More about our lovely tech overlords.
I'm a modern Luddite: it's not the tech that's evil, it's the people exploiting the tech to get filthy rich who are the problem.
This technology is trained on the huge datasets scraped by the invasive corporations that pry into every aspect of our lives. Unless we control this at source, cases like this are not deterrents to companies, they're the cost of doing business.
Well worth the read. The US left should think long and hard about this: they share a lot of common ground with MAGA and capitalism will only be defeated if the poor unite. All of the poor.
To update: The live English-language blog on the Iceland eruption is back. You can watch the volcanic activity live as nature documentary, not disaster news, thanks to all the efforts made last month.
Other sites get it. They understand why people are happy for their posts to be readable by anyone on a site they've agreed to be part of, but not the wider web.
It's the difference between "reply all" on an email and the email provider unilaterally deciding to make the email available to everyone who uses its services.
Most credible site have a version of this - but the Mastodon fedi refuses.
But of course the US won't do anything about Musk. He's far too "valuable" to the rapacious imperialistic state.
Y'all still buying the myth that he's a genius because it benefits the First World.
Hi. Any chance you can help me identify this ant?
Google reverse image search says Polyrhachis sokolova, but - although we have the correct climate/marine conditions here in Durban - it doesn't mention Africa as part of the distribution.
What caught my eye was that from a distance and with the naked eye, it looked blue. Not a dark blue/black, but almost teal. I was surprised when looking closer.
@futurebird Thanks! Will try inaturalist.org
Yes, she was alone - though I do see others of the same shape and size in the garden. She caught my eye because of the colour.
I don't have any closer pics, unfortunately - she wandered off under the bed.
I've boosted a post about the Mirai botnet before, but this has interesting new info.
It should help you understand why I just roll my eyes when people insist that the problematic crap you see online is all "the Russians" [insert your own conspiracy theory here].
I, like Allison Nixon in this story, also lurked around hacker forums a decade ago. I'm a journalist, though, not a cybersecurity expert - and my interest was more in what drove the participants than the details of what they were doing.
As Mirai imploded and dozens - if not hundreds - of youngsters took up the idea (particularly the lucrative click-fraud schemes), many of those with lesser coding skills moved to social media and created botnets there.
By 2015, their influence on Twitter was extraordinary. I started investigating what was happening.
And I found the manipulation of social media was mostly peopled by similar characters: youngsters who are not "evil".
When I say many of them were my friends, I mean it.
Believe it's all foreign powers and fascists, if you want. You're completely wrong.
The people involved honestly had very little idea of how or why what they were doing harmed others.
Twitter was very complicit in what went on. Those botnets drove traffic, which resulted in the company being able to raise advertising rates.
Occasionally, they took out a botnet that really was a foreign agitator. These were usually around 30k-80k in size, and insignificant in terms of overall bot numbers.
Next time you see any current or former Twitter Safety official opining about how "it's all Russia or China", remember what you've read here about Mirai.
They are selling you the same old shit, because they did - and still do - represent a certain economic class. They were concerned with Twitter's safety, not that of users.
On 11 March 2004, Madrid was hit by a series of bombs that centred on train stations. Almost 200 people were killed and more than 2000 injured.
A lot of photographers were around to catalogue the loss of life and devastation.
Many of the images were very graphic. There's an old principle in newspaper journalism called the "Post Toasties rule", with Post Toasties being a brand of breakfast cereal.
The imagery is of your average person sitting reading the news in the morning. They don't want to see explicit gore.
"Don't make them puke into their Post Toasties" is the adage - journalism has a brutal in-house joke culture.
(The brandname might differ from country to country; the rule remains.)
By 2004, there had been enough quality progress in programs such as PhotoShop that images could be manipulated to remove gore.
So we get to the story of the Human Ham.
There were many terrible images, but this was an image used by many major newspapers around the world. It was from a big wire agency. (These are Reuters, AP, AFP, etc.)
It showed the devastation, shocked and bloodied people ... and, in the foreground, a section of thigh from a person blown apart by the bomb.
Most newspapers used their new computer toys to remove the ham from the photo.
This became a huge debate: there are very strict contractual rules governing the use of copy or photos from the wires.
I'm not going to go into all the arguments - I've posted about it before - but the upshot is that you are not allowed to alter an image. You may crop it, but not change it.
This not only affects regular newspapers' Post Toasties rules, but it hits all the internet "news sites".
They might be able to avoid copyright infringement by rewriting the news, but they can't do the same with images. Use the image as is, or don't use it at all.
The wire agencies go after infringements like vengeful angels of justice. They put offenders out of business not only through lawsuits but by denying access.
It's slmost DMCA-like power.
