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#decentralization

tanakian@spyurk.am
inky, from the tape

this is a russian podcast on history of the fediverse: https://open.tube/videos/watch/db9cc76d-093c-4347-a49a-9af4246a1d92

i have to say they did a comprehensive research, or did know the history very well.
it starts with the early internet, email, then explains situation with messengers, xmpp, xml, rss, tells about aaron schwartz, and goes in to early fediverse projects, starting from identica.

in this podcast, diaspora is a tragic story. near the end of the podcast they mention the ticket to support activitypub, and that the comments were mostly not about whether it should be done, but on how it should be done. and then comes dennis schubert, critisizes the protocol and rejects the wanted proposal. then they say that diaspora is getting weaker - quantity of nodes decreases, while fediverse is getting richer - more and more people are attracted.

mastodon was mentioned as a huge success. well, it is a huge success. but they also mentioned that the project is heavy, slow, not easily deployed, has too many dependencies. most of that can also be said about diaspora. the pleroma was presented as an alternative, which is much faster, easily updated without downtime, thanks to underlying erlang ecosystem. it also supports gopher!

i did not think socialhome will be mentioned. but jason robinson was mentioned several times, as federation activist, diaspora developer, then the-federation.info author, and then they described the socialhome project in details, starting with its history. mentioned that it has very little number of nodes, and expressed the hope that it'll be developed further.

they also were talking about pixelfed, funkwhale, peertube, mobilizon, and the blog engines that support federation: write freely, plume, and that wordpress is able to federate with activitypub nodes via special plugin.

overall, very interesting, for me, listening, and a very good introduction for newcomers. thanks to creators. i am really thankful to creators, i wish the text was published, because i know many prefer to read, not listen, like me, also it would make the text searchable.

#russian #podcast #history #internet #diaspora #mastodon #decentralization #socialhome #pixelfed #funkwhale #peertube #mobilizon, #blog #rss #atom #writefreely #plume #wordpress #activitypub #federation #freedom #freedom_of_speech #freedom-of-speech #freedomofspeech #web #gopher #w3c #standards #protocol #protocols #research #listening

История Fediverse

Пересборка представляет: История Fediverse Полная версия истории социальной сети Fediverse. Ведущий - @drq@mastodon.ml Огромное...

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dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

Bruce Schneier, "IT for Oppression"

IEEE Security & Privacy. March/April 2013

  • What is called censorship when practiced by a government is content filtering when practiced by an organization. Many companies want to keep their employees from viewing porn or updating their Facebook pages while at work. In the other direction, data loss prevention software keeps employees from sending proprietary corporate information outside the network and also serves as a censorship tool. Governments can use these products for their own ends.
  • Propaganda is really just another name for marketing. All sorts of companies offer social media-based marketing services designed to fool consumers into believing there is “buzz” around a product or brand. The only thing different in a government propaganda campaign is the content of the messages.
  • Surveillance is necessary for personalized marketing, the primary profit stream of the Internet. Companies have built massive Internet surveillance systems designed to track users’ behavior all over the Internet and closely monitor their habits. These systems track not only individuals but also relationships between individuals, to deduce their interests so as to advertise to them more effectively. It’s a totalitarian’s dream.
  • Control is how companies protect their business models by limiting what people can do with their computers. These same technologies can easily be co-opted by governments that want to ensure that only certain computer programs are run inside their countries or that their citizens never see particular news programs.

Technology magnifies power, and there’s no technical difference between a government and a corporation wielding it. This is how commercial security equipment from companies like BlueCoat and Sophos end up being used by the Syrian and other oppressive governments to surveil — in order to arrest — and censor their citizens. This is how the same face-recognition technology that Disney uses in its theme parks ends up identifying protesters in China and Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York.

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/03/it_for_oppression.html

See previously: Propaganda, Censorship, and Surveillance are attributes of the same underlying aspect: Monopoly and Centralised Control.

#propaganda #censorship #surveillance #monopoly #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #control #power #decentralisation #decentralization #pluralism

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dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

Propaganda, Censorship, and Surveillance are attributes of the same underlying aspect: Monopoly and Centralised Control.

All three problems have the same effective solution: Break up the monopolies.

Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience capture, selective promotion, discovery, distraction, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Censorship and Gatekeeping are functions of excludability, audience gating, selective exclusion, obfuscation, distraction, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Surveillance whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state actor varieties, is a function of population and provider capture, coercion or gatekeeping of vendors and pipelines, and, again, coöption of the platform. Surveillance is an inherent property of monopoly control.

Speakers and Audiences --- a public --- divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control

It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface. Retail brand labels vs. brand ownership, or Luxottica's stranglehold over the eyeglasses market, for example, give a false sense of "consumer choice" in a case of actual tight corporate control.

Why is this?

What's the fundamental connection between monopoly and control? Control is about maximising desired outcome to applied effort. In monopoly, there is a central focus of influence: the monopolist. Even a very partial controlling share can still be effective. In a first-past-the-post majority scenario such as elections or corporate share ownership, the bloc which swings the majority has control, even if it itself is numerically a minority. In markets, networks, organisations, etc., a single place to permit or deny input or output increases control by decreasing effort and increasing effect. Price and costs often afford control, a faact monopoly apologists attempt to turn into a strength. By offering lower-price goods or services, or facing lower internal provisiioning and operating costs, monopolists can undercut competitors, even without taking active anticompetitive measures such as price-dumping, rebating, blackballing, blacklisting, exclusive dealing, tying, bundling, non-competes, and the like.

