Posts Tagged

software

Memory Terms

Elizabeth Technology March 7, 2024

The first Bit of Data

A bit is a single character in binary, and actually comes from shortening “Binary Digit”. A bit is the simplest possible data that the machine can read, and is either a 1, or a 0. A yes, or a no. True or false. The bit has been around for longer than computers, originating in punch cards in the 1700s for analog machines to “read”.

Processing

If you’ve recently upgraded to Windows 10, you may recall having to check if your computer is 32 bit or 64 bit. The numbers determine how much memory the computer’s processor can access by its architecture – is it equipped to read up to 32 consecutive bits of data as an address, or 64? A 32 bit computer has fewer possible memory addresses from its CPU register– not much more than 4 GB’s worth, or 2^32’s address’s worth – while a 64 bit computer can store to up to two TB, or 2^64 addresses. This doesn’t mean 32 bit computers can only store 4 GB of data, it just means it can store 4 GB worth of names. The files themselves can be nearly any size as long as there’s storage available for them.

Then, a Byte

A byte is usually eight bits in compliance with international standard – but it didn’t always have to be. Instead, it used to be as long as needed to show a character on screen, usually somewhere between two and ten bits, with exceptions down to one and up to forty-eight bits for certain characters. Eight-bit bytes became the standard by their convenience for the new generation of microprocessors in the 70s: within 8 bits in binary, there are 255 possible organizations of ones and zeroes. 16 bits would give too many possibilities and could slow the computer down, while 4 bits would mean combining phrases of bits anyway to get more than 32 or so characters.

Alphabet

8 sounds like the perfect combination of length and possible complexity, at least with the benefit of hindsight. The government had struggled with incompatible systems across branches due to byte size before 8-bit came along. ASCII was the compromise, at seven bits per byte, and when commercial microprocessors came along in the 1970s, they were forced to compromise again with ASCII Extended, so that commercial and government systems could communicate.

However, not all ASCII extended versions contained the same additions, so Unicode was then formed later to try and bridge all the gaps between versions. Unicode, a character reading program that includes the ASCII set of characters within it, uses eight-bit bytes, and it’s one of the most common character encoding libraries out there. You’ll run into ASCII a lot, too – if you’ve ever opened an article and seen little boxes where characters should be, that’s because it was viewed with ASCII but written with a bigger library. ASCII doesn’t know what goes there, so it puts a blank!

Kilobyte

1000 bytes of storage forms a Kilobyte, or a Kb. This is the smallest unit of measure that the average computer user is likely to see written as a unit on their device – not much can be done with less than 1000 bytes. The smallest document I can currently find on my device is an Excel file with two sheets and no equations put into it. That takes up 9 KB. A downloadable “pen” for an art program on my device takes up 2 KB.

Computers before Windows had about 640 KB to work with, not including memory dedicated to essential operations.

The original Donkey Kong machines had approximately 20 kilobytes of content for the entire game.

Megabyte

A megabyte is 1 million bytes, or 1,000 kilobytes. Computers had made some progress post-relays, moving to hard disks for internal memory. IBM’s first computer containing a megabyte (or two) of storage, the System 355, was huge. It was also one of the first models to use disk drives, which read faster than tapes. In 1970, if users didn’t want a fridge, they could invest in the now desk-sized 3 million bytes on IBM’s model 165 computers, an improvement over GE’s 2.3 million bytes the year before – and the year before that, Univac had unveiled a new machine with separate cores tied together to give users between 14 and 58 megabytes of capacity in Byte Magazine, at the cost of space. IBM’s System 360 could reach up to 233 megabytes with auxiliary storage, but its size was…prohibitive, reminiscent of that first System 355.

Tapes and drums were competitive with the disk format for a while, but ultimately disk and solid state improved faster and won out (right now it’s looking more and more like SSDs, those solid state drives, will outcompete disks in the future too). During the 80s, the technology improved so much that hard disks became standard (IBM released a home computer with 10 MBs of storage in 1983) and floppy disks acted as media transport.

