General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 days ago:
I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.
How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 days ago:
To me, this feels like school politics.
OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!
Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!
Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 2 days ago:
Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social
The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.
This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.
Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.
I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.
I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.
The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.
Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?
- Comment on Bluesky just verified ICE 3 days ago:
So, trying to parse what’s going on here.
Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?
Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.
- Submitted 4 days ago to technology@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
Similar to copyright, enforcement requires surveillance and empowers censorship. But worse than copyright, it is directly aimed at information about people. So that is what gets surveilled and censored.
Of course, there are positive uses, such as disappearing revenge porn. But in practice, it will always favor the rich and powerful who have the resources to actively manage their image. I don’t believe it is worth the massive surveillance and censorship apparatus, even before one gets to the obvious potential for misuse.
Have you heard of the recent Russmedia case?
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
How did free speech help when the Nazis humiliated jews publicly in the 1930s?
How did it help taking “jew-baiters” like Julius Streicher to court during the Weimar Republic? Obviously it didn’t.
It seems obvious that I want the state to prevent hate speech, especially against minorities.
You want the state to act against hate speech coming from the elected head of state. What about that seems like a good plan?
You can’t convince people that Trump is a bad guy, and so you want the state to go after the bad guys. Maybe you can convince people that the state should smash bad guys. It’s not hard. But Trump is in charge of the state and not you. He’ll decide who’s a bad guy.
- Comment on Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! 1 week ago:
Really good. I wouldn’t have given full marks. Semi-precious gemstone isn’t good enough. Too much reliance on the pronunciation. Good pun, though, I feel. Very groan.
- Comment on Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! 1 week ago:
Nono, you’re thinking of circumference. This is about a semi-precious gemstone in the shape of a small, domesticated mustelid.
- Comment on Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! 1 week ago:
Nono, you’re thinking of circumlocution. This is about building a wall around a besieged city.
- Comment on Let's end Anti-Circumvention. We should own the things we buy! 1 week ago:
Nono, you’re thinking of a convention. This is about a psychological treatment that makes gay men like women.
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
Yeah, he has his own Mastodon instance. I was trying to make a different point, though.
People couldn’t even agree to keep Trump away from government, even though that’s a no-brainer. If you react by trying to build a consensus that some people should be banned from social media, you may get that consensus. But it won’t be Trump who is banned. That is a no-brainer, too.
It’s shockingly fascist thinking, actually.
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
It is real. There is a lot of hypocrisy, particularly among the right. But the difference between Europe and the US is stark.
Compare the criticism of the DMCA or Google’s Content ID to this affair. It’s on completely different levels.
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
As a European, I’ve really come around to a more American view of Free Speech.
Over the last few years, we get more and more laws requiring more and more surveillance and censorship to protect copyright, stop hate speech, enforce GDPR, … We’re building up this infrastructure and the population thinks it’s fine. The courts go along and ask for more.
What is going to happen when a European Trump comes to power? You think it’s terrible that Big Tech goes along with Trump? That Must bought Twitter? We ain’t seen nothing yet.
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
the Italian law is overly broad here, but that doesn’t excuse this behaviour.
This behavior = Going to court.
- Comment on Cloudflare defies Italy’s Piracy Shield, won’t block websites on 1.1.1.1 DNS 1 week ago:
And who is going to ban Trump from Twitter?
- Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions 1 week ago:
You can’t exactly feed it a manual and expect it to extrapolate or understand (for that matter “what manual).
You can do that to a degree (RLVR). They are also paying human experts. But that’s the situation now. Who knows how it will be in a couple more years. Maybe training AIs will be like writing a library, framework, …
- Comment on What principles you wish to see social networks (or the fediverse) adopt in their design? 1 week ago:
Good pitch. You could also ask people to help out with the more expensive computations. Say, adding alt text.
- Comment on What principles you wish to see social networks (or the fediverse) adopt in their design? 1 week ago:
In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)
Absolutely. There’s a lot you can do. The “For You” Feed on Bluesky is quite instructive. bsky.app/profile/…/3mb2r5qei322a
But when you’re talking about sending a lot more data to clients, you really need to consider what that means for the internet bill of instance owners.
- Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions 1 week ago:
- Comment on What principles you wish to see social networks (or the fediverse) adopt in their design? 1 week ago:
Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
I’m so with you. xkcd.com/927/
Transferable user identity (between instances)
User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
- Comment on Bluesky suspending antifascist researchers for sharing publicly available information about literal nazis. 3 weeks ago:
Not quite. Such official documents may be published by the government, but only if provided by law. It doesn’t mean that the data may be used by others.
EU data protection activists are fighting against such transparency rules. I’m thinking of Noyb’s lawsuit against the Swedish government, in particular. Sweden has a very strong tradition of transparency.
That German law was explicitly made to criminalize such lists compiled from public data. If the context suggests that the information is meant to enable illegal harm to the people, then it’s criminal to publish the information. In the German understanding, that is fighting Nazis because Nazis create such lists of their enemies.
- Comment on Bluesky suspending antifascist researchers for sharing publicly available information about literal nazis. 3 weeks ago:
GDPR works like copyright in that regard. Just because someone publishes something, doesn’t mean you may re-publish it.
This data is especially problematic since it is about people’s political views. That’s defined as sensitive data. By default, it is a violation to even create or store such data at all, even if you kept it private. You could only do that legally if you benefit from specific exceptions.
- Comment on Bluesky suspending antifascist researchers for sharing publicly available information about literal nazis. 3 weeks ago:
PSA: Sharing that information was almost certainly a GDPR violation in the EU. It may also have been a criminal offense under German law (§128a StGB).
- Comment on China Has Reportedly Built Its First EUV Machine Prototype, Marking a Semiconductor Breakthrough the U.S. Has Feared All Along 4 weeks ago:
The EU does not have the military capacity to protect Taiwan.
That’s not mentioning that the EU is not a military alliance. That’s the first political challenge to tackle.
Anyhow, the channel ‘Asianometry’, has a video covering the physics of EUV machines. They are an incredible linchpin of our modern world.
So true. This stuff is absolutely mind-blowing. Especially if you are old enough to remember how some of that seemed like almost unsurmountable problems. Now the solution are used in mass production.
- Comment on How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data 4 weeks ago:
It’s a myth that the GDPR is a useful tool in such cases. You know the expression “protected by copyright”? That’s how lawyers protect data.
The GDPR grants people rights over data concerning them, similar to how copyright grants rights over data. That means 2 things.
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It’s rarely obvious that some data processing is illegal. It’s not obvious if it happens without consent. But even so, you often don’t need explicit consent to use someone’s data. EG when we write about French president Macron, then that is Macron’s data under the GDPR. Of course, you don’t need his consent to discuss or report on politics, and so you usually don’t need his consent to discuss his person.
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Enforcement is difficult and expensive. Think about the problems the copyright industry has. Surveillance tools like Content ID can at least rely on knowing what exactly they are looking for. Besides, much of the world has similar laws supported by influential industries. Little chance to do that for GDPR.
Basically, using GDPR to protect actual secrets is like using copyright for the purpose.
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- Comment on How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data 4 weeks ago:
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
/futurama
- Comment on How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data 4 weeks ago:
The Devs pulled out of France because of government pressure, but it wasn’t banned.
- Comment on How French spies, police and military personnel are betrayed by advertising data 4 weeks ago:
Good thing the EU has the GDPR, which solved this problem once and for all.
