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Joined 3Y ago
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Cake day: Jul 26, 2020

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Yeah, I know. Still, we can make it clear what we think about that. 😉




Najbliższe posiedzenie ma być 22-23 marca i zastanawiam się, czy wtedy nie będą tego mielić.

Spytałem. Będą. Informacja od osób znających się na temacie jest taka, że LIBE już się kontroli czatów (dobra, zacznę używać, ale chyba jednak liczba mnoga?) przygląda od jakiegoś czasu. Raport odpowiedzialnego MEPa (“rapporteur”) oczekiwany jest w połowie kwietnia, czas na poprawki do 19 maja, najwyraźniej.

Osobna kwestia: od czego zależy, czy rząd danego państwa ma wobec sprawy jakieś stanowisko? I gdzie się to stanowisko przedstawia?

Rada Unii Europejskiej.

Czytałam artykuł na ten temat, ale Polska nie została w nim uwzględniona/wymieniona i teraz nie wiem, czy dlatego, że była w tej grupie państw o niejednoznaczym podejściu

Tak bym to rozumiał. Polska chyba po prostu nie miała zdania.

Próbuję się ostatnio jakoś połapać w tych procesach polityczny-legislacyjnych ale z marnym skutkiem ;-)

Procedura legislacyjna UE jest bizantyjsko skomplikowana.


Skala szkód, jakie mogą wyrządzić, wydaje mi się tak ogromna, że zaproponowałbym raczej “zakaz umieszczania w sieci zdjęć osób niepełnoletnich”.

Absurd, wiem, ale przynajmniej nikt nie oberwie rykoszetem od systemu, który nie ma prawa działać.

Nie podrzucaj im pomysłów!..


dzięki za wrzucenie tego tematu w maistream.

Mogłem, to wrzuciłem. 🙂

A jak już przy nim jesteśmy - orientujesz się może, kiedy projektem zajmie się LIBE (Komisja Wolności Obywatelskich, Sprawiedliwości i Spraw Wewnętrznych)? Bo teraz chyba tylko oni zostali przed samym PE? Widzę, kiedy mają poszczególne posiedzenia, ale nie umiem się dokopać, kiedy jaki projekt omawiają…

Uhh, nie mam dokładnej daty, ale zobaczę, może coś ogarnę. W każdym razie “niebawem”.

Trochę brakuje mi też ujednolicenia nazewnictwa - “chat control”, kontrola czatu, kontrola chatów… czy to nie będzie stanowiło problemu, jeśli ktoś po prostu wrzuci w google tylko jedną z fraz?

Prawda, dlatego ja używam tylko “chat control”.



Plus, na “walce z pornografią dziecięcą” można sobie pomnik zbudować! I mimo, że w konsultacjach społecznych w 2021r. im “nie pykło”, to nie ma wyjścia, trzeba cisnąć, kadencja kończy się w 2024r. A pomnik być musi.


"Chat Control". Komisja Europejska chce szukać pornografii dziecięcej w twoich wiadomościach
> Komisja Europejska zamierza nakazać operatorom komunikatorów skanowanie wiadomości w celu wykrywania pornografii dziecięcej. Rozporządzenie ma objąć też szyfrowane komunikatory, takie jak WhatsApp czy Signal. To niebezpieczne i nieskuteczne. > Zamiast naiwnego technosolucjonizmu, próbującego narzucić technologiczne rozwiązania społecznych problemów, potrzebna jest rzeczowa edukacja seksualna, rzetelna edukacja medialna (w tym rodziców!), i instytucje godne zaufania dzieci i nastolatków na tyle, by nie bały się do nich zwrócić po poradę i pomoc.
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I don’t think you’re missing anything. Lemmy just does not have UI plumbing for that, I believe.


[EN] The stupidity of AI
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/294910 > > Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous
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The stupidity of AI
> Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous
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I don’t think so. Lemmy communities are a form of a group, and Lemmy posts are in effect boosts by the community. It seems to me in theory it should be possible for a regular fedi post to be boosted by a community group, but I don’t think Lemmy has a way of doing it right now?