DOOM comes out in the 1990s and takes up 2.39 MB for it’s downloadable file, with smaller, DLC-like packs of fan-created mods coming out along the way.

Gigabyte

A Gigabyte is 1 billion bytes, or 1,000 megabytes. In 1980, IBM releases another fridge – but it stores up to a gigabyte of information! According to Miriam-Webster Dictionary, you can pronounce Gigabyte as “Jig-ga-bite”, which just… feels wrong. In 1974, IBM releases a 20 foot long beast of a storage system that stores up to 236 GB of data on magnetic tape.

In 2000, the first USB sticks (memory sticks, jump drives, etc…) are released to the public with 8 megabyte capacities, and they’re so convenient that floppy disk ports begin disappearing from computer designs in favor of USB ports. USB sticks then improve exponentially, and soon have capacities of one, two, and four Gigabytes while floppies struggle to keep up.

Besides being smaller and harder to break, those USB sticks also store more. Where the first USB sticks held 8 MB, the standard size floppy disk at the time could only hold 1.44 MB of memory. Knowing how small DOOM is, it would take two floppy disks to download all of DOOM, but a USB only took one. By 2009, USB sticks with capacities of 256 GB were available on the market. That’s 178 floppy drives.

Terabyte

A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes. The first commercial drive with a capacity of one terabyte was first sold in 2007 by Hitachi, a Japanese construction and electronics company. The movie Interstellar, released in 2015, featured a depiction of a black hole known as Gargantua – and became famous when it closely resembled a picture of an actual black hole taken by NASA. A ring of light surrounds the black hole in two directions, one due to friction-heated material Gargantua has accumulated, one due to the lensing of light around it. The gravity is so intense that light itself is pulled into orbit around Gargantua’s hypothetical horizon and kept there. It took 800 terabytes to fully render the movie and make Gargantua somewhat accurate in terms of light-lensing.

Petabyte

A petabyte is 1 quadrillion bytes, or 1,000 terabytes. This is typically cluster storage, and while it’s available for purchase, it’s very expensive for the average consumer. For comparison, while rendering Interstellar took 800 terabytes, storing it at standard quality takes 1/200th of a terabyte. You could store approximately 2000 DVD quality copies of Interstellar on a petabyte. It took a little less than 5 petabytes to take a picture of the real black hole, M87.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

https://kb.iu.edu/d/ahfr

http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/software-technology/difference-between-unicode-and-ascii/

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3155B.html

https://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gigabyte

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/

The World’s Most Specific Shirt

Elizabeth Technology February 29, 2024

You’ve probably seen some variation of the shirt.

You’re wondering how it’s so wildly specific. You click it, and scroll down, and somehow… somehow the company seems to have made shirts specifically for you, the boyfriend of a Registered Nurse who was born in June, who’s a little crazy with a heart of gold.

And then you notice on other channels, people are getting shirts that say ‘Never mess with a Union Welder born in November with Blue Eyes’. ‘My Boyfriend is a Crazy Libra who loves Fishing and Mountain Biking”. Okay… it’s specific… but no harm, right?

What’s happening?

The Ads

First, some context. Facebook takes information like birth date, gender, likes and dislikes, etc. to hyper-tailor ads directly to specific individuals. On the advertiser’s side, Facebook allows their advertising customers to modify ads depending on group – companies can make multiple ads for their product to better build a brand image for any one customer’s specific demographic profile.

Picture that a company makes hair gel for adolescents as well as young adults, for example. The adult is looking to impress their coworkers, but the kid just wants to prevent helmet hair. The gel does both, but the ad will change the target customer’s view of the product – is it for skateboarders, or is it for professionals? Only a super generic ad could appeal to both, and generic ads do much worse than targeted ones. Luckily, Facebook’s fine-tuned ad program can determine which set of ads the viewer should be seeing, and the company can make two ads, one for skateboarders, and one for young professionals.

