EFFector 32.6
Who Has Your Cat?
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In our "this is satire, right, so we don't have to worry about Article 13"th issue:
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Top Features
In past years, EFF's annual Who Has Your Back report has asked which major tech companies "have your back" when the government comes knocking to request your data or censor your content. For 2019, EFF is changing our focus to cats—and not even when the government comes knocking. (Our research shows that if the government were to come knocking, cats would probably run and hide under the bed, or just not care, because they are cats.)
Instead, this year’s "Who Has Your Cat?" report features substantially redesigned categories and criteria. (Unfortunately, doggos, birbs, and other critters are outside the scope of this report.) We focus on a handful of specific, measurable criteria that reflect attainable best practices, which cats tend to ignore.
First, the good news—all cats assessed in this year’s report received 5 out of 5 stars on feline best practices. We look forward to more long-term improvements across the industry in future years, as cats take steps to be more accountable to themselves and absolutely no one else.
Press and members of the public wishing to discuss the results of our new survey, preferably while surrounded by small bowls of milk and bouncy loops of metal with fuzzy cloth attached, should check EFF's Instagram account. The account often contains damning evidence of cat rule-breaking in our offices.
EFF Updates
The EU has announced the investment of six billion euros into a new alternative network that respects the right to be forgotten, including the subsidiary right of not remembering what it was you intended to do when you first started to connect to the network. "We're calling it the Internet of Thingummies, because none of us wrote down the much better name we came up with last week," announced its chief researcher, who was either Tim Berners-Lee or Vint Cerf, nobody seems entirely sure. The IoT mesh network is expected to be deployed using thousands of tiny "smart dust" transceivers smaller than a human eyelash, just as soon as anyone can recall where they last put them.
Philadelphia’s City Council this week approved a new initiative in which 200 intelligent street-lights are installed around the city proper, in order to create what designers calls a "Smart-Ass City." Each light is equipped with gait detection and micro-seismic sensors that can recognize when a pedestrian stumbles. The lights then trigger a number of automated loudspeaker responses, such as "Smooth move, ex-lax," and "Have a nice trip, see you next fall."
"We're not even sure who we're supposed to report this to," said representatives of the FTC in an unofficial phone conversation with EFF, "so we were thinking of just mailing everybody on this email list we bought. What do you think? Hello?"
MiniLinks
Technologists at the non-profit claim to have fixed the problem by editing the Wikipedia entry for "gullible."
"People said that our anti-encryption laws discard years of privacy protections, and that we can't break the laws of math," the chair of the new project noted. "We say: what if we ran really fast, then discarded those privacy protections directly at the math laws? Answer that, nerds!"
"Everybody stood around, but nobody wanted to be the first to say anything." Emergency crews at the scene say that there were no serious casualties, except for a general understanding of First Amendment history, which is expected to recover thanks to a series of increasingly annoying corrections on Twitter.
The maximum number of novel jokes one can make about cryptocurrency has an overall ceiling of twenty-one million, a figure that is expected to be reached in a New Yorker cartoon in late 2021. The difficulty of finding the jokes has halved on a regular schedule since 2010: earlier, cheaper, jokes have now been replaced by humor mined by just a handful of professional comedians, somewhere in Burbank.
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