Out of curiosity, are you using an Android One phone now or something a little less bloated, but still bloated?
5,648 karma · joined January 7, 2014
Piracy decreased because the alternative became more convenient. It's easier to pay a few bucks on a monthly basis than it is to download the torrents. But, as those fees are increasing alongside the number of services that you need to pay for, piracy is bound to fill in the gaps. It's illegal, but the less people could afford the alternative, the more difficult it is going to be to stop piracy. A domain or two could be shut down, but if TPB is of any use now, it's to remind us that it's not easy to stop a highly-motivated group of people. I'd argue that The Web is still hectic enough to accommodate such a group of individuals.
This is totally different because it's gradual. Humans aren't good at thinking long-term, so it's more difficult to gather the support for projects that benefit us in the long run. The glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, but a congressman brought a snowball to congress so we don't have to do shit that inconveniences us now for something that benefits us in the long run.
> Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally.
Having a low number there is a feature.
...and let me quote the SCOTUS decision in the Korematsu v. U.S. (1944):
> Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies— we are dealing specifically: with nothing but an exclusion order.
Do you not see the issue here?
This is the airline collecting your biometrics — a completely different entity from the border control that usually checks your passport.
You insert your passport and that should be it. Border control has already checked your identity. Afterwards, your photo was taken by the airline in order to "verify you".
Granted, airlines could get your photograph in a myriad of ways, but this system makes it as convenient for them as it can get.
I guess that qualifies as "not easy", because it's a meaningless statement that can be justified by the slightest inconvenience.
Back then, they were called war relocation centers. Right now, we call them concentration camps. Same thing will happen with the current camps, both in the US and China. In both cases, it's only the citizens of those countries that object to the usage of the term "concentration camps", while everyone else classifies them properly. Nobody in the history has called their own camps for what they truly are. Keeping people in inhumane conditions because the government identified their nationality as suspects is a terrible thing to do regardless of how that same government tries to spin it.
Yeah, that makes sense. Things have changed since last time I went through that pain.
"Execute these commands only once and then just type youtube-dl https://example.com. If something breaks, run this command to upgrade the script and retry." If the target audience is someone who you think will feel comfortable doing youtube-dl in a terminal, you may as well point them to the total of three other commands to set things up.
Point to Ubuntu in the Microsoft Store. Python is preinstalled. You may need to install Python's package manager (I'm not sure does it come preinstalled) with "sudo apt install python3-pip". Install it from Python's package manager with "pip3 install youtube-dl".
You could technically skip Python's package manager by just doing "sudo apt install youtube-dl", but updates are slow there, and you really don't want slow updates with this tool ("pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl"). I'd argue that three commands are way easier to explain than installing two binaries and clicking around far too many times, especially because youtube-dl needs to be updated on a regular basis in order to work properly.
Slack is Discord for adults, but adults are never the ones who make or break social media. It's younger people who tend to be more invested in the platform they use. It's not a rational choice (nor was Facebook for my generation), but it got kickstarted out of necessity (as a substitute to the limited chat options within games) and right now, it's the convenience that drives it further. Why switch over when, unlike Facebook or Slack, everyone you know is already using Discord?
Instagram succeeded for that same reason: profiles set to private, no real name policy, people can't look you up in a search bar. It was easier to group up in small communities. The less that's the case, the crappier the content. Instagram was ruined the moment Facebook accounts were attached to Instagram accounts — it's just dying slowly, the same way Facebook is dying slowly.
The next "global" platform is going to be Discord. It started as a place to host gaming communities. People were subscribed to a few gaming communities, so it already made sense for them to join more communities that are available on the platform. Right now, it's no longer the place exclusively for gaming. Every subreddit has one, every Patreon supporter is a member of some secret one. It'll outlast both Instagram and Facebook for one reason only: no personal info what so ever. People can't find out anything about you by clicking on your username: not your real name, not your contact info, not even a list of other communities you are a part of. You join a community by being invited to one.
You're not gonna suggest Mastodon to someone, you're gonna point to a specific community (probably the same one you're a member of). Only one set of rules you need to worry about. Federation? You don't have to pay attention to it at all. It's a nice feature to have for sure, but it only becomes relevant once you don't have people to follow inside of your own instance. By recommending an instance, you're recommending a community, not the software behind that community.
There have been plenty of attempts of taking Facebook's crown (both VC-funded and user-funded), and they've all failed spectacularly. The reason for that is simple: people don't want a global network. Facebook was the first and last one to succeed. Nobody wants to be on the same network as their parents, so they indeed decentralize: they decentralize in group chats, Facebook groups, Discord servers, Slack servers, Twitter communities, Discourse instances, Mastodon instances, forums like HN, subreddits etc. Facebook and Google+ failed immediately simply by having a real-name policy. That's okay if you want to communicate with people around you, but terrible if you want to truly express yourself to a bunch of strangers. The younger you are, the bigger the odds that you belong in the latter. Nothing wrong with communicating with people around you, but that's not the group that drives your numbers up drastically.
