I can't get sad for Instagram's demise, because I never used it.

It is good that I use minoritary hobbie platforms like this instead. Any time I try one of the big ones I find it so full of shit as to be of no practical use.

2020-06-14 19:40 from zooer
Zoom announced this past week that those who use the video platform
for free will no longer have encrypted calls and that this new change
will happen sooner than later. The reasoning behind this change
—according to the company — is that they want to be able to
comply and work with local law enforcement agencies as well as the
FBI in the event that Zoom would be used for malicious reasons. 

I call that bullshit. I mean, they are taking the feature from free users only, right? If it was a compliance thing, wouldn't it affect everybody?

The connection is not end-to-end encrypted anyway. We could guess that without endpoint encryption, law enforcement agencies (or anyone else?) would not have to contact Zoom to get involved when they want to monitor a conference; they could just intercept any participant. This is less work on Zoom's part.

Zoom is the public's favorite right now, but it's not trustworthy. I'm thinking about installing Jitsi Meet on one of my servers.

2020-06-18 09:25 from IGnatius T Foobar
The connection is not end-to-end encrypted anyway. We could guess that

without endpoint encryption, law enforcement agencies (or anyone else?)

would not have to contact Zoom to get involved when they want to
monitor a conference; they could just intercept any participant. This

is less work on Zoom's part.

Zoom is the public's favorite right now, but it's not trustworthy.
I'm thinking about installing Jitsi Meet on one of my servers.

Have you heard of Jami? I was talking about it on I2P's IRC with somebody this week. It is a peer-to-peer video, call and chat system. I have not tried myself. I read a review and it looked like a cool concept that needed some UX improvements and bug fixing.

I think Social Meidia was born as a data mining device. I don't think it has a more evil streak than other online platforms. They just happen to be very powerful

I mean, I have seen a heck of a lot of censorship and information manipulation in freaking games for kids (such as Horse Reality). I think the world as a whole is getting mad and everybody is trying to push their political agenda on the digital platforms they control. It is just that Social Media is very good at it.

Data mining is apropos for this week. It was just discovered that the TikTok app was sending every user's clipboard contents back home to the CCP all the time. They just got busted, and claimed that it was for "spam prevention".
Riiiiiight. If you believe that, you probably believe the official death count from Wuhan.

Profit! I just got a check for $17.99 as part of a class action lawsuit because my TV was spying on me.

"The lawsuit alleges VIZIO violated privacy laws and consumer-protection laws by collecting sensitive information about what was displayed on certain VIZIO Smart TVs during the time period above for sale to advertisers. The lawsuit also alleges VIZIO did this without the consent or knowledge of persons who bought these TVs. VIZIO denies these allegations." [https://viziotvsettlement.com/]

At this point in time and space, I kind of assume that everything that happens on a connected "smart" TV is being collected and sent to someone. But I'll take the money anyway.

Anyone else noticing a big uptick in email spam volume over the last week or two? I'm getting more at work where we have some sort of $$$-ware industrial grade filter, and I'm getting more at home, particularly from newly-registered domains in vanity TLD's.

For the latter, I'm thinking about writing a DNSBL that rejects mail from any domain that was registered within the last 30 days ... although I suspect even as little as two days would do it.

Some are aware by now that Twitter was compromised yesterday, by a group of people who took over high-profile accounts such as Elon Musk and Joe Didenf to advertise a bitcoin scam. Apparently it worked well and they made some decent bitcoin before they got locked out.


More interesting than the scam, though, was the discovery and publication of what most people already suspected: Twitter does indeed have "trends blacklist" and "search blacklist" modules in their system. These blacklists can apparently be applied to individual user accounts.

https://www.cnn.com/specials/live-video-1

zuckerberg interviewing fauci, live, now, about the vaccine process

More interesting than the scam, though, was the discovery and
publication of what most people already suspected: Twitter does indeed

have "trends blacklist" and "search blacklist" modules in their system.

These blacklists can apparently be applied to individual user accounts.

Absolutely. The latter is called "shadowbanning". I have personal, real-life friends on Twitter who are shaddowbanned to smithereens: if I unfollow them, suddenly they no longer appear in my search results, even if I search precisely for their exact handle.

You might assume they're right-wingers, but they're not.

Of course they're not right-wingers. We don't get shadowbanned; we get completely banned.

Regadrdless, the people who run Twitter still insist that there is no such thing as shadowbanning, and that they don't skew search and trend results in any way. It's pretty clear that they're lying.

2020-07-28 09:31 from IGnatius T Foobar
Regadrdless, the people who run Twitter still insist that there is no

such thing as shadowbanning, and that they don't skew search and trend

results in any way. It's pretty clear that they're lying.

Don't get me started in their trending topic algorythms.

They will tell you they are neutral, but I don't think it was a coincidence that a hashtag asking for the resingation of our prime minister was taken down after it wend from zero to nearly 900k in about a day.

They have been bought. End of story.