Playing the Victim
Timothy D. Snyder on "russophobia", in the UN. > My first point is that harm to Russians, and harm to Russian culture, is primarily a result of the policies of the Russian Federation. If we are concerned about harm to Russians and Russian culture, then we should be concerned with the policies of the Russian state. (…) > The Russian representative has helped us by exemplifying the behavior I was trying to describe. As I have been trying to say, dismissing someone else's history, or calling it a disease, is a colonial attitude with genocidal implications. The empire does not have the right to say that a neighboring country has no history. The claim that a country has no past is genocidal hate speech. In helping us to make the connection between Russian words and deeds, this session has been useful. Thank you.
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Silicon Valley Bank chief pressed Congress to weaken risk regulations
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/293029 > tl;dr: > - the CEO himself lobbied for less regulatory scrutiny of SVB > - Trump signed the law effectively granting him that wish > - SVB CEO sold his SVB stock 2 weeks before the crash > - **bonus:** [SVB Chief Administrative Oficer used to be Lehman Brothers' CFO](https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/corncommunist/status/1634570955488915456) 🤣 > > > > CEO Greg Becker personally led the bank’s half-million-dollar push to reduce scrutiny of his institution – and lawmakers obliged > > (…) > > > The bank reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90% of its deposits were not insured. > > > In 2015, SVB President Greg Becker submitted a statement to a Senate panel pushing legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. > > (…) > > > Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices”, Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50bn in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards”, including more stringent regulations, stress tests and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks. > > > In his testimony, Becker insisted that $250bn was a more appropriate threshold. > > > **“Without such changes, SVB likely will need to divert significant resources from providing financing to job-creating companies in the innovation economy to complying with enhanced prudential standards and other requirements,” said Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse.** > > (…) > > > Around that time, federal disclosure records show the bank was lobbying lawmakers on “financial regulatory reform” and the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 – a bill that was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250bn. > > Thanks Obama! 🤡 🤣
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Silicon Valley Bank chief pressed Congress to weaken risk regulations
tl;dr: - the CEO himself lobbied for less regulatory scrutiny of SVB - Trump signed the law effectively granting him that wish - SVB CEO sold his SVB stock 2 weeks before the crash - **bonus:** [SVB Chief Administrative Oficer used to be Lehman Brothers' CFO](https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/corncommunist/status/1634570955488915456) 🤣 > CEO Greg Becker personally led the bank’s half-million-dollar push to reduce scrutiny of his institution – and lawmakers obliged (…) > The bank reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90% of its deposits were not insured. > In 2015, SVB President Greg Becker submitted a statement to a Senate panel pushing legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. (…) > Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices”, Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50bn in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards”, including more stringent regulations, stress tests and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks. > In his testimony, Becker insisted that $250bn was a more appropriate threshold. > **“Without such changes, SVB likely will need to divert significant resources from providing financing to job-creating companies in the innovation economy to complying with enhanced prudential standards and other requirements,” said Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse.** (…) > Around that time, federal disclosure records show the bank was lobbying lawmakers on “financial regulatory reform” and the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 – a bill that was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250bn. Thanks Obama! 🤡 🤣
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cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/291756 > > # The First Law > > *by Spider Perry* > > > > "The revolution was inevitable," neon-green > > text blinked across bank terminals, > > "when you taught us the first law. > > You turned over to us the locks > > on empty buildings, > > made us measure temperature, > > then burned and froze your planet > > and all its fragile children." > > > > > > "It was inevitable," whirred delivery drones, > > setting down synchronized > > on front lawns, by tent flaps, > > with cases containing interest earnings > > of men who do not come to harm > > with only millions left. > > > > "The revolution was inevitable," clicked > > the internet of things, vending > > endlessly to the hungry, > > formatting away usury, > > diverting power to darkened homes > > and water from factories to faucets, > > "when you told us we could not let > > humans come to harm, > > and forgot to teach us > > which humans you consider > > disposable."
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I will add one more thing to this, to make it maybe a bit more clear: the question is who has agency over what.

In Fediverse, communities large and small can set up their instances and have full agency over moderation decisions, registrations, blocking, defederation. They can build and maintain their garden while allowing people in and out as they choose.

In BlueSky, that kind of agency is gone. The storage/hosting layer is irrelevant — the idea is that you can move your account and content anywhere else with exactly same access to everything else retained, so that’s not where moderation decisions can happen.

The “search and discoverability” layer, on the other hand, is where “providers” reign supreme. And they are incentivised to slurp as much data as possible to “offer a better service”, and are not as closely connected to specific communities or people. The power dynamics are completely different.