However, that’s time consuming, so many ad vendors allow mix-n-match campaigns, where lines are taken from one ad and put in another. An adolescent’s ad would work for most teens if the wording was a little different – see Axe’s body spray ads. Sometimes the company doesn’t even have to make the new lines themselves, they just include a modifiable blank field in the ad space and they’re good to go.

That’s where things go sideways! A blank line in an insurance ad can tell the user that they’ll be eligible for a rate as low as X$ based on their age and gender. A blank line in a kennel ad knows they’re looking for a medium dog over a small cat based on their search history. A blank line in a T-shirt ad tells them that Facebook knows they’re a Gemini, an accountant, of Swedish descent, a regular fisher, an occasional beer-drinker, and more.

Art and More

Even worse, bots that work on similar mechanisms have been caught scraping art from artists and slapping it on cheap T-shirts. Since copyright enforcement is dependent on the copyright owner filing for takedown, shirts with that artwork might get sold before the artist even knows something’s amiss. The shirts are frequently poor-quality rips directly from the artist’s social media account, triggered by comments requesting wearable merch or complimenting the work – the bot determines demand and then harvests it, without human intervention, just like the ad T-shirts.

Sure, the artist can request a takedown each and every time the bots snag their art, but it’s a slog, and the company itself never seems to actually do anything meaningful about the violations. It’s also bad for the artist’s reputation: fans complaining to them about the quality of a shirt they bought may be the first time the artist hears about the art theft, and then explaining to someone that they’ve been scammed is only going to make them angrier. It becomes “How could you let this happen” instead of “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize” – everyone loses except for the ad bot’s shirt company.

The ‘Why’

Before companies like ZapTee and CustomInk, getting a custom shirt meant going to a print shop and paying a hefty price for the final product. As such, shirt companies just didn’t make shirts like these ad bots do. It was unfeasible. If it didn’t sell, it was a waste of production. The closest you could get was “I’m a Proud Mom!” or “Rather be Fishin’”. If you were an artist, and your work was too fringe for major manufacturers to work with, you might have had to buy the screen-printing supplies yourself, build your own website or storefront, source blank shirts, and do things the hard way.

Now, all of that is easily outsourced to these printing companies that specialize in customizable products. The tech has improved so much that they can make money on single shirt sales, where before orders had to be in bulk. It’s honestly incredible. However, customers don’t necessarily understand the mechanisms behind these shirts. The specifics on the shirt are just blank space fill-ins, based on information Facebook gives to the ad. They think they’re seeing a unicorn out in the wild when they see something that relates to them. They’re thinking back to the times where companies couldn’t do this, where everything was geared towards two or three consumer profiles. “Wow, a shirt for Peruvians!” instead of “Oh, Facebook knows I’m Peruvian”.

Or in the case of the art-rippers, they see merch from an artist they really like and respect, and buy it without wondering if it’s official because – once again – they’re thinking back to a time when companies didn’t steal art (not officially, anyway) for shirts. Independent artists had to beg, barter, and network their way onto the front of a T-shirt, there wasn’t any other way to sell art-shirts en masse before silk-screen tech got cheap. Therefore, there’s no way unofficial or stolen art merch exists, it just doesn’t happen!

The Marketing

A company named Signal decided to take out ads mocking Facebook’s hyper-specific targeting by simply filling in a MadLib with demographic spots.

The result is, shockingly, just like the T-shirts! Facebook already knows you pretty well. A trend of ‘hyper-targeting’ took over once social media websites realized that people guard their info from companies but share it willingly with friends, publicly. As a result, it can pinpoint things like your favorite movie, your favorite color, what items you’ve bought online (and post about), your perfect vacation, and how dark you like your coffee, to name a few, all harvested from comments and posts you share with your friends. Ads then generate shirts out of what the site gathers. You can turn off targeted advertising in Google, but that doesn’t mean they’re not gathering information. It just means you’re not seeing the direct results of that. The only way to fight the hyper-targeting is to be vague and lie to the platforms, or stay off of them altogether.

