In Germany there’s a private company called https://www.schufa.de/schufa-en/ that aggregates data about people, mangles them in a proprietary (i.e. secret) way and produces a “score” indicating how creditworthy an individual is. Companies buy these scores from SCHUFA, that’s how they make a profit.
One of the data points influencing the score is a person’s address. If you live near people of whom SCHUFA thinks they’re not creditworthy, your own score will drop, too. So by simply sharing their your address, you may already suffer detrimental consequences against which they have no recourse.
This is another instance of the “being put in categories you don’t want to be in” point in favor of privacy.
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.
We aren’t the problem, but we can be the solution.
Show you want sustainable products by only buying sustainable products. Framework is a small company but did enough damage in the enthusiast company that now Lenovo and Dell are spinning up repairable/sustainable laptop product lines for the future.
Show that you want to move on from the carbon fuels era by only buying solar and electric products.
Be an enthusiast about such products. Be positive about the impact in your daily life.
Word of mouth goes a long way, especially when you are likely the first person in everyone’s network driving an electric car and their only other perception was shaped by what they read on Drudge or Fox News.
Nobody wants to hear about reducing their “carbon footprint,” that’s an immediate turnoff. But saying, “oh yeah I was getting a little big around the waist, decided to try eating healthier” for why you are eating clean, or “Gas prices are such a motherfucker and parts were always breaking on my old car, I couldn’t afford it anymore, this electric car is simple and the only thing I ever have to replace are tires and wiper blades.” That shit goes a long way.
Even little things like, “I got tired of plastic grocery bags breaking all the time, the fucking kid at the store always stuffs too much in the bag and the bags tear open in the car, plus the reusable bags are really nice and sturdy and I use them around the house for XXXX” can get people to buy reusable grocery bags.
Something about flies, honey, and vinegar.
Obviously, nothing will really change without legislation. But legislation won’t change until normal people start seeing the green solution as the best solution.
Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and...
Yeah, people made the same arguments about 'gay' and 'fag'.
Retarded was the word of choice medically in the 60's - 80's for people with developmental disabilities. It derives from the Latin word Tardus which means slow or late.
Languages evolve, but the euphemistic treadmill is ongoing. The word 'cretin' derived from the word 'Christian', the person who coined it intended it to mean that people with cognitive impairments were still people worthy of respect. And now it's just a straight up insult. Similar with 'idiot' and 'moron'.
And these days you can look at wojaks which use physical differences like drooling or missing half a head or being physically unattractive in unconventional ways to indicate ignorance or stupidity.
Every word that people use to try to describe people with disabilities respectfully becomes a slur. That's because of ableism. It's just not talked about much.
Victorian woman Kathryn Beaton says repeated, illegal denials of service from drivers refusing to allow her guide dog into their vehicles have left her effectively housebound....
The fact that this blind lady needs to have both her guide dog and a taxi/rideshare to get around anywhere sucks for both her and the driver - the former for obvious reasons, and the latter for the reasons you listed out. It’s a sort-of perfect microcosm of the major issue a lot of modern cities seem to have: poor public transit and heavy car-centric infrastructure.
The unfortunate reality that she absolutely needs a car to seemingly get anywhere is the problem here. People - and not just people with disabilities, but in general - should have (and deserve) different viable options to get around. The whole idea of a person becoming stuck at their house because of not being able to get the transport they need to get around the place is fuckin atrocious and should be what’s actually talked about here, not “jUsT lEt ThE aNiMaL oN!” or “MaKe An UbEr ApP fOr PeOpLe LiKe ThIs!”
I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started...
I tried to make it fairly realistic. Obviously I would like HSR absolutely everywhere, but a line through middle of nowhere Montana probably would not see much ridership and would come at extreme cost (especially in the mountains).
There’s a lot of anxiety because it’s topical. Nearly ever user here I’d wager, myself included, just flipped to Lemmy as we watched Reddit break the camel’s back.
I think what most people don’t quite realize though is why this is happening. Reddit isn’t just gearing up for an IPO, they’re transitioning to the model spearheaded by Apple: you access their ecosystem exclusively through their platform.
