Notices by Sean R. Lynch ☑️ (seanl@social.literati.org), page 2

Two questions have occurred to me in the context of Zuck's testimony:

1. What does it mean for someone to "agree" to something when it's well known that almost nobody actually reads the type of agreement they've "agreed" to?

2. What does "consent" mean between two parties of vastly different power?

@woozle So far it's been primarily through tools like Privacy Badger and Multi-Account Containers. Privacy Badger at least should come with the browser and be on by default. It's essentially what Apple's now building in to Safari (the Privacy Badger functionality at least).

Tracking needs to be opt-in. Europe's "We use cookies, opt in or fuck off" is utterly worthless. We need laws against non-opt-in tracking, not laws forcing web sites to tell people meaningless things.

@pennsylforniageek Because just what we need for fixing privacy violations by the big centralized services is... another big centralized service. It's operated by CloudFlare, who already handle way too big a fraction of Internet traffic. They're just jealous of all the free data we're giving Google by using 8.8.8.8.

Mozilla has a petition asking Facebook to stop tracking people's browsing off the site unless they opt in to it. Frankly I think the solution is to remove the ability to track people across sites from the web entirely, but I signed the petition anyway. Facebook has taken a huge hit to their reputation, so now is a good time to be putting pressure on them to change their ways.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/campaigns/facebook-update/

@lnxw48a1 Wait Remedy still exists? I remember setting up Remedy Action Request back in 1996. Their template system encouraged making overly complicated templates. I can't imagine what it'd be like with 22 years of additional features.

We need a legal defense fund.

If any instance admins get hit with an undeserved lawsuit or criminal action due to your responsible operation of your instance, I pledge to contribute at least $1000 to your defense.

("Responsible" means no fascists or fostering of fascists. I believe in freedom of speech but they can provide their own spaces & legal defense.)

I used to work at Linden Lab. Its founder, Philip Rosedale, wants to use blockchain to track virtual assets across different virtual worlds. With free content this doesn't matter so much; you can just point at some inventory server and have access to the same stuff everywhere. But the blockchain seems well-suited to tracking something like license keys for commercial content. This is not an application I care about, but I *do* care about decentralized virtual worlds.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/03/vrba-high-fidelity-janusvr-metaverse.html

Squel (sql string builder for node.js) cannot, as far as I can tell, even handle a single quote inside a string in its "setFields" method. Go forth and inject some SQL.

It's not really end-to-end encryption of the company even *can* hand all your encryption keys to the government.

If you're still using Telegram, stop. Use something with genuine end-to-end encryption like XMPP with OMEMO, Tox, or Signal.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180320/19123839463/russian-court-says-telegram-must-hand-over-encryption-keys-to-state-intelligence-service.shtml

@bob You'll have price-controlled UBI stores with long lines that run out of stuff by the end of the day, and expensive grocery stores where people with jobs shop.

@bob Since they won't be able to kill consumer price inflation by raising interest rates (because the government won't be able to afford the payments), they'll have no choice but to resort to price controls. And the price controls will likely focus on the kinds of things people buy with UBI, which will ultimately result in a system that looks very much like "Basic" in Abraham and Franck's "The Expanse" series.

@bob Welfare has always been about keeping the people at the losing end of the system from revolting. At least Keynes believed in keeping them from revolting by making sure there was meaningful work available. Now they're trying to make people accept our badly distorted system as "normal".

A UBI will even further solidify our addiction to debt monetization and near-zero interest rates. When consumer price inflation finally comes it will be unkillable.

It takes far less effort for a spammer to create 1000 bot accounts than it is for a single legit human being caught up in one of Twitter's shitty algorithmic suspensions to restore their own account. The result is that Twitter's efforts to raise the quality of discourse on the platform only make it worse. The problem is that the very *idea* of Twitter is fatally and irreparably broken.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180312/23574639409/twitters-attempt-to-clean-up-spammers-meant-that-people-sarcastically-tweeting-kill-me-were-suspended.shtml

"Telegram ICO: Scam Among Cryptocurrency Scams"

It's so scammy it's spawned baby scams trying to scam off its scamminess.

Got a spam about this today. Not sure if it's the legit scam or one of the baby scams it's spawned. Either way, I reported it for the spam it was and went on with my life.

Oddly, the official Twitter account for Telegram mentions nothing about the ICO, though it's clear that Telegram is really having one. I've deleted Telegram over this crap.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/02/17/telegram-ico-scam-among-cryptocurrency-scams/#260544d21cf0

"Facebook knew for two years that a data firm harvested data from more than 50 million profiles of U.S. voters without their permission but did nothing to protect its users, Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr told CBSN on Saturday. Cadwalladr said Facebook threatened to sue in a bid to prevent The Guardian publishing an exposé on the data harvesting."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cambridge-analytica-facebook-knew-for-two-years-no-action-taken/

AFAICT Ruby exists because Python didn't look enough like Perl for its creator and early adopters. And it got popular because it had one web framework where Python had 20.

Literally all PayPal accomplishes by not allowing auto-filling of their password field is to make it more likely their customers will get phished by training them to always type in their password when they see a page that looks like the PayPal login page.

Why is it that financial companies are so consistently stupid when it comes to security? Oh, I know why. It's because they get to push nearly all of the cost of fraud onto consumers and merchants.

@thegibson @dewb I think one of the effects of the instantaneous nature of broadcast Internet communication is that it makes us feel pressured to have an opinion about everything. And then we feel pressured to defend our initial opinions even when new information comes to light.

If you were intentionally designing a device to be easily hacked into and used for surveillance, I'm not sure what you'd come up with besides a "smart" phone. These devices are honeypots for their own users, especially when combined with "the cloud", which is a euphemism for "a computer that belongs to someone who suffers no repercussions if they lose your data or give it to the government."

Haven't been doing a good job keeping up with my RSS feed lately, and less frequent posters tend to be drowned out by the big multi-author blogs, but I just ran across this post from @ajroach42 that would make a good answer to whoever was asking about URL shorteners a few days ago, and I don't know if Andrew responded directly. http://ajroach42.com/permanent-urls-from-archive-org/