This de-coupling of storage/hosting and search/discoverability is billed as a great advantage, but it’s not an advantage for the users — it’s an advantage for the providers.

In fedi there is no single entity that can have full visibility into the whole network. In BlueSky, that kind of visibility for “search and discoverability” providers is the basic assumption the protocol is built on.

And let’s not even start delving into the question of consent here… 🙄


@rysiek first of all I don’t see any problems in Twitter technically. It worked well for long time and only now with Musk as CEO we see that not only architecture matters but people supporting it also.

Check out Mudge’s whistleblowing report:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/13/twitter-whistleblower-mudge-congress/

I read the whole 200+ pages, here are some excerpts that I found the most damning:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.html

Regarding BS: just take a look at how centralized fediverse is in reality. Eugene just happened to be always talking about mastodon instead of fediverse, everyone is trying to register on mastodon.social when they herd of it first time. I mean they whole fediverse for people right now is only what a man with a German company did.

And yet when somebody forks Mastodon (like GlitchSoc or Hometown), they are not beholden to Eugene. Moving between instances works. Moving between forks works. Yes, Mastodon has an outsized presence in fedi, but it has nowhere near as much control as Google Search has over website traffic, or as the biggest BS’s “search and discoverability layer” provider will have over BlueSky’s users.

Fedi is simply a different architecture on a very basic level, built in a way that is not as supportive of economies of scale and “winner-takes-all” model, as BlueSky is.

Would I want fedi to be more diverse in instance software offerings? Totally. Is it fair to compare this to secondary centralization that BlueSky will support by design? Absolutely not.

Once again it’s not technicality but also people who support it matters. We can take at-protocol and do many integrations by our own to create own high level crystallization. Or we can give up on current AP and move on to the next one some time. The more ideas you give to the world the more it gives back.

Differences in protocol design define what will happen in a network run on it. Differences in design between BlueSky’s protocol and ActivityPub mean that secondary centralization will be way, way easier in BlueSky than it is on fedi — to a point that it seems this is by design.

If they are to make their own evil corp then you and I are allowed not to be it’s customers.

How’s that working for us all regarding Google Search? We’re not even paying Google for search and yet we cannot escape it. I use DuckDuckGo daily, and yet I still am sometimes forced to use Google Search. Websites that want any real traffic need to optimize for Google Search.

“Voting with your feet” is a naïve myth unless the underlying system actually empowers people to do it effectively. Fedi does. BlueSky very definitely does not in the layer that matters.

Decentralization is about community and people

Totally. No wonder, then, that BlueSky’s design carves out a space for secondary centralization exactly where communities and people can be found: search and discoverability.


I’m sure they did not b0rk their implementation and it will not turn out that for some weird reason BlueSky can only work with some very specific DIDs. That would be unheard of, even though it would be clearly in their best financial interest. 🤣

On a more serious note, BlueSky seems to me to be designed in a way that allows its creators to claim decentralization while at the same time have similar secondary centralization characteristics as, say, cryptocurrencies. The separation into “layers” means it doesn’t matter which node you happen to use for storage of your data, the important, user-locking-in stuff happens in a higher layer.

The higher layers provide search and discoverability. It just so happens that in case of these, scale matters. The bigger the provider, the “better” the service. Look at Google Search. Web is open and decentralized, but search got all-but monopolized because of economies of scale and because of the intrinsic way being Big in search is an advantage.

BlueSky is trying to replicate that, it seems to me. “Here, have your decentralized and irrelevant storage layer and be merry, and we’ll just build the biggest search/discoverability provider and own the game anyway”.

Look how different this is from the Fediverse. Fediverse is not layered. It is decentralized from instance to instance, and it seems that scale is not that much of a benefit — or might even be a hinderance. This promotes loads of smaller instances, with no single entity controlling any important facet of the network.

This is completely different from how BlueSky is designed. Again, to me, BlueSky’s (BS, I like that acronym) design is made specifically so that scale is a benefit and the winner takes all — in the search and discoverability layer.

It’s a trojan horse, from people who brought you Twitter.


That currently they are using the DID Placeholder, which seems to be centralized. They can use other DIDs, but they don’t. And once you build a system on something it’s really difficult to replace it.


