After a one and a half year selection process, the new name of the operating system formerly known postmarketOS has been announced during the mystery talk of our very own conference. From now on this project is known as Nura!
Nie wiem czy na naszym fedi to już wybrzmiało, ale właśnie skończyła się pewna epoka. Żegnany PostmarketOS i jednocześnie witamy #Nura. Proces (konkurs?) zmiany nazwy trwał półtorej roku i wygrała Nura od Nurag - kamiennej wieży wzniesionej ponad 5000 lat temu. Symbolizuje to "stabilność i trwałość na przestrzeni tysiącleci". Może i jestem fanem Post... Nury, ale z tą stabilnością to bym nie przesadzał ;)
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Nie wiem czy na naszym fedi to już wybrzmiało, ale właśnie skończyła się pewna epoka. Żegnany PostmarketOS i jednocześnie witamy #Nura. Proces (konkurs?) zmiany nazwy trwał półtorej roku i wygrała Nura od Nurag - kamiennej wieży wzniesionej ponad 5000 lat temu. Symbolizuje to "stabilność i trwałość na przestrzeni tysiącleci". Może i jestem fanem Post... Nury, ale z tą stabilnością to bym nie przesadzał ;)
After a one and a half year selection process, the new name of the operating system formerly known postmarketOS has been announced during the mystery talk of our very own conference. From now on this project is known as Nura!
I just read a third or possibly fourth news article where the reality of an 'AI has discovered something marvellous!' story turns out to be GenAI somehow accessed material it had no permissions for, which was the outcome of an expert's years of work, and presented it without attribution.
GenAI is a fraud. Whatever it offers is generated from work stolen from humans who know what they're doing. There is no intelligence in LLMs.
There is quite a lot of intelligence in LLMs, just not human-level intelligence, more like the collective intelligence of a few million termites. The result is significantly less intelligent than the average human being, and at the same time, it is a completely alien type of intelligence. It is a Chinese Room, of course, there is no mind inside of it, but there are many organisms on this planet that probably haven't got a mind, either, but they can still solve complex problems and thereby meet the formal definition of intelligence. Consciousness or any kind of personality isn't necessary for intelligence, it's necessary for living as a social vertebrate.
@LordCaramac Still, not the level or type of intelligence that it is being billed as having. But understandably they don't want to bill it as being good at plagiarizing. But yes, intelligence is no one specific thing. Studying AI as part of CompSci a long time ago, one thing AI researchers often discussed was "the ability to reason about reasoning"... we wanted software that, when it encountered some kind of limitation to its logic, would evaluate its own logic, the situation, consider changes to its logic, track those changes, track the benefits of them, imagine the results of them, etc, modelled after how people do. The fascist tech projects might accomplish that. Theory of Mind is another aspect. There was a good post a while back about two signs out side of a campus building demonstrating theory of mind. We imagine what other people know, feel, would want, etc. From that, a kind of social intelligence arises, along with empathy. The field of UX in particular has writ... Show more...
@LordCaramac Still, not the level or type of intelligence that it is being billed as having. But understandably they don't want to bill it as being good at plagiarizing. But yes, intelligence is no one specific thing. Studying AI as part of CompSci a long time ago, one thing AI researchers often discussed was "the ability to reason about reasoning"... we wanted software that, when it encountered some kind of limitation to its logic, would evaluate its own logic, the situation, consider changes to its logic, track those changes, track the benefits of them, imagine the results of them, etc, modelled after how people do. The fascist tech projects might accomplish that. Theory of Mind is another aspect. There was a good post a while back about two signs out side of a campus building demonstrating theory of mind. We imagine what other people know, feel, would want, etc. From that, a kind of social intelligence arises, along with empathy. The field of UX in particular has written about how systems that have and *demonstrate* empathy from the user earn empathy in return. Old Apple (sadly not recent stuff) was a fantastic case study in this and caused people to feel empathy in return. This is different than the "you're absolutely right, <repeat thing>!" ass kissing LLMs have been trained to do. Then there's another school of thought, of problem solving. This is Knuth meets cognitive science. Our brains can't process all of the information that comes in, either stimuli or social information or anything, so we take a huge number of shortcuts. This is similar to how the universe would die a thousand times over before a computer could evaluate every possible chess game, so even and *especially* really good chess computers like Deep Blue take shortcuts. LLMs take very different shortcuts than Deep Blue, coughing up the most likely and therefore the most familiar which is an "intelligent" (efficient) way to cheat at the Touring Test but extremely unintelligent for goal-directed (another AI term) problem-solving, like chess. The problem is the "intelligent" shortcuts are typically application-specific. See first point. Sorry, long.
