Blog - Elixis Technology

Content Mills and Fan-Fiction Theft

Elizabeth Technology January 11, 2024

If you’re online at all, it’s possible you saw a sudden spike in interest around plagiarism recently. A Youtube creator known as HBomberGuy released a longform video demonstrating how a couple of other big creators on the platform were plagiarizing content. This in itself was a huge reveal, and a giant rugpull for all of the people who were fans of the creators being put on trial, but the secondary result – a swarm of content mills also being called out for plagiarism – is now shaking out between a bunch of online archives and Youtube.

Stealing Fanfictions

Fanfiction is a tricky area, legally. Fanfiction’s right to exist was (and still is) heavily contested, but we’re in a place now where large nonprofit archives (such as Archive of Our Own, one of the largest) can host fanfictions and creative writing projects for others to read, so long as the creatives don’t make profit off of the work elsewhere (such as Patreon or via donations made specifically for access to the work). This is itself an interesting system, but the point to focus on for this article is that profit part. You cannot profit off of characters you don’t own the rights to if they aren’t public domain. To make any profit off of the work, an author must at least change the characters’ names and the setting. Again, interesting, but not the point.

User AConstantStateOfBladeRunner on Tumblr (alongside a few others) have started hunting down Youtube channels plagiarizing the work of fanfiction authors. The channels generally either generate or take an image relevant to the fanfiction, put the fanfiction itself through an AI voice generator as a script, and then simply upload the image plus the audio directly to Youtube as a listenable video. Some channels bother to frame the content as a “what if?”, where the premise of the fanfiction is used as a title instead of the actual title of the fanfiction. Others just steal the title and add keywords so it’s easier to find by searches.

These channels are scooping up ad revenue where fanfiction authors are legally forbidden from doing so.

Potential Landmines

Stealing another person’s work is scummy. It’s plagiarism. There are plenty of tools within academics dedicated specifically to sussing out plagiarism, because it has a degenerative effect on whatever field it’s happening in. However, when the product is published for free, there’s an inherent lack of leverage between parties. A school could deduct points for not submitting via Turnitin to avoid the plagiarism detectors. A judge can penalize you for submitting poorly cited work as a lawyer. A paper could decide not to continue using your services if it turns out you’d been stealing reviews from other, smaller papers. But when it comes to fanfiction, written for free and consumed for free using copywritten content as a base, what happens to a thief?

One particular creator in HBomberGuy’s video was directly copyright claimed by Mental Floss, which owned the right to publish the article that the creator had used as a script. You can’t necessarily do that with fanfiction – the path from ‘copyright owner’ to ‘theft of copyrighted work’ is not nearly as linear. Obviously, it’s scummy to take someone else’s work and not give them credit, but they don’t own the characters either, just anything unique they added to the fanwork.

The only clear part of the equation is in the profit – the video is making money, which is expressly forbidden, but the fanwork original is not. If this draws attention from the wrong company, the channel might get copyright stricken for pulling in a profit on the content they stole. At the very least, they may be demonetized. This is such a potential minefield that a handful of the channels pointed out by AConstantStateOfBladeRunner would rather just yoink the video as soon as it’s noticed by the author than even try to win at the YouTube copyright takedown system. It’s imperfect, as just as many argue in favor of their theft or try to make the author go away by ignoring them. Because the content is transformative of the original copywritten work, that could only be countered by getting to a real human at YouTube rather than their automated copyright system. The copyright laws of today will be outdated by tomorrow – every day, someone finds a new way to jack content and re-label it as their own. This whole subsection of content farming wouldn’t have been possible before AI generated voices got better, because just reading these things out and editing that audio clip is much more work than it’s worth. Finding fanfiction on the open web was also difficult until very recently. Who knows what tool will be misused tomorrow?

Buying A Personality and Identity

Elizabeth Technology January 9, 2024

Being from a group of people has been coopted into another way to sell you stuff.

Frogs, Possums, Rats, and Pigeons

There’s a particular collection of animals that people love to see online, just not in person. Animals that are funny, a little bit charismatic (not a lot) and accessible, but only with difficulty. Associating one of these animals with your social media account in a specific way will signal to other people from this group that you’re under thirty, perhaps by a lot; online a lot of the time; hip; and generally steered towards positive content made to be cute or funny. You like possums? So do a lot of the Gen-Z and Millennial generations on TikTok and Instagram! Drawing these animals in cowboy hats or high heels is a great skate ramp straight into virality. The off-centered animals are getting their big day of publicity, with a flood of tattoos and clothing following closely behind. With it, so does the attitude that its what cool people get into, and if you want to keep up with the people you follow, you should invest in looking like this is what you like too.

What does it mean to invest in a meme? Hot Topic has plenty of shirts featuring the hot topic of the day. Pin stores aplenty on Etsy want to sell you stuff. It’s cheap to print and easy to acquire the rights to most modern memes. I still have a Doge shirt bought back when Doge was a representative of online meme culture and not the rocky cryptocurrency market. The shirt’s not in good shape, but it wasn’t made to last for years. Stores like Hot Topic assume you’ll get tired of the joke and toss or donate the shirt long before you have to start patching it. If you want the funny shirt with the frog cowboy on it because it signals to other people that you’re in their niche online community, you’ll spend the 20$ it takes to own such an item, and when that online community moves onto something else, you’ll do it again. And again. Clothing is seen as so disposable now that these ridiculously short-lived jokes give the shirt most of its value in the store, and when the joke stops being funny, the shirt’s not even valuable as a shirt anymore. Tattoos of cowboy animals are also starting to slide into the same territory as tribal tattoos did in the 2000s, albeit easier to cover and less potentially offensive.

