WarGames (11/11) Movie CLIP - The Only Winning Move (1983) HD

The moral of the story is that when you beat Wall Street at their own game, they will change the rules on you so they win anyway [VIDEO]

> I hadn't thought of boycotting much of popular online space as being counter-cultural. It's an interesting thought. The only winning move is not to play: [VIDEO]

I'm sure that is a thing, but my friends are not that exciting. We are just privacy lunatics and old fuddy duddies that study the behavior of corporations, governments and others. We postulate what countermeasures could be enacted to minimize the sprawling intrusive nature of the internet into our lives. We always seem to reach the same conclusion as Joshua. "The only winning move is not to play" [1] [1] - [VIDEO]

> That’s why people opt for moderated communities, actually learning to handle content and ignore repugnant or vile content takes diligence and building that up is time-consuming, so they’ll happily pay money (via ads or directly) to offload filtering out that content. The catch here is that people are not aware that their content is frequently shadow moderated. Even if you do try to engage with vitriolic commentary, your comment may be removed without your knowledge, and the forum will still show you your comment as if it's not removed . It works like this on Reddit for all comments [1], but again as I said, all forums now engage in shadow moderation. And at the end of the day it is also an us problem, not just a them problem, because we're often the ones reporting the content that gets taken down. When people are made aware that this is happening, they do call for change, for example [2], > ...what is the supposed rationale for making you think a removed post is still live and visible? > ...So the mods delete comments, but have them still visible to the writer. How sinister. > ...what’s stunning is you get no notification and to you the comment still looks up. Which means mods can set whatever narrative they want without answering to anyone. Here's another way to think about whether or not to use shadow moderation. If you think it's a good idea to use it, then you think it's an effective tool for changing minds. Your ideological opponent, whose comments you want to secretly

I ran an experiment years ago. I used a throw-away email along with plus-addressing [0] to register and receive updates from democrat, republican and a handful of media organizations. I knew what the results would be: Unmitigated mayhem. And that's exactly what I got. It was interesting to watch for a few months. All of these organizations shared (definitely) or sold (assumption) the customized email addresses far and wide. The only other possible explanations for what happened with these email addresses might be that they were stolen during a breach or that a bad actor with internal access shared or sold them. OK, I can buy either of these for one organization here or there, sure. When it happens across all organizations? No, the sharing or selling had to be intentional. There was no effective way to stop the stream of emails that resulted from a handful of registrations. From my perspective, clicking on "unsubscribe" only served to confirm the email address was good. In other words, perhaps it did unsubscribe you from that specific organization, yet, what you actually accomplished was to provide them with a validated "live target" email they could sell or provide to another organization. The result was an almost exponential growth of emails. Registering to, if I remember correctly, approximately six organizations led to a constant daily stream of emails form hundreds (did not count them) of groups. Crazy. I never set out to quantify any of this or run study, so I don't have