Notices by Jonah Aragon :MN: (jonah@mastodon.neat.computer)

Fucking-AI-ass posts from Cloudflare and GitLab 🤮

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116435835882195004

Can we instead stop ceding all the words that are useful descriptors to the right just because they start using them?

I also have this issue with libertarianism, which should describe a useful political position about liberty from government abuses independently from your views on economic policies, but now just makes you sound like a gun toting nut. This makes it harder to defend against the narrative that everyone on the left is rooting for some authoritarian communist society.

The same goes for many internet memes and sayings that were once universally used, e.g. Pepe the Frog. It is no wonder members of younger generations keep falling to the alt-right, when the right is co-opting all the things they enjoy, and everyone else not only lets them, but actively works to make those popular things be seen as hateful. In this example, the popular idea that Pepe the Frog is a hate symbol stems almost entirely from some uninformed, reactionary article the Clinton campaign posted to try and smear Trump, then got the media to repeat forever.

The unfortunate reality is that the EU is currently trying their absolute hardest to create “Big Tech, but Europe.”

Europeans need to be discussing *in advance* the very real ways that data sovereignty gives them the opportunity to avoid the fundamental issues of Big Tech has.

If this does not change, you will have the American version of data sovereignty, which is just “taking Chinese apps and putting them in Oracle datacenters.”

This being said, I’d agree the idea of data sovereignty *alone* is an utterly pointless thing for the EU to be so worried about, seeing as they haven’t first enacted clear rules about the public sector use of consumer data, only really rules about commercial use.

However it *is* happening and it *can* be a helpful concept *if* we can discuss appropriate safeguards. If only the right are participating in these discussions WE WILL LOSE the future of cloud technology.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116415973849880514

This whole thread is a good explainer for people who still wrongly think Bluesky is a resilient/user-run/federated network like Mastodon is.

The reality is that Bluesky requires infinite VC money to fully replicate, whereas Mastodon can run totally self-sufficiently on a Raspberry Pi.

@aral hate to defend macs, but it’s probably a good thing they can’t be disabled via the main operating system or malware would just do that

RE: https://mstdn.games/@britt/116013094706931728

So, I helped Britt out with moving her instance to a new server provider this week.

While the people at toot.io were relatively helpful in our email chain (once she was finally able to get a hold of them in the first place anyways), the setup at toot.io was a bit strange and not optimized for an instance of her size. The actual server itself was well *over*powered for her to be seeing the slowdowns she was, and Mastodon & especially Postgres just weren’t using those resources to a full extent.

Honestly the biggest red flag 🚩🚩🚩 to me isn’t what toot.io is doing now necessarily, but that it was apparently sold(?) to completely new management without notice to customers. In a niche service industry like this, that seems like a big problem to me, to not even explain who’s taking over and why you should trust them.

The previous ownership is probably more at fault for this relatively speaking, but it’s probably a good opportunity for toot.io customers to reevaluate their hosting options… Even if you ultimately end up sticking with toot.io, you simply might not be fully aware of what’s going on over at your own hosting company anymore, and that’s always worth double-checking 👀

#MastoAdmin #MastodonAdmin #MstdnGames #InstanceMigration #Tootio

I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.

Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.

This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.

Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.

This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.

This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.

RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/115971195227745876

Next up will be a VPN ban. Many tech-y people will see that and think “lol yeah well that’s not going to stop *me* from using a VPN”

A VPN ban isn’t really meant stop you from using one. It means when they catch you doing so, they’ll use the fact you’re using this harmless technology itself as a *pretense* to lock you up without needing to do any “hard work” (i.e. an investigator’s job) like actually confirming whether you committed a real crime.

Don’t think you won’t be impacted just because you know how to outsmart an ISP filter! This is not a plan to protect children or stop you from consuming adult media. It is a ploy to eventually eliminate ALL freedom of expression and free access to information in the UK.

And the same goes for Chat Control and encrypted messengers, btw

#UKpol #VPNban #PornHub #ChatControl #Privacy #FreeSpeech #SocialMedia

Can my electric company possibly know this, or are these nonsense numbers? 🤔

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/115587256564864694

Okay… if Mozilla is going “to do for AI what [they] did for the web” now, then who is going to do for the web what Mozilla did for the web?

It's been said before a dozen times in a dozen ways, but corporations taking away *ownership* of internet spaces is why technology is kind of going to shit.

People used to have hand-crafted blogs and build well-structured forums, and they gave it all up for a feudalist system of Facebook Groups, Subreddits, and Discord 'servers.' I'm so happy tech like Ghost and Mastodon is changing the tides here, I only wish we could speed it up further 🙂

@BrodieOnLinux sure, but unfortunately the ratio of AI videos to human videos is the best it's ever going to be

idk if any mutuals have/want a newsletter and want to switch to Ghost, but I will literally help you migrate to Ghost from your static site, Substack, whatever for free; just because I think Ghost and its recommendation network and its ActivityPub features are all so awesome 🙏

I *really* want to get the network effect going with an open-source platform and leave Substack in the dust. So yeah hmu lol

what do you do?

@BrodieOnLinux yeah of course there were definitely other dips 😅

But uh, yeah I think right now is also one of those dips…

I feel like every generation thinks they had the best childhood, because historically at almost every point in history your childhood was probably occurring at the all time high of humanity up to that point right? That’s the nature of progress.

However, I genuinely believe people born from 1994–2004 actually had THE best childhoods so far, and ever since, the level of how cool society is has never again reached those all time high peaks. I’m sad for the kids!

Anyways, prove me wrong 🤓

It’s unfortunate I can easily clear 10x the number of boosts on posts about bad news compared to good news. Where’s all the people who want to highlight the good stuff going on? 🙂

Friends don’t let friends use ccTLDs! (any 2-character TLD)

Sucks for gup.pe 😬

People talking about this whole Google APK verification thing has really proven to me how many people mistakenly believe Google's flavor of Android is any more "free" than iOS. You have never had freedom and choice under the Play Services regime 🙃