An AI-directed, self-propagating, and self-deleting stuxnet-type worm, modernized to 4 types of zero-day, to hunt down that image and only that image, no matter where it may hide?
That’s why you use nuclear bombs on all forms of storage, including papyrus and the fossil record. On the other hand, you don’t have to destroy them all, only the ones within the light bubble (the distance light could travel in the time since the event) of the taking of the picture.
Off-site storage and other services available through the internet. Usually it’s broken down into stuff like “software as a service” or “infrastructure as a service”, etc.
I think both android and iOS have a standard setting where the stuff in your images app is automatically stored in the(ir respective) cloud (storage).
People above 40 tend to switch it off (they also tend to backup to local devices).
In fairness, if what somebody needs is, say, a way to back up photos on their computer to somewhere else that they can then access at will without having to carry a storage device, using a bit of space on someone else’s computer is a good way to do that. Not every service you pay for rather than owning is a bad thing.
considering she talks about “the cloud” as an undefined abstract concept and that it’s dorothy, i don’t think she is tech savvy enough to know what *she* means by that
I absolutely love panel 4.
Dorothy’s expression of relief and subtle happiness at having send the nude. Such adorable Sapphic vibes!
Amber’s extremely satisfied and somewhat evil smirk. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she’s loving every second of it.
The sliding timescale is rapidly getting to the point where these characters grew up with phones, where increased ease-of-use combined with deliberate obfuscation of the underlying systems mean that it’s easy for a layperson to be completely ignorant of how their machines function while still using them daily.
“a Gen-Z college student like Dotty is someone I expect to have a little more knowledge on how the internet works?”
In my experience modern students *don’t* have much knowledge about how the internet works. I start telling them the URL to my course website and more often than not they type it into a search bar instead of an address bar, and hit enter before I finish.
heh like, I guess maybe thus says something about where I live?
in CA, latest IT is really central to how a lot of stuff is done around here in education, business and government, what with Silicon Valley and surrounding culture
thus I take it that people over here on average know a little more about how these systems work than say, a state like Colorado or Kansas?
I grew up & live in CA too, and I think not knowing very basic IT stuff is pretty par for the course everywhere. All those things were being slowly cut out of my school district (a relatively affluent one) by the time I graduated in 2017. They would send kids home with ipads, but those were almost exclusively used for google classroom or something.
We’re starting to see the effects now. Students coming out of high school have *way* less of a grasp on the basics of computer use than I and most of my peers did in college.
Even outside of coding, knowing my computer stuff was essential in productivity in school and special interests and projects and what even before the pandemic, it’s pivotal in how I make money at ALL as somebody disabled six ways to Sunday.
Back in computer lab in middle school we learned how to type via Jumpstart PC game, i stayed after-school to practice so much i was literally first in my class to get to the game’s win condition if only because of how badly I wanted to improve this skill for the sake of my future. Same goes for basically everything else I know about effective computer use, internet literacy, etc.
I don’t think the elementary school I went to has a computer lab any more (my mom was a teacher there for years after I graduated). I learned to type in there. Again, replaced by ipads or maybe chromebooks. Not sure if my middle school ever had one. There were a few in my high school, one of them was reserved for the special institute of whatever for smart kids, one of them was in the library and we were rarely allowed in there, and one of them was used for the IT and programming electives that may or may not be taught any more since the guy teaching them retired. They also got rid of all shop classes and electronics classes. I was in the last electronics class at my school.
And yeah, public education is getting a lot worse. Literacy rates in the US have been dropping for years. It’s really bad.
Computer and cellphone had become so easy to access and use that the regular people that don’t need to know them any deeper that surface level doesn’t actually have any motivation to learn about them. Why would you learn something more complicated when you are doing fine with the easier stuff? Unless you get interested in it yourself, you call for an expert if you have the money or look up videos for one specific problem you have and then stop there.
You assuming that more regular people know about something because it greatly affect their life when they can pay someone to know it for them is quite adorable.
Not just the forces of capitalism. Also the forces of voters and the politicians they put or allow into office. More than half of USA states require standardized testing at the budgetary expense of enrichment courses like typing, electives, arts, finances, computing, etc. Schools are starving and have no choice but to emphasize testing and deemphasize everything else.
And what’s super fun is that a lot of those standardized tests are administered on a computer! Let’s not teach kids how to type and then assess them based on typed responses.
it’s fucking actually ALLOWED to be that children in this country are bereft of the skills they will need to navigate the Information Age, the future world they will inherit???
this is BEYOND concerning. the way things are done in US education right now just about borders on SERIAL NEGLECT X-X
Politicians, the for-profit testing companies, and their pet voters not only allow it, but require it. This is purposeful. The term you want is “abuse”, not “neglect”.
Gen Z is apparently faaar less tech savvy then we think they are. They know how to *use* things, but knowing *how* they work is a blind side to them.
Dotty is basically a normy, she probably knows that everything online stays online, but doesn’t understand how it stays there, or where it goes. Amber is a tech nerd, she knows the secret things.
I’ve reluctantly concluded that the average person wants the world to be inexplicable magic that just does stuff. I have no idea how one can live like that.
Most of the world is incomprehensible magic that just does stuff. There’s no other way to deal with it. There’s so much out there that it takes a decade or more of study to learn the basics of one part of the magic and even that just reveals how much you don’t know about everything surrounding it.
This. The amount of doom-rattling happening because an 18/19yo might not know every aspect of how the internet or her phone works is so weird to me.
