Notices by Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com), page 3

These are the same people who crow about 'religious freedom', and spend large sums of money to influence politics abroad, like in Europe. See this article from March 28th, 2019;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/28/us-fundamentalists-spent-38m-on-european-politics

$50M over the course of a decade to promote 'conservative values' like anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, etc.

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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18/ 🧵

June 18th, 2019;

"Nearly 13,000 violent rightwing extremists are living in Germany, the chief of the country’s domestic intelligence service, which is investigating the murder of a pro-refugee politician, has revealed. Thomas Haldenwang, head of the BfV, said the number was too great for security services to be able to monitor them all."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/18/nearly-13000-violent-rightwing-extremists-now-living-in-germany

Same numbers as in May, but now in the context of the murder of Walter Lübcke.

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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21/ 🧵

On June 20th, 2019, there was news about the Dutch Defense Ministry starting a procedure against students and staff at the Royal Military Academy for sharing racist and Nazi imagery in a WhatsApp group;

https://www.nu.nl/politiek/5945592/nazi-uitingen-en-ongepaste-relaties-op-academie-van-defensie.html

A similar investigation happened at the Luchtmobiele Brigade, including the use of the Nazi salute. Concluded that it had happened, but that there was no indication of 'affinity with Nazi ideas' 🙄

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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22/ 🧵

From September 30th, 2019;

"The trial of an alleged neo-Nazi cell accused of plotting a violent political uprising in Germany has begun amid fears that the far-right movement is increasingly armed and radical. Eight members of Revolution Chemnitz, aged between 21 and 32, have been charged with forming a rightwing terrorist organisation."

They aimed to acquire semi-automatic weapons for a potential attack in Berlin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/30/neo-nazi-terrorist-cell-revolution-chemnitz-trial-germany

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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30/ 🧵

On October 3rd, 2019, Dutch media reported that at least eight (8) Dutch nationals were fighting in the civil war in Ukraine, using it as a far-right training ground; "Ukraine is to them what Syria is for jihadists."

https://www.nu.nl/buitenland/6001541/minstens-acht-nederlanders-vechten-mee-in-oekraiense-burgeroorlog.html

Source is a report from the Soufan Center, from September 27th, 2019;

https://thesoufancenter.org/research/white-supremacy-extremism-the-transnational-rise-of-the-violent-white-supremacist-movement/

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers

31/ 🧵

March 6th, 2020;

"A sweep of arrests of a neo-Nazi group in the US has dealt a major blow to an organization associated with at least five murders and raised questions as to whether the extreme far-right movement the group is at the center of has been largely undone by pressure from law enforcement, journalists and anti-fascist activists."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/neo-nazi-arrests-deals-blow-us-group-atomwaffen-division

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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40/ 🧵

June 27th, 2020;

"Violence by far-right groups and individuals has emerged as one of the most dangerous terrorist threats faced by US law enforcement and triggered a wave of warnings and arrests of people associated with those extremist movements."

And there it is again; the 'emerged', 'on the rise', 'resurgent' narrative, as if it was ever gone.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/us-far-right-violence-terrorist-threat-analysis

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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42/ 🧵

June 28th, 2020;

"The Black Lives Matter movement has been aggressively exploited by the UK's far right, which has recruited and radicalised people on the back of its success, the government's chief adviser on extremism has warned."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/28/far-right-thugs-exploit-black-lives-matter-movement-warns-uk-anti-extremism-chief

#OrganisedAffiliatedFuckers
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43/ 🧵

UP FOR DEBATE:

Whether you like the grille on the 2024 BMW i5 M60, like me, or think it's an abomination, like @maccoaster does. We can agree to disagree on a matter of taste, and this is fine.

NOT UP FOR DEBATE:

The right for every human being to be their whole selves, in peace and unafraid. Bodily autonomy. Trans rights. Black Lives Matter. Accessibility for all. And so forth. These are not matters of taste, and they are not up for debate.

If you disagree with that, you're just an asshole.

This is an excellent short video from the Vox team, talking about the many problems with the Western Acquisition manifest in the sets of data that large language models get trained on;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2DgdsE86ts

Entirely unsurprising for anyone who has been keeping track of this sort of thing for a while, but worth being reminded of regardless.

