Tag: marketing

Why is Plaintext Better than HTML for Email?

~ cafebedouin

“In short, HTML emails are a security nightmare, are mostly used for advertising to you and tracking you, are less accessible for many users, and don’t offer anything especially great for it.”

https://useplaintext.email/

He buried the lede. I went ahead and put it at the top. For more detail, read the below. Another in my ongoing series advocating for plain text: A Text Only World, OpenBSD & the Command Line, The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Sciences, The Plain Text Accounting Program, etc.

Why is plaintext better than HTML?

HTML emails are mainly used for marketing – that is, emails you probably don’t want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren’t worth the trade-off.

HTML as a vector for phishing

HTML emails allow you to make links which hide the URL behind some user-friendly text. However, this is an extremely common vector for phishing attacks, where a malicious sender makes a misleading link which takes you to a different website than you expect. Often these websites are modeled after the login page of a service you use, and will trick you into entering your account password. In plaintext emails, the URL is always visible, and you can more easily make an informed choice to click it.

Privacy invasion and tracking

Virtually all HTML emails sent by marketers include identifiers in links and inline images which are designed to extract information about you and send it back to the sender. Examine the URLs closely – the strange numbers and letters are unique to you and used to identify you. This information is used to hack your brain, attempting to find advertisements which are more likely to influence your buying habits. HTML emails are good for marketers and bad for you.

Mail client vulnerabilities

HTML is an extremely large and complicated set of specifications designed without emails in mind. It’s designed for browsing the world wide web, on which a huge variety of documents, applications, and more are available. Implementing even a reasonable subset of these standards represents hundreds of thousands of hours of work, or even millions. A large subset (perhaps the majority) of these features are not desirable for emails, and if included can be leveraged to leak information about you, your contacts, your calendar, other emails in your inbox, and so on. However, because of the herculean effort necessary to implement an HTML renderer, no one has built one specialized for emails which is guaranteed to be safe. Instead, general purpose web browsers, with many of their features disabled, are employed in most email clients. This is the number one source of vulnerabilities in email clients which result in information disclosure and even the execution of arbitrary malicious code.

This is a list of 421 remote code execution vulnerabilities in Thunderbird. If you’re bored, try finding one that doesn’t exploit web tech.

HTML emails are less accessible

Browsing the web is a big challenge for users who require a screenreader or other assistive tools to use their computer. The same problems apply to email, only more so – making an accessible HTML email is even more difficult than making an accessible website due to the limitations imposed on HTML emails by most mail clients (which they have no choice but to impose – for the security reasons stated above). Plain text emails are a breeze in comparison for screenreaders to recite, especially for users with specialized email clients designed for this purpose. How do you speak bold text aloud? How about your inline image?

Some clients can’t display HTML emails at all

Some email clients don’t support HTML emails at all. Many email clients are designed to run in text-only environments, like a terminal emulator, where they’re useful to people who spend a lot of time working in these environments. In a text-only interface it’s not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text. A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason.

Rich text isn’t that great, anyway

Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn’t worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like *asterisks*, /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. You can still communicate your point effectively without bringing along all of the bad things HTML emails come with.

-ibid

Soundbeaming

~ cafebedouin

“‘You don’t believe it because it sounds like a speaker, but no one else can hear it…it’s supporting you and you’re in the middle of everything. It’s happening around you.’

By changing a setting, the sound can follow a listener around when they move their head. It’s also possible to move out of the beam’s path and hear nothing at all, which creates a surreal experience.

‘You don’t need to tell the device where you are. It’s not streaming to one exact place,’ Wallwater said.

‘It follows you wherever you go. So it’s personally for you — follows you, plays what you want inside your head.'”

-Louise Dixon, “New device puts music in your head — no headphones required.” AP. November 12, 2020

What could possibly go wrong? Here’s the clue, “…it’s personally for you — follows you, plays what [someone else wants] inside your head.” Want to guess the power of this kind of suggestibility on crowds, targeted advertising, etc.? Coming soon, a device that blocks this device, available for a moderate fee.

Protecting Your Online Privacy is Tough—But Here’s a Start

~ cafebedouin

“Algorithms make decisions based on statistical correlations. If you happen to not be a typical individual, showing unusual characteristics, there is a chance that an algorithm will misinterpret your behavior. It may make a mistake regarding your employment, your loan, or your right to cross the border. As long as those statistical correlations remain true, nobody will care to revise this particular judgement. You’re an anomaly.”

—Katarzyna Szymielewicz, “Protecting your online privacy is tough—but here’s a start.” Quartz. January 25, 2019.

So, algorithms are just like people then?

There is a need to regulate data aggregators. But, you have more technical options to avoid surveillance than this article suggests. Here’s a good start.

For one, instead of trying to control the information you put into social media and limiting your “likes”, opt-out of social media entirely. Data aggregators don’t need many real data points to make an accurate profile, and these will be correlated against real records, such as credit card purchases to complete the picture.

You can also not log into a Google account on your Android device. It still may phone home your location data, but at least it isn’t associated with your account. You also can control whether to share location data with social media apps, which again makes the job harder.

Also, using a VPN or Tor Browser can create some distance between your digital and real identity. It certainly makes the job of creating marketing profiles of individuals harder.

Like security, privacy is a process. The more layers you put between you and the surveillance apparatus, the more difficult you make it to profile and surveil you.

