Noticing a lot of progressive techy people like to shit on Koletiva generally but especially today, and like... You do-gooder normies are at basically zero fucking risk of being raided by the cops because the "activism" you do is mostly useless, so may fucking cut it out with the potshots at admins here.
"Uhhhhhhh but the admin had an an unencrypted local copy of the DB."
Yes, that is not a good move, but basically everyone is constantly doing wildly unsafe computer shit because sometimes they just need to fucking make it work. FFS people still email passport photos around offices and they end up sitting on some corporate mail server (and a local copy) for a decade cuz Walter the dinosaur is still around and never empties his inbox.
"Unsafe" shit happens all the time, but also you fucking techy weirdos don't face fuckall for repression, so I'm really not interested in hearing anything from you people about this situation.
I think there is also a good launch off point to think about how situations like this happen because there really are not enough hands on deck, as it were, to have clear and clean role based engagement that insulates the larger whole from bad beats. Wearing many hats that create a kind of crossover contamination isnt just one person's error or folly, its an ecosystem fault to some degree that someone feels they need to wear every hat and then manage that on their ownsome.
@hakan_geijer a lot of these tech bro takes are coming from whitehats that work in Enterprise environments. Some of their arguments make sense, but not for a small crew like those behind kolektiva. The devs are the admins a lot of the times in these situations. 🤷♂️ Besides, do we really think other instances are going to put up resistance to LEA requests? Not one bit. I'll stick with the crew I know I can trust to stand up for me and mine when they can.
@hakan_geijer Also you make a good point about the realistic levels of danger here.
So the feds have a kolektiva DB, so what? I'm not saying it isn't bad, but let's be real. Sure, maybe there's some network mapping dangers here that would've been otherwise difficult of impossible, maybe some other stuff.
But putting people on a list for being anarchists? I'm doubtful people who are exposing their IP and personal email aren't gonna end up on a 'list' via so many other avenues. Most anarchists were/are on Twitter and Meta, they can get that shit with far more data anytime they want. Kolektiva is hardly SeriousAnarchist™ central, mainstream social media has far more juicy targets.
Maybe I'm going a little far here with minimising but there has been an overreaction from many.
@hakan_geijer I think a lot of people think encryption at rest means things it doesn't, tbh. It just means access without decryption keys isn't possible. Anyone with access to (e.g. a machine, like the masto server, with access to) the encryption keys still has access.
@hakan_geijer As a tech person: you are absolutely right.
It is impossible to have a setup with zero risk, and to be efficient pragmatic choices will be made. Sure, a situation like this is a great time to reevaluate practices, but a lot of the takes are unreasonable in their expectations.
Even if nobody ever had an unencrypted copy of the db, someone somewhere has access to the machine (e.g. by deploying code) that can read the unencrypted db. It's a fundamental limitation of Mastodon.
Shut the entire fuck up. If you or your friends haven been a) raided by the feds or cops with rifles/submachine guns in the early morning or b) faced 10+ years in prison, you can take your snark and get in the fucking sea.
@hakan_geijer especially hearing it from people who still use Twitter and Instagram. Cops can just say please and see all your DMs on those platforms, they don't even need to raid your house for that. I don't know how to admin a server and I'm pretty grateful there's anarchists willing to do it.
@hakan_geijer It would be nice to have some smaller instances to make it a little harder to get so much info all at once.
That's a fair criticism, but it involves people standing up their own better or at least as-good smaller instances as options with similar values and commitment to moderation.
The point was not that it was an *easy* solution but that it was a *simple* one.
The hard part is all of the work involved that few of us feel like we have the bandwidth to do, especially as hobbyists.
We need more and smaller instances with values like what Kolektiva professes and attracts, but doing that involves some money but also lots of time and energy.
@hakan_geijer ngl I am both very impressed by the fact kolektiva admins actually do stuff, but also I'm not sure I wanna be on a high risk instance I suppose? Like I'm very boring, I don't commit crimes, and if I did I wouldn't post about them, but I also idk I don't want to be on a high-risk instance.
Like my first thought was "oh the admin had an unencrypted db downloaded? Sounds like the sort of thing everyone says they'd never do until they need to and don't have an extra four hours to deal with an SSL connection to an in-production server using most of its processing power for other tasks". I haven't run a social media server before but I do run multiple VPS for mail administration and I've had to do that before, only difference is I have dedicated computers for this stuff because it's what I do for a living, I'm not a volunteer doing IT server administration from my fucking bedroom or w/e.
The thing that's suspicious to me is that IF what the feds were after was the server data specifically, and IF it wasn't a coincidence (which seems reasonable to assume, if you assume a mantra that you maybe shouldn't underestimate the imperial secret police), it's weird they knew precisely when to hit. I wouldn't jump to "there's a rat", there are several ways it could happen with all the tools available to the feds, but I am interested in how they knew when to hit.
@hakan_geijer yeh that makes sense. I didn't know they could have access to that in almost real time but I mean not like your ISP isn't basically a giant spy agency, so
@hakan_geijer@FarmingWarMech Yeah, I know of a similar case in Germany(though it might have been a raid against fascists), but one of the cops fucked up and removed the power supply to the device.