201–210 of 506 posts
Thank you. We're seeing a far more insidious and accelerating nationalization and politicization of reality. A very dangerous world ahead.
We're seeing the effects of globalisation. India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.
Presumably they don't want India to ban all of Wikipedia, so they're playing ball.
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They c…
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As a wikipedia contributor (aroound 10-13 year old account) but not really serious, i have no kind words for wikipedia. The trolling and brigading is alive and well there. Thats the reason i stopped contributing. As my name would suggest, I live in a hotly contested part of the world and I have hundreds of pages in my watchlist. The amount of "bjp it cell" work they put in to portray their world view on Wikipedia is…
Without the full details of the edit war you were involved in, the scenario seems to be clash between your "world view" and those who reversed your edits. From your username, being from a region where a successful genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group was conducted by the majority local population only a couple of decades back, the possibility of your edits being controversial to others not necessar…
200 people of that minority were killed.
I do not deny there was a mass exodus but to say a minority was ethnic cleansing is disengenous.
Again, my comment was not about the exodus but regarding the politics regarding the last 500 years and more specifically the last 70-90 odd years of history. That has nothing minority-majority issue you are claiming it out to be.
On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.
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Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social co…
"needs to be" No it doesn't. And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street. Thought policing and other neo-puritanian movements can go fuck themselves.
It's slightly different, since you don't do your banking, taxes, business, information gathering at that family gathering; nor can malicious actor effortlessly spam misinformation/scams at every family gathering/street.
Especially considering we know multiple countries have extremely active operations online trying to sway opinions their way, it's naive to compare the internet to a neutral public place.
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I am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened"). Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
This was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.
The fact they pulled it means I will no longer be donating. I can’t support orgs that won’t go the distance to protect a free and open internet when that’s what they argue for.
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I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others. And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B. So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases wil…
Most of these cases don't involve any actual harm beyond hurt feelings, so that's largely a red herring.
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As more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them. In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service. The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable. Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
It's not just the newer generations. I have multiple friends who are literally afraid of using ad blockers and sideloading apps on their Macs in fear of some imaginary boogeyman out to get them. And VPNs are exclusively the domain of criminals, apparently. There are a dominating amount of people who have turned into the caricature of the perfect CONSUMER. It is so frustrating.
- Richard M. Stallman, 2011, writing in Der Spiegel
He was right. He was always right. About all of it. People didn't listen, or perhaps were never introduced to his ideas. Software grew faster than the idea of free software (on some level this was inevitable, since the latter is by definition a subset of the former).
And so, the noose tightened a little more every year.
The remedy has never changed: you must explain to people why freedom is important, and what the terrible consequences are of non-freedom. Refer them to the free software ecosystem, Linux and the FSF. Many will not listen. But whether they listen is to some extent irrelevant. Life is more fulfilling when it is lived ethically. By doing your part to advocate for freedom and against its enemies, you are at least making your own welfare better, and hopefully someone else's too.