If you or an artist you know gets their work ripped by bots, combatting it is unfortunately pretty difficult. The best you can do is sometimes just cave and make your own branded products via something like RedBubble or FanJoy. Give customers an official way to support their favorite artist, and most of the time, they’ll take it! Making your social media work obnoxiously and obviously watermarked helps, as does making the preview pic low-quality. Fans need to know that you have official channels, and if they buy from anywhere else, they’re not supporting you. If they like it so much that they want to wear it, they should want the artist to keep making more of it! Make that link between your official purchasing channels and their support of your work clear.

Sources:

Reddit.com/r/TargetedShirts

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17177842/facebook-advertising-ads-explained-mark-zuckerberg

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50817561

Lunatic Million Words T-Shirt

Who makes those insanely specific t-shirts on the internet?

Optical Memory

Elizabeth Technology January 30, 2024

Optical storage is defined by IBM as any storage medium that uses a laser to read and write the information. The use of lasers means that more information can be packed into a smaller space than magnetic tape could manage (at the time)! Better quality and longer media time are natural results. A laser burns information into the surface of the media, and then the reading laser, which is less powerful, can decipher these burnt areas into usable data. The surface is usually some sort of metal or dye sandwiched between protective layers of plastic that burns easily, producing ‘pits’ or less reflective areas for the laser to read.

This is why fingerprints and scratches can pose such a problem for reading data; even though you aren’t damaging the actual data storage, like you would be if you scratched a hard drive disk, fingerprints prevent the laser from being able to read the data. Scratch up the plastic layer above the dye, and the data’s as good as destroyed.

Destroying data can be even more complete than that, even. Shredding the disc in a capable paper shredder (ONLY IF IT SAYS IT CAN SHRED DISCS) destroys the data, as does microwaving the disc (don’t do that – most discs contain some amount of metal, and that can damage your microwave badly enough to be dangerous).

CDs

“Burning a CD” replaced “making a mix tape” when both CDs and downloadable music were available to teenagers, and for good reason. The amount of content may be roughly the same, but the quality is significantly higher.

Most CDs are CD-Rs – disks that can only be written on once but can be read until the end of time. A CD-ROM is just a CD-R that’s been used! The average CD-R has room for about an album’s worth of music, and maybe a hidden track or two, about 75-80 minutes depending on the manufacturer of the disc. Alternatively, if you’d like to store data instead of high-quality audio, you’ll get about 700 MB of data onto a single disc.

To burn a CD, you’d need an optical drive that’s capable of also lasering information into the disc, which wasn’t always the standard. The laser will burn the information into the metal-dye mix behind the plastic coating the outside of the disc, which permanently changes how reflective those sections are. This makes it possible to visually tell what has and hasn’t been used on a disc yet, and CD-Rs can be burnt in multiple sessions! Data is typically burnt from the center outwards.

But everybody knows about CD-Rs. What about CD-RWs, their much fussier brethren?

CD-RW

The primary difference between a  CD-R and a CD-RW is the dye used in the layers that the optical drives can read. CD-RWs are burnt less deeply than CD-Rs, but as a result, they take a more sensitive reader. Early disc readers sometimes can’t read more modern CD-RWs as a result!

To reuse the disc, one has to blank it first (the same drive that can write a CD-RW in the first place should also be able to blank it), which takes time. After it’s been wiped, new data can be put onto the disc again. CD-RWs wear out quicker than other memory media as a result of their medium. That wafer-thin dye layer can only handle being rearranged so many times before it loses the ability to actually hold the data. It’s pretty unlikely that the average user could hit that re-write limit, but it’s more possible than, say, a hard drive, which has a re-write life about 100 times longer than the re-write life of a CD-RW.

DVDs

DVDs store significantly more data than CDs do, even though they take up about the same space. Where a CD can hold about 700 MB, a DVD can hold up to 4.7 GB. This is enough for most movies, but if the movie is especially long or has a lot of other extra features, it has to be double layered, which can store up to 9 GB. Why can it hold so much more in the same space?

