Revv

I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.

Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.

For a company, it’s essential to be able to monitor/review employee communications for legal/compliance reasons. That said, while you should assume that any communication made with your official email/slack/teams/whatever can be seen by the company if it needs to be (e.g. somebody sues for something, even something potentially unrelated to you, that creates a need to search for relevant records), it’s unlikely that Slack is actively reporting your conversations to your boss.

As others have said, if you don’t want your company to see something you’re saying, don’t say it at work or on their platforms. In the U.S. at least, you have no expectation of privacy at work. If you’re worried about something you’ve already said, you might just be screwed. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

At least among the folks in my circles, in addition to the many fine answers already given, it refers to an irl action that is completely idiotic/unhinged that you’re doing for laughs (either your own or those around you).

It’s worse than that. It’s arguing that her estate and surviving husband can’t sue because he had a trial subscription to Disney+. It’s fucking absurd.

Obviously, you do it on the night of a full moon. Jeez, they really don’t teach critical thinking anymore, huh?

Transphobes: You can’t change your gender from what was assigned at birth. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Also transphobes: a person who was assigned female at birth, was born with a vagina, and raised as a woman in a country that is in no way supportive of its queer population… is not a woman.

If only mental gymnastics were an Olympic event.

Check out low end box. I found coupons for racknerd. I have one VPS that’s $10/yr, another that’s $18/yr. I’ve had zero downtime in the 18 months I’ve used them. No complaints from me. YMMV of course.

You can get super cheap VPSs and use them just as a reverse proxy (with access via VPN). I host 11 servers using one single-core VPS as a reverse proxy. All data resides on premises, in house. I pay 10/yr for VPS. It definitely does not defeat the purpose.

I’m not a docker expert- i tend to just run everything in an LXC. But, doesn’t docker typically run as root? It might be that you gave your lxc user UID proper permissions, but not the lxc root UID.

Alternatively, you are aware that LXC UID 1000 != Host UID 1000, yes?

FWIW, permissions in proxmox/LXC are really clear and predictable… once you understand the way the map in the config files.

Ah yes, tracingwoodgrains.com- everyone’s source for hard-hitting, unbiased news coverage. 🙄

This story got shot down for the whiny trash it is two days ago. What made you think people would forget?

Honestly, I think the theatrical releases are better and some of the stuff left on the cutting room floor belonged there (looking at you, weird mouth of Sauron).

Get at me when they release the Tom Bombadil/Scouring of the Shire cut though.

Aside from driving being an activity that, in my opinion, will require something approaching AGI, there are other issues to consider. Self driving cars will be completely unable to make difficult decisions reliably. How, for example, do they deal with a robbery where you just have someone stand in front of the car to immobilize it and then have the folks inside the car at your mercy? I have to imagine that either you’re producing pedestrian murder machines or serving up passengers on a silver platter.

Well, on substack, that community of writers includes nazis who are able to monetize their hate through that platform. So, if that’s what you’re looking for…

Personally, I take comfort that the executive will be weakened as it looks more and more likely that we’re about to have a wannabe dictator coming to office.

I think this might want a clean sheet design. At least as I understand it, there are issues with privacy in the fediverse/activitypub vis-a-vis non-public messages. I think it’s also an area where, in order to go the most good, you’d want simple signups and easy engagement (to say nothing of being able to trust that your info has been deleted when you delete it).

Clearly, I’m here and I value the philosophical underpinnings of the fediverse, but I think it might not be the best fit for dating.

That said, if you feel like you can solve those problems, you’d be doing a world of good if you’re right.

Nonprofit versions of vital social tech. If I had the money sitting around, I’d love to start a nonprofit dating site/app. I met my wife on OKC in 2011 before it got bought up and enshittified. It was great and wasn’t geared toward just keeping you engaged (they’re soooooo bad now!). You’d probably have to gatekeep it with a small fee to disincentive bots, but with a relatively small investment, you could create something really useful for folks without preying on anyone’s desperation.

Signal would be a good model for this sort of thing.

Edit: typos

Racknerd via the coupon @ Low end box.

The full price is like $24/yr, so even if it goes up, meh.

I’m a big fan of cheap (as in ~$10/yr vps) and reverse proxy over wireguard. My home ip isn’t exposed and I’m able to quickly spin new containers up by updating my reverse proxy config and adding a wireguard peer.

I keep two VPSs- one as reverse proxy for all my miscellaneous services and another solely for email. The latter port forwards raw traffic over wireguard to my email server container. That way, even if the VPS gets compromised, my personal data remains secure.

I end up paying ~ $30/yr (+ whatever I’m paying in electricity) for domain + VPS. It’s a bit more involved than tailscale, etc, but I’m willing to put in a little extra work to make sure I’m not at the mercy of some company getting up to some rent-seeking bullshit.

I agree with respect to the low likelihood of changing one’s old posts being effective in preventing their being used as training data. I’d assume, however, that those who are motivated to “vandalize” (itself a loaded term to refer to altering one’s own words) their old posts have more than one motive; in addition to inconveniencing humans, doing so devalues reddit as a place to find information and, in theory, punishes reddit for their actions, maybe even deters others from behaving similarly.

This a situation where I think that maybe a shared distaste/disdain for “slacktivism” leads to folks discouraging potentially effective collective action in one of the limited contexts where online protest has a chance of having any effect.