mtumishi

A centralized web ain’t worth fighting for.

  • 52 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 3Y ago
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Cake day: Oct 22, 2020

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Hello. The horrible loss of life in this crisis is clear for all to see. Even though there is so much confusion on what is coming out of Ukraine, I wonder what is really the situation of government control like. Is the Ukrainian government controlling major areas or is the Russian army having an upper hand?


> The many existing decentralized social networks that currently make up the ecosystem can be categorized into federated and p2p architectures. Our approach will be to combine the best of both worlds by integrating the portability of self-certifying protocols with the user-friendliness of delegated hosting, so users don’t have to run their own infrastructure and developers can build performant apps. Moderation is an important part of any online social forum, which is why we will proactively build tooling for reputation and moderation systems that are transparent, opt-in, and multi-layered, as well as create frameworks for others to build such tooling. We’re building on existing protocols and technologies but are not committed to any stack in its entirety. We see use cases for blockchains, but Bluesky is not a blockchain, and we believe the adoption of social web protocols should be independent of any blockchain. > > Our current focus is on building and releasing a prototype that illustrates our approach.
fedilink

A perspective about NSO that I find important but not usually covered is how their success is related to centralized mobile phone operating software. One vulnerability exposes billions of devices. Perhaps if we had FOSS mobile OS options as mainstream installations, it would not be as easy for these companies to hack almost anybody at once.


For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week’s terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise signup effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are from existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff.

The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that in so far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.

In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.




Does the proximity mothers have with children at the formative age (0-15) compared to the time they have with their fathers (if they are present in their lives) explain this variation? Or it is just that mothers are more likely to be easier to support than fathers?


After upgrading to 0.15.1, I activated the signup form. I haven’t had to deal with the daily trolls. Not ideal but it helps.



I like the app. Good work on the tutorials and it feels overall like a well done package.


I have been to two cities in West Africa: Lagos and Dakar. My experience was no different from other parts like SouthErn Africa and The Horn.


On to financing the project. They need to find $1B to get the project done and I wonder whether this was a tactical move to build confidence on their credibility while fundraising.



Question 1 - yes, ansible is run on your local machine.


Kate + RStudio.

I spend a lot of time working in R so RStudio is a practical choice. It could be better in many ways though, which is why I use Kate for general editing tasks.


cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/143207 > Xiaomi has patented a new fingerprint scanning technology that allows the user to use the fingerprint sensor by touching any part of their screen. Now you don’t have to try anymore to turn on your phone or place your finger on the finger reader, because you can do this by touching anywhere on the phone’s screen. This is a very privacy issue. > > It will have a set of infrared LED light transmitters under the capacitive touch screen layer and above the usual AMOLED display. > > ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4387e3dd-63e3-41d4-acc5-157a1c6269fa.png)

Hey - just checking in. How is this “news”? Is it because Ukraine is in the news?


This is very interesting. Now I wonder if my mind thinks best about code in native language or the language I first encountered code in.






Some journalist also making that case that this Hamdok threat is being used to bargain with the military especially on appointments.


Don’t forget the whole idea of federation is that an instance with 10 members is not limited to those members only on content sources. I like it when more instances interlink and therefore reduce the centralization risks while keeping network benefits.


Look south: challenges and opportunities for the ‘rules of the road’ for cyberspace in ASEAN and the AU
> Nonetheless, questions remain on how and where agreement on international law and cyber norms at the regional level can be achieved.



cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/28510 > > Congolese rumba is a musical genre and a dance common in urban areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo. Generally danced by a male-female couple, it is a multicultural form of expression originating from an ancient dance called nkumba (meaning ‘waist’ in Kikongo).

> Congolese rumba is a musical genre and a dance common in urban areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo. Generally danced by a male-female couple, it is a multicultural form of expression originating from an ancient dance called nkumba (meaning ‘waist’ in Kikongo).

Watamu is quite something.


Been looking for a reliable VPS in the region for low latency and stuff. Hair-pinning Europe is not a good gesture for an “African” instance but we are pragmatic.


Public participation is a key variable in budget processes. The problem though is that the theatre of participation is less by affected residents and more by executive offices.


Nope! I would rather deal with spam than everyday surveillance.



Matirî Ngemi podcast
> Matirí Ngemi is a podcast discussing, exploring and researching the Agikuyu culture, history and heritage.




cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/22603 > > While Makhan Singh does not state it explicitly (possibly due to writing the history in post-colonial Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta's presidency in 1969, and in the midst of political assassinations of Kenyatta's left wing opponents) he makes clear that the demand of the KAU for complete abolition of the pass system was significantly watered down by Kenyatta, who was happy to accept a formally non-racial pass system in its place.

> While Makhan Singh does not state it explicitly (possibly due to writing the history in post-colonial Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta's presidency in 1969, and in the midst of political assassinations of Kenyatta's left wing opponents) he makes clear that the demand of the KAU for complete abolition of the pass system was significantly watered down by Kenyatta, who was happy to accept a formally non-racial pass system in its place.


B and 8; 0 and O convinced me to adopted it as my default font for LIbreOffice.






Alarm grows over escalating Ethiopia war as more foreign citizens told to flee
> France became the latest country to tell its citizens to get out of Ethiopia, while the UN has ordered the immediate evacuation of family members of international staff

Empire be looting since forever:

These artefacts were taken in 1868 after the battle of Maqdala between the British and Ethiopian empires. Some of the objects had been offered in an auction in Britain in June by a private seller descended from a British soldier who fought in Maqdala.












Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210911000935/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/africa/guinea-coup-americans.html



> Running for 354 or 355 days, it is approximately 11 days shorter than the solar, Gregorian calendar. > > The year has 12 months beginning with Muharram, and ending with Dhul al-Hijjah. Each month starts with the sighting of the new moon.

This is a brainstorm post, not a peer-reviewed paper on moderating fediverse :) Mods with finite resources cannot compete with automated systems. The signal to noise ratio will keep increasing if a new account can post 10 items immediately they join. The alternative could be restricted signups (signups by invitations, recommendations) even though a low hanging fruit could be temporal throttling for new users. Something got to give in the long run.


I agree on the need for a technical friction on new users ability to post – and especially on the main communities that are federated with other instances.


Good stuff @dessalines@lemmy.ml. Successful upgrade on these shores.


If you look at their funding sources – and therefore the structure they are constrained in – you will notice there is a certain pro-American, anti-other sensibility. Philanthropies, while they look all well meaning (and most evolve into reasonable places for social change), they also serve to ‘launder’ the shady histories of their founders. Chen Zuckerburg Foundation does not sound as ironic promoting privacy compared to if this was done by Facebook.

Funding is a VERY tough position to figure out in human rights work, and while I know people need to be paid even when they are in so called non-profit (my preferred word here would be non-monetary gains, since profits could generally be social benefits, but I digress), I also believe wherever you knowingly take money from models you in strategic ways.

Also, consider this recent post on how social indexology reproduces hegemonic relations at the global stage: https://baraza.africa/post/10070

The article critically examines how the neoliberal ethos has influenced the racialised ranking of countries using indexes, or what I propose to call social indexology (SI). SI refers to the use of quantitative metrics to measure the performance of countries based on selected indicators, often drawn from a pool of Western and neoliberal variables associated with governance, corruption, development and other value-loaded concepts. The article critically examines the methodological, ideological and cultural shortcomings of SI and how it reinforces existing racial stereotypes about the presumed natural differences between ‘advanced’ European societies and ‘backward’ Global South countries. These racialised imageries have continued since the time of Enlightenment, colonialism and slavery and persist even under global neoliberal hegemony today. The use of SI metrics for the purpose of quantified measurement and ranking gives it the appearance of being ‘scientific’ and as such has the implicit ideological power of making the racialised inequality of peoples and countries much more acceptable and natural.



Indeed, it would be quite a whole discourse. When network effects are not gated in a private company, perhaps we could be on to other issues like quality of service, and selling things, not behavior. Things like storage standards, backups, portability etc. But here we are, asking how to make WhatsApp better, and Amazon more diverse.

Ironic how after every public crisis, these centralized platforms emerge stronger and more accepted in the everyday life. Perhaps because the issues that are framed as problematic are not against their existence – like EE2E debate, Cambridge Analytica, 2020/2021 censorship tirade linked to COVID and US Elections.

The other point, Twitter in Nambia :), I think we should not assume it would be better. The point, as I see it, is centralization, not nationalism. A Nambia billionaire may be just as worse as a Silicon Valley billionaire. Individual <> Individual, Individual <> State: The market wants to mediate those relations and I think not all domains need the market. Other mediation strategies like collective ownership at the community level can succeed, given time and good will.


Thank you for the article. Renata (the author) has been very consistent on the asymmetrical global relations of technology we contend with. part of me feels the privacy agenda has created a lot of blindspots in public discourse and issues of technological self determination (at the individual and collective level) have been put on the backburner. Fediverse and its enabling protocols offer both networked value AND reasonable sense of independence. Definitely a small piece of the bigger puzzle but yeah, surveillance discourse without (de)centralization aspects is a major blindspot in popular discourse. E2EE on Facebook apps sounds quite an oxymoron.


> As usual, several Israeli police officers would be there at the gate, which is close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. But Eyad was used to seeing them there, and in case he was ever stopped (he rarely was), he always carried three forms of identification to show – two of them attesting to his autism. > Realising the danger Eyad was in, Wardeh called out “Nakheh nakheh (disabled)!” in Hebrew, to warn the officers that the man they were chasing had a disability.

This is a community to discuss Tanzanian issues. If you would like to discuss issues lke SEO, you can start a community for that. This post in this community is therefore spam.


> The harm to any one individual in a group that results from a violation of privacy rights might be relatively small or hard to pin down, but the harm to the group as a whole can be profound.

> It allows the country to go ahead with the delegate system of voting as earlier mooted, ending weeks of uncertainty.

> Ethiopia's foreign ministry said that if the U.S. restrictions continued, Addis Ababa "will be forced to reassess its relations with the United States, which might have implications beyond our bilateral relationship."


See this too:

In 1984, Palestinian American intellectual and Columbia University Professor Edward Said famously argued that Palestinians are denied “permission to narrate”.

More than 30 years later, in 2020, Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, analysed opinion articles published in two daily newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – and two weekly news magazines – The New Republic and The Nation – over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that “Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways – yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-companies-are-trying-to-silence-palestinian-voices




> Peacekeeping is less costly and less disastrous than either an ill-planned humanitarian intervention or a full blown humanitarian crises. It will give the international community the presence and access to guarantee that parties to the conflict honor their agreement.

I wonder for whom this danger The Economist is making squares for. /s