Digital Freedom

They have a fairly large user base.

I think this is pretty cool. You should be able to interact with minds now through nostr and a Fedi nostr bridge.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290

Two years ago when I launched Exploding-Heads, Lemmy offered a way to let me play a small role in fighting back against:

• censorship
• deplatforming
• propaganda
• Big Tech tyranny, and
• to help spread suppressed stories.

I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.

Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr:

• it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers
• it makes censorship very difficult
• it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly.

As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are

• petty tyrants, or
• benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment)

I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative.

So Exploding Heads is moving to Nostr.

Exploding-Heads.com will go offline August 31st 2023.

Please join us on Nostr.

Exploding Heads address on Nostr is npub1qprptnnuwnqc6h6wxc2q07rfwcmj7cfc6g4r5dgnlkxaysmpr0mqc5365p

Sounds complicated, but it is pretty easy. Here is what I recommend to get started

Amethyst App

• Lets you follow people
• Lets you follow #hastags (I have been using communities as a substitute for #hashtags on Lemmy
• Has evolving support for communities

Habla.news

• a Nostr alternative for Medium for long form content

Damus app (Apple IOS)

If you have any questions about getting up and running on Nostr, please ask them here https://exploding-heads.com/c/nostrblog

In closing, I sincerely apologize to all of you who are going to lose their profiles and content (please get anything you want off by August 31st), but it proves my warning about the problem with relying on benevolent dictators.

Please make sure to say hi to us on Nostr.

I hope the majority of our wonderful Exploding Heads community will make the move to Nostr with us.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/739484

Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that he made continuous efforts to airbrush his image and the Wikipedia articles associated with his Ukrainian benefactors.

The outreach by high-priced consultants making stealth edits to Wikipedia, for a period, paid off.

The tech giant had been sued for secretly diminishing the devices’ functionality to persuade customers to purchase a new phone.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/722518

The report found that girls report that exposure to both topics is prevalent across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and even messaging apps, with more than one in three girls reporting that they “hear or see things about suicide or self-harm that is upsetting to [them]” at least monthly on all platforms, with 15 percent of girls who use TikTok and Instagram saying they come across this type of content on the platforms on a daily basis.

The figures are even higher for those with depressive symptoms.

Some 75 percent of the girls who reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms who use Instagram said they come across harmful suicide-related content on the platform at least once a month. This is nearly three times the likelihood of the girls without depressive symptoms who come across the content at the same frequency (26 percent). According to the report, a similar pattern emerges for TikTok users (69 percent of girls with moderate to severe depressive symptoms see the harmful content versus 27 percent of girls without depressive symptoms) as well as for the other platforms

The slump in computers and handheld devices comes as the world's biggest market for smartphones, China, is sliding into a deflationary environment that might worsen.

The technocrats love nothing more than killing two (or three) birds with one stone. In this case, said birds are:

• getting rid of gas-powered cars,
• inventing for themselves a brand-new revenue generation scheme, and
• instituting even more tracking power to make sure the peasants behave themselves.

the unnamed minor was only 10 years old when she was contacted by a first predator on Instagram and coerced into sending explicit photos of herself. He kept demanding more, leading to the child attempting suicide “in the hopes of finding some escape,”

When the family found out what was going on they reported “the exploitation to police, who informed them that Meta’s Instagram product was designed in such a way that they could not identify who was behind the Instagram account that was used to abuse her, and a case was never opened,”

In 2019, when she was 13, the child was contacted on Snapchat by a second convicted sex offender — Reginald Sharp — who knew her real age. He convinced her to send nude photos and blackmailed her, saying that he would post them online unless she met him in person.

The girl snuck out and met him and was repeatedly raped.

In October 2021, the girl was still allowed on social media apps, and the situation repeated itself with another registered sex offender, Edward “Eddie” Rodriguez, a former New Haven police officer. He was on probation for assaulting another teenage girl.

The girl met with Rodriguez and he sexually assaulted her in his car before driving her to school.

Maybe when my warranty is up i'll buy the mod chip.

In April, a landmark study called "Human or Not?" was launched to determine whether people could identify if they were talking to another person or an AI chatbot.

More than 2 million volunteers and 15 million conversations later, 32 percent of participants picked incorrectly.