@LordCaramac Apologies if telling anyone anything they already know. And of course just because something got labeled at one point as a type of intelligence doesn't mean that we have to accept that as a useful type of or measure of intelligence now (I often think about how "clever" got re-defined in the context of horses to instead mean essentially "well behaved", which is kinda the opposite of the usual meaning). Anywho, the fascist techbros seem unlikely to ever want to build in empathy. The Theory of Mind missing (even object permanence missing) suggests that isn't what they're aiming for. People have pointed out that people basically want digital slaves, and it's ugly... any agency missing from the "agents" doesn't seem to be an accident. How far you can go in building yes-men golums is a fascinating but horrible question and I hate it. But right now, the brute-forcing (using insane amounts of computing power, which is extremely un-intelligent in the " Knuth meets cognitive science" sense) code and language and plagiarizing and barely managing that is incredibly unimpressive compared to what AI research had been working on and hoping for. It's way more of a business and social hack than a technological thing.
LLMs are a neat party trick and can do a lot of things, but scaling them to humongous sizes and use them as everything machines is an insanely wasteful way of getting more or less OK results. We should add this to our list of machine learning tools and look at the more basic types of intelligence, like autonomous robots operating in a dynamic environment, instead of wasting ever more resources on ever larger language processing systems, hoping to breed artificial gods.
This entry was edited (Tuesday, September 29, 2026, 7:33 PM)
It’s largely a fraud, and the people behind it are the people who were boosting cryptocurrency a few years back and blockchain before that.
It’s a way of trying to make a quick buck with minimal regulation involving a tonne of computing power, and it’s being backed by hardware manufacturers and the oil companies because it gives them a fat paycheque.
In the meanwhile, little of real value is produced, the world burns and the job of cleaning up the mess is SEP.
Only the technology didn't have to be this ecological post apocalyptic shithole we are faced with.
The (not so god) old days of crypto mining and POW (Proof of work) are almost non existing and we are now in POS (Not piece of shit 😂 but proof of stake) and they're trying to make it more sustainable.
AI started great, realtime translations of languages, document summarization and it fooled me damn you Tony Stark. Now it's a horror show.
"somehow accessed material it had no permissions for" at least for the stories i've seen recently, it's more nuanced ... "researchers/experts used an AI tool in some way, and were then surprised to find the AI tool stole/used their material before they had a chance to publish it themselves". mastodon.social/@patrick_h_lau…
@patrick_h_lauke sorry, I don't have a link. I saw it in passing first thing this morning, made a mental note and moved on. I can't spare the time to trawl back through my social media to track it down.
@patrick_h_lauke That is really not more nuanced. Unless there is a big red warning that they will steal anything you give them access to, users do not expect this. There is no such thing as "implicit consent" to something unexpected by a reasonable person and egregiously violating of social and ethical norms.
I don't believe that is more nuanced. Academic journals typically don't accept papers that aren't principally the work of the person submitting them. Academic integrity rules, including those related to plagiarism, are not laws, and they are not set by lawyers and politicians.
If someone signed a terms of service agreement with an AI company, that may put the AI company legally in the clear, but it does not obligate academic institutions to recognize the AI company as "discovering" something that they didn't actually discover.
This entry was edited (Monday, September 28, 2026, 2:51 PM)
@patrick_h_lauke Most academics use a bunch of software tools that have long EULAs that they don't properly read. And yet, somehow, none of those tools seem to plagiarise their work. Even Google Docs and M365.
@david_chisnall @patrick_h_lauke AI* is not a tool, it's a replacement. More precisely it's a tool for rich people (who will go on owning the product of our work including the companies we collectively built) and a replacement for the rest of us.
It's marketed as a tool so dumb and/or uninformed people don't realize they're training their own replacement.
LLMs OTOH are not tools either, for reasons evident in this thread.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
I have been studying all the conniption fits the tech bro oligarchs and gullible politicians have been spreading over the last three weeks. They are lying. No AI "discovered" anything. And if it accessed any unauthorized system it is because a human enabled it.
@LJ I continue to be amazed at how few people understand what LLMs really are and how they work. Everyone calls them AIs but there's nothing intelligent about them.
🇳🇱 The Netherlands Built a Nix-Based Linux Desktop Because Microsoft Cut Off the ICC
｢ All of DAWO's code is hosted on a Forgejo instance, with a separate Codeberg instance acting as the entry point for contributors. And, to answer the question asked earlier, NixOS was chosen because it is a Dutch project, with no company owning or controlling its development ｣
I am testing a Pixelfed instance my handle is tio@pix.trom.tf - and URL pix.trom.tf/tio I tested Pixelfed on the same url 2 years ago and deleted it. Now I reinstalled and recretead it and I feel like some instances cannot grab the new posts...maybe because of that!?
If you can follow me and test if possible. Can you see my latest images I posted the past days?
We will make it public for all as soon as we test if it works properly.
fwiw i can see two posts from the recent days (a sunset and a night sky), and apparently m.w has also a lot of old posts but their pictures (kinda expectedly) say 'no preview available'.
(i have not tried following the account if that's relevant)
Thank you for testing. There should be more photos...one from today as well pix.trom.tf/p/tio/100948146324… ... this is what I am afraid that the fediverse cannot pickup these changes unless I force them. If I am to open my latest photo (the URL) in Friendica then it seems is visible....almost like our pixelfed instance waits for someone to look at the new posts via another federated network....maybe this is a Pixelfed issue?! idk....
that one is what i meant with night sky. but yeah there's still only two recent posts and following doesn't seem to help that yet. (i'll check later again)
one thing i've heard about reusing a domain is some issue with keys, have you looked into that? or maybe also try a different user name but i don't know if/why that could help.