Cosmic Dyspepsia & Divine Excrement by Thomas Moyihan

~ cafebedouin

“One pauses, and is suddenly struck with a vision: The Earth opens up and seeps fizzy pop. The carbonated fountains of the great deep break open. End-oriented teleoplexic history reveals that the world was created merely to spew forth Pepsi: everything else was merely a means to this end. They call it the 𝖕𝖊𝖕𝖘𝖎𝖈𝖑𝖎𝖕𝖕𝖊𝖗. Pepsi, as cosmic alchemical baseline or sugary-blackened-Nigredo, is the Alpha and the Omega, and all other conceivable ‘ends’ (human will, desire, values, Promethean ambitions) are merely camouflaged ‘means’ for the shooting forth of Pepsi from the great internal fountains of the Earth. The springs of terrestrial history weep black liquid sugar. Tears of Pepsi trickle from the empty eye-socket of an anorganic God, a cosmic visage pulled back into sugarrush rictus. This time there is no Noah and no ark. Everything drowns in obsidian sluice. Glucose high; glucose crash. John Milton — blind prophet, blind to his own prophecy — announces this, our fate, from Anno Domini 1667.”

An essay in seven parts, Thomas Moyihan’s Cosmic Dyspepsia & Divine Excrement is a schizophrenic juxtaposition of the Arnell Group’s Breathtaking: A Design Document for the Pepsi brand (a document of uncertain origin that could be a modern Protocols of the Elders of Zion aimed at the marketing masters of late-stage capitalism), academic critical theory, and a reimagining of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a prophecy of Pepsi.

Not for everyone, but if the text above appeals to you, then it might be worth taking a look at the whole thing.

Part 1 of the 7 part series.

h/t 3:AM Magazine

The New Age of Bullshit

~ cafebedouin

A definition and a theory of bullshit, which Frankfurt broadened into a book length treatment, is a very helpful place to go to make sense of our modern social environment.

“Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether or not their listener is persuaded.”

What is advertising, if not bullshit? Truth is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is whether an ad gets the audience to buy the product. “Good” advertising is about creating stories, packaging them into a “brand”, and getting people to identify with that brand.

Advertising is at the center of most of the technology platforms of the feudal internet. Increase your followers, your likes, your comments, and you too could make a living creating “content” that attracts followers, likes and comments. The feudal internet uses your “content” to sell products and to the small degree you aid this endeavor, you can get a kickback on the profits. The variations are infinite: Instagram accounts with product placements, blogs with sponsors, and so forth and so on. But, in the end, it is all the same.

Advertising is an insidious influence. Not only is it bullshit. It pulls people into thinking and living lives that are bullshit. Even reactions to the consumerist vision of our society are steeped in bullshit.

Consider “New Age” religious and spiritual beliefs. They are new beliefs that are sold like a product. I recently came across the website, Ascension Glossary, which has a Where Can I Start? page, that advocates educating yourself about Mind Control:

“Mind Control is used to form socially acceptable belief systems and shape value systems to which are used to control the masses to enslave themselves on planet earth. God, Religious Violence, gender issues, financial and debt enslavement, Consumptive Modeling, Misogyny and sexuality are the most mind controlled and manipulated belief systems promoted by the NAA and their human Power Elite to continue their enslavement and vampirism of humanity and planetary resources.”

They are talking about bullshit. So, they’ve at least identified the problem.

But, it’s not just the dominate narrative that is riddled with mind control and false beliefs. We must also “Discern False New Age Channeling or Modalities or Presumed Authority that want to take your Power or Manipulate through Lower Emotional States. Avoid New Age Material Hijacked with Vampirism or Cult mentality.”

In other words, don’t replace mainstream bullshit with other bullshit. Pretty sound advice. Of course, the problem here is that it is hard not to review the material of Ascension Glossary and not come to the conclusion that the ideas and techniques recommended are also a form of bullshit. Truth, lies and cockamamy ideas about extra-terrestrial global minds and guardians are not an obvious improvement over the mainstream narrative.

May I suggest, if you feel the need to believe in New Age bullshit, that you randomly generate some beliefs using a computer algorithm using New Age tropes and choose a few ideas that appeal to you.

New Age Bullshit Generator

—http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

Example output:

  • The goal of ultra-sentient particles is to plant the seeds of purpose rather than discontinuity.
  • This life is nothing short of an unfolding paradigm shift of high-frequency fulfillment. By awakening, we heal.
  • The biosphere is approaching a tipping point.
  • Who are we? Where on the great story will we be re-energized? We are at a crossroads of potentiality and bondage. Humankind has nothing to lose.
  • We must develop ourselves and heal others. We must learn how to lead infinite lives in the face of selfishness. It is in invocation that we are re-energized.
  • Curiosity requires exploration. Consciousness consists of sonar energy of quantum energy. “Quantum” means a refining of the karmic. We exist as electromagnetic resonance.
  • You and I are travellers of the dreamscape.
  • Have you found your journey? If you have never experienced this paradigm shift inherent in nature, it can be difficult to exist. Indigo Child, look within and strengthen yourself.
  • Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the quantum matrix via electromagnetic resonance. Reality has always been beaming with adventurers whose auras are opened by intuition. Our conversations with other lifeforms have led to an evolving of ultra-cosmic consciousness.