World News

Simple Governmental Collapse

FunkoPop's AI hates fun. Elon Musk denied some pay. The skies sure seem blue these days. France's government gets a glowup. Assad is a little piss boy.

Endeavorance

09 Dec 2024 — 5 min read

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Funk Off

Popular gaming website Itch.io was completely offline for a while over the past day after an AI-powered "brand protection" system used by toy maker FunkoPop flagged their website.

The base URL of a website—it's "domain name"—is essentially just leased to the owner of the website and is managed by a service called a "domain registrar." According to the owners of Itch, some automated software sent their registrar a report, to which their registrar just turned off their domain in response without checking in beforehand.

At that time, their website and all of their integrations, apps, and services became wholly inaccessible while they had no real course of action aside from repeatedly emailing the registrar.

It's back now, but that is a massive problem. It's also a problem in part because their domain registrar is the same one that I use for most of my websites, so… oop.

Musk Denied Again

Elon Musk—who recently used his child as a human shield in the wake of the killing of the health insurance CEO—was denied his $56,000,000,000 pay package from Tesla once again by a Delaware judge.

Musk has been trying for this $56B pay package for a while now, having used his influence over the Tesla board to rubber stamp what would amount to the largest ever pay package for the CEO of a company.

University of Delaware Center for Corporate Governance's Charles Elson sums it up quite nicely:

"You had a board that wasn't independent, a process that was dominated by the chief executive, and a package that was way out of any sort of reasonable bounds. It's quite a combo."

The case against Musk's absurd payout was brought to court by a Tesla shareholder originally, citing, "this some bullshit" (legal terminology).

Elon Musk is worth somewhere around $350,000,000,000 despite not seeming to actually do much work. A quick look at his Twitter profile shows that he's constantly posting and replying to tweets, despite apparently being the head of several companies, a major advisor to an incoming US President, a father of double digit children, and a chronic Diablo 4 addict who boasts about his hours-long play session.

Clearly this $56,000,000,000 will be spent on something other than Diablo 4 microtransactions.

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Skies of Blue

Bluesky has been popping the hell off recently as journalists and major outlets are starting to flock there. It recently hit 24 million users; a dramatic spike in popularity.

Bluesky calls itself "open" because of the way it is built. Similar to Mastodon, Bluesky was built around a protocol rather than being a traditional private service. What does that mean? Well, think about email for example. You can get email from Google, Yahoo, Fastmail, ProtonMail, and all sorts of other places. That is because email is a protocol, and any service that "speaks the language of email" can interface with each other. That's why you can be on Gmail but email anyone.

Mastodon took a similar approach. It is a twitter-like microblogging service built on top of the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is an open standard for publishing microblog feeds while allowing the usual stuff like replies, reposts, favorites, etc. Many other systems are also built on top of ActivityPub, and in general, any system that "speaks the language of ActivityPub" can interact with any other.

Bluesky took a different approach and decided to not use the existing ActivityPub protocol, citing that they felt it lacked in areas they wanted to focus on. They made their own standard called the AT Protocol, and built Bluesky on top of that.

Their ultimate goal with this is to use the technical structure of Bluesky and the AT Protocol to defend against the app getting taken over by private ownership and cutting everyone out. I wonder what would make them want that? Hmm…

Anyway, follow me on Bluesky.

French Government Goes Boop

It wasn't long ago that I covered the appointment of Michel Barnier as the new prime minister of France by French President Macron. The appointment was deeply unpopular and sparked a wave of protests against the conservative PM after left-leaning parties primarily won a recent election.

In a SHOCKING twist, it didn't work out. The French government has collapsed after a historic vote of no confidence passed for the first time in 60 years. The recently appointed PM was trying to ram through an unpopular budget without a parliamentary vote, which is not something people tend to be chill with.

Now, "the government collapsed" sounds pretty dang dramatic. But in reality, it just means that the French parliament needs to restructure and will need a new Prime Minister. Macron has already said he will be appointing a new PM and intends to keep serving as President through the end of his term (2027) despite his current less-than-stellar standing in the public eye.

The End of Assad

Bashar Assad has fled Syria after 13 years of civil war.

In 2000, Assad rose to power, taking the place of his father who had held the seat firmly with authoritarian rule. His father's cronies actually lowered the age requirement for Bashar to be able to take over. While there was originally some hope of change from the new leader, hope quickly faded as he took up the ways of his father.

In 2011, civil war broke out over his continued grip on power. It evolved into a proxy war and has been disastrous for the region.

Now, as Assad's go-to supports are entangled with the ongoing conflict with Israel, the opposition rushed into Damascus and swiftly took the city, forcing Assad to flee the country like the little bitch boy he always has been.

What's next for the country is up in the air, but as news spread of his unseating, folks began to rejoice in the streets of Damascus and around the world as so many refugees have fled their home from the violence this man's ego has caused.