Yeah, thanks. Guess OP asked if they want to do it / are trying. But i answered another question, whether I think they’re successful in actually doing it…

Thh, I can’t even tell. What Trump does is a lot of caprice. Goals and rules change on a weekly basis. Probably so we all learn to submit to whatever is sent our way, as proper peasants should. That would be learned helplessness for one part of the people. And gladly accepting the role as sheeple for the people who just want someone to tell them whom to hate.

But I really question whether there’s more geopolitical strategy behind it. Doesn’t look like it to me. And Venezuela was kind of the only successful thing Trump did. Iran… not so much.

Interesting question. I mean it probably depends a bit on how long we think the current political course of the USA lasts. Seems to me the current wannabe king lost quite some backing with the electorate. And all of the unsteadiness, extra cost for the economy, … might not be very sustainable in the long run. So this situation might swing to the other direction sometime soonish?!

I think the USA overall might still have quite some of the original idea deep inside. It’s just the current administration and whatever crazy things some individuals come up with. But it doesn’t look to me like they’re doing a lot of successful geopolitical strategy. I mean they do have ideas. But then they just do random things. One week they’re big into conspiracy narratives against the jews, the next day they side with Israel and start a war. Which is another thing they promised to do less, a few months before that. They start some trade war against China, and they lose it. Then they do declare themselves the winner. I think only real strategy here is some Orwellian: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength… And their flood the zone strategy. But that mostly deals with the domestic population. A good amount of them is stupid and they cheer for Trump for deporting people. But at some point even they will realize the current rate at which Trump is doing it will leave you with immigrants for another 30-60 years. So he can’t even meet the expectations of the xenophobes. In reality, that is. They can lie about it, and they do. But I guess at some point there will be a reality check. Plus there’s also lots of clever and sane people in the USA.

So I don’t see any proper attempt suitable to beat China or Europe. And I think the MAGA days are already numbered. So I just don’t think we might be looking at a strategy like that in the near future.

And it takes two to tango. Putin has been following a long term strategy for decades already. And up to now, all his negotiations with the US and phone calls have turned out his way. Seems to me that kind of direction comes Putin’s way. But idk. He’s kinda weak? He misjudged the situation in Ukraine and he’s now busy with that. He can’t beat them. And he lost over a million men, wasted his weapon stockpile. His economy isn’t doing good at all. I don’t think he can afford another war, right now. Plus he already has a strategy against us and he’ll probably stick with it for a little bit longer. He’s doing this hybrid warfare to destabilize us. Fill our social media with misinformation, sow distrust, give suitcases filled with money to our most fascist and corrupt politicians. Sabotage our infrastructure… I think that’s more like Putin. I don’t expect any pact with the USA from him. At least not any pact that makes him promise anything to the USA.

Ultimately, I don’t think Russia and the USA are even aligned. There’s some overlap with the oligarchy and corruption going on. But it’s not really like they follow the same goals. And the USA as a democratic country are supposed to do what the population wants, anyway. Not let some politicians do whatever, mostly for personal gain.

Aren’t they doing a super shitty job at it?

I mean computer tech and movies and TV series are a good point. That’s entirely dominated by the USA. So are the internet platforms. And I think that is a big issue. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have the stupid culture war and as many radicalized or passively doomscrolling people, if it wasn’t for their effective algorithms.

Other than that, idk. Most our consumer goods come from China. Our infrastructure is made here or at other places. Trains, a good chunk of airplanes. It’s a tiny amount of the population who buys American cars, because they’re just not as good as any German or South Asian one… If I look at my apartment, furniture, appliances, pans and pots, power drill… None of that has anything to do with the US, nor does it have any American brand name on it.

We have a lot of culture, books, podcasts, music… It’s more or less just the TV and cinema that come with predominantly US content. My bookshelf is >90% non-US authors. Lots of Germans, quite some Brits, something about a Witcher made by a Polish dude… And I’ve been socialised that way. I think it’s only Americans who grow up consuming only their own culture.

Energy… Well if it wasn’t for stupid politicians, we’d do the renewable ones. And seems with recent events, quite some people learned we want electric vehicles and heat pumps, and renewable electricity. So if we manage to convince our politicians to invest, we’re free from the shackles of the oil and natural gas industry a bit sooner. We need to do it anyway, because it’s cheaper and there’s a finite amount of resources. So selling the outdated energy isn’t even a good long-term strategy in colonializing anyone.

And US military “protection”… Against whom? We didn’t have any proper attempt at invading us with a military, since WW2. And now that Putin tries waging war, we can see the US isn’t even reliable anymore.

Yeah, It’s a weak point anyway. While the graphs aren’t detailed research, there’s also no reason to believe dbzer0’s perspective on the same network includes 8 times as many new users as LW for some reason. Or all the users in their communities have 8x worse karma for some external reasons. So we probably need further research.

It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣

Stupid article. For once, there’s no reason to call them a “Church”. They’re not. They specifically do some shenanigans, to legally qualify as a “church”. But that’s pretty much it.

Secondly, they live off of secrecy and not getting their lunatic practices and beliefs exposed. Why call for letting them continue on that path? I’d say them not having any doorhandles anymore is a good thing. Now it’s less likely they can lure in some vulnerable people. Solely by the front door being closed and having no handles.

I think if you write an article like this, don’t lead with all the church stuff, and bury the parts with the abuse and brainwashing at the bottom. Do it the other way round.

(This comment is an opinion piece.)

I think there’s two concurrent, but different definitions of the word Fediverse. One means, software that can speak the ActivityPub protocol. And the other one means, social media service which is able to interconnect between different websites.

