tfm

joined 2 weeks ago
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Forums lifespans weren't all that much anyways.

Couldn't this be much different if "web 2.0" hadn't taken over?

Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.

Many of them are still alive but don't get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.

The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.

Right. But what can we do to get people to switch to the Fediverse and put an end to this?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?

Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.

So basically, let the world burn? Because that's what it looks like we're heading toward right now because of big tech.

Maybe we can build something from the ashes.

The big question is whether it will be us who do that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

That's why we have to strengthen the fediverse!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago (2 children)

They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don't care about the business snippets.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (75 children)

How do we get them to switch to something like Element?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (11 children)

Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn't spit out some SEO or garbage content?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 days ago (1 children)

None of the moneybags will listen, unfortunately. But I'm with you. The rollout of AI was extremely irresponsible. Just to make it profitable as quickly as possible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

SpaceX came to prominence and it's not because their rockets are always falling apart.

Ok, please tell me one thing they did to advance space exploration. And please don't say reusable rockets that bring down costs, because this is still a pipe dream.

Hell, the whole reason we're now talking about a European space industry is because of Starlink, so clearly capitalism was able to innovate that.

We already had satellite internet long before Starlink. In fact, Starlink is a bad idea if you consider astronomy and space exploration.

https://www.space.com/satellite-megaconstellations-spacex-starlink-interference-astronomy

The only reason Starlink was created is that Elon wanted to play online games while on some island and didn't get the latency down for it to work well. (Source: my dog)

Jokes aside, why do you need ultra-high-speed internet always and everywhere? For emergencies or normal usage, it definitely doesn't matter if a request takes 10ms or 250ms.

Taking something from a proof of concept in a lab into factories all over the world and then continuously improving it is innovation.

But does it need private institutions for that? Innovation, at least in my opinion, means making possible something we previously thought was impossible. Production and distribution aren't.

If something is truly wanted or needed, people will manufacture and distribute it easily without the need for private corporations to tell us what we need.

continuously improving

If you think that money is the driving factor, how would you explain the entire open-source ecosystem?

That seems more of a problem with lack of spine than anything else.

Huh? Of whom? The billionaire-sponsored politicians?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (4 children)

but putting it in state hands encourages stagnation and will eventually leave you unable to compete globally.

NASA sent people to the moon in the seventies. SpaceX must be happy if their rocket gets into low earth orbit without falling apart.

It's a widespread myth that capitalism is best at innovation. Quite the contrary is true. Most (real) innovations get developed with public resources in public institutions and private companies then take it and commercialize on it.

The internet, the touchscreen, computers, heck even AI, all developed with public money.

Also if someone tries to do stupid shit like Elon you can just nationalize the company or enforce some other harsh consequence.

And as we see it doesn't and will never happen in our current system.

He does shit like this because he knows nobody can punish him.

And that's the reason why no unelected individual should have control over so many resources which usually only countries have.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Critical infrastructure shouldn't be in private hands. As Musk perfectly demonstrates right now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago (18 children)

Commercial/private spaceflights are dumb and shouldn't exist. Just more trash that flies at bullet speed in our orbit.

 
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24070601

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.18-150511/https://www.ft.com/content/aedd1e6b-fb4f-41fd-af10-af9dce6f88dc

The European Commission is seeking to set up collective arms purchasing for the entire bloc, in what would represent a significant transfer of power to Brussels.

Ursula von der Leyen, head of the EU’s executive, said on Tuesday that the bloc would set up a “European Military Sales Mechanism” — a strategic reserve of European weaponry that capitals could purchase from to refill their own inventories. 

The initiative is part of the continent’s rearmament drive and aims to provide additional orders for arms manufacturers which have struggled to scale up production despite Russia’s war in Ukraine.

 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9410064

 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9411140

 

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9411140

 
 

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/15513

Sponsored ad

 

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cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24069568

Hungarian lawmakers on Tuesday, March 18, passed a law banning Pride events and allowing authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attendees, continuing a crackdown by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's right-wing populist party on the country's LGBTQ+ community.

The measure passed in a 136-27 vote. The law, supported by Orbán's Fidesz party and their minority coalition partner the Christian Democrats, was pushed through parliament in an accelerated procedure after being submitted only a day earlier.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24846782

Summary

Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.

The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.

Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.

Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/25826615

For those not familiar, there are numerous messages containing images being repeatedly spammed to many Threadiverse users talking about a Polish girl named "Nicole". This has been ongoing for some time now.

Lemmy permits external inline image references to be embedded in messages. This means that if a unique image URL or set of image URLs are sent to each user, it's possible to log the IP addresses that fetch these images; by analyzing the log, one can determine the IP address that a user has.

In some earlier discussion, someone had claimed that local lemmy instances cache these on their local pict-rs instance and rewrite messages to reference the local image.

It does appear that there is a closed issue on the lemmy issue tracker referencing such a deanonymization attack:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1036

I had not looked into these earlier, but it looks like such rewriting and caching intending to avoid this attack is not occurring, at least on my home instance. I hadn't looked until the most-recent message, but the image embedded here is indeed remote:

https://lemmy.doesnotexist.club/pictrs/image/323899d9-79dd-4670-8cf9-f6d008c37e79.png

I haven't stored and looked through a list of these, but as I recall, the user sending them is bouncing around different instances. They certainly are not using the same hostname for their lemmy instance as the pict-rs instance; this message was sent from nicole92 on lemmy.latinlok.com, though the image is hosted on lemmy.doesnotexist.club. I don't know whether they are moving around where the pict-rs instance is located from message to message. If not, it might be possible to block the pict-rs instance in your browser. That will only be a temporary fix, since I see no reason that they couldn't also be moving the hostname on the pict-rs instance.

Another mitigation would be to route one's client software or browser through a VPN.

I don't know if there are admins working on addressing the issue; I'd assume so, but I wanted to at least mention that there might be privacy implications to other users.

In any event, regardless of whether the "Nicole" spammer is aiming to deanonymize users, as things stand, it does appear that someone could do so.

My own take is that the best fix here on the lemmy-and-other-Threadiverse-software-side would be to disable inline images in messages. Someone who wants to reference an image can always link to an external image in a messages, and permit a user to click through. But if remote inline image references can be used, there's no great way to prevent a user's IP address from being exposed.

If anyone has other suggestions to mitigate this (maybe a Greasemonkey snippet to require a click to load inline images as a patch for the lemmy Web UI?), I'm all ears.

 
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