating women with his own sperm.
I... that's not what a fertility doctor supposed to do.
Discord has updated their safety policy and now considers intentionally misgendering and deadnaming trans people to be a form of harassment, which is not allowed on the platform.
So if you're going to be out here being a transphobe and a TERF, get the fuck out.
Rudy Giuliani has been ordered by a court to pay nearly 150 million dollars in damages after his election fraud stuff that he claimed was very real.
There is no chance that he can afford that.
Dude's already like sold his apartment because he doesn't have any money.
Get fucking wrecked, you idiot.
And while we're out here laughing at morons, Elon Musk previously promised banks that if they invested in his Twitter purchase, they wouldn't lose any money.
Those banks are now stuck with uninvestable debt.
And that is because he's hemorrhaging cash and destroying the platform and is a moron.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
I had to Stuff Keeps Happening to online for sources, bonus content and a email address for you to email me ideas for inspiration for additional nail stuff for future manicures.
That was fun.
Anyway, quick programming note, this is going to be the last week of Stuff Keeps Happening for the rest of this year.
I'm going to be back in 2024, Monday, January 8th.
So just a couple of weeks for the holidays.
That good stuff.
But I will see you then.
Regardless, my name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Thursday.
Take care and be well.