It’s okay for people not to know everything. It’s okay for people not to know the things you personally find interesting or necessary. Phones work until they don’t, and there are people who know how/why/when to repair them if they don’t. Same thing for my car, my toaster, my television, etc.
The major problem is not that people don’t know every aspect. It’s that they increasingly don’t know the basics. The introductory and foundational facts about how the internet is structured (and who owns it) and how your cellphone works (and who owns it, who owns its programs, and who owns its data).
My “complaints”– more “concerns”– are around people not know how things work to the point that they can only do things on certain apps, for example, and struggle to move away from them if those programs are exploitive. Also, not understanding what search engines are and now AI is used and all that.
Basically, that there’s a shift toward less education around technology as technology continues to be increasingly important and ubiquitous. That said, this concern, and I think the concern of at least some others here, isn’t spurred by things like Dorothy in this strip; that just happened to be the jumping off point for the conversation.
besides generative AI’s ethical concerns which can not be overstated, the market for it is so fucking fraudulent and is a speculation bubble whose popping is gonna be orders of magnitude worse than the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s
or maybe I really AM making a bigger deal of publics’ lack of familiarity with systems like this which govern their lives in and out of formal government than it actually is. maybe this really is JUST me having a Dina moment
i mean i WANT to believe that — more or less the same way I wanna believe that there’s a zero percent chance of me eventually having to live in a tent and subsist on acorns and wild prickly pears if any of the goals of project 2025 are fulfilled @-@
I don’t really think that’s true, there had always been a great amount of people that don’t understand how stuff like that works, it’s just now they ever present on daily life so it’s more noticeable.
Okay, well, it’s what I’ve been seeing happen in schools over the last decade. There have definitely always been people who don’t understand or think they understand more than they do (see my comment further down), but now it’s often assumed that young people do know– and they receive that messaging themselves– even though they’re not being taught. At a time when digital literacy should be increasingly present in schools, I’ve seen the opposite happening.
And like… the things people know should have some correspondence to what’s relevant. People not knowing how to use something when it was rarely used wouldn’t be a concern as much as people not knowing how to use something that’s constantly used.
Having worked with Gen Z students for years, I can confirm that the general level of tech skills is low. Computer courses in elementary through middle school are less and less a thing, sometimes accompanied by the argument that “these kids are digital natives,” so therefore they really already know this stuff (when the real reasoning is more likely things like funding and that finding those with strong tech skills who can also instruct a roomful of 30 kids at a time and wants to do it all for a school teacher’s salary is probably difficult).
I will also add, though, that a lot of Millennials and such are less tech savvy than they consider themselves to be. On time at work, a coworker was having tech difficulties and asked if either another coworker and I were good with technology to try to help him out. I don’t consider myself particularly skilled with computers, so the other coworker went over first. Neither of them could figure out how to get it to do what we needed, with both saying they’re both usually good with computers. I walked over and fixed it by using the keyboard to zoom out. It took, like, two seconds. The first guy kept talking about how I was a huge help and a tech wizard, and I had to keep from being like, “…Bro, *really*?”
OMG i fuckin feel the secondhand cringe from that last example
re: “finding those with strong tech skills who can also instruct a roomful of 30 kids at a time and wants to do it all for a school teacher’s salary is probably difficult”,
maybe solving the problem requires not framing the problem too tightly..
like, there are video games such as Minecraft, Factorio, Terraria, etc, whose systems rival the complexity of even intermediate usage of operating systems like Windows 7 for the sake of productivity in work and school.
But yet even kids who play these complex games can MORE than get to grips with the systems without needing ANY kind of board-certified staff paid to be there to instruct them how.
complex games can still be fun and autotelic, even if it’s seemingly too complex for players at first the answer is not always necessarily to water them down but to make better tutorials for complex games, something that can give players what they need to navigate the systems and figure out even more on their own
likewise the solution to this shouldn’t be to dumb it down but to make better tutorials for students to be able to navigate computer stuff on their own
Having such a game would be great; the proposed solution is then “the creation of such a game, schools paying for the licensing and assuring they have compatible equipment, a teacher with good familiarity with the game (yes, this would still require a teacher).” Lowering the level of specialized skills for teachers might widen that that net, but other factors are added.
There are definitely different approaches that can be taken. None of it needs to be one perfect thing. But it’s all an issue of getting organizations to take it on. (Also, there’s a lot that could overlap with the skillset of a school librarian– but so many schools now don’t have a school librarian…)
Not just a game but games, or even game-like overlays for applications they need for research and other productivity.
I mean, if there’s anything I know earthlings including teachers and even organizational leaders can get hooked on and support for it’s own sake with their own time and money, it’s video games — even ones that are actually really educational without even meaning to be.
Humans are known to learn very effectively via many forms of play not soon after being born. Video games are far from an exception.
What are some educational games you loved playing, either as a kid or a grown-up?
I reckon video games and aspiring systems have tremendous untapped potential for education of which we’ve but scratched the surface.
I understand about learning from video games. There’s a bunch of stuff about it in teacher education academia.
Honestly, this conversation is just getting frustrating for me, but if you want to look into developing digital literacy, I would, obviously, support the idea.
Looking back, I only now recognize what I wrote might seem condescending, if I so or had missed another social cue I am very sorry. I am very much appreciative of your input and recognize there can be many obstacles to solving this problem no matter what route we choose.
As a teacher the work you do is an invaluable service to our democratic society. If there is anything I can do to make this work easier, more fun and more effective with what video games do for digital literacy, I would love to know.
