I am a huge fan of WebMention and a WordPress user. This is why I am so thrilled that Matthias Pfefferle created the fantastic WebMention plugin for WordPress. I think we should all use WebMention and in this post, I will explain why.

What is WebMention?

TL;DR: WebMention pings a page you link to to tell it about the link. The linked-to page can choose to display a list of the pages linking to it this way. Perhaps in the form of a comment.

WebMention is a set of groovy IndieWeb Internet rules (aka a protocol) that (among other things) allows us to reply in the form of a blog post (or any other page on the web). For a better overview, try the Wikipedia Webmention article.

All I have to do to reply from this blog is link to a WebMention-enabled page that I want to mention. My post will (maybe after a short delay) appear as a comment on the mentioned page in question.

Why is WebMention good?

This is a great idea because it allows small web things to knit together into a semblance of a community. Not to mention that it can increase the count of relevant comments. Pair with ActivityPub also by Matthias Pfefferle for maximum federated comments.

Getting comments, I think, validates the efforts we make to write interesting content. Also, it just feels nice.

Can WebMention really get me more readers?

Yes but also maybe.

By itself, WebMention does not do much. However, when you start interacting with others and reply to their content, you are likely to attract the attention of others. Some of those others might like your stuff and bookmark you or add you to a feed reader or something. They might not but they might. That rather depends on what content you make.

Does WebMention increase spam?

No.

I’ve never had a spam WebMention. Probably because the link to the page has to exist when the ping was sent or the mention gets rejected.

Is WebMention free?

Yes.

There are no ways for someone to charge you for it. The WordPress plugin is free too.

Conclusions

WebMention is fantastic IMHO. I want more people to find out about it and start mentioning to each other. If you are an indie blogger, WebMention is your friend.

In this post, I am going to share some Python stuff I have written for my visual novel written in Renpy. The novel is set in my Three Kingdoms setting (recently added to my pixel wall).

These may or may not be a good way to do what I am doing. Please feel free to comment or reply with corrections, suggestions, or insights. Then again, feel free to just say hello.

If you want to use my draft Python code, feel free to take it under the GNU GPL2 or CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Injectable flags

init 1 python:
    #skip some stuff
    
    class ChFlags:
        def __init__(self):
            self.name = 'flags'
            self.flags = dict()
        
        def set(self, flag, flag_bool=True):
            self.flags[flag]=flag_bool
            
        def has(self, flag):
            if flag in self.flags:
                return self.flags[flag]
            self.flags[flag] = False
            return False

The purpose of this class is that it can be injected into other classes – mostly character and faction classes. The setting self.name is what is used as the index to retrieve the class later.

Injectable classes (like characters) have a method like this:

        def add_feature(self,feature):
            self.feature[feature.name]=feature

I chose to go this way as not all characters need all the features. The player, for example, needs almost all, and the key characters also need many. Characters have a big enough list of data as it is. Adding more than needed did not seem smart.

Faction tracking

I use a similar approach to assigning characters to factions.

init 1 python:
    #skip some stuff
    class faction:
        def __init__(self, name):
            self.name = name
            self.chars = dict()
    
        #skip some stuff 
    
        def add(self,ch):
            self.chars[ch.name] = ch

In this class for faction tracking, you can see that I’ve not completed it (I skipped some bits that are not good enough to show off yet). I use that same name as the key method as characters all have unique names. Here, however, the faction itself is initialised with a unique name. That’s because the collection of all factions contains more than one faction. This way I can ask for a faction by name.

Spells and spell effects

I have used the same pattern for building up unique spells.

init 4 python:
    #skip some stuff

    class SpellEffect:
        def __init__(self):
            self.name = 'mistake'
            
        def single_target_effect(self, target, caster,spell):
            pass

    #skip some stuff

    class SpellEffectDamageDice(SpellEffect):
    
        def __init__(self):
            self.name = 'damagedice'
            self.n=1
            self.dice=4
            
        def define_dice(self,n,dice):
            self.n=n
            self.dice=dice
            
        def single_target_effect(self, target, caster,spell):
            damage = spell.modify_by_element(dice_roll(self.n,dice=self.dice))
            return target.take_hp(damage)

In this example, spell effects build off of the SpellEffect class. This is so I can change all spells at once (if I need to) by editing the base class and specifying different ways to implement spell effects.

