#Wise customers are now expected to consent to retention and disclosure to partners of #biometric facial information for up to a year simply to continue using their accounts, and even when not required by local financial regulations.
@ncoca I recently signed up here with Sony Bank and that was quite smooth. I think anyone with 6 months left on their long-term visa can do that. Signup is all via an app, the usual documents, but you don't need to send a selfie. They don't do all the interbank transfer options you have with Wise but the VISA card seems to work fine for international transactions and you can hold funds in major currencies within the account.
@tokyo_0 I do have a Sony bank account too, but haven't yet taken advantage of the multiple currency functions much. Since I get paid from clients in many countries, Wise has been pretty essential.
I don't understand why the tech brotherhood is pushing AI so hard. I get that investors want to hear about it. But it's so resource hungry, and they have to know that. They also have to be smart enough to know it's a fad. Is it a desperate ploy to establish a sustainable revenue model for it before the music stops? Surely they have to know the music is going to stop. They have to know no one is going to keep paying for this.
It doesn't make sense. Something else has to be behind this.
JFC now you need to use a browser Microsoft approves of in your operating system to be able to disable its on-by-default continual surveillance of your every action while using it 👀
@adnan I don't get how companies are expected to be fine with "Recall", either. Surely the information security ramifications are staggering in a corporate environment. Or maybe they're hoping firms will buy it for the opportunity to be able to retrospectively snoop on staff.
@tokyo_0 Remote Recall? 😱 the most abusive employers and bosses will definitely use it. They already have the ability to run arbitrary programs on corporate laptops. Surely they would also be able to run the Recall feature.
@boop Hi there. Do you know who administers the @aajtak account? I was wondering if the language setting for the account could be switched to Hindi—that way the translate features would work for speakers of other languages🙏🧡
Right now, with the posting langauge set to English, the option to translate the post isn't displayed to users whose own language is set to English as well—it's assumed the poster and the user are both using English and that no translation is needed.
Feeling overwhelmed by life. I really feel like there's a gap in the market for some kind of life concierge service that you can query and get good, reliable guidance on various things that need to be taken care of to live well... particularly for people living in foreign countries, but actually not just that. I think even if I was living in my own country it'd be useful. Like having some kind of advocate who helps you to live well by saving you the hours of research it takes to get answers.
Trying to work out the best way to distribute an update to a group of ActivityPub users directly (so, like it's being sent to their inbox — like they're followers) but separate from a follower relationship. Then those updates could be displayed for those users in a separate timeline from the main home timeline.
Can you have multiple inboxes? The spec says something about allowing extensions — could you augment it to add your own extra inbox that anyone using your extended protocol would be able to access?
Best way I can think of right now is to deliver the updates to the recipients' inboxes, then have the recipients determine whether to show in the regular timeline or the extra one based on whether the sender is followed. But that would clutter the default timeline for other #ActivityPub clients.
Coincidentally, this seems to expose a gap in #Fediverse security—since right now there's no way for me to continue posting to a hashtag I use frequently and avoid this user, who openly admits that they use .social to browse hashtags and then quote posts.
The only way I can use a hashtag on this federated network is to make my post publicly visible. Doesn't that make all hashtag-based communities here vulnerable to surveillance and potential abuse?
@adnan Maybe the #Fediverse would benefit from some kind of "listed and fediverse-public but not external-public" level of post visibility that would allow people to have their posts on hashtags propagated across the fediverse and visible internally within the federated timeline but not visible via pages like the non-authenticated external search on most instances to people who are not logged in 🤔
@adnan Only the ones admins haven't realised are undesirable yet. If it's within the ecosystem, the mechanisms admins have for blocking instances should work. If it's web-public, nothing will work.
Personally I've been thinking recently about a conceptual social networking platform (perhaps based around AP and interoperable with this) that allows users to limit visibility of their content to within certain degrees of separation. But that's an incomplete idea I don't yet have time to implement.
A lot of people have insisted #Meta isn't getting involved with the #Fediverse to embrace, extend and extinguish it...
... but even before fully implementing Fediverse interoperability in #Threads they're already talking openly about changing its protocols to add features like monetization. 🤔
Text in a screenshot reads as follows: McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too. He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.
And aware, no doubt, that quote posts are a divisive, hot-button issue, they're already building into #Threads not only quote post functionality but more refined controls for it than I know of anywhere in the #Fediverse — a feature bound to attract attention and make people consider choosing Threads in preference to other Fediverse software that doesn't offer the same functionality.
@youronlyone I don't think they can force the rest of fedi to implement controls on quotes. I do think it's a bad idea to control who can quote post no matter if it's Mastodon or Threads doing it (or even Misskey). But it's just going to be circumvented/ignored easily, like how Masto's "opt-in search" has no effect on Misskey's note search per user.
What fedi really should focus on is controlling replies. And while I have reservations on federating that control, I do believe it's important to give users the power to control how their posts look like in their own instances without having admin privileges. Because it's a (micro)blog.
"Even in recent days, the Biden administration has taken steps to contain the fallout from the assassination plot. White House officials warned the Modi government this month that The Post was close to publishing an investigation that would reveal new details about the case. It did so without notifying The Post."
@adnan I'm a big fan. The way it's set up here means I end up bookmarking a load of stuff to preserve, which then gets in the way of other things I bookmark to read or reply to, but it's still a vast improvement on the birdsite. I'd be really reluctant now to move to any service that didn't offer automatic deletion. Wish you could set it to remove old favourites, too.
@adnan Yeah, I guess I meant other Fediverse software really - things like Sharkey or GoToSocial, or whatever the new fork is going to be called (if it actually happens)
I thought #VanessaDougnac had a piece published somewhere in English that did the rounds here and elsewhere when she was forced to leave #India a few months ago, but I can't find it at all now. Does anyone else remember it?
(I can find lots of other stories talking about her departure, some with quotes from a statement she released, but what I thought I saw was a story, rather than a statement—though links to the statement also gratefully received!)🙏🧡
@mike Hi there! I just started trying to watch/listen to your podcast on flipboard.video and the only resolution options it gives me are 720p or "auto". A lot of people are on metered data — I always have to turn down video resolution on my phone to 480p or 360p. Is there any way one of these lower resolution options could be added? An hour long video at 720p is a big chunk of data.
@tokyo_0 hmmm. I'll check but I think this is a peertube limitation. In the meantime, you could try listening to the podcast in audio only on Spotify or Apple or other podcast players.
Can you imagine what the #Fediverse would look like now if the response to Gab had been "Admins don't need to block these instances, individual users can just choose whether or not to apply a user-level block (mute) themselves"?
And #Meta is even more corrosive than Gab. Gab users just posted a barrage of hate and unpleasantness. Meta is commercially incentivised to destroy what some people are inviting it to into.