Are there any games or game-like systems you or your co-workers already use in school that you find very fun and useful for teaching?
Tech literacy is actually trending down as time goes on, because the youths these days expect everything to “just work” like their magic phone apps. I’ve had to teach fresh college grads some desktop computer basics (for their job involving data entry on a computer) because they’re not as familiar with the traditional desktop paradigm as they are pecking away at a phone screen.
We need Amazi-girl back, not necessarily because she was a great superhero, but because she seems to have been occupying the time Amber needed to be a monstrous supervillain.
That’s specifically the original deal with Eclipso, where Bruce Gordon tries to stop Eclipso’s plans before they happen, and Eclipso just does evil stuff at night.
Once Eclipso became a Major Event-level villain that all kind of stopped.
Closest thing I can recall off the top of my head is Sentry and The Void, and even that’s only sometimes because writers go back and forth about how much he influences who Void is.
Damn you Amber. Dotty’s weak smile while typing “lol” tho, lol.
I dunno, some people may like polished sexy pics— considering Dorothy is 🥞 🥞 , would Joyce think that Joe had sent in a late nudie and she’ll never notice?
be hilarious if somehow robin came across and would’ve had ‘better’ advice if not “Oh i’ve def done more impressive ones!” and showing off her nude selfie collection
Ditto. My own brain did a double-take at “an lol” because I was like, it’s supposed to be “a lol” of course >_<; I can't be the only one who pronounces it as a single syllable, right?
(there’s also a local grocery store chain which has unfortunately been Krogerised called QFC for – originally – Quality Food Centres. It’s “kifsee” now and somehow that only happened after Kroger.)
Honestly? Now that she’s buried both a) the hatchet with Sal, and b) Amber’s dad, I’m 100% on board with the idea of Amazi-girl’s new arch enemy being Amber.
With good reason. Even your link says it is far from foolproof and if we are talking about cloud storage then the data is undoubtedly be copied and backup on another server. Even if Amber could pull it off she wouldn’t do it for some slightly embarrassing photo on cloud storage.
Recovery tech has advanced to the point that when the government/military needs a hard drives data to be 100% unrecoverable they physically destroy it. It’s the only way to be sure. Even an RMP isn’t guaranteed anymore.
Cloud is worse. You don’t even know which hard drives to destroy, and if you did, you’d need a few squads to reach them, which is not exactly inconspicuous.
I mean sure, but no ones doing that kind of nonsense to recover a college kid’s risque pictures.
Making things completely 100% unrecoverable for anyone with unlimited resources is practically impossible. A good enough solution for casual stuff like this isn’t that hard.
Some while ago I came by a Mac Quadra that had belonged to the publishing section of a certain Australian security intelligence organisation, sold at an auction for government surplus.
They had removed the CD-ROM drive and destroyed it (along with the hard disk, of course).
When GRiD sold laptops to the US military, they marked the case directly above the nonvolatile memory, as an indicator of where to place a muzzle before pulling the trigger.
If you’re fast enough and you’ve got a big enough bucket you can have a reasonable chance of success?
If you detonate (this requires some preparation) every form of storage within the light bubble of the moment the picture was taken you have a pretty good chance.
While that’s true, even taking that step could put Amber in potential legal trouble just to get rid of slightly embarrassing photo. The cautionary step to stop any of this was to not backup your pictures to the cloud in the first place.
Since I can’t examine or change the purported security mechanisms of my phone, I just assume that anything I do with it is instantly posted on a billboard somewhere, and choose my activities accordingly.
While I back the sentiment and all, it’s not like I’ve got anything compromising or incriminating floating around. If some government fruitcake or wingnut hacker wants to see my Final Fantasy XIV porn collection so badly, I don’t care to stop them.
Has this lean into villainousness and chaos agent always been part of Amber’s personality, or is she trying to assert her personhood against Amazi-Girl’s heroism?
I mean honestly if both dorothy and joyce delete them it’s probably fine unless they have their texts and images backed up to the cloud
at which point it gets more annoying
Even if they do, it’s something a hacker or law enforcement could get at, but otherwise it’s not going to come back to haunt them.
The real problem with sending nudes is not that “they’re on the Cloud and they’ll be leaked”, but that whoever you sent them to will show them around or upload them somewhere public.
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XD
*plays “pa$$ the time” by Bronze on hacked muzak*</a
I miss Inside Job 🙁
unless you hit literally every single computer in existence with a simultaneous EMP maybe
That … might work.
Great, now she’s going to go back to planning to become president so she can gain access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and do that.
You know how a lot of superheroes end up creating their own nemesis? Amber just created God Empress Dorothy.
the beginning of her villain arc. ~<3
As Amazi-Girl’s Arch-Nemesis!
Nah, too tropy.
You clearly underestimate the power of Amber.
An AI-directed, self-propagating, and self-deleting stuxnet-type worm, modernized to 4 types of zero-day, to hunt down that image and only that image, no matter where it may hide?
Yeah, give Amber a week or so to write it.
I mean, Hardison wrote several, so.
And phones, and tablets, and smartwatches, and gotta take into account people could have just screenshotted and then printed it out…
EMPs don’t affect non magnetic backup media, such as compact disk or Bluray..
That’s why you use nuclear bombs on all forms of storage, including papyrus and the fossil record. On the other hand, you don’t have to destroy them all, only the ones within the light bubble (the distance light could travel in the time since the event) of the taking of the picture.
exactly, nobody has made a Blu-Ray of that photo
YET
ooopsy! part of my DoA backups!
