@overanalytcl may i suggest Zola? it's a hugo-like framework, but simplified, very fast to build, written in Rust: https://www.getzola.org/ (i've used it for my personal site)
The Romanian Ministry of Digitalization released a form that people can use to report malicious #deepfake materials. What counts as malicious? Fraud, propaganda, disinformation.
98% of #deepfake material is pornographic. 99% of the victims of deepfake pornography identify as women.
In Ro, journalists & activists have been adamant about showing the violence against women perpetrated online and aided by technology.
Yet, the Gov. chose to focus on 2% of all deepfakes, thus creating a false narrative that this tech is used mainly to influence elections and commit fraud - when, in fact, the majority of victims are being ignored. 2/4
The Ministry doesn't have any competence to decide what propaganda & disinformation is. The end result may be that legitimate speech gets classified as malicious, or that truly harmful speech gets classified as legit. Both are dangerous.
There could be a collaboration (and knowledge sharing) between Gov. & civic society & academia, under the #DSA. But the Ro #DSC is adamant in not reaching out and involving these sectors. We also don't know which ones the competent authorities are. 3/4
Last but not least, there is no transparency, nor feedback.
A user doesn't find out whether the content they reported was forwarded to the adequate VLOP. We don't even get to know how many reports the Ministry processed, who they forwarded the reports to and whether action was taken to remove the content.
The form asks citizens to provide an e-mail address, but doesn't mention why, doesn't indicate what it will be used for (hello, #GDPR).
Journalists and activists are being intimidated, as are their families. They see their own faces on posters under the message "no place for agents in Georgia". And it's not just them who are treated with such brutality - protesters have also seen their faces on such posters.
Here's the part where it gets really dystopian (I'm quoting from the OCCRP article):
Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Shalva Papuashvili announced that the Political Council of Georgian Dream has decided to create a database containing information on all individuals “who are involved in violence, blackmail, threats and other illegal acts,” or “who publicly endorse these actions,” referring to the protesters.
This is what we will all get if we tolerate intolerance.
It's especially important since the only other time I hear people defending cash is when they fear a take-over from a shady, world-wide organization. And it's not that they want freedom, but they want another shady, world-wide organization to not lose its foothold.
@zdl@jens paying via card / similar solutions puts every single
exchange into the databases of private entities. forcing citizens to only use card payments means there is no more exchange that involves money that isn't under surveillance.
two things happen. one: surveillance alters the behaviour of subjects. think: panopticon. two: whoever controls the surveillance controls what is permissable for citizens to do. what if we don't want to award this trust?
The police in Georgia are reacting violently and abusively against protestors who took to the streets against the "foreign agent law", that would force NGOs, civil rights groups and media to register as “foreign agents” if more than 20% of their funding came from abroad.
The chair of the leading party says the law is meant to prevent “non-transparent funding of NGOs", which is "the main instrument for the appointment of a Georgian government from abroad”.
Meanwhile, the local government is validating a violent reaction against public assembly, protests and the wave of discontent among the citizens. Remember, it's not violence if the state powers are doing it. We only call it violence when it threatens to disturb the status quo.
The first attempt to introduce this law was also met with protests last year
Now, thousands of demonstrators have shut down Tbilisi’s central streets since parliament approved the bill’s first reading on 17 April.
@KatS oh, thank you so much for sharing your own! i love seeing efforts like this to curate knowledge. i've been having the "oh if only i had written this down" thought alot 😮💨
do you happen to know whether anyone (including yourself) is keeping track in some way of other personal or collective indie wikis?
I'm making a list of Mastodon and other Fediverse instances either hosted in Romania, registered on a .ro domain or with content that is mostly Romanian (regardless of where they are hosted).
The reason behind this: the Ro digital service coordinator added some extra hoops on top of what DSA requires. We're trying to figure out who will be affected.
If anyone knows such instances, please leave them in a public or private toot (or boost / tag folx who can help) <3
@cheri would you be comfortable telling me the domain?
so far, our understanding is that invidious deployments are not intermediary services, so they don't fall under DSA so they don't need to notify ANCOM (the RO DSC). as you pointed out, they don't host user generated content
we do want to publish an article going in depth on this and it would be great to be able to reference an Invidious instance that's hosted on .ro
Part of the plan with our new #MAIHT3k newsletter is to redirect the energy that we've been putting into twitter threads, etc over there (partly because posting threads across multiple social platforms is getting to be a lot). Here's the first of those:
@emilymbender thank you for putting out a newsletter! it feels like slower media that i can interact with from a place that seems less of a dopamine-slotmachine (my inbox). reading any and all content from you folks is a delight!