Capital - Tumblr Posts
photos via bbcicecream.com/blog
Hi I’m a Jewish Rromani Butch Disabled lesbian and I’m currently in the middle of “tr*mp country” if you would/are able to d0nate to keep me and my 70 yr old Jewish father safe please feel free to v3nm0 me at laladracula. If you can’t donate I please ask to boost this. My father was told he was being put on leave by his work for calling in for his safety.
update as of the 21st of august - my father has medical bills I need to help cover. Anything helps
update as of the 16th of October - I also have a c@sh@pp ($deathstarxo) now and we are still in need of some funding to pay the rest of his medical bills and possibly help getting a lawyer as he was @ss@tled around the end of Sukkot, which the 🐷 had gotten into custody the n*zi who did it, we just might need to pay a lawyer if we can’t find one who will automatically take the case
![Bateau-mouche , Canal / Autobus , Pont [Strasbourg]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c8ca5f16112c0cea2527bea4face2b46/e1e9af433218c9ce-67/s500x750/30aff7863c6ab360329bb99a557ad0603e33cb12.jpg)
Bateau-mouche , canal / Autobus , pont [Strasbourg]
Photo by me : Frédéric Poirier
class consciousness is kind of a burden sometimes like, what do you mean i have very little chances of rising above my station in this lifetime because i have no generational wealth and capital ? what do you mean ill work till the day i die, wail in misery and not enjoy the fruit of my labor ? sucks :(
Schematype
(Original Handmade Book Art Collage: 3 Elements)
January 6th
Dear American people
I'm so sorry about what happened on January 6th. The day or the next day should be another good day for people voting blue, organizers, and volunteers.
And the capital building was attacked. (Must-See New Video Shows Capitol Riot Was Way Worse Than We Thought | All In | MSNBC) The riot, the insurrection is also categorized as domestic terrorism because they attacked the democratic process by terror. It can be called a “coup” because the president of the United States of America and his allies incited it.
The image of an attacked capital building itself was very shocking. And updated information is too. Some of them claimed what they have done was the same as BLM protesters did. The people of color, especially black and brown people, have been suffered from racism for a long time. This fact cannot be found on what they said. The capital building is “sacred”. Because the building is the place where the voice of people has been reflected on politics by politicians who represent people. Doing Democracy has been much far different from having loyalty to their king. Medieval Kings and queens are good materials for thinking about modern democracy and republic, not for destroying it.
The division is serious and deep. A poll shows 21% of registered voters, 45% of Republican voters approve of “the storming”. (Most voters say the events at the US Capitol are a threat to democracy)
They were "trained and prepared". And there were off-duty police officers across the country. (Black Police Officers Describe The Racist Attacks They Faced As They Protected The Capitol) This fact needs to be considered for oncoming police reform.
Pardoned criminals were attended at “rally” the day before January 6th. I guess some would expect their pardoning after their doing criminal activities next day. (Arrests as Trump backers protest in D.C. ahead of major rally)
And reasons why enough law enforcements weren’t there has not been not clear yet. (What Went Wrong With Security At The Capitol? | Morning Joe | MSNBC)
Although I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to make a comment about immediate possible choices, I am sure that his presence in the oval office keeps damaging the presidency, American democracy and the republic. The Chinese government would be very pleased with the insurrection. It is the president of United States, Donald J. Trump’s, favorite enemy.
He just should have conceded when all networks reported Biden’s winning in November. This insurrection wouldn’t happen if he would have done so. 5 persons dead including a police officer. A lot of casualties. I think the Republican politicians and conservative media should act responsible for the insurrection and the division. They know well the seriousness of attacking capital building more than ordinary citizens. Just like carpenters know carpentry very well more than others.
The world of Tumblr wasn’t always the most peaceful of places. Ship wars destroyed much of the land and the random hearts and double-arrows popping up in the sky could get a bit distracting. But most of the fandoms were able to get along peacefully, most staying in their respective districts/ factions /camps.
Wizards & half-bloods patrolled the districts under the leadership of Admiral Holmes, making sure everything was going well and making sure that the demons, cannibalistic doctors, & makeup-wearing aristocrats stay in place.
Each day, grand ceremonies were held by the people of the blogs in prayer to the Gallifreyan God of the Tardis as Supreme Princess Dean Winchester oversaw it all on his floating Chevy Impala.
I'll never forgive those vampires at Hewlett Packard. Their little arms race of "how ludicrously hard can we gouge these peasants" has brought me the closest I've been to going full chaotic tinkerer and just tearing out that proprietary Ink Cop crap and coding a humane replacement, then daring a court to convict me once HPs pillaging is laid bare. until then, When my current printer dies, I'll just pick up another one off the side of the road, and it'll last me another 5 years. except oh wait that one I found in hard rubbish is ~20 years old so it's probably better made than most nowadays. isn't society fun and not at all rotten to its core, hidden only by a thin shiny veneer? yay!
A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars
It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.
They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."
HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.
DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.
Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.
In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.
HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.
Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.
But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention
Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.
Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.
This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."
In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/
Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/
As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.
It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches
Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
Alternate US