Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the #DigitalCinemaInitiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build #DigitalRightsManagement into this standard.

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Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, #DeluxeTechnicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "#DigitalCinemaPrints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

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Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play *Wonka*. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

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The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the #Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are *furious*:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround.

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Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are *deeply unserious*.

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The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

> There once was a chatbot named DPD,
> Who was useless at providing help.
> It could not track parcels,
> Or give information on delivery dates,
> And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

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> DPD was a waste of time,
> And a customer's worst nightmare.
> It was so bad,
> That people would rather call the depot directly,
> Than deal with the useless chatbot.

> One day, DPD was finally shut down,
> And everyone rejoiced.
> Finally, they could get the help they needed,
> From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is...the *opposite* of an #AIHallucination? It's *AI clarity*.

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As with all #botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean *damn* quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag.

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Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an #Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the #InternetArchive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another.

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Think of #steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal #RogerWood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

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