Interested in the intersections between policy, law and technology. Programmer, lawyer, civil servant, orthodox Marxist. Blind.
Interesado en la intersección entre la política, el derecho y la tecnología. Programador, abogado, funcionario, marxista ortodoxo. Ciego.
For me the weirdest part of the interview is where he says he doesn't want to follow anyone, that he wants the algorithm to just pick up on his interests. It's so diametrically opposed to how I want to intentionally use social networks and how the fedi tends to work that it's sometimes hard to remember there are people who take that view.
The biggest issues for me are:
No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set--and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.
Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.
Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).
Worth considering that this is already the law in the EU. Specifically, the Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market has exceptions for text and data mining.
Article 3 has a very broad exception for scientific research: "Member States shall provide for an exception to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions made by research organisations and cultural heritage institutions in order to carry out, for the purposes of scientific research, text and data mining of works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access." There is no opt-out clause to this.
Article 4 has a narrower exception for text and data mining in general: "Member States shall provide for an exception or limitation to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 4(1)(a) and (b) of Directive 2009/24/EC and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works and other subject matter for the purposes of text and data mining." This one's narrower because it also provides that, "The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online."
So, effectively, this means scientific research can data mine freely without rights' holders being able to opt out, and other uses for data mining such as commercial applications can data mine provided there has not been an opt out through machine-readable means.
Security and performance are hard to measure but it's at least questionable that they're behind in either.
AI has many good uses, for example the local translation capability that allows for privacy-preserving translations of websites is AI and already in Firefox, and makes it possible to translate in environments that do not allow sending data out for security reasons.
I wouldn't really count Mastodon/Bluesky bridging as federation. They're incompatible protocols that were never intended to work together (arguably Bluesky was explicitly designed to avoid using AP).
Not saying this won't have any negative effects on people, however I think it's a little premature to guess at what it will be like. About 3/4 of the article is commenting what it will do to men when we find out only at the end women are the majority of users.
Completely disagree. Using the Firefox master password feature passwords are safe even in the context of sharing a device or an extension. In addition, multi-FA isn't necessarily a safer option.
And what's the provided alternative? A password manager. So storing passwords somewhere else that may leak, and in fact has leaked, and is by its nature a high value target.
Each person has to consider their particular situation and threat model, but a well-secured browser that stores passwords locally can be a perfectly adequate and in fact safer alternative than a password manager.
Clearly this particular suit by this particular person is iffy. However, I don't think this framing is very good: the fact Wikimedia is headquartered elsewhere shouldn't make it immune from being sued where an affected party lives.
Also, this part of the article seems a bit contradictory:
Just because someone doesn’t like what’s written about them doesn’t give them the right to unmask contributors. And if the plaintiff still believes he’s been wronged by these contributors, he can definitely sue them personally for libel (or whatever). What he has no right to demand is that a third party unmask users simply because it’s the easiest target to hit.
Ok, but how does he sue them personally without knowing who they are? It's fine to say this shouldn't be regarded as libel (I agree, it's a factual point, should be covered by exceptio veritatis or whatever) but I think it's a bit dishonest to say you can't hit Wikimedia, go after the individual users; but also, Wikimedia shouldn't be forced to reveal them.
Much better if the court would consider this information as being accurate and in the public interest.
Of course the GDPR cuts two ways here, because political information is an especially protected category, with certain exceptions (notorious information). So I'm not sure how the information on this person's affiliation to the far right was obtained and so on.
In spite of which, there's a pretty good chance that the government will change in the upcoming elections in July. There's been lots of good economic policy, but it isn't satisfying people.
On my instance, the following control measures apply:
So I think I have reason to feel fairly strongly that follower only posts are not public, and even unlisted posts are reasonably restricted.
So, not super sure what this is or how this works. Is the idea that you run the cgi, it sets up static files, and it responds to AP requests like follows, mentions, boosts and such? I realise lots of people don't like long docs but I didn't really understand the use case very well.
I find it impossible not to see it as a symmetric situation. The notion the US is restricting access to chips for natsec reasons may be true, if that includes restricting Chinese economic and technical development to maintain its hegemony. That China responds in kind is not only to be expected, but also fair from any possible neutral stance. The special pleading is especially apparent here. "No, it's different when they do it to us because we're the good guys." Really?
I generally agree, though I could be convinced of recurring payment in the case of high speed APIs that need a lot of updates to keep working. Chasing an API can be a lot of work.
Of course, a solution to that is having an up-front payment and letting people update as they wish--if there's new value in the new releases presumably they will.