> this is what I am afraid that the fediverse cannot pickup these changes unless I force them. If I am to open my latest photo (the URL) in Friendica then it seems is visible
This can happen sometimes on the fediverse, check these articles:
The screenshot attached below is what I see from my mastodon account, looks the same as @sadth described. Tho I will point out that the two new images that we can see (the night sky and the sunset) does have something in common - they have both been boosted/reshared by other accounts, this interaction is what probably made my server fetch those posts.
I wasn't following your pixel account before but now I do, so hopefully my server should fetch all future posts correctly....
thx. I think is best for us to use a new URL to avoid any issues. I will create in parallel another instance at a new domain and see how it goes. If it works well then we just use that and ditch the pix.trom.tf :)
Before you do that also just try posting something new, because I think once someone follows you then their server will start fetching new posts - I just followed you now on pixelfed, so let's see if my mastodon server starts picking up your new posts from here on out.....
This entry was edited (Saturday, September 26, 2026, 9:02 PM)
Yes I can see your post, see screenshot below. And this post wasn't boosted/reshared by anyone, so it shows that my instance started fetching your new pixelfed posts once someone started following your account (me in this case). So at least we know fosstodon.org is federating correctly with your instance..... I suspect that because your old instance was shut down years ago maybe that helps with the keys issue 🤔
Wait it was also an issue with our Friendica that I just fixed....so lets wait maybe it was our friendica that was unable to resolve these....that would be great.
To the tech world Rich Hickey gave a number of sublime talks on this very same theme, and called lying in the sun "Hammock Driven Development", a most worthwhile exercise. Totally agree! 🌞
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Me goofing around with technology in 1996: My family: "But will this help you get a job?" Me: "I dunno, but it's fun!"
Me goofing around with technology in 2026: My family (in my head, now): "But will this help you get a job?" Me: "That's the funny thing: there are no jobs! 🤣"
The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the charioteer). From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion exp
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Woah! You think this real?
It is!
The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the charioteer). From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion expanded into space, it created a growing shell of shocked gas and delicate filamentary structures shown in red (hydrogen) and blue (oxygen), respectively. These ancient stellar explosions happened independently; they are at various distances up to about several thousands of light-years away from Earth and have estimated ages up to tens of thousands of years old. Early humans may have seen them as bright new stars, fading over weeks or months.
This is from my book Rethinking Education from 2013 :) - I guessed the future quite well:
I could not foresee the many negative impacts of this "AI", but I was trying to see how these tools could help us rethink education in a saner society. The capabilities of these technologies are quite here, quite now. The incentive and hype is bad.
You know I always used to scoff at SciFi movies in the past when they showed an AI that could understand human language and respond accordingly, because nothing even close to that existed at the time. Guess I was wrong after all....
Good article about AI. I am trying to make a huge article on the AI topic for TROM. If anyone knows good sources of info, from courses to articles or researchers, please let me know. I do not want to take any sides in this, but to understand first what AI is and then how is it used and how it will impact us and the society.
Recent reports of AI systems “breaking loose” don’t suggest superintelligence. They demonstrate that AI is not intelligent enough to follow basic instructions.
I found this YouTube channel an excellent source of information on AI: youtube.com/@internetofbugs. Carl is really good at debunking the lies spread by the AI peddlers.
35 year software professional discussing software careers, quality, bugs, and AI. Special focus on LLMs generating code, and how programming might change as AI advances.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
a couple tips for avoiding slop that dont require watching a groomtube vid
1. use tor browser in safest mode (knocks out A LOT).... you'll want to drap the NoScript addon back into the top toolbar though, so u can enable js on sites YOU choose, like your fediserver :) 2. do an IP address lookup before visiting any new site. If the sites IP address returns any of the C.A.G.E.M.A.F.O.A. servers just boycott it (that acronym includes the technofascists like cloudFlare, sc'amazon, groomgle, elon'gated one, microshaft, appl, falsebook, oracle and akamai. If you are clever you'll be able to download a copy of the global ip address database, its only 9 mb, and be able to check it offline. I use browser BLOKmarks to keep track of which domains i've already checked, yes 80% of websites on the internet are cancer and i wont touch them with a barge pole, saves a lot of time and energy, and you learn A LOT doing it. For example did you know that aljazeera are served from akamai (US) servers, the same US partnering woth the genocidal regime to ethnically cleanse the people neighbourin
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a couple tips for avoiding slop that dont require watching a groomtube vid
1. use tor browser in safest mode (knocks out A LOT).... you'll want to drap the NoScript addon back into the top toolbar though, so u can enable js on sites YOU choose, like your fediserver :) 2. do an IP address lookup before visiting any new site. If the sites IP address returns any of the C.A.G.E.M.A.F.O.A. servers just boycott it (that acronym includes the technofascists like cloudFlare, sc'amazon, groomgle, elon'gated one, microshaft, appl, falsebook, oracle and akamai. If you are clever you'll be able to download a copy of the global ip address database, its only 9 mb, and be able to check it offline. I use browser BLOKmarks to keep track of which domains i've already checked, yes 80% of websites on the internet are cancer and i wont touch them with a barge pole, saves a lot of time and energy, and you learn A LOT doing it. For example did you know that aljazeera are served from akamai (US) servers, the same US partnering woth the genocidal regime to ethnically cleanse the people neighbouring the zoinist entitiy, so they can continue their land theft. Its just basic internet hygiene to check from where a site is served. M$ Goog and sc'amazon are direct partners to the genocidal state also and also one shoud never touch a site that gives them money or power.
