Notices by Daniel Schildt (autiomaa@mastodon.social)

@dansup It's also good to remember that one person can't always do as much community management & outreach work as large companies (who have dedicated people for that).

NPR got a new CEO from Wikimedia Foundation. Katherine Maher starts at NPR on March 25, 2024.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/business/media/katherine-maher-npr.html

#news #journalism #media #NPR #Wikimedia #CEO

@simounet Firefox gets funded increasingly from the commercial SaaS integrations, and product placements on the search tools. Previously it was Google paying for the search visibility via browser UI, but those days are mostly gone.

@aral

@simounet @aral As people from Mozilla have said (at events), it's just a company with a bit more complex ownership structure. Business focused on producing profits.

@dansup @tomwor Unami collects geolocated IP data, so it seems that the privacy relay works nicely for preventing that.

@dansup Probably they should say that those "anonymized" web statistics are in fact less anonymous than expected.
https://the-federation.info/info/#privacy-policy

"The Company is a U.S. company and some data infrastructure are located in the U.S."
https://umami.is/privacy

@dansup No, but there is a calculator about how much lifetime you will lose with the new Slack UI design.

https://www.inttodouble.com/explore/slack-workspace-tax

@dansup Does @pixelfed have a way to export list of followers in a CSV format? That kind of feature is missing from Mastodon, even while the same data is available via API.

Wondering how well different fediverse platforms have (not) implemented the Data Portability requirements imposed by the GDPR etc. regulations. Mastodon has a lot of problems on the portability side, so interesting to see how much better others have made such features.

Reading blog post https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-bots-tout-slavery-genocide written by Avram Piltch about what kinds of crap are automatically generated by Google's chatbot assistants.

"Because it plagiarizes from other peoples’ content, [Google] SGE doesn’t have any sense of proprietary, morality, or even logical consistency."

"Google is no longer acting as a librarian that curates content, but has turned itself into a publisher with a loud-mouthed opinion columnist it can’t control."

@aral I remember when friend told that he met multiple Google employees at large ICANN event. They were very quietly there since didn't want to show any visible signs about how many decisions are influenced by the giant corporations.

Google employees were mostly attending closed doors meetings there.

@emc2 @feld @dalias This is getting quite out of sync from the original conversation, but adding one point:

Publicly available content is different from having permission of using it freely. Copyright laws and ethical standards are complex systems of thinking about usage permissions, but publicly available clearly doesn't give others permission for reusing it (in a modified form).

@isagalaev https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754183/apollo-reddit-app-shutting-down-api has some of the details.

@thomasfuchs @geobeck For sure, it's not directly comparable in all. But particular types of greenhouse gases are produced more by those massive ships, than by a very large fleets of cars.

@thomasfuchs Some years ago I heard (from a person who worked with the shipping industry) that:

20 largest container ships create similar amounts of certain gas & particle pollutions than all of the consumer cars on the planet. But those ships are very weakly regulated, and largely registered to tax havens.

@geobeck @thomasfuchs For sure, as many ports forbid use of the "cheap" system.

Cheap system uses so sticky oil that people can literally walk on top of it, if it's cold. Closer to asphalt than a regular processed oil cars would use.

@pettter @rysiek To be fair, if you have any mobile phone device, you are already sharing most of your movements in real time (at least to the telecom operator and either Google or Apple).

@rysiek @miklo @ares Mesh networks of home devices are already happening. Besides of Amazon's home devices creating open mesh network with any compatible device (across the walls to street and neighbours), there are similar in electricity measurement systems, solar panels, etc.

@whvholst @rysiek @miklo @ares Funny part recently in the news was that most car tires have RFID tags that allow fingerprinting cars on the street. No need to use camera when industrial RFID reader is enough... ?

@johnmu Most people don't understand how to limit search engine indexing. But it's already possible to limit from the Mastodon settings (Preferences, Other, Opt-out of search engine indexing).

"Affects your public profile and post pages"

Sadly people don't adjust the default settings and blame search engines (instead of the default settings of Mastodon software). By default every post on Mastodon is publicly indexable.

@evan Maybe with a better tagging (or other types of keyword-based filtering) it would become easier to filter the timeline towards what people are interested of.

Current filtering UI of the Mastodon settings still has a lot of limitations. It would benefit if there would be machine-readable category tags for posts (in addition to hashtags) that would enable filtering without having to broadcast messages with hashtags.