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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

infosec.exchange

301–310 of 386 posts

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way? Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist. Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower. Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order. Or when that tesla employee post…

Its the right wing radicalization that the parent is talking about. That's disturbing to watch.

tbf I'm not sure Musk's rightwingery is any deeper than realising what kind of one-liner appeals most to his stans on Twitter and deflects from stories about him which are bad no matter where you sit on the political spectrum (plus standard billionaire CEO views on regulation, employee rights and tax he's always had). I don't think we need to worry about him being more politically deft or ideologically driven than Trump either,.

I'd offer the alternative view: it's a bit sad to watch someone who once had the motivation and means to build flying cars get obsessed by 140 characters. The Twitter purchase feels less like his road to being the next Trump and more like Howard Hughes' passion for Vegas.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ElonJet pointed out where the flight was. The journalists simply pointed out that ElonJet was using public data from the FAA. So no, its not considered doxxing. All airplanes must be tracked, otherwise there's a chance that they'll crash into each other. If you don't like that, then maybe don't fly in a private jet all the time. Share your jet with others. Or God forbid, use a cheaper, more efficient, better-for-the-…

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> Jack Sweeney was posting non public information.

I feel like the speculation going on in the discourse as to the mysterious ways that the tracking was able to perpetuate muddies the waters, so let’s make that clearer.

1. It is public information that SpaceX has a public address at 1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne[0].

2. It is public information that a jet is registered at FAA for an owner whose shell company has a public address at 1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne. Its tail number is N628TS[1].

3. The jet is required by law to broadcast publicly, unencrypted, its tail number. Hobbyist pilots and ATCs around the world exchange that information to keep track of what is in the air. That exact jet’s ACARS information contains both its tail number and ICAO address[2]. The PIA anonymization program can randomize the ICAO address, but here we find which one it is by going through all planes. There are just so few.

4. The jet is also required to broadcast ADS-B messages publicly. ADS-B contains the ICAO address and latitude / longitude / altitude / velocity[3].

[0]: https://www.spacex.com/media/privacy_policy_spacex.pdf

[1]: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

[2]: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/109/52...

[3]: https://mode-s.org/decode/content/ads-b/1-basics.html

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#303
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

Such as Tumblr

For those downvoting the above poster, this probably wasn't a sarcastic quip - Tumblr really does plan to federate with the rest of the fediverse.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#304
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to leave the node. That's not censorship, it's the node owner's own free speech rights.

Right. I like mastodon's approach to moderation and ownership, it makes sense. But it's wrong to think of it as some sort of 8chan anarchy.

8chan wasn't anarchy. It's a closed fiefdom that had a highly permissive moderation policy. It could have decided to change at any time, and there's evidence that the owners manipulated it as well such as pretending to be "Q" and modifying trip codes for certain people.

Whomever admins the system owns the system. True for any Mastodon instance and true for Twitter.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#305
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when the instance you are on is banned or otherwise disappears and you use your exported data to "revive" your account on a different instance (with a different handle), which is the scenario I proposed above.

The only way to avoid that is to stand up your own instance. And that is the great thing about decentralized systems. Because you as a user have no visibility into the systems, finances, nor management of any of these platforms. I still blog on a server I rent but the backup is hosted in a server in my closet. I’m fully aware that rental can go away any time. And that’s been the case for decades. Maybe it’s a generat…

I'm on my own Mastodon instance but should it get banned I'd pretty much lose my followers. I think that was the original point. Otherwise agreed, neither Twitter nor Mastodon owe me anything.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#307
post #262
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr > How do I find people to follow? > > First, you must know them and get their public key somehow And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follo…

You can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked. The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you…

It makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery.

Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok.

It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

And people who host their own email server complain all the time that Google and Microsoft centralized email and set their own (often opaque) rules on what gets delivered. Therefore, 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization.

> 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization

Nobody outside a select few want to host their own server. And nobody wants to research which server to join, before they’ve experienced an ounce of product benefit, nor how to back up their data. This was always going to be centralised to a degree. But Gmail/Outlook with some Proton/Fast is distinctly better than Twitter, Musk or no Musk.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#309
post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

I have build https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#310

I suspect this whole "Twitter blocking Mastodon links for anticompetitive reasons" narrative is wrong to the point of being disingenuous. People have been tweeting links ElonJet trackers on Mastodon instances (including the official @joinmastodon account!), getting both themselves and the target Mastodon instance domains flagged. This is edgelord behaviour. Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-tim…

> Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information

This is a novel Twitter policy interpretation and everyone knows it. It’s par for the course for Twitter. But it’s hypocritical of Musk to be doing it.

> Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information

No, it does not. It lets operators rotate their aircraft address. Elon didn’t. He held the phone wrong.

If the FAA wanted to restrict the use of this information, it wouldn’t be publishing it.

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