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It’s Tuesday, my house is a plague pit*, Trump v2.0 is due soon, friends are burning their Neil Gaiman books, and I’m here for Americans who believe TikTok will entirely cease to exist by the weekend…
1/ I really hope the VPN providers are geared-up for a massive spike over the next few days 2/ I hope not too many innocent teenagers get ripped-off by malware as a consequence 3/ Government needs to learn that cyber-posing blunt regulation around “safety” leads to concrete harms [*] I’m walking evidence that vaccination works
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johnsonjh/altoschat: Altger Altos Chat | GitHub
Nerds, especially European, of a certain age, will remember “Altos” as a bulletin board (Millennials: “social network”) that powered much of hackerdom in the 1980s, via the semi-commercial, semi-academic X.25 PSS networks which of course were not under threat from this upstart TCP/IP “ARPANet” thing. This is a fossil: https://github.com/johnsonjh/altoschat
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Irregular Verbs for Censorship
One of the greatest moments in British political comedy is from 1986’s Yes Prime Minister: Bernard: That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a* of the Official Secrets Act It’s a pressing issue that we lack clear terminology for censorship, because
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Remember Kids! Censorship is terrible and must be avoided at all costs — however, we also can’t allow people to say bad or rude things about our friends…
Also: it’s great to know that all potential things one implicitly could say on a platform, will therefore obviously, literally, and explicitly be endorsed by that platform, simply because the platform enabled that speech. The concept of a common carrier — let alone Section 230 protections in the USA — is not realistic in the
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Facebook Derangement Syndrome, Part 2: Trust, Safety, and Community Notes
Mark Zuckerberg (MZ) is a lucky sumbitch, and if I were misfortunate enough to be in his position I would do precisely the same thing: [this post is part 2; see part 1 for prior context] Back in 2016 Facebook made an annoucement in response to (déjà vu) a Trump election victory that was widely
Fediverse reactions
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“Is it a revolution? No, it’s porn…”
Typically, we see such spikes from countries with unstable governments facing internet shutdowns, meaning this is an anomaly.
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The Pornhub Bans Are Not About Keeping Kids Safe | …frankly this goes for most online safety regulation…
…except for the bits which are about parents not wanting to accept partial responsibility for their children’s actions: https://uk.pcmag.com/security/156095/the-pornhub-bans-are-not-about-keeping-kids-safe
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Smuggled Starlink devices allegedly used to defy India’s internet shutdowns | The Guardian
The internet is a dual use technology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/elon-musks-starlink-satellites-allegedly-used-to-defy-indias-internet-shutdowns
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One person’s “over-engineering” is another person’s “…this error or elision would have been obvious to anyone who had actually thought about the problem for ten minutes”
I can’t count the number of times…
Fediverse reactions