Lemmy - RazBot

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/luigi-mangione-accused-us-ceo-murder-depicted-london-mural-2025-02-26/

The story at that link is about 1 month old, but someone posted about this mural on Reddit yesterday.

Thoughts?

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

• A bug in the most recent Windows 11 update removes Copilot from systems entirely.
• Microsoft is currently working on a fix but those who need the app can simply redownload and install it from the Windows Store.
• The update also introduced a bug for Roblox players on Arm hardware.

The Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

Discord was already succumbing to enshitification. Now with their intention to be owned by Wall Street, that trajectory will certainly accelerate at warp speed once the change of hands happens.

Anyone already get ahead of this and find a solid alternative?

Right now I'm on the fence between Element for Matrix, and Revolt. Both seem to have their pros and cons and I can't find a clear "winner".

Amazon has used tricks, algorithms, and surveillance to discourage warehouse employees from unionizing, according to a paper published in the journal Socius.

Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I've been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other's review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It's steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA's Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That's where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They're not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very clean data. I feel like BookBrainz has the potential to be the perfect source of data on books, for other apps to use as they please, similar to how MusicBrainz is already functioning. It just needs more contributors, but I'm sure it's steadily growing. I just started doing my part, adding the books I read on all three.

Would love to hear thoughts on these platforms, as well as other platform suggestion if you've got any.

Edit: changed Bookwyrm.social to BookWyrm, since people should pick an instance themselves.

This is the first time in history that South Korea has received this classification by the US government

The US Department of Energy (DOE), which supervises US energy policy and duties relating to nuclear power research and development and military nuclear weapon programs, has classified South Korea as a “sensitive country” and established regulatory measures in line with this, the Hankyoreh confirmed in an investigation on Sunday.

Classification as a sensitive country means that exchange and cooperation in connection with US advanced technology areas such as nuclear power and artificial intelligence (AI) are heavily restricted. This is the first time in history that South Korea has received this classification by the US government.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/25826615

For those not familiar, there are numerous messages containing images being repeatedly spammed to many Threadiverse users talking about a Polish girl named "Nicole". This has been ongoing for some time now.

Lemmy permits external inline image references to be embedded in messages. This means that if a unique image URL or set of image URLs are sent to each user, it's possible to log the IP addresses that fetch these images; by analyzing the log, one can determine the IP address that a user has.

In some earlier discussion, someone had claimed that local lemmy instances cache these on their local pict-rs instance and rewrite messages to reference the local image.

It does appear that there is a closed issue on the lemmy issue tracker referencing such a deanonymization attack:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1036

I had not looked into these earlier, but it looks like such rewriting and caching intending to avoid this attack is not occurring, at least on my home instance. I hadn't looked until the most-recent message, but the image embedded here is indeed remote:

https://lemmy.doesnotexist.club/pictrs/image/323899d9-79dd-4670-8cf9-f6d008c37e79.png

I haven't stored and looked through a list of these, but as I recall, the user sending them is bouncing around different instances. They certainly are not using the same hostname for their lemmy instance as the pict-rs instance; this message was sent from nicole92 on lemmy.latinlok.com, though the image is hosted on lemmy.doesnotexist.club. I don't know whether they are moving around where the pict-rs instance is located from message to message. If not, it might be possible to block the pict-rs instance in your browser. That will only be a temporary fix, since I see no reason that they couldn't also be moving the hostname on the pict-rs instance.

Another mitigation would be to route one's client software or browser through a VPN.

I don't know if there are admins working on addressing the issue; I'd assume so, but I wanted to at least mention that there might be privacy implications to other users.

In any event, regardless of whether the "Nicole" spammer is aiming to deanonymize users, as things stand, it does appear that someone could do so.

My own take is that the best fix here on the lemmy-and-other-Threadiverse-software-side would be to disable inline images in messages. Someone who wants to reference an image can always link to an external image in a messages, and permit a user to click through. But if remote inline image references can be used, there's no great way to prevent a user's IP address from being exposed.

If anyone has other suggestions to mitigate this (maybe a Greasemonkey snippet to require a click to load inline images as a patch for the lemmy Web UI?), I'm all ears.

What is your line in the sand?

Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it's important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don't really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they've never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it's important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.

Even the guy who said, "lol." Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.

Apple Inc. lost its fight at Germany’s top civil court to overturn a regulator’s decision to put it under tighter antitrust scrutiny alongside other U.S. tech giants.

The judges on Tuesday said the Federal Cartel Office was right to find that the iPhone maker’s footprint across markets meets the threshold for more oversight. It’s not necessary that the company already hampers competition but that it carries such a risk. Apple does so as it’s one of the largest, most profitable companies worldwide with access to extraordinary financial and other resources, the judges added.

“The products and services that Apple offers are highly vertically integrated, closely interconnected and largely reserved for users of Apple devices,” the court said. “This is the basis for what the company itself calls the Apple ecosystem.”

The judges also pointed to Apple’s importance for third parties’ access to markets. External app developers and other third-party companies are dependent on Apple’s support to reach the large number of its users, opening a box that the company could use for strategies the new rules seek to address, the court said.

Apple was attempting to topple a May 2023 decision by the German antitrust watchdog, which subjected it to the so-called 19a rules on the grounds that its strong position in digital markets could threaten competition.

Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler again told his 'Creativity Machine' can't earn a ©

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27143191

Why I recommend against Bluesky.

Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?