The example here is SpellEffectDamageDice(SpellEffect) – a class that rolls a number (n) of arbitrary-sided dice. As the name variable is set only one dice roll of damage happens per spell. That said, all class attributes are public in Python as far as I can tell so, I guess, I can always rename one.

In case you were wondering about that last method (not fully tested), dice_roll is a function. IT is currently the only helper/tool not inside a class.

init -99 python:

    # common rpg feature
    def dice_roll(number=1, dice=6, plus=0):
        total = 0
        for x in range(1,number):
            total = total + renpy.random.randint(1, dice)
        total = total + plus
        return total

Conclusions

I have this peek at some of my code from a project in development was interesting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my approach. Is it good, bad, or something else? I’m fairly new to Python so I won’t feel bad if you want to correct me on anything.

I’m sharing this mostly for the comments and interactions – so please reply, mention, or comment. I want to know your thoughts.

I’ve been reflecting on the EU “Upload Moderation” law – better known as Chat Control – and why it will not work as intended.

What is Chat Control?

Upload Moderation is an EU proposal designed to identify child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a valid and laudable aim. The law proposes legal obligations for chat and email providers to scan every message for CSAM, even if the data is encrypted.

The scanning proposal would create “detection orders” that allow for messages, files, and photos from hundreds of millions of users around the world to be compared to government databases of child abuse images. At some points during the debate, EU officials even suggested using AI to scan text conversations and predict who would engage in child abuse. That’s one of the reasons why some opponents have labeled the proposal “chat control.”

Now The EU Council Should Finally Understand: No One Wants “Chat Control”, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Why is (Upload Moderation) Chat Control bad?

Chat Control is terrible for so many reasons. Here are some of those reasons which can be summarised as cost, effectiveness, and detrimental effects. But mostly Chat Control is a square-peg solution for a round-hole problem.

1. Chat Control could fatally undermine encryption.

The proposal, which is aimed at preventing child sexual abuse material, would essentially break encryption.

EU chat control law proposes scanning your messages — even encrypted ones, theverge.com

If you leave the backdoor open so your mum can pop in any time she likes, criminals and local wildlife could also pop in when they want to. On a technical level, the only way Chat Control could be implemented would be to essentially install spyware on phones and computers or compromise encryption. Do you want a digital back door that never closes?

Spyware is not smart, it will report to whoever figures out how to ask it to report. No matter how much the EU plans to protect the spyware access, sooner or later cyber criminals will figure out how to use it too. At that point, we are all in for a world of hurt.

A hole in a defensive wall is a hole that both sides can use. If you poke a hole in encryption, everything the encryption protects is open to whoever wants to look at it. That would include passwords. Any chat or email system with that sort of security problem is no longer worth using.

Either way, the EU does not understand the technology being legislated about. The UK tried something similar and was shot down because what they were asking for would have given criminals unrivalled access to Internet banking via compromised encryption.

For two years, Member States have been unable to agree on a common position for the CSA Regulation. It is time to withdraw the current proposal and consider a new approach for making online platforms safer for children that does not lead to generalised monitoring or breaks encryption.

Joint statement on the future of the CSA Regulation

2. Chat Control treats us all like criminals

We are alarmed and fear that the EU Council’s current proposal would simply undermine the confidentiality of private communications.

Warnung vor Chatkontrolle (Warning against chat control) – translation via tuta.com

There is no practical difference between reading all emails/chats and any of these things:

• Opening every letter sent in the mail just in case
• Recording every telephone conversation
• Planting a bug in every home

They are all the same level of privacy invasion.

No good thing ever came from the assumption of guilt until proven innocent. I’m confident no one needs me to explain this one.

I also assume you noticed that once set up, it would be trivial for EU countries to quietly expand the scope of Chat Control and spy on people for other reasons.

3. Preditors would not be slowed by Chat Control

Evildoers determined not to be caught doing evil are highly motivated to find ways to remain undetected. In this case, said preditors have a whole load of options not least of which include chat and email systems operated outside of the EU. Chuck into the mix TOR, VPNs, proxies, and other privacy tools and the vast majority will remain undetected.

Back in the early days of the web, we all communicated in forums. These forums had filters to block topics that the moderators did not want. They never worked. They failed because as fast as the filters updated, users found new and fun ways to say things such that the filters were none the wiser.

“Sex” could become s*x, zex, se><, $ex, se)(, sox*(o=e), and so on.

“Porn” could become, pron, p@rn, p*rn, prn, p()rn,pr()n, p()r|\|, and so on.