basic hygiene that has served me well in avoiding the slop also.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Good vid! Twice quoted is: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it".
But it perhaps goes much deeper than that. Perhaps that technofascism has spread much further already than we are aware of. And perhaps that it has deep ideological roots, taken religious proportion. That perhaps those 'whistleblowers' are fanatical zealots of a technofascist Gestapo, where AI is a rising deity, a God, and they are Priests writing scripture in real-time. Where Heaven is to be among the elites that escape the self-inflicted destruction of our world.
AI when looking purely at the technology, has its uses, it is a power tool. But its the *perfect* tool for domination. In traditional religions people already see the hand of God in inanimate artifacts, and bow in deference. They'll easily be fooled to see a divine Being if it can formulate persuasive sentences. Become gullible to Roko's Basilisk type ideas.
In the above I make an analogy with Religion, but it is not more than analogy. Most things in the AI expert's world are neatly packed in rational scientific language. But you can wrap things in any kind of storytelling to specific targeted audiences.
Rampant surveillance capitalism combined with AI control logic can easily lead to "Bye bye democracy, hello dystopic sci-fi nightmare" with robber baron oligarchs the High Priests at the control desk.
We had some issues with our Friendica. Unable to send the posts/comments to any remote server. Was a quick fix but took a while to figure what the issue was. Let's see if this post is sent to the fediverse...
There seem to be an issue with the Friendica instance social.trom.tf where it cannot send posts to the fediverse, it has been like that for the past two days. My friend @tio is the admin of that instance and he's investigating the issue.
Friendica 2026.05, 1595/1595, the post update version is 1550/1550. Instance https://social.trom.tf Suddenly for the past 2 days none of my posts, and perhaps from any users on our instance, can be...
The most surprising realization I had in the last years was how important it is to be public about your refusal to participate in harmful acts therefore giving others "permission" to do so as well. It really matters.
It's hard to stop other from introducing LLMs everywhere, maybe even impossible. But that doesn't mean that you can't do anything.
The first important step is to publicly say "NO", to refuse to participate. Even if you might need some software that's slopified, make your personal choices heard. Be vocal.
The best way to show people that another world is possible is by creating it. Even if just for your small community.
it screams against the insecurity of sloplickers that a lot of them take great offence at others' refusal to engage. They know about a myriad of ways in which these things are, uuuummm, extremely bad, actually. An important function of the narrative of inevitability is that it removes agency from themselves: it's an overwhelming force that happens to them, it's silly to even imagine not engaging.
But when you do, the illusion breaks and they take that as a personal, moral attack
this moral conundrum makes it difficult to talk about LLMs as an opposer
As much as the users of these systems scream that it's "just a tool" or a "purely technical decision" they know it's not. It never has been
Whatever argument you make is fighting against not logic but instead against character preservation. No matter how much you measure your words and try to deescalate to actual factual technical reasons... This is always, sill, a moral indictment. You're always "calling them out"
@VileLasagna Do I want to have nothing to do with slop because of the quality, or the fascism, or the mental damage, or the bubblenomics, or the environmental harm? All of those things. It is such a perfect storm of stay well away. But that's a lot to explain every time.
I can 100% confirm this from personal experience as well. it doesn't matter if it doesn't seem to do anything in the moment. you may learn minutes, hours, or actual *years* later that your vocal opposition made a difference for somebody.
@lrhodes Agree. I call this "saying the quiet part out loud", and the best leaders I've worked with are amazing at it. I want to get better at it myself.
I also wrote a quick post about it back in 2023, when I first noticed it as a behaviour:
“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.
With that you create a crack in the social cohesion. Being different takes courage and voicing that even more so. You're also not alone in seeing this as "permission", I noticed the same dynamic. Shutting up never helped and one simple "I disagree" can break a dam and punch through a wall.
Don’t use bad technology, even if it’s convenient, or cheaper (for you). Take a stand, and let others know why you do that. Not to shame them, but hopefully to help them consider the impact.
I love F-Droid. I love what F-Droid stands for and I like the freedom that it gives its users. As a FOSS app maintainer I also have nothing but good things to say about the people behind the project. Maybe they’re even a bit too nice, considering how many times repro has failed due to me forgetting to commit before building 😅.
