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Pakistani content moderators are exhausted and stuck – Rest of World
It’s dirty work and somebody is doing it… but can (or even: should) the categorisation of user-generated-content with respect to per-platform “policy” somehow be a stepping-stone into the mythic goal of a career in “tech?” Is that supposed to be a thing? Were people promised that? Quote: They wanted careers in tech. They’re stuck as…
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Having it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web | a critical analysis of the impact of Perl
I’m pretty sure that the author is simply restating that Perl allowed ordinary geeks to participate in Web development & research … with a subtext that that’s unusual since the web ought to have been stitched-up as a (Marxist?) vision of industry exploiting the worker, possibly a-la Stallman. If so, the author’s dog’s tail is…
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Johannes Kepler University Linz reports significant DDoS attack targeted at @torproject HSDirs hosted on-site; seek reports from other Tor operators of similar, for analysis
* The attack was more advanced than simply saturating the upstream with bandwidth/packets, but had proper handshakes with the Tor relays, trying to cause resource exhaustion on the application level (we have seen this pattern multiple times in the last 6+ months, but this one was much more massive in terms of incoming packets).* The…
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The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
An eye-opening read; all it takes is the supposedly best of intentions for ordinary people to become complicit in censorship and suppression, even in a genre which is almost defined by diversity and inclusion: https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
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Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134
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You! Yes you! Are you an “evil privacy nerd?”
Because apparently the way to an anti-monopolistic better society, for some, is to mandate corporate surveillance that elsewhere the same people have been fighting *against* for many years.
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Has Wired Given Up On Fact Checking? Publishes Facts-Optional Screed Against Section 230 That Gets Almost Everything Wrong
“The article is terrible, full of factual mistakes and nonsense, and @wired should be ashamed.” mmasnick on Threads https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/15/has-wired-given-up-on-fact-checking-publishes-facts-optional-screed-against-section-230-that-gets-almost-everything-wrong/
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With experimental cross-silo Federation and so many Fediverse operators running on shoestring budgets, maybe we need Government regulators to demand that all content creators *must* accept this classic UX dialogue before posting
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny] https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume1/rn/patch30
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Today I have learnt something about the central heating system in my home
We had a new boiler and pump installed recently and the house was running at about 23C almost constantly. I was going around switching off radiators and trying to diagnose what was happening but getting nowhere. Finally, today the answer was revealed: At the very end of the central heating ring is a small radiator…
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Shoshana Weissmann: Carding People for Joining Social Media Solves Nothing
https://reason.com/podcast/2024/02/14/shoshana-weissmann-carding-people-for-joining-social-media-solves-nothing/
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Hobbyists running AI foundation models at home will be the next frontier of attempted Government regulation; Civil Society will have to decide which side it is on
Do they support general purpose computing and free software, OR do they fear the risk of people using clever software to do abusive things? Perhaps I should build a spreadsheet to track their opinions? I can run almost any model now. So so happy. Cost a little more than a Mac Studio. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/nMQFPXdZRT