I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.
Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.
Hopefully he asks you to audit a tool you might enjoy using or contributing to.
Sounds good… will be interesting to see if @[email protected] takes you up on the offer!
lemmy.ml (formerly dev.lemmy.ml) was centralized by Cloudflare (after the renaming iirc). It was an embarrassment that the flagship instance was so antithetical to Fedi philosophy. Perhaps due to that well-placed criticism, lemmy.ml eventually dropped CF. But lemmy.ml is still today centralized by disproportionate size. There is also copious political baggage with those admins which has helped drive people off (thus beneficial shrinkage) but which ultimately enabled/led lemmy.world to become the biggest most centralized instance (which is centralized by both factors: Cloudflare and disproportionate size).
In the big scheme of things, AFAICT beehaw is federated and reachable from other Fedi-principles-respecting instances. I can reach it from other non-walled-garden instances I listed. Grouping beehaw with the walled garden instances is a weird place to draw a line. I’ve only heard about beehaw defederating from instances that are antithetical to the fediverse spirit. But I only know w.r.t the big instances… feel free to point out counter examples. There probably wouldn’t be much chatter about defederation from small instances.
The biggest problem is self-contradiction. These two statements are incompatible:
@[email protected] or @[email protected] can audit for you.
Seriously, that’s what you’re missing. Bob the non-coder can trust Microsoft not to plant spyware in MS products, or Bob can trust some portion of the public (limited to ~8 billion people) to audit the code. It’s easier to trust the public than it is to trust a corporation. It’s not just about quantity of eyes, but having eyes that are more aligned with your interests.
When I first read this, I thought you were referring to threads in the generic sense – that your instance was blocking specific discussions. You should have capitalized Threads™, and ideally have the TM.
Wow… Fuck #Facebook for hi-jacking a common word. We really need to replace FB Threads™ with an unambiguous word that does not fuck up conversation.
Perhaps, but your reasoning is a bit too vague to be convincing. So what am I missing? Beehaw registration is open. I had no problem getting an account there; over Tor in fact. I don’t recall if they were using the Q/A interview field back when I signed up. OTOH that screening mechanism has become quite typical these days.
W.r.t defederation, I only know that Beehaw defederated from centralized instances, which is fair enough from the PoV of those embracing the decentralization principle. I skimmed through their several page long policies which boil down to “don’t be mean”. So I would guess they defederate from hate-rich nodes - not sure. What specifically do you have in mind?
The Cloudflare instances I listed are walled gardens because they restrict access hard and fast to various demographics with arbitrary exclusion of various groups of people (which IMO is an even harsher form of walled garden than some of the corporate walled gardens). I would not call having a code of conduct indicative of a walled garden, otherwise we would be calling just about every single instance a walled garden and thus not a useful place to draw a line.
If you oppose tech giants, then of course these Cloudflare instances are unsuitable and should be avoided:
This has nothing to do with your question about blocked threads, but I gather that you want to avoid the enshitification brought by tech giants, and you are on lemmy.zip. Cloudflare is a walled-garden and exclusive club. Not everyone can access Cloudflare-jailed content. CF also sees your username and password. So I suggest choosing an instance other than the above, and favoring communities that are also not on those instances.
Some free-world non-walled-garden instances are:
It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.
That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.
Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.
That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.
It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.
Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.
Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).
You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).
I didn’t see the OP’s pic but these groups generally work against enshitification of the world:
Notice that none of those communities are on Cloudflared instances (thus also avoid propagating the enshitified portion of the fedi).
Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:
Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.
Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.
All law compliance is voluntary on the threat of consequences, that is a bad point, because since all compliance is voluntary, then you are saying that all laws are largely useless.
Yes, but this only muddies the waters to mention. You’ve forgotten what I said previously. I’m not saying it’s voluntary on the trivial basis that all actions are voluntary. I’m saying compliance is voluntary because (as I have established and you failed to counter) the GDPR is not being enforced for the most part. You have ONE fine every THREE WEEKS by each DPA. How is your math not sorting that out? I will lay it out here:
52 weeks/yr ÷ 3 weeks × 23 DPAs × 5 years = 1993 + ⅓
That’s absurdly deadbeat on the DPA’s part. As one individual I am personally encountering violations at nearly that rate just on my own as one person. On average the DPA in one country is doing enough workload for one single victim. Scale that to a nation of people and the result is they’re doing fuck all.
My anecdotal experience reflects that of others and in fact mirrors the big picture. But you need not take my word for it. Read about it (“Fines are few and far between…Enforcement is, at best, patchy and inconsistent.”). Though I must say your lack of awareness makes your background questionable. You should know about the lack of enforcement problem if your career is tied to it. After all, your own numbers reflects this you’re just neglecting to do the math.
You’ve tried shifting the focus onto the revenue from the fines, which is irrelevant to the probability of getting a fine. The absurdity of that attempt is that “Meta…. accounted for 80% [of last year’s total fines], with its largest fine reaching €405 million.”
