Was just listening to the latest episode of Dot Social podcast where there was a discussion with CEO of Ghost (alternative to Substack). They’re integrating ActivityPub into the platform, but where they’re going with it is that you can use your Fediverse ID instead of email to sign up.
Once they have that worked out, any likes or comments automatically migrate back to the fediverse. Replies back to replies also show up in your timeline and your followers can see them. This makes discovery pretty effortless. They can also use the stats to keep track of engagement across all fediverse services.
It also means turning one-way streams like RSS (podcasting), email services, and commenting services into common two-way communities.
You’re now going beyond just catching up to existing services and doing things just not possible in closed silos. Real “Aha!” moment.
tl;dr: Here's everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you're never going to use it. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Friendica. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.
This reads like a whole lot of research was boiled down to fit the “barely an article” constraints of a casual news outlet. The outline is all over the place but seems well-intended; it’s just not clear what information we’re supposed to take away from this.
Kudos for mentioning GNU Social, Zot and Diaspora, but I’m not really sure any of them are relevant anymore?
It is weird. Lemmy is the second largest fedi platform, having long since passed Pixelfed. But it is rarely mentioned in articles like these. I’m not sure what makes it such the black sheep.
Eh, it’s quite leftist here and VERY atheistic but honestly I’ve seen more insane takes come out of Reddit. Here there is reason and sense to those takes, as well as substance.
And instead mentions Bluesky, which I wouldn't even really classify as part of the Fediverse. Sure, it's federated, but it's pretty much just federated with its own self, and isn't accessible from any part of the Fediverse at large.
The article is nice, but I’m not sure if I’d send it to friends that aren’t familiar with the fediverse. It seems to gloss over some problems and focus less relevant ones
It doesn’t touch on the issues with Blueskys protocol and makes it sound like an equivalent choice (or worse, a better choice). In the downsides section it touches on racism in badly moderated instances, and the difficulty of setting up an instance. Those issues aren’t relevant to the vast majority of users who will join a large instance that has defederated from the bad stuff.
It’s a nice article for those who are already somewhat familiar, but a bad first impression
EU lawmakers are utter rubbish. Cookie consent spam?? Paper straws and ear sticks?? Non-removable bottle caps?? Invasive KYC laws?? Banning ‘foreign propaganda’ through DNS blacklist?? Propping up failed projects like the ukromaidan regime?? What. The. Hell. They just spam our countries with the worst stupidity they can come up with, all the while infringing upon our rights and wellbeing.
I voted against joining EU 20 years ago. I guess I was right about that, unfortunately…
Once this has been implemented, something worse can be implemented.
I don’t like these slippery slope arguments. You might as well reduce it to any legislation.
Once people are allowed to make laws, bad people can make bad laws.
Which is why we must continue to vote in the right people, not abandon the concept of laws.
In this case, I don’t doubt that copyright infringement and general censorship are on some people’s agenda.
But this current proposal is bad enough itself and should be opposed because of that and not because someone might make other, even worse proposals in the future.
Article 10a, which contains the upload moderation plan, states that these technologies would be expected “to detect, prior to transmission, the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material or of new child sexual abuse material.”
This is what I guessed the other day when a post here didn’t clarify what the censorship meant.
While I’m not a fan of this stupid regulation, it doesn’t sound like being the armageddon that turns e2ee into ashes.
(Given that Signal doesn’t like it, I might be wrong though.)
As long as we trust, say, Signal, it will possibly be able to do the scan without sending a good chunk of the image data that the user is sending. URLs can be hashed before sending it to the scanner.
The remaining piece for privacy is to use open source and to guarantee that the binaries are free of modification from the original. This problem always existed on the Apple ecosystem btw.
But you can’t detect such things without either server side scanning (kills E2EE dead) or client side scanning (will always be limited in what it can detect, and it’s easy to patch out of clients, AND there’s still the risk of govs maliciously pushing detection of banned media)
The whole system is so flawed that it has like 20-25% success rate.
