Okay, hi, how's it going? Hey, it's me. I'm not
standing over over there. I'm sitting right here
I posted yesterday because of you know the whole
um, you know dropping lots of bombs on Iran thing
that that we're doing now and It kind of derailed
my whole ass plan for the week. We're trying
something new today. This is an experiment You're
here with me together in this moment to see how
this goes. I'm just gonna like read some of the
like half baked stuff from the draft that I had
to throw away because of the aforementioned bombs.
But I didn't want to just like not talk about
some of this stuff because there's some there's
some like good stuff in here. Well, there's some
good stuff in here. There's also some like crazy
shit. But I'm just going to go through it and
just give some quick thoughts off the dome. This
is going to be very casual, business casual,
though. So wear your wear your formal wear. So
I'm going to skip over what was going to be the
main story. I had I had so much written. was
like here is the current state of play of like
everyone who's involved in this potential war
slash proxy war and Whoops, so let's just kind
of like let's talk about anything else because
that's all I've been steeping in since it happened
Understandably, I think but I'm gonna I'm gonna
put my brain on something else for a bit. Here
we go A really wonderful first topic here medical
assisted death. So over over in England and Wales
They're dying Jesus, this is how unprepared I
am. So people die, and sometimes people get sick
and then die. And there's an issue where your
quality of life is like really, really bad while
you're sick and dying. And so some people are
like, hey, you know what? I'd rather just be
dead. It would be considered mercy by some. It
would be considered horrific by others. But I
feel like it's a deeply personal choice. And
I feel like I have no business in telling somebody
else whether or not what they should do with
that. But still doctor assisted suicide is a
touchy issue especially in part because doctors
wear an oath to do no harm and so like What happens
there, but also also sometimes? putting them
out of their misery is the right thing. It does
less harm. It's a whole debate, but in England
and Wales there has finally been some movement
forward where lawmakers have actually signaled
support and pushed some legislation forward to
allow doctor assisted suicide or terminally ill
patients specifically. It passed the House of
Commons, I believe, and it's now going to go
to the House of Lords. If you're not a Brit boy,
you're not an Englander, You know, if you're
not united under the kingdom, they've got sort
of how like we, like in the States, we've got
two houses of Congress, we've got the House and
the Senate, like a lower and a higher house.
In London land, right, in the Britopia, they've
got a House of Commons for the rabble rousers,
and then a House of Lords. And my understanding
is that to be a member of the House of Lords,
You have to have a cane. Maybe a top hat. But
yeah, they're unelected. Cool. But also, like,
largely expected that this is gonna pass. I'm
gonna look up what countries already have doctor
-assisted suicide as a thing. Okay, it is...
According to Wikipedia, assisted suicide is legal
in some countries under certain circumstances,
including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain,
Switzerland, parts of the United States. and
all six states in Australia. Goes on to say the
constitutional courts of Colombia, Ecuador, Estonia,
and Italy have legalized assisted suicide, but
their governments have not yet legislated or
regulated the practice. What? Parts of the states?
Whoa. OK, well, um, here's a map. Oh, good. It's
legal in D .C. I need I need to record a self
-promo at some point. Hi. If you like what I
do, if you want to support me, you can head to
merchfrom .dev and get yourself some Next up
on my list we've got this this This came across
my feed last week. It was around the earlier
part of the week It has been sitting around in
my back pocket as a thing that I didn't even
know how to begin approaching because it it broke
my brain in in ways I think because I should
have expected this and I just ha headline the
army's newest recruits tech executives from meta
open AI and more high -ranking executives from
major tech companies like Palantir and Metta
have been literally added to the military, but
they're basically just consultants, but Big Tech
has been angling to just suck up that government
contract money recently. Metta, Google, Microsoft,
they're all supplying infrastructure, at least.
for military exercises, like AI stuff to help
you analyze the battlefield or whatever, and
cloud computing for your airstrikes, I guess.
