The Blog Experiment | Technology Nonsense and Internet Tripe

Save $75: Walmart’s 10-foot-tall skeleton named Steve is on sale for $174, down from its typical list price of $249. It might just be the next best thing to Home Depot’s viral, sold-out giant skeleton. Opens in a new window Credit: Walmart Steve the Poseable 10′ Skeleton $174.00 at Walmart $249.00 Save $75.00 Get Deal Walmart might have the deal to make all your spooky season dreams come true. Its 10-foot skeleton decoration, dubbed Steve, is $75 off on the heels of Amazon’s Prime Day. Typically, Steve will run you a $249 but its price is reduced 30 percent to $174. Walmart’s giant, 10-foot skeleton is not the viral giant skeleton you might’ve seen everywhere for the past few years. Home Depot’s Skelly has become a Halloween staple since its debut in 2020. But Skelly, which retails for $299, is currently out of stock, meaning ol’ Steve might be your next best option. Still, Walmart’s Steve is pretty massive and can be put into different poses — so let your creativity run wild this Halloween season.A 10-foot skeleton named Steve is on sale at Walmart

Dateline: Woking, 10th October 2024.Do you think that getting rid of cash will reduce crime or increase it? We can look at Scandinavia for indicators, since there are a great many people in Scandinavia who cannot remember when they last used cash. Cash-related crimes such as bank robbery are down (twenty years ago Denmark had 200 bank robberies per annum, last year it had none) as is tax evasion. The Swedish black market appears to have contracted, just as cashless campaigner Bjorn (from ABBA) and others had hoped.Share In the future, everyone will be famous for 15MbDifferent Kinds Of CrimeThe presence of cash means the presence of criminals and many of them are violent. Not only guns, but all sorts of weapons. This guy did not smash his car through the doors of a grocery store in England to threaten staff and demand credit card receipts. He demanded cash.(It’s not a purely English problem. There were nearly 900 robberies using a vehicle as a weapon in the US in 2022.)In largely cashless Sweden, online crime has surged, with criminals taking more than $100m in 2023 through a variety of scams. Does this $100m make Sweden a “high crime” country as the article implies? No, it does not. I would think that Swedish citizens are more concerned about violent gang warfare and a tripling of the murder rate, but for comparison according to UK Finance the equivalent scams in the UK were well over $1 billion back in 2022.While cash attracts…Cash And Crime

Lydia Bach, a 15-year-old sophomore living in New York City, has a message for adults who think teens can’t possibly experience burnout.”If people want to find out what teens are burnt out about, they have to just take a look at the world,” Bach says, rattling off stressors like gun violence and global conflict, not to mention the “ever-looming threat that we actually won’t have a future because of climate change.” Now, she says, imagine you’re a high school student also trying to constantly “be better” and “do better,” because “productivity culture” demands regular self-improvement. Meanwhile, you’re painfully aware of the economic stakes of your high school career. Without a high grade point average, you might not get into the good college, which will set you up for the well-paying job with health insurance. Trying to meet high expectations set by parents, teachers, coaches, peers, and even themselves, teens have to also contend with social media. The unpredictable algorithmic force that is the internet often amplifies the different pressures that teens feel, according to a new report on grind culture from Common Sense Media, the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard School of Education, and Indiana University. SEE ALSO: Why teens are telling strangers their secrets online For teens, these pressures include feeling like they need to have a “game plan” for their future; that they must rack up “exceptional” achievements; and that they should look and present themselves in a certain way. More than a quarter of the 1,545…Teens feel burnt out. Social media can make it worse.

Listen up, losers: We can tell when your posts are made with an audience in mind and we don’t like it. It sounds like ChatGPT, it is the lowest possible denominator of posting, and, worst of all, it’s boring.I come to you with a solution: Delete your drafts. It’s a strategy I learned with a fair bit of hesitance — why work so hard just to trash it all — but one that’s paid off. My journey in deleting began in 2022 when I attended a writers workshop in need of a creative reset. I was paralyzed not with fear but with an obligation to an imagined reader. After years of getting paid to write, I had stopped writing it for the good of the story and started writing it for an audience — the Mashable audience, the NPR audience, or some other invented audience that might enjoy the piece, take something from the piece, and, importantly, give me money for writing the piece. Soon enough, a good idea had been reduced to something boring, watered-down from its initial promise.  The pressure creatives feel to constantly produce content for an audience — and ultimately for validation — can ruin our ability to actually create interesting work.My mentor at the workshop recommended I try something new: Write the work and let my brain take it where it takes it, whether that’s with an audience in mind or not, and when I felt it was perfected — that moment I would typically send it to an…Have writer's block? Delete your drafts.

