🇬🇧The leaked #ChatControl proposal from the Belgian Council Presidency which will be discussed today reveals: The EU Commission’s extreme #ChatControl bill is alive. Our fight against this attack on digital privacy of correspondence continues!
In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.
Let's envision what a truly federated chat like #Matrix could do to improve the cross-connectivity of chat channels. Most of these features are already possible, they just haven't been implemented yet in a community-oriented client experience.
I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS culture of shitty behavior and abuse.
Yes, there're other pathologies at work here (the big tech capitalist pillaging of the commons, etc).
But what is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, & that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.
I spent a week on #Bluesky doing a social experiment. It was an exercise in depression. #Mastodon is the best new #socialmedia, by far. On Bsky, nobody uses the search function or hashtags like #science to discover posts. You're stuck to one science feed that's a closed-membership algorithmic coffin that only boosts large long-established accounts. It felt like I was in solitary confinement. You're forced to play the "social ladder" game, which encourages twitter-style toxicity. #fediverse#tech
"[the] computer that provided hundreds of charts for Joan Quigley, the [President Ronald and Nancy] Reagans' astrologer, who determined the timing of important events in the Reagan presidency such as: the take off times for Air Force One for important trips, the timing of all presidential press conferences, the signing of numerous anti-nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union."
I think “make dist”-generated tarballs are just one part of the xz debacle (and not the most frightening part), but at least we can do something about them: when they’re the byproduct of a build process, we can build them from source (like Debian does); when they add something that’s not in the VCS (such as .po files), we can at least ensure a reproducible build process as Simon advocates here.
The RDF Dataset Canonicalization and Hash WG published RDF Dataset Canonicalization as a W3C Proposed Recommendation.
"At times, it becomes necessary to compare the differences between sets of graphs, digitally sign them, or generate short identifiers for graphs via hashing algorithms. This document outlines an algorithm for normalizing RDF datasets such that these operations can be performed" https://www.w3.org/news/2024/rdf-dataset-canonicalization-is-a-w3c-proposed-recommendation/
Three years ago, #FDroid had a similar kind of attempt as the #xz#backdoor. A new contributor submitted a merge request to improve the search, which was oft requested but the maintainers hadn't found time to work on. There was also pressure from other random accounts to merge it. In the end, it became clear that it added a #SQLinjection#vuln. In this case, we managed to catch it before it was merged. Since similar tactics were used, I think its relevant now
@mike 's contributions to #FOSS and #DeSoc go back much further than just the #ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse, well over a decade in fact, as the creator of #Mistpark, now #Friendica, and also #Zot6 and #Nomad, which promises to be a show changer for identity in the world of Social communications.
Today some people in Scotland are getting upset that they are no longer able to be quite as publicly and loudly horrible to other people any more without potential legal consequences.
For those out of the loop...
Have an opinion? Allowed.
Threats, abuse and inciting hatred against people because of who they are?
No.
Not even those ones over there.
Legislation covers race, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, trans and intersex.
Federation in the #Wikimedia#Commons Query Service is impressively powerful: You can use the wealth of information contained in #Wikidata, combine it with structured metadata on Commons and retrieve media from Commons you'd hardly find otherwise.
For example:
Find images for all monuments with a Bavarian monument authority ID in a certain administrative district (here Passau): https://w.wiki/9dba
You can now carry 25g of weed legally in Germany and own up to 50g in your home.
Still no legal way to buy it anywhere so you either have to grow it yourself or join a community, but those are not allowed to send it via the post....
Not sure that this will drain the black market....
I’m working on a piece about the Apple antitrust case and I’m looking for app developers who feel they’ve been hurt — or helped! — by Apple’s so-called ecosystem lock-in.
Please reach out here or to rani@sherwood.news if you’d like to discuss!