deflarerOfClouds

@deflarerOfClouds@eattherich.club

I would rather not be a #luddite but the incompetence of the tech industry gives me little choice. I will not support lousy technology, thus most technology.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Frisk, to Matrix

I wrote another miniblog, this time about why I decided to donate to @matrix. :apartyblobcat:

https://frisk.space/posts/matrix-donation/

deflarerOfClouds,

@Frisk I would rather to see a bounty to get @matrix to stop using (Cloudflare as a Crutch) and switch to . I can’t be motivated to donate to project until it shakes free from its tech giant dependency.

https://sopuli.xyz/post/8923970

becha, to random
@becha@v.st avatar

“How to stop a data center” :: a community in Chile blocked Google https://disconnect.blog/how-to-stop-a-data-center/

deflarerOfClouds,

@jowek @becha It seems like in principle a data center could run an open loop of water that heats the water and provides hot water to the community.

badrihippo, to DuckDuckGo
@badrihippo@fosstodon.org avatar

Any plans to add !bangs in @Mojeek? Bangs was the main reason #DuckDuckGo was my default search engine for so long.

I've kept #Mojeek there for a few weeks, but I keep switching to DDG just for the bangs 😕

I suppose a better solution would be to include bang-like functionality directly in #Firefox because why hit an external website, but not sure if any plugins make it at seamless? 🧩

deflarerOfClouds,

@Mojeek, something else for that big list of requests: a way to reach your cache. Google just discontinued¹ access to their cache. Cache access is extremely important because #Mojeek search results often lead to exclusive gate-kept websites like Cloudflare. We need a way to reach that content when it appears in search results. This is what stops me from using Mojeek. #Searx instances offer a cache option (though they cheat and just redirect to archive.org).

Long-shot: are there any mojeek syndicates that have a search UI that offers a mirror or cache alternate link?

BTW, your article mentions #Gigablast but i think they’re gone now.

  1. It’s unclear what happened with Google. They said they will stop caching sites but that’s obviously not true because they need the cache inherently for indexation. Which suggests they intend to make it inaccessible to the public. Though if that’s true, then it would be all-or-nothing, not continued access to old caches.
ChristosArgyrop, to hpc

One of the mainstream testing systems for high performance computing is written in @Perl

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ctsproject/

deflarerOfClouds,

@mjgardner @Perl @ChristosArgyrop @ovid Certainly it’s an embarrassment considering has recently joined the exclusive walled-garden of . I cannot reach any sourceforge.net/* pages. But I can reach perltidy.sourceforge.net because it’s CF with Tor whitelisted. However, I’ll still avoid it on principle. I don’t think I’ve filed bug reports there but certainly I will not in the future.

ben, to journalism
@ben@werd.social avatar

Molly White, who has been one of the most important voices on technology and society, has moved her newsletter from Substack to Ghost because of the Nazi problem. #Media https://citationneeded.news/citation-needed-has-a-new-home/?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

deflarerOfClouds,

@mjgardner
Indeed. I never read molly white’s blog because it’s not open.. #Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes me.

#CitationNeeded has the same problem as #substack so nothing changes for me. It’s still in the portion of web that’s dark to proponents of an open free web.
@ben @molly0xfff

deflarerOfClouds,

@ben @molly0xfff @mjgardner @deflarerOfClouds #Cloudflare is not like AWS because CF is an access-restricted service that blocks various groups of people. It’s exclusive. If you can access CF’s websites then it means you are not in any of the excluded groups. They designed the garden walls to be invisible to people who are included, so to you it just looks like any other website.

I don’t see Mark’s screenshot in my textual environment, but I suspect he posted what it looks like when you are in one of Cloudflare’s excluded groups of people.

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

#poll what is your favorite memory safe language?

deflarerOfClouds,

@aeva I see zero votes. Did no one vote, or is it just that my instance is not federated with anyone who voted?

strypey, to random
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz avatar

I'm writing a blog piece about the Digital Markets Act in the EU, and legislation of the same name in the UK. As well as others laws in play or on the horizon to regulate digital services.

So what does the fediverse think of the #DigitalMarketsAct?

#AskFedi

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey I’m sure I’m not representative here, but I’m bothered that the #DigitalMarketsAct (DMA) is needed. It’s only because the consumer masses are spineless pushover zombies that the status quo is what it is.

What if you force #GAFAM to split up a bit more? I think you end up with just a few more shitty options. An econ prof once told me 2 or 3 competitors is insufficient. To get a pro-consumer market you need at least 6 competitors.

