just saw someone ask if podfic is really necessary… my dude it is the year of our lord 2018 and every mediocre white man with an external mic records himself talking shit about your favorite childhood tv shows and gets PAID for it, let me listen to this Voltron fic in peace please
Podfic is absolutely necessary. If I could get away with never reading a fic in text again I would do it in a heartbeat.
My eyeballs are dry, my time resource is thin, my field of fucks is barren, my attention ledger is in the red, my timeturner is too rusty to work past 9PM anymore, and my WiFi is random. If I want to read with my eyes, my To Be Read pile of published books is piled to the ceiling.
If podfic doesn’t work for you, that’s fine, but it’s one of the only things that work for me.
So do let me enjoy fandom a way that is functionally available to me and super fun to boost. Let me enjoy fanworks on public transport, while working, while cleaning dishes, while falling asleep, and while drawing. Let me enjoy a highly personalised, human, fandom-savvy, friendly voice in my ears making me cry in laughter and in pain, hold my thoughts through the good and the bad.
Podfic is an accessibility issue. If I lived somewhere I felt safe to read smut out loud, you bet I’d be recording it.
Wait they have audio book type fan fictions???? Why have I never heard of this?!?!?!
search the “podfic” tag on AO3 and you’ll find a ton :D Enjoy!
this is so nostalgic. tumblr rolls out something terrible. everyone complains. it breaks several people’s dashboards. for some reason it only rolls out to a few people at a time with seemingly no warning. the community collectively and immediately searches for a browser extension that undoes the change. i know we’ve all gotten burnt out on all social media sucking but this is genuinely The tumblr experience. everyone who hasn’t gotten it already gets an achievement. welcome to the club
[Image ID: a drawing of a bunch of people smiling and holding a person aloft as money floats above them. One is holding a pitch fork another is holding a torch. Below is written in all caps: Tree! Law! Tree! Law! End ID]
[image ID: first image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 8 with a starting bid of $100 and titled, “Bidding begins July 27 – Personalized Video from the Office Ladies.” Attached is a photo of actresses Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer, aka Angela and Pam from The Office.
second image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 14 with a starting bid of $100 and titled, “Bidding begins July 27: Elementary props from Robert Wolfe. @writergeekrhw Image is of a man holding props.
third image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 18 with a starting bid of $100 and titled "Enigma Machine prop from Bones.” Image is of the Enigma Machine from the TV show Bones.
fourth image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 24 with a starting bid of $50 and titled, “Lisa Hanawalt Handpainted Bojack Horseman strike sign.” Attached is an image of Bojack Horseman with the text “Give us a fair deal or suck a dick dumbshits!”
fifth image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 37 with a starting bid of $100 and titled, “Better Call Saul Crew Gifts.” Attached is an image of BCS logo beer steins, a bag, and a mug.
sixth image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 42 with a starting bid of $100 and titled, “What We Do In The Shadows - Colin Robinson’s notebook.” Image is of a composition book prop from WWDITS.
seventh image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 41 with a starting bid of $50 and titled, “What We Do In The Shadows signed poster (1 of 12 printed).” Attached is the WWDITS poster.
eighth image is a screenshot from the WGA Garage Sale Auction page. Item is listed as Package 46 with a starting bid of $50 and titled, “Connor Roy For President Hat.” Image is of a baseball cap from the show Succession that says Connor Roy For President. end ID.]
Support the WGA strike and bid on some cool items from your favorite writers, creators, and film/TV shows! Link to auction site here.
Lots more stuff on the website, with more auction items added frequently!
you want to help stop tumblr from murdering itself? here’s how!
click this link and go to the support page, then click “contact support”
click on the category list and click on feedback
now you need to tell staff WHY putting in an algorithm will cause the site to fucking die, and be sure to be detailed and not a dick in it. theyre not gonna listen to feedback calling them assholes
i encourage you to reblog this so we can get as many people leaving feedback as humanly possible. we need to let staff know this is an utterly terrible idea
by the way, tumblr has turned off asks on all of their staff blogs, so this is the only way to tell tumblr how you feel
TLDR: Homeland Security has been tying our social media to our IPs, licenses, posts, emails, selfies, cloud, apps, location, etc through our phones without a warrant using Babel X and will hold that information gathered for 75 years. Certain aspects of it were hushed because law enforcement will/does/has used it and it would give away confidential information about ongoing operations.
This gets renewed in September.
Between this, Agincourt (a VR simulator for cops Directly related to this project), cop city, and widespread demonization of abortions, sex workers, & queer people mixed with qanon/Trumpism, and fascism in Florida, and the return of child labor, & removed abortion rights fresh on our tails it’s time for alarms to be raised and it’s time for everyone to stop calling us paranoid and start showing up to protest and mutual aid groups.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
These are the same feds who want to build cop city and recreate civilian houses en masse and use facial recognition. The same feds that want cop city to also be a training ground for police across the country. Cop city where they will build civilian neighborhoods to train in.
Widespread mass surveillance against us.