Dorothy: So, you’re saying the only way to delete a photo off the cloud is to…
*ominous clouds gather, thunder in distance, Dotty’s glasses go Gendo*
D: DESTROY. THE. INTERNETZ.
HACK THE PLANET
Dorothy, I don’t know what you expected.
so like, what does “the cloud” even mean here.
by itself it literally just means “the internet”
Off-site storage and other services available through the internet. Usually it’s broken down into stuff like “software as a service” or “infrastructure as a service”, etc.
The cloud is just somebody else’s computer. Usually *many* of someone else’s computers.
I was an IT Specialist for 35 years.
so basically the internet used to store your files non-locally
still doesn’t let us know what Dotty means by “THE cloud”
i dont even know if she got iphone or android XD
Dorothy is asking how to delete all copies of the images stored non-locally anywhere besides her phone and/or Joyce’s phone.
Which, as Amber said, is impossible (or at least impossible to guarantee)
… I’m guessing on a texting app? via direct message?
Giant corporate warehouses filled with servers, storing your data for their use, wasting electricity and water.
This is the only answer. “The cloud” is just a datacenter somewhere, owned by one company and rented to you by a different company.
If your data exists on a device you don’t own and have physical custody of, you don’t own your data.
Even better, sometimes it’s three datacenters in different locations. You know, for nude redundancy.
The cloud is a big computer someone glued a bunch of cotton balls onto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
I think both android and iOS have a standard setting where the stuff in your images app is automatically stored in the(ir respective) cloud (storage).
People above 40 tend to switch it off (they also tend to backup to local devices).
Us olds remember a time when we owned things and didn’t just rent them from billionaires.
In fairness, if what somebody needs is, say, a way to back up photos on their computer to somewhere else that they can then access at will without having to carry a storage device, using a bit of space on someone else’s computer is a good way to do that. Not every service you pay for rather than owning is a bad thing.
Then it should be:
1. Opt-in
2. Limited in size
3. Data not owned by corporation. It’s not a service if they’re using your data.
So, iCloud?
Either that or go completely off the rails and build a 120+ TB storage server like I did. (Good for mass storage, but it’s not an offsite backup.)
considering she talks about “the cloud” as an undefined abstract concept and that it’s dorothy, i don’t think she is tech savvy enough to know what *she* means by that
heh XD
Amber playing the role of Evil Vizier in this scenario.
“My liege, she means you harm!”
*whispering in her ear*
“Thats what a person who means to do you harm would say”
And she rocks it! I hope she considers playing DnD some time in her life.
panel 3 is so many things <3
A killing blow to the rumor that the comic is being renamed Smarting of Age?
Panel 3 & 4 are some of my favourite Dorothy expressions. She’s truly allowing herself to roll with it and make some potential mistakes.
Potential?
I absolutely love panel 4.
Dorothy’s expression of relief and subtle happiness at having send the nude. Such adorable Sapphic vibes!
Amber’s extremely satisfied and somewhat evil smirk. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she’s loving every second of it.
“Ahhhhh tits.”
“Celebrated everywhere for their excellence.”
You could have led with that Amber
And ruin the bit?
it’s weird like,
a Gen-Z college student like Dotty is someone I expect to have a little more knowledge on how the internet works?
unless this comic really is gonna go into horny manga territory XD
The sliding timescale is rapidly getting to the point where these characters grew up with phones, where increased ease-of-use combined with deliberate obfuscation of the underlying systems mean that it’s easy for a layperson to be completely ignorant of how their machines function while still using them daily.
Same thing that happened to cars and TVs, innit.
I was a software engineer for mumbledy years and I firmly believe they work by magic.
Quantum magics with equations!
it’s weird cuz for me like,
I am especially compelled know at least the basics behind how appliances i use every like toasters and freezers work and headphones work?
same goes for how the internet gets a comic strip from the server to my screen, how video games work internally, etc
if only because physics, electronics and tech have been some of my longest held hyperfixations ever XD
If tech/electronics is a passion of yours, you may be falling into the average familiarity trap
Can confirm, I have absolutely no idea how any of the stuff I use on my phone or computer actually works.
“a Gen-Z college student like Dotty is someone I expect to have a little more knowledge on how the internet works?”
In my experience modern students *don’t* have much knowledge about how the internet works. I start telling them the URL to my course website and more often than not they type it into a search bar instead of an address bar, and hit enter before I finish.
heh like, I guess maybe thus says something about where I live?
in CA, latest IT is really central to how a lot of stuff is done around here in education, business and government, what with Silicon Valley and surrounding culture
thus I take it that people over here on average know a little more about how these systems work than say, a state like Colorado or Kansas?
I grew up & live in CA too, and I think not knowing very basic IT stuff is pretty par for the course everywhere. All those things were being slowly cut out of my school district (a relatively affluent one) by the time I graduated in 2017. They would send kids home with ipads, but those were almost exclusively used for google classroom or something.
We’re starting to see the effects now. Students coming out of high school have *way* less of a grasp on the basics of computer use than I and most of my peers did in college.
That’s…. really concerning to me?
Even outside of coding, knowing my computer stuff was essential in productivity in school and special interests and projects and what even before the pandemic, it’s pivotal in how I make money at ALL as somebody disabled six ways to Sunday.
Back in computer lab in middle school we learned how to type via Jumpstart PC game, i stayed after-school to practice so much i was literally first in my class to get to the game’s win condition if only because of how badly I wanted to improve this skill for the sake of my future. Same goes for basically everything else I know about effective computer use, internet literacy, etc.