Stanley Cups

On the other side of the longevity spectrum, even tough items that can’t justifiably be replaced often are used as flags. For example, Stanley cups. A Stanley cup is an insulated cup, much like a Yeti cup, designed with a small bottom and large top to fit into car drink holders but still hold more than 24 ounces of whatever it is you want to put into the cup. The Stanley cup is a bit pricey, and is meant (at least in theory) to keep your drink whatever temperature it was going into the cup for the rest of the day. It’s also tough, made of stainless steel coated for color. What does this cup signal? You need a drink holder that keeps your coffee warm or your water cold for an entire day – you’re a hustler who makes enough money to justify the purchase of a name-brand item like the Stanley cup that’s at its most useful when you’re out and about. You’re probably older than a teenager, because teenagers use Hydroflasks or drink their coffee straight out of the cup that their café gave them, because they don’t use the coffee brewer at home.

Collecting Stanley cups to match to outfits or cars is even more a sign that you’re very busy and very successful. Those cups ain’t cheap! There’s an almost competitive group of people online who make a point of showing off their collection any time they want to post a get-ready image set or video, because why have all these cups if the full extent of your investment isn’t visible?

How Did We Get Here?

A public consciousness that buying from bad brands with bad practices (think sweatshop labor or deforestation) should make you bad if you could buy something made more ethically has made it possible for brands to flip around and say that buying from good brands with good practices (think inclusivity and a promise to be eco-friendly) makes you a good person, or at least better than the next person who’s still buying stuff from bad companies.

Beyond that, there’s a bigger need than ever to feel like a part of a community, even if that community is still online. In-jokes are what friends share – showing that you get the joke means that you’re in. These flags make the gaps between us all feel a little smaller, even if they don’t turn into conversations or friend requests, and that eases the pain. Isn’t buying a shirt with a cowboy rat on it, or another Stanley cup in an exclusive color, worth the price if it simulates human connection?

Driven By Clicks And Money – TikTok

Elizabeth Technology January 4, 2024

Clicks

What do you know about frosting?

You probably know intuitively that royal frosting is really dense, and meringues are lighter and fluffier, even if you don’t know the exact terms or science behind it. Royal icing and buttercream are good for cookies, buttercream and meringues are good for cakes.

The trick is adding air. More air usually means a lighter, fluffier frosting. But trapped air in frosting is white, which makes decorating cakes with a dark frosting that’s not mason’s mortar is hard. Food dyes have a flavor, so adding more to get to a certain color is trading appearance for taste; even the best gel food dyes struggle to achieve a passable red in buttercream. What is a home chef to do?

One TikToker, Sugarologie, had discovered a hack: by blending the frosting, she was able to improve the color. Many dyes are not fat-soluble, so the butter in a buttercream was actively impeding the dye’s saturation powers; by blending it, she was introducing more of the dye to the water in the butter/sugar mixture. But don’t forget: air has a color too!

Air bubbles catch and diffract light. If you look at how hard candy manufacturers make the color white (Lofty Pursuits on Youtube has plenty of good examples of this process), you’ll see that what they’re doing is using their hook to catch air bubbles inside of the translucent, slightly golden molten sugar to turn it white. This also noticeably increases the volume of the sugar wad they’re working with, because added pockets of air add volume.

By blending the frosting, Sugarologie was able to improve the color distribution in the frosting, but in doing so decreased the air in the recipe. That effect also made it darker, but it made the frosting denser too. Users noticed (one large Youtuber known as Ann Reardon made a video demonstrating the problem), but Sugarologie clarified that re-whipping the frosting was easy… and users were still having problems recreating her results. She didn’t include enough detail the first time around, and by leaving out that A) yes, the frosting gets denser and B) only certain frostings can tolerate this treatment, she’d accidentally created a minidrama between her and the people trying things as she described them in the initial video. Ann couldn’t recreate her results because she was using her own preferred frosting recipe. Neither one of them was making fake or bad content – this misunderstanding of where the technique works was creating the difference.

Why not clarify in the first video? Why react as though all of this was obvious when those people testing showed it clearly wasn’t?

I used to watch a show called “Chopped” on Food Network. You may be familiar with the premise – four contestants have a sum of 80 minutes to make a three course meal, including strange ingredients picked out beforehand. Chef Smartypants (who is still active online to this day!) lost her first round. But, the general air I got was that she was more a scholar of food, and a timed challenge like Chopped was not the right environment for her expertise to shine. There was no “they judged me wrong”. She was still confident in her skill. She is skilled!

Outside of going to a pastry or cooking school, there’s basically no real requirement that you need to meet in order to call yourself a chef, or a baker (outside of SafeServ). To demonstrate skill is to prove you’re worth listening to for tips and tricks. It’s what separates you from the thousands of channels freebooting content or putting out useless garbage. Admitting that one trick is not a universal is not the end of the world, but it does feel like a direct threat to one’s credibility in the moment. Those tips and tricks are what give people reason to listen at all. If a user is dismissed as making low-quality hacks, then suddenly people are less inclined to watch. This need for clicks necessitates being right (or looking right) at least most of the time.