Another powerful hurricane is barreling towards Florida directly on the heels of the devastation wrought across multiple states by Hurricane Helene. Hurricane Milton has strengthened into a Category 5 storm that is all but certain to make landfall in Florida as soon as Wednesday. Mashable has the info on the latest projections for where and when the storm might hit via forecasting spaghetti models. But the long and short of it is that a major hurricane is once again heading for the state. “Milton can bring a variety of life-threatening dangers, including an extreme storm surge of 10-15 feet along and near the coast, including in the Tampa Bay area, destructive winds and major flooding to one of the most densely populated parts of Florida, the I-4 corridor, especially from Tampa toward Orlando,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter.  Tweet may have been deleted But, because the internet is the internet, there has been loads of fake information circulating about the dangerous storm. While Floridians should expect another damaging hurricane, they can also expect to see more misinformation about Milton. Milton is not a HAARP ‘weather weapon’ that ‘they’ can controlThis shouldn’t be something that we need to explain but, no, neither the government nor some nefarious “they” are able to generate a storm to unleash on its own citizens. But that is something that’s circulating online ahead of Milton’s landfall. Typically speaking, these sorts of conspiracy theories are coming from rightwing accounts that specialize in trafficking that kind of misinformation….Hurricane Milton: Debunking online conspiracy theories as the storm looms

Dateline: Kampala, 4th October 2024.Earlier this year The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a warning about the “growing abuse” of QR codes and it is certainly the case that QR crime is growing. So given that we saw the 50th anniversary of the first barcode transaction this year, perhaps we should start thinking about what will come next.ShareJet PropelledFifty years ago, in June 1974, the first swipe of a Universal Product Code (UPC) standard black and white stripes barcode occurred at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. (It was for a 67-cent pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum, by the way).Twenty years on from that, in 1994, Mr. Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of parts that zoomed past on the assembly line at the Toyota car parts factory where he worked. He couldn’t help but wonder why they were still using those limited capacity 1970s barcodes when there was so much more data that needed to be read. After studying a game of Go, he came up with the two-dimensional barcodes that we now know as the QR Code.Twenty years on and in 2014, QR codes were being used for all sorts of things and Mr. Hara was awarded the Europen Inventor Awards “Popular Prize” and which point he said that that QR codes would likely only last about a decade before they were replaced by something more sophisticated.Well, they haven’t been yet, and here we are in 2024, and QR codes are everywhere. Was Mr. Hara wrong?with…QR Codes Are A Fraud Risk

Dateline: Chicago, 1st October 2024.Here’s a way of improving the payments infrastructure and extending inclusion by using circulating bank-issued cheques instead of cash as a means of exchange. I’ll call it the d-cheque scheme and I’ll explain it using paper as the implementation.SharePayments PushThe d-cheque scheme works in this way. Customers are given books of cheques that are preprinted with a maximum amount and protected with a simple anti-rewriting mechanism such as perforations with the same amount on them. To avoid the problem of cheques bouncing and the uncertainties related to clearing (and to obviate the need for any form of cheque guarantee card, as we used to have in the UK) the value of the cheques given to any customer is against money that is held in an interest-bearing account for them.Subscribe nowSo, for example, I would ask Citi for $100 in d-cheques. Citi then gives me a book of ten maximum $10 cheques. The $100 is moved from my checking account to an interest-bearing deposit account solely for the purpose of backing the cheques. The cheques would be valid for, say, two years.When I want to pay my gardener $20, I sign two of the cheques and give them to her. Now that the cheques have been signed by the owner, the gardener can use them in lieu of cash, up until the expiry date – no need to pay them into a bank account, which is the time-consuming and expensive part. She can use them to pay…Deposits And Cheques