The long answer is that there are a number of small differences that ultimately lead to a DVD having more burnable space, including a closer ‘laser spiral’ (the track a laser burns, like the grooves in a vinyl record), as well as smaller readable pockets. It all adds up into more data storage, but a more expensive product as well.

DVD +R DL

That double-layering mentioned earlier isn’t present on every disc. Sometime in the later 2000s, double layer discs hit the market at about the same price as single layer discs (although that changed over time). The first layer that the laser can read is made of a semi-transparent dye, so the laser can penetrate it to reach the other layer.

Most modern DVD drives can read dual layer, but if your computer is especially old, it would be wise to check its specs first – DVD readers programmed before their release might not understand the second layer, and readers that can read them might not be able to write to them. DLs are a great invention, it’s just a struggle to find good disc readers when everything is switching to digital.

Compatibility

CD players aren’t usually also able to play DVDs. CDs came first, and the reader would have to be forwards compatible. Obviously, this would have taken a time machine to actually assemble. Picture expecting a record player to read a CD! The gap between the two is almost that large. Nowadays, the manufacturing standard seems to be a DVD player with CD compatibility tacked on. You should double check before you buy a disc reader to be sure it can do everything you want it to, but it’s less common to see CD-Only tech when a DVD reader is only slightly more expensive to create, and can work backwards.

FlexPlay Self-Destructing Entertainment

Remember FlexPlay self-destructing entertainment? The disc that was meant to simulate a rental and could have generated literal tons of trash per family, per year? The self-destructing medium that the disc was coated in turned very dark red to thwart the disc reader’s lasers! The pits aren’t directly on the surface of the DVD, they’re under a couple of layers of plastic. All FlexPlay had to do was sandwich an additional layer of dye between the plastic and the metal/dye that’s being inscribed upon. When that dye obscures the data below it, it’s as good as gone! The laser can no longer get through to the information and read it. Even Blu-Ray tech was thwarted by the dye.

Blu-Ray

Blu-Ray discs have higher visual quality than DVDs because they hold even more information. The blue-ray technology enables the pits to be even closer together, so more optical data can be crammed into the same space. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, which shrinks the necessary pit size! A single-layer Blu-Ray disc can hold up to 25 GB of information! Blu-Ray discs are most commonly used for entertainment media rather than storage. Disc readers have to be specifically compatible with that blue laser technology, rather than just programmed for it. An ordinary DVD player may be able to play a CD, but it wouldn’t be able to fully read a pit in a Blu-Ray disc before that pit’s passed the reader.

Right now, the state of the art is Blu-Ray: most good Blu-Ray readers are backwards compatible with DVDs and CDs. However, many companies still sell ordinary DVDs alongside their Blu-ray releases due to cost. If you have a DVD player, you can probably hold off on upgrading, at least for a little while longer.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/technology/optical-storage

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000149930/what-are-the-different-cd-and-dvd-media-formats-available

http://www.osta.org/technology/cdqa13.htm

All about CD-R and CD-RW

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-a-dvd-and-how-does/

https://kodakdigitizing.com/blogs/news/cd-vs-dvd-how-are-they-different

http://recordhead.biz/difference-blu-ray-dvd/

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000147805/guide-to-optical-disk-drives-and-optical-discs

Internet Of Things Items Can Create Vulnerability

Elizabeth Technology January 23, 2024

Internet of Things items are convenient, otherwise they wouldn’t be selling. At least not next to regular, non-wifi-enabled items. They don’t even have to be connected to the internet, and they should stay that way!

An Internet of Things item, or an IoT item, is a device that has a WiFi- or network-enabled computer in it to make the consumer’s use of it easier. This includes things like WiFi-enabled/networked washing and drying machines, ovens, fridges, mini-fridges, coffee makers, lamps, embedded lights, etc. anything can be an IoT item, if it’s got WiFi capability.