Clicks And Money

What do you know about oats? They’re a crop. They’re often sprayed with pesticides to keep bugs from eating them before harvest, as are most crops in the US. A lot of US commercial bug sprays contain glyphosate, a potential carcinogen. Reading that, you’re probably thinking you should stop eating oats, or at least switch to organic, right? Well – experts disagree, and there’s money in arguing. Organic farms have a financial incentive to push their more expensive but glyphosate-free oats, and non-organic farms using glyphosate pesticides are obviously invested in their customers believing their product is safe to eat. Outside of the farmers, regulatory bodies themselves have placed glyphosates into different carcinogen risk categories: https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-018-0184-7 , largely because one is measuring exposure via food and the other is measuring exposure via food, spraying, and other sources. The FDA in the U.S suggests that there is a safe amount of glyphosate when it comes to harvested crops (https://www.fda.gov/food/pesticides/questions-and-answers-glyphosate), but to trust that, you have to trust the FDA, and not everyone does!

This is one food. One specific crop. If you don’t trust the FDA or American farmers (and after the last salmonella outbreak, it’s tough to trust blindly) then you’ve got to do this for everything you’re eating and compare research, and then from there decide what level of risk you, personally, are comfortable with. That’s exhausting, but nobody wants salmonella. This creates a demand for experts who can condense the complexities of the US food system into a short clip or article that gives you the info you need to know to make an informed decision.

The problem is that some “experts” are interested in that demand, and don’t have the necessary background or research skills to give advice or condense articles. Because they lack the background, they give advice that’s contradictory, or overly strict, or otherwise out of line with what the real experts recommend. Real dieticians then have to debunk the idea that oats are poison, or that candy bars are poison, or that the human body only really needs celery or raw meat or whichever diet the other guy subscribes to in order to function.

One expert says that eating non-organic foods is bad for you. Another one disagrees, and suggests you just wash fresh produce before you eat it. One expert paces up and down the aisles, pointing to the added sugar content of foods to tell you it will actively harm you. Another one disagrees, and asks you to look at the sugar content of the food you eat over the course of the day as a whole.

To one, a candy bar is fatal. To another, a candy bar can be a part of what you eat in a day so long as it’s not the only thing you eat. To one, raw meat is the only food you need. To another, you’re a human, not a lion or a wolf or a cat.

The only way a lot of people can emulate what they see on screen, sometimes from these “experts” themselves, is disordered eating. Orthorexia and anorexia have spiked in recent years (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7114025/), and this trend of TikTok “dieticians” suggesting that most food is poison takes advantage of that. Body dysmorphia is a very tricky illness to treat: the person suffering from it may lean into destructive habits because it’s easier than trying to recover, even when being treated. If they happen upon a TikTok from an “expert” “dietician” telling them that they actually should only need 800 calories a day, it can justify the complex structure of thoughts slowly killing them. After all, they’re listening to an expert. Right?

This need for clicks goes from petty arguing and misunderstandings to actively harmful. When attention is the currency, misinformation that reconfirms biases confidently is what rises to the top.

Pros and Cons of All Sites Becoming Five Sites

Elizabeth Technology January 2, 2024

The amalgamation of smaller websites’ features into bigger websites comes with ups and downs.

The Pros

1) Hardiness

The way that servers used to work, individual clicks to a site counted towards fractions of pennies of hosting costs, and bigger websites that had bigger requirements got better rates because they paid more overall. If a smaller website got linked to from somewhere bigger, and the ordinary traffic quintupled, the website’s owner could be out of a lot of money. The other option was to simply let the traffic take the website offline temporarily, which was also ugly: it made DDoSing smaller websites for political or social reasons pretty easy. Big websites with big servers and lots of through-flow don’t have to worry about that. DDoSing Facebook, for example, would be almost impossible, and would cost a ton of money in equipment and electricity to even try.

2) Family of Services

Amazon’s numerous smart home devices are undeniably convenient (although it comes with many trades). You can simply ask Alexa to turn on your Smart lights, add frozen onions to your shopping list, ask it what a new air fryer would cost from Amazon dot com, and ask it to order it for you all without getting out of bed. None of that would be possible if Amazon were not a sprawling mass of other, smaller services purchased or created for the sole purpose of supporting Amazon.

3) Ease of Communication

While websites that allow for small, closed groups to communicate (like Mastodon and Discord) have an easier time controlling their user culture, bigger sites like Reddit, Twitter, MySpace, etc. can connect people with what they’re looking for much easier. Crowdsourcing an answer to questions that don’t exist on informational pages is something that only forum and blogging websites can do, and only because they’re so easy to access and create an account for.

Social media is so common that some businesses extended their official helplines down into Twitter or Facebook to make it easier for customers to reach them wherever they can be found online.

The Cons

1) Tangled Services

The new Facebook (Meta) app Threads requires an Instagram account to log in. Threads demands a lot of info about you. If you made an account, saw some bad news about Threads, and wanted to leave, you wouldn’t be able to do so without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is holding that account hostage.

When big websites buy smaller websites, the services can become entangled, or watered down for profit-making reasons. If there’s no substitute, then tough luck – you’ll put up with the downsides or you’ll leave.

2) Being Presentable

Trying to bring up a site to meet censorship requirements held by giant access chokepoints like app stores or parent websites can make a purchased website stop working. For example, trying to make Tumblr fit into the Apple App Store’s standards crushed it! Tumblr’s NSFW ban also caught plenty of art and random unrelated pictures in the crossfire thanks to an open-sourced, poorly trained algorithm being deployed to moderate, and a big portion of the userbase left, never to return. Is the website better now? No, but it meets the App Store’s standards.

