No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.
"The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.â
In short, running from platforms that do things we don't like won't change them. Because too many people are just going to stay there anyway. Running from Twitter, Discord, etc, they're not going to change because the vast majority of people won't do that. They'll just carry on doing what they always have.
What's needed instead is for the users to collectively tell companies to knock off their shit. Which admittedly is something also pretty damed hard to get people to do, but it's the better option of the two.
I donât understand this. The only thing that gives these platforms their power is their huge user base - leaving is the only method that you as an individual have to directly affect that power.
Collectively demanding anything wonât make a difference - it doesnât threaten their power.
@nepi This is true, but their huge user bases also insulate them from people leaving unless it happens en masse. For example, just before Musk bought Twitter, it had around 260 million users. When he bought it many people left. I'm not exaggerating when I say millions. But, it's continued to get worse. All in all about 10 million people have left Twitter since then. But out of 260 million that just wasn't enough. The vast, overwhelming majority of people stayed, and other than changing their name to X and becoming even more of a cess pool nothing else really changed.
Sometimes it's better to stay, make noise, and get anyone else you can to also make noise. Be intolerable, getting together and being loud about the things you want to see change can sometimes work against large companies where just leaving doesn't.
@nepi "Sometimes it's better to stay, make noise, and get anyone else you can to also make noise. Be intolerable, getting together and being loud about the things you want to see change can sometimes work against large companies where just leaving doesn't."
This also means putting a hudge target on our account for the people with too much free time. Receiving torrents of hate of people which are very happy with the way this plateforms work isn't funny nor good for the mental health. It would feel more approripate to leave a bot doing it instead, while leaving to an other plateform.
@ck0 @nepi This is a risk. But it's a risk we face in everything we do. And I understand not everyone is up to bearing that risk. And if it's not something you're up to that's also fine. There have been times I've just stepped away from things as well, not every cause is a hill worth dying on.
If someone is legitimately afraid that people will come after them directly for one reason or another and they're not up to that, they definitely shouldn't put themselves potentially in harms way.
They won't do it. The only way to move towards it is to help or fund a platform that is moving in the direction that you want - you're already on Mastodon, so you're already doing that.
Unfortunately what people actually want is a benevolent billionaire that provides roughly what they want. In that absence they will choose a free of cost platform run by venture capitalists until it becomes unbearable, then move directly on to another VC backed service. Rinse and repeat.
Until the average person understands that to control something they consider important they need to pay for it *even and especially if it is free* nothing will change. That's the more likely option.
The other option is everyone collectively provides their labour to create the service they want. That's even less probable.
@syllopsium You're right from a certain point of view. It's really hard to get people to agree on or move in unison on anything. But often as not a small vocal group can do more than a silent group of people that leave. Unless that group can reach a critical mass, it might not even be noticed.
Although, if you're talking about a commercial service it'll have to align exactly with their commercial interests, otherwise they will continually try to shift the goalposts.
That takes a montruous quantity of time and energy to do so. I get that's possible, there are laws in EU which can be exploited for this. But when just to get the GPDR applied in the right way requires to legally attack the administration in charge of the GPDR application because they are more busy trying to find ways to bend the laws in order to let the companies no respect the GPDR, attempting to exploit a local legislation in order to constrain a company to be less shitty feels like an impossible task.
It feels much more easier to just leave to a more appropriate plateform, or to make a selfhosted one.
@ck0 I'm not familiar with the specifics on laws in the EU, but I get that legally forcing a company to do anything is difficult. Over here. (US,) basically money is god so large corporations with their vast wealth typically just buy whatever lawmakers they need to get things the way they want them. And for some things sure, just leaving and going to something else, or doing something self hosted is a viable answer, but for other things it's not. Every situation is going to be different. Sometimes just leaving isn't an option because a service or piece of software has become so ubiquitous that it's basically infrastructure. Sometimes neither approach will really make a difference. Everything has to be looked at on a case by case basis.
@Lemmus Oh yeah, that's a whole other side of the thing. In cases like that it makes sense to individually move away. Same for Twitter as they now use all of the tweets to train the love child of Elon Musk and a 30 year old CRAY super computer.
And of course, if you run from Company Nasty to Company Slightly Less Nasty, there's nothing in the way for Nasty to simply buy Slightly Less Nasty along with their customer base. Which is the other side of the coin why systemic, collective fight is the answer to lasting improvement.