I don’t oppose the DMA but I have little enthusiasm.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey @icedquinn My memory is unreliable. I just recall being at an RMS talk around 2004 where he mentioned that Disney & Mickey Mouse, & something about them getting extensions on the copyright. I didn’t know it required an act of Congress.

I wonder how Congress has that power considering copyright involves international treaties. Did all countries agree that any country could extend the copyright of a creation in that country?

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey Well I think the forced interoperability would have similar effect. That is, a few corp baddies will share the job of abusing people’s data for profit.

Market intervention should be a last resort. I can (and do) boycott Twitter. The problem comes when gov public services use Twitter. That should be banned. I should not have to conform to Twitter’s gatekeeping to interact with an elected public rep. A university in Denmark excluded me for not using Facebook. That should be banned.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey They should have first introduced law to make boycotts possible, which would mean a public/private separation so everyone can use gov. resources without being forced to bow down to gatekeepers. Police in Belgium recovered a bunch of stolen bikes & posted them to the Facebook page of the police dept. Told victims to find their bike on the FB page. Victims without FB were denied from looking at the recovered bikes.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey My concern with forced interoperabilty is that it will make it even harder to boycott the baddies. The evil corps will have less marketshare but it will be harder to ditch them. The forced interoperability will actually reinforce the public sector’s presence inside walled gardens.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey Suppose Palantir creates microblog platform Z. They “compete” but interoperate with each other. They perhaps need not interoperate with all platforms & could remain incompatible with the fedi. The rules are still unwritten on this, according to wikipedia:

“no interoperability obligation for social networks has been decided upon yet.”

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey I am personally immune to network effect. I do not touch Twitter, FB, tiktok, etc. Politicians should also be immune to network effect. Network effect works well on:

  • children
  • people who lack discipline & self control
  • pragmatists

A public rep has a duty to be available to everyone. Since the walled gardens are exclusive, public reps have a duty to avoid them. The fedi excludes no one.

The other thing is, these people we elected are supposed to be leaders, not followers. They shouldn’t be coerced by the vicious cycle of the network effect.

US republican politicians love the private sector & they are happy to feed corporations and force the public into the private marketplace. But the US democrats on twitter should be ashamed. They should know better.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey The markets need regulation for sure. And it’s precisely for that reason that public officials should not be participating in those markets. It biases the regulation. A senator should regulate Twitter from outside of Twitter. If the senator is using Twitter and they like the UX, they might be less inclined to act against Twitter.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey I’m quite irritated that I can never read the europa.eu pages. The EU is forwardly tor-hostile. And lately (such as now) archive.org is down. So I’ll have to try later. archive.org is down more than it’s up lately, at least for tor users.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey archive.ph links are useless because it uses a Cloudflare config designed to block Tor.

But I was finally able to reach it via archive.org. Indeed the proposal implies any 3rd party may interact with a gatekeeper:

“allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations;”

That wording leaves us hanging as far as the API design goes, and if nothing else is said implies the gatekeeper can design the API as they see fit (which I suspect could involve CAPTCHAs). Will be interesting to see how that unfolds.

deflarerOfClouds, (edited )

@strypey Nothing on that page about network effect obviates what I said. You’ll have to clarify why you think otherwise.

I am not vulnerable to the temptation of going where the people are without prioritizing tech ethics. Network effect is a social virus that has zero effect on me. I do not catch the virus & do not empower the gatekeepers. I go as far as choosing isolation in situations where that is the only ethical option. Very few people have this degree of discipline which is why places like Facebook can continue to thrive on network effect.

If we were to reach “herd immunity” whereby enough people develop a moral constitution to be immune to #networkEffect, gatekeepers would not get the critical mass they need to maintain a stranglehold.

deflarerOfClouds, (edited )

@strypey
Senators already have the option to use a number of inclusive microblogging platforms to reach anyone and to be available to all. The excludes no one (unlike Twitter).

What’s the point in forcing people to keep a private-sector enterprise like Twitter relevant? Let it die. Public officials should not be supporting exclusive private .

One of the major problems your advocacy fails to solve is when you have a public rep on Twitter and you make them fedi-reachable, you remove the pressure for the public rep to enter & participate on the public network, which means people who boycott FB & Twitter are effectively forced to choose between boycotting the baddies & talking to their rep. I should not have to feed Twitter or Facebook or any other surveillance capitalist as a precondition to talk to my elected public official.