Similarly, if a web services vendor the size of Amazon decides they don’t like a website and won’t be supporting it any longer due to content concerns, that website may simply vanish as a result. Giving one big company the power to decide what is unacceptable behavior starts getting ethically tricky, very fast.

3) Standards for Banning

Being banned on some sites means being banned from their entire family of services. Meta in particular holds a lot of enforcement power because of the vast array of products it has (Instagram, Facebook, VR services, etc.) and some cost money. Unknowingly violating the ToS of a site could result in being kicked from multiple other places.

This also creates the problem of restricting access to ‘official channels’ of businesses or the government. As said above, some businesses want people to be able to reach them on social media. Oftentimes tweeting at a company gets them to respond quicker. Getting banned for something unrelated restricts access to help.

4) Genuine Conspiracies

Conspiracies about everything from Flat Earth and Indigo Children to Cambridge Analytica riddle social media. Cults can recruit through Facebook now! On an even larger scale, misinformation campaigns designed to undermine elections or start fearmongering also target users on their favorite websites.

Big sites make a better target for the big, organized attacks using deliberate misinformation, although small sites are not immune to it – on a forum like Reddit, where everyone is a stranger and everyone is on the same standing, arguing something insane and sounding correct can sway people who’d never agree with someone who was standing right in front of them, saying the same thing. One big platform shared equally gives those people a better cost/reward ratio.

5) Trends In Site Design

You may have noticed that Instagram and Tumblr both became more video-focused after the success of TikTok. Facebook launched Threads after it started to look like Elon Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter) might stop holding the average Twitter user’s attention. Most major social media works with the same handful of advertisers, and most have similar, but not identical, designs.

When something is trending and working for another big website, the other big websites want to hop on and do the same, whether their original fanbase wanted that or not. If you were on Tumblr because you didn’t like TikTok, that sure sucks, because Tumblr is pushing a TikTok (Tumblr LIVE) tab update out whether you use it or not.

The Awareness of Future Cringe Past

Elizabeth Technology December 28, 2023

The Concept of Cringe

What is ‘cringe’? To cringe is to jerk away from a negative stimuli – accidentally getting a papercut between your fingers, or hearing the sound of nails on chalkboard, may make you cringe.

Sometime in the 2000s, a new definition of cringe arose, and forums sprung up trying to catalog it. This new cringe focuses on secondhand embarrassment over actual, physical discomfort: it’s the awkward text to a crush that gets rejected outright. It’s the kid in a college-level presentation class trying to get their group members to theme the project after an unrelated kid’s TV show. It’s someone wearing something in public that breaks rules everyone else is trying to follow. While shame and embarrassment are useful emotions almost anywhere else, the concept of cringe in the new panopticon created by modern social media and high-definition phone cameras is sucking the joy out of memes. The next generation is not ready to be made fun of by people who they respect.

“Millennial Humor” and “This is What Gen Alpha Will Make Fun of Us For”

Gen Z is effectively building a prison made of cringe and ensuring that nobody will escape it, using social media. One comment, one foot, is calling I Can Haz Cheezburger speak annoying and cringe. Another comment, the other foot, is calling someone the Rizzler, and spamming fire emojis. Both feet are straddling a hole in the ground, an abyss that can’t be looked into because the abyss – Nietzsche’s final, paralyzing frontier of awareness – will look back. That hole contains the phrase “this is what gen Alpha will make fun of us for”.

Some Gen Zers have looked into the abyss. The abyss looks back. The future looks back. They, themselves, but younger and meaner and willing to make a joke at their older selves’ expense, looks back at them and sneers. Their jokes are cringe. Their clothes are cringe and make them look cringe. The way they take their selfies in public is cringe. The easily identifiable way that they speak signals to the next generation that they may say something neocringe if prodded right. There’s no escaping now that phones are everywhere, and everyone seems to be filming. They will, one day, have a haircut that turns cringe. They know all of this because the previous generation, Millennials, are subjected to the same treatment. The introduction of the “Millennial Pause” gave ammo to an audience that cares about age so much that identifying Millennials is a sport now, even for other Millennials. Of course that little pause is no big deal, but it exists. The fire emoji, too, will one day be no big deal, but exist, and signal out to Gen Alpha that they’re talking to someone older than them. There’s some comment to be made about how much Americans love the idea of youth. Now, if someone sticks out with dated humor or an awkward pause, they’re a target – they are expected to look and act young enough to blend in with the next generation (which means understanding the jokes and dressing like them too) or risk being singled out as cringe.

This awareness that trendy things age poorly is so paralyzing that some teens are trying to remove themselves from the memery without fully leaving social media. It’s the final stage of irony poisoning, where doing cringey things ironically is still too close to being cringe, and so is just existing (unironically and contemporaneously) with trends in photos or videos, so the people who’d otherwise be having fun making jokes or dancing their meme dances are instead opting to say “this joke won’t be nearly as funny when it’s no longer fresh” as if that’s a revelation. The other option is posting cringe and making jokes that are only funny for right now; if someone wants to stay young and funny forever, they can’t participate. They try to warn the other people outside their prison that one day they’ll be cringe, as though they can somehow stop the embarrassment of embracing popular trends by stopping the trend itself from manifesting with the power of irony and self-awareness, but it’s always already too late. Mullets are on a comeback, and some day the people who had them will look back at those photos and laugh.

To be cringe is to be free. Embrace the cringe. Pause awkwardly. Say ‘Rizzler’ out loud. Keep an ugly haircut and a sage-colored couch, and enjoy existence freed from the dichotomy of cringe and noncringe.

