Technology

From their own internal metrics, tech giants have long known what independent research now continuously validates: that the content that is most likely to go viral is that which induces strong feelings such as outrage and disgust, regardless of its underlying veracity. Moreover, they also know that such content is heavily engaged with and most profitable. Far from acting against false, harmful content, they placed profits above its staggering—and damaging—social impact to implicitly encourage it while downplaying the massive costs.

Social media titans embrace essentially the same hypocrisy the tobacco industry embodied when they feigned concern over harm reduction while covertly pushing their product ever more aggressively. With the reelection of Trump, our tech giants now no longer even pretend to care.

Engagement is their business model, and doubt about the harms they cause is their product. Tobacco executives, and their bought-off scientists, once proclaimed uncertainty over links between cigarettes and lung cancer. Zuckerberg has likewise testified to Congress, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health, ” even while studies find self-harm, eating disorder and misogynistic material spreads on these platform unimpeded. This equivocation echoes protestations of tobacco companies that there was no causal evidence of smoking harms, even as incontrovertible evidence to the contrary rapidly amassed.

There's an infamous anti-piracy advertisement from back in 2004 that online oldsters will immediately recognize: "You wouldn't steal a car," it begins, complete with shakycam footage of some sketchy looking dude popping a lock, before rolling into various other types of theft and eventually equating it all with downloading a copy of Shrek 2. The ad makes it dramatically clear: Stealing Shrek will get you hard time in the slam when you're inevitably busted for your criminal ways.

It was, and is, overwrought and silly, and so of course it inspired numerous parodies and memes: The British comedy series The IT Crowd did a particularly good one a few years after the original aired—in fact the old URL, piracyisacrime.com, now directs to The IT Crowd Clip on YouTube. I urge you to watch it. The ad itself was only around for a short time, but "you wouldn't download a car" has endured in shitpost form for decades; it's practically embedded in the fabric of the internet at this point.

But as good as many of these parodies are, none are as ridiculous (and funny) as the recent discovery that the world's best-known anti-piracy ad may have used a pirated font.

The distinctive font used in the ad appears to be FF Confidential, created by Just van Rossum in 1992. But there's another font called XBand Rough that's virtually identical, and when journalist Melissa Lewis reached out to van Rossum about it, he told her XBand Rough is an "illegal clone" of FF Confidential.

This is where it gets interesting. After all this, another Bluesky user named Rib used the FontForge tool on a PDF file from the old anti-piracy campaign, available via the Wayback Machine, and discovered the file in question uses the XBand Rough font—the clone.

At least in the U.S. and Canada, that is.

This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post where a user (presumably a resident of Canada), had posted how Lenovo was shipping laptops with Fedora and Ubuntu at a cheaper price compared to their Windows-equipped counterparts.

Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is.

When I dug in further, I found out that the US and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives.

I think these manufacturers could do a better job in marketing these Linux-based alternative operating systems to general consumers, showing them how they can save big when opting for these instead of the pricey and bloated Windows.

website to create songs from meme sounds and emoji on pad

it looked something like this

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62370804