Me, internally:
everyone has forgotten, but I haven't. I haven't forgotten uptown funk. I can't hear those words without getting an unexplainable urge to say 'hot damn.' Maybe nobody forgot. Maybe we all think this. I feel like we need to talk about the influence this song had on all of us.
I’ve noticed this revisionist Greek myth is common wherein Persephone loves Hades and eats the pomegranate seeds in order to evade her overbearing mother, and that’s all well and good. You know, sometimes I’m in the mood for it and sometimes I’m not. But hear this: as long as we’re doing this, why is no one wondering whether Aphrodite might really love Hephaestus?
Think about it. All the gods in their immortal splendor are lining up to marry her, doing everything in their power to impress her, the goddess of love and beauty, and she choses…that guy. A god in technical terms only, a social reject who’s ugly and malformed and um, no fun. Always slaving away in his workshop when everyone else is quaffing nectar and having their eternal beach party up on Mount Olympus. They can’t believe she’d give up all of them for that.
So, because the gods do not take rejection well (looking at you Apollo), eventually they start to say to each other, well, we all know Zeus made her do it anyway. He’s gotta feel guilty for throwing Hephaestus off Mount Olympus that one time. And it quickly becomes thatpoorgirl, stuck in that workshop full of sweat and dirt and cyclopses when she could have had one of us. Because of course they’ve got love all figured out; it’s entirely technical and dependent on who’s the most charming and good-looking and not at all variable and strange and notoriously unpredictable, right?
Meanwhile Ares, only the most arrogant and brainless of the crew, can’t take a hint and is still showing up wherever Aphrodite goes trying to hit on her, so eventually she and Hephaestus decide to rig up an elaborate mechanical trap for him, using her as bait. When all the gods have laughed at him for getting caught he huffily attempts to regain his dignity by telling them, whatever, guys, you want to know the truth, I was meeting her for an assignation. And they all kind of know he’s full of it but they just accept it as the unvarnished truth from thereon in, because they’d love to believe she’d cheat on Hephaestus with Ares. They’d love it. Come on, Aphrodite, get off your high horse and admit you’re just as shallow as the rest of us.
So they talk, but Aphrodite doesn’t really care about their collective jealousy because she dotes on her misshapen genius of a husband with his sooty hands and his sweaty brow who always takes her seriously and is always so hard at work inventing astonishing new things to make her happy, and she loves the volcano they live in with its internal pressures so conducive to the formation of precious stones and its passages lit with glowing lava that so gorgeously offsets her cheekbones, and all the cyclopses worship her because even with one eye apiece they’ve still got more depth perception than most men do where she’s concerned. True it is that as a couple the two develop a reputation for not getting out much, because all those Olympian parties bore them to death and they’d rather spend time with each other (poor Aphrodite, she’s such a vivacious young thing and her husband is so grasping and insecure that he won’t let her go out and have fun), but they do all right.
THIS IS THE KIND OF CONTENT I’M LOOKING FOR
love <3
Ok, ok, wait, but it doesn’t end there. Because Aphrodite features pretty heavily in the story of Eros and Psyche. She’s painted as the villain, her jealousy causing her to send her son to curse the girl, but that’s just not true. She knows what it’s like to be clamored over for your beauty, knows the lies that are spread, the way it sets you up as a target and discredits your mind. Aphrodite hears the mortals whisper that this human girl rivals her in beauty, and one day she gets around to seeing what the fuss is about.
She finds Psyche’s home all but besieged by suitors, but she notices the girl isn’t falling for their flattery, that she is still kind, no matter who she’s dealing with. She sees a bit of herself in this girl who aches to be spoken to, not at, and who wants most of all to be heard.
When she sends her son to the girl, she is less than truthful about her motivations. She knows if she tells him she hopes he will fall for this mortal girl it will make things awkward for him, that true love must be discovered on its own and cannot be forced. When he comes away from the encounter with her name on his lips, searching for excuses to talk to her again, Aphrodite whispers into the soothsayer’s ear to tell Psyche’s father that she is loved by a god. Frees her from the hoards of shallow admirers and gives her son the opportunity he needs to see her again.
