@jorgecandeias@mastodon.socialEvery European (and Canadian, and Australian, and so on) should read @… 's latest.
A snippet:
"It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from upda…
@acka47@openbiblio.socialStarting the fourth chapter "The Rise of the Web" of #ThisIsForEveryone, I am pleasently surprised to find out a librarian — Louise Addis of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) — played an important, supportive role in the very first days of the web.
@cobordism@berlin.social"Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours."
https://www.
@cdarwin@c.imFascinating:
A feature in the Financial Times reveals some very rich people have started selling up and living in motorhomes.
Obviously, they’re ultra-luxurious motorhomes. The owner of a private equity firm interviewed has a 30-tonne behemoth with air conditioning and high-speed internet, a kitchen, dining room, two bathrooms, a “spacious master bedroom” and “a range of modern hi-tech appliances”. which cost
“around $2.7m” (£2m)
I read something else about ultra-high…
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzGood points well made by @…:
"It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work. Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe. ...
"For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies – and therefore Trump – a veto over how your technology works."
#tech #privacy #law #USPol #Apple #Google
@hippyjo@c.imI remember people describing the rise of the Internet as the "Information Age".
Now we live in the Age of Lies.
The age of lies is a tragic time, where our attention is manipulated, stolen, and exploited for the gain of greedy monsters who only care about squeezing every nickel out of you that they can.
All we get in return is distracted, abused, and poorer, in every sense of the word.
@grumpybozo@toad.socialThis is only true for some flavors of "big accounts."
A number of the people I follow with thousands of followers are ONLY on the #Fediverse and most of the rest are only here and on Bluesky. I routinely block people here and on Bluesky (and across the bridge) who pull in the sewage from X and dump it in either place.
I'm not really interested in following people that wa…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialPeople CEO Neil Vogel calls Google a "bad actor" for refusing to pay publishers for AI content and says Google Search drives 25%-30% of visits to People sites (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/11/media-in…
@darkrat@chaosfurs.social"OwO What's this?" explained by a german news broadcaster.
What a time to be alive.
Translated quote:
It's a reference to an internet joke that's been circulating for years, originally from a "furry" role-playing, in which people dress up in furry costumes and take on the role of anthropomorphised animals.
The phrase means "Notices a bulge in your crotch," with "OwO" standing for an emoticon meant to express cute surp…
@kcase@mastodon.socialThis coming Monday is the 33rd anniversary of my registering omnigroup.com. (Along with wizards.com: having dug up the registration forms, figured I might as well fill out both of them at the same time.)
Back then, registering an Internet domain was free, you just had to fill out the paperwork and send it to the right place. This was mostly done for the sake of having a domain for email and ftp, not websites, since only a few of us crazy NeXT people were using the World Wide Web at tha…
@zudn@theres.lifeThe perfect form for the internet and people's ever decreasing attention spans.
#blogging
@aral@mastodon.ar.alSadly, we are unable to hold any new verification calls today as @…, who is suffering through the same situation as the people she is trying to help in Gaza, has temporarily lost her Internet connection.
If you can’t reach her today, it’s not cause for worry.
We’ve moved our scheduled calls to tomorrow and we will see if we can squeeze in a few to…
@randy_@social.linux.pizza
@stiefkind@mastodon.social
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"We shouldn’t be surprised, because capturing communities with false promises only to sell us out is business as usual in the corporate internet. The founders handled the transition horribly, even by tech industry standards, and the pain and disruption it creates in our lives is real. Yet capital is constantly pulling the rug on online communities... For corporations, it’s always profits over people"
@bird@birdbox.partySince the UK and to an extant the EU governments like age verification so much and asking for photo ID from people for using the internet, how long until the provider that handles these verifications has a data breach?
Of course, the politicians will be fine, they probably all have their VPN apps which have likely been filed as an expense somewhere.
#Internet #Censorship #AgeVerification
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaThe people who want to censor the Internet because 'think of the children' are most likely same the people on a certain list for doing more than thinking about them
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsWhen another coach capitalist philosopher starts telling you how people wouldn't work at all if they weren't coerced to, and the whole world would fall apart then, you should remind them that practically the whole Internet — yes, the same they're using to spread their capitalistic bullshit and the one capitalism is repeatedly trying to turn into complete useless shit — is founded on the work of volunteers, who for many years tirelessly work to keep it working while usually not expecting anything in return.
#AntiCapitalism
@grumpybozo@toad.socialWhat total garbage... But of course simply putting "Microsoft" and "Mail" together always means garbage is involved.
One of the huge mistakes in the evolution of the Internet was the conflation of identities that serve distinct functions. E.g. there's no reason for the string that one uses for logging into an email account to have even the form of an email address.
The conflation of identities is why & how we have phishing.
@arXiv_csSI_bot@mastoxiv.pageCleanNews: a Network-aware Fake News Mitigation Architecture for Social Media
Maria-Diana Cotelin, Ciprian-Octavian Truic\u{a}, Elena-Simona Apostol
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04489
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIt's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion
@cdarwin@c.im"The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits,”
Megan Greenwell wrote in an eviscerating blog postannouncing her departure.
“It’s that the people posing as experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen.”
Greenwell’s entire staff followed her lead shortly after, mass quitting largely in protest of a mandate to abandon higher-traffic stories about politics and internet od…
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.pageInto the Void: Understanding Online Health Information in Low-Web Data Languages
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Nuredin Ali Abdelkadir, Fiker Tewelde, Stevie Chancellor, Daricia Wilkinson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20245
@arXiv_csNI_bot@mastoxiv.pageLIFY: IoT System for Monitoring Vital Signs of Elderly People
Sara Gonzalez, Martin Vasquez, Wilder Castellanos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18411 https://ar…
@arXiv_qbioOT_bot@mastoxiv.pageA Computer Vision and Depth Sensor-Powered Smart Cane for Real-Time Obstacle Detection and Navigation Assistance for the Visually Impaired
Sunkalp Chandra, Umang Sharma, Devesh Khilnani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16698
