• 60 Posts
  • 340 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 24th, 2023
  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@beehaw.org•Fewer people posting on social media, Ofcom finds
    1·
    9 days ago

    I actually dislike the term “social media” in the first place, only used it above for convenience…

    I (seriously) discovered that there were websites that allowed the general public to participate in the mid-2000s when I was a preteen. I immediately liked that concept and started to participate on such sites (first forums, later wikis) myself and found that fun.

    Then around 2008, everyone started to insist that such sites were now called “social media” and the most important ones were Facebook and Twitter, both of which I hadn’t heard of until around that time, and both of which didn’t seem like very fun or appealing places at all.

    Now I keep hearing about the horrible things apparently caused by “social media” and wonder, what do you even mean, what could possibly be wrong with web forums.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.detoLinux@programming.dev•"FOSS" and "GNU Linux" do *not* automatically mean "for the community" or "for human rights"
    32·
    15 days ago

    The problem is that “human freedom” and “human rights” are very general and somewhat vague terms and some people’s freedoms and rights are sometimes in conflict with each other. So it’s also often meaningless to say that you support “human freedom” and “human rights” without asking what freedoms and rights and for whom.

    FOSS is a very specific subset of human freedom and human rights, it’s the right to control, modify and distribute the software one uses. All other parts of human freedom and human rights aren’t something that the free software movement necessarily has a position on. (Free software can certainly be used to, at least arguably, violate human rights, for example armed forces can use free software too, and should be able to!)

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@beehaw.org•Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field
    10·
    20 days ago

    The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

    That’s a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

    I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.detoLinux@lemmy.ml•A Counter-View on the Age Verification Law
    142·
    22 days ago

    The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

    I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

    My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

    But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

    The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

    No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

    Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

    I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

    I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

    The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.detoLinux@lemmy.ml•The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux
    5·
    23 days ago

    With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

    • voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
    • mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

    Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

    Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

    The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.