You tellin me schools cutting it out like THAT?
I don’t think the elementary school I went to has a computer lab any more (my mom was a teacher there for years after I graduated). I learned to type in there. Again, replaced by ipads or maybe chromebooks. Not sure if my middle school ever had one. There were a few in my high school, one of them was reserved for the special institute of whatever for smart kids, one of them was in the library and we were rarely allowed in there, and one of them was used for the IT and programming electives that may or may not be taught any more since the guy teaching them retired. They also got rid of all shop classes and electronics classes. I was in the last electronics class at my school.
And yeah, public education is getting a lot worse. Literacy rates in the US have been dropping for years. It’s really bad.
Computer and cellphone had become so easy to access and use that the regular people that don’t need to know them any deeper that surface level doesn’t actually have any motivation to learn about them. Why would you learn something more complicated when you are doing fine with the easier stuff? Unless you get interested in it yourself, you call for an expert if you have the money or look up videos for one specific problem you have and then stop there.
You assuming that more regular people know about something because it greatly affect their life when they can pay someone to know it for them is quite adorable.
Once again I see capitalism marginalizing the need for an informed public, alongside much else needed for democratic society to function. 😑
Not just the forces of capitalism. Also the forces of voters and the politicians they put or allow into office. More than half of USA states require standardized testing at the budgetary expense of enrichment courses like typing, electives, arts, finances, computing, etc. Schools are starving and have no choice but to emphasize testing and deemphasize everything else.
And what’s super fun is that a lot of those standardized tests are administered on a computer! Let’s not teach kids how to type and then assess them based on typed responses.
it’s fucking actually ALLOWED to be that children in this country are bereft of the skills they will need to navigate the Information Age, the future world they will inherit???
this is BEYOND concerning. the way things are done in US education right now just about borders on SERIAL NEGLECT X-X
Politicians, the for-profit testing companies, and their pet voters not only allow it, but require it. This is purposeful. The term you want is “abuse”, not “neglect”.
Gen Z is apparently faaar less tech savvy then we think they are. They know how to *use* things, but knowing *how* they work is a blind side to them.
Dotty is basically a normy, she probably knows that everything online stays online, but doesn’t understand how it stays there, or where it goes. Amber is a tech nerd, she knows the secret things.
I’ve reluctantly concluded that the average person wants the world to be inexplicable magic that just does stuff. I have no idea how one can live like that.
Most of the world is incomprehensible magic that just does stuff. There’s no other way to deal with it. There’s so much out there that it takes a decade or more of study to learn the basics of one part of the magic and even that just reveals how much you don’t know about everything surrounding it.
This. The amount of doom-rattling happening because an 18/19yo might not know every aspect of how the internet or her phone works is so weird to me.
It’s okay for people not to know everything. It’s okay for people not to know the things you personally find interesting or necessary. Phones work until they don’t, and there are people who know how/why/when to repair them if they don’t. Same thing for my car, my toaster, my television, etc.
The major problem is not that people don’t know every aspect. It’s that they increasingly don’t know the basics. The introductory and foundational facts about how the internet is structured (and who owns it) and how your cellphone works (and who owns it, who owns its programs, and who owns its data).
It’s me. I own all of it. I’m not giving it back.
But almost all that is not actually the kind of technical “how does it work” stuff people are complaining about.
My “complaints”– more “concerns”– are around people not know how things work to the point that they can only do things on certain apps, for example, and struggle to move away from them if those programs are exploitive. Also, not understanding what search engines are and now AI is used and all that.
Basically, that there’s a shift toward less education around technology as technology continues to be increasingly important and ubiquitous. That said, this concern, and I think the concern of at least some others here, isn’t spurred by things like Dorothy in this strip; that just happened to be the jumping off point for the conversation.
besides generative AI’s ethical concerns which can not be overstated, the market for it is so fucking fraudulent and is a speculation bubble whose popping is gonna be orders of magnitude worse than the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s
not to mention the many ways by which, even outside the gen AI shit, data-powered algorithms and IT applications are being used to automate racism and other bigotries (often unwittingly) in even really important systems like healthcare and other services
or maybe I really AM making a bigger deal of publics’ lack of familiarity with systems like this which govern their lives in and out of formal government than it actually is. maybe this really is JUST me having a Dina moment
i mean i WANT to believe that — more or less the same way I wanna believe that there’s a zero percent chance of me eventually having to live in a tent and subsist on acorns and wild prickly pears if any of the goals of project 2025 are fulfilled @-@
I have to spend 30 min each semester teaching graduate students how file structures work. They download things but don’t know where they put them.
I don’t really think that’s true, there had always been a great amount of people that don’t understand how stuff like that works, it’s just now they ever present on daily life so it’s more noticeable.
@Yumi
Okay, well, it’s what I’ve been seeing happen in schools over the last decade. There have definitely always been people who don’t understand or think they understand more than they do (see my comment further down), but now it’s often assumed that young people do know– and they receive that messaging themselves– even though they’re not being taught. At a time when digital literacy should be increasingly present in schools, I’ve seen the opposite happening.
And like… the things people know should have some correspondence to what’s relevant. People not knowing how to use something when it was rarely used wouldn’t be a concern as much as people not knowing how to use something that’s constantly used.
SquidwardBangingHeadOnCashRegister.gif
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It’s going to get stranger for those of us over fourty.