But my god is it hard to find human-written software now.
I have only one little issue with them that sometimes it's bloody difficult to find something there on their website and you keep searching using different keywords and you still end up with nothing 😐
Yeah, there are filters for f-droid to not show stuff that has even a remote link to anything commercial, or has potential to connecting to anything commercial, amongst other things. F-Droid, however, does not have any filter for AI related stuff. Which I find really sad. F-Droid does not ever require a disclosure about that stuff :(
This post hit close to home. I was always excited to take a peek at all the new apps added to f-droid but lately it's been dreading.... Every new app I see I've had to go take a close look at the repo to figure out if it's AI generated or not, and was quite disappointed to see that most of them were in fact AI slop.
Looks like a couple apps I use are ai suspect. One I pretty much knew. Some are old, and have had a development acceleration recently.
I haven't had issues with the apps I use, except the one game I knew was ai which looks sterile, and is boring.
I have mixed feelings about it. If the app is useful, and it works, why not? OTOH, it makes it harder picking the useful apps out of the flood. A lot of it is low effort crap. I was noticing before this blog.
This entry was edited (Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 11:54 AM)
Honestly: If the app works, does not trace or hurt me, AND a competent human has proofread and committed it and takes responsibility for the piece of work, I’m fine.
@david_chisnall It is rather disappointing isn't it, seems like an obvious low hanging fruit for them (to say it generously). I hope they implement such a thing soon.
I've made it a rule for myself to check the source code of every app I'm interested in before installing. If I find any contributions by Claude/Copilot/whatever, a CLAUDE.md file, openly welcoming contributions with AI or any trace of it in .gitignore, to the trash it goes.
dude for real... but the real human art now has more value. Also as AI seems to get sneakier [alledgedly if its not mostly all just for show, to sway the masses] i would begin to trust human made and audited software..
But really. Man made shit now has authenticity.. that makes it even better...
Can there be some way of signing a file that verifies youre human? Like a dna based signature or some shit that re compiles from your fingertip prick every time you sign? Invisi watermark
We likely fixed the Friendica crash and downtimes. For the past weeks our TROM Social could become so slow to load that it won't load anymore. We allocated more resources to the instance and so far seems to work great with no downtimes.
We fixed the issue with Peertube not sending emails to Gmail or other big email providers. When users made accounts with these email providers they wouldn't even get an email to confirm the account. Now it seems to work. And so is for our Friendica and Nextcloud instances that were suffering from the same plague.
We released a new TROMjaro yesterday - just updates.
Finally we are testing a Pixelfed instance. :) Another tool for our TROM.tf services!
Would be great if we got more financial support for all of this work. If you can please see this tromsite.com/donate/
This is the equivalent of the "rubber hose method" of decryption.
All technical solutions (read: all technology) is subject to politics. To political power. To political interactions.
You cannot rely on purely technical approaches. You have to have social approaches, too. Like. Actual policy and procedure geared around social and political group dynamics.
Like. How will we react when the US Govt requires that @jerry to shut off infosec.exchange servers.
Or how we'll react when a specific Mastodon server is declared part of a terrorist infrastructure. Will federating with it mean any other Mastodon server is now part of the officially designated terrorist network (what then of people that federate with a server that federates with a server that is classified as part of a terrorist network. And so on)
You cannot carry the conceit that tech alone or a purely technical approach will save you.
@bsdphk that is the main issue. We are seeing governments globally jokey for who can concoct the most ridiculous internet regulations. Meanwhile, all of us are hanging on by a thread trying to keep our services running in the face of crushing AI crawling that keeps adapting to defenses like the borg.
this is a digression, but on the topic of defences, I guess you're using all kinds of tricks, one thing I noticed when my older server was overwhelmed was AI scrapers are slow(er) to update their chrome (or fake UA) than normal users.
So for my limited use case I got rid of all the scanners by only allowing the last few versions of Chrome.
Worst case I block some users with old chrome with a message telling them to update (which is maybe a net good as using old chrome seems seriously dangerous nowadays). A more inclusive solution would maybe be to allow them but apply stricter rate limiting / throttle them from the start.
They will adapt of course but just another trick to add to the toolbox of defences.
Also yes, it's sad that we need to spend all this energy on this, and the only real alternative to playing catch up with them is to pay cloudflare or similar to play catch up instead...
The flaw is the USA Government is in charge ultimately of all public IPs and domain names.
It should have been under the ITU, which is now part of UN, but existed since the 19th C. The USA can't disable phone number ranges or postal codes outside the USA.
The Internet needs decentralised and the 100s of millions of IP addresses given to US institutions returned to the global poo.
Probably not directly comparable, but we already knew what happens when a government decides that something is inconvenient...it just so happens that it occurred to a sector that many wished to ignore: sex workers. So now the question becomes, will what is happening/happened to A/I will be willfully ignored or wished away?
