Notices by Mike Masnick ✅ (mmasnick@mastodon.social), page 12

@hankg @caseynewton gotcha. thanks for explaining.

@johndporter Yeah. The issue is that ActivityPub doesn't enable what they're trying to do. Their PDS setup wouldn't work with ActivityPub.

@mergy yes, the idea behind Bluesky is also to be "beyond a centralized environment." They just have a different approach to it than ActivityPub.

I know that lots of folks here don't like Bluesky (and I understand most of the reasons why), But now that it's open, I tried to explain the reasons why I am excited about it and hope it succeeds. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/06/bluesky-opens-up/

@hankg @caseynewton i'm curious what makes you say they don't care about decentralization? I know a few folks on the team and they care deeply about it, and are extraordinarily thoughtful about the tradeoffs related to it. So I'm curious what you saw that makes you think otherwise? It could be something I've missed.

A collection of people with direct and indirect links to the Indian firm Appin Technology have used legal threats to erase reporting on its alleged hacker-for-hire past. Now, a group of anti-censorship voices is working to make that strategy backfire.

https://www.wired.com/story/appin-training-centers-lawsuits-censorship

In addition, @agreenberg has written a thorough piece for @WIRED about it as well: https://www.wired.com/story/appin-training-centers-lawsuits-censorship/

Thanks to @eff and @davidgreene for sending a letter on our behalf, along with @muckrock, who has written about this separately. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/feb/01/global-censorship-appin-reuters/

So, a couple months back we wrote about how Appin, an Indian company, had forced Reuters to remove an article that presented evidence of Appin's connections to "hack for hire" operations. Appin demanded we remove it. We will not do so.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/01/sorry-appin-were-not-taking-down-our-article-about-your-attempts-to-silence-reporters/

Our Gaming Like It's 1928 public domain game jam closes the door for submissions tomorrow night, but tonight, ABC News (owned by Disney!) put out a news report about it: https://abcnews.go.com/US/gamers-turning-public-domain-find-big-trend/story?id=106645056

@luis_in_brief @sophie ooh that is a great guide. wish that had been around before i had to learn all that directly (often by making mistakes).

@mcrocker @arstechnica i believe in slow news... we take our time to write what we want carefully. we'll have a post about it soon.

@5easypieces lol. i feel like this can be ready as a compliment or an insult depending on the tone in which it's said.

@fifilamoura yes. so what?

This morning we released the latest Sky is Rising report! I spent basically all of last year working on this massive report about the state of the creative/entertainment industries, and showing how much the internet has helped them thrive.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/22/the-sky-is-rising-2024-edition-rather-than-destroying-culture-the-internet-has-saved-the-content-industries/

@afif the proposed ballot initiative (routing around the legislature) would allow people to sue social media for up to a million dollars for anything bad they can loosely connect to social media. Eating disorder? Sue! Depressed? Sue! Bullied? Sue! Etc. Would lead to a big mess, and the initiative literally says that legislature can only ratchet up penalties, never decrease them.

Common Sense Media has submitted a very dumb, no good, bad, and problematic California ballot initiative "to protect children" on social media. Today is the deadline for submitting comments. Here's the comment I just submitted:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/17/my-comments-to-attorney-general-rob-bonta-regarding-common-sense-medias-dangerous-protect-the-kids-ballot-initiative/

@chrisod have you seen https://futurism.com/amazon-products-ai-generated

I have written about the dude who has sued everyone he could possibly think of because a few women in Chicago said he wasn't a very good date. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/12/filing-a-badly-drafted-mistargeted-bullshit-slapp-suit-is-no-way-to-convince-women-youre-not-an-asshole/

@adnan it's on the roadmap, but we're so ridiculously busy. we'll get to it!