Now let’s cut to some parts of the article. May 17th from Vice:
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using an invasive, AI-powered monitoring tool to screen travelers, including U.S. citizens, refugees, and people seeking asylum, which can in some cases link their social media posts to their Social Security number and location data, according to an internal CBP document obtained by Motherboard.
Called Babel X, the system lets a user input a piece of information about a target—their name, email address, or telephone number—and receive a bevy of data in return, according to the document. Results can include their social media posts, linked IP address, employment history, and unique advertising identifiers associated with their mobile phone. The monitoring can apply to U.S. persons, including citizens and permanent residents, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, according to the document.
“Babel data will be used/captured/stored in support of CBP targeting, vetting, operations and analysis,” the document reads. Babel X will be used to “identify potential derogatory and confirmatory information” associated with travelers, persons of interest, and “persons seeking benefits.” The document then says results from Babel X will be stored in other CBP operated systems for 75 years.
“The U.S. government’s ever-expanding social media dragnet is certain to chill people from engaging in protected speech and association online. And CBP’s use of this social media surveillance technology is especially concerning in connection with existing rules requiring millions of visa applicants each year to register their social media handles with the government. As we’ve argued in a related lawsuit, the government simply has no legitimate interest in collecting and retaining such sensitive information on this immense scale,” Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told Motherboard in an email.
The full list of information that Babel X may provide to CBP analysts is a target’s name, date of birth, address, usernames, email address, phone number, social media content, images, IP address, Social Security number, driver’s license number, employment history, and location data based on geolocation tags in public posts.
Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor to activist
organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard in an online chat “the data isn’t limited to public posts made under someone’s real name on Facebook or Twitter.”
The document says CBP also has access to AdID information through an add-on called Locate X, which includes smartphone location data. AdID information is data such as a device’s unique advertising ID, which can act as an useful identifier for tracking a phone and, by extension, a person’s movements. Babel Street obtains location information from a long supply chain of data. Ordinary apps installed on peoples’ smartphones provide data to a company called Gravy Analytics, which repackages that location data and sells it to law enforcement agencies via its related company Venntel. But Babel Street also repackages Venntel’s data for its own Locate X product.”
The PTA obtained by Motherboard says that Locate X is covered by a separate “commercial telemetry” PTA. CBP denied Motherboard’s FOIA request for a copy of this document, claiming it “would disclose techniques and/or procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions”.
A former Babel Street employee previously told Motherboard how users of Locate X can draw a shape on a map known as a geofence, see all devices Babel Street has data on for that location, and then follow a specific device to see where else it has been.
Cyphers from the EFF added “most of the people whose location data is collected in this way likely have no idea it’s happening.”
CBP has been purchasing access to location data without a warrant, a practice that critics say violates the Fourth Amendment. Under a ruling from the Supreme Court, law enforcement agencies need court approval before accessing location data generated by a cell phone tower; those critics believe this applies to location data generated by smartphone apps too.
“Homeland Security needs to come clean to the American people about how it believes it can legally purchase and use U.S. location data without any kind of court order. Americans’ privacy shouldn’t depend on whether the government uses a court order or credit card,” Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement. “DHS should stop violating Americans’ rights, and Congress should pass my bipartisan legislation to prohibit the government’s purchase of Americans’ data.“ CBP has refused to tell Congress what legal authority it is following when using commercially bought smartphone location data to track Americans without a warrant.
Neither CBP or Babel Street responded to a request for comment. Motherboard visited the Babel X section of Babel Street’s website on Tuesday. On Wednesday before publication, that product page was replaced with a message that said “page not found.”
Do you know anything else about how Babel X is being used by government or private clients? Do you work for Babel Street? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
Wow that sounds bad right.
Be a shame if it got worse.
.
.
It does.
The software (previously Agincourt Solutions) is sold by AI data company Babel Street, was led by Jeffrey Chapman, a former Treasury Department official,, Navy retiree & Earlier in his career a White House aide and intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, according to LinkedIn.
In essence, synthetic BATTLEVR training is a mixture of all three realities – virtual, augmented and physical. It is flexible enough to allow for mission rehearsals of most types and be intuitive enough to make training effective.
Anyway the new CEO of Babel Street (Babel X) as of April is a guy named Michael Southworth and I couldn’t find much more on him than that tbh, it’s all very vague and missing. That’s the most detail I’ve seen on him.
And the detail says he has a history of tech startups that scanned paperwork and sent it elsewhere, good with numbers, and has a lot of knowledge about cell networks probably.
Every inch more of this I learn as I continue to Google the names and companies popping up… It gets worse.
Monitor phone use. Quit photobombing and filming strangers and for the love of fucking God quit sending apps photos of your actual legal ID to prove your age. Just don’t use that site, you’ll be fine I swear. And quit posting your private info online. For activists/leftists NO personally identifiable info at least AND DEFINITELY leave your phone at home to Work™!!!
With threads now directly tying your identity and health and location and face and habits and purchases and everything else from your phone and given that meta has ALREADY said they’d work with police and give them any info they asked for…
