Notices by Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 (rysiek@mstdn.social)

There's a "Signal deanonymized" thing going around:
https://gist.github.com/hackermondev/45a3cdfa52246f1d1201c1e8cdef6117

Stay calm. Deep breaths.

👉 while this is a real consideration, the only thing the attacker gets from this is a very rough (kilometers or tens of kilometers radius) location

👉 other communication platforms that use any kind of caching CDN to deliver attachments are just as affected

👉 you almost certainly should continue to use Signal, unless you specifically know that this is a big problem for you.

#Signal #InfoSec

Thank God we don't live in Omelas… :blobcat0_0:
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Damn this hits hard.

I hate having photos taken of me. I feel uncomfortable whenever that happens, always look weird on photos, etc. My friends are well aware.

Not rest of the world though. So people take photos, I object, it gets awkward fast. :blobcatsweats:

Today a guy running a small bar somewhere in #Iceland came up with a huge camera and… asked first. And you know what? I was fine with the photo being taken.

The fact he recognized the need for consent first made it much less likely the photo gets mis-used.

Best social network money can't buy.

#Fediverse

Wait, is there any way at all to install Windows 11 on a laptop *without* connecting it to the bullshit "Microsoft account" thing?

The installer seems not to give me that option. As in, there is no way to move forward without "signing in."

What the actual fsck.

Edit: trying a non-existent account worked. It then allowed me to proceed without a Microsoft account. 🤦♀️

#Windows #Microsoft

@beanclock bean there, done that.

@maperal no no, I did not mean to imply that! I only meant it as: appreciate that person and the work they are doing. Regardless of whether or not they were involved in this at all.

@maperal thanks. But it's not me who needs support right now, it's the fedi admins from all sides of this kerfuffle that do.

Send a hug to your fedi admin. :blobcatfingerguns:

@dansup

@maperal I have not seen a clear, complete explanation yet, no.

But discourse got completely off the rails, and this is the time to calm down and just wait a bit until somebody writes all of this up.

@dansup

@maperal this is a five day old too that is missing a bunch of context, and was never meant to explode the way it did.

Seriously, at this stage, best ignore it, there are way better places to get informed about this.

I am leaving it up only because deleting toots gets people into paranoid mode looking for conspiracies.

@dansup

And to make this abundantly clear… regardless of how much you disagree with a person and how much you feel their decisions might be wrong:
👉 harassment is harassment, and is unacceptable
👉 calling for harm is calling for harm, and is unacceptable
👉 pile-ons are pile-ons, and are unacceptable

People who engage in that sort of thing are like locusts. They join a community, destroy it, and move on.

If you care about fedi, push back against that, even if it targets someone you disagree with.

There is a need for a longer conversation about the stuff that the kerfuffle relates to.

But it has to be a conversation, not a shouting match. People are throwing accusations and making conjectures that have nothing to do with reality!

And we need to be able to have this conversation without pushing out people most engaged in maintaining the infrastructure we use to have this conversation.

There is a way to do all that, but for that we need to take a step back, and take a deep breath.

I feel embarrassed and bad about my role in this latest kerfuffle. A question was asked, I responded strongly as I often do, and that got its own life.

I am disappointed in myself (because I should have been more careful with words, with the platform I have around here), but also in fedi (because we all should know to be excellent to each other).

No, nobody is trying to "sell out" fedi. Nobody is being "paid off" by some corpo. There is no need for digging trenches and laying barbed wire.

Hug your #FediAdmin today.

There's a lot of shit flying in the #Fediverse lately and a lot of times perspective seems to get lost. Yes, there are things we need to talk about, and yes there are things we will not agree on. And that's okay.

But leave the pitchforks and torches out of this.

Fedi admins put in the hours and effort and emotion into making fedi happen. Sometimes they make decisions we might not agree with. We should criticize, but we should not pile-on.

@dansup fedi admins meeting with Meta under NDAs is shit, that's what it is.

It's effectively giving Meta power over fedi, by giving Meta power over what fedi admins can and cannot share with their communities.

Which admins went, do you know?

#Fediverse #FediAdmin

…invite-only, that's not "elitist" of course 🙄)
- "thoughtful" articles show up asking questions about "how will Lemmy monetize", etc; and pointing out that choosing an instance is "confusing".
- the wave eventually subsides; plenty of people stay on Threadiverse, some don't; this gets reported as "Lemmy has failed".

We know all this from the #TwitterMigration. Point is, just as "Mastodon" has not failed (it's order of magnitude bigger than before!), Threadiverse will not have failed either.

🧵

A lot of media cannot think in any other terms than VC-funded startups chasing hockey-stick growth, and proclaiming them failed the moment that growth slows down.

#Fediverse in general, and #Threadiverse in particular, are not VC-funded startups. They don't need that hockey-stick growth.

We're here to build resilient, equitable, safe communities, not to maximize shareholder value. Don't get distracted or disheartened because some people don't get that.

Some do:
https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-users-c48ef8102891

🧵/end

A few days ago I made some predictions about the #Threadiverse and #RedditBlackout:
https://szmer.info/post/349217

tl;dr:
- soon media will discover Lemmy exists
- they will miss Kbin exists
- once they eventually notice it, they will be befuddled about it; Kbin will get called a "fork" of Lemmy at some point.
- more Threadiverse instances will start turning off registrations to deal with the deluge of people joining
- media will call this "elitist" (as opposed to BlueSky or ClubHouse being…

🧵

@tekkie yeah, a bunch of people will avoid it. Plus, there is no info what #CloudFlare considers an "event" and why it needed "mitigation". And if it's a small site, presumably going static would be feasible, which would remove a gigantic amount of attack surface, without putting a spying gatekeeper between the site and its visitors.

@tekkie @digitalRightsNinja scoring by whom, for what purpose?

Why do I care if a Tor node is "red" in that sense if my site is static and there's not much to abuse? What kind of "events" did CloudFlare "mitigate" for you on a static site that would not be mitigated by the fact that the site is static?

After doing some serious web hosting work, I really doubt that blocking Tor makes a difference, unless we're talking dynamic websites that allow anonymous interactions.