tothedaring

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy @auscovid19 it’s not. it’s fucking the fuck NOT here to stay. it does NOT have to be like this. people simply need to stop living their lives so recklessly and wear a goddamn mask and give a damn about others and we could be so done with it. it could be behind us. stop giving the virus a host and it dies. that’s how it works. even if everyone masked with high quality respirators like 3M Auras we’d see this thing PLUMMET. this is fucking madness i s2g.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

when we (possibly unwittingly or through social pressures) made the shift to taking authoritative positions on concepts and refusing to allow them to be challenged or allowing ourselves to be open to discussing ideas, we lost the plot because that’s what the internet was made for.

if we’re not swapping tips on how to make this declining society and difficult existence more comfy for each other, what are we doing here?

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@rolle a search for “bluesky needs” on Bluesky gives you a stream of mostly already-implemented Mastodon features that Bluesky lacks.

sure, polish is one of the reasons that makes Bluesky more appealing to some, but it seems ppl are willing to sacrifice features for the fleeting dopamine and social capital they get from ‘invite-only’ platforms and for not feeling like they’re starting over because their friends are already there. that’s what made Clubhouse so popular before it died and, sans the invite aspect, that’s what’s led to Threads current success—it duplicated an existing social graph.

for Mastodon to be seen as a viable alternative, it would need to either compromise on principles (never a good move) by making some aspect exclusive or by finding a solution to helping people reconnect—even if they’re on other instances.

their solution has been to start everyone on the same server (a familiar experience) then let people move organically from there. it’s not a bad move, but there needs to be another layer of beacons or importing social graphs so people can be notified when friends join, i think.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@rolle you have to wonder how much of that explanation is repeated because they don’t have a good explanation or haven’t collected their thoughts on it but aren’t confident enough to say so (which is disappointing but understandably human.)

it’s like when years ago people said “i use android because it’s open and ios isn’t” but they didn’t know what it meant. they want a snappy, intelligent answer to give.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@kcarruthers you can use Signal’s blur tool to blur tattoos and other clearly identifiable marks too!

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@skinnylatte you know, teas always bored me—i was one of those annoying ‘i’m too good for tea. i drink coffee’ ppl—before i found the funky earthy ones

tothedaring, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

@stux @rolle yearning for the days when brooklyn looked like this every few blocks 😩

tothedaring, 6 months ago

people will self-righteously condemn you for not posting about [insert new atrocity here] but can't point to any instance where they've made material changes with their actions

or worse yet, point to their protest selfies and footage that is without a doubt being scraped by LEAs and analyzed to kick off arrest warrants

tothedaring, 6 months ago

there are entire groups of people* that take privacy & security seriously and there are countless people that go to rallies, but the overlap of people that would consider the safety implications of their actions based on insight that groups like @eff and @cldc spend years compiling for us that would -also- go to a rally and even pass that insight along amounts to a baker's dozen of people in cities the size of brooklyn (which, mind you, dwarfs most other major cities). we'd be lucky to have a handful in others.

(i refuse to use the term 'community' to describe things like this bc that's not what the word means... a community is a collection of people with whom you cultivate trust and mutual respect and support, not a fan club)

tothedaring, 6 months ago

most of the time, we either encounter defeatist (not to be confused with nihilism) approaches to the surveillance state and true gravity of what we're up against, or it's people that have no intention of making material changes to the world and simply want to extract some social capital along the way and cash in on it while it's still valuable.

rarely do you meet people that are neither type, but if you do, hold onto them with everything you've fucking got.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

this isn't a particularly well-thought out thread or complete with context—truly off-the-cuff and out of character for me—but i felt i needed to vent a bit.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@soundshadow87 @glightly there’s a neat project to create an #opensource replacement for the AirPods case that an engineer spearheaded. it even swaps lightning for usb-c.

really digging the scrappy solarpunk reverse engineer everything efforts out there.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/man-open-sources-the-self-repairable-airpods-pro-case-that-apple-wont-make/

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@protonmail if a user stores their Proton credentials in Pass and then their subscription lapses, how do they log in to their account to pay the invoice? do they have to resort to recovery keys?

it seems more realistic for a paying subscriber to use the free version of pass on a second account than risk being locked out of accounts. it makes the Pass experience feel like users are just renting a glorified digital storage locker where your belongings are held ransom for payment.

tothedaring, 6 months ago

@protonmail right. and that seems obvious to more technically-adept users like you (the person replying) and me, but most likely not to most users, i’d be willing to bet. it’s absent from any documentation (like the import guides) i’ve read so far.

truthfully—even for those of us that know these best practices—having that brief reminder is crazy-helpful, since we’re churning through several dozens of other things and make mistakes too.

tothedaring, 7 months ago

@LouisIngenthron lol does it feel crummy knowing you’re not getting paid?

tothedaring, 7 months ago

@maddy @thisismissem i think it's easy for us to say we should boycott Spotify since there's a new reason every few weeks, but it's harder to implement.

i think the strategy instead needs to be encouraging people to be reaching out to their fav artists—big and small—to encourage them to help us make the leap by supporting efforts to build artist-managed platforms like what @radiofreefedi @jessica are doing with #faircamp and what @ajroach42 & @djsundog have in the works with a fediverse model.

think about it... we can't take them on head to head, but if we get enough of the smaller artists talking that it gets a Janelle Monáe or Taylor talking to fans about it? the clowns at Spotify will suddenly have a big problem on their hands

tothedaring, 7 months ago

@thisismissem you’re right, but i’m not sure what that has to do with these platform execs making millions more each year yet decreasing payouts to artists.

swapping one capitalist for a marginally better one isn’t going to save us.

tothedaring, 7 months ago

@Pineywoozle @fulelo the irony of these studies (with increasingly troubling results) coming from NYU while NYU Langone remains one of the hospital networks that don't require masking and seemingly even relaxed gloving protocols is mindblowing...

tothedaring, 7 months ago

@dangoodin @Wednesday @glightly from an industry newbie / outsider’s PoV, it was far too minor a breach not to throw everything they had at it to stress-test their response flow. at worst, they’d have solidified the trust people have given them and it would have been free marketing material, like “you trusted us and we value that—here’s a look at what we do to maintain it, no matter the severity”.

and given the breadth of orgs deploying Okta, it seems like an operational security gaffe to pass the report around on yet another third party platform—and one that’s unencrypted no less. not securing what you know about an attack, how you’re combatting it, and which industry partners should be notified to prevent a cascade of related attacks is a strategic failure imo.