thenexusofprivacy
@thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.sdf.org
The Nexus Of Privacy looks at the connections between technology, policy, strategy, and justice. We’re also on the fediverse at @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.pub
- Congress’s push to protect kids online is at a crossroads (KOSA, US-focused)www.washingtonpost.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to technology@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- House delays plans on FISA Section 702 surveillance program reauthorization vote (US Politics)rollcall.com ↗Submitted 4 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 4 months ago:
Technically yes but judges get annoyed if there’s absolutely no case, so they rarely do – and if they threaten when there’s no case, larger companies will look at it and say the threat’s not real.
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 4 months ago:
The law’s defintion of harm is extremely broad. Charlie Jane Anders has a good discussion of this in The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse:
“This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.”
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 5 months ago:
In practice, when the AG threatens to sue and the law makes it clear that they’ll win (which KOSA currently does), companies will typically stop what they’re doing (or settle if the AG actually launches a suit)
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 5 months ago:
Yep. There’s money to be made here!
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 5 months ago:
Great point. Mike Masnick has said that he wouldn’t be surprised if Meta also comes out in support, for similar reasons.
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 5 months ago:
Totally agreed that it opens things up to censorship in general and doesn’t actually make kids safer. Charlie Jane Anders’ The Internet Is About to Get A Lot Worse sets it in the context of book banning. The LGBTQ part is in the headlines because one big focus of the advocacy against it is highlighting that Democrats who claim to be pro-LGBTQ should not be backing this bill. This has been effective enough that Senators Cantwell and Markey both mentioned it in the committee markup, although it’s certainly far from the only problem with the bill.
Sec. 11 (b): Enforcement By State Attorneys General covers this. It’s hard to find – the bill text starts out with all the text removed from the previous amendment, and if you click on the “enforcement” link in the new table of context it takes you to the old struck-out text. It’s almost like they want to make it as hard as possible for people to figure out what’s going on!
- Comment on Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics) 5 months ago:
They get to position themselves as looking out for the children.
- Microsoft endorses anti-LGBTQ online "child safety" bill KOSA night before Big Tech hearing (US Politics)gazette.com ↗Submitted 5 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 20 comments
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
That’s great! And a lot of trans people I’ve talked with on Mastodon say similar things, which is also great. But a lot don’t. It depends a lot on the instance you wind up choosing. So the people who stay wind up as a self-selecting sample.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
Thanks, glad you liked it. Agreed that blocklists (while currently necessary) have big problems, it would really be great if we had other good tools and they were much more of a last resort … I’ll talk more about that in a later installment.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
At some level you’re not missing anything: there are obvious solutions, and they’re largely ignored. Blocking is effective, and it’s a key part of why some instances actually do provide good experiences; and an allow-list approach works well. But, those aren’t the default; so new instances don’t start out blocking anybody. And, most instances only block the worst-of-the-worst; there’s a lot of stuff that comes from large open-registration instances like .social and .world that relatively few instances block or even limit.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
I didn’t say the fediverse has come a long way. I said that many people on well-moderated instances have good experiences – which has been true since 2017. In general though I’d say there was a brief period of rapid progress on this front in the early days of Mastodon in 2016/2017, and since then progress has been minimal. Lemmy for example has much weak moderation functionality than Mastodon. Akkoma, Bonfire, Hubzilla etc are better but have minimal adoption.
And @originallucifer Ipeople have been complaining about this for years – it was an issue in 2011 with Diaspora, 2016 with Gnu social, 2017 with Mastodon, etc etc etc – so it’s not a matter of fediverse software as a whole being in its infancy. Even Lemmy’s been around for almost four years at this point. It’s just that the developers haven’t prioritized this.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
If you read the article and follow the links you’ll find plenty of evidence. The Whiteness of Mastodon, A breaking point for the queer community, and Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy are three places to start.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
From the article:
I’m using LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender, two-sprit, and others (including non-binary people) who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative. Julia Serrano’s trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, and discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like “gender and sexual minorities”. OACAS Library Guides’ Two-spirit identities page goes into more detail on this often-overlooked intersectional aspect of non-cis identity.
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
I’ll get to that in a followon post, but one straightforward way to make progress is to change some of the defaults
- Comment on Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default 7 months ago:
As I say in the article:
Despite these problems, many people on well-moderated instances have very positive experiences in today’s fediverse. Especially for small-to-medium-size instances, for experienced moderators even Mastodon’s tools can be good enough.
However, many instances aren’t well-moderated. So many people have very negative experiences in today’s fediverse.
- Submitted 7 months ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 46 comments
- Comment on Can the Fediverse Help Stop Bad Internet Bills? (US focused) 11 months ago:
Here’s how the article starts – I’ll put this in the main post here as well, thanks for the suggestion.
“Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress.We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. I’m asking you to join us, ACLU, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights defenders in a week of action to protect the internet.”
– You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills, Jason Kelley, Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Comment on Can the Fediverse Help Stop Bad Internet Bills? (US focused) 11 months ago:
There’s actually a footnote in the article about that!
I’m using LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender, two-sprit, and others who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative. Julia Serrano’s trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, although resources like OACAS Library Guides’ Two-spirit identities page go into a lot more detail. Serrano also discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like “gender and sexual minorities”. There’s a Mastodon instance called lgbtqia.space, and Indigenous people are often overlooked in the fediverse, so I decided to go with the acronym despite its problems.
- Submitted 11 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 21 comments