People are on places where many other people are

More on that idea here: Network effect

It’s a reason so many big tech companies hate interoperability. Without interoperability you get locked into their system. Then they can enshittify their service to extreme levels, and you are trapped.

Unfortunately there is a harmful incentive structure. The more abusive a service is, the more money it makes from its malicious but profitable aspects which we all know. Meanwhile less harmful services struggle because they lack the monetization stream.

Hopefully it can stay up. Reportedly Flock has been very aggressive about trying to take these sites down with DMCA complaints toward hosting providers and things like that.

I cannot get out of my neighborhood without passing a Flock camera. This pisses me TF off.

But there have been successes. In some cities in Oregon, California, other states too. The community has come together to put pressure on the city government to cancel the contracts. We don’t have to accept this. We can fight back against dragnet surveillance. It takes community effort and grassroots organization but we can do it.

For sure.

I talk to my pa, he was around in the earliest days of personal computing in the 1970’s when you didn’t need a whole room for a computer any more. You could get one in your very own house! He remembers feeling like we were headed into a utopia. There was no spyware. Computers would do all these great things for us.

Honestly we did get some pieces of a utopia. I can now talk to my friend who speaks only German while I cannot speak any German at all. We use a computer to translate for us. That’s straight up sci fi! We got some good parts, but we got even more bad parts. We got all this dystopian big-tech corp, mass surveillance, Orwellian BS.

Never go full dystopia.

Those are good thoughts, thank you. I agree, account reputation and initial rate limits is a much better approach than IP blocking.

It’s especially annoying when IP blocking happens long after you sign up. I was a casual user of a popular e-marketplace, mostly buying. Over 10 entire years, 100% of my feedback was the highest possible rating. I literally never got anything else. Then one day, no warning, my account was disabled. They would only unlock it if I sent them an unredacted copy of my government ID. I would not do that, so it remains locked to this day. I am sure it was because I always used a VPN. Yet I acted in the most upstanding and good faith manner for a decade.

This is why I want to see privacy normalized. Today, sites don’t have to care about shedding a few good faith privacy minded users if the blunt tool can sweep up enough abusers. We’re collateral damage. If privacy was normalized and we had some critical mass, then more nuance is required, because they can’t afford to shed so many good faith users.

The article:

financial service providers increasingly utilize AI features, such as automated social media screening, to determine risk scores for their customers.

I wonder how long until the absence of a discoverable social media trail will be considered a “red flag” used to deny essential services required for remedial participation in society.

The US and the UK trying to one-up each other for the worst tech laws and regs. We will not let you out-dumb us, Brits! You merely adopted the dumb. We were born in it. Molded by it.

It was widely predicted that age or geography restrictions lead to VPNs, and VPNs lead to banning VPNs, and banning VPNs lead to circumventions, and circumventions lead to better detections, and better detections leads to better circumventions, until everyone is dizzy and wants off the bloody ride.

It’s easy to think, this is ok, I can get around the surveillance. I’ll just tunnel over this and bounce through that and triple-rot13 it all. Take that, bureaucrats! Yet the difficulty goes up and up. More and more people are unable to do it. More and more do not want to deal with the hassle. More and more do not want the legal exposure, or are not even aware.

In countries that already ban VPNs, some people can get around that. It is never iron clad. But it is still effective again most people. It is risky for the others.

I do not believe this problem has a technical solution. Only a cultural and political one.

if it has cameras, microphones, gps, data mapping capabilities and speaks to a server outside of your home

It has also happened with baby monitors. Well, almost endless other IoT devices too. But baby monitors are a particular issue. They have speakers in them too. Attackers were exploiting it and playing very disturbing sounds to cause extreme distress to babies.

I always felt this was the paradox of privacy. Those of us who want privacy but try to contribute in a positive way to a community get caught in the crossfire when the same privacy tools are used by bad faith actors, sometimes individuals, sometimes even nation state influence ops.

I don’t know about public servers, but that’s part of why I self host my own server for me and my mates. We all know each other, and we don’t federate the server with anything else, even though XMPP supports that. The only way for anyone to join is if i send them an invite link, so randos can’t show up.

It does for me, but I’m not sure whether it does in a general way, or if that’s because of some extension on the server I’m running.

I can send a message to my mates, or vice versa, and if we’re not online those will be delivered to us next time we connect. It’s been perfectly seamless.

However they have complained about multi-device support, where they want to log in sometimes from a phone and sometimes from a desktop. Apparently that is a less polished experience.

I second this. Local is the way to go for medical information.

I always recommend remaining highly skeptical about apps promising to help with anything like this. There were period tracking apps sending women’s period information to data broker companies, who would then sell it onward. That’s creepy as hell! Doing everything locally avoids intrusive data collection.

Zero knowledge systems

I like this idea, it’s very interesting. Yet I always end up wondering how it could go sideways.

A one time token (as in per message) seems onerous. A multi use token attesting “this is a human” could be sold to a bad actor using it to allow non-humans to masquerade as humans. We already see something like that on big social media where human accounts are sold to troll farms.

The only identifable information you should have to provide is the information you signed up with.

There was a bill in the US that would’ve required sites let you delete your info without providing anything extra besides what you provided to sign up.

Last I knew, it failed to become law. I’m sure every tech company in the galaxy was lobbying against it.

When me and my mates set this up, Signal was only available on phones, not desktops. It also required providing a phone number to a central authority, which some of us were not comfortable doing. With XMPP we got the choice of a large number of clients to pick from. Both the server and the clients were lightweight.

I just had a search maybe you can self host a Signal server, but I did not know that at the time. I wanted to self-host. So that was a reason too, but maybe (?) a false reason. The Signal self hosting situation may be murky. My brief search found some claims that the official app does not support using other servers, and you need a customized app to do it. It might be more self host-able in theory than in practice. XMPP had multiple servers to pick from, and lots of clients.

All those things could balance more toward Signal if your priorities are different, tho.

True enough… but I wonder how this would play out. For example, linked images could also be ads, or hold ads embedded in the same image content you wanted to see, and you don’t know that until you click on the image.

Leaving aside ad-blockers for one moment, non-inline images move the unit of atomicity from a whole page with all its embedded images, to a single image you wanted to see. Clicking gets you an image which can be anywhere between 0-100% ads. Bringing ad-blockers back into the picture, if the unit of atomicity is a whole page and most images are either 0 or 100% ads, it seems far easier to block ads on a link by link basis. If ads end up embedded into the same images you want to see in a more 80/20% mixture in the image, it’s more difficult to block sub-regions, and the advertiser could vary the subregion randomly.

Ah man. It feels like there is nothing advertisers cannot ruin if it becomes popular.

IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound

I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.

It’s worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I’m 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.

XMPP has been the cat’s pajamas so far.

I have heard that called “sludge”. As a generic term for that tactic.

If you are over 18 click yes

Years ago, I heard of a guy who failed one of the voluntary “enter your age” checks because it thought he was 7 years old. He was actually 107, but the system only considered the last two digits.

A Gemini reference in the wild!

I looked a couple years ago. Briefly toyed with it, made a page or two. I like the ethos, and am about 99% on board. I only wish it had inline images. I feel like that omission alone would greatly hurt its adoption and relegate it to not just niche, but super-ultra-niche.

Oh, nice. Canada & USA have cooperated closely for a long time on regulations for cars, so manufacturers only need minor tweaks to sell into both markets. Hopefully that’ll help.