skuzz

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I'm convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They'd much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer's opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is "scary" or challenges their worldview.

It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom's bathroom.

So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a "career" too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who's maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.

That being said, traditional media definitely hasn't adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I just realized how odd it would be to see people walking around in brandless clothes. As odd as when someone removes all the badges from their car.

The advertising has been so prevalent for so long that it has been normalized. Fascinating.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

America does have a greater than zero percentage of spineless bootlickers, more interested in upvotes and likes than their own freedom, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

A vehicle as a real tool? Blasphemy! We don't do that here in America.

Where the hell would we mount the dashboard nacho cheese dispenser and 42" plasma touch display in a standard truck?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Also Democrats: "We're still doing nothing."

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Considering in a sane timeline, every member of ICE would all be tried in international courts for crimes against humanity, I'd hope everyone would be breaking all their noses.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

DenverCircleJerk had become the unofficial real Denver for a while now.

For real fun, though, open some of your comments in Denver, and many other subs in a private browser. They likely won't show up. Many subs seem very heavy at shadowbanning so many comments in recent months.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Intel was technologically cooked when the first AMD Athlon came out, architecturally, and business-wise. They should have kicked true r&d into high-gear and didn't, really. The Core processors were something, but more of a nudge than something to stay relevant in the 21st century. If Apple can finally crack modems, Qualcomm will be next, although their mil/gov stuff may keep them in business as purely a contractor. Cisco is pretty close too, but they're too skilled at acquisitions as a method to keep staying relevant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War

Seeing real life mimicking fiction so fast is a bit disturbing. Although this series has always been creepily prescient.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Most Second amendment people are either white racists

They're also often larpers that like buying toys and playing pretend. True action is foreign to them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Preach. We're pathetic losers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

So what exactly are you doing to help, then?

Right now, anything is something. This is an unprecedented situation in 250 years of America. Things are slowly coming together, but it is new territory. Unlike the developed world, America binds work/health/insurance/vacation/home/car/life very tightly together. Even a week of missed work can result in homelessness, sickness, death. This is by design so the ruling class can limit movement. This all needs to be fixed first thing once we're done destroying evil, but in the now, we have to work how we can, when we can, where we can.

I wouldn't be surprised if the corpo media focus on minor aircraft crashes (not all minor, but non-fatal collisions at airports, and personal craft going down are commonplace anytime) is to make people scared to fly to DC.

Donate anything you can afford to local charities, every little bit helps. Funding is being drained all over the place and the ripple effects are only beginning. Write letters to your leadership so they know their constituents are pissed and they better do what they can.

Learn things in your skill-set that may be helpful in the coming chaos, alternate means of communication, computers, networking, radios, transportation, maps, routes, memorizing information.

Store food so you can go without grocery stores for a few months if you have to.

Be proactive on goings on, support protesting Tesla and corpo protests. Don't buy things. Check out how people just not going to Target has been going. Silly protests like hacking road crossing buttons in Silicon Valley, law suits, letters, anything to slow down the morons that think they're in charge. It's boots on the ground, it's psyops, its money, its visual, its presence, it is everything to cause noise and confusion right back at them.

Delay buying that new iPhone. Cancel Amazon Prime. Read books. Books on history. Stay informed. If you see someone harassed on the street, at the bare minimum, video broadcast it, intervene if you're brave.

Once the billionaire class wakes up and realizes that we, not an orange blumpkin, nor a muskrat actually make them money, they'll change their tune or miss out on all that sweet sweet revenue. (Who knows, maybe even grow a conscience, but let us not be delusional.) With or without them, however, we can't give up on hope.

Even those with the means to leave are doing their part by taking talent away from the US which will cripple the Machine of Evil long-term. They can help from the outside by helping those on the inside stay informed to the real news.

No one thing is going to change this, it has to be all things at the same time.

So stop being a fatalist, what shit are you doing? If you are a member of planet Earth, you should be doing something.

 

AT&T (T) is in talks to acquire Lumen Technologies' (LUMN), consumer fiber operations, in a deal that could value the unit at more than $5.5 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Shares of Lumen were down more than 14% after the report.

The terms, which are not yet finalized, could change or the talks might still collapse, according to the report.

Both Lumen and AT&T declined to comment on Reuters requests.

The potential move to offload the fiber business, which provides high-speed internet services to residential customers, comes as Lumen is doubling down on the AI boom to power its near-term growth, while grappling with a rapid decline of its legacy business.

Lumen kicked off a process to sell its consumer fiber operations, Reuters reported in December.

The fiber-optic cable provider has over 1,700 wire centers across its total network, with consumer fiber available in about 400 of them.

 

In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate.

That person was Mark Klein, who died on March 8 this year from cancer. He was 79.

After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.

The evidence he gathered and shared led to two lawsuits that exposed the extent to which US citizens were being spied on by their own government in the post-9/11 world. Klein faced legal pressure, death threats, and the constant fear of ruin, to get his story out and tell the public what was going on. But Klein regretted nothing.

 

A while back, AT&T and TransUnion introduced a service called Branded Call Display to help people figure out if a business call was real or just another scam. When companies signed up for this feature, their name and logo would show up on your phone screen when they called.

...

Soon, people will see the reason why a business is calling before they even pick up. You won’t have to download anything or tweak your settings—it’ll just show up automatically.

...

Instead of just a company name, you might see messages like ‘delivery service,’ ‘refill reminder,’ or ‘patient callback’ when a business calls. If you ordered food, you’d instantly know it was your driver instead of some random unknown number.

