Notices by Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social), page 28

pettter ✅ (pettter@social.umeahackerspace.se)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 03:49:55 EDT pettter ✅
in reply to
- clacke
- zerohedge
@clacke @zerohedge E-voting is a patently _bad idea_ that misses the point of voting and democracy in the first place.

In short, voting and democracy are not tools of governance but of _legitimacy_. Governing and deciding things through voting is all well and good, and is what the legitimacy is intented to help with, but the _primary_ use is to make everyone (or near everyone) feel that the decisions and appointments made are legitimate.

That means the voting system needs to be so obviously hard to fake that any attempt to delegitimize the results falls flat on it's face. That means, essentially, hand-counted paper ballots, where the ballots are mixed in transparent boxes, with complete (theoretical) oversight from _anyone_, and actual oversight from many opposing parties.

Any e-voting system is, for all but a small subset of people, essentially a black box that does magic. That's easy to delegitimize _regardless_ of its theoretical or provable properties.

In conversation Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 03:49:55 EDT from social.umeahackerspace.se permalink Repeated by rysiek
Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 05:24:22 EDT Nate Cull

It's spooky, those are exactly my two biggest fears too.
https://twitter.com/odavis_/status/914809753716523009
oxford comma much?
https://mastodon.social/media/3iDt7ip1LCyclxdlkfU

In conversation Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 05:24:22 EDT from mastodon.social permalink Repeated by rysiek
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 04:29:54 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- Eugen
@Gargron this one is the best one so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvuwldnG7c0
In conversation Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 04:29:54 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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  Everything Wrong With The Room In 8 Minutes Or Less
  
  By CinemaSins from YouTube
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 03:37:24 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson

"This is complicated, there's a lot more Greek letters in the math now"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LawfHPh6s
#SmarterEveryDay
In conversation Wednesday, 04-Oct-2017 03:37:24 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  250,000 DOMINOES! - The American Domino Record - Smarter Every Day 178
  
  By SmarterEveryDay from YouTube
Lyrilith (lyrilith@mastodon.art)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2017 13:30:04 EDT Lyrilith

Inktober x 31 Witches | 3. Merchant Witch
I had a few ideas for this one, but thought a small and secretive shop might be better. I’m not sure I want to know what that potion does to the one who takes it. 😵
#inktober #31witches #witch #art #drawing #ink

In conversation Tuesday, 03-Oct-2017 13:30:04 EDT from mastodon.art permalink Repeated by rysiek
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2017 04:26:31 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- Antanicus
@Antanicus and, they are pushing for legalizing silencers https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16403318/republican-gun-silencer-bill-mass-shooting
What is wrong with these people...
In conversation Tuesday, 03-Oct-2017 04:26:31 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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  Republicans want to pass a gun bill that critics say will make mass shootings more deadly
  
  from Vox
  
  In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, controversy on the Hearing Protection Act begins anew.
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 18:32:17 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
in reply to
- ☠️ Grumpy Oldman
@grmpyoldman he's not gonna come around here no more... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8
In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 18:32:17 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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  Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - Don't Come Around Here No More
  
  By TomPettyVEVO from YouTube
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:54:29 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- Spencer Alves
@impiaaa oh... wow.

In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:54:29 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Spencer Alves (impiaaa@dev.glitch.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 12:51:10 EDT Spencer Alves

https://www.thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/
In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 12:51:10 EDT from dev.glitch.social permalink Repeated by rysiek
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  Thoughts & Prayers: The Game
  
  from Thoughts & Prayers: The Game
  
  America faces an epidemic of mass shootings. It's up to you to stop them... with the power of your thoughts and prayers.
🏵️ virtualice 🏵️ (cobaltvelvet@octodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:14:43 EDT 🏵️ virtualice 🏵️

sorry i accidentally the fediverse
again

In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:14:43 EDT from octodon.social permalink Repeated by rysiek
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:52:12 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
in reply to
- Eugen
@Gargron so, what was the underlying cause of the downtime? /me likes to learn from post-mortems

In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 16:52:12 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 25-Sep-2017 02:48:49 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson

"Your tattoos seem to be spelled incorrectly" is clearly among the sickest of burns.