The first one is more useful if you want to use it and know whether it connects you to your friends on Mastodon and the other big ones. The latter is the more technical definition and includes older protocols as well, as well as newer ones and alternative approaches to form a network in a certain way. I guess it’s the more correct one. But it doesn’t tell you a lot as a user. Maybe technically it can exchange your user statuses but nobody uses it so you can’t really do anything with it in reality. Or there’s two approaches and you were talking about a different manifestation than somebody else, and you’re both federated but not part of any compatible ecosystem.

Sure, I’m not debating that. And there’s other ways to destroy or impede (with) something to generate attention towards it. Sorry for getting political here, but other example that comes to my mind is how people supposedly cut cable ties of the German train system to draw attention to the cause of climate politics. It is massively annoying for all commuters, and people who are already on board for a more enviromentally friendly way to get to work. Because now everyone is 2h late, except people with a car. And I always question the validity of it.
But ultimately it’s completely unclear who does it. Could very well be people trying to make climate activists look bad in some false-flag-operation. And in this instance (post deletion) I’m willing to believe it’s genuine.
But the gist of it is the same… Is it going to archieve the long-term goal? Because the short- and mid-term way of working is, you’re being destructive to tear down the remaining good things about something faster, so it eventually is going to have to get replaced… And I’m more on board with, focus on direct constructivism. For example I just left Reddit and went here. And I’m somewhat happy the crowd working towards something is more pronounced than the people immediately trying to destroy it as well. I mean theoretically we probably should - by that reasoning. I’ve seen the AI scrapers hammer my Fediverse instance, too.

Uh. I hate the power deleters. It mainly makes conversation worse for the remaining humans on Reddit.

PieFed Trump/Musk filter for the win!

We have the Swiss AI iniative as well. It’s in early stages and doesn’t match the performance of …well anything. But they list some more providers: https://apertvs.ai/pages/get-started/

Ah, I get it. Yes. That section is weird. And it’s unalike the bureaucrat English around it. And I’d say the call to action: “Embark on a journey […]” is pretty much like ChatGPT sounded 2 years ago. I’m fairly certain the other text comes from humans with some expertise in writing legalese or specifications, and this will be a ChatGPT snippet.

The committer also has this weird habit of naming their commits “Update Readme.md”. So I’m also fairly sure they’re not your average open-source developer using Git how it’s intended.

Most other markdown files in that specific directory smell of ChatGPT as well.

Well, in theory it’s your software anyway… In case you’re an EU citizen.

Depends on where you’re at. If that’s Germany or close to it, we have the Digitalcourage DNS server, OpenNIC. I haven’t tested anything else but there’s also dnsforge.de, Digitale Gesellschaft in Switzerland, and of course Quad9 who operate globally.

Huh, where did you find emojis? I found one lightbulb emoji in the iOS README. And some in their bio. But that’s basically it for the 7 READMEs of the various sub-projects?!

My first thought was, has someone considered filing a bug report? But boy are the issues and PRs bad. Someone linked the Xitter post, though.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui

Dunno what kind of state the project is in. Seems development is very active. Maybe it’s more an early tech demo? But they should probably be more upfront, if it is… And not have Ursula announce this is an App?!

And does the EU Wallet App (which it is forked from) contain the same basic design flaws?

I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.

Thanks for the nice conversation.

Now that OP is inactive, I can also spoil the surprise: My link further up was Rick Astley singing: Never Gonna Give You Up.

It’s safe to click. I just figured since OP isn’t listening to answers, I’ll give them some video to learn -hands-on- about videos on the Darknet.

If someone had clicked the link, they’d get the opportunity to learn how fast or slow a video loads. And how it (likely) first requires the user to lift some security measures or videos won’t load at all. (At least my browser does, there’s no JS and then NoScript also complains about the media file.)

We and other people in the comments pointed that out in the proceeding conversation. But nobody clicked the link anyway. I always have the feeling the groups of Threadiverse users and people with the capacity to surf the Darknet are pretty much disjoint groups. But it’s really nice to once and again talk to someone with some more knowledge and/or first hand experience. 👍

Does the App allow random platforms to do verification? Or do we need to be some registered business, do contracts, likely pay for the service…? For the App to speak to our instances?

I think we’re somewhat on the same page here.

That means going through an exit node […]

I2P doesn’t have exit nodes. Once you load content from outside the network, that won’t be via I2P, only chance is to get it directly via another connection. For example your default internet connection. So either the browser or operating system is configured to block that. Or you’ll leak your IP.

Then you didn’t have ‘Safest’ mode enabled

Yeah, that’s why I said, use a dedicated browser for that. Something preconfigured to not allow any of that.
Yet better: Use Tails like recommended by Snowden.

Those are called bugs and they do happen […]

I’m not so sure about this… Is “safest” mode really all you need? And does it reliably deal with 100% of the attack vectors? Last time I tried it wasn’t too good for example against browser fingerprinting (which doesn’t reveal an IP, but might be bad as well). And there’s a million ways from WebRTC, to trying to get the IPv6 address if all you did is configure an IPv4 proxy, DNS leaks, browser plugins, the webfont system does a lot of weird things, all the things done to do multimedia are very complex and might offer side-channels, I recently learned how to extract some information with CSS alone, no JS needed… Does “safest” really do a 100% job? I mean what I’ve done until now is to discourage people to mess with their browser settings themselves because it’s (a) easy to make mistakes or miss something, and (b) I wasn’t sure if that setting even does all the heavy-lifting without going into detail with all the other changes for example TOR browser bundle has?!

I’d need to look it up but I think there’s a lot of opportunity without resorting to 0-days.

EDIT […]

Yeah, I think that’s why good (and easy to use) pron sites you’d “recommend to people” aren’t really a thing on there.

And there’s the other thing that horny people might just click “allow” on something, because their brain is currently not in logical thinking mode.