I’m sure there probably are far-right instances out there somewhere federating with each other. If the Naziverse federation somehow grows to have anything like the cultural relevance of the mainstream Fediverse federation, the problem will not be the technology. The problem will be that your society is full of Nazis.

“People would block it” is the solution, yes. Not that Fedi is perfect but it got that bit right.

That’s getting awfully hypothetical. Should we not wait and see if the social norms of fedi continue to hold up before condemning it along with its more evil-oriented analogues?

It seems like you are dead set on a course that leads only to concluding that humanity is evil at heart and we should all be locked up and prevented from ever being seen in public in the name of safety. In an era where so much of social life is online that’s only a few small steps beyond the idea of making everyone show their ID before they’re allowed to use the Internet. Even if it’s done in the name of safety, it works in service of oppression.

I’ve been exploring the fediverse for several years and have never seen anything like “body shaming videos” anywhere on it. Have you? Really? I think you’d really need to go out of your way to look for it, because any instance routinely allowing that kind of shit would be quickly blocklisted into oblivion, perhaps still in existence but unseen by casual users.

There do exist other things that one might say are not suitable for children here and there — but on social media that respects its users they are not pushed on people who don’t want them by algorithms designed to hook into people’s anxieties and keep them dependent.

If free-world social media like mastodon is too dangerous for you I really don’t know what to recommend, because obviously going outside instead would be even more risky.

Pass comprehensive data privacy laws that prohibit the surveillance capitalist business model on which the current social media giants depend. It is the driving force behind their continued enshittification.

61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds in Australia continue to hold social media accounts despite being banned, while 70 per cent said it was “easy” to circumvent the ban.

Well there you go, at least it will do some good for young people. It will teach them how to circumvent whatever age-probing nonsense they come up with for use in Canada. It will teach them that the government can’t be trusted. It will teach them that the right to freedom of expression does not apply to youth. It will make them aware, as they approach the age where they’re able to vote, that the tradition of “good government” in Canada, if there was any life left in it, is now dead.

For the rest of us, and for the international reputation of Canada, it will only be harmful.

The real beneficiaries are not in Canada. They’re the American tech giants who will maintain their grip on Canada all the more tightly with this fancy new regulatory barrier to entry standing in the way of any possible competition, as the blame for whatever they continue doing to their younger users is shifted to disposable 3rd-party “age verification” providers given the job of doing the impossible.

This one looks like it’s going nowhere. We are not likely to get a better chance to reform the electoral system than to vote NDP at the next opportunity.

Gradually, we all become aware that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of fossil fuels.

Huh, weird. The only thing I can think of is to check /etc/security/limits.d to see if there’s another conf file in there setting it to 4096.

Are you sure you really need 1048576 open files? It seems like a lot. But you’ll probably want to set “soft” as well as “hard” limits. Then you need to log in again for the change to take effect.

I wonder how Cloudflare estimates the increased rate of false positives they’re getting after they made their bot detector even more oversensitive in recent weeks. It no longer likes my default javascript-enabled browser profile and I don’t always bother to load another one when I get cloudflared, so >50% of visits from me are “bots”.

I don’t know how many minutes of this I’ll be able to take. Already I’m getting tired of watching this group of a dozen unfortunate souls stuck standing there behind the speaker, acting as human furniture, smiling and pretending to be impressed for the full hour from the looks of it. I hate it. It’s got to be going out of style some day soon. If not, maybe they should be first in line to have their jobs replaced by AI.

“Too often, AI is talked about …”

So true. I’m going to stop watching right there. Looking forward to getting my official government AI learning kit in the mail so I can learn to AI all the AI in the new AI-powered Canada.

Federal and municipal social media bans are also unlikely to work. It’s best regulated at the household level.

Much as I would like to completely ban everyone in the world from visiting facebook and twitter, you can’t really do that and still pretend to have a free society that cares about human rights. What you could do instead is outlaw the surveillance capitalist business model they depend on — universally, through strong privacy laws not aimed specifically at social media or any other narrowly-defined type of application.

The collection, use, and disclosure of personal information must be limited to reasonable purposes, which organizations must identify to individuals at the time of collection … Organizations must limit their collection of personal information to that which is necessary for the purpose identified to the individual.

That’s what Canada’s Vehicle Cyber Security Guidance says is required by Canadian privacy law. Maybe start enforcing that law, then? If that principle were adhered to in reality, cars wouldn’t collect any sensitive data at all. It would not have intelligence value for friends or adversaries if it didn’t exist.

Even after two rounds of everyone pointing out that it’s an incredibly bad idea, they still plan to make some cosmetic changes and push it through. The arrogance of this government is stunning.

I would take that as good news if it said “building” instead of “leasing.”

I just checked, and it is apparently called “Default”.

You don’t have to be rich for that, just stupid.

I was surprised as well. I found the instructions at debian.org somewhat confusing, and I’m not sure if they’re completely comprehensive or accurate — but they were the most useful reference I found and provide a good idea of what it’s like.