They are warmongers, like they sell war -supporting
infrastructure. That is, that's what these companies
do. So you see Google, oh yeah, the search engine,
right? Yeah, they also help with bombings. Microsoft
is kind of worse on that. Oracle's also very
bad, and Palantir, I mean Palantir's an actual
contractor. Long story short, there's a blurring
and vanishing difference. between government,
like military contractors, and big tech as we
knew them. Meta, a social media platform, is
developing AI models that they're then turning
around and selling to the US military. Same with
OpenAI and ChatGPT. So, fun. So what does this
mean? Not a ton, it's just collusion. Like it's
just, it's the usual goings -ons of money being
passed around between major corporations and
the military. They want to be more embedded in
the military so they have better offers and options
for getting contracts. That's my read on this.
It sucks, it's dumb, and it shouldn't be happening.
But that's the mantra of this entire country.
Moving on. What do we got here? What do we got
here? What do we got here? Oh, this one's fucked.
This is more of a technical thing, but there
was a snooping process that was discovered that
a bunch of the shady apps, you know, like Facebook,
Instagram, a handful of Chinese apps as well,
were using to circumvent protections for your
privacy on your own device. The attack is called
Local Mess, and there's a really great write
-up about it. I'll link to it below. But here
is the summary paragraph. Quote, we disclose
a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially
affecting billions of Android users. We have
found that native Android apps, including Facebook,
Instagram, and several Yandex apps, including
Maps and Browser, silently listen on fixed local
ports for tracking purposes. So what does that
mean? Let's start with defining a few terms.
Let's start with port. Port in like computing
terms is... It refers to a place in which a device
can do communication. Think of it like a literal
port, like a cargo port, but for data instead
of cargo. And so a, quote, local port is a port
that's on your device. And what this is saying
is these apps were setting up ports that were
quietly being used by websites that you were
visiting. That would funnel data to the apps
that could then associate your web traffic with
your advertising ID that the apps know about
you already They're supposed to be a disconnect
there. They're supposed to be a native app tracking
ID and Separately, there's web stuff. They're
supposed to be a gap there But they were looking
for ways to get around that so they could better
track you around the internet leveraging features
of your devices without your knowledge to gather
information against the will of the platform
and the spec of the design. And then they got
caught and stopped doing that. So, or at least
changed their strategy. According to this, they've
stopped doing it as of June 3rd. Hopefully they
keep not doing it. Next up, Musk is suing New
York State over a social media hate speech law.
New York State has a law that they're basically
saying if you run a social media website, you
need to disclose how you monitor hate speech.
Elon Musk doesn't want to do that with Twitter,
probably because they don't monitor hate speech.
I've talked about this before, the whole like
piecemeal states having their own laws for tech.
We've seen it in Texas for the not allowing minors
on social media and also in a bunch of other
states with porn bans. In California, they've
got sort of like their own privacy laws that
are trying to emulate some of what the EU does.
But because of the way that the states are set
up, they're all trying to sort of force companies
to have regulation that's not federal, but for
all intents and purposes. you kind of have to
adhere to it if you want to function in the United
States. So it's not federal, it's a state law,
but it's a mess. That's what I said last time,
I think. I'm pretty sure I said it's a mess.
And so, yeah, there's not a lot here. I mean,
tech companies are suing states all the time.
But this is basically Twitter saying, we don't
want to have to tell you what we're doing about
hate speech. Stop it. Oh, this one's... But the
girls are fighting. Don't don't come at me for
that meme. It's a meme. I talked about this on
stream last week. Open AI and Microsoft are kind
of quietly starting to beef. Microsoft wants
to basically own Open AI. They tried to be there
first. They wanted to just be the ones that are
like the corporate sponsor for Open AI and Open
AI would just forever be working with Microsoft.
