this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

FBI needs to go after the actual “domestic terrorists” The one wrapping fascism with a cross and holding a bible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Why would they go after their own families?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Who the fuck are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right wing Christian extremists, clearly.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Never seen any. Take your meds

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They're everywhere here in the States

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's a pretty big problem here in the States.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

mfs doing stuff like this really need to stop living in america bruh 💀

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait til you hear about extradition

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

plenty of places w/ no extradition 🤷‍♀️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[...] This is exactly what the admins over at Kolektiva.social have done and now one of them has been raided and charged by the FBI for activities unrelated to Mastodon

Clickbait.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, but the title makes it sound like it was because he was running an anarchist Mastodon instance. That's not why, he just happened to be doing a backup when he was raided, the backup was unencrypted, and they seized it. Has nothing to do with him running an anarchist instance from what I can tell.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok ... so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs ... yea there aren't DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don't exist ... you should presume DMs are public.

Because the fediverse is not in any way private. See for a good treatment of this: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/

The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place ... essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn't know about and probably couldn't do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) ... try a google search for mastoodn content.

This is all public internet stuff, you're basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.

As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives ... it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn't have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.

I've argued this elsewhere ... I like the fediverse and am here out of principle ... but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time ... because it's about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast ... in retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn't ready IMO, it's still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about 2013 seemed more favorable to the fediverse than now? Twitter, reddit and Facebook were pretty useful at that time - I don't think I'd have left.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.

These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the "Google" era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being "free".

In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it's a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thanks for the link, explains it very well. how bout my activity, like IP address, up/down votes, clicks on links, favorites and whatnot, is that federated around or how does that work, i.e. who has access to it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Up and down votes are federated with your username, along with posts and comments (obviously).

Clicking on links, favourites, email address (if you put one in when signing up), password and IP address are all only on your local instance.

Basically, unless another server needs to know about it for federation to work, it's going to be local to the instance you're using.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How is the data handled on Lemmy compared to Mastodon?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably the same. This bears repeating: All your information online is and always has been available for others to collect and see, from FBI to advertisers. If you want any amount of protection, it must be with E2E encryption for which you own the keys.

We taught online safety in the 90s. Did we all just collectively forget this in the last two decades?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They stopped teaching about computers. I tutored high schoolers about 10 years ago and they didn't know how to use computers fluently. It moved to the realm of expecting parents to teach to their kids along with taxes and career planning.

Speaking of which, I grew up in the 90s pre Internet, and started using the Internet in middle school. Definitely never got any official Internet safety lessons. Maybe I was a little too early? Idk. But by the time I was 30 schools were not teaching this at least from what I saw

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The other day, I spoke to an 18 year old who didn't know the difference between "copy and paste" and "cut and paste". I want to know what the hell they're doing in IT classes. Do they just assume that kids these days are good at tech because it's so ubiquitous? Because that's a dangerous assumption

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've taught multiple college students how to copy and paste.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I don't know that they have classes like that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

DMs aren't stored securely (Lemmy even warns you of that)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You aren't allowed to have anarchist worldviews in the US?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social's admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest.

Protests are illegal? Since when?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

FBI claiming it's for non-Mastodon related reasons, but that could be a cover. https://kolektiva.social is still up

Regardless, I don't think they even have to ask to get this sort of data from any of the big platforms.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah the 'happened to have a bunch of unencrypted data laying around' bit seems odd. Would make sense if they got picked up for something else and that was the bargain. Fucked if I know though

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're almost right: they do have to ask. They get a warrant, and they ask, and they are never told no.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was never any lag in service. I'm on that instance. I believe the person was raided due to their activism and had a backup of some data but not the actual server. They made an announcement and told people to change their passwords. Many lost a degree of trust but are being as transparent as possible with members. https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah, what the fuck are you supposed to do? Ask the FBI to please come back later?

It's a good reminder for folks with concerns to not say anything on a platform that isn't end-to-end encrypted that you don't want folks finding out about, to not use an email you don't want associated with yourself, and to use some sort.of VPN or Tor if you need to hide your IP address.

And if course use unique passwords but I would really hope people do that already.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Well thats worrying for everyone federated with them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

oh no! they have all the posts that people publicly posted onto the Internet!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Is it? As far as I know, identifying data such as IP addresses are not transmitted between instances.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does anyone have a eli5 explanation/read/video of being federated? When I joined lemmy i thought it was lemmy exclusive thing, but now it seems being federated is a copy of your data shared among servers that multiple communities/applications use including outside entities, such as lemmy communicating w/ mastodon? Or am I way off? Any explanation would be greatly appreciated help me get up to speed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy & KBin & Mastodon & Misskey & Calckey & others all use the ActivityPub protocol to deliver posts to your inbox no matter which account / software created the post in the first place.

How the posts are interpreted changes a bit depending on what software was used to create and display your inbox.

This is very much like how email works in Outlook & Gmail, but how the labels or tagging changes depending on which you use.

Try this video:

https://youtu.be/S57uhCQBEk0

@CuckyMcCuckyFace

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, the land of the free where thought police will bust servers where people practice wrongthink.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fed glowing N. Why am I not surprised. Never fully trust your government

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Insecure data? Does it just need a few compliments?