uabstraction

When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So let's say I build a nuclear plant. I make a lot of money from this nuclear plant, and I'm providing a useful and arguably essential service to my community.

Now, it turns out my nuclear plant is emitting toxic radiation and poisoning the community. Not only that, but the problem was blatantly apparent for years, everyone with the slightest bit of foresight tried to bring it to my attention, and to the attention of the community leaders.

The problem was identified, but I did absolutely nothing to resolve it even after being warned. When the problem shifted from a hypothetical to a forensically provable reality, I tried to cover it up and minimize it, while my gross negligence exerted immeasurable harm to the community.

That is the story of Facebook. When you build things - especially giant pieces of infrastructure which communities rely on - you have a RESPONSIBILITY to do your very best to ensure it does not cause harm. Facebook is not responsible for everything which occurs on their platform, but they sure as hell have a responsibility to at least apply due diligence in reducing the harm it causes.

Facebook did not apply that due diligence. They were negligent at the very least, if not openly malicious in their intent.

Stop making excuses for them.

> Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms

I disagree here. Communities like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, have grown to such enormous scales, that their eventual fracture is inevitable. Whether it takes the form of griefers getting the boot, or communities leaving on their own accord, the root problem is the same. You simply can't put a billion people together in a box without any stronger identity or culture tying them together.

Think of how things work in the natural world. We have universities, libraries, coffee shops, pubs, clubs, offices, stores, restaurants, museums, parks, playgrounds, fairs, festivals. Each social setting has its own culture, its own rules, its own priorities.

If you take the riffraff from the pub and inject them into the library, you're going to have a bad time. If you start club dancing on the HR lady at the office, you're going to have a bad time.

The problem with the current crop of social media is that they are meant to be everything for everyone. We mash hundreds of different communities that have nothing to do with each other into the same platforms like square pegs into round holes. Engagement and user count are the ONLY thing the companies care about - but those KPIs aren't what drive healthy communities.

The future of the web is going to be fractured and federated. The pains being experienced by the big players right now are the obvious outcome of trying to apply the same set of standards and rules to thousands of different sets of people. If there is no set of rules you can make to please everyone, the answer is simple: it is time to split.

Eh. The irony of an anonymous person defending a company which forbids anonymity is not lost on me :)

Yes. In its simplest form, radio jamming is just tramsmitting junk on the same frequency as the target. If you want to jam a couple kids using channel 10 on their FRS radios, all you need to do is put your own radio on that channel, ducttape down the push to talk button, and stick it in front of a laptop playing a 10 hour rick-roll video. Jamming RC aircraft, or GPS, or any other radio service is more or less the same in practice. The only difference is the type of transmitter you need to emit the jamming signal.

Radio jamming can be as broadband or narrow band as you desire. The narrower the band you target, the less power you need. The catch is, 1) you need to know what frequency you are trying to jam, and 2) this is not at all legal, so it would probably only fly in the middle of a warzone.

As far as decentralization and curated platforms go, I think the former is practically a prerequisite for the latter. It all boils down to moderation. Moderation is what makes the difference between a productive debate and a room full of idiots screaming at each other.

Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests.

This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm.

Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.

The Times provides the information necessary to do just this right on their tips page, including instructions for PGP, WhatsApp, Signal, and SecureDrop.

One would hope that serious whistleblowers would heed these instructions.

Not with this Congress.

Let them move abroad then. If they want to work on the tools to prop up a dictatorship, they can go live in one.

Good. Ethical standards are worthless unless they are practiced. The tech industry needs a shit-ton more people like you.

Never underestimate the amateur radio community. They hunt down radio pirates, emitters of interference, and hidden beacons for FUN! With the right antenna and a halfway decent receiver, it is not too difficult to hunt down the source of a transmission.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting

"Unsafe at any feed"

Mastodon surely isn't the first decentralized social network to come about, but it seems to be the first one that I would refer to as a success.

This style of federation is the future of the web - and the only alternative to the corporate walled garden and advertising surveillance hell it has become. When the users have the power to vote with their feet, they become emancipated. When the administrators have the power to take decisive action in the interests of their communities without pleading their case to a greedy board of directors, our ability to freely conduct civil debate in good faith is protected.