And Open AI is increasingly uninterested in that,
it seems, and is less interested in solely working
with Microsoft and more interested in Probably
trying to eventually use SERP, Microsoft. It's
gotten to the point that OpenAI has, I believe,
a contract with Microsoft or at least an agreement
where Microsoft is their cloud hosting provider
for OpenAI for all the chat GPT stuff, but OpenAI
doesn't want that to be the case. They want more
power. They want more control over their own
company, which I can't blame them on that, except
for OpenAI does suck. But it looks like they're
getting ready to start saying that Microsoft
is being anti -competitive, which if it gets
to that point, oh boy. Because Microsoft has
staked its claim on like co -pilot and co -pilot
branding and all that built into PCs powered
by OpenAI or whatever. If OpenAI starts beefing
with Microsoft, let me rephrase that. I hope
OpenAI continues beefing with Microsoft. Hey,
good news. Here's good news. ZeniMax is unionizing.
This is gaming. We're in gaming now. Uh, sorry.
I warned you. Oh, damn. Reporting from Engadget.
Members of the Zenimac Workers United CWA union
have ratified the contract agreement with parent
company Microsoft. This agreement with the union
representing the video game studios quality assurance
employees marks the first time that Microsoft
has entered into any union contract in the US.
That is... significant the Zenimax is best known
for working under Bethesda doing I think right
now they're doing Elder Scrolls online and Bethesda
got picked up by Microsoft and when that happened
the QA team was like hey Don't fuck us as a part
of this and now it seems that it worked. That's
exciting like literal years in the making I think
this all started back in like 2022 2023 well
done. Yay workers go Union. I'm just gonna read
the headline here. This is from 404 media They
do amazing work go check out 404 media. They're
they're excellent Here's the headline martyrdom
or bust Texas man caught plotting terror attack
through roblox chats I am kind of just I'm sitting
here like I'm just it's wild they were there's
essentially just a group that is like Chatting
in roblox and this dudes like I am going to be
a martyr I'm going to do a terrorist and like
the feds found out because someone else in roblox
overheard and was like hey feds This doesn't
seem good. The dude's handle was crazy pain with
it with a three like oh my I'm I'm I'm reading
about You know remember when there was like all
that shit going down with Investigations into
Trump and there was like person of interest one
or whatever like they when there's when there's
legal documents They label people as like, you
know, person one, person two, party one, whatever.
Roblox user one replied to the person. Roblox
user one is. At this point, if they don't hold
the trial in Roblox, then what the fuck is the
point? He was caught. He wanted to bomb some
kind of music festival. I'm seeing Christian
music festival, but also other. other groups
as well. It seems like the dude was unhinged
and thought that he was like a member of ISIS
or something. When questioned he was like it
was an emotional response but then also said
that he wanted to either get the hell out of
the US and if not that then quote martyrdom or
bust. So hey if you are playing Roblox keep an
eye out. I used to gag about how everybody should
use RuneScape guild chat to coordinate the uprising.
Now we're here. Alright, last thing. I've kinda
skipped over some of the other stuff. I wanna
end on a fun one. I think we could all use a
bit of fun, and not only is this a fun one, it
also has the cutest pictures to go with it. Here
we go. A book collector in the UK was, quote,
gobsmacked. He was rearranging his collection
of books, and he opened up one of them that he
got at a charity shop, like a secondhand store,
a while ago. And he was flipping through it,
and he found that it contained handwritten notes
from his wife from 50 years ago. Timeline. They
were not together 50 years ago and and his wife
had a book and drew in it his wife's mom gave
that book away like, you know charity drive gave
it away at some point years ago in the 70s, holy
shit this guy is then a book collector and just
happens to have purchased this book at some point
and Then way later on happens to look into it
and see that's my brother -in -law. And these
are my wife's writings Oh, hey, they went on
to discover two other novels on his bookshelf
also featured annotations from his wife. Quote,
we both sat there not quite sure how to handle
it because this was just extraordinary. So this
guy now says that he essentially has a quest
to go find more books that his wife wrote in
50 years ago. This is the news that we need.
This is what we need. And look at the... It's
a good one to end on. Let me know how this was.
I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just recording
stuff. I Let me know if you like this. I I hope
I hope hope you did obviously I didn't talk about
Same things I talked about in yesterday's post.
So you want to hear about the Iran stuff? That's
there's a whole video on that. That's yesterday
Regardless, take care be well. I'll see you on
Monday. Goodbye