There was also little difference in the results based on age categories. Older and younger adults both struggled at a similar level to discern who—or what—was on the other end of the conversation.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/675696

August 25 is the deadline to sign up for this class action lawsuit. Apparently a settlement has been reached. Though I don't expect to receive much if any money for a long time if ever, hopefully it will hurt Facebook, so please sign up.

X, formerly known as Twitter, was fined $350,000 because it delayed producing the subpoenaed records.

The search warrant was so secret that Trump didn’t even know Jack Smith issued a subpoena for the records.

Biden’s corrupt Justice Department obtained a nondisclosure order that prohibited X from informing Trump about Jack Smith’s subpoena.

Not only is Jack Smith using every dirty trick to use secret gag orders, he is also working to silence Trump with another type of gag order so the former president cannot defend himself publicly from unprecendented abuse by Biden’s DOJ.

"You have to ask yourself why your eyes are being scanned and information gathered. What does it mean and what will it mean to you and your offspring?"

Many elite leaders of America’s most profitable corporations have aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s heinous human rights abuses, including genocide,”

Testimony from human rights experts highlighted a high-profile case involving forced labor used to make Milwaukee Tool products at Chishan Prison in China. With China’s recent aggression against Taiwan and its military build-up, other witnesses testified about sales by U.S. defense giants, such as Boeing and Raytheon, to the Chinese government.

Cisco helped construct, operate, and maintain China’s so-called Golden Shield, better known as the Great Firewall of China, an Internet surveillance system put in place by China’s Ministry of Public Security for the surveillance of dissidents, human rights defenders and those practicing banned religions, such as the Falun Gong.

China then pursued large-scale detentions, torture, forced conversions, and executions of Falun Gong members, which have been well documented by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and many other respected organizations around the world. In 2019, the China Tribunal, a government commission in the U.K., found that forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong victims and other prisoners had taken place on a significant scale throughout China for years.

Cisco purposefully customized its router technology to allow the Chinese government to identify, track, and detain Falun Gong members. The evidence that Cisco executives specifically helped design the technology to target Falun Gong followers includes Cisco marketing material touting its highly advanced video and image analyzers as the “only product capable of recognizing over 90% of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

Cisco of providing the Chinese government with a library of carefully analyzed patterns of Falun Gong Internet activity, or “signatures,” that enable the Chinese government to identify Falun Gong Internet users; several log/alert systems that provide the Chinese government with real-time monitoring and notification based on Falun Gong Internet traffic patterns; applications for storing data profiles on individual Falun Gong practitioners for use during interrogations and “forced conversions” that included torture; and a nationwide video surveillance system which enabled the Chinese government to identify and detain Falun Gong practitioners.

An internal Cisco presentation, showed that the company’s engineers regarded the Chinese government’s extensive Internet censorship program as an opportunity to expand its business with the CCP and marketed its routers to China, specifically as a tool of repression.

More than half of 11-15 year old girls using Instagram and Snapchat in the United States have been contacted by strangers in a way that made them feel uncomfortable, according to a report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that reviews and provides ratings for media and technology in order to safeguard children.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/657607

I lol'd

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/660115

from now on you can not unlock the bootloader on new asus phones, i guess custom roms are slowly going to die. They already work on very specific phones and the custom rom support is not as good as it was back in the day.

The algorithm learns your political biases and feeds you self-validating social media posts to assist you in confirming them.

The algorithm listens to your conversations and presents you with helpful advertising to assist you in achieving your maximum consumer potential.

Don’t cover your laptop camera like some weird conspiracy theorist, the algorithm is trying to watch you masturbate.

The algorithm is always a step ahead of you.

You have never once fooled the algorithm.

The algorithm knows you act confident but secretly you fear you’re inadequate and everyone hates you. The algorithm knows that those times you quickly pause and screw your eyes shut are because you remembered something embarrassing that you did in the past.

It’s okay.

Don’t worry.

Your secret is safe with the algorithm.

It’s a private little secret just between you and the algorithm and the NSA.

“I think the legislation should go further and limit banks to closing accounts only when there is clear evidence of criminal activity.”

There have also been suggestions that the government may require banks to pledge to protect the principle of freedom of expression or face having their licence to lend in Britain revoked.

Comes with an assurance that the tool remains shielded against censorship and retains its core focus on user privacy.

“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know,” Musk wrote in a post made Saturday night.

Musk further pledged that such legal battles would be carried out on a significant scale and will target not only the companies but their boards of directors as well.

“And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too,” Musk wrote