Uriel238

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

It took France about a century before they went full Republic. I’d give the folks in Iran some latitude.

Note that the hijab thing was the last straw, and they’re still going without functional infrastructure.

I suspect the molotovs will resume flyong shortly. They are already on a short fuse.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I’m looking forward to owning my computer, especially as Microsoft claws away more of my rights season by season. But WTF am I getting myself into when I make the jump? Is it possible to own my computer and have an easy to understand OS?

I hope I’m not fucking myself when I try to make the switch, but when the first response to it’s got problems is don’t look a gift horse in the mouth then yeah, it makes me a bit worried I’m going to be left out in the elements on my own by a community with the attitude of COD gamers.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

And what does that mean? That drivers for most hardware doesn’t exist unless we write it ourselves? I don’t have time for that steep a climb.

You guys are now seriously freaking me out. My experience has been decades of windows not mainframes with 1980s era OSes. Is all that experience going to be useless?

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Heh. During the Trump administration when all the Republican elected officials we’re shouting Free Speech In Social Media because Trump was getting factchecked on Twitter, we fantasized about a state-serves social media platform that would be as free-speechy as the state legally allowed.

Not that it would be useful except to point at it and say if you don’t moderate your platform, it’ll turn into this!

I expected some poor bureaucrat would have to clear all the CSAM but the furry-futa porn would remain, as would all the advertisements for penis pills and Nigerian princes. The hate speech would stay up but get tracked until someone got radicalized by it.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

An Underground Education by Richard Zacks. Especially since all the controversies are getting combed out of Wikipedia.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Is there a community exclusively for users with strange names? And if so, how is qualifying strangeness determined?

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Related to this topic is Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, Mike Masnick observes that it’s impossible to do content moderation at scale well (that is without both malicious content slipping through while false positives get taken down).

A more humorous version of the same notion is found on Masnick’s proposed Twitter content moderation speedrun. Note that Musk not only failed to not trip over all these steps, but also found new ones to trip over, and now Twitter is… well what Twitter is today.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Having recently migrated from Reddit (and kept up with commercial social media hacks) I’m used to Nothing To See Here! We totally didn’t store your personal information in plaintext for hackers to snatch. Oh and maybe please change your passwords. All Part Of The Show!

So, by comparison, the response here is downright heartwarming.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I only gave awards after getting ones that gave me points to give awards, and then gave them either to sad posts or when someone said to someone else, I wish I had an award to give you so take this emoji! (🎖️) so I’d cover for them, as that was appropriate.

This is to say, I suck at awards protocol, and will write fancy comments whether I’m getting awards or not.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I think this is going to raise some questions about fair use, since AI projects are absolutely a derivative works that are sufficiently removed from the content they used. (There may be some argument that it’s also educational use.)

This case may rekindle questions about fair use given that our current copyright-maximalist clime has been less interested in enforcing fair use and more interested in enforcing copyright regardless of fair use.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Any lawsuit that rules in favor of copyright holders promotes piracy (as opposed to legalizing use of copyrighted material).

The more draconian and extreme our copyright laws, the more there is a need for a piracy sector.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I’ll have you know I am not (yet!) a Linux user. (Later this year, maybe.)

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don’t understand.

If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)

I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Okay when I was considering builds, I was figuring on Mint, but since that’s an Ubuntu variant, I take that’s a bad idea now?

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I think the abortion and trans kids situations are putting into sharp relief the danger of large third parties knowing too much about us. Facebook is absolutely scanning its servers for signs of unwanted pregnancies and relaying that information to red state law enforcement. Other platforms may be doing the same thing.

Women in the US are advised not to use period-tracker apps, given they do often sell the data they glean, and don’t discriminate against far-right interests. And anti-abortion organizations are shopping.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Welp, a short internet news search of period tracker led me to this interview on Slate

On TechDirt (which I use a lot for tech-industry news) reported this in 2021, so before the Dobbs ruling was leaked or released in May / June 2022.

So, it depends on to what degree you need it confirmed, but it doesn’t seem to be buried.

My most recent trans privacy freak-out was Texas AG Ken Paxton requesting a list of all Texas drivers license / state ID records that have requested a change of sex on their ID, which can also be found searching news.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Normies don’t exist. Like birds.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

So this is related to a previous law (the CDA? Not sure) that requires special accommodations for users under 13 years of age in order to separate kids and porn (also kids and predators). For most social media platforms the response was to limit the age in the TOS to 13 years.

Did you click a TOS confirmation when you joined facebook? Congrats, you asserted you’re at least 13 years old. Were you underage at the time? Congrats! You committed a felony violation of the CFAA (though this was fixed somewhere in the mid 2010s). It was never enforced, but the assumption was if you’re tweeting you’re old enough to read swearing.

In time we established that kids who want to see porn will gladly pretend to be an old person to do it. If someone admits they’re underage, and you’re sexually explicit at them, then yes Chris Hanson wants you to have a seat.

(Our rules regarding sex and underage people vary from county to county, and while a teen boy and a teen girl of like ages can get it on without violating the law in every US county, this is not always the case when it comes to two boys or two girls or enbies of any stripe, and very few counties have protections for teens doing anything else, like sexting their sweetheart. So be safe!)

That said, currently all a porn site has to do is put an age-gate where you click to assure you’re over 18 and can witness the content of M-rated video games. If Louisana is going to require more (such as mandating a license check) they’ll have to specify, and in being specific the law will then interact with commonplace rights to privacy, which includes engaging with the internet while staying anonymous.

So far we don’t have a way to prove one’s age without also compromising their specific identity, a consequence which has a chilling effect that most would-be moral guardians depend on. Since the porn industry depends on people obtaining porn anonymously, we can expect there will be some very serious first-amendment and fifth-amendment challenges to this law.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Yes. That’s Amazon using dark patterns. This demonstrates that enshittification is not confined to social media.

Ooop, it may have happened even before Twitter, Reddit etc.

From Corey Doctorow: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Amazon’s enshittification is because [Jeff] Bezos was a cynic or because he sold out. Once Amazon could make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job became a fait accompli.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Once Musk took over Twitter, and he opened his day with firing half his staff, we kinda knew he was going to enshittify Twitter into irrelevance. Now we’re watching as the world catches up and seeks alternative platforms for general announcements.

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Can we add to this free broadband wifi in all populated parts of the world?

I suspect with about a billion dollars (and but for the local state-enforced stakeholder protections in some areas) we could actually do this.