Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 63

@buoyantair I don't know enough about the network topology of #Scuttlebutt to be sure, but from what I've learnt so far, it seems unlikely to be able to work on a large scale without a much greater use of "pubs" and other such supernodes. I don't see that as a problem (see the second post). To me, it just means that server/client and P2P are two ends of a spectrum, rather than a hard dichotomy, and that successful future network tech will involve hybrids of the two.
@alcinnz @aral @VeintePesos

Having said that, I agree that supernodes don't have to be as centralized as servers. The #fediverse takes this one step, by connecting standard servers. The next step might be to disaggregate server functions, with some specializing in authentication, or media storage, or search, and so on. But we can't get rid of the concept of servers entirely without giving every device a persistent IP address (#IP6), and creating a decentralized replacement for #DNS.
@VeintePesos @buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@VeintePesos
> We can just turn to P2P networking and destroy the idea of "servers"

I like this idea politically. But after 20 years of waiting, I've yet to see a single piece of network software that can work entirely #P2P, without supernodes of any kind for bootstrapping, relay, ID mapping etc. Can you think of one? #BitTorrent needs both trackers and search sites to be useful. Even #BlockChains need "miners", which are supernodes, not pure P2P.
@buoyantair @aral @alcinnz

@gdr now I'm curious, but also scared ;)
@Wolf480pl

@bob sure, we've seen that before. Although a lot of the "alt-right" refugees who turned up in earlier waves turned out to be less trouble than we might have expected. That's what makes me increasingly sceptical of the claims about what is and isn't being targeted by the #datafarms. So often it ends up looking more like capitalists targeting both nationalists with anti-corporate sympathies and radical socialists, rather than the clear-cut "liberal" vs. "conservative" divide laid out in the PR.

As with its Chinese and EU counterparts (Great Firewall and Copyright Firewall), the US Border Firewall will not be effective in preventing communication among the targeted groups, will tangle millions of people up in false positives, and will lead to chilling effects on legitimate #FreeSpeech and other erosions of the #CivilLiberties that are essential to protecting democracy from creeping fascism. It's almost as it if it's designed to achieve the opposite of its stated goals ...

#FarceBook begins the erection of the Border Firewall of the US. No doubt goOgle and other US tech corporations will soon roll out their sections of the wall:
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/385827/facebook-ban-what-can-it-do-and-will-it-work

@jordan31 software definitely shapes people's behaviour. Two examples:
1) Infinite scrolling makes a UI more compulsive than having to click a link, and wait for a new page to load. This leads to people spending longer on websites and apps that use it.
2) FB's infamous psychology experiment:
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
@riking

@Are0h I think you need a hug man :)

@charlag fair point but;
1) Wire is a commercial product developed primarily by a paid team, not a volunteer-led open source community project. User feedback is customer feedback and gives them a sense of where pain points are for existing or potential customers.
2) That particular issues board is for meta-issues like feature requests. They have separate boards for bug triage on each of their packages.
3) See the follow-up in subsequent posts, especially:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/101777357034085651

@nipos Wire was proprietary for the first 4-5 years of development. They released the code for their clients in 2016:
http://fortune.com/2016/07/22/wire-open-source/

... and then the server in 2017.
https://medium.com/@wireapp/wire-server-code-now-100-open-source-the-journey-continues-88e24164309c

@josemanuel
> they were convinced that Christianity was a threat to the Empire.

So they fed them to enslaved carnivores, or nailed them to trees? How does this square with your claim that the Romans were "civilized"?

> Then that's Christianity's fault, not Rome's.

If the Romans had started behaving more like pre-Constantine Christians, that argument would be valid. They did the opposite. Christian Rome was just pre-Christian Rome on monotheistic steroids.

@josemanuel
> they were the most civilised people in Europe at the time.

Only if you accept the white supremacist definition of "civilized", which is something like 'able and willing to use unsustainable military-industrial power to enslave or murder one's neighbours'. By that definition, the US are the most civilized people in the world right now. I recommend reading 'Ishmael' by #DanielQuinn to fully understand how biased and self-justifying notions of "civilized" can be.

@sillystring sure, #Slack "works", like any datafarm "works", or they wouldn't be able to lure people in to be locked in. But that doesn't mean anything I said here is wrong:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/101771912984187731

@muzkore search results always serve people content they didn't ask for, and that's what recommendations are, by definition.

> the right to make your own mind up.

... is important, I agree. But it's not much use if you've fallen down a rabbit hole that gives you unlimited variations on one side of the argument. Just to be clear, I'm suggesting disconfirming evidence of flat earth theory be *included*, among a range of links representing multiple points of view on the subject.

@oz I also came across #Lantern when I was looking for something to use in China that didn't require me to install non-free apps from commercial VPN companies. Not sure how secure or useful it really is but it might be worth checking out for someone with the skills to audit the code:
https://github.com/getlantern

@wire I see various comments there about a "partnership" between #Signal and #WhatsApp. I see no mention of money changing hands, in either direction, or how much. Unless I'm not reading carefully enough, and missing that bit?

@aral that's a fine distinction. As a developer, you're in a better position than I am to know. But you'll need to convince me. Because it seems to me that outsourcing processing work to the user's PC - via JS black boxes - is exactly how #SurveillanceCapitalism achieves massive scale, while claiming that #ThereIsNoAlternative to centralized server infrastructure. A myth they've propagated so effectively that even many developers have started believing it:
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

@mjd totally agree. JS is an ugly hack for adding experimental functionality to browsers. Once any web function becomes common enough to justify standard JS libraries, it ought to be implemented in a standardized way in the browser, not fired down the pipe every time a user hits a web page that needs it. Among other things, it's a huge waste of bandwidth.