skullgiver

skullgiver, 5 days ago

Facebook is allowed to verify your identity before deleting any accounts that belong to you. They’re allowed to ask you for ID, as long as they delete the proof you’ve supplied immediately (and don’t process that information for any other purpose, of course). I don’t think it’s that unusual to require logging in from the associated email address, but if you can prove that the account is yours another way I don’t see why they wouldn’t be required to oblige.

If you believe you’ve sent a legally compliant GDPR deletion request, your next step would be to file a complaint with your country’s data processing authority. If they consider Facebook to be breaking the law, they should take your case up with them for you. If they refuse, for instance because they’re overworked and underfunded, there are legal procedures you can take to make them enforce the law, usually at your expense. They may also choose to wait for a while and collect more complaints to strengthen their case in court.

If your DPA cannot get Facebook to comply with the law, they will start a lawsuit. Depending on how well your DPA is run and how bad Facebook is breaking the law, they may be able to not only force them to comply, but also fine Facebook for thousands or even millions of euros for their noncompliance.

You can also sue Facebook for breaching privacy laws. This is not free unless you get lucky and the judge makes Facebook pay for your legal costs when you win (which is not a given in every country, check your local laws and customs).

The quickest way would be to log in and delete the account the normal way. Recover the email accounts if you have to. The alternatives will take months at least, possibly years if you need to go the legal route, and may require paying for lawyers and court costs.

skullgiver, 7 days ago

Tools I use:

• Timeshift for snapshots (and automatic snapshots after package upgrades)
• BTRFS assistant for helping with BTRFS maintenance

skullgiver, 13 days ago

Picard shaves his head, while Riker puts on a fake beard. Really shows who’s boss on the bridge.

skullgiver, 14 days ago

Last time I checked, almost all those were all off by default. Could be because I’m in Europe, though.

skullgiver, 14 days ago

I still enjoy the comics, but I have no idea how they got an animated series. The jokes are fine for a once-a-day thing, but minutes of this stuff at a time? I barely managed to get through the first episode.

I guess Apple must’ve been desperate for content.

skullgiver, 26 days ago

You can keep the trademark with FOSS. That’s why Debian had Iceweasel rather than Firefox.

skullgiver, 3 months ago

It definitely is, but “better” does not mean “good” unfortunately.

Hopefully Nvidia will push harder for decent drivers now that corporate Linux servers are in route to disabling X11, but as you can still get X11 back with just a simple package, I expect this process to take years.

skullgiver, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Aluminium cans have a thin plastic liner inside them that’s almost impossible to recycle. I’m not sure if you’re fixing much by switching to cans, here…

Glass is better, but any carbonated drink turns into a bomb if you put more than half a liter or so in a closed glass container.

skullgiver, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I don’t think so. They use the same protocol anyway, so now you can use Signal without being that one guy that has everyone install an app to chat with them. People can also move to other chat apps (or, if Google and Apple play ball, their built in chat app) to talk to everyone around them.

Excluding RCS (I don’t actually use that), I have apps for five different communication platforms on my phone because other people won’t switch away from the app’s they’re using. If it were up to me, everyone would be either on Signal or Matrix, but I can’t possibly convince that many people to switch, especially not the group chats.

XMPP/Matrix bridging only gets you so far, because none of the bridges I’ve seen support things like video calling, so I still end up with apps on my phone. At least I can send the majority of my messages from one single client now. My experience would be a lot better if I didn’t need to deal with these bridges, though, because they require constant maintenance and don’t support encryption well.

skullgiver, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Not really, the organisation behind Manjaro introduces a bug every two years or so (I think their software manager caused excessive requests to the Arch repos at one point?) and sometimes their website’s certificate renewal breaks for a few days, but that’s about it.

The biggest breakage problems occur when the AUR gets ahead of the Manjaro packages and compiles and upgrades fail, but they don’t leave you with an unbootable system unless you ignore a lot of warnings and try to force your way through a doomed upgrade.

It’s no worse than Arch, except installing Arch is so difficult that the people who don’t know why they broke their installs will veer off to another distro instead. Manjaro users also have a tendency to go to the Arch forums for support which annoys the Arch people for good reason, but I doubt they’d be any less annoyed if the people who couldn’t even be bothered to check if they’re on the right forum did install Arch.

Manjaro does tend to distribute code that’s nowhere near stable yet as part of their “standard” releases, which causes annoyances for others (notably the Asahi folks, because the ARM Apple CPUs were nowhere close to prime time yet when Manjaro announced Apple support based on Asahi) but the same can be said for Arch, or any Arch split-off like Endeavour, because bleeding edge support will always be painful for new software packages.

skullgiver, 5 months ago

ActivityPub uses the acct URI to kickstart itself and then uses LD-JSON to span the network. The JSON contains fields and lists that can be dynamically expanded into whatever representation you need, with default schemas ready for use through ActivityStreams.

I think it’s difficult to set up a URI standard for ActivityStreams objects because there is no standard identifier, nor is there a guarantee that these identifiers will be URI-safe. Objects do contain references to (unique) URLs that identify them, but the data is linked either by value (written out completely) or as URLs.