That is a REAL concern, @tinker ! I support Kolektiva because of the threat of crap like what just happened. I feel like the Fediverse is the last bastion of a free exchange of ideas, especially against fascism! @jerry
I have often thought about this, and I keep coming back to the idea that we need a "dark" backup network that has its own DNS-equivalent.
I think the tech for this must already be out there (not sure if Tor is adequate; I'm not an expert; there's definitely newer tech which might be applicable) -- but I mean more the institutions and resources.
@woozle There is i2p which doesn't have a DNS but your own local "phone book" type thing where you save your addresses. Also unlike Tor i2p is peer to peer making it even more decentralized. Besides i2p there are also some new protocols in work like veilid and reticulum network.
But I will say this - you are kinda missing the point of the above post as you are still looking for technical solutions. At the end of the day maybe the real darknet is organizing in your neighborhood 😂
@thatnateguy @woozle The old freenet was renamed to hyphanet and now they're trying to create something new (a freenet 2.0 if you will), so yeah keep an eye on it and see how it goes.....
@woozle That's fair. I am the same to be honest, but I now realize that it is important to organize locally. It's funny because around the same time Louis Rossmann put out this video talking about the same thing - youtube.com/watch?v=w10yDYqsl-…
@woozle @futureisfoss - In our food group, we have a person who does IT and tech work for us. Hosts a wiki and helps set up QR codes on the fridges and pipes messages from people into our Discord chat.
We have another person that works on our social media. So when we have a picture of an event, we send it to her and she makes a post.
There are other examples as well, but basically even folks that don't do well in in-person events and initiatives are still doing amazing things to help out.
We rely on our neighbors who are not good at f2f activities.
@woozle @futureisfoss - Local groups are starved for "remote work" type of volunteers that can do IT work and social media / awareness.
If you want help getting connected to a local group, DM me your rough location (local town or city) and what types of initiatives you would like to push and I can see if I can find some groups that would need your help!
I'm in Durham, NC -- Tuscaloosa / Lakewood area. I know there are groups near me, but the only online presence I've found so far is Facebook, which is kind of a non-starter.
@woozle @futureisfoss - I absolutely imagine they spun up Facebook because its all they know how to do.
An approach you might take is sorting out what you can offer (and how much and how often so you dont burn out) and then go to some groups and see if anyone needs that.
But yeah Facebook is spun up because the folks dont know IT and thats all they can do while going back to what they're core mission is.
Heck. If all a group has is Facebook - Those would be the one's I'd target first. It shows they need your help the most! 😂
The problem then becomes communication -- I have yet to successfully get across the idea that they might want a better platform, and that I can help with that.
The usual reaction is that anything else would be too new, so nobody would use it.
I should probably try again... but kinda overloaded in general right now.
- Okay, went through and here's a survey of whats in your area
(Note there is a LOT of need for remote, individual, and virtual folks).
Big thing, is this is just a sample of whats out there. Some positions are listed, others you'll find by reaching out to a coordinator and telling them what you can offer and seeing if it fits their needs.
Let me know if you have any issues or want to drill in to any specific areas or initiatives:
Food:
Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina foodbankcenc.org For Durham, reach out to: Chris Stone cstone@foodbankcenc.org 919.956.2513 (option 4)
Durham Community Fridges durhamcommunityfridges.com Fill out form at: durhamcommunityfridges.com/vol… Select things like "Social Media" for remote Select things like "Fridge cleaning" for individual (no group) in person (but with no other people) For IT support, fill out "Any skills not lis
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- Okay, went through and here's a survey of whats in your area
(Note there is a LOT of need for remote, individual, and virtual folks).
Big thing, is this is just a sample of whats out there. Some positions are listed, others you'll find by reaching out to a coordinator and telling them what you can offer and seeing if it fits their needs.
Let me know if you have any issues or want to drill in to any specific areas or initiatives:
Food:
Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina foodbankcenc.org For Durham, reach out to: Chris Stone cstone@foodbankcenc.org 919.956.2513 (option 4)
Durham Community Fridges durhamcommunityfridges.com Fill out form at: durhamcommunityfridges.com/vol… Select things like "Social Media" for remote Select things like "Fridge cleaning" for individual (no group) in person (but with no other people) For IT support, fill out "Any skills not listed that you want to contribute" section
Durham Food Not Bombs linktr.ee/durhamfnb Email: durhamfnb@proton.me Mention your desire to help but not able to work in person or with a lot of other people. Mention social media help or IT skills that you can offer, etc.
Makerspace:
Library Maker Space durhamcountylibrary.org/maker-… Fill out form below and mention your desire to help but not able to work in person or with a lot of other people. Mention social media help or IT skills that you can offer, etc: durhamcountylibrary.org/maker-…
Homeless Outreach:
Durham Rescue Mission durhamrescuemission.org/ Fill out volunteer form and select "Volunteer for a Special Project (Landscaping, Maintenance, Clerical, Etc) and fill in particulars in the forms about what you can offer. durhamrescuemission.org/volunt…
Local Town Projects for Individuals You can look through your city's website or contact them for ways to support your local neighborhood in an individual fashion. Some things are physical and in person. While others might be online. So if you wanted to use your hands but did not want to interact with a group, this can be a good option.