Those are just the ones I remember seeing. You cannot update the filters faster than people can find ways around those filters. Word scan moderation never solved the problem on forums so why does anyone believe that Upload Moderation will work this time?

Not to mention that common phrases often got truncated into acronyms. Comment “I feel old” to anyone who remembers ASL being a banned topic and/or still knows what it means and why it worried the admins. FYI, this problem was solved with more moderators and better user reporting tools. Forums were made into safe places not through technical solutions but through community cooperation.

4. Just look at China – they had to ban Winnie-the-Pooh

China has near-total surveillance of everything its population does online. Nevertheless, the Chinese population still talks about illegal topics. They do so by adaptively switching to new euphemisms.

China ended up banning Whinny the Pooh because that became a way to “innocently” mention a high-ranking party member.

Beginning in July 2017, the government of China has been censoring imagery of the anthropomorphic teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, particularly Disney’s version of the character. The censorship is believed to be a result of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping being compared to the character in internet memes, which the Chinese government perceived as a disrespectful mockery of Xi.

Censorship of Winnie-the-Pooh in China, Wikipedia

China may have frightened the masses into being very careful about what they say online but they have yet to stop people from talking about or expressing opposition to legally protected ideas.

Unless the EU is prepared to be as ever-present as the Great Firewall of China, Chat Control will fail to help even if it passes. Moreover, the EU is not a territory with restricted speech laws so the same type of oppressive overreach will be less effective in the EU than in China.

5. Preditors are motivated to stay hidden

If you scan files of people who are trying to stay secret, do you think they are not going to find ways to hide those files from the scan? They are already trying to hide from the police and often from their own families.

To identify images of the unmentionable evil variety requires either an unsustainable workforce or automation. The workforce is too expensive and automation has some big risks attached.

You could look for files called this-is-criminal-abuse.jpg but nothing is stopping them from calling the file roses-on-a-sunny-morning-in-june.jpg. So, obviously, this is out. This is why the legislation points to AI matching criminal images to sample images via AI identification. And we all know that AI never spits out nonsense apart from those times when it does. This means that innocent people may be heavily investigated because the AI couldn’t tell the difference between someone’s holiday photos and something vile.

Meanwhile, the preditors will be (1) not sending images as scalable as that and probably encrypting them inside archive files with, say, VeraCrypt, (2) use coded language that only other predators understand that changes over time, and (3) selling to each other on the dark web where everyone ignores the law anyway. Chat Control solves none of these problems as most criminals are already doing these things.

Furthermore, AI can be tricked into misidentifying images with very little effort. I cover this in more detail further down the page.

Preditors are actively attempting to avoid being noticed. The ones that were not caught early in their active evil behaviour will have already mastered looking innocent under inspection. Some well-known British entertainers spent their entire lives beloved of the public while doing unspeakable things. The spot light does not frighten them.

6. There are a lot of ways to ignore the Chat Control law

If you knew that your whole house was bugged, you would be careful about what you said at home. For important conversation, you would go out for coffee, visit a park, or sit on the beach. Likewise, Chat Control can easily be avoided too.

The most obvious method of avoiding Chat Control I mentioned earlier – TOR. A technology that is pretty much what people mean when they say “The Dark Web”. TOR cannot be indexed, resists user identification, and is heavily encrypted over and over again (in layers like an onion).

If TOR is not your cup of tea, there are guides out there that allow you to jailbreak your phone. Once that is done, you can determine what does and does not run. And you can sideload chat apps that are not in the EU and thus not filled with legally mandated spyware.

If there is enough demand, another criminal enterprise will arise with a solution. Like the one that sold specially built and encrypted smartphones running on a dedicated dark (and criminal network) for criminals.

Chat Control is an attempt at a technical solution to a human problem. The thing is, technical solutions only work for technical problems. Chat Control would just set itself up as a technical problem to be solved. For human problems, you need human solutions.

7. Compliance enforcement will only hurt the economy

What if Chat Control passes and all the technology companies just said no? What if the companies that understand the technology respond that the Chat Control laws are unrealistic and/or technically impossible? What if companies oppose them on moral grounds (at least for PR reasons)?