Also, I know perfectly well it doesn't change Facebook or reduce their income in any meaningful way that I'm not there. On the other hand it makes a meaningful difference to me. Not being exposed to their racism amplifier and not contributing to ad impressions feels good. To me.
@gimmechocolate @nepi The thing is leaving isnât a challenge to that power either. Most large companies have user bases in the millions. Some the tens or hundreds of millions. The small number of people that stop using their services in cases like this arenât enough to matter. Twitter is a special case where because the owner is a shitbird nothing will really matter there.
@nepi Just leaving isn't, but working to build other communities, getting people you know to move over, and building a space for yourself is at least a challenge to their power over you and your community, or at least if it's not then nothing is.
If you can do that it's a great thing. But getting people to move off of one service onto another is in it's self kind of like trying to move a mountain a teaspoon at a time. I hate to keep using Twitter as an example here, because this isn't specifically about Twitter, or even social media. But it provides a good example here.
When Musk bought Twitter and started turning it to shit Mastodon users thought that Mastodon would be the easy choice. And that people would happily come here over somewhere else corporate owned like BlueSky where they'll probably face the same fate in a decade or less. But that isn't what happened at all.
95%+ people that were on Twitter, stayed on Twitter. And to this day are still there. 4.5% went to BlueSky, and like .5% came to Mastodon. In a lot of ways on paper Mastodon was easily better than the alternatives, but it wasn't what most people wanted. Most people just wanted to stay where their friends were. And were willing to put up with everything to do so.
This kind of thing also applies to other businesses in a way. People get stuck into a software, service, operating system, etc, and don't want to leave it because they become familiar with it and use it a lot. They don't want to learn something else or invest in different hardware. It makes getting people to just leave anything en masse very difficult.
It can also be difficult to recreate what they do for logistic or legal reasons. Sometimes there's a lot more to it than just splitting off and making your own version of something.
None of this is to say that people shouldn't try, just that it doesn't always work.
@gimmechocolate @nepi It's largely the case everywhere. At least here in the US. And I think that's the real crux of the problem. Too many people are just totally unwilling to do anything.
If you find a way to make a computer bad at maths, you've fucked up.
If you've found a way to make a computer bad at maths, and are calling it the next big tech revolution, then I hope you're ready to get hauled in front of a public inquiry in 10 years time.
Science Officer's log - we've returned from a very successful away mission to Anthro Irish where our scans recorded amazing vibes and wonderful times with friends. A stellar time was had all around.
Anyone here familiar with physical fibre types and could give me a bit of advice?
I am planning to put a network cable between my house and garage. The only feasible route seems to be the one the solar panel guys put their cables along: out the eaves of the house, down the wall, through a groove dremmelled between two paving stones in the path, and in through the garage wall. There's already an AC power cable on that route, so I'm looking at putting in fibre instead of copper as I won't be able to get any separation between the parallel AC and network cables.
I would expect to cable-clip it to the wall (I think flat plate ones with cable ties are recommended for fibre, yes? I think those have already been used for some of the other cables) and run it loose through the groove between the pavers - probably covered by gravel later. It looks like loose tube fibre is probably not right because the fibres would have a whole storey drop where they hang inside the tube and I understand that's not good. So probably tight buffered, right?
Do I need SWA or something, or is normal outdoor cable likely to be okay? Do I need to put it in a conduit to protect it from the elements? But if I do that, it'll be hanging loose inside a tube again and presumably that's not great.
Should I go for SMF? I would think if I install it right it should be fine and not need to go for MMF, but I'm not sure if there's any other reason to favour one over the other - it's only going to be 20m at most I would think. Do I need an attenuator for that kind of range?
Oof, I can't think what else I ought to consider. OM3 is presumably fine if going for multi-mode, and OS2 for single-mode. Are mode conditioning adaptors still a thing that are needed, for getting the right launch offset? I'm assuming not as I haven't seen any mention of them in my recent reading, but I just seem to have no ideaâŚ
I used to do networking in power plants and OM1 MM was used for most everything below a 2000m run and is fine for 100Mbps and 1Gig up to about a few hundred meters. MM also has the advantage of being cheaper. Loose tube should be ok if vertical run is less than a 10m or so. What ever you used, make sure that the cable has more strands than needed and are terminated (so much easier if you get a broken fiber. I always wanted my fiber runs to be protected, unless armored
@Mira Thank you! I still have plenty to think about but all the info helps. My searches for preterminated outdoor fibre cables tend not to come up with any 1- or 2-strand cables, 4 seems to be the minimum, but 8 seems barely more expensive so it might well be worth getting 8 even though I probably only need 2 at the moment and am unlikely to need more than 4 in future, IMO. I assume I'm best putting one of those little patch boxes at each end so I can plug all the strands in so they don't get dirty or damaged, and so I can fix the outdoor cable in place all the way along and never have to touch it again, then use short patch leads to the actual devices.