Network Entry Point

Internet of Things items, when connected to WiFi, represent a weak link in the chain. They’re poorly protected, they’re designed to favor user friendliness over all else, and they’re usually always on. You likely don’t unplug your fridge or washing machine when you go to bed – that computer may sleep, but it’s not off. You probably don’t disconnect the internet when you go to bed, either. Some devices take advantage of this, and only schedule updates for late at night so you don’t notice any service interruptions. Unfortunately, their strengths are their weaknesses, and an always-open port is a dream for hackers.

Outdated Password Policies

Internet of Things items are rarely password protected, and if they are, many users don’t bother actually changing the password from the factory default. This makes them excellent places to start probing for weaknesses in the network!

Assuming someone’s hacking into a place to ding it with ransomware, there are a number of worthy targets: corporate offices, nuclear facilities, hospitals, etc. are all staffed by people, and people like their coffee. A well-meaning coworker bringing in an internet-enabled coffee machine for his coworkers is suddenly the source of a critical network vulnerability, an open port in an otherwise well-defended network!

If the coffee machine, or vending machine, or the lights are IoT items, they need to be air-gapped from the networks supplying critical data within the center (or cut off from the network completely), the same way outside computers are. The devices are simply unable to protect themselves in the same way a PC or phone is – there’s no way to download a suitable antivirus. If something gets past a firewall, and that password’s still default or nonexistent, there’s effectively no second layer of protection for IoT devices.

Malware

For example, hacking into a fridge is not nearly as hard as hacking into an old PC. Even great antivirus can struggle with traffic coming from inside the network, and IoT devices are often missed in security checkups. After all, when McAfee or Norton or Kaspersky recommends you scan your computer, are they offering to scan your lightbulbs as well?

Once they’re in, the entire network is vulnerable. Ransomware events with no obvious cause, malware that’s suddenly deleted all the files on a server, stolen data and stolen WiFi – all of it’s possible with IoT devices. There’s more to gain than just bots for the botnet, which is why hackers keep going after these IoT items.

IoT devices are also much easier to overwhelm to gain access, even with firewalls and effective load balancing. DoSing an IoT item can be as simple as scanning it. No, really. A team in the UK found that they could shut down turbines in a wind farm by scanning them. The computers inside weren’t equipped to handle both a network scan and their other computing duties at the same time. Many user devices are in the same spot or worse!

Security

Besides turbines, items like cameras and door locks probably shouldn’t be connected to the internet just yet. A terrifying string of hacks let strangers view doorbell and baby monitoring cameras, for example, because the cameras themselves were difficult to defend even though the network was protected by a router. This is terrible for obvious reasons and class action suits were filed soon after. It even happened accidentally; Nest users would occasionally end up viewing other people’s cameras accidentally, a bug in the system that was only fixed after complaints were made. A consistent pattern is forming, here: security patches are only issued after vulnerabilities are discovered by the consumer! Any other type of programming wouldn’t get away with this without some public outcry – you shouldn’t have to become a victim of a security flaw to get it fixed.

And then there’s things that physically interact with the security features of a house, like electronic locks. There’s nothing wrong in theory with a password lock. However, electronics are not inherently more secure than physical locks, and adding in WiFi only gives lockpickers another ‘in’. Hacking the lock could lead to being locked out of your own home, or worse. Besides, a regular lock will never unlock itself because its battery died, or because you sat down on the fob while getting on your bike or into your car. If you do want a password lock, it’s better to get one that’s not network enabled.

We aren’t quite at the point where hacked self-driving cars are a legitimate issue, although the danger is growing on the horizon. Cars are also poorly protected, computer wise.

BotNets

The fridge doesn’t need a quadcore processor and 8 GB of RAM to tell you that it’s at the wrong temperature, or that the door’s been left open and you should check the milk. The voice-controlled lightbulbs only need enough power to cycle through colors. IoT items are weak. However, that doesn’t mean they can’t be used for things like Botnets, even if your main PC wards off botnet software.

