ciferecaNinjo

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2
mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected. (fedia.io)
 

Both Lemmy and mbin have a shitty way of treating authors of content that is censored by a moderator.

Lemmy: if your post is removed from a community timeline, you still have the content. In fact, your logged-in profile looks no different, as if the message is still there. It’s quite similar to shadow banning. Slightly better though because if you pay attention or dig around, you can at least discover that you were censored. But shitty nonetheless that you get no notification of the censorship.

Mbin: if your post is removed, you are subjected to data loss. I just wrote a high effort post europe@feddit.org and it was censored for not being “news”. There is no rule that your post must be news, just a subtle mention in the topic of news. In fact they delete posts that are not news, despite not having a rule along those lines. So my article is lost due to this heavy-handed moderation style. Mbin authors are not deceived about the status of their post like on lemmy, but authors suffer from data loss. They do not get a copy of what they wrote so they cannot recover and post it elsewhere.

It’s really disgusting that a moderator’s trigger happy delete button has data loss for someone else as a consequence. I probably spent 30 minutes writing the post only to have that effort thrown away by a couple clicks. Data loss is obviously a significant software defect.

7
installation instructions needed (fedia.io)
 

The readme talks about docker. I’m not a docker user. I did a git clone when I was on a decent connection. ATM I’m not on a decent connection. The releases page lacks file sizes. And MS Github conceals the size:

curl -LI 'https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/archive/refs/tags/v1.31.2-fix.1.tar.gz' | grep -i 'content-length'

output:

content-length: 0

So instead of fetching the tarball of unknown size, I need to know how to build either the app or the tarball from the cloned repo. Is that documented anywhere?

4
Recording website state at a snapshot in time for evidence (fedia.io)
 

I often save websites to my local drive when collecting evidence that might later need to be presented in court. But of course there problems with that because I could trivially make alterations at will. And some websites give me different treatment based on my IP address. So I got in the habit of using web.archive.org/save/$targetsite to get a third party snapshot. That’s no longer working. It seems archive.org has cut off that service due to popular demand, which apparently outstrips their resources.

Are there more reliable alternatives? I’m aware of archive.ph but that’s a non-starter (Cloudflare).

In the 1990s there was a service that would email you a webpage. Would love to an out-of-band mechanism like that since email has come to carry some legal weight and meets standards of evidence in some countries (strangely enough).

4
(mbin) Onion hosts are not recognized as URLs and thus get funny treatment (fedia.io)
Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

Suppose an instance has these users:

  • Victor who uses a VPN
  • Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
  • Terry who uses a Tor
  • Norm who uses the normal clearnet
  • Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to [!travelpics@exclusivenode.com](/c/travelpics@exclusivenode.com). Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

  • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
  • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -1 points 11 months ago (28 children)

tl;dr:

  • Lemmy ← shit show for years
  • (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
  • piefed ← never heard of it

I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

Cloudflare filters lacking

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 3 points 11 months ago

Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)

5
Rules and conventions for labeling documentary evidence -- I write “exhibit A” on the doc but it’s getting resistence (fedia.io)
 

I often supply documents as evidence to regulators (e.g. GDPR regulators). A document is normally in A4 format and I digitally superimpose that onto an A4 page. Thus generally without shrinking or expanding.

I label it by printing “exhibit A”, “bewijsstuk A”, or “pièce A” in the topmost rightmost corner at a 45° angle and give a small margin to avoid unprintable areas. I do that on every single page. If it would overlap something, I shift it down to avoid overlap. It seems to do the job well but a regulator once requested that I resubmit the evidence without my markups.

So apparently they don’t like my style. Maybe they wonder if I could be making more material alterations. What is the normal convention in the legal industry? These evidence submissions are not for a court process but they always have potential to end up in court in the future.

I have some ideas:

  • (only for paper submissions) I could stick a Post-It note to every document (every page?) and hand-write evidence labels. This would be inconvenient for them to scan. If they remove the notes to feed into a scanner, then the digital version is lossy and so they cannot dispense of the paper version. Or they must be diligent with entering the label into the file’s metadata or filename.
  • (only for electronic submissions) I could make the evidence label a PDF annotation, so when viewing the doc and printing it the user can decide whether to show/print annotations. This seems useful superficially but it’s problematic because the PDF tools poorly adhere to the standard to w.r.t. annotations. Many tools do not handle annotations well. A recipient’s app does not necessarily give them control over whether annotations appear, and how they appear (different fonts chosen by different tools and if a tool does not have the source font it may simply ignore the annotation). The 45° angle that sets it apart and makes it pop-out better is apparently impossible with PDF annotations. And with little control over the font it might look good in one viewer but overlap in another.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could shrink the doc to ~90% of the original size, put a frame around it, and push it low on the page to leave space at the top for metadata like evidence labels. The the label is obviously not altering the original.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could add a cover page to each doc with the sole purpose of writing “exhibit A”. Seems good for digital submissions but I really don’t like the idea of bulking out my paper submissions. It would add €1 to the cost for every ten docs.
  • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) Perhaps I could get away with rotating “exhibit A” 90° and finely printing it along the edge of the margin. This could even be combined with bullet 3 and maybe with less scaling (~95%).

Any other ideas?

Barcelona is banning Airbnbs. Other European cities have cracked down already — with some success. in c/europe@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions -- which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.

¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.

français → anglais translation help wanted for a paragraph of legal text in c/forumlibre@jlai.lu
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the insight; that’s quite helpful.

The concept of easements still exists in this area but it seems like easements are not being used for façades, which kind of makes sense. The dispute I’m getting into is over a telecom company that is not serving the whole public. They are discriminatory and exclusive. I consider it an injustice that they can arbitrarily drill into people’s houses to support a “public” service which they then exclude some people from access (including owners of the homes they are drilling). Property owners then have a burden of paying €10 per cable to give notice by registered letter to all telecoms using their façade whenever a homeowner wants to perform work on their own façade.