In conversation Monday, 25-Sep-2017 02:48:49 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 25-Sep-2017 01:26:53 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- Elly, nasty enby :heart_pan:
- kɜ:ʳ :dragnmlem:
@chr @Elizafox https://mastodon.social/media/4bnYdvGOzilLSueHF8U

In conversation Monday, 25-Sep-2017 01:26:53 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2017 06:19:31 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson

Wooo! https://publiccode.eu/
In conversation Sunday, 17-Sep-2017 06:19:31 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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  Public Money, Public Code
  
  Public Money, Public Code - A campaign for releasing publicly financed software as Free Software
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2017 17:57:52 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
in reply to
@jeffcliff @bortzmeyer @ghostdancer I see you're referring to one of Google Jigsaw projects? Jigsaw is a team at Google, not a project: https://jigsaw.google.com/
Also, Zuckerberg doesn't have anything to do with it.
No need to mix things up...

In conversation Thursday, 14-Sep-2017 17:57:52 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2017 03:26:21 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
in reply to
- Stéphane Bortzmeyer
- Mr. Jeff Cliff, BSc(CompSci)
@jeffcliff @bortzmeyer "big fuckup"? You mean like Internet of Things? ;)
#EternalSeptember will never be over. The Internet is turning into cable TV. Consider: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/
In conversation Thursday, 14-Sep-2017 03:26:21 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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  Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet
  
  By Leo Mirani from Quartz
  
  It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly.
  
  Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.
  
  “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook.” In Africa, Christoph Stork stumbled upon something similar. Looking at results from a survey on communications use for Research ICT Africa, Stork found what looked like an error. The number of people who had responded saying they used Facebook was much higher than those who said they used the internet. The discrepancy accounted for some 3% to 4% of mobile phone users, he says.
  
  Since at least 2013, Facebook has been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet. But even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook users who don’t know they’re on the internet. So is Facebook succeeding in its goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet? And what does it mean if masses of first-time adopters come online not via the open web, but the closed, proprietary network where they must play by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rules?
  
  This is more than a matter of semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. And that has implications for us all.
  
  The data
  
  11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. Measuring Facebook penetration versus internet penetration is tricky business. Internet penetration numbers come from national regulators and from estimates by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body. These are generally months if not years old. Facebook numbers come from Facebook’s advertising platform. These can be tricky, too. Some people have more than one account. Some accounts are rarely used. And some people access Facebook through phones with only the most basic of online features, in which case it is hard to argue that they really are using the internet in any meaningful way.
  
  In an attempt to replicate Stork and Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30 days. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500 respondents each.
  
  It would appear, on the surface, that more people use the internet than use Facebook, a perfectly sensible outcome.
  
  But a closer look at the data (available in full here) shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook users said they do not use the internet. These are largely young people; the median age of respondents with this combination of answers is 25 in Indonesia and 22 in Nigeria.
  
  It would be silly to extrapolate this to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. But the survey does provide replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya. Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions. (Quartz commissioned limited surveys in just two countries; we encourage researchers and other journalists to conduct more large-scale studies.)
  
  The effects of the misconception also are visible in the survey results. We asked respondents whether they follow links out of Facebook. In both countries, more than half of those who don’t know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook, compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook and the internet. If people stay on one service, it follows that content, advertisers, and associated services also will flow to that service, possibly to the exclusion of other venues.
  
  How Facebook became the internet
  
  At Davos this year, Sandberg told the well-heeled crowd (paywall) that in the developing world, “people will walk into phone stores and say ‘I want Facebook.’ People actually confuse Facebook and the internet in some places.” Or as Iris Orriss, Facebook’s head of localization and internationalization, has put it, “Awareness of the Internet in developing countries is very limited. In fact, for many users, Facebook is the internet, as it’s often the only accessible application.” (Emphasis in the original.)
  
  Facebook is “often the only accessible application,” as Orriss puts it, but that’s because Facebook—which did not respond to requests to comment on this story—has worked to ensure that it is the easiest and cheapest to access. The company backs internet.org, an initiative to “bring the Internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.” Yet internet.org’s showpiece, an app now available in nearly half a dozen countries, provides free access only to Facebook, Facebook messenger, and a handful of other services (the precise lineup varies by country).
  
  Most of these other services are well-meaning and related to development: Women’s rights. Jobs. Maternal-health information. An Ebola FAQ. The only concessions to the wider web are Wikipedia and Google search. But clicking through on a Google search result requires a data plan—and that must be paid for by the user. (Despite the name, internet.org is not a non-profit concern, but very much a part of Facebook Inc.)
  
  Ghana’s Facebook phone looked like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Telecom operators across the developing world also contribute to the confusion—though this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mobile web users spend a lot of time on Facebook and WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook). Mobile networks see this and offer these customers social-only plans.
  
  In India, you can get a Facebook-only data plan for $2.50 a year (the cheapest full data plans cost about $10 a year.) In the Philippines, Facebook-only plans cost a fifth as much as data plans. In Ghana, telecom operator Tigo once sold a Facebook phone. It looked like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Even in America, Sprint offers a data plan (paywall) solely for access to Facebook and Twitter.
  
