otter

TELL META: Don't Kill Your Crucial Transparency Tool, CrowdTangle!

Meta has announced it will be abandoning CrowdTangle, its industry leading transparency tool, this August - in the middle of the biggest election year on record.

CrowdTangle is used by thousands of researchers, journalists and advocates to monitor political disinformation and hate speech on Facebook and Instagram.

The decision to kill this crucial tool without an equivalent replacement couldn’t come at a worse time: Elections affecting approximately half of the world’s population are taking place this year. Meta’s irresponsible decision poses a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of these elections - but we can still stop it.

Sign the petition now to call on Meta to maintain CrowdTangle during this critical period of elections worldwide to protect election integrity in 2024 and beyond!

There are so many out there, with varying benefits, risks, and ethics. I'd like to know what to recommend when asked, and also what I could use for myself.

Some areas that could be good for discussion:

• Locally hosted models (both for low and high powered devices)
• Open source models (also calling out "open source" models that aren't actually open source)
• Privacy friendly tools/frontends (ex. DuckDuckGo's AI chat for anonymous use of some "free" models)
• Unified interfaces for multiple models, or 'pay as you go' platforms instead of paying for individual subscriptions

ShinyHunters posted on Tuesday night in a hacking forum that it obtained data from Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, including customers’ names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, and order details, Cyber Daily wrote. The group is reportedly attempting to sell the stolen data for $500 million.

From this other link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-29/ticketmaster-hack-allegedlyshinyhunter-customers-data-leaked/103908614

It said 1.3 terabytes of customer data possessed by Ticketmaster including names, addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers and payment details is up for sale.

There are so many out there, a few that I came across include:

• Wallabag ( GitHub, Website): Older, long history, somewhat clunky now?
• LinkWarden (Website): Focus on multi user and teams?
• Raindrop.io (Website)
• Omnivore (Website)
• Hoarder (GitHub)
• Shiori (Article)
• Readeck (Website)

Having a giant comparison table for this might be nice

Or rather, homelabs and home labs?

(image from Wikimedia)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.smeargle.fans/post/165906

HN Discussion

The channel has excellent visuals for the different steps

The linked article is the intro message from her. I copied a part of it here:

Why I’m Joining Mozilla as Executive Director

Delight -- absolute delight -- is what I felt when my parents brought home a Compaq Deskpro 386 for us to play with. It was love at first sight, thanks to games like Reader Rabbit, but I fell especially hard once we had a machine connected to the Internet. The unparalleled joy that comes from making things with and for other people was intoxicating. I can’t tell you how many hours were spent building Geocities websites for friends, poring over message boards, writing X-Files fan fiction, exchanging inside jokes and song lyrics on AIM and ICQ chats with friends and far-flung cousins across the world.

Actually, I could tell you. In detail. But it would be embarrassing.

Years later I would learn that the ability to share, connect, and create is rooted in how the Internet works differently than the media preceding it. The Internet speaks standards and protocols. It links instead of copying. Its nature is open. You don’t need permission to make something on the Internet. That freedom holds enormous potential: At its best, it helps us explore history we didn’t know, build movements to better the future, or make a meme to brighten someone’s day. At its best, the Internet lets us see each other.

That magic -- this power -- is revolutionary. Protecting it, celebrating it, and expanding it is why I’m so excited to join the Mozilla Foundation as its executive director.

I started my career as a media lawyer to protect those who made things that helped us see one another, and the truth about our shared world. Almost fifteen years ago, I co-founded and built a media law clinic to train others to do the same. After a stint at a law firm, I joined BuzzFeed as its first newsroom lawyer, which felt sort of like being a lawyer for the silliest and most serious parts of the internet all at the same time. In other words, I was a lawyer for the Internet at its best.

I am not naive about the Internet at its worst. From the Edward Snowden disclosures to a quick trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, much of my career has confronted issues of surveillance -- including of my own religious community. I watched as consumers became more concerned about surveillance and other harms online, and so we built an accountability journalism outlet, The Markup, to serve those needs. The Markup’s mission is to help people challenge technology to serve the public good, which intentionally centers human agency. So we didn’t just write articles: Our team imagined and made things people used to make informed choices. Blacklight, for example, empowers people to use the Web how they want, by helping them see the otherwise invisible set of tracking tools, watching them as they browse.

Take a skim through the link for full details (especially the breaking changes), but I have included some parts that I thought were important:

This release has been over two years in the making, so we're really glad to finally get it out to you. The long cycle does mean quite an extensive changelog however, with well over 1100 pull requests merged into our master branch since 10.8.0 first dropped back in 2022.

General

• We now support "trickplay" a.k.a. live video scrubbing. When scrubbing through a video with this enabled, you will be able to see a live preview of the video at that timestamp. Note that this requires explicit client support, which may require some time to become available depending on your client.

• [...]

• We now support AVIF and WEBP images for Pictures libraries.

• Tags are now accounted for during searches, allowing one to search by tag.

• We now support multiple simultaneous subtitle tracks (maximum of two, a primary and secondary) in the web player.

• We've revamped the administrative dashboard UI to help improve usability and ease of finding options.

API & Security

• All API endpoints now return proper return codes, ensuring that API endpoint results can be reliably interpreted without additional parsing.

• Parental ratings are significantly improved, with better enforcement, inheritable ratings, and more.

• LiveTV and Collection permissions are now discrete and configurable per-user.

• The EasyPassword (PIN) feature has been removed as this was a big security risk especially for administrator accounts; QuickConnect login is still supported however.

• User permission handling has been unified and numerous bugs fixed, ensuring a more secure server from untrusted users.

Core Server & Networking

• [...]
• The server now supports in-process restarting, and removes the old hacky restart.sh method. This should make things like installing plugins much more robust and ensure a consistent restart experience regardless of platform or install method.
• [...]
• The backend SQLite database now supports connection pooling, which should improve performance for database operations.
• [...]

Also sections on Packaging, Transcoding & FFmpeg improvements/support, Scanning, Library & Playlist Management, and Casting

The Next Version

With our continuous integrations improvements outlined previously, we're quite confident that this will be our last "very long" release cycle. Our plan is for the next major version (10.10.0) to be released at most 6 months from now, some time in October. We hope this increased cadence will help alleviate the problems with large releases such as a very long time-to-stable for new features, translations, etc. and help lower the number of major bugs at each major release, streamlining the upgrade process. But this needs everyone's help. Back in October 2023, we made a call for developers, and we've gotten a lot of interest, but this is not a one-and-done event. We need contributions now more than ever, especially around the web frontend to help implement our planned design changes. If this interests you, please reach out and we can help get you set up.

Good summary by another user in the crosspost over in [email protected]:

https://lemmy.ca/post/20720943