Every large tech company is trying to play this game. They are developing hardware that gives sole access to their platform which in turn controls the experience and distribution of their content. Apple is best at it and massively profitable, but everyone is trying it. Most already have the software>>>content pipeline locked down, it’s the hardware they can’t get right.
That being said, Meta understands that the easiest way to grow Threads is to flip Instagram and Facebook users, not Mastadon users. The easiest way to keep users is not some defederation long con, it’s to get your grandma and your spouse on their platform. The goal for Meta is to reach a critical mass tipping point, where as a society, most people agree you just have to have an account through them to be part of a larger conversation. They aren’t trying to kill federalized platforms directly, because it’s easier to skip that step and try to make every platform that isn’t their own second tier at best. It’s in their best interest to ignore everyone else and just on-board as much of their Instagram and Facebook base as possible in the next year.
I tried one called Lemmur that I downloaded off F-Droid, however, it can not find this instance (lemmy.world). I want one that’s open-source, and preferably from F-Droid (because screw Google). Which one do you guys use?
Honestly, using wefwef.app as a web app is hard to beat right now. It works very smoothly, and I finally understand why all the iOS users mourn the loss of Apollo so hard. Granted, using an iOS-esque interface on an Android device is a bit odd, but the gestures and the layout are just chef’s kiss.
The biggest issue with it is that it’s getting hammered on the primary domain, so I’ll probably move to self-host it sooner than later.
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It’s very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others… I don’t know who runs all of those or what they’re doing with the data…
“When you use Signal, your data is stored in encrypted form on your devices. The only information that is stored on the Signal servers for each account is the phone number you registered with, the date and time you joined the service, and the date you last logged on.”...
The Lemmy devs are actively asking for donations and every Lemmy instance - apollo.town and vlemmy.net included links to the join-lemmy.org landing page with donation links, so I'm a bit more wary of the whole construct. Perhaps the instance admins mean well - but at the end of the day, they and their instances are soliciting links that finance tankies. That's a no-go for me personally. But each to their own.
Some of the Kbin criticism in those posts is valid, though.
Kbin is not "production ready" software and it's missing a lot of Quality of Life features for instance admins.
It's hard to deploy, hard to to troubleshoot, operate and update. It's not packaged. We users are missing moderation and migration tools necessary to deal with the federated nature of the content (moving instances, content filtering etc)
But such is life on the bleeding edge.
I fully understand if fedi-admins don't want to spend all their free time fiddling with the instance. Many of them are volunteers. It's their choice and no one can fault them for installing Lemmy instead.
Ernest has stated multiple times the project is just a prototype and it very clearly is. People are working on it though. The tracker isn't exploding with issues anymore and Ernest seems to be back working on pull requests instead of battling with the server load, There's 53 of them currently - and they're from multiple contributors. It's going to take some time, but seems there's good work being done - by multiple devs.
Starting a software flamewar between Lemmy and Kbin seems incredibly silly and unproductive though, so I'll just say this - the fediverse puts lot of decision making power into the hands of users. There is choice. So use the stuff that works for you personally. No need to build walls, throw FUD or talk down the other software product or act as a knight in shining white armor for the one you happen to use and prefer.
There's space for everyone and there's space for multiple software projects and products. There's no division.
I stopped using reddit after spez's AmA. If all of this would have been handled in a more mature and open way, I would probably have moved to the reddit app, complained about it for a while, but kept usind reddit. But after what happened in the last weeks, reddit is no longer something I want to be associated with.
For lack of a better description, I simply don't 'like' reddit anymore. It's like a friend who treated you like shit.. Sure, you could still go to a party together and have fun, but it's just not quite the same anymore.
It's not so much about what they did, most people understand reddit has to make money at some point. It's the how that is driving people away imho. At least it is for me.
The Euclid telescope, just launched today, will be able to observe galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Here's the largest map I could find (1 billion light years) that includes the Milky Way, Laniakea, the Shapley supercluster, the Perseus–Pisces supercluster, and the South Pole Wall....
Industrially processed pizzas, cereals, and convenience foods are responsible for a host of diseases. Policymakers and doctors need to lead the food fight.
