The dragon with its hoard of gold (private user data) is a great description of Facebook and Google's regulatory goals. As Maciej has also put it, "privacy is an essential right — your most intimate moments should be kept strictly between you and Google".
The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.
Agreed. The thrust of this article is correct, in that people should support open source projects as much as they can (I usually donate around $100 a month, which is really not that much). But, other sources of income are being missed here. Sometimes companies will pay maintainers as consultants for integration or new features. Sometimes people have companies that provide their project as a service as well.
Does anyone have experience with bandwidth charges for colocated servers? If you pay $300 a month (or whatever it is, I really have no idea because most of these places don't post their prices publicly) to put a 1U somewhere with a 500mbps link, will they ever stop or throttle you if your use case is legitimate? It seems like colo could be significantly cheaper than cloud for a lot of high-bandwidth things that don't need HA.
Making a choice properly requires having knowledge about the particular options. Fertility education particularly in regard to age is not part of the sexual education curriculum in the UK [1] nor in international guidance documents [2,3] (just Ctrl-F "fertility"). And a recent poll in the US showed that 77% of women did not properly understand the relationship between age and fertility [4]. At some point this stops being choices made with appropriate knowledge and starts being a massive and tragic policy failure.
The statement you reference is "77% of women do not know that when a woman is 35+, her age is a better indicator of her fertility than her overall health." As a women in her 30s, I'll say that every damn woman in America has heard of a biological clock by her 20s, and is quite aware, and many are getting calls from Auntie every two weeks about whether she's getting on it yet.
This looks awesome! A few questions if anyone knowledgable is around:
* Does Unwalled.Garden automatically pin the content of people you follow, so that their stuff stays online if they aren't?
* I didn't understand "We also use a second “private” dat for records which should be kept off the network". What is this referring to, the follow request, or some other private content like a DM? I assume that since this is still Dat there is no access control if you happen to know the address?
* How is reader privacy and DHT coming along with this ecosystem?
> Does Unwalled.Garden automatically pin the content of people you follow, so that their stuff stays online if they aren't?
It gets saved locally so you can access it when they're offline. It'll also be possible to instruct your pinning service to seed it on your behalf.
> I didn't understand "We also use a second “private” dat for records which should be kept off the network".
I'll talk more about this in the future as Beaker 0.9 is closer to release. We basically are creating a filesystem with a root dat (which is private). Your public dat will then be "mounted" to it at /public so it feels like one unified FS. The structure will look something like this:
/
/.data/.unwalled.garden/* <- private records
/public
/public/.data/.unwalled.garden/* <- public records
> How is reader privacy and DHT coming along with this ecosystem?
At this stage, I'm pretty sure we're going to need to use proxies to solve this. We're open to using an anonymity protocol like Tor but still uncertain about the tradeoffs.
Every existing ActivityPub application requires you to rely on a server operated by someone else that controls your identity. This application puts you fundamentally in control of your content: it is just served from your own device by default, with the option to have another server pin your content (all of your content has Dat addresses).
Also, this sort of "use this, not that" dismissal ignores the fact that almost every decentralized application can be bridged together. It would not be hard to have Mastodon/Pleroma pull someones Unwalled.Garden feed and put it on its federated timeline, or conversely for Mastodon/Pleroma to expose its users feeds as Unwalled.Garden files.
The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.