For that distance, even OM1 will technically do 10Gbps. These days it's easier to get SMF fiber and optics, the MMF stuff is actually getting harder to find, at least in US suppliers. We default to SMF for everything new now.
@Thumper Ah, nice. At least one supplier I looked at seemed to have SM cable slightly cheaper than MM, but the difference wasn't huge and most places seem to do both. I do wonder if SM is any more fragile? I get the feeling it would be but I'm not sure I can source that feeling. I'd guess SM might be a little more futureproof too, although 10Gbps will likely be enough for me for a long long time!
We just did SMF upgrades for two runs at two sites and both were 15-20% cheaper than MMF. I don't have hands-on experience with new SMF termination but I'm told there are lots of quick/easy termination tools that don't require the hours of polishing anymore if you're just using it for local LAN stuff and not long range stuff.
"Are you aware of anything which would prevent you from holding SC or DV clearance?"
No, but if you put me in for it, I'm going to spend the next few weeks dressing like I'm on my way to Pride. You know, just to reduce the blackmail potential a little more, and improve my chances...
I feel like this decade is going to end more or less like the XKEYSCORE/Snowden scandal did: the level of encryption used on the internet increases further. Maybe to the point of "everything travels over VPNs"
Four windows. Four cute faces: Slyde, Scotch, Russec, and Kosten, each painted on their own acrylic canvas, all turning to look at one another, just like a certain TV intro⌠but fluffier.
Acrylics over canvases.
----
There is a time-lapse I recorded working on these 4 pieces, you can watch it on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
Or there is even a longer version (36 minutes long) of the process of this project, exclusive for Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters, as well of other time-lapse videos, many pictures I haven't shared on my galleries yet, high resolutions and more. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/notifications Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
Official Art Channel đ˛đ˝ Clean cute artist. Full-Time Panda. Here to paint some smiles. https://linktr.ee/panda_paco Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi Shop: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco/shop Stickers channel: @pacostickers
Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are often left out of critical infrastructure discussions. From Sudanâs total Internet isolation to traffic collapses in Italy and the Netherlands, fragile interconnection leaves nations vulnerable.
Find out why IXPs are systemic stabilisers, not just technical optimisers:
In âEveâs Byte of the Appleâ, Sandi Toksvig will be taking an alternative look at the evolution of information, at how the knowledge of women and about women...
Happy Spider-Man day! (Apparently? I used to have it in the calendar on my old phone, but that phone broke a few months ago and I'm still finding things I used to be forewarned about but⌠am no longer.)
I might adopt that. I've never liked that "self" is a convention rather than a language definitive. Using "elf" would be more obviously arbitrary but still be close enough to convention to not throw off those who depend upon them.
I am an artist from Montreal currently working fulltime on furry art! I studied 3D animation for 3 years, and worked as a 3D modeller for about a year, ultimately realising that I didn't enjoy it as...
official petition to the national french assembly just got 2 million signatures against bad farming practices and corruption and the speaker of the gvt responded by hiring a lobbyist as chief of staff...
For the US, just change it to say "GOP Run US Government Response: We'll not just say no. We'll do the opposite to cause the most pain, harm, and chaos."
Tom Lehrer on public domain (2020):https://tomlehrersongs.com/The recording is from Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 1967.Here are some other links:Tom Lehr...
The physical cart shows the original cartridge's label on a tiny screen? Heh, wow. (I probably still have a Star Raiders cartridge in a box somewhere, somewhere... I am sure I've at least seen my old Atari Assembler relatively recently.)
DecentCart2350, new upcoming open source #Atari8bit computers multicart with a nice screen (and many other useful features - see video). Entry for ABBUC Hardware Contest 2025. https://youtu.be/o-sEndb4mEI #atari #retrocomputers
The DecentCart2350 is a new multicart for Atari 8-bit computers. It's based on the RP2350 microcontroller and features a large screen that can display the cu...