Clicks Drive Misleading

Elizabeth Technology December 21, 2023

Clicks for Being Reliable

What do you know about frosting?

You probably know intuitively that royal frosting is denser than buttercream, and meringues are lighter and fluffier, even if you don’t know the exact terms or science behind it. Royal icing and buttercream are good for cookies, buttercream and meringues are good for cakes.

One TikToker, Sugarologie, had discovered a hack: by blending the frosting, she was able to improve the color. Many dyes are not fat-soluble, so the butter in a buttercream was actively impeding the dye’s saturation powers; by blending it, she was introducing more of the dye to more of the water in the butter/sugar mixture. But that wasn’t the only factor at play!

By blending the frosting, Sugarologie was able to improve the color, but in doing so decreased the air in the recipe. That effect also made it darker, but it made the frosting denser too. Users noticed (one large Youtuber known as Ann Reardon made a video demonstrating the problem), but Sugarologie clarified that re-whipping the frosting was easy… and users were still having problems recreating her results. She later released a response video insinuating she was not given a fair shot. She didn’t include enough detail the first time around, and by leaving out that A) yes, the frosting gets denser and B) only certain frostings can tolerate this treatment, she’d accidentally created a minidrama between her and the people trying things as she described them in the initial video. Ann couldn’t recreate her results because she was using her own preferred frosting recipe. Neither one of them was making fake or bad content – this misunderstanding was creating the difference.

Why not clarify in the first video? Why react as though all of this was obvious when those people testing showed it clearly wasn’t?

I used to watch a show called “Chopped” on Food Network. You may be familiar with the premise – four contestants have a sum of 80 minutes to make a three course meal, including strange ingredients picked out beforehand. Chef Smartypants (who is still active on TikTok to this day, go check her out!) lost her first round. But, the general air I got was that she was more a scholar of food, and a timed challenge like Chopped forces was not the right environment for her expertise to shine. There was no “they judged me wrong”. She was still confident in her skill. She is skilled!

Outside of going to a pastry or cooking school, there’s basically no real requirement that you need to meet in order to call yourself a chef, or a baker (outside of SafeServ). To demonstrate skill and share it is to prove you’re worth listening to for tips and tricks. It’s what separates you from the thousands of channels freebooting content or putting out useless garbage. Admitting that one trick is not a universal is not the end of the world, but it does feel like a direct threat to one’s credibility in the moment. Those tips and tricks are what give people reason to listen at all. If a user is dismissed as making low-quality hacks, then suddenly people are less inclined to watch. This need for clicks necessitates being right (or looking right) at least most of the time.

Clicks for Being Believable

What do you know about oats? They’re a crop. They’re often sprayed with pesticides to keep bugs from eating them before harvest, as are many crops in the US. A lot of US commercial bug sprays contain glyphosate, a potential carcinogen. Reading that, you’re probably thinking you should stop eating oats, or at least switch to organic, right? Well – experts disagree, and there’s money behind both sides. Organic farms have a financial incentive to push their more expensive but glyphosate-free oats, and non-organic farms using glyphosate pesticides are obviously invested in their customers believing their product is safe to eat. Outside of the farmers, regulatory bodies themselves have placed glyphosates into different carcinogen risk categories: https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-018-0184-7 , largely because one is measuring exposure via just food and the other is measuring exposure via food, spraying, and other sources. The FDA in the U.S suggests that there is a safe amount of glyphosate when it comes to harvested crops (https://www.fda.gov/food/pesticides/questions-and-answers-glyphosate), but to trust that, you have to trust the FDA!

This is one food. One specific crop. If you don’t trust the FDA or American farmers (and after the last salmonella outbreak, it’s tough to trust blindly) then you’ve got to do this research for everything you’re eating and compare results, and then from there decide what level of risk you, personally, are comfortable with. That’s exhausting, but nobody wants salmonella. This creates a demand for experts who can condense the complexities of the US food system into a short clip or article that gives you the info you need to know to make an informed decision.

The problem is that some “experts” are interested in that demand, and don’t have the necessary background or research skills to give advice or condense articles. Because they lack the background, they give advice that’s contradictory, or overly strict, or otherwise out of line with what the real experts recommend. Cutting out all of the fat in your diet isn’t actually very healthy, for example, but suggesting it is sounds right. Real dieticians then have to debunk the idea that oats are poison, or that candy bars are poison, or that the human body only really needs celery or raw meat or whichever diet the other guy subscribes to in order to function.

Orthorexia and anorexia have spiked in recent years (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7114025/), and this trend of TikTok “dieticians” suggesting that most food is poison takes advantage of that. Body dysmorphia is a very tricky illness to treat: the person suffering from it may lean into destructive habits because it’s easier than trying to recover, even when being treated. If they happen upon a TikTok from an “expert” “dietician” telling them that they actually should only need 800 calories a day, it can justify the complex structure of thoughts slowly killing them. After all, they’re listening to an expert. Right?

Where Did You Hear That?

Elizabeth Technology December 19, 2023

The internet is a vast source of knowledge and firsthand accounts from people all over the world. In the modern age, you can look up nearly anything and get an answer. Convenient, right?

It’s not.

Some things don’t have definitive answers. Some things are a conglomerate of answers. Some answers come from sources suffering the replicability crisis, and now, some answers are generated by AI and published regardless of whether the AI is correct or not. The internet is huge, and stuffed with information from an enormous variety of sources, but that doesn’t mean finding something useful for the question being asked is easy to find.