Let’s say I am a tiny start-up in the chat world with a staff of just me. I can’t afford expansive AI. Do I go bust or do I tell a white lie? What I can afford is to write a tiny script which says that I did the scans and found nothing. After all, there is no difference between finding nothing and saying you found nothing – they look the same. The fake version is affordable and takes an afternoon.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have deep pockets and teams of people just for handling legal challenges by governments. The EU would have to raise a big old budget to take on all the technology firms. Even if they win, the technology companies can just walk away from the EU. There’s no rule that says they have to stay.

An international technology company with its headquarters in France would have little problem becoming a technology company with its headquarters in the UK, America, or some other non-EU location. No criminals have been caught and you just cost your country a whole load of jobs and tax revenue while making the EU less relevant in the technology marketplace.

Sure some companies may comply. Others will fight you to the bitter end.

Of those companies that comply, how many will survive the rapid departure of the technologically literate to other companies that don’t spy on you?

At that stage all Chat Control has done is create a financial incentive for companies to (1) say they comply but don’t, (2) refuse to comply, and/or (3) move their HQ somewhere that values them.

For years, experts, civil rights groups, and chat service providers have warned about the potential impact on privacy and security. Chat services like Threema and Signal have stated they would leave the EU if such controls were implemented.

Chat Control to be back on the European political agenda in October, stackdiary.com

8. Chat Control is an invitation to protest using technology

Some time ago, it was revealed that an American agency was secretly reading citizen’s emails. People did not like that much and so protested in the funniest way possible. They started sending vast quantities of emails laden with junk text containing keywords that whatever three-letter group it was looking for. (My memory suggests it was the NSA but I don’t fully recall). Thus for no cost to the protesters, the government agency had to pay more to sort through the increased volume of noise (false positives).

It would be trivial to send billions of emails a minute as noise the EU states and ISPs would have to work through. Spammers already do this so the tools are mature and robust. The recipients don’t even need to exist so long as the sending is what the Chat Control spyware logs. If you have an unlimited data plan, that automation can run 24/7.

One assumes that there would have to be some API for those remaining compliant companies to send their data to the EU. There is nothing stopping protesters from buying of-the-self DDoS software and just hitting the API with more than it can handle.

Smarter hackers could register themselves as chat/email company and then just start fining bogus claims about politicians or rivals they don’t like.

I can assure you that when Chat Control becomes a vector for protest, no amount of AI will protect the EU from the eyewatering computer infrastructure and personal costs. I confidently predict that maintaining Chat Control will be expensive. If only because it only takes a few discontented and technically able people to cause a massive headache for whoever maintains a computer-based system.

If you want useful data from that, someone is going to have to wade through the bottomless depths of false positives, and spammed noise. EU, stop hitting yourself.

9. There are cheaper and more effective ways to stop vile evil scum who hurt children

There are cheaper and more effective ways to stop vile evil scum who hurt children than Chat Control.

An open letter from EDRi and 48* digital rights, human rights and children’s rights/protection organisations demanded that the EU instead:

i. Work with children’s rights groups, child protection advocates, digital human rights groups, cybersecurity experts and other technologists to develop new technical and nontechnical solutions which are lawful, targeted, and technically-feasible, where these are necessary;
ii. Focus on the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA) to ensure that illegal content is tackled swiftly and proportionately;

Joint statement on the future of the CSA Regulation

Who would have thought that the best solution is to work with the experts to build solutions that are both lawful and technically feasible? What a shocker.

10 Chat Control is a data breach waiting to happen

Privacy advocates aren’t the only ones raising alarm bells about the proposal. This week, dozens of Parliament members wrote to the EU Council to express their opposition to the proposal. Patrick Breyer, a German member of the European Parliament, has also spoken out about the bill, saying that “indiscriminate searches and error-prone leaks of private chats and intimate photos destroy our fundamental right to private correspondence.”

EU chat control law proposes scanning your messages — even encrypted ones, theverge.com

If you strip away the privacy and security protection necessary for Chat Control to be fully implemented, you make data breaches easier. This is not me being alarmist – if you remove the things that are there to stop data breaches, you get data breaches. This isn’t rocket science.

Chat Control is an ill-informed order to make mobile phones less secure. That’s bad for users, but amazing for criminals. The EU will have done the hard work for the underworld. You can bet there are criminals ready to try using this the minute it goes live.

11. Chat Control is undemocratic and a perfect tool for oppression

There has never been a time or place where mass surveillance was not used to oppress the population. It is a rare security law that has not suffered from scope creep over time. Today it is sex traffickers and child abusers they are looking for. Who or what will be added to that search tomorrow or the days after tomorrow?

