“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
@kroltanz
When someone says something to the effect of "they're not a nazi, don't be hyperbolic" I ask myself only one question. "Would they do anything to stop the nazis if they came for me?"
That's really all I need to know.
Mozilla fires 60 people to “focus on bringing ‘trustworthy AI into Firefox.’”
Fuck you, Mozilla. No one is asking for AI in Firefox. Sadly, you’re the best we can hope for under capitalism. So if we want something better, we should look into alternative models.
I remember when Microstrategy, a then-respected analytics company that made one of the best data visualisation packages at the time, decided to go all-in on bitcoin. When the fad collapsed, it almost wiped them out, and very few analytics people take Microstrategy seriously any more.
Large companies like IBM or Facebook can get away with going in on bad tech. IBM bet heavily on blockchain and Facebook bet heavily on metaverse. Both survived the experience. Likewise, Microsoft will probably survive their bet on LLMs. Mozilla might not.
This is a problem because the world might not have needed Microstrategy, IMHO it does need Mozilla. Allowing Tableau to dominate doesn't harm the web itself; allowing Chrome to dominate does.
@aral In "I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1" by Victor Klemperer, he notes how first books by Jewish authors were off-limits to people, then how he as a Jew was not allowed to check books out, then not allowed to read them in the Reading Room, then had bits of his personal library made verboten.
If folks keep letting fascists fash, personal libraries become unavailable as well.
Whenever you see the words “ads”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “web 3”, or “AI”, just replace them with “farts” and you’ll know whether you want them or not.
“Can the fediverse survive without farts?”
Yes, perfectly well.
“Will farts replace people?”
I hope not.
“The European Commission embraces farts.”
That’s unfortunate.
“This new startup wants to improve your life with farts.”
Your Twitter/X account is a microphone connected to a mixer controlled by a fascist. You can speak all you want. The fascist controls your volume and can mute you whenever he wants. And you might not even know you’ve been muted because you can still hear yourself in your headphones.
It’s not called resistance when your volume knob is in someone else’s hand.
@rooftopaxx@flip0xfff Oh don’t worry, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia now owns the second largest share of Twitter/X after Elon Musk so we know exactly where the Arab Spring folks would end up today if they were to use Twitter/X.
And that’s the problem. We have folks who don’t understand the dangers telling people it’s safe to use.
And in case you think I’m exaggerating the danger, Saudi just sentenced a man to death for his posts:
@aral I have probably quoted it before, but it nicely fits my experiences:
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human”
@onepict on listening to Age of Surveillance Capitalism, it certainly comes across as they view themselves in the 'divine right of kings' way.
As they, the billionaire class, want all at any cost and are free from all consequence.
They have the court jesters and are without criticism.
@aral Oh, our daughter was almost dropped as a patient by her medical provider, when we chose to not give consent to electronic processing of her health data - until we pointed out that this is illegal under GDPR regulations.
Direct messages (DMs) on #Mastodon / #ActivityPub / the #fediverse are not end-to-end encrypted (#e2ee) and you should never include sensitive/private information in them.
Until they are e2ee, this is all we should be telling people. Anything else is irresponsible and could cause vulnerable people harm.
Specifically, it doesn’t matter:
if your instance admin is ethical or not
whether Elon Musk can read DMs easier on Twitter
etc.
It’s not end-to-end encrypted. It’s not private. End of.
@aral Certainly journalists should never use DMs on Mastodon or Twitter to communicate with sources. I was disturbed to learn how many journalists use DMs heavily on Twitter.
🚨 Another EU mass surveillance attempt. Will kill privacy on web. Must not pass. 🚨
“[A]ll web browsers distributed in Europe will be required to trust the certificate authorities and cryptographic keys selected by EU governments.
These changes radically expand the capability of EU governments to surveil their citizens by ensuring cryptographic keys under government control can be used to intercept encrypted web traffic across the EU.”
What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:
Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)
Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)
“So it’s over for you, Elon Musk. You are a public failure of a man. You’ll still be rich, but you no longer matter. That’s all you really wanted out of this, wasn’t it? You bought Twitter because you thought that owning it would make you the most special person in the whole wide world, only to reveal yourself as an unremarkable shithead with no good ideas … Go fuck yourself, Elon. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear?”