asjmcguire

Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.

His mother started telling him he was a genius that would change the world - from the age of 4. Repeatedly telling a young child with ASD that… I think it’s pretty safe to say that is going to produce narcissistic tendencies.

But… I thought nitter had figured out that they could just use the API keys in the official Twitter apps to continue using the API?

I mean I find it mind boggling that people aren’t noticing yet, that Elon has basically pulled a bait and switch. Especially now that it is becoming even more obvious. Take a product that everyone is using, and degrade the free aspects of it to the point that the only way for people to be able to continue using it - is by paying for it.

His excuses are ludicrous, that he thinks that advance notice would let “bad actors” change the way they operate, as if those bad actors wouldn’t have just changed the way they operate as soon as it started being limited anyway.

Hell there is a thread floating around somewhere which shows that you can just reverse engineer the app and get the API key that way. The bots and “bad actors” will therefore continue, and legitimate users will be the only ones impacted.

Because the GDPR requires explicit consent, you need to informed what data Meta will collect about you, and how they will use it, and then you have to click something saying that you are OK with that. The GDPR specifically rules out implicit consent, which is what Meta would be claiming “Well they are posting to the fediverse, so it is fair game”

But I am a citizen that is covered by the GDPR in the UK. I have an account on allthingstech.social which a US server, so they would be breaching GDPR by ingesting my data. They can’t know where any user comes from just by the server that user is attached to - which is going to a lovely fun headache for them to deal with 😂

Just going to remind you that we STILL don’t have the fancy Instagram messaging in the UK because of the GDPR. Not sure how exactly the GDPR is hampering us being able to react to a message with more emoji than just a heart, or be able to reply to specific messages - but thats what Instagram claim is the reason it’s not available anywhere that has the GDPR

Sadly I haven’t yet got Kbin’s RSS to work with FreshRSS. It claims there is no feed. Which is a shame. But yes I use FreshRSS daily 👍

Indeed, SpaceX was indeed almost bankrupt. It only succeeded because the last attempt to launch and land a reusable rocket got them a massive cash injection from NASA. But if that launch had failed like the ones before it, that would have been the end of SpaceX.

Yeah but Elons problem isn’t just the ASD - that’s part of it sure, but his problem is having ASD and a mother who told him repeatedly from a very very early age, that he was a genius.

That would be damaging to a neurotypical persons self view, but I dread to think how that damages a neurodivergent 😲

In short, Elon definitely displays narcissistic tendencies - and I suspect that being constantly told you are a genius who will change the world, is a bug reason why.

There should be no technical reason why not, with an Nginx reverse proxy in front to handle connecting to the docker containers.

Next step - should be a server that simply coordinates video transcoding, and users can run an application on their computer which will do the transcoding when it’s idle and deliver the transcoded video back to the server. Like the rest of the Fediverse, make the community actually part of the community. I’m sure many of us would be happy to donate spare CPU time.

This is awesome game changing stuff for PeerTube. Especially since it lays the groundwork for more distributed tasks down the road.

Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.

But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.

I feel like outside the federated system, meta would rely on geographic metadata (eg IP address) to identify if a user was within the scope of the GDPR or not. But they aren’t going to have access to any of this information, when they receive the data from another server in the fediverse. There will be zero way for them to identify if a user from any server in the fediverse would be applicable to the GDPR or not, because any user from any country can basically sign up anywhere. It will be difficult for them to argue against that - since it’s highly publicised that when Mastodon was struggling under the strain of the massive influx of new users - that people were being advised to find an instance that aligned to their interests rather than just their geographical location. Indeed I am on a Scottish server - where I arrived in 2019, but I have recently started another account on a US server ( allthingstech.social) so I would indeed be a user protected by GDPR on a US server. Because Meta have no way of knowing where a user comes from, the only thing they can definitely legally do - is process data from their own known users - but they are crossing into dangerous territory the second they start trying to process data from users outside their own instance. In my opinion anyway.

And no I don’t mind debating at all. There needs to be a lot more debate, and a lot less death threats and screaming matches online - in order for us to start resolving anything.

Edit:
The GDPR applies to data on people. So in your example - it doesn’t matter how Meta got the data, the point is that they have data on citizens that are protected by the GDPR, the fact that the data arrived indirectly via a US server, doesn’t remove the protection afforded to the EU citizen

Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.

You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.

Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.

Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.

Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄

Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.