981–990 of 996 posts
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This wouldn't address a lot of metadata-related privacy concerns.
How would it not?
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Has anyone demonstrated how many people these "Russian bots" have influenced? There's enough craziness online before throwing in non-linear warfare. I'd imagine it's far less influence than, say, Charles Koch has. Why is it ok that he has an outsized influence on our "democracy" but such a terrible thought that Putin has influence? It's not like either person will act in our collective interest.
It's connected to the same reason we only allow US citizens to be involved in US politics. You at least assume that a citizen has a direct interest in the country's domestic well-being. We talk about russian bots nationally because violating that norm is a cultural scandal, but there's plenty of discussion around outsize influence by corporations and the rich in social media as well. It's not really okay for anybody.
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A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/
I didn't know about this. I'll stop recommending F-droid.
If the gab devs were somewhat competent they'd create their own F-droid repo and distribute their app through that - F-droid allows this, and cannot stop this.
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This is a tricky problem even to define, because there's "Reddit" which is the owners and paid moderators, then there is "reddit" which is the universe of its subreddits and its unpaid, unaccountable moderators. For example, it's been well known for awhile that if you subscribe to any of the men's rights subs, you are auto-banned from several of the feminism ones (including TwoXChromosomes). That kind of thing certai…
Just a slight correction - nobody knows what subs you subscribe to on Reddit, it all works by looking at you commenting in these "wrong" subs. It does not matter what the content of the comment was, of course. What matters is the fact you left the bubble and interacted with a different one, you traitorous scum.
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The thing is, any service that offers a "censorship-free" alternative will instantly attract mostly by those whose content is garbage for everyone else: usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation, and then come Nazis, antisemites and conspiracy myth peddlers. And said hate peddlers then complain that they don't have the r…
> usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation You're describing illegal content. Nobody is objecting to taking that down. Everyone else is talking about censoring legal content.
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>Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria. Mental harms, in many cases, can also be detected by competent professionals; besides that, it is entirely possible for physical harms to heal and for supporting evidence of their infliction be used to convict. Further, many physical harms depend at least partially on the victim's characteristics or situation; a concert pianist is arguably harmed m…
Here's where mental harms "detected by competent professionals" leads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
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I mean the NYT has the videos and very clearly shows that he acted defensively each time. I was surprised by how clearly they were willing to show that considering their bias, I didn’t really read the content around the video, but that alone was interesting. Of course the title at the time made it sound like he was guilty so...
Followup reporting indicates that he was not asked to guard the business that he was "protecting", that the business asked him and others not to get involved and they did anyway, and that he instigated the altercation with the men chasing him in the video. It's not self-defense when you start the fight.
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A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/
good
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How would it not?
Because you'd still know everyone who went to a specific site because they'd be sending you unique hash. Even if you ignore that, you'd know what clusters of people all use the same sites, how often and when.
However I suppose that if the site does have comments, then you do have to make requests to the server to get them...
Still, I believe you're being overly pessimistic here. I think there may be some solutions to this. Maybe not perfect, but better. Lets say our social network "Ascenter" has become corrupt and is looking blackmail its participants. What about this?:
The design currently requires you to send a sha(URL+salt) to the server to look up comments. This prevents Ascenter from directly knowing what site the comments refer to, but the comments themselves will be a big clue. What if to look at the comments you have to decrypt them using sha(URL+salt2)? Ascenter will have no means to derive this key, it will only be able to determine how many comments have being placed and how large they are. That improves things a bit...
But Ascenter might be able to crawl the web to discover conversations. Particularly for salacious sites if it's looking for blackmail. So... What if the salts are the answer to that? If you had your own set of salts you could use them to create your own private groups, Ascenter would have no way to access that conversation. Or even figure out that they have occurred.
With the presence of public and private salts, what if the browser plugin itself could be configured with a blacklist of sites not to send requests for? You could still have private channel comments, but not public. I could see the community per-generating a black list...
One last note I'd end on here is that the level of trust we are expecting right now is a huge bar lower than the level of trust we give general social networks
Consider what HackerNews could do if it went rogue like like Ascenter? To blackmail you all they would need to do is go to one of your old comments, rewrite it as something salacious, then blackmail you with it. Comments on HackerNews arn't signed, and arn't encrypted. We're quite vulnerable to them.
edit: sorry for the long post. This was a bit of a stream of consciousness.
TL;DR: The bloom filter limits the risk, and I think there are cryptographic solutions that reduce the level of user exposure to below that of current social networks.
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> usually it's pedophiles until the operators get a couple not-so-nice letters or a police raid and then at least introduce modest moderation You're describing illegal content. Nobody is objecting to taking that down. Everyone else is talking about censoring legal content.
Hitler salutes, calling for gassing Jews, or "out with migrants" have been illegal in Germany since 1945 - for obvious reasons, one might add. That is illegal content under German laws, but "muh free speech!!!11" for Americans.