cabbage

As the headlins in the article I linked earlier kindly informs us, half of all active satellites are now from SpaceX. And it’s increasing fast. If other companies enter the scene and start competing, the earth will be orbited by a shitload of useful satelites launched into space by billionaires with a penis complex.

Governments are supposed to provide services for their population. Some of these needs might justify launching satellites. It is not unproblematic, and I would rather see it being governed by an international organization, but at least it’s being done on behalf of people.

Companies launch them to make a profit for the fat wallets of their stakeholders and CEOs.

They are not the same. Pretending they are is, as you so nicely put it, weird.

It’s incredible it took them this long, considering how obvious it is. But good - it’s nice to see at least one thing getting less and not more shitty for once, however tiny.

They just need to capitalize the surveillance capabilities. Find a way to convince users they need access to everything on their phones in order to sell them first class convenience. Once you’ve done that there’s plenty of money to be made.

You can do that all by yourself, no AI needed!

So we will have a bunch of trash circulating the earth, left there by opporunistic billionaires. No thank you. What they have done to the night sky alone is a crime against all of us as far as I’m concerned.

And to think that lower orbit is not interesting any more now that NASA wants to build a telescope on the moon is beyond me.

If it is you probably wouldn’t be thrilled to find out how.

There are a number of concerns, from hindering science by blocking pictures taken by Hubble to flat out malfunctioning and crashing into the ISS. For every new satellite the risk increases. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/satellites-spacex-problem-space-pollution

Assuming the same communities are being followed and no users are blocked and all else is equal, one possible explanation is that lemmy.world is using Lemmy 0.19.3, and sh.itjust.works is on Lemmy 0.19.5. Something might have changed in how posts are sorted between the two versions.

One might expect these two instances to be pretty similar, as they both have a bunch of users and are pretty much catch-all. But in general, different instances of Lemmy will display different content by design - the users decide the direction of the instance by following communities they are interested in.

But also, we cannot have so many god-damn satellites polluting the night sky. Starlink should never have been allowed to get up there as a private actor in the first place.

It’s a tricky situation, as international cooperation would be extremely difficult to maintain, especially during situations like the Ukraine war. But having private companies compete to fill the orbit with space waste as soon as possible is hardly a good solution either.

Information here is public.

That said, there has been problems of people scraping random fediverse servers and causing a lot of traffic, in turn sending a huge bill to the owner of the instance.

We don’t have money, so ransom attacks are unlikely.

If it’s state actors and cyber warfare, which I think is fair to suspect, we’re probably way under the radar. We’re not quite critical infrastructure just yet. :)

For the lols attacks could happen anywhere, but this is not that.

I think it’s the first time in my life I routinely check in on the stock value of a company, and it’s pure Schadenfreude.

While most news media keeps on endlessly reporting on what politicians say, tech and law commentators by definition focus on what is being done. In a world where what is being said is not only irrelevant, but flat-out weaponized, this is the only kind of reporting that matters.

Never gave this much thought. I’ve been considering subscribing for Kagi again, but basically they are paying for a Google API subscription, meaning that Google directly monetizes my Kagi searches?

To be completely honest, I’m less worried about privacy and more worried about what kind of world I’m contributing to with my internet usage. I Mullvad sends money to Google for every search, it’s probably not for me.

Switched to Qwant now - rather Microsoft than Google, and at least they are working on their own engine.

That’s @[email protected], for those who can follow Mastodon handles. Worth following!

There are several mammoths (instances) peacefully grazing on the same pastures (the social web), but the pastures are also shared with completely different species of animal. Perhaps they are single-user instances as no birds are landing on them; perhaps they are completely different pieces of the social web, such as Peertube or Lemmy.

Or maybe I’m over-thinking it.

I have had it with these motherfuckin’ snakes in this motherfuckin’ government!

Ideally while remaining more respectful of pussies perhaps, but that’s a stylistic choice.

Or how it has normalized using AI for everything between heaven and earth, when what is actually going on is machine learning. AI implies that the machine is thinking for itself, which of course leads (reasonable) people to draw conclusions that it’s not a very reliable source.

ActivityPub is absolutely not suited for private communication. I guess you could in theory transfer encrypted content over AP as well, but it’s not what it is designed for and it generally makes little sense for content in a public forum like this. I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise.

This is not what is proposed though. For E2EE, Rimu suggests the following:

Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

So to keep user data encrypted on the server, as well as looking into finding a way to encrypt private messages. I think it’s hard to argue this wouldn’t be at least a minor change for the better, giving instance administrators less insight into the private data of the users (and thereby also making them less vulnerable to law enforcement).

Of course this wouldn’t make PieFed or Lemmy or whatever a good replacement for Signal. It is not supposed to be. It’s a public forum. But it can still do its best to protect the identity of the users in this public forum, even with the inherent limitations of the format.