I am looking forward to a handful of other projects taking up the same model, in the same spirit as Mastodon. It is truly one if the few remaining rays of sunshine available on the net.

It follows a clear pattern of behavior which has been escalating for years. If this wasn't a boneheaded mistake, it was an attack.

Or it was "just a prank, bro!"

I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist. If you think The US intelligence community would go out of their way to stir up a panic like this just because CoIntelPro was a thing 50 years ago, with no other evidence or reasonable motives, you must be a UFO chasing loon.

If there is anything nefarious here (seems like it), this is the work of a foreign state actor probing our infrastructure for exploitable weaknesses and sizing up our response. I'll put my money on Russia, who has already been attacking our elections¹, energy infrastructure², social media, and spearphishing candidates and elected officials³.

They have conducted similar attacks in the past, sending out tweets and text message alerts to hundreds of people for nonexistent emergencies⁴.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-b...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russi...

[3] https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...

[4] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.ht...

Meh. This is the same administration which politicized the NFL, and continues to politicize climate science and basic reality itself. Anything you say or do that comes remotely close to holding them accountable will be decried as a political attack. Any evidence of corruption is fake news.

I'm not buying it. Pai is as slimy as they come, and everyone knows it. We are going to figure out who was responsible for stuffing the FCC public comment forum with dead people's comments no matter how much Pai screams about it. We are going to find where this blatantly corrupt man's kickbacks are coming from. That isn't politics. That's justice.

I don't know about you, but I want to get as far away from the whole Android ecosystem as possible. I don't want "Linux-based." I want fully fledged GNU/Linux in my pocket. I want to take advantage of GNOME/KDE's convergence interfaces. I want to develop real Unix software and port it to a phone without rewriting it for cocoa touch or Android's java API.

There is so much great software available for GNU/Linux that we have the potential to tap into, and many of them can be made to work on a 5" touchscreen with a little bit of elbow grease. Firefox OS and Ubuntu phones failed because they ignored the giant stack of software sitting right in front of us. Purism would do well to leverage the software we already have and love, rather than wasting time designing new application models and distribution channels which nobody asked for in the first place.

There's been a hole in my heart since the day the Nokia n900 was discontinued. I've got my fingers crossed on this one.

If it hasn't worked, why has no one forked the kernel and left Linus in the dust?

Manufacturers ought to support their products for their full lifecycle instead of behaving like e-waste factories. If they're not happy about unstable kernel ABIs, they can start making Windows devices.

What we really need is some hardcore trustbusting. The Media companies must be split off from advertisers, which must be split off from ISPs, which must be split off from the software companies, which must be split off from the hardware vendors.

Unless something changes, there is so much vertical integration and so many conflicts of interest at play that the Internet will soon become Cable TV 2.0. A walled garden, proprietary, pay to play network where the only innovation that takes place is in new ways to separate the subscribers from their money.

Investors won't like it, but they can eat shit. An economy which only serves large mega-corporations is an unhealthy one. If the masses get nothing out of it, they will eventually bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.

The great thing about ham radio is that if you don't like what you're hearing, you can just keep spinning the dial. In my experience (NYC metro area), I hear very little politics on the ham bands. There are also CW and digital modes which tend to draw people with more than five brain cells. I know there are a couple infamous HF frequencies where some reality-challenged folks tend to congregate, but there is much more to the hobby than that QRM.

You may break the rules in situations threatening life or property (there is an exemption for this), but why send potentally inexperienced technicians INTO a disaster area to drown out potential calls for help when you can send generals or extras who have more understanding and experience?

Communications isn't an all hands on deck problem in the same sense that providing resources and shelter is. Ham nets and repeaters can get traffic jams very easily in a situation like this, so it's better to send a dozen experts than 100 beginners.

> there's a part of me that suspect the Equifax hack has the NSA

This is ridiculous. It makes no sense why the NSA or any other members of the US Intelligence Community would cause this sort of reputational damage and nationwide outrage to a company when they could simply walk up to them with one of those fancy national security letters with a built in gag order and take the information with much less of a fuss.

