nodester

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] nodester@partizle.com 3 points 2 years ago

They're trying to juice up their stats for advertisers. More registered users = more surveillance capitalism.

 

The Twitter shitshow continues.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 1 points 2 years ago

What's the cleaning cloth cost?

1
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by nodester@partizle.com to c/meta@partizle.com
 

When @bouncing@partizle.com, @The_iceman_cometh@partizle.com and I started this instance, we figured we'd get a dozen or so signups from people we knew. We left registration open, figuring no one would care because we did exactly nothing to promote this.

It's by any measure still a small instance (~100 users) but even so, moderation of other instances is now a thing: we've blocked some troublesome instances, in particular ones that we suspect traffic in borderline illegal content. We by no means, however, have any good grasp on what's federating to us from the open web.

Sooner or later, bots and spammers and trolls will find our humble little instance. Lemmy's only real remedies for that is an application process and/or verified email. Both to our mind seem useless, because bots can convincingly automate either or both. Cloudflare can keep out the more naive bots, though ratcheting up the security in it causes inconvenience for users, especially ones who protect their privacy (think of captchas you get when using a VPN).

For its part, Lemmy is fun software, but not especially feature-rich. There's really no admin interface to speak of. If you get 100 bot signups, you have to ban them, one at a time. That hasn't happened yet to us, but it has happened to other instances, and it's rough. We've considered even just slapping a Django admin UI on its Postgres database, but we'd need to learn the table structure and also make sure that just updating tables in Postgres is enough (ie, does Lemmy's backend have state in RAM, etc). It's not something we're ready to take on right now.

Anyway, about the possible future of bots and spammers: So what do you guys think? Leave registrations wide open? Require approval? Keep it the way it is, but lean more on Cloudflare for protection?

[–] nodester@partizle.com 1 points 2 years ago

Part of the premise of the criminal justice system is supposed to be that the system is designed to occasionally fail to punish the guilty if it protects the innocent. That's often expressed as, "it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to prison."

You might just have to accept that you can't always be completely sure that someone's internet usage is sanitized. Could they reoffend awaiting trial? Possibly. Same as letting an alleged mugger walk the streets until trial or an alleged rapist be around women. Innocent until proven guilty means that, as it stands right now until a verdict otherwise is returned, an innocent man and his family are having their right to use a very basic feature of modern existence, the internet, infringed upon.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

It’s more efficient, certainly. But telling someone pretrial in 2023 they can’t use a computer isn’t realistic.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 1 points 2 years ago

Oh totally. And they’re not even alleged to have done anything wrong.

The prosecutor will say “well they could have lived in a Four Seasons instead of with their father.” Prosecutors are seldom reasonable people.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Computers are remarkably efficient but at the dawn of the Gutenberg press, you could have made similar observations. For the first time with paper, it was possible to commit crimes in the privacy of your own home merely by writing things down and sending them to a publisher.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 25 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Absolutely.

In 1950, if you were told as a pretrial release condition, you weren't allowed to use paper because your alleged crime involved a book, no one would have thought that reasonable. Today, devices are the equivalent of paper.

 

Lately I've liked Spotify's Adrenaline Workout. Something about Rob Zombie makes me want to push myself. Maybe I'm running from zombies??

[–] nodester@partizle.com 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

So confidently predicting an outcome is the problem?

[–] nodester@partizle.com 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

That's a problem that could emerge with any system used to predict the outcome of any election.

If you make a prediction, you're arguably telling people not to vote.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What is he, a religious leader now?

He was a good modeler and handicapper. His model happened to work well for the 2016 election. That's it. He's not a fucking oracle.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

he chose to agree to be monitored and they chose to continue living with him” was uttered

That got me too.

"The alternative is that they could have rented a separate house while the breadwinner of the family was in jail. They agreed to it!"

Utterly absurd. I also think, especially for the 14 year old, that level of surveillance is itself a form of abuse.

[–] nodester@partizle.com 10 points 2 years ago

Not to mention the fact that any reasonable person would say that its use constitutes a punishment in and of itself.

We need a standard for pretrial release where if any measure could, if taken in isolation, be considered punitive, prosecutors are not allowed to ask for it.

 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump faces a new legal challenge - this time from the government he used to lead - with charges for illegally retaining classified documents and other crimes expected to be filed next week in federal court in Miami.

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