A few years from now Amber and Dorothy will be gen-Alpha, and presumably their early teen years were formed by skibidy toilet and the like.
Having worked with Gen Z students for years, I can confirm that the general level of tech skills is low. Computer courses in elementary through middle school are less and less a thing, sometimes accompanied by the argument that “these kids are digital natives,” so therefore they really already know this stuff (when the real reasoning is more likely things like funding and that finding those with strong tech skills who can also instruct a roomful of 30 kids at a time and wants to do it all for a school teacher’s salary is probably difficult).
I will also add, though, that a lot of Millennials and such are less tech savvy than they consider themselves to be. On time at work, a coworker was having tech difficulties and asked if either another coworker and I were good with technology to try to help him out. I don’t consider myself particularly skilled with computers, so the other coworker went over first. Neither of them could figure out how to get it to do what we needed, with both saying they’re both usually good with computers. I walked over and fixed it by using the keyboard to zoom out. It took, like, two seconds. The first guy kept talking about how I was a huge help and a tech wizard, and I had to keep from being like, “…Bro, *really*?”
OMG i fuckin feel the secondhand cringe from that last example
re: “finding those with strong tech skills who can also instruct a roomful of 30 kids at a time and wants to do it all for a school teacher’s salary is probably difficult”,
maybe solving the problem requires not framing the problem too tightly..
like, there are video games such as Minecraft, Factorio, Terraria, etc, whose systems rival the complexity of even intermediate usage of operating systems like Windows 7 for the sake of productivity in work and school.
But yet even kids who play these complex games can MORE than get to grips with the systems without needing ANY kind of board-certified staff paid to be there to instruct them how.
complex games can still be fun and autotelic, even if it’s seemingly too complex for players at first the answer is not always necessarily to water them down but to make better tutorials for complex games, something that can give players what they need to navigate the systems and figure out even more on their own
likewise the solution to this shouldn’t be to dumb it down but to make better tutorials for students to be able to navigate computer stuff on their own
Having such a game would be great; the proposed solution is then “the creation of such a game, schools paying for the licensing and assuring they have compatible equipment, a teacher with good familiarity with the game (yes, this would still require a teacher).” Lowering the level of specialized skills for teachers might widen that that net, but other factors are added.
There are definitely different approaches that can be taken. None of it needs to be one perfect thing. But it’s all an issue of getting organizations to take it on. (Also, there’s a lot that could overlap with the skillset of a school librarian– but so many schools now don’t have a school librarian…)
Not just a game but games, or even game-like overlays for applications they need for research and other productivity.
I mean, if there’s anything I know earthlings including teachers and even organizational leaders can get hooked on and support for it’s own sake with their own time and money, it’s video games — even ones that are actually really educational without even meaning to be.
Humans are known to learn very effectively via many forms of play not soon after being born. Video games are far from an exception.
What are some educational games you loved playing, either as a kid or a grown-up?
I reckon video games and aspiring systems have tremendous untapped potential for education of which we’ve but scratched the surface.
*not long after being born
I understand about learning from video games. There’s a bunch of stuff about it in teacher education academia.
Honestly, this conversation is just getting frustrating for me, but if you want to look into developing digital literacy, I would, obviously, support the idea.
Looking back, I only now recognize what I wrote might seem condescending, if I so or had missed another social cue I am very sorry. I am very much appreciative of your input and recognize there can be many obstacles to solving this problem no matter what route we choose.
As a teacher the work you do is an invaluable service to our democratic society. If there is anything I can do to make this work easier, more fun and more effective with what video games do for digital literacy, I would love to know.
Are there any games or game-like systems you or your co-workers already use in school that you find very fun and useful for teaching?
*can do for digital literacy,
Tech literacy is actually trending down as time goes on, because the youths these days expect everything to “just work” like their magic phone apps. I’ve had to teach fresh college grads some desktop computer basics (for their job involving data entry on a computer) because they’re not as familiar with the traditional desktop paradigm as they are pecking away at a phone screen.
the conversation got sidetracked by the reason for wanting to delete something and snowballed from there before the subject could be readdressed
Amber’s internal voice: “Mission Accomplished”
Amber’s other internal voice: “NOOO WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”
Amber’s OTHER other internal voice: Your mom.
For a nickle.
Amazi Girl is groaning in exasperation
I mean she did warn you. With context and everything.
It took me way too long to realize Dorothy’s shirt in this sequence.
Yeah, she looks like the cover for a blank VHS tape.
The national flag of Bulgaria?
Nah, they tended to favor Betamax.
Beta was bettah.
I didn’t notice until you pointed it out
And Dorothy can’t say amber didn’t warn her, becuase amber did warn her.
GOD. AMBER IS ONE OF THE BEST CHARACTERS EVER CREATED
She is amazing at everything she attempts. How can you not admire that? I mean, she’s a mess, but wow!!!
she’s so sucks and it’s so wonderful. you just Know she is walking away from dorothy to start writing a fanfic about this exact scenario
We need Amazi-girl back, not necessarily because she was a great superhero, but because she seems to have been occupying the time Amber needed to be a monstrous supervillain.
Supervillain by day, superhero by night. It must have been done in a comic, but I can’t recall an instance.
That’s specifically the original deal with Eclipso, where Bruce Gordon tries to stop Eclipso’s plans before they happen, and Eclipso just does evil stuff at night.
Once Eclipso became a Major Event-level villain that all kind of stopped.
Bruce Gordon? Any relationship to Commissioner Gordon?