Snapchat (Snap) has been deceptively marketing itself to young people despite monumental risks of sexual scams (sextortion), according to New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres. The state filed a lawsuit against the platform in early September, alleging it did not do enough to warn users of online risks despite employees waving red flags. New Mexico’s suit claims that the platform weighed the cost of addressing widespread child grooming and decided it wasn’t worth the administrative burden, despite warnings that the problem was becoming more common among teens. Internal communications show the company believed the task “should not be its responsibility,” and safety staff documented that 90 percent of reports were ignored in favor of automatic prompts telling users to merely “block the other person.”The newly unredacted complaint points to a 2022 internal analysis showing company employees were fielding around 10,000 reports of sextortion each month. Those numbers are most likely grossly underestimated, the company noted internally, as victims frequently choose not to report intimidation. Executives also said they couldn’t actually verify user ages, and that user reports, as well as known perpetrators, were “falling through the cracks.” SEE ALSO: X just released its first transparency report in years. Here’s what they aren’t saying. “We continue to evolve our safety mechanisms and policies, from leveraging advanced technology to detect and block certain activity, to prohibiting friending from suspicious accounts, to working alongside law enforcement and government agencies, among so much more,” a company spokesperson said in a comment on the filing.”We…Snapchat allowed sextortion, grooming to proliferate, lawsuit claims

Reddit is changing its rules in a way that may ensure its mods never go rogue again.On Monday, Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler, announced in a post on the platform’s r/modnews subreddit that the company was changing Community Type settings rules. Going forward, moderators will be required to submit a request to Reddit instead of being able to just change the setting immediately on their own.Community Type settings on subreddits are typically set by moderators and change a subreddit’s visibility from public view to restricted or private. Mods can also change the Community Type settings from SFW (safe for work) to NSFW (not safe for work), which restrict access to the group by age. SEE ALSO: Reddit CEO hints that subreddit paywalls are on the way According to Nestler, in an interview with The Verge, Reddit has been talking about this change behind-the-scenes since she joined the company in 2021.”When a public community goes private, all redditors (even members of that community) lose access to the community and its content,” Nestler said in the announcement posted on Reddit. “Outside of extenuating circumstances, communities should honor the expectations they set — public communities should remain accessible to all; private communities should remain private.”Stifling future Reddit protestsWhether or not Reddit has been discussing this change prior to the Reddit blackout protests of last year, it’ll be hard for users to see this as anything but a change meant to stifle future dissent.In June 2023, thousands of Reddit communities, known as subreddits,…Reddit's latest policy change could stifle future protests against the platform

On the far-right, some have developed an obsessive fixation on two things: interracial relationships and pornography.If you’ve ventured into the conspiracy-laden world of X (formerly Twitter), you’ll find disturbingly prevalent discussions of the Great Replacement Theory. This white supremacist conspiracy theory — pushed on the site by owner Elon Musk himself — suggests that an ominous “they” (an antisemitic euphemism for Jewish people) is secretly bringing people of color into the country to vote for Democrats and ultimately “replace” the white population. When it comes to pornography, this conspiracy takes a twisted turn. The belief is that the same ominous group “importing immigrants to vote for Democrats” (re: Jewish people) is using interracial cuckold pornography as a tool to emasculate white men and manipulate them into accepting interracial relationships. It sounds absurd and it is. SEE ALSO: How Big Tech is approaching explicit, nonconsensual deepfakes Meanwhile, statistics reveal that Americans are consuming cuckold porn — a scenario where a man watches his wife engage in sexual activity with another man — in staggering numbers. According to a spokesperson from the adult video site Clips4Sale, sales of cuckold content have skyrocketed — up 191 percent since 2020 and 75 percent in just the past year. Meanwhile, Blacked, a site known for its high-definition interracial content, has become Pornhub’s second most popular channel according to its Channels page, boasting three million subscribers and 2.6 billion views.The reality is that interracial porn, particularly featuring Black men and white women, is one of the…Why does the alt-right love interracial porn so much?