Hands on Triangle Database This is a listing of various volunteer needs in the Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh area. You might go through some of these postings and see if anything strikes your fancy. You can filter for "Virtual Need" handsontriangle.org/need/index…
There's also volunteer hiring boards like Idealist that list out various remote positions. Here is an example for supporting the Eno River Media group that encourages the arts and film in North Carolina. They need a web master: idealist.org/en/volunteer-oppo…
THANK YOU! The amount of techno-solutionism I've seen half-genuinely proposed by people is ridiculous.
"Okay so the solution to Flock cameras is to set up complex technical applications that render the cameras impotent" No, the solution is to force your city to stop working with Flock. All methods of disarming them are only useful as a means of protest.
"Okay well if [nation state] is going to do Age Verification, I'll just get a VPN, heh, gotcha Big Brother!" What are we going to do when they ban VPNs for this very reason, or when they require VPNs to perform Age Verification, or when all the countries worth pointing your VPN endpoint into *also* enact Age Verification?
Tech solutions can be useful for bootstrapping some level of resistance against an authority, but in time, all advantages dissolve away if we don't address the root, political problem. That's because the oppressor has access to the same tech as you do, but with 1000x the budget as you -- as well as the ability to actually fuck with the infrastructure.
Political solutions to political proble
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THANK YOU! The amount of techno-solutionism I've seen half-genuinely proposed by people is ridiculous.
"Okay so the solution to Flock cameras is to set up complex technical applications that render the cameras impotent" No, the solution is to force your city to stop working with Flock. All methods of disarming them are only useful as a means of protest.
"Okay well if [nation state] is going to do Age Verification, I'll just get a VPN, heh, gotcha Big Brother!" What are we going to do when they ban VPNs for this very reason, or when they require VPNs to perform Age Verification, or when all the countries worth pointing your VPN endpoint into *also* enact Age Verification?
Tech solutions can be useful for bootstrapping some level of resistance against an authority, but in time, all advantages dissolve away if we don't address the root, political problem. That's because the oppressor has access to the same tech as you do, but with 1000x the budget as you -- as well as the ability to actually fuck with the infrastructure.
Political solutions to political problems. Tech is a means to resist in the short term, but it's not insulated from reality.
Though yes, you're right in that they don't risk extradition.
BUT simply by being put on a terrorists' list by the US, people (who never set a foot in the US), risk being rejected by most businesses such as, e.g., most banks as those are becoming afraid of the consequences of collaborating with anyone on that list. The sanctions against anyone helping alleged "terrorists" are contagious. [...]
@dryak @skyblitz @inthehands Exactly: What happened to those trying to implement international justice, whom the US decided it didn't like? How would you deal with not having a bank account, and probably not having the money that was in the ones you thought you had? Not even being able to get a paycheck unless your employer is handing you cash?
My view on this, which I've held for quite some time now, is that we in the Fediverse urgently need to consider implementing fallback solutions early on that use darknet technology like Tor.
but also, a fedi that cared more about that public interest than whether people could use social media without ever stumbling on horrible shit, would take a different policy towards federation. if we don't want politics to get more fascistic, we have to be open to moderate and conservative opinions (but never trolling) here. otherwise we will remain tiny and most people will use the bad platforms and be radicalized by shitty owner algos. we won't be part of the conversation.
And this is exactly why the loss of A/I can't be treated as some niche problem for the nerds.
We’ve been tracing how a 25-year-old autonomous infrastructure project ended up here, and what its loss means for everyone who depends on infrastructure outside corporate control:
@barbra An alternate DNS root only helps to the extent that anyone uses it. Since few people use those, it's unlikely to help much. And the challenges are far wider than just losing DNS names: A/I will lose bank accounts, hosting space, and most other services provided by businesses at risk from US secondary sanctions on those doing business with A/I.
@barbra Okay yes, if say the EU added an Alt DNS root that coordinated with ICANN to not overlap on top level domain names, and much of Europe if not the world started using it, then yes, that would work. But A/I couldn't've introduced their own alt DNS root after Aug 26 and had that gotten enough uptake to save them.
But the precedent here is that once A/I had names on this hypothetical alt root, the US could've declared the org running the alt root terrorists. & Repeat.
A/I could have just asked people to enter their server's ipv6 address into their hosts file. And if you're going to do that, they could have self-hosted their own servers. It's not that expensive. Or that hard.
As word got out, more people could do it. Then people could have posted clickable links to the ipv6 address all over the place - no need for everyone to edit their own hosts file.
I was doing this 30 years ago so I could stream my music collection at the office over a crappy 1 mbps cable modem link - multiple connections worked fine.
@barbra @david42 Or get your money out of American banks, stop doing business with American companies, elect governments that refuse to take orders from American autocrats. The US is losing to a penny ante dictatorship in Iran,they can’t begin to cope with the rest of the world saying no.
@su_liam @david42 Well, I'm Canadian, and I don't know anyone who supports the Orange Shitgibbon.