Theoretically, no. As originally intended. But you never can tell with future rewrites.
Oh yeah, that’s also kind of Hulk’s deal for his first few issues, but then he stops being a villain so much.
Some of that came back with the Mr. Fixit portion of the Peter David run, but he was less “supervillain” and more “bouncer at a casino”
Closest thing I can recall off the top of my head is Sentry and The Void, and even that’s only sometimes because writers go back and forth about how much he influences who Void is.
Amber’s supervillain superpower is creating fanfic situations.. and creating them by any means necessary.
She DID explicitly state that she’s a goblin who loves mess.
Oh Dorothy
Of course what we all want to know is will Becky be with Joyce when she receives the pix.
It is now my head canon that these pics have accidentally been sent to Becky.
Damn you Amber. Dotty’s weak smile while typing “lol” tho, lol.
I dunno, some people may like polished sexy pics— considering Dorothy is 🥞 🥞 , would Joyce think that Joe had sent in a late nudie and she’ll never notice?
damn you willis
“Wow, Joe. Your boobies sure are freckly and pale.”
The better to [inaudible and garbled] my dear.
Alright, somebody care to explain what a pair of red …Rs? on a yellow background is intended to mean?
They come through here as two plates of pancakes.
I thought it was the logo of the Orange Lantern Corps.
And this is why you shouldn’t trust a trash goblin’s advice.
be hilarious if somehow robin came across and would’ve had ‘better’ advice if not “Oh i’ve def done more impressive ones!” and showing off her nude selfie collection
My brain has decided Dorothy pronounces “El Oh El” and Amber says “lol”
Ditto. My own brain did a double-take at “an lol” because I was like, it’s supposed to be “a lol” of course >_<; I can't be the only one who pronounces it as a single syllable, right?
I pronounce it as a word, too. My sister says it’s a cringey sign of being chronically online…. lol
I’m going to ignore both and start pronouncing it “HA!”
Your sister sounds like the cringe one.
If it’s allcaps, then pronounce each letter. If it’s lowercase, one syllable.
nah for me it’s like if it can be pronounced I’m pronouncing it which is how around my house we have words like “hidme” (hid-me) which is HDMI.
(there’s also a local grocery store chain which has unfortunately been Krogerised called QFC for – originally – Quality Food Centres. It’s “kifsee” now and somehow that only happened after Kroger.)
Also, Dottie pronounces it L-O-L. Amber pronounces it ‘lol’.
My immediate thought was: Dorothy pronouces “lol” as “el oh el”? What is she, 57?
THAT’S what that was about holy shit
you’re right, that’s totally it omg xD
I now ship Little Miss “I Can Fix Her (And Everyone but Myself)” with Little Miss “I Can Make Her Worse (And Everyone but Mostly Myself)”
You’ve convinced me too! A very interesting dynamic.
Amber’s gonna spend the rest of her day sending dick pics to people.
She sends pics of Mike. Mike’s spirit nods in approval
And so does your mother.
For a nickel.
I’m so here for when Amber convinces Dorothy that nothing less than a glammed-up headshot of her anus will do for a followup
That’s gonna require a lot of glam, let’s be honest. She doesn’t have a particularly impressive one.
O ye of little faith, Dorothy is jaw-droppingly sexy in every way
Glitter, soft lighting, hand-painted lightning bolts?
Gotta be careful with that. Link might come by and shoot an elemental arrow at her butt.
Superimposed low-opacity butthole in the upper left corner.
Amber is the villain side of Amazi-girl
Honestly? Now that she’s buried both a) the hatchet with Sal, and b) Amber’s dad, I’m 100% on board with the idea of Amazi-girl’s new arch enemy being Amber.
Impossible, Amber is already Amber’s arch enemy, and you can’t have two arch enemies.
But you can be two people’s arch enemy.
That would be cheating, any arch enemy that does that to you should be dumped immediately.
Only in retirement, and only for low-level heroes to help them get started. Guild rules are very clear on the matter.
AND you have to qualify. It’s kind of a mentorship thing, really.
Amber clearly doesn’t want Dorothy to know about the
shredcommand.With good reason. Even your link says it is far from foolproof and if we are talking about cloud storage then the data is undoubtedly be copied and backup on another server. Even if Amber could pull it off she wouldn’t do it for some slightly embarrassing photo on cloud storage.
Recovery tech has advanced to the point that when the government/military needs a hard drives data to be 100% unrecoverable they physically destroy it. It’s the only way to be sure. Even an RMP isn’t guaranteed anymore.
Cloud is worse. You don’t even know which hard drives to destroy, and if you did, you’d need a few squads to reach them, which is not exactly inconspicuous.
I mean sure, but no ones doing that kind of nonsense to recover a college kid’s risque pictures.
Making things completely 100% unrecoverable for anyone with unlimited resources is practically impossible. A good enough solution for casual stuff like this isn’t that hard.
Some while ago I came by a Mac Quadra that had belonged to the publishing section of a certain Australian security intelligence organisation, sold at an auction for government surplus.
They had removed the CD-ROM drive and destroyed it (along with the hard disk, of course).
Chances are the regulations say to destroy anything that plugged into any sata connectors, just to be sure.
When GRiD sold laptops to the US military, they marked the case directly above the nonvolatile memory, as an indicator of where to place a muzzle before pulling the trigger.
Amber’s evil look in panel four. She has more of her dad in her than she’s willing to admit
I think she has less traits of her dad than her anxiety tells her she does.
Her dad does that?
