Breaking Robinhood

The GameStop investors will be able to go all Sheriff of Nottingham and easily bury Robinhood in arbitration if they wish, as it has the same insanely stupid ban on class arbitration incorporated into its terms of use that many tech firms do. Note that JAMS used to wisely mandate a class arbitration clause in its rules, but removed it in 2005 because the idiot tech corporations didn’t want to risk losing in arbitration to all their users if they did something shady. Instead, the technocracy forced a system on everyone that can quite literally bankrupt them in order to save a little on potential litigation fees. The stupidity is epic-class.

38. Arbitration.

A. This Agreement contains a pre-dispute arbitration clause. By signing an arbitration agreement, the parties agree as follows: (1) All parties to this Agreement are giving up the right to sue each other in court, including the right to a trial by jury, except as provided by the rules of the arbitration forum in which a claim is filed. (2) Arbitration awards are generally final and binding; a party’s ability to have a court reverse or modify an arbitration award is very limited. (3) The ability of the parties to obtain documents, witness statements and other discovery is generally more limited in arbitration than in court proceedings. (4) The arbitrators do not have to explain the reason(s) for their award unless, in an eligible case, a joint request for an explained decision has been submitted by all parties to the panel at least 20 days prior to the first scheduled hearing date. (5) The panel of arbitrators will typically include a minority of arbitrators who were or are affiliated with the securities industry. (6) The rules of some arbitration forums may impose time limits for bringing a claim in arbitration. In some cases, a claim that is ineligible for arbitration may be brought in court. (7) The rules of the arbitration forum in which the claim is filed, and any amendments thereto, shall be incorporated into this Agreement. B. Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to this Agreement, any other agreement between Me and Robinhood, any Account(s) established hereunder, any transaction therein, shall be settled by arbitration in accordance with the rules of FINRA Dispute Resolution, Inc. (“FINRA DR”). I agree to arbitrate any controversy or claim before FINRA DR in the State of California. C. This agreement to arbitrate constitutes a waiver of the right to seek a judicial forum unless such a waiver would be void under the federal securities laws. If I am a foreign national, non-resident alien, or if I do not reside in the United States, I agree to waive My right to file an action against Robinhood in any foreign venue. D. No person shall bring a putative or certified class action to arbitration, nor seek to enforce any pre-dispute arbitration agreement against any person who has initiated in court a putative class action; or who is a member of a putative class who has not opted out of the class with respect to any claims encompassed by the putative class action until: (1) the class certification is denied; or (2) the class is decertified; or (3) the customer is excluded from the class by the court. Such forbearance to enforce an agreement to arbitrate shall not constitute a waiver of any rights under this Agreement except to the extent stated herein.

Two observations:

  • Unlike AAA, FINRA has no rule allowing an arbitrator to declare an arbitration to be “frivolous”, and furthermore, the right to file even frivolous arbitrations is protected by the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court rulings Steelworkers and Schein.
  • Robinhood’s terms of use specify California law. CCP Section 1284.3 prevents any consumer from being charged anything for an arbitration proceeding beyond the initial filing fee. “No neutral arbitrator or private arbitration company shall administer a consumer arbitration under any agreement or rule requiring that a consumer who is a party to the arbitration pay the fees and costs incurred by an opposing party if the consumer does not prevail in the arbitration, including, but not limited to, the fees and costs of the arbitrator, provider organization, attorney, or witnesses.”
If this sounds like a foreign language to you, I strongly suggest reading Corporate Cancer, particularly chapters 8-10.

The Ride Never Ends.


The Ride, She Never Ends

D-Live has doubled-down and banned Big Bear. How fortunate that the Patreon lawsuit has already been successfully concluded…. In answer to the obvious question, yes, UATV will have streaming in the future. We will not answer any questions as to when. When it is ready, we will let everyone know.

If you’re not yet on Unauthorized, well, you know what to do. The cult of free is over. Keep in mind that under the present regime, Big Tech is going to be banning everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. In related news, Parler is learning why cloud technology is not an option.

When Amazon Web Services informed Parler that it was terminating its hosting deal, the social platform initially maintained that it would be back online in a week. It appears to have secured DNS hosting from Epik (the Sammamish, WA-company that hosts sites like 8chan, the Daily Stormer, Gab and Stormfront who have been dropped from other providers and recently lost its relationship with PayPal because of that).

But a later statement indicated that other providers are not willing to host the platform and as a result, the service may not return: “most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us,” a statement to the Parler user base read and the company’s legal team suggested in court might not return without access to AWS.

Even if the social network finds a hosting provider, setting up all the different services it needs could be prohibitively slow, or even impossible. For all the talk of hybrid and edge computing, hyperscale cloud still has some hard to beat advantages for organizations with small infrastructure teams and not much capital expenditure budget who need to build large services quickly.

Needless to say, we’re not relying on the cloud for anything, not even brand new projects that are not even remotely political. In not-entirely-unrelated-news, MeWe is not a viable Facebook-alternative.


