No relation to the sports channel.
To be honest I’m still winding down there.
But for me, once the blind moderators said they can’t work with the new system, that’s pretty definitive for me. When people with disabilities have found and built their own ways to exercise equal power with others and protect their communities, and then those ways are wantonly taken away from them — yeah, that’s bad.
Crypto? You mean like PGP? Group theory? Post-quantum security?
… oh, you mean scams. Yeah, those are harder to find around here.
Isn’t that nice?
I’m fortunate to live in an area with good local independent news sources like Berkeleyside.
National & international are a big mess. Better to look at lots of different sources. If the Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazeera, and The Grauniad all talk about an event, it probably happened.
Bad guys have noticed that there’s a resource here that could become valuable later: the ability to inject spam into Lemmy. Maybe not very valuable yet, but after a few more weeks/months of growth, expect it.
So they’re acquiring the accounts needed to do that.
These may be commercial spammers. If they’re not posting any spam yet, that may be because nobody’s paying them to do so yet. Commercial spammers don’t spam for free.
They may be “black hats” (for-profit computer criminals) acquiring accounts to hold with the expectation of selling them or leasing them out. Their intended customers could include commercial spammers in the future; or (e.g.) terrorist or fascist groups. ISIS supporters and Trumpist-Putinists have both spammed other forums and social media sites, for example; and Republican operatives have used phone and SMS spam for voter suppression.
Or they may be collecting accounts to use for denial-of-service or flooding attacks, to shut down Lemmy activity they don’t like. A number of political entities, including nation-states, have used similar activity to suppress or make unusable forums that they don’t like; e.g. flooding a forum with gore pictures to make it unpleasant to use or moderate.
Did these folks make fun of Kobe Bryant and his daughter?
Water is not very compressible; even at the bottom of the ocean a kilogram of plain water still takes up 0.982 liters of volume (compared to 1 liter at the surface).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Compressibility
However, actual ocean water is saline (salty), and the salinity of the ocean varies widely. Dissolved salt makes ocean water more dense than pure water; and the more salt there is, the denser it is. That’s why it’s easier to float in the ocean than in a freshwater lake.
Typically, the water at the bottom of the ocean is slightly less salty than the water at the surface. This is because evaporation happens at the surface.
House centipedes are predators. They’re only there because there’s food for them to eat — prey animals that they are hunting.
Now, what are their prey animals? Here’s some critters that house centipedes eat:
You have house centipedes because you have these.
The centipedes are eating them.
Now, what was it you wanted to get rid of?
Well, there’s not just one Them.
The Them who wrote your American history textbook and glossed over the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause, aren’t the same Them who write TV sitcoms that propagate stereotypes of bumbling clueless men entitled to dump all the emotional labor on their hyper-competent women partners.
The Them who fund intrusive social media, aren’t the same Them who dial down the yellow-light time on your traffic lights to catch more people with red-light cameras.
And the closer you look, the less it looks like a Them at all.
The individual TV writers were really trying to be good TV writers, in the social & economic context of TV studios.
The history textbook people were mostly actual professors. They want you to have a good history textbook. But the Texas Board of Education is giving them a hard time.
Heck, the social-media programmers mostly just wanna launch cool stuff.
The yellow-light people, though? They have no goddamn excuse.
It was eaten and/or mind-controlled by Leviathan; specifically, the pyramid-shaped tentacled hyperintelligent creature of that name from the Illuminatus! books.
Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.
As it turns out, it’s not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you’re interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!
More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they’ve built! They usually don’t have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you’re enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.
I’ve only read the ActivityPub spec; I haven’t read the Lemmy code.
With that in mind, my impression is —
The new domain owner — if they set up an ActivityPub server instance (e.g. a Lemmy) and got a list of the old user’s post URLs — might be able to delete or edit the old user’s posts stored on other instances. That is a vulnerability, albeit a small one.
If the old user was still listed as a moderator of communities hosted on other instances, the new domain owner might be able to take over that moderator role.
One way to fix this would be for instances to issue a public-key cryptographic identity to each user, and distribute users’ public keys to other instances. Then activities purporting to be from that user would need to be signed by that user’s private key.
Users’ private keys would stay local to their home instance, so users don’t have to do any key management themselves.
This would mean that if an instance goes away (and its key material is destroyed) then nobody can ever act as any of those users again. A new user created with the same username and domain would be a distinct user for all other instances too.
Blocking and unblocking should be normal, expected, easily discoverable, and openly discussed. There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.
The whole system we’re on here is still new and in rapid flux. Expect change. This isn’t Reddit with admins saying for years that hosting /r/jailbait is essential to free speech. It takes time to develop agreeable responses to kinds of trouble this system hasn’t yet seen.
Oh, you might be interested to know that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are also federating with the lolicon one, which appears to be a Mastodon instance. Both of those have blocked the exploding-heads one, though. This is probably also due to the default open federation policy. You could talk with the instance admins about it.
It’s pretty cool that federation (& blocking) information is public! In any event, there’s no point in “repeating what you heard about”, which is to say “playing Telephone with speculations”, when we can all just see the facts:
https://lemmy.world/instances
https://lemmy.ml/instances
https://lemmygrad.ml/instances
It’s really a lot like email, only the messages are (mostly) public instead of private.
If you have an account at gmail.com you can send and receive emails with someone at another site like mit.edu, because your mail server and their mail server know how to talk to each other (that’s “federation”).
But you don’t have to personally log into their mail server to do that. You just use your account on your server, and the servers take care of getting messages to the right server for the recipient.
Similarly, here, you can subscribe to and comment on forums (“communities”) originating on other instances. You don’t have to personally log into the other instance to do that; the servers take care of that part.
Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.
(A Scottish professor who starred on game shows was unsuccessful at hunting Arctic cats.)
Fwd: Blackthorn PJs vex quiz gym.
(I’ve forwarded you this email about trivia-obsessed weightlifters confused by sloe pajamas.)
It’s nice when “easy” UI features teach new users how to use the “advanced” features, instead of replacing or hiding the advanced features.
For instance, the comment editor I’m using right now supports markup, but it also has a row of buttons that insert specific markup. If I don’t know how to type boldface in this markup language, I can press the B button and it inserts some stars for me. I still see the markup, which means that I can learn how to type boldface using the keyboard.
This is an improvement over having a WYSIWYG editor where pressing the “bold” button makes your text bold but doesn’t teach you how to type markup for yourself.
Another example of this is how menu items in many GUIs show you the keyboard shortcut that you could use instead of mousing through the menus.
I’m boring. Xkcd and Oglaf.
No clue. I’m in California so I picked the CCPA option, but they haven’t delivered the data yet.
Back in the early 2000s, I heard tell of Freenet, thought it sounded like a cool project, and started poking around there. I soon determined that a lot of the material being exchanged there was not anything I wanted anywhere near my disk, even encrypted. Deleted it pretty darn quick.