• 7 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle







  • They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

    I’ll go one further - they can never work. AI is trained using a system where an artist system generates art, and a gatekeeper system gives a confidence rating of how it looks human. The artist system goes through a training process until it can consistently fool the gatekeeper system. If there was a system that existed that could identify currently generated AI art, it would become the new gatekeeper system, and the artist system would only get better.






  • Admin post from Kolektiva:

    🚨 Kolektiva.social SECURITY ALERT 🚨

    This is an alert for Kolektiva.social users. Please read this post in its entirety!

    In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.

    Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

    The database is the heart of a Mastodon server. A database copy such as the one seized may include any of the following user data, in this case up to date as of early May 2023:

    • User account information like the e-mail address associated with your account, your followers and follows, etc.
    • All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, and direct (“DMs”).
    • Possibly IP addresses associated with your account - IP addresses on Kolektiva.social are logged for 3 days and then deleted, so IP addresses from any logins in the 3 days prior to the database backup date would be included.
    • A hashed (“encrypted”) version of your password.

    🚨 👉 As a precaution we highly recommend that all users on Kolektiva.social change their password immediately to a new, unique, and strong password.

    We sincerely apologize to all our users and regret this breach. In hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to leave a copy of the database in an unencrypted state. Unfortunately, what would otherwise have been a small mistake happened to coincide with a raid, due to bad luck and spectacularly bad timing.

    We understand that our users and other people on the Fediverse will have a lot of questions. We will try to answer them as best we can, but please be patient and bear in mind that we may be overwhelmed with messages, and may be delayed in responding or unable to provide answers to certain questions for legal or technical reasons. As a security culture reminder, it can be extremely harmful to the individuals charged and to our community to openly speculate on the Internet about alleged criminal activity or about what law enforcement may be able to do with seized data. Our present awareness is that the seized Kolektiva data is unrelated to the federal investigation and prosecution and we are exploring legal avenues to have the seized data returned and copies destroyed.

    Thank you for your understanding and solidarity :black_sparkling_heart:

    👇 Please see our replies to this post for additional information (1/?) 👇





  • Clients are filtered out of the federated email system all the time. In fact, the major email distributors are so block-happy, it’s difficult to run a private email server anymore. If you want to guarantee your email gets through, you’re basically forced to use a major webmail client. If Facebook is allowed into the community, that will happen to ActivityPub too.

    Allowing large corporations to leverage their resources to dominate the Fediverse goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.


  • Ziq seems to be primarily a prominent poster on raddle.me. I don’t want to say he’s not a significant anarchist thinker, but it makes me wonder if some of the posts the decade+ I’ve been posting about anarchism on internet forums maybe belong in the Anarchist Library also.

    I’m not super familiar with his work, but he sounds like someone from the anti-civ branch of anarchism. It’s very popular in this branch to represent themselves as the only true exemplars of anarchism, so a forum personality denying Chomsky his due is pretty on message. Franklin López of The Stimulator fame came up from this trend, but it also includes Deep Green Resistance and Derek Jensen; there’s some troubling concordances with eco-fascism, ‘bio-truth’, and trans-exclusionary philosophies.

    Unlike the C4SS article this looks like something worth analyzing, as they seem to have done some research. I don’t have time now, but might come back to it later, especially if there’s interest.

    I do find the use of ‘minarchist’ here unusual also. Contrary to the C4SS article, minarchist is a bad thing in context. Ziq does seem to be using minarchist to mean a kind of authoritarian or capitalist, but it’s strange language to use. It seems like a rhetorical trick in that calling Chomsky this very specific, underutilized word that usually means capitalist sounds less ridiculous on the face of it than saying plainly that Chomsky is an authoritarian or capitalist, actually.







  • The pre-colon title is apposite as a quote from an anarchist soldier during a civil war. It was a response to a reporter asking how he felt about winning and “sitting on a pile of ruins.”

    “You must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.“