👍 Pointless Fines
My other Bored Ape is your Bored Ape | Some regulators have been defrosted to administer ineffective fines | Your car is your final tech prison
Hello high-calibre internet chums. Welcome to 2022 — I hope it does not turn to poo.
This week was good! Finally 👍. Yep, why not start the year right? But also, more Bored Apes have been ‘stolen’ — it’s always great when this happens.
The last thing we need is more black boxes, but now we’re putting them in cars
It’s fine time again: Google and Facebook have been hit with fines from France — let’s all brace ourselves for nothing to change
Have you noticed? If you stop caring about NFTs, you’ll stop caring when they get stolen
🤪 More NFTs stolen; the crypto community remains unembarrassed
Just last week someone had more dumbass Bored Ape images ‘stolen’ from them. They complained, and so OpenSea (the NFT marketplace) froze the associated assets so that no one else could buy or sell them.
💆♀️ The more I read about NFT hacks, the less I understand about the logic behind all this. I cannot comprehend why you’d buy an NFT instead of, I dunno, having an orgasm or eating a pile of delicious food. But also... this move from OpenSea to freeze assets just completely baffles me for the following reasons:
Why is it that all crypto bros seem to champion ‘decentralisation’ until it stops working for them? You can’t buy ‘digital assets’ in a decentralised system, and then complain like a little bitch-baby to a central authority when they get stolen. That’s just not how it works.
But apparently it is, because OpenSea have attempted to frozen any trading of these particular stolen assets. I don’t understand how? Does the right-click save thing suddenly not work anymore? Are the bored apes not just floating around somewhere else on the internet?
Protip to the idiot who got their assets stolen: this is all just game, and you only feel bad because you are playing. Simply STOP playing the game, admire the extremely underwhelming ape jpegs that are on your computer, and go have a wank.
Honestly sometimes the simplest solutions are the hardest ones to find, even if they’re staring you right in the face...
🤑 “Here I go fining again!”
Imagine: you go to facebook.com (for some reason) and then you are presented with a cookie banner which makes it really hard to simply ‘reject’ the cookies that they want to give you. This is a bad practice that many many websites engage in (not mine!), and French regulators have HAD ENOUGH. Facebook have been fined 60 million Euros, and Google have been fined 100 million for the same thing.
The regulator demands that both Facebook and Google make it as easy to reject cookies on their websites as it is to accept them. They say that they want to fight the prevalence of persistent cookies from both Facebook and Google across the web. They also say that for every day either company do not comply, there will be an additional 100k added to the fine.
Now that we have all the FACTS, allow me to do what I do best: complain about reality:
If you think these fines seem large, you’re wrong... sit down.
How will the regulator track whether Facebook and Google are complying to their demands? This was already illegal, and nothing had been done about it, because the rules are nearly impossible to enforce (which sort of makes them pointless, don’t you think?)
France are doing this in the name of the ePrivacy Directive, a set of rules from 2002, back when internet was exactly the same as it is now yep that’s right absolutely nothing different twenty years later yep.
My final complaint concerns what the fines are for: to make it easier for people to reject cookies on facebook.com and google.fr. Even if they do comply with this, it won’t even make a tiny dent in the wealth of privacy problems these two websites create. This is because the cookies they set in your browsers from their own websites barely matter — the more important thing to worry about is the facebook and google cookies (or any other kind of tracking tech) that other websites set in your browsers.
Several times a day, when all we want to do is read the first three sentences of a pesky article, we are confronted with extremely annoying and confusing cookie controls. According to DuckDuckGo, Google are present on 86% of the top 50k websites. That’s because we don’t pay for content anymore, so publishers need to make ad money instead. This very destructive business model is exactly why clickbait and misinformation exists. It’s simply a reality of web2. Bring on web3! (JK).
🛻 Yet another reason not to own a car
Okay here’s the thing: if you’re finding that you have to regularly drive places, you live too far away from those places/you’re carrying too much stuff. Consider radically changing your lifestyle. Oh, also, from July, the EU will be shipping all cars with a pre-installed black box which passively collects driving data. The box will measure things like speed, location, and steering wheel angle (wtf).
✨ Important detail: all this data will be made available to law enforcement so that they can... I dunno, oppress you? They insist that all the data will remain anonymous, and I insist that granular details on an individual’s driving habits is far from anonymous.
This other article says that “The law from the European Parliament has specified that only police can access information from the black boxes amid fears over potential invasion of privacy.” Ahem... no. If you are collecting this data, it’s already an invasion of privacy. Recording every aspect of someone’s driving IN CASE they break the law is the kind of rubbish we USED TO read about in novels set in dystopian futures.
But no you’re right; we really need ‘drowsiness alert systems’ and ‘advanced tyre pressure surveillance’. I’m sure giving law enforcement even more data about citizens won’t lead to any kind of abuse at all...
That’s all for this week. If you’re in the UK and getting worried about seasonal affective disorder, don’t: my chickens have started laying again which is a clear sign that the days are finally getting longer. Take that, winter.
Georgia