Setting up a URI scheme can be difficult to do comprehensively. How do you represent a link to a repost of an edit of a Location object? You can’t exactly expect the URL to indicate the type, so you’ll probably end up with “ap:server.com/1234”, but at that point you’re leaving out the important part (“where do I go to fetch this object”). You can’t just assume that there are standard endpoints because ActivityPub doesn’t standardise any. Soms apps break on showing Lemmy content for this reason; they were written for Mastodon and Mastodon alone, so their URL generation breaks.

I think an URI scheme would just become one of those unimplemented or useless specifications. It would only distract from what I consider to be the much better solution: fixing up and implementing ActivityPub’s client-server protocol.

The CS protocol lacks important things (like “how do I log in”), but it exposes ActivityPub directly. Your server will expose a bunch of lists (timelines? communities? Up to the server!) and all the app needs to do is render those. Dig down a level and you get a bunch of objects; posts, notes, comments, whatever you can think of, and they too can be rendered by the client in any way you may want.

The protocol is rather freeform but importantly, the server takes care of any references and dereferencing. Clients shouldn’t need to deal with that mess of they’re connected to a server that handles everything for them already.

You can write a super generic ActivityPub CS client that operates somewhat like a file browser, and then it should work with any type of ActivityPub content. A smarter app could detect the type of server responsible for managing certain things (i.e. when you’re following a Lemmy community, treat posts in it as such, and not as a flat timeline), and the protocol extensions that every server adds should help with that.

The only limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that so few servers actually implement the ActivityPub CS protocol, and that in turn there are only a few applications that make use of it. I think this comes down to the vagueness of things like “how do I tell whay user this is in a standardised way” and if we can improve that part of the protocol, we may be able to get the “one single super app” for ActivityPub.

skullgiver, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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skullgiver, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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skullgiver, 5 months ago

Apple already does a lot of this stuff. For example, it’ll do offline face recognition for your photos while your phone is charging overnight.

Plus, Apple is ahead of the curve when it comes to performance on this stuff. You don’t want to be running Stable Diffusion on your iPhone, but smaller AI is perfectly fine. Plus, unlike on Android, there are huge amounts of devices with ML accelerator chips that can run these models efficiently, allowing for power consumption optimisations by not having to provide a CPU fallback.

We’ll have to see how effective this will be in practice, but Apple generally doesn’t bring these types of features to their newer devices until they’re ready for daily use.

skullgiver, 5 months ago

Lemmy does that sometimeshttps://popplesburger.hilciferous.nl/pictrs/image/564a9f08-4680-4cad-b055-b419f980056e.png

skullgiver, 5 months ago

1. Instance moderators can block individual servers, as can account owners on services like Mastodon.
   • People are afraid that Threads will suck up all their posts and do something bad with them (privacy violations of some kind? not sure what the problem is when the content is already out there for anyone to crawl and analyse). People are also afraid that this will be another XMPP, and that the popularity of Threads will overwhelm the small Fediverse.

XMPP??XMPP is a federated messaging protocol that Google and Facebook adopted at some point; Google’s/Facebook’s implementations became much more popular, the majority of the XMPP network was on those services, and when XMPP was phased out, XMPP shrunk back to the tiny userbase of enthusiasts that it originally comprised of. It has grown to be actually useful since then but neither Google nor Facebook have enabled XMPP again (i.e. you can actually keep your chat history on multiple devices, E2EE has been added, some standards have been grouped together to make the protocol more palatable). However, with MIMI+MLS on the horizon, I imagine XMPP users will be able to talk to Facebook/GChat users in the future.

2. Yes, Meta can already access and scrape most content on the Fediverse if they wanted to. The exceptions Mastodon and services that copied Mastodon’s solution, which have a setting to only allow fetching posts for logged-in users or from servers that sign requests, effectively allowing the administrators to choose which servers can access their content at the cost of posts being inaccessible on the website without a local account.
   • Public information received by a partaking ActivityPub server includes usernames, display names, post contents, edit history upvotes/downvotes/favourites, boosts, and some other activity. Scrapers cannot find out who upvoted posts and in many cases who favourited posts but by scraping across different servers, it’s possible to figure out what accounts are liking what posts.
   • Something that many Mastodon operators have done is limit or silence Threads; basically, you can follow Threads users and interact with them, but their content will not appear on any algorithmic timeline and accounts on those servers will not be suggested to new users. Lemmy has no such ability at the moment, but I can’t imagine Threads interacting with Lemmy in the first place; we can’t even follow accounts on Lemmy, as far as I know following a Lemmy community through Threads would be as useless and spammy as it is on Mastodon. At the moment Threads users can’t follow Fediverse users anyway, they’ve only enabled outgoing traffic so far.

skullgiver, 5 months ago

I’ve noticed the same, but when I check other instances, it seems like all my comments and posts still arrive at the other servers. I think it’s just that most Lemmings are busy preparing for Christmas.

0.19.1 is out, that did fix at least one bug related to the ActivityPub endpoints.

skullgiver, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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skullgiver, 8 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

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skullgiver, 8 months ago

Easy, export BRIDGE_BEHAVIOR=legacy and pretend nothing changed until everything one day breaks horribly in production.

skullgiver, 9 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

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skullgiver, 10 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

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skullgiver, 10 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

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