Those are great links. I think I already read Cory Doctorow’s post.

I think I already struggle with the premise. I think Google, Facebook, etc using my data is NOT Fair Use. They can not just publish my full name, pictures and texts without my explicit consent.

And this is kind of lumping everything together again… For-profit AI and open-weight models to the benefit of humanity aren’t the same thing. And I think we should give open-weight models some advantage by applying different rules. I.e. let people use data more freely if they contribute something back and the resulting product can be used freely as well. And make the rules more strict for big and closed for-profit services. And demand more transparency as well.

I mean realistically, we don’t have any proper rules in place. The AI companies for example just pirate everything from Anna’s Archive. And they’re rich enough to afford enough lawyers to get away with that. And that’s unlike libraries, which pay for books and DVDs in their shelves… So that’s definitely illegal by any standard.

But I agree that learning something from a textbook is a different thing than copying it. The resulting knowledge escapes the copyrighted material. I believe that’s the same no matrer if it’s machine learning or me learning computer programming with textbooks… The thing is just that you can’t steal in the process. That’s still illegal. IMO.

One of my fears is that AI is as disruptive as people think. And that the market is going to be dominated by unsympathetic big-tech companies, due to the nature if it. I think we need some good legislation to push AI in the right direction, or we’re going to end up in some scifi dystopia where big companies just shape the world and our lives to their liking.

Actually there is a small but important difference. Libraries usually don’t generate (much) revenue. They’re funded by public money, institutions… And a subscription is like 25€ annually or it’s free… While AI companies have billions of dollars turnover and they’re very much for-profit. And Fair Use has other applications as well. It allows science, allows me to record television or listen to music in the car or together with friends. I don’t think we can lump all of this together.

I went with the option with keyfiles. I keep backups of LUKS headers and keyfile in case a harddisk gets damaged. Currently have that stored as a file attachment in my password manager.

I’ve been using it for quite some time now and I don’t see the issue. I mostly use Gnome and that’s kind of polished and minimalistic(?) looks very cohesive to me. But I believe the same applies to other desktop environments as well. My package manager mostly gets out of the way and I don’t have to pay too much attention to that. I even get browser extensions and all the stuff that ties into another from one and the same distro maintainers. I’ve tried other operating systems as well, but for the other ones I needed to install 50 small utilities to make it usable and those kind of fight each other as well. On Linux, I try to avoid Flatpak and I wouldn’t use Snap at all. We still(?) have most software available as proper packages.

I can see how image editing might be an issue. We have what we have and for the rest you need to get one of the commercial products running.

I occasionally ask people such things and from what I got it’s kind of mixed. Even beyond Germany. But I didn’t do a proper study, I might be wrong.

Uh, I don’t think recording internal IPs would be legal where I live. But yeah, my ISP sends me bills every month, they know exactly how much data I use and where I live. My router runs my own Linux (OpenWRT), though.

And sure, that’s exactly why I personally am worried about the advertisement and tracking platforms. Those definitely make a living by connecting every minor detail. And they have more available like Browser fingerprints, device identifiers if you forgot to disable the advertisement id on your phone…

Though, I seriously doubt it’s a legitimate study. Standards dictate you’d do it with people’s consent and inform them what’s up. You’d get scolded by your professor if you did it like this. And I believe we do studies without explicit consent, but that’s university level stuff and I suppose you’d have to file a request with the ethics committee and have someone look at the study layout. I’d say if it is a “study”, it’s probably illegitimate and done by someone without much academic background. Or they don’t abide by the same standards all students do for specific reasons.

Hmmh. I have uBlock and LocalCDN installed in my browser because I’m more worried about all the Google and Metas out there. Most of the news articles linked here are on websites with like 3 different trackers. And Google and Meta definitely have enough info about everyone to correlate minor details.

I must say I’m not super worried about my IP leaking into the Fediverse. I mean the pictures as a direct message is yet another thing. But generally speaking, we have some trade-off here between privacy and spreading information across a distributed network. It’s not a good thing, but I think the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Yeah, I can see how exploration for further things could be the case.

I just wonder, do people also install browser extensions to cache all the google fonts, jsdelivr urls etc? Or do they just give away the same data to every link on this link aggregator platform and it’s just when it becomes very obvious as with this weird thing?

Location would be possible. For me it’s a few 100km off, but usually the GeoIP databases are more accurate.

Piefed doesn’t do much image caching or proxying. It only keeps thumbnails around. Once you open a post with more than a thumbnail in it (a full picture), your IP is revealed to the image hoster.

Sure, back when I was young enough to do really stupid “pranks”, we tried to vandalize Wikipedia once or twice. You get banned and re-try one day later. That’s kind of how it works with IP bans. But it gets rid of 99% of people who aren’t super persistent. And that’s enough. And also why they do it even if it’s not “perfect”. Our school had one static IP for the entire computer room, so over there Wikipedia wouldn’t accept edits for a whole week or two, until the ban properly expired.

Yeah, I heard it’s different with some providers in north america. But then again, it’s not very straightforward to track which IPs belong to which provider, in which timespans they get renewed and then match that to other info.

I mean for most users worldwide, the IP changes every 24h or so, maybe every few days. So I doubt it’s of great value unless you have access to another big database of current logins to match this against. And if you already have that database, I don’t see the value of recording the IP again. Only added info is that the user uses Lemmy, if there isn’t any identifier in the image URL.

I wonder what the use case is for gathering IP addresses of random internet connections.

I use KaniDM and configured everything with OAuth2. That was the easiest and most straightforward I could find. But I don’t think they bothered implementing LDAP. Other platforms I tried are Authentik, Authelia, Keycloak, Zitadel… They’re all a bit heavier and have other/more features, but there wasn’t one I really fell in love with.

I’d say use something like zeroconf(?) for local computer names. Or give them names in either your dns forwarder (router), hosts file or ssh config. Along with shell autocompletion, that might do the job. I use scp, rsync and I have a NFS share on the NAS and some bookmarks in Gnome’s file manager, so i just click on that or type in scp or rsync with the target computer’s name.

I’m not sure about anything useful. Best thing would probably be to install Linux and donate them to people in need. For experimentation, sure, set up a Beowulf Cluster, learn FreeBSD, Orchestration, Kubernetes, Ansible… Use them to test your microservice architecture software projects, software-defined networking…

I get a lot of ads everywhere. And trackers. On most of the news sites, social media platforms, my email provider, .places where I look up information, … The majority of the internet is commercial and financed through advertisements. With few exceptions, like personal/indie blogs and places like this one. I mean if you read just blogs and Wikipedia, you might already be alright. But that’s not how 99% of people use the internet.

Yeah, Youtube ads won’t be blocked by a DNS blocker. You need a browser plugin for that. I use Firefox, uBlock and Sponsorblock. That removes most of the ads everywhere, including Youtube.

Can you give us some more information on what’s false?

I think it’s a waste of time. It doesn’t really add anything. If you don’t want to lose your subscription in the unlikely event that your server/instance goes down forever, just use the export feature to make occasional backups. You can always create a new account after something happened. No need to invest that time otherwise.

You’re free to use sockpuppets though. Or if you’re moderating stuff or participate in instances/communities who don’t federate.