DecentCart2350, new upcoming open source #Atari8bit computers multicart with a nice screen (and many other useful features - see video). Entry for ABBUC Hardware Contest 2025. https://youtu.be/o-sEndb4mEI #atari #retrocomputers
The DecentCart2350 is a new multicart for Atari 8-bit computers. It's based on the RP2350 microcontroller and features a large screen that can display the cu...
The scary thing about the data breach of the Tea app where peopleâs government IDs were leaked is that multiple governments are passing laws requiring people to provide their ID to random apps and websites to prove theyâre 18.
We are going to see some incredibly embarrassing leaks in the future.
@mattsqu It's not going to be long before we read about the death of someone who was blackmailed with stolen ID-check photos and details of the sites they were visiting. Or about them paying the ransom.
@mattsqu Exactly. Concerning adult content - itâs going to drive people to VPNs and/or deep/dark web or just overall sleazier sites with even worse control over illegal content.
They had absolutely NO REASON to retain this data. There is absolutely no way to completely trust someone you are handing your ID over to.
A few weeks ago I went to the local village fair in my new neighborhood. Of course, I Spideyed up the place. Got a card through the door the following day from my next-door neighbour⌠looks like I'm booked for next year! đ
(If you saw this post, did it appear to have 2 pictures attached, or just 1? I posted 2 through Friendica's web interface, and both show up there, but I'm only seeing 1 through Tusky.)
@Darkhorse WinterWolf đŞđş It was a very nice surprise to get a thank you card after just⌠going and having some fun! I didn't expect to be booked for next year quite so quick either. đ
For anyone who couldn't see the second picture⌠(I'm guessing it was because I didn't escape some stuff in square brackets that wasn't valid BBcode. Oops.)
2 years ago I had worked on a piece where I was being such a red panda impostor, but now Cinnabar decided to reverse this and he's the impostor wah, disguising himself as a panda bear.
This is a continuation for this picture: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51395703/ Cinnabar got the original piece at MFF's Art Show and he wanted to have the reverse version with his character to put both of them together. So here it is!
Picture for Cinnabar Panda Traditional. Colored Pencils over toned blue mix media paper.
I would like to thank all those who signed the petition.
ButâŚ
The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Complete waste of time. Zero commitments given to the hundreds of thousands of concerned people who signed. No âwe hear your concerns and we will act on itâ.
Still has to go to the Petitions Committee to decide whether to debate in Parliament, because over 100,000 signatures. The (predictable) government response was triggered by 10,000 signatures.
@cyberleagle Iâm in the middle of writing another letter to my MP. Iâm considering asking to meet with them at their constituency surgery to discuss the matter too. Itâs far too easy for these politicians to wriggle out of doing anything meaningful.
Cue surprised centrist faces in 2029 âwhy did we get voted out?â - âhow on Earth did extreme right-wing Reform candidates beat us?â #OnlineSafetyAct
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a centrist approach. People tend to be very polarised politically one way or the other, and the best way to prevent that is by taking a balanced position.
Write to your MP. I mean physically write - not just an email. Letters have far more weight as they are kept as documentation on an issue: "Additionally, written correspondence allows for a documented⢠record of public opinion, which MPs can use to inform their decisions. â¤Forâ instance, consider⣠theâ case in 2020 when⣠MPs received an influx⢠of â¤letters regardingâ climateâ change."
Writing a letter to your Parliament member can feel like sending a message in a bottleâexcept this one actually gets read! In "How to Write a Letter to Parliament Member: Key Points," you'll discover how to craft a compelling message that demandâŚ
They seem to be in La-La land. They believe the things they are requiring are proportionate, technically practical and enforceable. Add to that the companies on the arse-end of the legislation taking dumb fool implementations to do age confirmation...
Of course they're going to double down and make it all even worse.
@Avon DeRussate @Rick I thought I noticed a lot of mentions of enforcement in tht statement, and how they'll decide to choose who to enforce against. Which basically means police state - so many are in violation the enforcers can choose who to take action against however they like. The whole reason so many sites are choosing to block the UK is because they don't want to get into all that. If the law shouldn't be so broad, make it not so broad, don't just make everyone a criminal and then choose only to enforce against people you don't like. But apparently they just don't get that (or choose not to get that).