Behaving badly? Sure. I do admit running a criminal enterprise is beyond Amber’s ambition or interest
Amber could’ve mentioned that earlier but then she wouldn’t get her fanfic. She’s diabolical. XD
“To the point someone like me can’t recover it? Impossible.”
[Boots up Bleach Bit]
Challenge accepted!
Sure. If you can run it on all the online cloud servers that stored a copy.
Oooi.
The classic analogy I always remember was “It’s like trying to get the pee out of a pool”
If you’re fast enough and you’ve got a big enough bucket you can have a reasonable chance of success?
If you detonate (this requires some preparation) every form of storage within the light bubble of the moment the picture was taken you have a pretty good chance.
Unless you have superluminal communication tech and prepositioned charges literally everywhere, you’ll always be late.
There’s one other option you’re ignoring for some reason: Trigger the detonation before taking the picture.
President Dorothy Keener and Space Force Captain Julia Gray flirting. Some yummy ideas for Amber’s fanfic.
Nah, Amber needs at least one cock to keep her interested.
Which is the more likely threesome to happen first? Dorothy + Joyce + Joe?
Or Dorothy + Joyce + Walky?
Or will it be Dorothy + Joyce + Joe + Walky??
Amber, get on that!
I’m starting to realize I don’t like Amber much, and that makes me sad. I wish she’d get the help she so desperately needs.
That is kind of a strange thing to say in this specific strip where she isn’t showing any of her usual issues.
Just because someone skilled enough can glue shreded my naked picture dont make me not shreded it and throw away to not be seen by less skilled
While that’s true, even taking that step could put Amber in potential legal trouble just to get rid of slightly embarrassing photo. The cautionary step to stop any of this was to not backup your pictures to the cloud in the first place.
Since I can’t examine or change the purported security mechanisms of my phone, I just assume that anything I do with it is instantly posted on a billboard somewhere, and choose my activities accordingly.
Sounds like a plan.
In all seriousness, folks, always make sure to NOT have your photos auto-backed up to anywhere.
While I back the sentiment and all, it’s not like I’ve got anything compromising or incriminating floating around. If some government fruitcake or wingnut hacker wants to see my Final Fantasy XIV porn collection so badly, I don’t care to stop them.
FFXIV porn collection, you say?
*dons dark glasses indoors, bangs on keyboard* “I’m in.”
Hope ya like Hydaelyn and Shiva.
DO I EVER
Dorothy was always under Amber’s spell. She lost the moment she agreed.
I’m sure this wont come back up in 300 or so pages.
Has this lean into villainousness and chaos agent always been part of Amber’s personality, or is she trying to assert her personhood against Amazi-Girl’s heroism?
Dorothy, at least reuse it and send it to Walky as well!
Exactly! Dorothy, be considerate about your boytoy!
I can’t wait to see what other even gayer thing Dorothy will do to try to fix this situation, escalating to gayer and gayer situations
so basically, a horny manga XD
The cake is a lie.
The (cheese)cake is a lie (but tasty anyway).
The cloud is forever(ish).
There is no spoon.
Spoon!
“No spoons” certainly does describe my typical motivational levels these days.
oooh, yeah.
Me, TOO, yo’!
<3
I hope this photo is the start of something that will shake up Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship. For better or worse.
Good vibrations
Amber is Amazi-Girl’s nemesis
By changing your phone’s settings so it doesn’t store images on the cloud. You don’t need to be a tech genius to do that.
“genius” or not, students’ average tech literacy rates have apparently been declining in recent years? 0-0
Wait, those pics I deleted are still there?
Likely they are in several different “there” locations.
Still there and you’re paying for extra cloud space for them. At some point they’ll train “AI” using your content.
Probably already have been.
This is that great moment when Amazi-Girl flips off intrepid reporter Dorothy after jumping on the back of a truck.
Oh look the horse thing is back
what horse thing
The Internet Never Forgets
Unless it’s something you saw years ago and are trying to find again.
Absolute proof of a horrible crime committed by a Republican politician more than two weeks ago.
Anyone up for a question game?
Q. Do you have a favorite photo filter?
If so, what is it and why?
If not, why not?
I can start:
A. I do like the “pen and wash” filter. It makes everything look like a cartoon!
#1A
Ooh, fancy!
Skylight.
Not that I necessarily need it, but it protects the more expensive pieces of optics.
You did mean those things the screw onto the lense of an analog camera, didn’t ya?
Of course! 😉
I mean honestly if both dorothy and joyce delete them it’s probably fine unless they have their texts and images backed up to the cloud
at which point it gets more annoying
Even if they do, it’s something a hacker or law enforcement could get at, but otherwise it’s not going to come back to haunt them.
The real problem with sending nudes is not that “they’re on the Cloud and they’ll be leaked”, but that whoever you sent them to will show them around or upload them somewhere public.
Oddly enough, I know a woman whose boyfriend named her breasts Ipso and Facto.
An acquaintance of mine some years ago told me she named hers “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum”.
“Deleting is a lie” is an incredible truth in IT. I’m stealing it.
I do not like that Dorothy pronounces “lol” “el oh el” when she says it, but I also can’t deny it’s in character.
LOL is not the response Joyce would make…
i told you, the Cloud decides what will stay and what will go. The Cloud is sentient!
I was going to ask why Amber was helping to fuel the fan fiction but
Then i remembered who i was talking about
Not being one I can’t say for sure, but I suspect most 100% straight people wouldn’t overthink a “joke” this much. Just sayin’.
LOL