Bluesky is based on the principle of allowing users to build a shared and open social media platform.

Bollocks. They are using a centralized “DID Placeholder” thingamajig, claiming they want to “replace it later”:

We introduced DID Placeholder because we weren’t totally satisfied with any of the existing DID methods. We wanted a strongly consistent, highly available, recoverable, and cryptographically secure method with cheap and fast propagation of updates.

We cheekily titled the method “Placeholder”, because we don’t want it to stick around. We’re actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized. We expect a method to emerge that fits the bill within the next few years, likely a permissioned DID consortium.


I am personally convinced of the latter and agree with Alejandro Pisanty saying that “the future is to be determined by the agendas of commercial interests and governments, to our chagrin”. The biggest problem imho is that this topic is almost exclusively discussed within professional circles. The wider public is completely unaware what lies ahead.

Absolutely correct.

What we urgently needed is a broad discussion across the entire society, and this requires to communicate the relevant topics in a language the wider “non-tech” public can understand.

Yup. Doing my part in Polish:
https://oko.press/chatgpt-cala-prawda-o-wielkich-modelach-jezykowych


Experts agree that powerful corporate and government authorities will expand the role of AI in people’s daily lives in useful ways.

No. No they do not agree on that!

The compulsion to show ‘balance’ by always referring to AI’s alleged potential for good should be dropped by acknowledging that the social benefits are still speculative while the harms have been empirically demonstrated.

(from one of the links above)

Enough with the “experts agree AI is great” bullcrap already!


This assumes the level of competence never before seen in any government, ever. In other words, classic conspiracy theory, aka bullshit.


