Definitely, I didn’t mean to sound too defeatist.

It’s because they’re corrupt and young people are just as susceptible to lobbyists bribes, unfortunately. The gerontocracy doesn’t make things better though, that’s for sure.

The problem isn’t that they’re spending money on political causes and I wouldn’t even expect them to do some false balance bs where they’d spend money on left and right wing politics, but spending money on political causes with almost zero transparency (like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc) seems fishy as fuck.

I always have Tor installed and I often use it instead of incognito browser sessions when researching stuff. It’s sometimes slow and Cloudflare made it a lot more annoying to use than ~5-10 years ago, but I’m glad it exists.

I’m sure it’s still more useful to US interests though, or it wouldn’t be funded anymore.

I think the current discussion is a good example showing that it’s not as black and white, and definitely not easy, as you make it out to be.

Yep, looks like we’re headed to the cyberpunk dystopia, full steam ahead. Wait until they crash the banks and have CBDCs ready to go.

I’m referring to the CSAM scanning systems that are outside of the control of almost anyone except governments, three letter agencies, other law enforcement and parts of the private sector.

These systems must be fed every hash of every file submitted to as many instances as possible to be efficient with close to no oversight or public scrutiny.

Pass.

Edit: I’m not blocking you but I noticed intermittent connectivity issues on lemmy.ml today, possibly around the time where I replied.

researchers found 112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts on the platform

So you’re willing to vacuum up the hashes of every image file uploaded on thousands of decentralized systems into a centralized systems (that is out of “our” control and coupled with direct access for law enforcement and corporations) to prevent the distribution of 0.034% of files that are CSAM and that could just as well be reported and deleted by admins and moderators? Remember how Snowden warned us about metadata?

If you think that’s a wise tradeoff, I guess, go ahead. But then I’d have to question the entire goal of being decentralized in the first place. If it’s all about “a billionare can’t wreak havok upon my social network”, then yeah, I guess decentralization helps a bit but even that remains to be seen.

But if you’re actually willing to do that, you’d probably also be in favor of having government backdoors into chat encryption (and thus rendering the entire concept moot, because you can’t have backdoors that cannot be discovered by other nefarious actors) and even more censorship-resistant systems like Tor because evil people use it to exchange CSAM anonymously as well?

Of course, I didn’t say that though.

And the instances who want to engage with that material would all opt for the fork and be done with it. That’s all I meant.

The researchers can’t be taken seriously if they don’t acknowledge that you can’t force free software to do something you don’t want it to.

Even if we started way down at the stack and we added a CSAM hash scanner to the Linux kernel, people would just fork the kernel and use their own build without it.

Same goes for nginx or any other web server or web proxy. Same goes for Tor. Same goes for Mastodon or any other Fedi/ActivityPub implementation.

It. Does. Not*. Work.

* Please, prove me wrong, I’m not all knowing, but short of total surveillance, I see no technical solution to this.

That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.

We’re not gonna fix society using tech unless we’re all hooked up to some all knowing AI under government control.

Removed by mod

I should’ve added a smiley face myself, sorry. I thought you were joking.

An insight that’s coming a couple of years too late though.

Can’t organize forming Unions if all you can use is corporate services.

chromeOS meets early KDE4. Weird. I don’t like Windows 11 either so but I managed to get rid of most of the crap. Should’ve gone for Windows 10 on my gaming machine but since I use Ubuntu 99% of the time, it’s not worth the effort. At least I figured out how to install and use Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. I’d rather depend on Steam on Linux than use a computer with a Microsoft account hooked in.

I’m seriously wondering if we’ve hit rock button in terms of UI flatness.

Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).

Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.

Online advertising would take a big hit, lots of small businesses would struggle until other advertising companies (Meta, Twitter, whatever, smaller website analytics products) take over and direct customers to them. Major international businesses would probably sit one out wait until the market has resettled itself (like we’re seeing with Twitter right now).

Lots of search engines would try to capture a piece of the pie.