07.18.13

Tech Tip for Today

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:25 am by George Smith

Don’t watch Net TV on original content server websites of mega-corporations. They drip with what would have been considered malicious programming ten years ago.

I have been mildly interested in Under the Dome, the CBS serialization of the King science-fiction novel. If you watch it on CBS’s website it lays an unnecessary burden on you.

It’s far easier and more pleasant to watch it off a site that provides pirated streams, like Couch Tuner.

And this is because American mega-business entertainment and news websites have largely gone over to using malicious programming web design to wring maximum value from online viewers. They all use scripting to take over your machine, instituting endless background downloading and churn to whatever stream you are intent on viewing or listening to. The programming design of the page is not to benefit the user in any way. It is to squeeze maximum big data and value from the target.

Let’s take Rolling Stone magazine’s website as another example.

If you read Matt Taibbi’s space regularly you’ll have noticed that the RS designers have put in a click trap as well as an annoying overlay. When you click on a Taibbi post the first time it will load a Facebook sign-on so that it can reach into your profile on the social network. And this is not because they like you and are trying to make an easy, pleasant experience of the reading.

RS wants your profile data for use in its advertising department. It wants the ability to sneakily add likes you may not be interested in giving to its own presence. And it wants your material for whatever reciprocal deal it has going with the ZuckerBorg. This just for the privilege of reading a damn blog posting already festooned with digital advertising.

Most of this is plainly hostile. American web users accept this because it is normalized. They have been conditioned to take a daily dispensation of digital guff as good. The web was far from always being like this.

You can deal with this level of corporate animosity, for television anyway, by using the pirate aggregator I linked to at the beginning of the piece. If you do so and you’re savvy enough about your machine, you’ll immediately see the processing burden is far less, even with pop-ups from the Internet’s bottom-feeders.

There is no reason for streamed network television or video to take over your device.

Paradoxically, pirate sites which established the reputation for giving you malicious gifts you didn’t want, are now a more pleasant place to do on-line viewing of mainstream corporate product.

They also dispense with the commercial breaks.

I don’t have a problem with commercials but in today’s world their elimination becomes an added small pleasure, too. Because in erasing them more layers of the automation of reflexive corporate grasping that permeates every aspect of the American experience are peeled away.

As mega-corporate America becomes more malicious on the web, enabled by Silicon Valley programming for the aggregation of avarice, aka the sharing economy [1], it becomes counter-productive. It gives justice to recommending and encouraging piracy, outright stealing of content.

When you cynically view your web-delivered entertainment as just another vehicle for extracting data from consumers, you’ve crossed a threshold to a point where striking back with efforts to deprive you of that content, if even only in a minimal way, are just.

American corporations work under the premise that it’s proper and fair for them to use programming to surreptitiously get into your on-line world, to reach into your pocket. They employ the equivalent of malicious programming to do it. Twenty years ago they would have been called professional programmers of booby-traps, trojan horses, and viruses. They share the same sets of skills. They are criminals passed off as cutting edge programmers.

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1. The sharing economy: American tech industry euphemism for the creation of an economy in which the top 1 percent gets all the share.

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