When a year of late-night conversations fails to convince her son that it’s time to reveal himself to his beloved, she puts a bug in Psysche’s ear to ask for her sisters to visit, whispers in their ears to convince Psyche to take matters into her own hands, ensures the two can finally meet face to face. She is saddened when Eros flees, believing Psyche had betrayed him.
The four tasks Psyche must overcome to be reunited with her son aren’t laid forth out of spite, but rather to help the girl find herself. Aphrodite knows this girl hasn’t had a choice in the path her life has taken up until this point. Knows that everything was in the hands of her father, and of Aphrodite herself. She wants to make sure Psyche means it, wants Psyche to know what she’s getting into when dealing with the Olympians. Wants, most of all, for Psyche to question her own motivations, fully evaluate the situation, and then make her own choice.
Her frustration at the Olympians aiding the girl isn’t because she hates being tricked. No, she wants Psyche to break out of her shell, wants her to have the option to decide this isn’t worth it and walk away.
When the final task ends in Psyche laying unconscious on the roadway, Aphrodite searches the girl’s heart and knows her intentions are true. Knows she is ready to join the family. She kicks Eros out of the house to ensure he would find Psyche, to ensure he would come to his senses and forgive her, realize that he had been unfair to her and to ask her forgiveness in turn.
They say Aphrodite was sour about the whole ordeal until her granddaughter was born, but the truth was she hadn’t stopped smiling from the moment her son had first come home, whispering the girls name in reverence.
With Windows 10, Microsoft has made their family account settings more visible and easier to access than ever before. These settings have been available since Vista (requiring separate downloads in Vista and 7, natively available in 8), but somewhat more obscure and not as feature-rich as they are now, and, for the most part? These are really smart, fantastic tools for parents, including things like screen time limitations, web and application filters, and prepaid balances for a child’s Xbox/Microsoft account to allow them to make purchases without having unfettered access to their parent’s credit or debit card.
Unfortunately, the family settings also include (and, again, have always included) activity/web reporting, and there is a very justified concern that this kind of reporting could lead to the careless (and dangerous) outing of LGBTQIA kids to bigoted parents.
To be honest, the way this information was presented made it sound somewhat Orwellian in scope, so I decided that I would investigate by setting up an old throwaway Live account I made to share pictures of my daughter with family as a child account.
Most of the administration is done through the web interface at account.live.com, under the family tab. Once you click through to the child’s account, this is the first screen you see, exactly as it appears on a new child account:
As you can see, both Activity Reporting and emailed reports are enabled by default. Parents have to intentionally turn these features off if they are using a child account.
Somewhat more surprising, web filtering (under the web browsing tab) is NOT turned on by default. I went ahead and enabled it for my tests to see what was allowed and blocked by default (whitelisting and blacklisting sites is very easy).
For some strange reason, my child account would not allow me to take screenshots, but I captured screens with my phone.
This notification greets child accounts EVERY TIME THEY LOG IN, which immediately made me feel better about what MS is doing (more editorializing in a bit). Any time a child logs in to their account, they know if they are being watched, which is a big deal.
Next, I decided to do some testing of blocked and reported content. The parent account had already installed Chrome and Firefox, so I loaded up all three browsers and tried visiting various webpages.
Major news sites largely loaded with no issue, and visits to most of the common gaming sites were no trouble. Strangely enough, Kotaku must have been flagged as having potentially objectionable content, because I got this screen when I tried to visit:
Other sites that were more likely to be outright blocked, such as Reddit, did not return any error at all - they simply did not load. Google.com also did not load (I presume this is because because Microsoft can’t force Google to load only “safe search” results), though Google accounts loaded just fine, as did Google ad services.