All monopolies are network structures with dominant nodes. These may be entry, exit, or transit nodes.

Increasing the number of entry, exit, and distribution points decreases the efficacy of propaganda (input control), censorship (output control), or surveillance (network control), as well as of targeted manipulation such as adtech and computational propaganda (data retention and algorithm control).

Careful readers may note the close correspondence with the ancient trivium of the classic liberal education: grammar (input), rhetoric (output), and logic (processing based on inputs and stored memory). The ancients had limited network control, widespread surveillance to them was exceedingly expensive, though small-town gossips and palace spies offer analogues.

Shout-outs to

... and others breaking through some seriously Borked chickenshit thinking on this topic.

Expanded from an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735860

#propagand #censorship #surveillance #monopoly #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #control #power #decentralisation #decentralization #pluralism

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presgas@pluspora.com
PresGas (OSR) Aspect

Someone earlier was lamenting the loss of G+ again. I get it; it was a pretty decent method of communication. It prompted me to rant....errrr...reply the following though. Making it an actual post.

The blogosphere was around before G+ and it is really still around after. There are plenty of decentralized options besides blogger or tumblr et al if you really look. Google failed us all on numerous occasions by killing services:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Time to bring the internet back from the big data centers, learn a bit along the way, and be independent of bottlenecks to connecting.

https://redecentralize.org/
https://switching.software/

#decentralization #google #floss

Killed by Google

Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.

dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

Manal al-Sharif: We need a new social media, Twitter is a trap: Why I deleted my Twitter account

Themes: Online harassment, propaganda, misinformation silencing tool of governments, dictatorships, and tyrants.

Decentralised, non-advertising-based media are required.

Also:

Social media ‘aids oppressors’, says Saudi rights campaigner
Manal al-Sharif, a leader in the fight for Saudi women’s right to drive, claims Twitter is used to harass activists
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/28/twitter-facebook-saudi-oppression

Transcript

Good morning everyone. I am in Stockholm, Sweden, and yesterday in Singularity U, I decided to delete my Twitter account live on stage in a protest of how this tool that once saved my life is now being used to put my life and the life of a lot of human rights and activists in danger.

If you look at world wide trends today it is ... I am Arab, and Mohammed bin Salman represents me. This tells you who is in control now of Twitter: Twitter is being controlled by trolls, by pro-government mobs, and by bots. Those are being paid by pro-government [agent]s who want to silence, intimidate, harass, dissidents and anyone who speaks the truth. Twitter today is being used by the same governments that we spoke against to disclose all the violations against human rights. It's being used by them to silence us, and not only to silence us but to propagate their propaganda, to also push for disinformation, and to harass and silence every single true voice.

People I know, people I trusted -- people I'd thought were friends, and who have critical thinking -- they've been brainwashed by the messages being pushed by the pro-Saudi government (voices), in a way that is horrendous. I ... I wonder is this really happening? Is this really true?

Ali Alzabarah), the Saudi Twitter employee, who had close ties with Saudi Intelligence, had had access to private accounts of Saudi activists providing this information to the Saudi government.

Day by day, more and more, we know about "influentials" -- Twitter influentials -- who were harrassed, sent to prison, and even disappeared. Reports by companies like McKinsey -- _The New York Times talked about that [hhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/us/politics/saudi-image-campaign-twitter.html] -- really make me worried.

Twitter is now becoming a trap, and it's being used in a very efficient way by these governments, and dictatorships and tyrants to silence us, and not only that, but to spread their own propaganda, their own hate speech, their own misinformation and disinformation. This is why I protested yesterday by deleting my Twitter account, and will not go to that platform. Now I'm also deleting my Facebook account, because I don't feel safe being on these accounts.

This is a call -- if you are a Tech Maker -- this is a call for people who believe that freedom of speech safeguards all other freedoms.

We need to create a blockchain-enabled social media. We need to create social media that is decentralised, that can be used to push for the truth, and cannot be bought. That doesn't have the business model of Twitter which is based on who pays, and they don't care about anything but how many people are signing up for accounts.

[Twitter] deleted 70 million fake, malicious accounts this year. Where were they since the company started, and since Saudis began using Twitter to push for human rights?

In 2011 when I joined [Twitter], I remember a friend of mine who told me that he'd joined because his mother joined to follow our campaign to enable Saudi women the right to drive. He felt so embarrassed that he didn't have an account on Twitter, and so he joined. That year, the number of Twitter users was 60 million, today it is 380 million. People joined Twitter and these platforms because they believed in these causes, and they believed in the things that we called for. But if the same tools that we used for liberation once are being used to oppress us, are being used to undermine us, are being used to spread hate and fake news -- I'm out of these platforms.

I'll continue speaking up because tyrants and dictators are the ones who should be afraid, not us.

Lightly edited for continuity and clarity, otherwise as close as possible to the original.

#twitter #onlineMedia #decentralizedWeb #federation #decentralization

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8regaO3hl_g

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