Olivier Forget @teleclimber@social.tchncs.de

Article also makes clear why effective #moderation on a huge site is so difficult:

"(The Saudi troll farm) decided to mute critics of Saudi Arabia’s military attacks on Yemen by reporting the messages to Twitter as “sensitive.” Such reported posts are one of the things Twitter considers as signals when it decides to hide content from other users, blunting its impact."

...so even moderation tools aren't enough, they need human beings to check for false reports. Moderation cannot be automated.

Apparently at least one major government had an insider working undercover at Twitter:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html

It doesn't really matter if Twitter is trustworthy or not, simply having a vast amount of personal data in one place is going to attract spies from all sorts of organisations that wish to misuse it.

This is why decentralisation is important, to make it technically more difficult to invade people's privacy.

#Privacy #Twitter

I have half a dozen different node scripts running on my server to take care of small custom services. Anyone know of useful tools for managing and monitoring such things without doing lots of setup or work?

Last night some people asked me why decentralized systems were useful, given that a company could just set up a couple of centralized servers. Then I explained what NotPetya did to Maersk. https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/?eminfo=%7b%22EMAIL%22%3a%22vMXQ8FVNjnx0q6IHKGCrs8bo%2fdzItv7b%22%2c%22BRAND%22%3a%22FO%22%2c%22CONTENT%22%3a%22Newsletter%22%2c%22UID%22%3a%22FO_DTA_8E80F659-8098-47BE-B030-5C59FC9429A1%22%2c%22SUBID%22%3a%2284709699%22%2c%22JOBID%22%3a%22862365%22%2c%22NEWSLETTER%22%3a%22DATA_SHEET%22%2c%22ZIP%22%3a%2294402%22%2c%22COUNTRY%22%3a%22USA%22%7d

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1053070141024620544

Mise en abyme...
#fuckfacebook

https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/ a really cool prototype by @Ninjatrappeur about an artesanal cypress E-Paper Raspberry Pi typewriter for distraction-free writing in neovim. Unfortunately so far he leaves out the most crucial information: what battery he's using!

This is kind of a huge problem in FLOSS generally. There isn't enough infrastructure dedicated to keeping things maintained. Most core functionality gets kept up, but you'll find little broken bits on the sides all over the place. -_-

This is a great, illustrated explanation of how a #TLS connection happens - https://tls.ulfheim.net - #netsec

Use the internet, not just companies.

https://sivers.org/netskill

But what's the most common self-hosted server on earth? It ain't fediverse software, it's Minecraft. Why? I think the appeal of building a world with you and your friends is very appealing.

If we can make it very easy in-world to be able to program the entities you're interact with as you walk around and talk, that could be a big win.

Suggestion for Mastodon (to prevent eventual gMastodon instance): cap instance size at 100 - 1,000 account by default. Make it a social contract for instances not to federate with instances greater than that limit.

Or, a few years from now, say hello to “gMastodon”. (See history of email and the Web for a lesson in the future.)

That said, we might already be on that path.

#economiesOfScale #networkEffects #powerDifferentials #ventureCapital

This video of yesterday's SpaceX launch is spectacular

(via: https://imgur.com/UDS9eiQ)

i'm self-hosting my own cloud now. so the cloud is someone else's computer but it's also my computer. although i'm renting it, so it actually is someone else's computer. also it's a virtual machine so it's not even a computer. i forgot where i was going with this.

RT @lkherman@twitter.com: Well, shit: Capping off this week is Taylor Swift getting...political?

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/lkherman/status/1049081965801029633

RT @dizwire@twitter.com: Holy shit, Mad Magazine 👏👏👏
Pulling no punches.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/dizwire/status/1047836036057812993

A beginner's guide to #nationalism:

Giant platforms like Medium are here to make sure you're always a renter and never an owner