Because I wanted to get a good idea of what the parental controls were and were not capable of, I tried to go into InPrivate/Incognito mode in all three browsers. The keyboard shortcuts were disabled, and any options to open new windows in these private modes were simply missing. I didn’t expect so simple a workaround as using a different browser to work, but it’s always worth checking for the basic vulnerabilities in a system first.
Next, I tried to download and install the IPVanish VPN client. I did not actually try to visit any websites with it active, because installation AND program use both require admin privileges, which the child account does not have, so a child wanting to use a VPN would have to either know their parent’s password (in which case these family settings could be bypassed anyway) or have their parents supply the password every time they logged in. Even if the VPN hides their activity, the necessity for parental involvement makes it worthless as a tool to avoid parental invasions of privacy.
Finally, I tried a few web-based proxies (specifically: hide.me and proxfree). Bing will happily search up free proxies for restricted accounts, and using the proxies, I sailed right through to previously inaccessible sites with ease. Kotaku and reddit both loaded right up.
PARENTAL RESULTS
With a nice browsing history worked up, I logged back in to my parental account to see what my snooping eyes could see and found out something interesting: parental accounts do NOT get real-time web reports. All night long, my parental account had a blank screen for web history. The next morning, it had populated the previous day’s activity. This means that parents can’t just sit and monitor a child in real time, so no “catching them in the act.”
The following morning, the parental account had a full history
You’ll notice that it shows attempts to visit questionable websites that require permission, but it does NOT show attempts to visit sites that it simply refused to load, like reddit. You’ll also notice that in the right-hand bar, there are “block” and “allow” buttons that enable instant white and blacklisting.
Here, you see that the hide.me visits are reported. The good news is that, since this reports shows EVERYTHING, including EVERY SINGLE AD AFFILIATE, a parent who doesn’t know what they’re looking for could very easily miss this proxy in the noise. Parents who DO know what they’re looking for, though? Chances are good they’ll see the proxy visits if they take the time to actually sift through the entire report.
Each root site listed can be expanded into a more detailed view. Fortunately, hide.me was as good as its word. Here is the detailed view from those 4 visits:
Parents can block proxies as a child uses them, but there are a LOT of proxies out there, so that is a Sisyphean task, at best.
Another important thing to note is that, while unique URLs visited are reported, a child’s search history on Bing is kept private.
Past the web history, these are the other stats collected on a child account:
There is no explicit data given to parents here (no screencaps or DVRed activity), but parents can easily block apps their children should not be using, and the screen time limit is a very good tool for younger children.
Tim’s Theory:
Once I saw that Microsoft warns child accounts at every single login that they are being watched, I started developing a theory:
Microsoft understands the privacy concern of spying on kids, and they’re trying to get in front of it and give kids the power to protect themselves where they might not otherwise have it.
There have been tools to allow parents to spy on their kids for as long as there has been internet access for parents to spy on. A lot of these tools are just prettied up versions of spyware that you would never, ever want on your computer, but a parent who is determined to spy on their kid usually doesn’t care.
By integrating parental controls that include spying by default, Microsoft can give parents a “safe” monitor while also warning kids that they are being watched. This means the computer and its users are safer (no keylogging, screencapturing, or camera hijacking for third parties to gain back-door access to), a child’s privacy is safer (passwords, even for logging in to the computer, are not revealed to a parent).
By not turning on web filtering by default, MS may be trying to subtly suggest that, rather than blocking your kids, you should be talking to them.
By not blocking even well-known proxy servers when web filtering is turned on, MS is giving kids an escape route from watchful eyes.
I would be far more comfortable if the spying were not turned on by default, but I feel like MS turns it on by default (and makes it sit right at the top of the page in the family controls) to make parents think about what they’re doing to their child’s privacy.
Everyone has to learn how to protect their privacy online, and, unfortunately, that includes kids. There are ways to be smart about “forbidden” websites. Kids at risk of having secrets exposed to their parents need to be made aware of how to be safe.