Commission President Von der Leyen’s planned chat control is a Big Brother agency that would monitor EU citizens’ private communications. We must prevent this massive state surveillance.

Moritz Körner, Member of the European Parliament

It would be easy for a government to oppress some groups it does not like by adding “just a few more parameters for the search” but very hard for the public to even find out about it. Do you trust your government?

In the UK we have had scandal after scandal involving lies to the public, the Queen, and parliament; cash handouts to Tory supporters, and all sorts of corruption. I very much doubt that such things will not happen again. Sooner or later a minister will abuse their power to enrich themselves or abuse a group they hate. It is not a question of if but of when.

12. Chat Control will not protect children

Client-side scanning is a highly controversial technology, with critics claiming that it erodes user security and privacy, while failing to protect children.

Tech Firms Warn Against EU Chat Control, Forbes

The reason this proposal fails so hard is that it fails to understand the problem it is trying to solve. Abuse of children is a retched and evil thing that humans do. What the law proposal misses is any evidence that the huge mass of user data will stop even one criminal. It assumes that because these evil ****s use phones that the solution is to search all phones.

Child abusers use cars too. Should we have checkpoints every fifty miles for a full stop and search of all cars? Of course not, that would be a massive overreach and disproportionate to the problem. Chat Control is the same amount of overreach for no good reason.

You would be much better off empowering children to speak up when an adult is harming them. It would be better to work with existing agencies that understand the problem and help them to be more effective. It would be cheaper to train police officers than it would to look at every photo ever sent by anyone ever again.

13. AI is not fit to do this job

You might be tempted to think that AI can handle the so-called “Upload Moderation” of Chat Control. The truth is, though, that current AI does little more than statistically guided guessing. AI does not understand what it is looking at. Furthermore, AI is so very easy to trick.

There is a tool called Nightshade designed to poison generative AI models by misleading the AI about what it sees. Nightshade changes the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to human perception. These changes manipulate machine-learning models so that they interpret the image as something different to what it actually is.

All a criminal would have to do is use Nightshade so that humans see, “a child being harmed by an adult” whereas the AI sees, “a dog jumping for a ball”. Now, how much use is your privacy invasion scan worth?

One of my hobbies is getting generative AI to do weird and amusing things. Trust me, it is trivial to get AI to behave in ways it was not designed to be used.

AI will not help Chat Control be effective. Instead, it will give you false positives and false negatives. I have doubts that such an undertaking would reliably produce actionable intel. On the other hand, investing in schools so that children feel safe enough to talk to an adult will produce actionable intel at a fraction of the cost.

14. “Upload Moderation” AKA Chat Control does not understand the technology

Any criminal who knows what they are doing will not feel threatened by this EU law. This is because the law fundamentally fails to understand the technology it is trying to address. Most of all because it assumes that no one knows how to hide files inside other files whereas criminals are very good at hiding. Hiding is in the job description for evildoers.

For a moment I am going to imagine that we live in an oppressive surveillance state with remarkably effective AI monitoring everything I send. I, in this imagination, am an activist working towards a return to free and fair democracy. If I am caught, I will be killed. I need to send a series of photographs I took inside the secret police headquarters. The government will see everything I send.

Part 1 – simple Op Sec

Today, I shall be paranoid. I will start but using a virtual PC running without access to my hard drive (you can use RAM as a temporary HDD). When I shut it down, all traces will be gone.

I boot my virtual PC and download TOR. The government AI saw me do that. The clock is ticking for me. Using TOR, I down an illegal-to-own copy of Nightshade from the darknet. Then I download a copy of VeraCrypt the same way.

I pull my photos from the memory card and then erase the memory card, smash it up, and burn it. I use Nightshade to corrupt my photos with false AI data. I strip all metadata from the images. Then I hide the photos inside the metadata of some cat photos. A method known as Steganography.

That was all stuff anyone with an internet connection could do for real, right now without the darknet. and unknown to anyone

Part 2 – getting my file ready

Now I boot VeraCrypt and create a volume twice as large as I need. This will make a file that is filled with random noise indistinguishable from encrypted content. I add some copies of underground newsletters that might get me a few years in prison onto the drive. Then I make an invisible VeraCrypt drive inside the first one. Even if they force me to give them a password for the file later, they will only unlock the newsletters.

I add the images to the second VeraCrypt volume. I save the file as financial-report-Q3-private.xls. I use TOR to connect to a disposable email address with which I send out the file with the subject “Help! This report is due and the file has corrupted”. I attach the VeraCrypt file.