I work in this space (food processing) and deal with this negative public perception all the time. I really think it’s misplaced. The degree to which something is processed is not a good indicator of it’s healthfulness. Tomato paste is a highly processed food, those tomatoes go through the ringer to end up in a little can you can use year round. Those little packs of peeled and sliced apples they sell to put in lunch boxes are a incredibly “processed”; in order to keep them fresh the entire composition of the atmosphere inside those little bags has to be modified, and the bag itself has to be semi-permeable so it can deal with the ethylene gas that the apple slices release.
All that to say that processing makes ultra-unhealthy foods possible, but I don’t think it’s a good metric that we should base policy off of. If we want to regulate the area it should be of the nutritional value of the products. Of course that’s harder to legislate because people get mad when you try to restrict what they can eat, unlike restricting processing which most people don’t know anything about.
I'm also wondering if portioning isn't also at play here with ultra processed foods.
For a snack, I might eat a bag of baked potato chips (pulling this from the above quoted article) or apple slices. I think for many people, it's natural to eat the whole portion in front of you, even past the feeling of satiated (not to be confused with the feeling of being full). Like, I don't know many people who throw away a bag of chips with just 2 chips left in it. So even if the flavoring of the chips is no longer even appealing to me (I got just enough saltiness fix), I'm likely to finish the bag because it seems weird to "waste" those last 2 chips. And now, I've consumed an extra 15+ calories that I didn't even enjoy. Compare to an apple for which, even if I'm kind of sick of it but still feel compelled to eat the whole thing, may be an extra +2 calories.
I have nothing to hide, why should I care about privacy?
Ever thought, “Why should I care about online privacy? I have nothing to hide.” Read this www.socialcooling.com...
Young People Should Oppose the Kids Online Safety Act (US-specific) (www.eff.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/1163015...
Help the EFF protect our digital privacy (www.eff.org)
Here's How Reddit F**ks Advertisers
There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see....
Opinion: You Are Not the Problem — Climate Guilt is a Marketing Strategy (news.climate.columbia.edu)
What's something you used to do/see/say but don't anymore because you don't feel it's right?
Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and...
My favorite XKCD (i.imgur.com)
https://xkcd.com/225/
How ActivityPub is setting the stage to weave all your social media feeds together (www.popsci.com)
Legally blind woman left anxious and in tears after rideshare drivers refuse to pick her up 23 times in six weeks (www.abc.net.au)
Victorian woman Kathryn Beaton says repeated, illegal denials of service from drivers refusing to allow her guide dog into their vehicles have left her effectively housebound....
/kbin project management costs, financing, future plans
I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started...
[image] What I wish high-speed rail were like in North America (lemmy.world)
I tried to make it fairly realistic. Obviously I would like HSR absolutely everywhere, but a line through middle of nowhere Montana probably would not see much ridership and would come at extreme cost (especially in the mountains).
Alot of people wants the old internet to return but cannot even handle when looking at its UI
...
ELI5: Why are Lemmy users freaking out over threads?
Title
Best Lemmy client for Android?
I tried one called Lemmur that I downloaded off F-Droid, however, it can not find this instance (lemmy.world). I want one that’s open-source, and preferably from F-Droid (because screw Google). Which one do you guys use?
iOS AppStore privacy preview for Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-based app Threads
Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over age verification laws (www.theverge.com)
And more states may be on the list soon.
YSK: Signal is a great secure private messenger app comparable to others on the market. (restoreprivacy.com)
“When you use Signal, your data is stored in encrypted form on your devices. The only information that is stored on the Signal servers for each account is the phone number you registered with, the date and time you joined the service, and the date you last logged on.”...
OC Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place....
TIFU by deleting the wrong app from my phone
Two minutes ago, I decided to clean up the post-Reddit mess on my phone....
deleted_by_author
Largest map of the universe I could find
The Euclid telescope, just launched today, will be able to observe galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Here's the largest map I could find (1 billion light years) that includes the Milky Way, Laniakea, the Shapley supercluster, the Perseus–Pisces supercluster, and the South Pole Wall....
It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Ultra-Processed Food (www.wired.com)
Industrially processed pizzas, cereals, and convenience foods are responsible for a host of diseases. Policymakers and doctors need to lead the food fight.