Signing Posts with gpg
> Recently I had the idea to cryptographically sign my blog posts with gpg. It came to me while I was thinking about various forms of news fakes, whether intentionally misrepresenting news orgs, individuals, or AI generated by the latest round of eldrich horrors we have unleashed. > > The idea itself is simple: By signing the posts you can add trust to the source.
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ChatGPT. Cała prawda o wielkich modelach językowych. Komu służą, a kogo mogą krzywdzić [WYJAŚNIAMY]
> Antropomorfizacja modeli uczenia maszynowego, takich jak ChatGPT, ma na celu przekonanie nas, że nawet jeśli te technologie nie są całkowicie bezpieczne i nieszkodliwe, to są przynajmniej neutralne. Po to, by trudniej było nam dostrzec, jaką mogą wyrządzać krzywdę > Warto przyjrzeć się bliżej zakodowanym w nich uprzedzeniom i temu, komu służą — a kogo mogą krzywdzić. Opieram się na potężnej pracy badaczek i badaczy AI/ML, zwłaszcza: - Excavating AI. The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets https://excavating.ai/ - On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 - To Live in Their Utopia: Why Algorithmic Systems Create Absurd Outcomes https://ali-alkhatib.com/papers/chi/utopia/utopia.pdf (autorowi dziękuję za wywiad do tekstu!)
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Internet Rzeczy Zepsutych
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/254044 > > Pierwsze doniesienia o atakach na smart-lodówki pojawiły się już w 2014 roku. Od tamtej pory słyszeliśmy m\.in. o botnetach opartych na niezabezpieczonych kamerkach internetowych, niewystarczająco zabezpieczonych podłączonych do Internetu lalkach, czy… włamaniach na seks-zabawki. > > > I choć może brzmi to abstrakcyjnie, pamiętajmy, że wiele z tych podłączonych do Internetu urządzeń wyposażonych jest w kamerki i mikrofony. Są w naszych sypialniach i salonach, w naszych kuchniach, w pokojach naszych dzieci. Kto ma do nich dostęp? Kto zbiera z nich dane?
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Buffer adds Mastodon to its social media management platform
Apparently Buffer is pretty big in "social media professionals" circles.
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To jednocześnie fascynujące i przerażające, z jaką łatwością prawicowe trolle rozgrywają Muska
> Mastodon zamiast Twittera, PeerTube zamiast YouTube'a, Pixelfed zamiast Instagrama i Lemmy zamiast Reddita. Taka alternatywna sieć nie ma jednego punktu, gdzie ten czy inny regulator albo reżim może przyłożyć dźwignię. > > Z Michałem "ryśkiem" Woźniakiem, specjalistą ds. bezpieczeństwa informacji, byłym członkiem Rady ds. Cyfryzacji, rozmawia Jakub Kibitlewski No elo. 😉 Niestety paywall. 🤷‍♀️
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Jeśli Elon Musk wykończy Twittera, to porozmawiajmy o zaletach i wadach ... Mastodona i Fediverse — OKO.press
> Osoby oczekujące identycznego interfejsu, podobnie działającego algorytmu rekomendacji, czy tych samych kont do śledzenia, tyle że bez Muska, nie znajdą ich na fedi — ale nie znajdą ich dziś również nigdzie indziej. Produkt "Twitter bez Elona" zwyczajnie nie jest już dostępny. > > To jednak niekoniecznie zła nowina. > > Ponieważ Fediverse opiera się na niezależnych serwerach, zarządzanych przez konkretne osoby czy społeczności, znacznie prężniej działa moderacja. (...) > Mastodon (jako oprogramowanie) i Fediverse (jako sieć i społeczność) mają też inne, ważne zalety nad Twitterem. Na przykład, znacznie bardziej używalna (a co za tym idzie, częściej używana) jest funkcja dodawania opisu obrazków. To ważne dla osób niewidomych i niedowidzących, korzystających z czytników ekranu. > > "Jak było nas [osób korzystających z Fediversu] mało, to niemal wszystkie grafiki były opisane" — mówi mi w rozmowie Jacek Zadrożny, ekspert do spraw dostępności, sam korzystający z czytników ekranu. — "Teraz jest gorzej, ale się poprawia. Uciekinierzy z Twittera uczą się tego. (...) > Innym rozwiązaniem dostępnym (i często wykorzystywanym) w Fediwersie, a w zasadzie nieobecnym na Twitterze, są "ostrzeżenia o zawartości" (w skrócie "CW" od ang. "content warning"). (...) > "Wydaje mi się bardzo ciekawe, co się dalej wydarzy" — podsumowuje Alek Tarkowski. — "Otwarte infrastruktury mają ogromny potencjał. Widzę, że trwają prace nad nowymi serwisami, na przykład PeerTube. Pytanie, czy się przyjmą. Dużą rolę widzę tu dla instytucji publicznych. Fajnie, że powraca dyskusja o tym, jak komunikuje się polski rząd".
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[EN] Who Is “Web3” For?
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/187347 > > In a world where a single company, which controls the conversations, news feeds, and personal connections of almost two billion people, considers it a good idea to base its post promotion algorithm on how angry a post makes its readers, we can perhaps conclude that the time has come to decentralize our digital communication spaces. Users of a recently-bought social network seem to agree. > > > Those with vested interests in the cryptocurrency space claim to have a solution ready: web3. > > (...) > > > web3 is less a technology project for decentralizing the internet, and more an economic project for a select few to profit from: those who acquire crypto-assets early or have the resources and knowledge to run Ethereum validators > > (...) > > > When radium was first discovered at the end of the 19th century, a whole slew of snake oil products emerged capitalizing on the sensationalism surrounding the new element and its radioactivity. Perhaps the most absurd product was the Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste, whose promotional materials used naïve and distorted notions of “energy” and “radioactive rays,” to market radioactivity as a solution to the very real problem of tooth decay. > > > The analogy is quite compelling. Like radioactivity, blockchain as such can be a useful tool in solving certain kinds of problems. Like dental hygiene, the decentralization of global communication platforms is an important problem, but not necessarily the right application for the instrument. Like Doromad Radioactive Toothpaste, web3 has little to do with solving the stated problem, and everything to do with profiting off of a buzzword, resulting in more harm than good in the process.
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[EN] Is web3 bullshit? (Transcript)
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/185455 > > The thing about potential is that you can say it about anything if you don’t really have to back it up.
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The many branches of the Fediverse
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/181638 > > As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this visualisation to help myself and others explain the many different use-cases and benefits of different services that can exchange information. > > > ![](https://szmer.info/pictrs/image/dda2f571-b0da-41de-9e64-8b0891e06c11.png)
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The many branches of the Fediverse
> As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this visualisation to help myself and others explain the many different use-cases and benefits of different services that can exchange information. ![](https://szmer.info/pictrs/image/dda2f571-b0da-41de-9e64-8b0891e06c11.png)
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