Who’s paying him? Seriously:

• If nobody is, then we got our value’s worth.
• If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.

What’s the progress of the Human Connectome Project?

I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.

Banks are allowed to use fractional reserve to lend several times more than they are required to warrant themselves, governments only force banks to have an entity who will pinky swear to write down up to a certain amount in everyone’s accounts in case the banks can’t. Neither skill nor labor produce money, central banks produce money as a loan with a repayment obligation, skill and labor only shift around the fractional obligations created by banks from thin air. Crypto is actually generated as an effect of the skill and labor required to secure its own ledger. People use golf courses to claim carbon offsets they sell in get-rich-quick schemes, or stamp collections, or digital collectibles, or natural gas extraction plants, or a thousand other schemes; everything can be, and is being used to scam someone somewhere at every moment, doesn’t mean everything is a scam.

Someone had real gold in their coffer full of gold coins, then someone convinced them that credit written down as a number on some slips of paper had the same value, that they could trust the bank’s computers with keeping track of the total value, and everyone clapped.

Recently saw a report on cocaine, apparently the prices haven’t changed since the 1990s… just the purity has gone down and it now comes laced with fentanyl.

Shining light on a problem is a good step to make people realize there is a problem in the first place.

What the fuck are you going to do about it?

Start a meme campaign targeted at countries with privacy legislations, aimed at making their future governments ask for higher bribes more lobbying before signing away taxpayer money to Microsoft contracts…

I mean, ideally have Microsoft rethink its approach, like Meta is rethinking its with Instagram, but let’s start with something simple.

Too late, it already has learned it:

Default (GPT-3.5)

User: Translate the following text into Esperanto: “I’m just going to start posting in Esperanto. Even AI won’t be interested in learning Esperanto.”

ChatGPT: “Mi ĵus komencos afiŝi en Esperanto. Eĉ la intelekta artifiko ne estos interesita lerni Esperanton.”

Didn’t Mozilla get most of its funding from Google for promoting its search engine? Or has that changed?

encrypted body of the message

Encrypted what? LinkedIn lets you add a key/cert to send you encrypted emails?

Unless you followed by installing gpg… then you failed. There are tons of uses for it, not necessarily encrypting emails (or more precisely, it kind of sucks at encrypting emails).

Don’t be sorry, just don’t use downvotes to express your opinion… use your words.

If you don’t like my arguments, go ahead and propose others.

For starters, I see you referring to “case law”, which sounds like a US thing. In the EU, case decisions generally don’t shape the law, except Supreme Court decisions, and even then lawmakers can inform or reform those decisions. It’s usually more accurate to define a logical reasoning from the bare law, rather than expect decisions in one case to influence others.

What do you base your reasoning on?

IANAL, but… I don’t think the law says that? My understanding is that the points are not related to each other:

• You need prior explicit consent in order to gather non-essential tracking data
• You can charge any amount for any functionality

That would mean all these combinations would be allowed:

1. Free, no tracking and no consent
2. Free, prior consent for tracking
3. Paid, no tracking and no consent
4. Paid, prior consent for tracking

If a site decides to only implement numbers 2 and 3… there wouldn’t be any conflict.

Either everyone pays, or you have the right to privacy. Otherwise, long term, the internet will become divided and inaccessible to low income households. And that’s something the EU definitely doesn’t want to happen (net neutrality)

Net neutrality doesn’t apply to services, only to carriers, who are considered more like utilities, but still aren’t required to offer a “free” tier. Services don’t need to offer an option accessible to everyone at all, they can specify whatever requirements they want (with only a few exceptions related to discrimination).

Large social media platforms… is where current legislative efforts are in. Above a certain number of users, they’re getting defined more as utilities, and subject to more requirements, but still no “free” tier.

The internet divide exists already: some households can afford 1Gbps unmetered symmetric fiber with Netflix, HBO and Disney+ and a few mobile lines with unlimited calls and 50GB/month data for 100€/month… while others can barely affford a prepaid 100MB/month mobile connection for 1€/month… but it’s fine as long as it’s a divide based on service pricing, not carrier traffic discrimination.

As has been prophesized… and it’s only starting.

Don’t sell yourself short, you’re worth more than that, I believe in you… being able to generate tracking data worth more than that.

Nobody is forcing anyone, you are free to not use the service at any time.

What they’re doing is turning it into an explicitly paid sevice, and letting you choose whether you’d rather pay in money, or in personal data.

In an ideal world, everyone would have the option to decide getting their personal data gathered, or not, in exchange for some money/crypto, with competing data gatherers offering different packages and rewards, and they could use it to subscribe to whatever services they wished.

Technically, no reason why there couldn’t be. You could even have ad bots follow you to send you targeted ads.

On Meta, you pay so they don’t use some of your data for showing you ads, while they collect tons more of data on you and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the Fediverse, you only give everyone access to all your published data for free to run whatever analysis they want on it… but at least you can choose from 1000+ different instances to pick the one that will be able to track your behavioral data.

You deleted your real Facebook account… but did you delete the anonymous shadow account…?

It’s not that Facebook hasn’t deleted the data from your real account, it’s that they keep tons of “anonymous” shadow accounts, each one of us probably has a dozen of them from different interactions with Facebook, and your new account most likely got suggestions from getting paired with those.

You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.

But feel free to give me an alternative “script” that gets similar functionality for cheaper.