I shut down the virtual machine leaving no trace on my actual PC.

Anyone could learn to do this in less than a day.

Part 3 – can’t touch this

The oppressive surveillance state saw me send that file to fellow dissidents. The secret police have a backdoor with my ISP and TOR (yes this is a dark timeline). They have the file I sent. Even so, I know they have nothing I did not want them to have.

They bring me in and “integrate me”. I yield under “enhanced questioning” and give them the first password. They see I have been reading banned writing. I confess to reading the newsletter.

Meanwhile, they search the VeraCrypt file but cannot determine if there is anything else inside it. They also search my computer which is totally clean.

They give the VeraCypt file to the AI. It breaks the second password (this is fantasy after all). It finds the hidden files (definitely a fantasy). It finds no images to worry about because I added the Nightshade corruption. It reports, “No crime detected”.

I get a couple of beatings and two years in re-education for passing about banned newsletters. The pro-democracy underground has my photos and the campaign continues without me.

In real life: AI is not that good, encryption is nearly impossible to break, pulling files from a noise-based encrypted virtual volume has never been done, finding hidden files requires trained professionals, and the police do not (officially) get to beat people until they confess.

Imagine this is a criminal in a democracy now

You can learn to do all of those things with a few searches. If a criminal did this – even if the criminal’s entire internet connection was monitored and scanned by both AI and people – the authorities would have nothing to base charges on.

Now imagine that the criminal was not a total newbie at this sort of thing like I am. How much better would they be at hiding evil images? No amount of privacy invasion will help the police.

Making sure the child being abused has safe adults to talk to will help. Making it easier for children to tell adults that they are being hurt will stop criminals sooner.

No amount of technical Op Sec will save a criminal if their victims speak up. In the fantasy version of this method, all it would take would be one person from the secret police inside my team, and my fictional activist self would forfeit their life. The sort of crime Chat Control wants to fix is a people thing, not a technology thing.

What I am saying is that this proposed law is not fit for purpose

If a child harming evil **** sends their illegal images in the clear, they have probably messed up in so many other ways that Chat Control is not needed and if not then Chat Control cannot help.

These are not secret techniques for hiding content. They are well-known tools. Some of the methods the criminals can use pre-date the Internet. Detecting these crimes was never a technology problem.

This little story is not a guide to evading capture as a vile human being but an object lesson in how the technology went passed the point of legislating to give you an inside view years ago. If you don’t think the criminals are using these and more advanced techniques, I have a bridge to sell you.

Just like as a fictional activist, I could hide my activities while in full view of the authorities, criminals can likewise hide what they do. Just like fictional me, the weakness is not technology but people. Fund the people parts of crime detection and prevention if you want to catch more evil criminals who harm children.

Conclusions

I waffled on for long enough already. I have shown you 14 reasons why Chat Control will never work even if it passes. The simple truth is that it is not an effective tool. For real change, you need human solutions to human problems. AI is not the answer.

The EU “Upload Moderation” law – better known as Chat Control – is silly and shows a profound lack of understanding about how technology works and how it is used.

What are your thoughts on Chat Control and other government attempts to fruitlessly break encryption? Do you disagree with me? Have I missed a good reason why it won’t work and should never be passed? Would you like to add something?

Let’s talk. Leave me a comment or a social reply.

It is, once again, time to archive tabs I’ve had open too long and images I’ve been sitting on without using.

I think I have quite the interesting collection of links this month. Some of which I actually did something with.

Links for bloggers and talkers

• Shall we talk – discussion prompts for authors, agents, editors, and writers
• FE Districts – old school links by topic (I’ve submitted a few of my things)
• The Muse of Last Resort – writing & journalling prompts

small web (aka smol web) links

These are left over from a post I researched recently (there was a follow up)

• What is the Small Web?
• Rediscovering the Small Web
• The small web is beautiful
• The Small Web will be the New Wave of the Internet for the 2020s (reddit)
• SMOLNET PORTAL
• The Internet is a Series of Webs

Gemini links

These are waiting for a follow up post that I have yet to write.

• The Gemini Protocol: What’s It All About?
• Gemini Specification (Work in Progress)
• Project Gemini FAQ
• Gemini Software
• r/geminiprotocol
• Wikipedia: Gemini (protocol)
• Toaster-friendly alternative web protocol Gemini attracts criticism for becoming exclusive clique

Windows’ Recall (an invasive AI) links

I made a thing for Recall. It is a page that refreshes repeatedly feeding Recall a lot of bunk data. It doubles as a poisoner for spammer email harvesters.

