Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.

According to my doctor - after diarrhea, it takes about 5 days for the digestive system to start working properly again (because the bacteria has to build back up to enough). So that would be my recommendation. Have diarrhea and then it doesn’t really matter what you eat after that, the poster would be back home again before they had to worry about pooping.

As someone who has diarrhea anytime I’m going to be in a stressful situation - I can testify that it takes me about a week to “form” poo again.

Making jokes is how people cope with tragic events.
This is why there is the on-going debate, that no topic should ever be unavailable to joke about.

I remember that the very same day that Princess Diana died, people were saying “Died in a nasty accident” and that was before the days of the internet being popular, that was a joke that spread around the country by text message.

OK lets start with the phone, what app is responsible for the suspicious activity message? Because I’m not aware that is part of Android. The closest symptom is that Android will disconnect from networks that it claims do not have internet connectivity. Which would fit more closely with your intermittent connection issues. We could really also do with knowing what router you are using for the actual internet. It sounds like you are using mesh system for the wireless side of things. Can we also know are you using the ISP DNS server, or have you pointed the router to more reliable DNS servers? You should probably never use the ISP DNS servers - aside from any other reason, because it makes it much easier for the ISP to record what sites you are visiting.

I think it would be awesome, but - my understanding is that AMA events tend to require quite a bit of moderation. Do we have good enough moderation on either platform yet - to be able to cope with an event like this?

Shouldn’t fundamentally be much different to seti@home, boinc etc. Break a video into chunks, and let multiple computers encode a chunk each. If the chunks were small enough, most people probably wouldn’t even realise their computer had just encoded a chunk of video

Next step - should be a server that simply coordinates video transcoding, and users can run an application on their computer which will do the transcoding when it’s idle and deliver the transcoded video back to the server. Like the rest of the Fediverse, make the community actually part of the community. I’m sure many of us would be happy to donate spare CPU time.

This is awesome game changing stuff for PeerTube. Especially since it lays the groundwork for more distributed tasks down the road.

Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.

But the vast majority of them don’t know about the fediverse, and will stick with the status quo. They are only going to find out about the fediverse by becoming part of it, without necessarily knowing that they are becoming part of it. The vast majority of meta users, either on facebook or instagram, or even whatsapp - just want to be able to talk to their friends.

I feel like outside the federated system, meta would rely on geographic metadata (eg IP address) to identify if a user was within the scope of the GDPR or not. But they aren’t going to have access to any of this information, when they receive the data from another server in the fediverse. There will be zero way for them to identify if a user from any server in the fediverse would be applicable to the GDPR or not, because any user from any country can basically sign up anywhere. It will be difficult for them to argue against that - since it’s highly publicised that when Mastodon was struggling under the strain of the massive influx of new users - that people were being advised to find an instance that aligned to their interests rather than just their geographical location. Indeed I am on a Scottish server - where I arrived in 2019, but I have recently started another account on a US server ( allthingstech.social) so I would indeed be a user protected by GDPR on a US server. Because Meta have no way of knowing where a user comes from, the only thing they can definitely legally do - is process data from their own known users - but they are crossing into dangerous territory the second they start trying to process data from users outside their own instance. In my opinion anyway.

And no I don’t mind debating at all. There needs to be a lot more debate, and a lot less death threats and screaming matches online - in order for us to start resolving anything.

Edit:
The GDPR applies to data on people. So in your example - it doesn’t matter how Meta got the data, the point is that they have data on citizens that are protected by the GDPR, the fact that the data arrived indirectly via a US server, doesn’t remove the protection afforded to the EU citizen

Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.

You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.

Oh I’m sorry. I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.

Also thank you so much, apparently instead of just having a debate. You immediately resort to bullying and insults.

Guess this really is Reddit 2.0 🙄

Right… But…
ActivityPub is not a protected encrypted protocol. Everything anyone says on any service using ActivityPub can already be intercepted and harvested by anyone, even blocked instances. The defederating is software based. But for example if someone wanted they could simply do https://mastodon.social/tags/fediverse.rss and there were go, instant access to data from the Fediverse. You can query any Mastodon server for any hashtag you like. That’s just one of many endpoints that will spit out Fediverse content.

I’m personally happy to take a wait and see approach - because the whole point is that WE have the power. Meta HAVE to play by the rules, because if they don’t they get defederated, and it’s going to be very difficult for them to convince people to federate with them again after that. If lots of instances start defederating them, then their users are going to start complaining to them that they don’t understand why they can talk to some people, but not other people. We have the power here folks.

EDIT: To add - the Fediverse is supposed to be an inclusive place…

This post reminded me to finally get around to fixing the error preventing me from setting up TOTP on my self hosted install.

There is a theatre attached to our house. It has only existed since 1991, before that it was a single story machine workshop, and before that - all manner of other things. There is a large Theatre Pipe Organ in it, and we host midweek groups who come down on their special outings (WI, Probus Club etc). One day we had one of these groups in, and as usual when they left we went around the building checking the toilets etc to make sure everyone was out. Most of the time people arrived by coach, but sometimes if the group was closer to us, and a smaller size, they came in cars.

This day we checked everyone was out, and as usual quite exhausted - we locked up the building and went through to the house for a smoke and a coffee before heading back through to tidy away the plates and bowls and start collating the left over scones, butter, jam, cakes etc so store in a fridge and pick our way through over the next several days.

On returning back to the foyer - the fire extinguisher which sits on a bracket on the wall, was sitting upright in the middle of the floor. It couldn’t have fallen off the bracket, because it would be laying in it’s side near the wall in that case. It was sitting upright - a good 3-4 metres away from the wall. There is simply no way it could naturally have ended up where it was - without someone physically putting it there. But the building was locked, and we would definitely have noticed if it was there when we locked up the building and left, because we would have had to walk around it to leave the building.

In the UK we call them daddy long legs, I don’t know what they would be called in the US - though I think it might be horseflies(?). Anyway I was told at School that IF they could break human skin, they would be deadly to us - but they haven’t evolved that ability - yet. So I think they would be who I would befriend first - just in case.

Reddit has been going for like a billion years, and you only got 80GB - I mean even zipped, that can’t even be a fraction of the data surely?