Or how about this system being adopted for anything else? Guns? Abortion? LGBT related issues? Once something gets implemented, it’s there forever and expansion is inevitable. And each subsequent government will use it for their personal agenda.
They say they the images are merely matched to pre-determined images found on the web. You’re talking about a different scenario where AI detects inappropriate contents in an image.
My guess was that this law was going to permit something as simple as pixel matching. Honestly I don’t imagine they can codify in the law something more sophisticated. Companies don’t want false positives either, at the very least due to profits.
Unfourtunately, I couldn’t find a source stating it would be required. AFAIK it’s been assumed that they would use perceptual hashes, since that’s what various companies have been suggesting/presenting. Like Apple’s NeuralHash, which was reverse engineered. It’s also the only somewhat practical solution, since exact matches would be easily be circumvented by changing one pixel or mirroring the image.
Its a slippery slope thing. Sure, technically it doesn’t break e2ee, but it basically forces app developers to integrate a trojan into their app that scans messages before they are encrypted and send. Right now it is “only” for images, but once this is in place and generally accepted, what is stopping lawmakers to extend it to scanning all messages?
I think the parent is distinguishing between messages & the attachments as they are stored differently & often in different places in many systems. But I agree with you in assuming that the goal would ultimately be to then start scanning messages too.
Imagine governments used something like SHA1 that has conflicts & now you have collision potential–you could even fabricate attachments that could cause a collision to get someone throw in jail since all you have to rely on is the file hashes. If you can’t scan the actually content & you are just using hashes, then you also don’t prevent new content that those in power deem ‘bad’ from being flagged either which doesn’t really stop the proliferation of the ‘bad thing’ just specific known ‘bad things’. If I were implementing clients, I would start adding random bits to the metadata so the hashes always change.
The only way this system even works is if there are centralized points the governments/corporations can control. Chalk this up as another point for supporting decentralization & lightweight self-hosting since it would be impossible to have oversight over such a system if anyone can spin up a personal server in their bedroom.
If the "endpoints" are defined as being somewhere outside the end users' control, because for example the client software they have is designed to betray their secrets, then the system is no longer end-to-end encrypted in the way that both cryptographers and normal people would usually understand the concept.
The images that are flagged by such scanning, local or server side, will have to be manually verified to avoid false persecution. Someone will have to look at the private images you’ve sent that might get flagged.
These systems have huge margins of error and are incredibly inaccurate, so there will be a significant task in manually verifying everything. And do you trust some government random employee (or just the departments general IT practices or ability to not be hacked) with not leaking your nudes or personal images? I sure as hell don’t.
And even if this is handled perfectly and all government employees are super super honorable standup citizens that never do anything slightly wrong ever…There are still malicious governments that persecute minorities, I doubt they will handle these backdoors in digital privacy very well.
So if I send a photo of our kids playing naked in a baby pool to my wife through signal, some slimy-ass eurocrat in some IT center will be able to ‘manually verify’ the photo of my naked kids?? Are you mentally sound??
I hate pedos just as much as every other sane parent, perhaps even more so (I’d love to wear “Why, Garry, why?!” t-shirt all day every day). But to hell with this stupid idea that some slimy scumbags will be able to browse my own photos of my own kids. Hell, even any random photo I take, it’s my business and nobody elses! Go catch pedos the proper way instead, work a little, we don’t need Gestapo or Stasi to hover over everything we do or photograph.
They say they the images are merely matched to pre-determined images found on the web. You’re talking about a different scenario where AI detects inappropriate contents in an image.
Article 10a, which contains the upload moderation plan, states that these technologies would be expected “to detect, prior to transmission, the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material or of new child sexual abuse material.”
My bad. But that phrasing is super stupid, honestly. What company would want to promise to detect new child sex abuse material? Impossible to avoid false negatives.
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