The better move is to sue public reps for free speech infringements & get them into public networks like the fedi. The DMA weakens the possibility of taking that action.

deflarerOfClouds, (edited )

@strypey Indeed being immune does not imply being unaffected. I am still affected by COVID 19 even though I was vaccinated & never got infected (AFAIK). People around me still die, lose taste, lose jobs, fight over masks, fight over covid passports, etc. Being subject to side-effects of network effect despite immunity is not cause to support it. I demand public reps be immune to network effect, as leaders; as people who we elect & require to not be spineless pushovers. It works against the public interest to have public reps & public services who are directly vulnerable to network effect & joining elitist private clubs that limit public access to them.

You’ll have to explain why a gov has a “need” to exclusively reach Twitter & FB users via Twitter & FB, by signing the non-negotiable one-sided privacy-abusing contracts (on behalf of a public office) of those private corporations.

We have an emergency broadcast system where the gov can interrupt any TV or radio program and issue a warning about a natural disaster. It would be an injustice & embarrassment if the gov had to ask permission buy an unplanned advertizing slot from the broadcaster and sign whatever is in the terms of those broadcaster-drafted agreements. I suspect (and hope) the gov legislated that broadcasters must have a license to operate which obligates them to accommodate emergency broadcasts on demand and without a client-supplier contract in place.

The gov does buy ad time to push anti-drug propaganda (e.g. “this is your brain on drugs” [frying egg in pan]). This is more like a client-supplier commercial relationship but the broadcast is not a “need”.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey Whatever happens you can probably count on the API being a limited subset of functionality as well as reduced access (CAPTCHA, anti-tor, etc).

That will create a human rights problem of the netneutrality veriety. That is, access inequality & probably coupled with privacy issues (arbitrary interference with privacy is theoretically protected as a human right). If you want to reach a public service or your public rep who sits in the private club of Twitter and you want fully featured access without functionality limitations, you will have to register for a Twitter account & subject yourself to surveillance advertizing. If you can’t or won’t buy a mobile phone and join that private club, you are an outsider. Outsiders won’t be treated as equal human beings. They will be subject to the API limitations.

So different people will have different priviledges in reaching their public office/rep (contrary to art. 1 of universal declaration of human rights). Some people will still likely be shut out entirely, such as tor users who have no mobile phone, or people whose ISP uses cgnat if Twitter is looking for any marginal security excuse to restrict the API.

DMA will likely reinforce public services continuing to use Twitter exclusively & creates a recipe for disaster for some people who will be marginalized.

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey
> The policy writers were smart enough to know they're not network designers.

Surely this is just because the policy is in a draft stage. Lawmakers will have to eventually pin down those details, otherwise gatekeepers are sure to deploy shenanigans that make the API useless. “We’re sorry our AI security bot didn’t let you in… security is important to us…” … “we’re sorry the API changes every week - we need to keep up with competition”

deflarerOfClouds,

@strypey It’s worth noting that Gmail was specifically excluded from the gatekeeper definition.

My superficial knee-jerk thought was “of course, since 3rd parties can interoperate with gmail already per email standards.” But then consider that gmail imposes arbitrary restrictions on who may connect to gmail’s server. ~20 years ago gmail cut me off by deciding to reject all residential IP addresses despite RFC standards compliance by senders. Google broke email & made it exclusive. Likewise with MS.

Either way there’s something shitty here. If the EC was well-informed about gmail when they nixed gmail as a gatekeeper, then we can expect the EC to also use a very long leash with gatekeepers & allow them to maintain a certain level of exclusivity as gmail does. The only other narrative is ignorance-- that the EC is unaware that gmail is an access-restricted walled garden that discriminates on the basis of IP address. Either way, this is not good for consumers.

mburr, to mastodon

How do I run a simple, comprehensible #Mastodon instance? I'm not crazy about setting up and installing the usual server. I have simple needs and want to experiment with my own instance.

It would be great if such were written in #Rust. But I can hold my nose and use a different modern compiled language.

I do know how to search the web. I do! But it's easy accidentally to waste time on something hopeless.

I'll happily be the only user and tolerate jankiness.

#whatsagood #golang #fediverse

deflarerOfClouds,

@mburr That’s a bit eye-opening. I mean isn’t there an expectation that rust tools be somewhat reliable? Lemmy is buggy as hell. Though suppose it’s the javascript web client where the bulk of the bugs are.

Em0nM4stodon, (edited ) to privacy

Asking For Your Recommendations!

As you might have read
in my previous post, I am now officially looking for work!

What are your recommendations
for great organizations to work for in the digital rights, privacy, or security related fields?

Tag them below
if they are on Mastodon! 👀

#GetFediHired #FediHired #AskFedi
#DigitalRights #Privacy #Security

deflarerOfClouds,

@Em0nM4stodon You might want to keep an eye on fossjobs.net.

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