Research Rules

The guiding principles of finding accurate and reliable sources are no longer a constant. Tell people to look for studies? We’re in the middle of a replication crisis: if they find a study, it might be wrong, but nobody will know until years later when it gets retracted. It might blow another study out of the water only to be wrong. Even if it’s not strictly incorrect, just exaggerating, finding where the statistical mistakes happened within the paper is difficult even for the editors of the journals. Worse, a lot of studies are pay-walled now. You need to pay a journal to access them, or be part of a university network that gives access to its members. This becomes more common the more cutting-edge the study is. That means people maybe, sometimes get to read the abstract, but otherwise the free option is to just ignore that source. What if it’s the only source? The person looking for info has to find a book or an online article talking about the study. If they’re lucky, accessing the paper or book is free, and they’re accurately reporting the facts of the study. If that person is unlucky, they stumble into a poorly written article that uses the results of the poorly made study to push a poorly supported idea.

Tell people to look for quotes? Not only are some sources quoting things in a misleading way, or buying another person’s credibility to slap into their own project (Folding Ideas’ “That Time GeoCentrists Tricked A Bunch of Physicists” video has a segment showing how easy it is to buy stock footage of someone known for their reliability and then twist their words with clever editing) some are just outright lying.

Lying by implying that a historical figure has said something they didn’t by putting their picture behind the fake quote is so common that Googling the meme “Don’t Believe Everything You Read Online” and attributing it to someone that most everyone likes (although Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein are the most common) will give you pages upon pages of results with few repeats. The joke goes far because it’s true: it’s easy to lie about people in places they won’t see, either because the site is obscure or because the person said to have given the quote is already dead.

Tell people to look at the experts? Right now, this is a nightmare all its own. Which experts? And who qualifies as an expert? How much education do they need to have received? How much of their own research must they have published, or how long must they have been in the business? How many mistakes are they allowed? TikTok goes through cycles where a user claiming to be an expert in something is later revealed to have limited experience and/or falsified their credentials. Experts have also been caught making content that they are technically allowed to be making, but are considered unethical (unsolicited advice for reshaping a face, coming from a plastic surgeon, for example). Morticians, artists, singers, DIYers, interior decorators, plastic surgeons, dieticians, etc. have all hit controversy this way.

Charismatic people who lack expertise but deliver what they’re saying with confidence spread further than the people with expertise. Just by the nature of obtaining expertise in the first place, there are fewer experts than people who want to be experts, or at least want to be seen as experts. Correcting misinformation once it’s gone viral is difficult. Just because something has been repeated widely does not make it correct.

Even if that expert is genuinely an expert, they can say things that make them hard to take seriously. Neil DeGrasse Tyson used to be very well-regarded… as long as he was talking about the complexities of space and physics. Once he got onto Twitter and started tweeting things that were obvious, his reputation among the populace of Twitter and Reddit degraded. The same thing happened to Bill Nye, after Deflategate, and then again to Bill Nye after he partnered with Coke to make a video about recycling. He was, for a time, considered a sell-out. You can’t trust sell-outs.

What To Do?

What can you do, if you want to research responsibly?

Firstly, consider the source. Consider where it’s getting its information. Consider whether or not it has motivation to slant or skew things. Consider whether or not you’ve heard anything from this source before. Consider the critics, as well – are they also able to pass this bar? Are there hordes of people online pointing out the same flaw in the article independently, not as retweets or stitches? Are other verifiable experts in the field reacting as though this is absurd?

This won’t keep you from being fooled by every grifter, but at the very least, it may prevent you being fooled by sock puppet webpages running on ad clicks and TikTok “Dieticians” trying to tell you that any non-organic brand of oatmeal is literal poison. It will also help you spot AI-written articles – AI sounds very believable, but when you search for something it’s allegedly quoting or otherwise stating as fact, you’ll often find it’s hallucinating. Usually the quote doesn’t exist. The fact goes against logic! That recent AI mushroom guidebook suggesting you taste mushrooms to identify them, for example, is easily disproven by looking for a human expert – every living mycologist will tell you this is a horrible idea.

The old tricks and shortcuts for finding reliable information online are breaking down in the sheer deluge of media, articles, studies, and misinformation happening everywhere online. Information as a whole is getting tougher to find, not easier!

A Phishing Refresher

Elizabeth Technology December 14, 2023

How To Avoid it in the First Place

There are a few key tips that give away phishing scams. Firstly, is there a sense of urgency? Your utility companies aren’t going to call and say they’ll shut off your water without at least a few mailed reminders that your bill is due! The same goes for your bank. If they demand that you resolve a problem right then, right there, out of the blue, it’s probably a phishing scam (if you’re nervous it’s not a scam, call the alleged company using their number off of their real website). This goes for both phone and email phishers.

If it’s an email or a text, ask yourself if you were expecting an email or a text from that company. If you get a Fedex text update that you didn’t sign up for, it might be a phishing scam. If you got a notification from Walgreens that your photos have finished printing, and you didn’t print any photos, it might be a phishing scam. They want you to click or tap the links they include to see what’s going on. Spelling errors are also a common tell – it’s not impossible for a company to make spelling errors in their communications with you, but they won’t be littering the page with them! Phishing scams do that to weed out people who know better so they won’t waste time on targets that won’t crack. Note that not every phishing scam comes with typos, even though they are common.