Mastodon surely can't be the new Facebook simply because that's not what it aims to become. It aims to become the software of choice for the communities. The easier you make it to jump on board (and the less personal data you need to provide in order to do so), the bigger the odds that you'll be the home for a community.
The comment above reached a figure of 700 per day per person. For my teen self, that's about two or three hours of conversation per day. It's certainly sustainable for months. Hell, I was known as the outlier in my teen circles because I liked to send longer messages (actually combining full sentences into one message) from time to time.
I agree. They've always existed in one form or the other, it's just that nobody gave a fuck. Mastodon kinda changed that by attracting about half a million monthly users. A tiny, tiny number for a social network, but a gigantic number for a decentralized social network.
This website is good for the overview of the "fediverse" (collection of social media services talking together via open protocols): https://the-federation.info/
Hell, name a social network, and I can name at least one attempt at decentralizing it: Twitter (Mastodon, Pleroma), Instagram (PixelFed, Anfora), reddit (Lemmy), YouTube (PeerTube), SoundCloud (Funkwhale), Medium (Write.as) etc. An obvious one that I haven't listed is Facebook, but that thing has so many features that a viable alternative heavily depends on which Facebook features you actually use.
I see nothing wrong with this strike, but I don't see how spreading awareness helps if you don't point to the most obvious solution available.
The best thing us outsiders can do to help them out is to provide them with an unlimited access to the information, not the opposite. The amount of young people that are willing to sacrifice their own chance at a good life for something as meaningless as self-determination can only be made smaller by making the education more accessible.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with being patriotic. In practice, there's very little to be patriotic about when your national identity pulls you down and becomes another hurdle that you have to deal with -- a hurdle that other young people don't have simply because they were born somewhere else.
You can toggle between the modes in one tap, and if you're in a private mode, opening links from other apps behaves just like Focus (minus the convenient "erase everything" button, at least for now).
It's the best of both worlds, I don't have to use a second one for those rare scenarios in which I want cookies (like remaining logged into HN).
I'll be happy to use their other browsers (mainly, Firefox Focus, my default browser) until this one gets more polished, but the moment this one becomes a bit more stable and adds a few more features (adblock support is certainly on top of that list) will be the moment when I not just switch over, but delete every other browser I have installed on my phone. I can't believe a browser (any browser) makes me feel excited in 2019, but this one does.
It bothers me when people draw badly considered conclusions from them, such as claiming that "most" or a "big part" of Tor is dedicated to illegal activities. The percentage is probably greater than on the "normal" web, but I object to the stronger claims than that.
Read a cool blog post? Nobody around you will ever give a shit, because in order to do so, they'd have to read it too. Shared a photo from a vacation? It might start a conversation or two with people around you, while you receive dozens or hundreds of affirmations (in the form of likes).
I don't like to use social networks, but that's what I fall back on when I have a few minutes to spare. I rarely look at my list of articles I've saved for later — who has time for that?
As someone who already tried it, I'd call it more of a Medium alternative. Or, at least, what Medium should have been.
Zero pop-ups, actually clutter-free reading experience, and an opportunity to not just host individual blogs (although that is certainly a feasible use case), but to also bring a community together, run a publication, and give the readers the freedom to consume the content in which ever way they'd like (website, decentralized social networks like Mastodon, RSS reader etc).
Citation needed please.
That's the juicier stuff that makes its way into the news. "A person living under an oppressive government evading censorship" will never be as juicy to write about as "murderers for hire on the dark web". That says absolutely nothing about the actual usage of Tor, so I'd like to see you back up that "big part" part.
...by enforcing the rules upon others? That's not how you make a world a better place. Remaining in status quo is not how society progresses.
Pushing those laws, challenging them, and adapting them quickly to the needs of the society today is how society progresses. Police officers are necessary evils. In most of the situations, they do good by enforcing rules that make sense. In some of the situations, they do bad because they're enforcing the rules that prohibit us from progress. How do you change those rules? You challenge them.
Doing nothing about climate change does us no good. I know that, you know that, we all know that. Following existing rules isn't gonna change that quickly enough. We need to progress further, and to prove to our lawmakers that there's enough of people interested in making a difference, some of which are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of the society. At first, you do radical things in order to draw attention to the problem. Once the consensus is reached, the government can prolong it for only so long before people stop obeying its rules.
That's when the defense forces start facing a difficult decision. They could either fight to stop the progress, or step the fuck down and let the people do what needs to be done for the things to change. Once they change, they go back to the start and enforce new rules. Those new rules will never be made perfect, so there will always be people that are going to push those boundaries further.
When you see .hr, Croatia is probably the last thing you would think of. It's the first two letters of Croatia spelled in Croatian ("Hrvatska"). There are only so many ways to shorten a word to two characters, and .ca, .cr, and .co were all taken. I guess they could have went with .ct, but they've decided on .hr instead.
Similarly, .flights is always gonna be more useful to have control over compared to .vuelos (same, but in Spanish).
Because it's their fucking job. There are plenty of jobs that don't require you to put your life into danger, and being a police officer isn't one of them. Don't want to risk your life while on a job? Don't get a job that requires you to enforce the rules on those that are not willing to follow the rules. Groundbreaking discovery, I know.