Outliers don’t make the law moot,
They do when the statistical outliers actually reflect cases of fines, as opposed to the cases of inaction. Again, 1 fine every 3 weeks for a whole country. That’s what makes the law moot from an enforcement perspective. You throw out the outliers and you’re left with no enforcement in the remaining dataset.
What you are saying is that due to the fact that corruption exists, your govs are not taking the law seriously.
I didn’t exactly assert corruption. That’d be slightly overstated. There is certainly a conflict of interest when gov agencies are accountable to DPAs of the same country. You can use your own judgement as to whether to outright assert “corruption”. Either way, that’s only a factor when the GDPR offender is a gov agency. Lack of enforcement is bigger than that. As I said, the law itself is the problem because it’s not motivational. Again, there is no enforcement clause to force DPAs to honor article 77 reports. That’s the problem which you continue to ignore. It also doesn’t help that “DPAs complain about a lack of budget and personnel. While German DPAs employ around 1200 staff, Belgian, Croatian, and Romanian DPAs average only 50.” (from the same article) So the other problem is that the GDPR does not require member states to allocate sufficient resources for the workload – though that problem would take care of itself if there were a penalty for member states who fail to uphold art.77.
You’re still talking about voluntary compliance. The GDPR is not entirely useless for this reason - some orgs will comply despite the unlikeliness that any action results. Great! My long history of art.77 reports show GDPR-hostile orgs getting away with it.
Here’s how the math works: your expectation of a fine (cost of noncompliance) is compared to the cost of compliance (e.g. hiring subject matter experts for consultation and making adaptations as needed). The expectation of a fine is the fine amount multiplied by the probability. The fine amount is negligible (if anything) for gov agencies and the probability a fine is levied by a state against itself is even much smaller than the probability of a fine against a commercial corp. So gov offices laugh at the GDPR. Commercial orgs can get a huge fine but they tend to get warnings, not to mention the chance a DPA even bothers to engage the offender is infintesmal as it is. The cost of compliance is generally higher, which is why they don’t bother. Hence why I’m up to my neck in violations. Luckily the good samaritans orgs that comply are the ones who haven’t done the math.
The GDPR would only become an effective force if they were to amend it so that article 77 were itself enforceable against the deadbeat DPAs.
You are quite confused. The places you list are places that do not have privacy protections for non-criminals. Europe is where a law-abiding person is least likely to be unreasonably searched or interrogated.
over 1900 fines so far
My point exactly. That’s nothing. That covers the past 5 years in 23 countries. They enforce just a enough cases to be able to suggest to the public that they are not doing absolutely nothing (because they want the public to accept the forced #digitalTransformation without resisting). GDPR violations are rampant and getting actual GDPR protection is like winning the lottery.
Adherence is taken seriously.
Bullshit. I have filed reports on well over 20 #GDPR violations citing law and evidence going ~4 years back in some cases. One of the reports was refused instantly by an incompetent desk clerk who gave a bogus rationale. The rest were accepted into litigation. Then every single one of them was silently and non-transparently mothballed. Not a single enforcement action resulted. Why? Because the GDPR does not have any teeth to force article 77 protection. If you think otherwise, please cite the text you think makes article 77 enforceable.
I’ve got 3 more art.77 reports to write as as we speak, and I struggle to get the motivation because I know they will just be mothballed as well.
clients are quite interested in learning how to keep their sites compliant.
That’s how the GDPR works. It’s voluntary, effectively. Some orgs opt to comply for optics and a bit of risk aversion (not wanting to be one of the few selected for enforcement like an inverse lottery). Orgs know enforcement is sparse and they abuse it. And when they abuse it, victims cannot get a remedy.
Also worth noting that gov agencies violate the GDPR with reckless disregard because the cognizant DPA represents the same country. There is no profit to speak of, so a fine would be moot.
Can’t the police, if need be, seize a server as easily as it would in any other country on Earth?
Yes. No privacy protections anywhere in the world protect criminal suspects from warranted surveillance. Privacy laws are only intended to protect non-suspects from unreasonable unwarranted searches.
And knowing a project is hosted in EU helps to know that the company/hosting adheres to our privacy laws.
That’s far fetched. You can say an EU-hosted service is bound by the GDPR, but adherence is a bit of a joke.
the fines for breaking data protection laws aren’t slaps on wrists like typical company fines in the US. We’re talking of sums that can literally bankrupt a company/provider.
Yes but there’s nothing to force the DPAs to enforce the law. If you file an article 77 complaint DPAs can just mothball your report forever. Not a single clause in the GDPR forces DPAs to properly treat art.77 complaints. So they don’t. They just treat enough to look like they’re doing something.
The others are right. Trying to stream from a torrent seems wasteful and complex.
But if you must for some strange reason, perhaps it would work to use webtor.io to produce an http-reachable audio file which could be curl/wget-fetched and piped to an audio decoder/player. I doubt you could make webtor fetch pieces linearly from the beginning. You would likely have to wait until the last piece is fetched to start streaming.