The biggest and best advice to keep yourself safe when being watched? Do a LOT of “not secret” browsing. Flood that report with “normal” websites, and keep your proxy visits to a minimum. Make it look like noise in the report. When you are on the proxy for something, make sure you go to a non-proxy tab every so often and click through to a new thing.
Also, don’t use just one proxy. Make yourself a list of proxies. Here are a few to start with:
Okay but after seeing this I started doing it too and it’s amazing how many men I’ve run into bc they expected me to move
Gotta try it
I work (and walk) on a college campus. I’ve lost count of how many men I’ve smacked shoulders with.
Recently, I was standing outside my son’s classroom waiting to talk to his teacher. I stood on one side of the hallway, not even close to the center. At some point, a man came walking along. I was standing right in his path, but the hallway was empty, so I logically expected him to swerve around me. Instead he kept walking right toward me, got to me, and stopped, as if waiting for me to get out of his way. I didn’t; I just smiled politely at him. He finally walked around me, clearly annoyed that I hadn’t leapt out of his manly path.
Now I’m wishing I’d leapt aside, taken off my jacket and laid it on the floor before him, then bowed deeply and said, “My Liege!”
I also work at a college campus. I smack shoulders sometimes, but I find that if I stare straight ahead and follow the advice below, people get the heck out of the way.
Honestly this post changed how I carry myself when walking alone in public, or in a situation where I’m the one leading. People definitely move for the murder gaze.
Confirmed. I once had to rush back inside a convention hall as the con was closing in order to a retrieve a sick friend’s medication, and I didn’t understand why people in the crowd were jumping out of my way (literally—one guy vaulted a table) until I realized I was dressed as the Winter Soldier and doing the Murder Walk because that’s just how I walk in those boots. I got the meds, got out, and made a mental note.
I repeated the experiment later, wearing the boots but otherwise my usual clothing and mimicking the expression I thought I’d had at that moment. People parted like I was Charlton Heston.
I now wear that style of boots whenever possible. I recently had a man do a double-take as I walked by and ask me, politely, where I had served because I “looked like a soldier.” I’m not current or former military. I was wearing a flowy purple peasant top and looked as un-soldierlike as possible.
Moral of the story: wear comfortable shoes, square your shoulders, and walk like you’ve been sent to murder Captain America.
WALK LIKE YOU’VE BEEN SENT TO MURDER CAPTAIN AMERICA
These dudes are fucking legit. They don’t just show up one day in court, either, they actually make friends with the kids and let them know they have a support system and that there are people in the world who care about them and will always have their back. And less important, but also cool, is that the few times a couple of them have come into my cafe, they’ve been super friendly and polite and when I told one of the guys that I noticed his Bikers Against Child Abuse patch and wanted him to know how awesome I thought he was because of it, he got kind of shy and blushed and said, “The kids are the awesome ones, we just let them know they’re allowed to be brave.”
The source is long, but so, so good. These men and women are available in 36 states, 24 hours a day to stand guard at home, in court, at school, even if the child has a nightmare. Many of them are survivors of childhood abuse as well, and know what it’s like to feel scared and alone.
In court that day, the judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said.
Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?”
The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”
Actual tears.. hnngh
Show me more of people like this, world. I give up on humans too easily.
where do i sign up for this,i want to be in this gang
My friend told me about this a few years ago when I really needed this. They really are the nicest people in the world and I love them!!
This is fucking amazing. It may be out of character for me to say this but rock on
Bikers Against Child Abuse was founded in 1995 by a Native American child psychologist whose ride name is Chief, when he came across a young boy who had been subjected to extreme abuse and was too afraid to leave his house. He called the boy to reach out to him, but the only thing that seemed to interest the child was Chief’s bike. Soon, some 20 bikers went to the boy’s neighborhood and were able to draw him out of his house for the first time in weeks.
Chief’s thesis was that a child who has been abused by an adult can benefit psychologically from the presence of even more intimidating adults that they know are on their side. “When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” Arizona biker Pipes told azcentral.com. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.”