This update is only rolling out to Android users for now since it’s part of the same Branded Call Display system. But according to James Garvert, a senior VP at TransUnion, this feature is likely to become available for all phones eventually.

 

T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Vistar Media, the leading provider of technology solutions for digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertisements reaching millions of consumers throughout their daily lives.

Through the T-Mobile Advertising Solutions business, T-Mobile will acquire all of Vistar’s industry-leading capabilities. This includes its intelligent marketplace and technology solutions for buying, selling and managing media campaigns across a global network of more than 1.1 million digital screens provided by nearly 370 OOH media owners and serving more than 3,000 brand partner advertisers.

 

AT&T agreed to pay a $13 million fine because it gave customer bill information to a vendor in order to create personalized videos, then allegedly failed to ensure that the vendor destroyed the data when it was no longer needed. In addition to the fine, AT&T agreed in a consent decree announced today by the Federal Communications Commission to stricter controls on sharing data with vendors.

In January 2023, years after the data was supposed to be destroyed, the vendor suffered a breach "when threat actors accessed the vendor's cloud environment and ultimately exfiltrated AT&T customer information," the FCC said. Information related to 8.9 million AT&T wireless customers was exposed.

Phone companies are required by law to protect customer information, and AT&T should not have merely relied on third-party firms' assurances that they destroyed data when it was no longer needed, the FCC said.

 

The Dinosaur Fire near NCAR coincided with a heat wave and severe drought in Boulder County. ‘We don’t have a ton of concern for public safety at this time,’ said Jennifer Ciplet, public information officer with the City of Boulder, around 1:30 p.m. However, officials are urging nearby residents to have a ‘go bag’ ready in case conditions change.

 

The data of nearly all customers of the telecommunications giant AT&T was downloaded to a third-party platform in a security breach, the company said Friday...

Approximately 109 million customer accounts were impacted, according to AT&T, which said that it currently doesn’t believe that the data is publicly available.

“The data does not contain the content of calls or texts, personal information such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other personally identifiable information,” AT&T said Friday.

The compromised data also doesn’t include some information typically seen in usage details, such as the time stamp of calls or texts, the company said, or customer names. AT&T, however, said that there are often ways using publicly available online tools to find the name associated with a specific telephone number...

AT&T identified the third-party platform as Snowflake and said that the incident was limited to an AT&T workspace on that cloud company’s platform and did not impact its network.

 

Relevant Portion:

With both industry leaders – AT&T and Verizon – on board, AST SpaceMobile is now uniquely positioned to achieve a groundbreaking feat: target 100% geographical coverage throughout the continental U.S., the most valuable wireless market in the world.

The key to unlocking this ubiquitous coverage lies in the power of the premium 850 MHz low-band spectrum, which offers superior signal penetration in the low band cellular range. AT&T and Verizon together will share with AST SpaceMobile a portion of their respective bands of 850 MHz low-band spectrum to enable nationwide satellite coverage.

 

AT&T is imposing $10 and $20 monthly price hikes on users of older unlimited wireless plans starting in August 2024, the company announced. The single-line price of these 10 "retired" plans will increase by $10 per month, while customers with multiple lines on a plan will be hit with a total monthly increase of $20.

...

The $10 and $20 price increases "affect most of our older unlimited plans," AT&T said. The list of affected plans is as follows:

    AT&T Unlimited & More Premium
    AT&T Unlimited Choice Enhanced
    AT&T Unlimited & More
    AT&T Unlimited Choice II
    AT&T Unlimited Plus
    AT&T Unlimited Choice
    AT&T Unlimited Plan
    AT&T Unlimited Plus Enhanced
    AT&T Unlimited Value Plan
    AT&T Unlimited Plan (with TV)
 

The US government has provided more detail on how a former AT&T executive allegedly bribed a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza is set to go on trial in September 2024 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully influence then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in October 2022 in connection with the alleged illegal influence campaign and said it was "committed to ensuring that this never happens again."

US government prosecutors offered a preview of their case against La Schiazza in a filing on Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A contract lobbyist hired by AT&T "is expected to testify that AT&T successfully passed two major pieces of legislation after the company started making payments to Individual FR-1."

The Madigan ally referred to in the court document as "Individual FR-1" is former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a Chicago Tribune article notes. Acevedo, who was Madigan's assistant majority leader in the Illinois House before retiring in 2017, was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in 2022. Madigan left his House speaker post in 2021.

 

AT&T doesn't charge users extra to access its fastest 5G networks, but it soon may charge more to let people get priority access to its network during busier times. In an app update published in the iOS App Store on Monday, the company detailed a new add-on feature called "Turbo."

While the add-on did not appear accessible inside the updated app, a description alongside the update says that you can add "AT&T Turbo" to a line on your account which will "provide uninterrupted network speeds during peak traffic times." In short, pay more for better access to AT&T's network when it's busy.

 

A temporary network disruption that affected AT&T customers in the U.S. Thursday was caused by a software update, the company said.

AT&T told ABC News in a statement ABC News that the outage was not a cyberattack but caused by "the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network."

"We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve," the statement continued.

The software update went wrong, according to preliminary information from two sources familiar with the situation.

Sources have told ABC News that there was nothing nefarious or malicious about the incident.

The outage was not caused by an external actor, according to a source familiar with the situation. AT&T performs updates regularly, according to the source.

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