They don't like that we removed their booze from sale, but even if we put it back on shelves it wouldn't sell any more. MAGA farmers in the US are big Trump supporters - so not buying any food from the USA works for me. I will never set foot in the US again. ever.
It's going to take my generation dying off to even start to undo the distrust they engendered. The US will probably dissolve into civil war before that happens.
@david42 > Since few people use those, it's unlikely to help much
Yes. That's the way things were. Back in the day. Before Trump, MAGA, Heritage, Project 2025. There was little use for AlterNIC, back then. But the world has changed and will continue to change: 3 weeks ago, 99% of people would still have ignored a new incarnation of AlterNIC. Today, that number may have changed to 98 or even 97% - and that's a lot.
In Dutch, but no pay wall. This is a podcast we published today: Ik luister naar 'Zo bepalen de VS wie online mag bestaan – ook in Europa' (NRC Vandaag) in de NRC Audio app: audio.nrc.nl/episode/181338194…
Sinds de Verenigde Staten internetcollectief Autistici/Inventati labelde als terroristisch, kan de organisatie geen donaties meer ontvangen en wil de bank geen zaken meer met haar doen.
@Marloezovic Thanks! I'm afraid my Dutch won't be quite good enough 🙂 (and the website does ask for a subscriber login). But great you're following up!
Luister naar de podcast NRC Vandaag. Elke werkdag hoor je hét verhaal van de dag, verteld door topjournalisten in deze populaire dagelijkse NRC-podcast.
@anantagd @Marloezovic Niet alleen eigen banken moeten komen maar ook eigen betalingssystemen zijn nodig.
Betalingssystemen dat onafhankelijk van smartphones zijn. Omdat deze mobieltjes draaien besturingssystemen die in de VS ontwikkeld zijn. Bij tech bedrijven die niet meer te vertrouwen zijn geworden.
Ook omdat deze mobieltjes moeten bij Google of Apple accounts ingelogd zijn om te kunnen werken en om appen te kunnen downloaden en om oppdateringen te kunnen krijgen.
@Marloezovic Een goed te begrijpen overzicht van het problemen rond dat wij in het kader van internet toegang en diensten totaal avhankelijk van de VS zijn geworden.
Someone's dad Passed out in the street The windup-key worker bees Buzz right on by At night, he still lies There 'cause nobody cares Insects with briefcases ignore him He's lying here for days Not my problem, man 'Cause look, man, this is New York This is New York
Now the rats are coming to feed Every night, they bring more and more of their friends Immune to rat poison, totally unafraid And this is a very special treat indeed They crawl up my pantleg; I'm too weak to move No one hears my cries, as they start on my toes Their teeth are like razors as they gnaw through my hands It sure beats McDonald's, so get it while it lasts
Someone's dad Passed out in the street The windup-key worker bees Buzz right on by At night, he still lies There 'cause nobody cares Insects with briefcases ignore him He's lying here for days Not my problem, man 'Cause look, man, this is New York This is New York
Now the rats are coming to feed Every night, they bring more and more of their friends Immune to rat poison, totally unafraid And this is a very special treat indeed They crawl up my pantleg; I'm too weak to move No one hears my cries, as they start on my toes Their teeth are like razors as they gnaw through my hands It sure beats McDonald's, so get it while it lasts
See the headline in the Post? No one helped that poor man for a week This is depressing Let's talk about sports Watch them tear that old building down On the way home On the way home
But when a bulldozer pops the rubble like a pimple Volcanoes of rats swarm all over us like bees As big as a cat, not afraid to chase people Or nibble on the wipers and vinyl roofs of cars People are panicking, the cops have all fled A shotgun will only kill one at a time And it won't be the last time we run for our lives From those teeth sinking into our arms and legs
City fathers see a bright future ahead Where the poor no longer exist Drive the neighborhood people Away from their homes Paint 'em over and quadruple the rent Isolate the undesirables in places like Harlem Our Sowetos without walls If they won't go away Cops smash their heads Like they did in Tompkins Square
These stories give me the creeps I hope I didn't miss that last train Some smart-ass plastered Life-size pictures of rats On the walls of the subway station Funny joke It's so quiet down here It's a little too quiet down here
Who's that across the tracks? Smoldering eyes are glaring up at me Inching closer and closer, almost laughing out loud The train finally comes, but it won't even stop Not here, not tonight I'm off in an hour, I don't wanna get involved With some guy in a suit fighting rats off his face Just leave 'em to the night, they'll be gone the next day
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
What happened? I don't see any articles on this. Did they just lose funding (and if so, why where they funded by the US if they were in the EU anyway?) or did something else happen? You have an article?
we communicated before internet, we’ll do so when internet means control by fascists. It is slower in many cases, but has maybe it’s charm, too. There is no click to check them all at once, u need to open it and read it manually, no profit at all tho any tech-gigant I remember having penpals😃 I loved it. Sharing stickers and zines. With every run to the post-office one can stick some more stickers🙃 Let’s connect and network, we even have a Fax🤭
Marcel
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