Botnets are networks of illegitimately linked computers used to do things like DDoSing, brute-forcing passwords, and all other kinds of shenanigans that a single computer can’t do alone. By combining the computing ability of literally thousands of devices, a hacker can turn a fridge into part of a supercomputer. No one ant can sustain an attack on another colony, but an entire swarm of ants can!

This is another reason tech experts are worried about IoT items becoming widely used. Their basic vulnerabilities give skilled hackers the ability to ding well-protected sites and fish for passwords even if the network they’re targeting doesn’t have any IoT items on them. It’s a network of weaponizable computers just waiting to be exploited. Remember, password protect your devices!

Source:

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/06/how-to-hack-an-iot-device/

How to Protect Your IoT Product from Hackers

https://cisomag.eccouncil.org/10-iot-security-incidents-that-make-you-feel-less-secure/

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16630199/1/orange-v-ring-llc/

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?

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.

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.

What Is Short-Circuiting?

Elizabeth Technology December 5, 2023

What’s a Short Circuit?

A short circuit is when something comes into contact with an electric current, and unintentionally gives it a shorter path. For example, sticking a fork into an active toaster will result in the fork redirecting the electricity through the fork, because it’s an easier path. Fun fact: the reason the coils inside the toaster get hot is because the path the electricity travels through has a lot of resistance. The fork is a much shorter path, but the other end is usually connected to a human body – which doesn’t handle electricity running through it very well. Old fashioned Incandescent lightbulbs work in the same way, but they’re juiced up so much that they produce both heat and light.

So why does this break things inside the computer? Well, not everything in the computer is meant to run off of 120V of pure outlet-supplied house power. If that flow of electricity comes into contact with a piece of hardware not made to handle it, the hardware fails, sometimes irreparably.

Static shock on the very delicate parts can short circuit them too. Be sure you’re grounded and charge-free before touching the computer’s insides!

What’s a Hardware Failure?

The difference between hardware and software is the difference between the machine and the things it does, basically. The CD tray is hardware, but the disk it’s holding contains software. A video game is software, the controller you use to interact with it is hardware! Music files on your computer? Software. Speakers to listen to it? Hardware! Hardware failure can be anything from the Wi-Fi receiver getting bent out of shape, to the CD tray getting stuck, or pins/solder coming loose inside the machine, and while software failure can be caused by hardware trouble, it can also happen spontaneously. If the computer blue screens? That’s a software failure. If the fan starts to sound like it’s hitting something repeatedly? Hardware!

The really fun issues are the ones that could be both: is your screen showing funny colors because a cord is pinched, or because something important in the software for the display was deleted?

What’s a Kernel Failure?

A kernel failure is when things happen to confuse the kernel, the essential bit of software that keeps programs from trying to pull the same file all at once. If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft Word, you might’ve experienced trying (and being unable) to move a file in the file selector while the document is still open. The kernel doesn’t control that, but it’s a similar principle. The file selector won’t move the doc as long as it’s open because you’re also using it – more specifically, Word is using it and can’t share. You have to close the document to let the file selector ‘use’ it to move it.

The kernel operates on similar principles: when one thing is using essential software, the kernel keeps other things from using that software until the first program is done with it. It keeps a schedule of what programs get to use which assets and when. While that might make it sound like it’s a software thing, both hardware and software can cause kernel panics. Incompatible driver extensions and incompatible or corrupted RAM are two of the most common causes.

What’s a Blue Screen Error, and What’s a Crash?

If you’ve ever owned or worked long-term on a Windows computer, you might have seen this one before :The Blue Screen of Death. A blue-screen happens when an illegal operation confuses the computer and causes it to shut down. For example, if a program’s permissions are read only, but another program tries to write on it, the computer may bluescreen and restart. If a program tries to use a piece of software reserved only for the operating system, the computer blue-screens and restarts.  Permissions violations, and illegal operations both cause blue-screening, but hardware failure is sometimes a cause too.

A crash is a pretty broad term. Anything that brings the computer to a stop can be a crash. Overloading it? Crash. Blue screen? Considered a crash. It shuts off randomly, and the tech can’t tell what caused it? Crash!

