Notices by Steven Bodzin (guacamayan@journa.host)

Not only do agencies wrongly rely on X. It turns out Facebook is even worse.

https://wapo.st/3XDxHeJ

Facebook is blocking emergency warnings as wildfires roar through West

@JorgeStolfi this kind of election excludes people who can't get to the voting station on election day.

Your characterization of losers as always being suspicious and sore losers is out of line with hundreds of years of representative democracy in which there were far bigger issues than what we suffer today.

No election system will convince people who want to be suspicious (see Venezuela under Chavez) and even an awful system can be trusted by people of good faith.

@JorgeStolfi none of this matters, man. Belief is not based on evidence. People either trust in electrical or they don't. In an era of antisocial media, distrust is the norm. No matter how good the system, distrust will prevail, and democracy can't survive that.

We don't need paper ballots, we need paper books and news papers. The problem isn't electronic voting but electronic social life.

@GossiTheDog how does a Windows user know if this "functionality" is turned on?

@GossiTheDog thanks for this work, Kevin.

As a reporter, I'm especially concerned about what happens when we cross borders with our computers. At least here in the US, border agents have the right to inspect and copy anything they want from computers. This system appears to make it impossible to delete drafts or notes, use disappearing messages, or otherwise clean a computer to protect sources and clients.

I think I have found out why people no longer include links with posts that refer directly to news stories and other things that are easily linked. I think it's because we're getting trained by the algorithms. Instagram deletes links. Twitter and Facebook hide posts with links.

Please resist this training. Links are the heart of the real internet. Include links in everything. Thanks!

If you are posting news, please please include links to the source data. Every time you post news without a link, a disinformation troll gets her wings.

People are getting used to information without context and without an easy path to verification. This is very bad.

I won't boost your informative post unless it has a link to the source.

Serious question: is Nicolas Maduro the only head of state on Mastodon?

@aral get well soon!

A funny thing about viral posts on Mastodon is how often they get edited after the fact to be less inflammatory. There's this one about Google moderating bookmarks where I can see 351 RT's; the real number is probably >1,000. Remember the German wind turbine bird deaths (retracted completely)? I myself edited a post after it had 300 RTs.

Turns out that RT-bait is often incorrect. Once viral, responsible people want to be more nuanced.

This is a very important lesson

There is an optical illusion where you stare out the window of a train or car for a long time. When you come to a halt, it looks like you are moving backward.

The same happens with privilege.

@feld @runkefer interesting, will examine

of course these systems use DRM to lock us in — if I go to a new system I still need to go back to Kobo to re-listen to 2666 or The Power Broker. Unless I decide to go rogue and just rip them into MP3s and keep copies locally. 60 hours of MP3 in each of those books. It would be a lot of work just to rip & store them.

Downloading an audiobook that I paid for, I am using Duck Duck Go's new tracker trapper to watch in real time as Google tries, more than once per second, to detect everything from my headphone status to my gender

Let me just buy a damn book

I am probably totally wrong about this, but I have a theory that the "crypto winter" was sparked by Elon's offer to buy Twitter on October 3, 2021.

As of Sept 30, just a few days earlier, Tesla owned USD 1.83bn worth of BTC. We don't know how much crypto Musk himself owned, but he has repeatedly said he personally held BTC, ETH and dogecoins.