I’m going to repost this every few days until the election. People need to memorize some basic differences so they can recall them on demand when talking to anyone who still doesn’t understand the stakes of the 2024 election. Please share this post, the image, or both.
@arstechnica "At first glance, the Recall feature seems like it may set the stage for potential gross violations of user privacy. Despite reassurances from Microsoft, that impression persists for second and third glances as well." You don't say. The only thing I want to know about this feature is how to disable it.
@caseynewton@zoeschiffer My physics professor taught us to watch for words like "obviously follows" and "of course." He said this is how a lecturer elides the part of the proof they don't understand.
Up to this point, I was wondering why you didn't find anyone from Facebook to talk to—even though FB, much more than Amazon, Apple, and Google, was roiled by employee dissent in 2020, and before that in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the Kavanaugh hearings. Now I see why.
I recently saw a conversation between two people I respect that ended poorly. This being a social platform, shortage of mutual understanding is not surprising. Most of the time, I just back away slowly, but this time, the topic is important enough, and I think I can see a framing that can help make conversations about it less antagonistic.
When different people prioritize different kinds of assets and threats, it's easy to end up comparing risks that can't be compared or balanced.
For a protester, the assets they need to protect are identity and location history. The threat they need to protect it from is local law enforcement. If a hostile foreign government operated platform such as #TikTok is less likely to volunteer their data to FBI, it's a bit safer for their use case than domestic platforms other than #E2EE messengers. 2/
For a protest organizer, the main asset to protect is their ability to reach people. The main threats to that are censorship, ranking algorithms, and network effects. If #TikTok is where they can reach the most people, they're going to use that.
Same thing happened with #Telegram in #Belarus in 2020: it attracted more people to the protests, even though in the end it burned many with its weak security. Would it be better if protests didn't happen at all, due to lack of reach? Not really. 3/
Personally, I think #TikTok activists made a Faustian bargain, and I will explain why, but it is their bargain to make, and it is not made of ignorance. Trying to educate them about the privacy and addictiveness problems of TikTok will only piss them off.
The main threats to democracy are #war and #disinfo. Mitigating the risk of war has never been as straightforward as today: arm #Ukraine, arm #Taiwan, and let their resistance deter fascist empires from invading their neighbors.
Disinfo is a harder problem. Like cancer, it exploits freedom of speech and other essential aspects of democracy to turn a society against itself. Like with cancer, any treatment has to walk a careful balance to eradicate the disease without killing the host. 5/
Global social networks with algorithmic feeds make #disinfo 10x worse.
A lot of people underestimate how bad it is, for the same reason people underestimated COVID: humans have no intuition for exponents, mechanical metaphors like weight and velocity really don't work for epidemiology.
In a race of exponents, a 0.1% advantage takes only 700 iterations to grow into a 2x advantage. On a platform with a billion users, a 0.1% difference can make one narrative overtake another in hours. 6/
Microsoft is refusing to let me update an older (Thinkpad T460) laptop to the most recent version of Windows 10 (it won't run Windows 11 at all, which is fine since I don't want to use it).
Install/upgrade fails every time with obscure error codes that defy troubleshooting.
Next step: Ubuntu 22.04, which is the most recent version of that Linux flavor and works great on older hardware.
Note: I've been running Linux as my primary OS for more than a decade...
@caseynewton If you have read it, why would you take anything Cantwell says about what she's going to do at face value? There's a pattern of her sabotaging tech regulation bills after endorsing them. This one, she didn't even cosponsor. Just look at the list of her top campaign contributors from OpenSecrets, that alone is enough to tell you whether or not she wants to open the Pandora's box of evaluating the national security threats posed by the big tech.
@timbray@stux After working in big tech for almost a decade, I'm no longer convinced that government spending, and even military spending, is universally more wasteful.
A lot of what large corporations do is net negative on the public harm vs good scale. Compared to that, being merely inefficient is a win. And don't even get me started about corruption...
"openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma."
No, systemd is not the root cause. The root cause is the sorry state of funding FOSS that leaves even core system components crumbling under tech debt.
We already had that conversation after Heartbleed. We still haven't solved it.
@box464 Fact. I, for one, gave up on my hope of making even a minimum wage level of money from running and moderating a Mastodon instance.
Allowing your social experience to be ruled by the privileged few who can afford to work non-billable hours isn't much of an improvement over it being ruled by a handful of billionaires.