• Windows AI feature that screenshots everything labeled a security ‘disaster’
• Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned
• Windows won’t take screenshots of everything you do after all — unless you opt in
• Microsoft Delays Windows Recall Rollout Amid Security Concerns

Other Links

• JQuery Lifestream – Show a stream of your online activity with jQuery
• James’ Coffee Blog
• The Digital Garden of Adam Tuttle
• I had a tab open to remind me to check out Hexguardian on Steam
• Variegated Succulents To Add To Your Plant Collection
• Introduction to Tameria
• John 3 (Bible)
• This bar joke from ancient Sumer has been making rounds on twitter as non-sequitur humor. What does it actually mean?
• Interaction on the Web – My Addition to the Great Posts by Alex, Tracy, Jo, and bacardi55 by Sara Jakša

A bunch of random images

More and more lately, I see YouTube channels I follow posting videos with titles that say something like, “YouTube is killing this channel”. Yes, of course it is. Did you think YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok were on your side?

The mistake you made was thinking that your channel belongs to you. You made YouTube or Twitter or whatever platform you are on the end game. That, my friend, was a fatal error.

These platforms exist to line the pockets of the owners. You, on the other hand, are the product they are selling. At least until they grow tired of you.

The YouTube creators are product and their followers and viewers are products too. The only difference is YouTube sometimes pays the creators. The only reason they pay the creators is so they have cheap labour creating content that keeps the viewers on site. Views watch adverts and adverts make money. That money was, is, and always will be YouTube’s money. If you thought differently, you were fooled.

You have my sympathy. This is not a nice thing to have happen to you. You were still had, though.

Creators on other people’s platforms own nothing

YouTube creators, people with massive followings on TikTok, or Facebook, or whatever the latest thing is might feel like they have built something for themselves. The truth is that the content, the followers, the comments, the income, the platform itself never belonged to the creator. It has always belonged to the platform operator.

If YouTube shut down operations tonight, what would you actually have?

If you answered, “Nothing at all” or, “Not a damn thing”, then you are correct.

If you do not control the data and the connections, you own nothing.

How to take back control from YouTube or Instagram or whatever

There is a way to take control. You might not like it though. It does mean a lot more work (and possibly a bunch more cost).

And this might not work so well on the newer platforms that are better than ever at keeping viewers on the app.

The one and only way you can take control is to own your own website. Your videos should be uploaded there. Not embedded – when YouTube goes, so do your videos. Plus you will need to add bonus content that makes it worth a viewer’s while to leave the doomscrolling and go visit your site.

This guy gets it

This is Paul a US Army vet with 352K YouTube subscribers on Combat Veteran Reacts. He covers war topics. War is something YouTube finds it hard to sell adverts for. So they regularly demonetise Paul. The same goes for Patreon – another platform that owns your income stream and supporters.

However, Paul was a man with a plan. He moved his monetisation off-platform to somewhere he controls. Combat Vet News.

In place of regular sponsors, Paul created his own product to sell.

Likewise, he pushes his fans to sign up not on YouTube but on his own mailing list. The Strategic SitRep.

If YouTube vanished tomorrow, he could find another platform to set up a new base on without a loss of content, supporters, subscribers, or advertiser products because he owns all of them himself. YouTube is, for him, a backup income stream and a great advert for an ecosystem he controls. That’s something Google, YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, and anything else cannot take away from him. He owns and controls the base product. All tied up in three focused websites.

Here’s the links to all Paul’s stuff:

• YouTube
• Combat Vet News
• Strategic SitRep
• Strike Gum

Key lessons

• No platform should be your end game.
• Own your stuff. Have a website. Put content on it.
• Free blogs don’t count. Don’t get tied down to a platform.
• Get a domain name and some hosting. Back it up regularly.
• Control your list. Keep subscriptions separate from social platforms.
• Consider creating your own product. Then you can sponsor yourself and others.
• Give people a reason to follow you to your thing (website, blog, forum, or whatever).
• Social Media should be an outpost for bringing guests (new fans and subscribers) back home.
• Everything ends. Even YouTube. Have a plan for when your platform ends (or kills/kicks you off).

TL;DR:

If you make money on social media like YouTube, you need a website.