Natanji ‏✅ @natanji@octodon.social

This #GDPR article makes me wonder whether laws and regulations can actually help us at all, more than they can hurt us.
I hope there's a less cynical view...

Recommended read on #GDPR by @tante https://tante.cc/2018/04/03/a-critical-reflection-on-gdpr/

There's good parts and nice ideas behind it, but as it is, it might just be dodged by big corporations, but be a barrier for small websites etc.

So, The Big Witch Migration is a thing. And I'm a pretty curious witch! So I designed this survey to shed some light on some questions:
- What were your reasons to choose the instance in the first place?
- How did you use your account?
- How are you planning to go on from here?

If you're a user of witches.town, please feel free to take the survey, it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes max. And spread the word, if you like! Thank you! 💫

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEwTF9PE6BT7Z-_xzIGvM67JeIRCwEOxQML-GLDQ0ZZ5UpNQ/viewform

iyi geçeler!

@gRuFtY GENTLEMEH. just one step away from gentle mäh, which is goats.

(apologies)

FYI if you use #Grindr

“Grindr Is Letting Other Companies See User HIV Status And Location Data”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/grindr-hiv-status-privacy

They’re sharing HIV status with the user’s GPS data, phone ID, and email

This is seriously messed up. Forget #privacy, that means they can precisely identify each user

https://mastodon.social/media/JjHQUN_noCoQ7wRs_v8

Forgot to add: nowhere have the developers come out and said it's a joke.

What I really hate about this post is I can't actually tell if it IS a joke. Sure, it's completely ridiculous, but the world of "blockchain" is so terrible these days, we've seen even less believable attempts that turned out to be completely genuine. (Often completely genuine scams, but all the same they weren't done to make someone laugh.)

So imagine this. It's April 2, the middle of the night. April Fools Day is over almost everywhere in the world. You grab your phone. And you see this message FROM THE SYSTEM ITSELF:

"Ahoy there matey. Shiver me timbers! Yer phone's booty be hornswaggled, matey!"

Doesn't that sound threatening? My initial assumption was that the LineageOS people put fake ransomware in the update as a joke. Which is very not funny. But this isn't the end.

Last night, a software update for my phone was released. That's not unusual. Software updates for my phone, on LineageOS are released frequently. I appreciate that. I nearly botched the update because I forgot I started it and tried to use my flashlight in the dark, but the updater prevented that at least.

Anyway, after it updated, I sleepily grabbed my phone, and noticed there was a mysterious message on it. In pirate lingo. Now hold on.

And it's pretty bad that the solution you're supposed to take is to just buy a new phone. Because that's a privilege.

So maybe you can imagine how important LineageOS is for me. Because I can (and did) install it on my phone so it could keep being updated and running properly. It's given me many more years from my phone that I deserve, but that the companies didn't want me to have. I guess I'm fairly dependent on them.

Ok, have a seat.

So, we all know how, for better or worse, our cell phones are key to the functioning of lives in this damned year of 2018. We rely on them completely. So it's pretty bad that phones tend to be obsolete about 10 seconds after first boot. (If that.)

It's pretty bad when your phone stops being updated and secure because the manufacturer stopped caring. It's pretty bad when all the software stops working right because the big devs expect something newer

this seems like another moment when it'd be useful for admins to have a like "tell every user an important thing" feature for like

when your instances is shutting down and a lot of people don't know

So in the last month of being a new Mastodon admin I've seen: (1) a popular instance wipe its entire database and (2) a popular instance's operator ragequit and take the server with them.

Definitely an education in mastodon failure modes!

My sense is that the decision to become a Mastodon admin comes with some responsibility to plan for continuity... the broader Mastodon community suffers when there is no plan or a lack of effort to carry it out.