You should also check the sender of the email! Spoofing is a technique that attaches a real name that you might know to an email address or phone number that definitely doesn’t belong to them. Anyone can set their name to George Smith or Big Company Customer Service in Gmail, but they can’t change the email address they’re sending from. If it’s [email protected] and not [email protected], for example, it’s probably a phishing scam.

The same goes for caller ID, although it’s getting harder and harder to tell real calls from fake ones – scammers can set their name to something like “Hospital” or “School” to make it more likely you’ll pick up. Some more sophisticated operations can even make it look like they’re calling from a different number altogether, using VOIP technology to match the area code of the caller to the person being called. Just like in the urgency tip, you should be able to call a legitimate company or organization like a school back from the number they have on their website, or the number you know to reach them at. If they’re really resistant to you hanging up and calling back for reasons that don’t make sense, it might be phishing. Unfortunately, some scam calls are really tough to pick up on, and the FCC can’t do much to stop them if they’re not in the US. Many people today don’t answer their phone unless they were explicitly expecting a call as a result, and phone companies themselves sometimes offer up call and text screening.

How to Better Protect Your Accounts

Luckily, there are a few tips that can make your information safer in the face of trickier scams! Firstly, don’t re-use passwords. If a password you were using for multiple accounts gets stolen, then multiple accounts are at risk, not just one. We recommend a password manager like BitWarden – it makes it much easier to store and create unique, strong passwords for every site!

Secondly, you’ll be better protected if you use two-factor authentication on every website that has the option to. If you do fall for a phishing scam, the scammer won’t have the code necessary to get in! Of course, some scams are sophisticated enough to think of that beforehand: Craigslist, for example, had a bad rash of scammers a while back who would “text a code” to a seller “to make sure they were a real person”. The seller then gives them the code, and the scammer now has a Google Voice number with the seller’s phone number as the verified number behind it! They just social-engineered their way into bypassing 2FA. This is why you should never give out verification codes – especially if you didn’t request them. Instead, it might be time to reset the password of the account that verification email came from. Just don’t click any links in those verification emails, either: go straight to the home page of the site instead to log in. The verification email might be a phishing attempt all by itself, hoping you’ll click a fake link to the website!

VHS Tapes and Analog Horror

Elizabeth Technology December 12, 2023

What is it about the humble VHS tape that inspires such magnetism from the horror community?

Distortion

It’s no secret VHS tapes are prone to degrading over time. The tape inside loses its charge, and the plastic it’s made out of starts to dry-rot. If you’ve tried to replay a particularly old VHS movie, you might have gotten part of the way through it only to have it crumble on you, never to play again. Even the old-fashioned photo reel tape is not as fragile.

A number of strange effects can be pulled out of the tape and the machine just by treating it poorly, even fresh out of the box – if the tape is exposed to radiation, it develops a distinctive ‘snow’ to it; if it’s rewound or played too fast, the voices and visuals onscreen get weird, high-pitched, and anxiety-inducing. Colorful graphical glitches and brief audio cutouts are eerie, no matter what movie they happen to, and the classic abrupt cut, as though the tape inside has been cut and reunited minus a scene, can jerk anyone out of a Disney movie or war film alike. Tapping, dropping, or shaking the VHS player is an easy way to distort the viewing experience without necessarily breaking the tape or the machine, too, making it super easy for kids to get the funny colors they like to appear onscreen.

For the artists who can catch it juuust right, exactly how it used to happen to them, it’s really something to behold.

Irreplaceable

But you’d think the nostalgia of the casually-creepy VHS system would fade, the same way other trends in media do – Westerns dominated the film landscape for years before slowly sliding off the map, and slasher films are nowhere near as dominant a horror style as they used to be. In that vein, you’d think the sort of skips you see from CDs and other optical storage methods would be getting the attention that VHS glitches are getting from analog horror, a recent online trend in horror that’s only getting more mainstream. Analog horror gets its very name from the style of filming that came to define the genre. Popular projects like the Mandela Catalogue or Angel Hare are purposefully designed to look like they are recovered from VHS tapes and analog TV tech, helpfully uploaded to Youtube by someone trying to get answers. The glitching is used to great effect: when something too horrifying to look at on-screen is due to enter, the VHS tape glitches and clips over the horror, a clever way of hiding the monster from view while amplifying the terror of the unknown.

The corruption itself represents a strange flavor of nostalgia, an additional ingredient thrown into the horror of the scenario. After all, new VHS tapes are rare now. Old VHS tapes didn’t look creepy or monstrous when they were new. What the best analog horror projects capture with this stylistic choice are childhood memories of VHS tapes revisited as an adult, only to discover those tapes have been irrevocably changed by the passage of time. The ultimate premise of trying to share these tapes with the next generation only to have them rot away in one’s hands, blinking all sorts of strange colors and textures on-screen before it fails to warn them of the danger it’s trying to capture, is itself a powerful metaphor.

For millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z, the comfortable becomes a source of horror, a haunted childhood home. For the younger members who never had those VHS tapes, it’s an alien technology that behaves irrationally and unpredictably. The fuzz of a VHS video is not a comfort to kids who grew up with 1080p60 resolution videos. Modern videos don’t skip, either. Optical tech skipped for obvious reasons, like scratches on the disk. VHS tapes seem to choose arbitrarily when to skip.

