what do I think the history is? A record of the sites I visited.
What do I think the history isn't? A correlated record of which advertisements I've been exposed to, and which conversions I've made, that gets sent to people who are not me.
Pretty relevant distinction. One thing is me tracking myself, another thing is this tracking being sent to others, no matter how purportedly trustworthy.
I'd like people to STOP PRETENDING that the only plausible reason why someone doesn't agree with this is that we don't understand it. Yes, I understand what this does. The browser tracks which advertisements have been visited, the advertiser indicates to the browser when a conversion action happens, and the browser sends this information to a third-party aggregator which uses differential techniques to make it infeasible to deanonymise specific users. Do I get a pass?
Yes, this is actively collaborating with advertising. It is, in the words of Mozilla, useful to advertisers. It involves going down a level from being tracked by remote sites to being tracked by my own browser, running on my own machine. Setting aside the issues of institutional design and the possibility for data leaks, it's still helping people whose business is to convince me to do things against my interest, to do so more effectively.
I don't blame Mozilla for not single-handedly ending advertising online. That's too much to expect from anyone. But they could at least avoid active collaboration with the enterprise. And if they're going to engage in it, they should at the very least warn their users.
I don't have a complete solution, but I have a vector, and this is in the opposite direction, being, according to its own claims useful to advertisers.
The solution passes through many things, but probably has to start by changing the perception of advertising as a necessary nuisance and into a needless, avoidable, and unacceptable evil. Collaboration does not help in this regard. Individual actions such as blocking advertising, refusing to accept any tracking from sites, deploying masking tools, using archives and mirrors to get content, consciously boycott any product that manages to escape the filtering, are good but insufficient.
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away.
Fuck that. Not if we don't make it. That's precisely the point. Do not comply. Do not submit. Never. Advertising is contrary to the interests of humanity. You're never going to convince me becoming a collaborator for a hypothetically less pernicious form is the right course of action. Never. No quarter.
We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this,
That makes it even worse.
any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers,
And therefore inimical to humanity in general and users in particular.
Digital advertising is not going away,
Not with that attitude.
but the surveillance parts could actually go away
Aggregate surveillance is still surveillance. It is still intrusive, it still leverages aggregate human behaviour in order to harm humans by convincing them to do things against their own interest and in the interest of the advertiser.
This is supposedly an experiment. You've decided to run an experiment on users without consent. And you still think this is the right thing--since you claim the default is the correct behaviour.
Yes, for example I donate to thunderbird since I find it useful. And I wouldn't mind donating to Firefox either provided they wouldn't do this sort of fuckery.
though in the long run we need to overturn capitalism of course, and that an economic model is viable doesn't mean we should sustain it or justify it.
This is bullshit. The total amount of advertising I want is zero. The total amount I want of tracking is zero. The total amount of experiments I want run on my data without consent is, guess, zero.
Definitely, AP is not magic. But if even within one protocol round-tripping and full-fidelity is impossible or very difficult, that makes it only harder and less likely through a bridge.
IMO bridging or translation isn't federation per se. Also it seems unlikely that protocols would converge to that extent. In fact AP implementations are already different enough that even within the same protocol it's hard to represent all the different activities instances can present.
I wouldn't really count Mastodon/Bluesky bridging as federation. They're incompatible protocols that were never intended to work together (arguably Bluesky was explicitly designed to avoid using AP).
For me the weirdest part of the interview is where he says he doesn't want to follow anyone, that he wants the algorithm to just pick up on his interests. It's so diametrically opposed to how I want to intentionally use social networks and how the fedi tends to work that it's sometimes hard to remember there are people who take that view.
Very informative. On paragraphs 61 and following, it clearly explains why the Israeli claims on human shields are improper and how attacks are not maintaining the principles of proportionality, distinction, and so on.
I can think of alternatives. For example, the server could keep the user's private key, encrypted with a passphrase that the user must have. So key loss wouldn't be an issue. (Yes, passphrase loss might, but there are lots of ways to keep those safely already, compared to key material which is difficult to handle.)
Security and performance are hard to measure but it's at least questionable that they're behind in either.
AI has many good uses, for example the local translation capability that allows for privacy-preserving translations of websites is AI and already in Firefox, and makes it possible to translate in environments that do not allow sending data out for security reasons.
There's a surprising amount of that, not to mention... not sure whether to go into it but...
Those collars that can control people who channel are also used in a very kinky way.
That said, there's also a few times when there's the same stuff on men by women, and, I think, on women by men. But since the Aiel wise ones and Aes Sedai alike are societies of women, well, there's a lot of that going on.
what do I think the history is? A record of the sites I visited.
What do I think the history isn't? A correlated record of which advertisements I've been exposed to, and which conversions I've made, that gets sent to people who are not me.
Pretty relevant distinction. One thing is me tracking myself, another thing is this tracking being sent to others, no matter how purportedly trustworthy.