Apple gets them again

I don’t use Apple products. I had a //e, an original Macintosh, and a Macintosh SE, but I haven’t used one since. So this just news of another charger change just amuses me:

Apple is planning to release a new thinner and lighter MacBook Air that will launch in the second half of this year or early next year, according to Bloomberg.

The report said Apple will plan to market the device as a higher-end version of the current MacBook Air, which Apple released in November with its new M1 processor. That device was among three new Apple computers to make the switch away from Intel chips.

Apple’s Mac revenue was up 28{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} year over year, when the company reported its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings in October. That boost was helped by millions of people forced to work from home because of Covid.

The new MacBook Air will include Apple’s magnetic charging system called MagSafe, according to the report. MagSafe was used in Apple laptops for years before it was removed over two years ago in place of newer USB-C charging. But, it’s convenient because it allows the charger to pop out easily and helps prevent the laptop from being dragged off a surface if someone pulls the cord or trips on it. MagSafe is also used in the latest iPhone 12 phones, though it has a different design and relies on a magnetic puck accessory that wirelessly charges the phones.

Pro tip: if you keep buying from them, they’ll keep doing this to you. 


YouTube bans the President

The most spectacular deplatforming cascade in the history of social media cyberpurges continues with YouTube:

YouTube has announced that it pulled new content from US President Donald Trump’s verified channel and blocked it from uploading new videos for at least a week, citing violations of its policy against inciting violence.

In a statement late on Tuesday, YouTube said that the Trump channel was issued a strike over unspecified “new content,” and pursuant to its long-standing policy, “is now prevented from uploading new videos or live streams for a minimum of seven days.”

The video-sharing platform, which was the only major social medium still carrying Trump’s message after the president was purged from both Twitter and Facebook, did not rule out the possibility of the week-long ban being extended further.

Comments under all videos on Trump’s channel have been suspended “indefinitely,” YouTube said, noting that this was a standard practice for the cases “involving safety concerns.”

The ban did not quite come out of the blue. Earlier on Tuesday, an umbrella group of civil rights organizations vowed to pressure YouTube advertisers to drop the platform if it fails to follow Twitter and Facebook’s suit in blocking Trump’s accounts.

That’s a bold move, Cotton. We’ll see how it turns out for them. 


Evil doesn’t care about hypocrisy

If you don’t understand that yet, perhaps Twitter’s brave and stunning stance against election-related censorship will suffice to make it clear to you.

Twitter is openly condemning internet service providers blocking social media apps in the run-up to an election in Uganda as it takes criticism for alleged censorship on its own platform.

“Ahead of the Ugandan election, we’re hearing reports that Internet service providers are being ordered to block social media and messaging apps,” the social media giant posted in a statement on Tuesday.

“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns – they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet,” the statement continued.

The company argued that “access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.”

Every country should simply ban Twitter. And if you’re on Twitter, get off it now. The Big Tech companies are exactly like Freddie Krueger. They have no power over you if you refuse to acknowledge their existence.

I was talking yesterday to someone about the idiocy of the Cult of Free. It’s astonishing that so many people are still reluctant to give up Twitter, Facebook, and other free social media, when they now know, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that the cost of using their “free” applications can very easily be your job and even your career. 


All Parler’s data are belong to them

Using Parler was a massive, massive mistake. When are conservatives going to learn to stop trusting their gatekeepers? Handing over your telephone and drivers license to someone who can’t protect your data just because they let you use their site for free is sheer idiocy.

A group of developers latched onto the Press Release that Twilio put out at midnight last night. In that Press Release, Twilio accidentally revealed which services Parler was using. Turns out it was all of the security authentications that were used to register a user. This allowed anyone to create a user, and not have to verify an email address, and immediately have a logged-on account.

Well, because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to deliver content — ALL CONTENT (parleys, video, images, user profiles, user information, etc) –. But what it also did was revealed which USERS had “Administration” rights, “Moderation” rights.

Well, then what happened, those user accounts that had Administration rights to the entire platform… The hackers, internet warriors, call it what you will, was able to use the forgot password link to change the password. Why? Because Twilio was no longer authenticating emails. This meant, they’d get directly to the reset password screen of that Administration user.

This group of Internet Warriors then used that account, to create a handful of other ADMINISTRATION accounts, and then created a script that ended up creating MILLIONS of fake administration accounts.

Now that they had a way of creating admin accounts without interruption, they created a Docker Image (basically a virtual machine) called a Warrior, that anyone could download, and when fired up, would immediately start collecting data off of Parler, in a coordinated fashion.

Consider it like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) that people used to load up as screen savers when their computers were not being used. Same concept, crowdsourcing.

All of this data, the videos, the images, the posts, the metadata (including the GEO location of all images and videos, and the connections to the accounts that posted it, has been (since midnight) being uploaded to various cloud drives and storage arrays for the purposes of Archiving this information, for later retrieval by law enforcement, by the public, by Open Source Intelligence communities.

And the kicker.. is this: all of this information was thought to be secure and private by individuals who were making the posts. A significant number of those individuals went through the process of being a “Verified Citizen” on Parler. What does that mean?

