volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@marxistvegan the problem is that rail isn't flexible enough, doesn't support the diversity of wants and lifestyles of humanity.

Rail is great in areas where there's a lot of conformance. But there are real downsides to systems built around such conformity.

@arstechnica

@donray

One instance cannot suspend a user on another instance.

That's just not a thing in the federated system built here.

@coreysnipes @mondoweiss

@neil yep.

So here's a related example: say a CEO publishes a bunch of secret information to his company's website at a secret address, then someone unexpectedly guesses the address and downloads the information.

In my opinion the CEO has no room to complain since he effectively publicly published the information, and the code worked as intended, as you say.

However, per my point, legal systems around the world would indulge the claim that this constitutes hacking and a violation of rights.

There are many, many implications of this, not the least letting the CEO off the hook for publicly releasing the damaging information.

But that's how the world evolved; that horse is out of the barn.

This English case is yet another result of a legal system that never was properly handling computer issues.

@simoto no, it's something that's between them and their users.

I'm opposed to instances blocking accounts at the instance level, but if users of an instance want that, then it's their business, not ours.

@MOULE I wonder how many people even notice domain names here.

@coreysnipes

This.

We should not refer to a case like this as suspension since that's not really what happened.

If an instance blocks someone then we need to refer to it that way, to hold THAT instance accountable, if we want to do that.

But it's not a suspension. It's a really different beast.

@donray @mondoweiss

@neil this is interesting and to me it brings up longstanding issues with how computers have been (mis)treated by law for generations, and around the world.

The case sounds like it's based on the idea that the company had Bitcoin stolen through a hack and rightly owns those Bitcoin, but the reality is that the system worked exactly as intended, with the Bitcoin being transferred to a new owner, even if as a result of a mistake on the part of the company.

IF ANYTHING the developers would have a fiduciary obligation NOT to work with the company as it no longer owns the Bitcoin.

But yep, under common legal practice this goes the other way, but that reflects that law has gotten computer stuff so wrong for so long.

@marynelson8 there's been a drumbeat of criticism against the guy, but it's largely misleading and overstated.

Just for one example, even going to the article you linked to, Johnson was quoted as saying Trump should pursue every legal option for responding to the election.

But that's just the way elections are supposed to work. There are legal structures in place to make sure we can have confidence in them.

It's not particularly extreme or even out of the mainstream when you get past the rhetoric.

@amiya_rbehera apps can't solve the problem if the underlying infrastructure isn't compatible.

@nicolaisabelle @ionica the frustration arises when I and my colleagues read communicators communicating stories of our work but getting the conclusion exactly backwards.

It really undermines trust in not only science communication, but journalism in general.

But then, at that point I suppose it's really just revealing the trust to have been misplaced all along.

If I spend a decade conducting a study and finally publish something I'm pretty proud of, only to see a communicator cite my paper but reverse the conclusion, that's really shocking!

So yeah, I'm definitely in the camp of saying the primary rule needs to be to get the facts right, whether or not that fits the "world" of the target audience.

@mnutty is it?

You don't think these prosecutors would really like to put these people in jail for the crimes they're accused of?

Seems like the prosecution is making an awful lot of noise over cases where they're so happy to let people go unpunished.

@pov but that's not really an accurate picture of what's going on.

@amiya_rbehera you say AP has public feeds but the problem is that a lot of people don't realize that it doesn't have anything else, it doesn't have private feeds.

I'm a huge critic of that.

@MJCarty I just want to point out that the article contained precious few details to support its headline claim.

So I'm pretty skeptical.

@amiya_rbehera so I'd say, yeah because E2E encryption flourished so well on email.

But that encryption on AP is one level worse? Because now I guess we are picturing public feeds full of gobbledy cook with people publicly publishing undecipherable crud, just filling the whole experience with unreadable crap.

This is why that doesn't work.

@spmatich Well, part of the reality is that sometimes the attacker makes it explicit, they say they will attack the certain group, and it doesn't really matter whether that grouping is based on a religion or hair color or last name or anything else, if an attacker declares that they will be coming after your group and then proves it by coming after your group and then declares that they will continue coming after your group... Well, it doesn't really matter whether it's about religion or not.

If there is a proven threat that seems likely to kill a whole bunch of people based on their own warnings, it's reasonable to say killing the threat would save a lot of lives.

So that's the unfortunate situation.

It's a trolley problem. Do you actively kill a few people to in the end save a whole lot more people?

@moira I honestly still have no idea what you're talking about.

@amiya_rbehera but that's exactly part of the problem that I'm trying to point out, that mastodon is based on protocols that are inherently opposed to things like end to end encryption.

ActivityPub is at its core kind of opposed to any of those privacy protecting features. And that's a big problem!

@ionica so as a scientist myself, in my opinion the thing that we really wish science communicators would stick with is actually communicating the science.

Maybe that's the first rule? Either way, it's very much not being followed.

So many of us are so frustrated because we find science communicators communicating things that are literally the opposite of what we have found, and that is just... It's infuriating.

I really think we need to stick with the first rule of science communicating should be to communicate the science, and we need to just keep repeating that first rule until it actually sticks.

I don't care what somebody is deeply interested in exploring if they are misreporting science.

This is people's entire reason for working and living that is being misreported, and until we get that straight, I just don't think anything else is priority.

@moira "Standard Prank Telephone Call Number 4" what?

What in the world does that mean?