It's a great example of how unequal access gets compounded, and bias essentially multiplies with every layer that is stacked on top of it.

The bias present in large language models is a combination of the colonial heritage of English as an imperial language, the ascent of the American Empire after World War II, accumulated wealth, the allocation of network resources, and so forth.

Take IPv4 address allocation, for example; it's a pretty solid proxy for how biased new tech is going to be.

The internet is an imperial project, controlled by the American Empire and its allies. As a result of this, the United States controls almost 36% of all IPv4 address space, or almost 5 IPv4 addresses per person; 4911 per 1000 people.

The next biggest chunk is China's, at about 7,7%, or 245 per 1000 people.

Ethiopia has a single IPv4 address per 3000 or so people.

This is 2012 data from Wikipedia, but I doubt the numbers have changed much since then, since IPv4 address exhaustion has been a thing for years now, and new allocations predictably tend to end up in the same hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation

It's also why, in 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee got to reminisce in The Guardian about how, despite his best intentions, there were negative outcomes. So surprising!

It is layer upon layer of cis white men insisting that they are benevolent creators who could not have predicted that their systems would create new problems and aggravate existing ones, despite having all of human history and decades worth of warnings to tell them otherwise.

Large language models are simply the latest iteration of these extractive practices.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-on-30-years-of-the-web-if-we-dream-a-little-we-can-get-the-web-we-want

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Colonial attitudes are alive and well, which is how, for example, IPv4 space assigned to AfriNIC, the regional internet registry for the African continent, ends up in the hands of US hosters, and then used by German spammers.

It is why the US Department of Defense has more IPv4 address space than the entire African continent combined.

Then there was that thing around how RIPE handled the allocations on an entire Class A, 185/8;

https://labs.ripe.net/author/wilhelm/so-long-last-8-and-thanks-for-all-the-allocations/

The process was abused. Shocking!

This is why there is no such thing as a 'neutral' algorithm, and it's not just a matter of 'getting better data’.

You simply cannot compensate for what amounts to centuries of skew by having computers controlled by the haves harvest more public data, because every link in that chain, including the programmers and their code, introduce compounding errors that increase bias, and erase some things altogether.

Everything associated with the Western Acquisition, whether it's big tech companies like Google and Microsoft or non-profit projects like the Internet Archive, is suspect.

And that's before you even get to consent.

So let's define consent again, shall we? There is only one (1) form of valid user consent;

INFORMED, ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT, REVOCABLE.

That's it. No ifs, no buts.

The user must understand what they are giving consent for, and the scope for which their consent is valid.

They must be enthusiastic, wholly onboard with the decision, not begrudgingly agreeing to it because they feel like they have no other choice.

And they must be able to revoke that consent at any time, whether five minutes from now, or five years in the future.

—

This part was originally posted on .lol, but that's about to disappear, so here it is again.

@HalvarFlake Yes, on some levels, but also no? Like, it very much depends on where you live, but in most European countries, recycling actually works, and works quite well.

Glass, for example. Aluminium. Paper and cardboard. Quite a few plastics. Recovery of precious metals from electronics is competitive. And so on.

The biggest problem, at least for plastics recycling, which is what people mostly refer to when they say that recycling doesn't work, is that virgin plastics are too cheap, and thus the market for recycled craters every time oil prices go down.

But that is slowly also being adressed through legislation.

@HalvarFlake Cardboard and paper can just be recycled into new cardboard and paper, it doesn't need to be composted.

But yeah, battery recycling is still in its early days, although there's slowly enough of a market to do it, with some real development that makes it feasible, profitable, etc.

I'm pretty sure precious metals are already profitable, even outside of vendors like Apple, but is still rather 'dirty’, because so many vendors don't keep track of re-exports, if they even have a collection program to begin with.

Which is why I get annoyed at headlines highlighting Apple this, Apple that, allowing everyone else to duck ?

@HalvarFlake Yeah, that’s what cradle to cradle design is about, essentially. There's already quite a few vendors doing it, voluntarily, but they sort of get drowned out by everyone else who just goes for the cheapest bidder.

One big step forward would be to require that the vendor recycle their product within the country it is sold in, in such a way that it cannot be re-re-re-exported and eventually end up somewhere on a burn pile in Africa or South East Asia.