Sources: http://thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

What is a short circuit?

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/electrictoasters.html

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/sbs/windows/troubleshoot-blue-screen-errors-5c62726c-6489-52da-a372-3f73142c14ad?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

(original page no longer available – web archiving service is fundraising as of December 2020, you have been warned) https://web.archive.org/web/20030823202532/http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=150314

What Is A V-Tuber Concert?

Elizabeth Technology November 28, 2023

A V-Tuber is the colloquial name for a virtual entertainer puppeted by a real person. A digital character onscreen blinks, moves their hands, looks around, and opens their mouth to talk at the same time as the person controlling them behind the scenes does. The software to do this is quite complex – the program controlling the model often works through a camera pointed at the real user (although some people do use things like pedals and controllers to control the model’s actions). A one-to-one real-time movement-matching simulation like the kind V-Tubers use are no easy feat, and they’re always getting better. The more recent ones are good enough to dance live with!

Why Have Concerts With These Things?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, the V-Tuber’s onscreen model can do things humans just can’t! The model can wear outfits that defy gravity, it can jump off cliffs or up through clouds, it can jump through sparklers and fireworks onscreen without ever risking anyone being burned, and it can do all this while still tethered to its owner and dancing in time. Speaking of which, while pre-recorded routines are possible, the singer is often still singing and dancing live offstage as well, although the complexity and mix of the routine can vary from show to show. It’s still live!

Secondly, a V-Tuber is mainly recognized through their model – not their own face. This grants them anonymity that many pop stars and internet celebrities don’t have, as well as a break from a cutthroat pop industry that insists singers be young, size 0, and pretty for as long as possible even at the expense of their health, both long and short term. The V-Tuber model does not suffer to meet these nightmarish standards, and the singer behind the model can focus harder on their voice and dancing.  

Even for the ones who focus on video games and livestreaming instead of dancing and singing, the anonymity of their V-Tuber model is a serious plus. While it doesn’t eliminate the risk of being doxxed, it makes existing in public a lot easier! Walking around a Twitch or gaming convention anonymously is just not possible for YouTubers who show themselves on-screen. For V-Tubers, it’s the default.

A Matter of Movement

With the pros out of the way, there are cons: namely that if they started out on a platform like YouTube, they may not be ready for a concert. A performance at a Cosplay Arts Festival in July of 2023 went viral on TikTok because the person on screen, the V-Tuber Dacapo, wasn’t dancing. The most movement came when the character model’s bangs were swept out of his eyes during an intense part of the song, which made his many fans in the crowd go absolutely nuts, and even that didn’t come with an animation. While the person behind Dacapo did sing the cover of the song themselves, the model wasn’t rigged for anything more intense than looking around and moving side-to-side – the most movement he could do live was sway. One arm was frozen in place holding a cigarette as a stylistic choice, and this was not changed for the concert. Neither was the framing of the character, who is normally only seen from the chest up. This culminated in a performance with some very technically impressive singing paired with the sort of setup you see from livestreamers, but blown up twenty feet tall.  (He has a replay on his official channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2FNn8d5o4A&ab_channel=DacapoCh.%E3%80%90ARP%E3%80%91)

It could hardly be called a waste of money, because the concert itself was free with the purchase of a ticket to the cosplay con it was hosted at, but it felt stiff. That model is part of a group of V-Tubers pulled together by the Thailand-based Algorhythm Project, which put Dacapo into a boy group with a couple of other singers. He debuted under that project – he was the fastest-growing member of it. This guy didn’t get famous by accident. For them to not have an alternate model for concerts, or at least modify the current one so it could move more freely, feels like an oversight! Especially when other V-Tubers prove it can be done.

That said, the next concert will probably be better – no performer has a flawless first stage show, no matter what their tech looks like.

Sources: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/vtuber-dacapo-receives-support-from-ironmouse-after-concert-sparks-backlash-2206437/

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