That’s why I am looking closely at this law. I found nothing in the law that requires telecoms to be inclusive.

Translation help wanted on telecom law in c/french@sopuli.xyz
11
français → anglais translation help wanted for a paragraph of legal text (fedia.io)
Translation help wanted on telecom law in c/french@sopuli.xyz
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Are you saying tends is not a false friend and the French and English meanings are quite similar? Because in English that word is astonishing in this legal context. Commercial translation tools are often better quality than Argos, so I was more tempted to trust the commercially translated version.

(edit) tends has a couple different meanings in English. One might have a tendency to do something or feel something. You might also tend to a store, which means to oversee something. Perhaps it’s that latter meaning that is intended by lawmakers. That the telecom operator oversees agreement.

5
Translation help wanted on telecom law (fedia.io)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/french@sopuli.xyz
7 comments fedilink
 

I would like to understand this paragraph:

§ 2. Lorsque (un opérateur d'un [¹ réseau public de communications électroniques]¹) a l'intention d'établir des câbles, lignes aériennes et équipements connexes, de les enlever ou d'y exécuter des travaux, elle tend à rechercher un accord quant à l'endroit et la méthode d'exécution des travaux, avec la personne dont la propriété sert d'appui, est franchie ou traversée.

Argos Translate yields:

§ 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish cables, airlines and related equipment, to remove or perform work therein, it tends to seek an agreement on the location and method of carrying out work, with the person whose property serves as a support, is crossed or crossed.

I think tends is a false friend here because it seems unlikely in this context. A commercial machine translation yields:

§ 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish, remove or carry out work on cables, overhead lines and related equipment, it shall seek agreement as to the location and method of carrying out the work with the person whose property is used as support, is crossed or is being traversed.

Sounds more accurate. I’m disappointed that there seems to be no requirement that the telecom company obtain consent from property owners. Is that correct? The telecom operator does not need consent on whether to use someone’s private property, only consent on how they deploy the cables?

17
Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation (fedia.io)
13
Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation (fedia.io)
Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy in c/privacy@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

3
Should Académie Française curate language translation models? (fedia.io)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/french@sopuli.xyz
1 comments fedilink
 

The FOSS app Argos Translate enables people to locally translate their documents without depending on an external service and then hoping their content is not snooped on (while simultaneously hoping to get translation service for free). Argos does okay with quite popular language pairs but it’s really not up to a good standard of quality overall.

The machine learning input into Argos known as “models” are trained on samples of (hopefully manual) translations. The models require huge amounts of data. Apparently the effort to gather large volumes of input leads to grabbing poor quality samples, which ultimately leads to bad translations. To worsen matters, you have a sparse scatter of different projects making their own models. So the effort is decentralised in a detrimental way. End users are then left with having to experiment with different models.

Shouldn’t Académie Française (the French language protection org) have some interest in the public having access to resources that give high-quality translations into French?

Consider that Académie Française members each spend €230k on clothes (yes, that “k” after the number is correct), surely they have money sloshing around to promote French. If playing dress-up is worth €9.2 million (€230k × 40 members), just imagine how much money they must have for their mission of supporting the French language.

When a law requires you to supply information that does not exist -- then what? Or when you cannot comply because you don’t have what is required? in c/juridisch@feddit.nl
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My question is what is forcing me to create an email address.

Does the law force me to create an email address (knowing that it would then be unavoidably used to facilitate the sender sharing whatever they want about me with Microsoft)?

It’s important to note that if your email address falls in the hands of a gov or org, they will use it without encryption. They will share willy nilly anything they want with Microsoft (their email provider) in the loop. And if you make a GDPR art.17 request to have your email address erased from their records after they abuse it, they ignore those requests and continue using your email address. So it’s best not to give them an email address to begin with.

(edit) govs and orgs seem to always put my full name in the e-mail headers, sometimes even including my middle name. And they usually greet me by surname. This ensures that Microsoft trivially knows exactly who to associate the content with. IMO it infringes on the data minimisation principle.

5
When a law requires you to supply information that does not exist -- then what? Or when you cannot comply because you don’t have what is required? (fedia.io)
 

This question is inspired by Belgian law but there is no Belgian law forum and I think it’s likely that Netherlands would have the same problem. So answers w.r.t. Dutch law would be interesting enough.

It’s increasingly common for law to mandate that people give the government their email address in various situations. If someone has no email address, I have to wonder how can they be expected to comply with the law? When the law requires disclosure of information that does not exist, is it implied that we must take necessary steps to make that information come into existence in order to disclose it? Is it implied by that law that we must enter the private marketplace and subscribe to email service, then periodically check our email?

I happen to have email addresses but I refuse to disclose them to users of Micosoft Outlook or Google. That includes government offices because the gov uses MS Outlook and simultaneously does not use PGP. Since my workflow of non-disclosure to MS & Google has ensured that email has the tiniest of roles in my life, it would not be a big step for me to nix email altogether and end my subscriptions. But I need to know if it’s even legal for me to do so.

3
How should “bis” and “ter” be typeset? (fedia.io)
 

French law often adds a “bis” (e.g. “Article 29bis”) if more law is added later and for whatever reason they don’t just append it to Article 29.

It’s ugly in text, but I’m writing a document in LaTeX so I have freedom and control to do something better. At the same time, I don’t want to invent something that alienates readers. I just want to know from people who have read a lot of well typeset French what style is common. I think italicizing the “bis” is common. But what about making it a subscript or superscript? What about putting a ½ space between the bis and the number?

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