"how they'll decide to choose who to enforce against"
If I were writing the legislation "any domestic internet connection the traffic of which (records of which are subpoenaed from ISPS) appears to have an IP signature that suggests VPN use. "
They had more than enough (indeed quite possibly excessive) power to deal with genuine problems before that act came in. That act just pushed things way into "excessive powers" territory.
![Inside the card: To [REDACTED] (and Spiderman). Thank you for coming down to the fete yesterday! The lads loved seeing Spiderman! From [REDACTED] (fete organiser). Next one 4/6/26!](https://floof.org/photo/832268496568896463ccc66086124038-1.jpeg "Inside the card: To [REDACTED] (and Spiderman). Thank you for coming down to the fete yesterday! The lads loved seeing Spiderman! From [REDACTED] (fete organiser). Next one 4/6/26!")
In short, running from platforms that do things we don't like won't change them. Because too many people are just going to stay there anyway. Running from Twitter, Discord, etc, they're not going to change because the vast majority of people won't do that. They'll just carry on doing what they always have.
What's needed instead is for the users to collectively tell companies to knock off their shit. Which admittedly is something also pretty damed hard to get people to do, but it's the better option of the two.
I donât understand this. The only thing that gives these platforms their power is their huge user base - leaving is the only method that you as an individual have to directly affect that power.
Collectively demanding anything wonât make a difference - it doesnât threaten their power.
@nepi This is true, but their huge user bases also insulate them from people leaving unless it happens en masse. For example, just before Musk bought Twitter, it had around 260 million users. When he bought it many people left. I'm not exaggerating when I say millions. But, it's continued to get worse. All in all about 10 million people have left Twitter since then. But out of 260 million that just wasn't enough. The vast, overwhelming majority of people stayed, and other than changing their name to X and becoming even more of a cess pool nothing else really changed.
Sometimes it's better to stay, make noise, and get anyone else you can to also make noise. Be intolerable, getting together and being loud about the things you want to see change can sometimes work against large companies where just leaving doesn't.
@nepi "Sometimes it's better to stay, make noise, and get anyone else you can to also make noise. Be intolerable, getting together and being loud about the things you want to see change can sometimes work against large companies where just leaving doesn't."
This also means putting a hudge target on our account for the people with too much free time. Receiving torrents of hate of people which are very happy with the way this plateforms work isn't funny nor good for the mental health.
It would feel more approripate to leave a bot doing it instead, while leaving to an other plateform.
@ck0 @nepi This is a risk. But it's a risk we face in everything we do. And I understand not everyone is up to bearing that risk. And if it's not something you're up to that's also fine. There have been times I've just stepped away from things as well, not every cause is a hill worth dying on.
If someone is legitimately afraid that people will come after them directly for one reason or another and they're not up to that, they definitely shouldn't put themselves potentially in harms way.
They won't do it. The only way to move towards it is to help or fund a platform that is moving in the direction that you want - you're already on Mastodon, so you're already doing that.
Unfortunately what people actually want is a benevolent billionaire that provides roughly what they want. In that absence they will choose a free of cost platform run by venture capitalists until it becomes unbearable, then move directly on to another VC backed service. Rinse and repeat.
Until the average person understands that to control something they consider important they need to pay for it *even and especially if it is free* nothing will change. That's the more likely option.
The other option is everyone collectively provides their labour to create the service they want. That's even less probable.
It's worth trying!
Although, if you're talking about a commercial service it'll have to align exactly with their commercial interests, otherwise they will continually try to shift the goalposts.
That takes a montruous quantity of time and energy to do so. I get that's possible, there are laws in EU which can be exploited for this.
But when just to get the GPDR applied in the right way requires to legally attack the administration in charge of the GPDR application because they are more busy trying to find ways to bend the laws in order to let the companies no respect the GPDR, attempting to exploit a local legislation in order to constrain a company to be less shitty feels like an impossible task.
It feels much more easier to just leave to a more appropriate plateform, or to make a selfhosted one.
And for some things sure, just leaving and going to something else, or doing something self hosted is a viable answer, but for other things it's not. Every situation is going to be different. Sometimes just leaving isn't an option because a service or piece of software has become so ubiquitous that it's basically infrastructure. Sometimes neither approach will really make a difference. Everything has to be looked at on a case by case basis.
Just leaving isn't, but working to build other communities, getting people you know to move over, and building a space for yourself is at least a challenge to their power over you and your community, or at least if it's not then nothing is.