IMO the hardest part is the legal side, and in fact I'm not very clear how MS skirted that issue other than through US lax enforcement on corporations. In order to have a db like this one must store stuff that is, ordinarily, illegal to store. Because of the use of imperfect, so-called perceptual hashes, and in case of algorithm updates, I don't think one can get away with simply storing the hash of the file. Some kind of computer vision/AI-ish solution might work out, but I wouldn't want to be the person compiling that training set...
Perhaps the manual reporting tool is enough? Then that content can be forwarded to the central ms service. I wonder if that API can report back to say whether it is positive.
The problem with a lot of this tooling is you need some sort of accreditation to use it, because it somewhat relies on security through obscurity. As far as I know you can't just hit MS's servers and ask "is this CSAM?" If something like that were possible it might work.
Can you elaborate on the hash problem?
Sure. When you have an image, you can do lots of things to it that change it in some way: change the compression, the format, crop it, apply a filter... This all changes the file and so it changes the hash. The perceptual hash system works on the basis of some computer vision stuff and the idea is that it will try to generate the same hash for pictures that are substantially the same. But this tech is imperfect and probably will have changes. So if there's a change in the way the hash gets calculated, it wouldn't be enough with keeping hashes, you'd have to keep the original file to recalculate, which is storing CSAM, which is ordinarily not allowed and for good reason.
For a hint on how bad these hashes can get, they are reversible, vulnerable to pre-image attacks, and so on.
Some of this is probably inevitable in this type of systems. You don't want to make it easy for someone to hit the servers with a large number of hashes, and then use IPFS or BitTorrent DHT to retrieve positives (you'd be helping people getting CSAM). The problem is hard.
Personally I was thinking of generating a federated set based on user reporting. Perhaps enhanced by checking with the central service as mentioned above. This db can then be synced with trusted instances.
Something like that could work, maybe obscuring some of the hash content (random parts of it) so that it doesn't become a way to actually find the stuff.
Whatever decisions are made have to be well thought through so as not to make the problem worse.
Welcome back!
There were points at which Firefox was difficult to stick with, especially after the extension apocalypse, but I think it's evolving pretty well at this point.
As far as I can tell, this is incorrect. If there's a post on instance A, a reply from instance B, and someone on instance C follows the OP on A but not the RP on B, they will only see the OP without the reply.
Source: I very often notice this because I run a single-user instance, and when I open a thread it's incomplete, lacking posts from instances that I have not suspended.
IMO bridging or translation isn't federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it's hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.
Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.
Well, in a way that's what we're doing now, and by and large it works but obviously there's some leakage, which is impossible to bring down to zero but which makes sense working on improving.
The other side of the coin is that the price of this moderation model is subjecting a lot more people to a lot more horrible shit, and I unfortunately don't know any way around that.
It's not maybe joining, it's definitely joining.
A bit soon to tell, but it's quite unclear what will happen. I don't find believable the article blaming cultural issues for the changes though, or UP's "messianic" ministers.
I think the issues are economic. Inflation has made many people angry and uncertain, and the same for increased interest rates. It's not as bad as in much of EU, but arguably there was less disposable income too. Whether the left can regain the initiative remains to be seen.
Blind user. So far my experience with Lemmy is good, slightly better than Reddit. The major accessibility hurdle is some way to easily navigate through comments. Possible ideas would be using HTML landmarks, headers, or invisible (to sighted users) separators.
I run a GoToSocial instance and have it on, not so much because I don't want to allow people to follow me (so far I think I've approved all requests) but because having it off means that a bot can easily get to my followers-only posts and archive or distribute them, and some iffy instances have been doing that in order to build search engines and the like.
Why not? Copyright is a monopoly. Generally society benefits from having it as weak as possible.
I can think of alternatives. For example, the server could keep the user's private key, encrypted with a passphrase that the user must have. So key loss wouldn't be an issue. (Yes, passphrase loss might, but there are lots of ways to keep those safely already, compared to key material which is difficult to handle.)
And since this is Germany pushing them, we can more or less know who. Same people that tried to cover up and avoid liability for dieselgate.
It's true luxury cars are involved too, and secured themselves the so-called Lamborghini exception, and of course airlines are the major player here.
But EVs are a bit speculative still, and the existence of efuls is likely to delay them, and give these companies bad ideas about continuing to produce the same engines. I don't know for sure if they're involved in the push, but even if EVs are their plan A, I wouldn't at all be surprised to find out efuels are their plan B.
The renewable mandate is not a bad idea per se, but the German opposition to nuclear power is incredibly harmful, and compounded by their inexplicable support for so-called e-fuels.
So at the same time as EU wants to reinstate the debt and deficit limits, they also want member states to contribute more money. Apparently it's ok to spend EU dosh in Kiev, but not in Lisbon or Athens.
There is literally no instance in which expanding the scope of copyright law is a good thing. Never.