Notices by :pdx_elk: (rose@503junk.house)

This is at the FBI reportedly. The wall was purely lip service, but this is a pretty wild photo. It has a kind of poetry for the moment.

The fediverse, culturally, needs to build up more in-person connections.

I want features to post events through ActivityPub with in-post rendering on most of the popular clients. However, I also want more instances being started around local communities, events/conferences/conventions, shared mutual aid activity (the real mutual aid not asking for help which is fine but different), ....

Honestly, most of the pontification about grand actions people demand someone should take can be cathartic, but doesn't accomplish much. We just end up adding to the doom scrolling.

Our spaces could be better than that. We can and do build real communities. When we do so, this digital ether is at its best.

The online and the offline are not so different unless we give in to a trend of alienating them from each other.

This is what I think will make the community driven fediverse stand out from the corporate social media.

anyone else remember when Facebook helped enable a genocide?

in other news, I hear Facebook feels we are at a "cultural tipping point" and are removing tools and policies implemented in response to enabling a genocide.

This also is why I advocate for unions to do care work. A therapist can only do so much to help you feel empowered over your life and work. Mindfulness only takes you so far. Having someone really listen to you, and help you act to enact change and take power over your working conditions is a totally different thing. You may need both, but the latter is so important imo.

I wonder how widespread the issue is where a sector of medical care has become highly inaccessible only to then have companies offer a "employee assistance program" that has a corporate bent version of the lost service?

For example, finding therapists is extremely difficult nowadays. However, many insurance companies and "employee assistance programs" offer on call therapists who you can only speak to a few times a year, and who barre you from speaking about workplace issues.

If a fascist state is trying to get copies of your messages, then maybe you and the person you sent messages with don't have fingerprint access on. OK. But then what happens when they tell the person you were messaging with that they will waterboard them if they don't unlock their phone?

Conversations about how far people will go and how much people will resist is a waste of time, imo. You should never put someone in a position where they could be tortured to get access to messages like that.

Don't boast. Don't get edgy. If you don't want something to come up in court through discovery, don't ever store it.

That's actual opsec. Everything else is mitigations to lower risk a bit and/or just security theater.

I keep seeing opsec posts about how to secure your phone to stop cops from checking it. These mitigations will never do a great job of protecting you from a state level threat (they may from stalkers, thieves, and domestic violence threats).

If you are worried about state level actors getting information from you, it should not touch your phone.

A lot of trans people in the US are scared tonight. I am too. If you feel like you gotta flee, then choose flight. If that doesn't work choose fight. Maybe both.

I transitioned when a lot of our current protections and ability to exist in public were not recognized. Legal public existence was a mine field.

We still had a community though. We still survived. Tomorrow we will still be here. Things will likely get less comfortable, and probably more dangerous.

We can only lose if we surrender and go back in the closet. Your existence is resistance. Take care of each other.

I found out that because I work in higher-ed I get a free (for me) subscription to the NYTimes. hell yeah, free wordle

The chance of your ballot being burned by an arsonist are near zero. if you want to vote, and a drop box is near you, then that's totally fine.

If you are worried about it counting go to the MyVote Oregon page and set it up to track your ballot. https://sos.oregon.gov/voting/Pages/myvote.aspx?lang=en

All of this talk of how it's "unsafe", we need more cops, blah blah blah will just scare people away.

You are almost certainly just fine, and if you are concerned, then you can just track it. No need to worry or panic about anything.

I made it another day. Lost the first track I made today on accident. So here is the second 5 minute thrown together loop.

looptober num. 2
#looptober

Don't know if I'll keep this up (probably not), but here is a loop I made in about 5-10 minutes.

looptober num. 1

#looptober

inevitably, I'll post something responding to something I very much disagree with, to the point I won't even mention the original source because the misinfo is spreading through a game of sensationalist influencer content telephone, and then I'll get people in the replies linking to the misleading article as a source that I'm wrong.

The 404 Media post about "Active Listening" is misleading. Are there ad agencies that exist that use active listening in some cases? Yes, these are part of their portfolio and there are specific apps that have use cases where you agree to turn your mic on all the time and they collect data from it. Do they have partnerships with big tech companies? Yes. They serve many types of ads and work with major companies.

That doesn't mean that any particular app is always on selling your audio data in the background where you are never made aware the mic is on. They are monitoring you though in a myriad of ways, and it's important we actually talk about where the risk lies instead of fairly easily disprovable fear stoking pieces. It's aggregate data collection from meta data, public data, and data you agree (often through coercion) to share.

no fucking way.

the DNC is now proudly talking about how Kamala took down backpage. Not only did they remove sex workers from the Dems platform throwing sex workers under the bus, now they are dancing all over their past actions that got sex workers killed:

https://www.newsweek.com/people-are-going-die-sex-workers-devastated-after-backpage-shutdown-876486

@technomancy PiHole for the tech savvy and NextDNS for others.

I'm open to other suggestions though.

There is also probably an opportunity to build up some community DNS services.

No, my stance has not changed since Chrome blocked ublock origin. Ad-blocking is one of the most important things you can do to stay safe online.

Now, I'm probably just going to recommend most people block ads at the DNS level. Firefox is also a solution, and I use it. However, it's not a holistic solution for your average internet user. Especially if someone uses a phone as their only or main point of net access. Most people aren't going to buy a phone and install a third party OS just to stop ads. Using a third party DNS setup is an easier solution for most now.

I finished Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause. There were parts of it I enjoyed, but other parts I found incredibly frustrating.

The book invents a future that is near dystopia, but has in it a few magic caveats that just so happen to let a version of hope in peaceful liberalism be uplifted as the answer to everything.

For example, the book highlights the danger of calling the police, but then the danger always ends in skepticism. When faced with violence, the book still suggests calling the police and then the police use their own violence to deal with far-right actors instead of joining with them and killing the protagonists.

It's a solar punk novel, but it envisions a future with a DSA president, friendly police, and mutual aid and solidarity filling all of the gaps. It whitewashes the fact that if you do those things in a way that threatens those in power, then they will kill you for it.

speaking of women in the olympics, Simone Biles is freaking amazing

Anyway, that's one of the features I want and advocate for.

I'm not too much a fan of a lot of the other proposals out there right now that are based in creating a centralized authority.

We can have autonomy and be safe online. Police are not necessary.

Since people are talking about more moderation controls again I want to point out the method I am most excited about that I think would have the biggest impact:

Giving users control over how their replies are handled and dissiminated in ActivityPub.

This would require a change to the protocol such as FEP-5624 https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/5624/fep-5624.md

I would also like to see a cryptographic step that requires Instance C to validate a reply from Instance B based off of a cryptographic signing on Instance A. This would allow granting of access to replies and revocation of replies.

Of course, malicious actors can write code to post replies on their own instance without permission just as they can start their own blog and screenshot a post and write a response on there. However, if the protocol change is adopted, then it would significantly inhibit the spread of replies which do not have consent to respond.