In this way, VHS is a perfect medium for horror. Everyone around today is a little put off by it for a host of different reasons. When it flubbed up, it wasn’t always obvious why. It doesn’t age gracefully and it’s easy to cause problems within it on purpose. Even when it’s a little broken, the VHS player will still try to play it, where optical drives refuse if too much data is missing. When an optical drive stops, it just freezes on a frame, it doesn’t distort what it’s trying to play like VHS players sometimes do. Of course, all analog horror is just a recreation of the effects of old and damaged machinery. Some method-purists go out of their way to get ahold of real VHS tapes to do what they want to do, but in the end, it’s still getting uploaded to Youtube, an entirely digital platform. The mystique of the VHS haunts us today where CD players and digital files don’t because when the newer two corrupt, you’re spared the horror of the corrupted footage. VHS is the only one capable of the level of jank required to be horrific.

Varieties of Screens

Elizabeth Technology December 7, 2023

There are many different screens. From gigantic vacuum-tube TVs to the flattest of the flat home theater displays, TVs come in all shapes and sizes.

LCD: Liquid Crystal Display – Big Screen, Little Equipment

LCDs, or liquid crystal displays, are what they sound like: a material that has traits of both liquids and crystals is manipulated with an electric current, using a panel behind the crystal panel. Then, an LED panel behind that lights it up so the colors are visible. LCD displays don’t handle heat well, and they’re fragile. You can’t put them next to or above a fireplace, and you can’t clean them with most regular cleaners as a rule. You especially can’t drop them. Videos of people running into their TVs with an AR headset on or throwing a Wii remote into the TV during a virtual bowling game demonstrate the spiderweb effect even minor impacts can cause on-screen.

But the screens are getting massive. A more delicate device is a tradeoff many people are fine with making, if the trend of larger, sleeker smartphones is any indication. For example, a projection screen TV is probably the closest someone in the 1980’s could get to the modern flat screen TV. At 50 inches, and adjusted for inflation to today, it costed about $3,100.

An 82 inch TV from LG currently costs about $1,500 on Amazon. Technology!

LED: Light-Emitting Diodes

The Sphere in our local Las Vegas is currently the largest LED display in the world! LED displays are a common choice for external signs. They’re cheap and easy to manage outdoors, so they’re a great choice for light-up billboards – here in Las Vegas, most casinos on the Strip have one outside for their advertising. However, since the individual components making up each ‘pixel’ or each little square of colors are pretty large, they’re not usually the first choice for indoor, TV electronics – the gaps between each diode cluster are big enough to be visible, and they put out a lot of light.

OLEDs are becoming more popular as a screen choice because the gaps are eliminated, but if an image is going to be displayed on it long term, they can be prone to ‘burn in’ – where the image becomes permanently etched into the screen. As a result, LCD displays are more popular in cases like digital menus and airport queues.

LEDs don’t have many weaknesses that aren’t also shared by LCD screens – the major one is that screen burning, but for big displays like the Casino signs, that’s not an issue. Panels going out and creating wrong-colored squares in the middle of the board are, but thanks to the modular design of LED panels, minor problems don’t kill the entire screen.

Plasma Screen

A plasma screen TV works by exciting little pockets of ionized gas to create plasma, which makes colors. These were all the rage for a while, but they’re also sensitive to heat – and when LCDs caught up, they were cheaper to make and easier to dispose of, so plasma screens dipped in popularity. They’re still high-definition, they’re still sold in stores, so nowadays it comes down to a matter of preference, not price or size.

Rear Projection TV: Big Screen, Big Equipment

These screens were huge, and the speakers were built in to face the viewer at the bottom of the screen. Rear projection TVs were the intermediate step between CRTs and LCDs, and they worked by beaming light from the source of choice to the screen using a system of lenses, magnifying the image. CRTs had reached their max size, but LCD panels weren’t anywhere near large enough by themselves yet – the rear projection TV smoothed the transition between the two while also providing a larger screen than previous TVs. The one I grew up with was gigantic, even at the time we had it. Scratches in the fabric covering the speaker area were the only worry. The TV itself was nigh indestructible, and impossible to knock over.

Over time, the screen we had became outdated. It didn’t have enough ports for all the adaptors it would have taken to keep it in line with new plugins: VCRs and DVRs had different requirements, and so did the Xbox and the Xbox 360. Eventually a smaller (but much thinner) screen won out. Everything could just be directly plugged into the TV instead of screwing with the jack hydra the rear-projection required. The price of progress.

CRTs and Degaussing

With the development of iron ships, navigators discovered a problem – large quantities of iron could mess with the compass, and other tools relying on the Earth’s magnetic poles to function. Even worse, with WWII on the horizon, the magnetic signature of the ship meant that weapons could be designed around it. Underwater mines, specifically, were geared to detect the field and then go off. Degaussing was invented! De-magnetizing the ship meant mines could no longer rely on it as a trigger.

Cathode Ray Tubes displays (or CRT displays for short) are easily disturbed by magnets. The colors turn funny shades when you hold a magnet too close. The same technology used to protect ships was then used to degauss the CRT display and return it to its former full color glory. Eventually, degaussing coils were included within the device, which causes that “Thunk” and then hum when the screen is flipped on. It resets every time the device is turned on, which keeps the image from gradually degrading if it’s kept near other devices with magnetic fields as well.

That doesn’t mean CRTs are immune to breakage: flicking the switch on and off repeatedly and too quickly may break the mechanism that does the degaussing, and you’re back to using an external degausser.

Sources: https://www.doncio.navy.mil/Chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=3031

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/monitor5.htm

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/80selectrical.html

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-largest-single-video-screen-illuminates-fremont-street-experience-with-fully-immersive-content-301017215.html

https://www.pcmag.com/news/led-vs-plasma-which-hdtv-type-is-best

Elixis Technology