Other than that, I agree. Google should buy me a god damn drink if they really want to get to know me. :)

Awesome. It's hard to imagine that only a couple years ago we had dark skies everywhere. As an off and on hobby astronomer I'm very happy to see this trend of dark sky consciousness and preservation.

You have to forgive him. Shilling Kremlin talking points in a second language is not as easy as it looks.

Worth noting also, with the default settings, Emacs tells you what your position is in the buffer in the mode line (Top, Bot, All, or a percent), so the scroll bar is redundant as a visual indicator.

> My challenge to a community that includes "hacker" in its name is to consider picking up the radio hobby.

You hit the nail on the head here. I've been fooling around with computer programming for over a decade now (since I was in Jr. High), and Arduinos and Raspberry Pis as long as they have been available, but I never put much thought into ham radio. Most of the makers I know go straight to pre-made WiFi or Bluetooth modules when the time comes to make their projects work wirelessly - accepting their limitations while overlooking much simpler solutions which can be achieved though RF and a little bit of know-how. In hindsight, I wish I had learned about ham radio much sooner.

There is a massive schism between the ham community and the hacker community which doesn't make much sense to me. They are both very much interested in finding novel solutions to problems and sharing them with the community, doing more with less, placing value in decentralization, and have a similar sort of independent counter-culture and grounded respect for technology.

I think it is simply a problem of awareness. Before I got into ham radio, I assumed that the FCC simply allocated a tiny bucket of useless spectrum for amateur use, and that it's practical utility was quite limited. I didn't know that amateurs had access to bands all the way across the spectrum, that they are allowed to transmit at 1500 watts, that they could talk directly to the ISS, or make use of satellite repeaters and reach across oceans with a walkie talkie. On the HF bands, ham radio makes international communication possible without any middleman, subscription fee, or infrastructure. It is also a godsend for people launching weather balloons, allows you to build some incredibly badass RC craft, and can serve as the backbone of all sorts of other fascinating endeavors.

I think the schism is generational. The maker movement is composed largely of kids who grew up with the Internet, and really took off with social media and web 2.0, while the ham community is composed of a large body of people who came of age and mastered their craft before computers became ubiquitous. For better or worse, a lot of them seem to remain set in their ways. Many ham websites, including those of active clubs, brick and mortar stores, and repeater networks, look like they're straight out of the 90s, and social media outreach remains quite limited. I suppose the fundamentals of radio, much like physics or mathematics, hasn't changed much in the past 50 years, but these communities unfortunately seem to be living in different worlds.

I think that it is essential for us to bridge the gap. The alliance of the hams and the makers really stands to bring positive outcomes for both communities.

Oh please. Social media was exploited and abused like never before during this election cycle. All the major social networks have become a breeding ground for extremism, geopolitical propaganda, and misinformation. The public has every right to know what role the operators of these platforms served, and what actions - if any - they took. How much did they know about it and when? Did they fight to maintain the integrity of their networks or were they complicit? Or did they simply turn a blind eye to protect their inflated user numbers and rip off the advertisers who use their platforms?

Nobody is accusing Zuckerburg of a crime, but his company has hardly been transparent or forthcoming about this either. The public deserves an explanation, not only from him, but the folks at Twitter and Reddit as well.

In a lot of ways you're right, but I still find myself memorized by some of the work that has been done in the 64kb PC demo scene. With such a low executable size limit, intimate technical knowledge and creativity becomes very important again. Everything from the geometry to the textures to the audio samples to the score needs to be procedurally generated, and the program itself needs to be written very efficiently.

Maybe we didn't have the cash sitting around to build up the ISS in the immediate aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

Yeah, I suppose for combat training, there's nothing better than joining the actual military or reserves. Many of the habits acquired playing airsoft will probably get you killed in reality (like taking cover behind a 1/4" boards of plywood, staying within the designated field, or being compelled to complete an objective within a half hour), and in reality, an opposing military force is going to put up a much more serious fight than a bunch of uncoordinated kids and middle aged men. Where I live, the odds of a domestic armed conflict are so insanely low, that taking things any farther would be insane. In fact, it would probably be more likely for someone to burglarize a rifle from my apartment than for me to ever end up needing one, so I just fool around with toys for fun.