It means they uploaded a picture of the front and back of their REAL State Driver’s License…….. Let that sink in for a second.

I am positive the FBI has been actively soaking in this information along with the Internet Warriors, but this is how they are going to officially track down. And it’s how the FBI, DHS, and FAA have been able to immediately and exhaustively create no-fly lists. Every verified attendee of the Capitol riot where they can find a real name has been placed on No-Fly Lists.

It might seem like a small geeky glitch or hack.. but in the age of Information warfare… this is the silver bullet for the people who used Parler as a place to organize their efforts. Also, a lot of posts were deleted by Parler members after the riots on the 6th. Turned out… Parler didn’t actually delete anything.. just set a bit as deleted.

Guess what has access to all “deleted” content?

Administrator accounts.

And this is why breaking yourself of your addiction to the Cult of Free is vital. Due to their business model, sooner or later, they are going to need to sell your data. That’s why they hold onto it even when they claim to respect your data privacy. If they actually did, they wouldn’t hold onto it in the first place.


Of all the words of screen and pen

The saddest are these: Vox was right again. The Other McCain muses on The Night of the Digital Long Knives:

I don’t think anyone except the Silicon Valley oligarchs, who no doubt had this planned well in advance, and Vox Day, who had expected this for some time – expected the whole sale purging of conservative & populist accounts from social media that’s taken place this week….

People used to accuse Vox Day of being paranoid when he said these things a few years ago. What’s keeping me awake nights is that Vox might not have been paranoid enough.

More is coming. Don’t be complacent. Don’t wait around on ground you have no intention of defending. Don’t give up any ground you intend to keep without being the hard out. And above all, support the alternative platforms. Because if you don’t, there won’t be anything left for you. Don’t kid yourself, the SJW corpocracy knows everything about who you are, they know that you are not on their side, and they have absolutely no intention of sparing you or permitting you to submit in the future.

You can join SocialGalactic in two ways, either by subscribing to Unauthorized or by subscribing to it directly.

MAILVOX: A new subscriber explains why he subscribed this weekend.

I held out from subscribing to Unauthorized.tv for a long time but when you added Razorfist to the lineup, it was impossible to continue making any more excuses for a measly $5 a month. Thank you! To Owen, Razorfist, Rachel, Wranglerstar, the Dread Ilk and the rest of the gang, thank you for the lasting work you are doing. History will remember your efforts to shine a light against the darkness.


Never trust the gatekeepers

You may recall that I told you Parler was never a viable option to Twitter. But John Matze tries to convince conservatives who were dumb enough to be taken in by an obvious trap that he wasn’t in on the shutdown.

Sunday at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.

First, Matze is a shameless liar. Parler doesn’t support free speech at all. Even Gab, which is run by a genuine free speech believer, no longer supports completely free speech due to its actual experience with it. Second, the fact that Parler used AWS as the foundation of its platform makes it obvious that, at the very least, Parler believed that it was safely on the side of the SJWs.

And third, never, ever, trust a tech company that comes out of nowhere with massive resources and gets tremendous media coverage. Unless it is something genuinely groundbreaking – and a Twitter clone is the exact opposite of that – it’s being pushed by the ticketmasters of the corpocracy. Parler isn’t an true alternative to Twitter, it’s just an offshoot designed to corral those who escape from it.

For a genuine alternative to Twitter, join SG. Or, if you still haven’t weaned yourself from the cult of free technology yet, get on Gab.

UPDATE: Speaking of not trusting the gatekeepers, the account posting as @realCodeMonkeyZ at Parler is a fake. Do not trust anything that is posted at Parler by anyone.

It has come to my attention that another Parler account is posing as me and publishing information in my name. That account is NOT MINE. I do not have a Parler account and never will. I am ONLY on Gab verified as @codemonkey


Fire Firefox

I switched from Firefox to Brave long ago. If you haven’t stopped using Firefox yet, it’s time to do so, because Mozilla has gone beyond mere SJW convergence to full sociofascist superconvergence:

Mozilla, developer of the Firefox internet browser, has argued that more must be done to keep Donald Trump and other “bad actors” out of cyberspace, prompting many to vow to never use the group’s services again.

In a blog post titled ‘We need more than deplatforming’, the open-source software community said that Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Trump from its platform didn’t go far enough in weeding out “hate” on the internet. While blaming Trump for the “siege and take-over” of the US Capitol on January 6, the non-profit tech group argued that “white supremacy is about more than any one personality.”

“We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done. Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms,” Mozilla wrote.

The group proposed a number of measures to help protect the internet from verboten views. Internet ads should list who paid for them, how much they are paying, and who is being targeted, Mozilla said. There should also be “meaningful transparency” of platform algorithms so that people can examine what kind of content is being promoted. 

The group also demanded that “tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation” are added to the default settings of internet platforms, and said that independent research must be carried out to determine how social media is affecting society and what can be done to “improve things.”

The blog post concluded by stating that the answer to Trump and other allegedly bad voices was not to “do away with the internet,” but rather to “build a better one” that can “withstand” such “challenges.”

Stop supporting those who hate you. More importantly, stop relying upon them.