  Finally, there is Facebook Zero, which predates internet.org and allows users of basic phones to access Facebook at no cost. Mobile operators have grumbled about this particular arrangement. Let them. One day Facebook will beam its services from the skies with its fleet of indefatigable, solar-powered drones.
  
  Why it matters
  
  Facebook bosses generally dismiss suggestions that the whole internet.org project might be self-interested. Writing in Time, Lev Grossman was granted access to Mark Zuckerberg when the Facebook CEO went to India to promote internet access. When Grossman asks whether internet.org is self-serving, Zuckerberg allows only that it may, one day, several decades down the line, pay off: “If you do good things for people in the world, then that comes back and you benefit from it over time.”
  
  Dave Wehner, Facebook’s finance chief, is more forthright. “I do think that over the long term, that focusing on helping connect everyone will be a good business opportunity for us.” If Facebook becomes one of the top services in these countries, he explained in a recent earnings call, “then over time we will be compensated for some of the value that we’ve provided.”
  
  That is a fair goal for any profit-seeking company. And besides, isn’t some access better than none at all? John Naughton of the Guardian argues that this is not the case:
  
  This is a pernicious way of framing the argument, and we should resist it. The goal of public policy everywhere should be to increase access to the internet—the whole goddam internet, not some corporate-controlled alcove—for as many people as possible. By condoning zero-rating we will condemn to a lifetime of servitude as one of Master Zuckerberg’s sharecroppers. We can, and should, do better than that.
  
  “It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and cherish.” Already services are starting to move away from the open web and to Facebook. And it’s happening not just in the poor world, but in poor parts of the developed world, where there also exists a sense among some that using an app isn’t the same as using the internet, which requires a web browser like Safari or Internet Explorer. Salix Homes manages government-owned subsidized housing in some the poorest parts of Salford, a deprived area in the north of England. Salix recently decided to accept complaints and rent payments from its tenants on Facebook.
  
  “We took the view that let’s go where people are rather than force them to go to our website,” says James Allan, the firm’s marketing manager. As a result, interactions are up 90% while traffic on the website has fallen.
  
  Allan is not in the business of deciding whether Facebook’s omnipresence among less affluent internet users is a good or bad thing. It is simply a thing. But as LIRNEasia’s Samarajiva says, “It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and cherish.” Yet he is optimistic that Facebook eventually will lead its users to that place.
  
  “Maybe it will introduce them,” he says, “to the larger concept of the internet. They’re already on the internet. They just don’t know they’re there.”
  
  A note on the methodology: The surveys of Indonesia and Nigeria used through this piece were administered by GeoPoll, which uses SMS to conduct real-time surveys without the need for face-to-face interaction in remote areas. This survey was conducted in late December in Indonesia and Nigeria, with 500 respondents from each country, equaling a margin of error of 4.38% at the 95% confidence level. For more information on this methodology visit research.geopoll.com. In addition, Quartz also commissioned surveys of India, Brazil, and Indonesia from Jana, whose members are reached via smartphone. Quartz asked Jana respondents, “Do you agree with the statement ‘Facebook is the Internet’?” Quartz also asked a representative sample of Americans the same question using SurveyMonkey.
  
  Read this next: $30 smartphones are here—and they’re getting better every day
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Sep-2017 18:10:54 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
in reply to
- lnxw48a1
- nds
@lnxw48a1 @nds and killing the stuff that made Firefox awesome (i.e. extensions)

In conversation Wednesday, 06-Sep-2017 18:10:54 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Sep-2017 11:51:27 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- nds
@nds they would keep being way better at defending the open web by focusing on making Firefox absolutely awesome. And then using the userbase to fight the good fight. As they have in the past.
With Chrome/Chromium pushing Firefox out, Mozilla has less and less say...

In conversation Wednesday, 06-Sep-2017 11:51:27 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 04-Sep-2017 04:38:19 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson

"It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas."
No shit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/30/zephyr-teachout-google-is-coming-after-critics-in-academia-and-journalism-its-time-to-stop-them/

In conversation Monday, 04-Sep-2017 04:38:19 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2017 06:02:17 EDT Rysiekúr Memesson
- Piers Beckley
@piersb but the real beauty here is that there are hundreds of #GNUSocial / #StatusNet instances that #Mastodon already can federate with. We are many.

In conversation Tuesday, 04-Apr-2017 06:02:17 EDT from mastodon.social permalink

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Notices by Rysiekúr Memesson (rysiek@mastodon.social), page 28