It's time for the best meteor shower of the year: the Geminids. This dependable shower can deliver upwards of 120 meteors per hour in perfect conditions. Unfortunately, this year isn't perfect conditions. The peak of the meteor shower, around December 14th, lines up with the full Moon, which will wash away the faintest meteor trails. But all hope isn't lost. Here's our guide to catching as many meteors as you can.

https://www.universetoday.com/169860/our-strategy-to-catch-the-2024-geminid-meteors/

if any other instance donated to trump you'd defederate them immediately

dont give special treatment to the rich and powerful

https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/113640119673222929

🎉 MAMY STOWARZYSZENIE! 🎉

Z radością ogłaszamy, iż Sąd Rejonowy w Poznaniu właśnie zarejestrował nasze stowarzyszenie! 🥳 Po zaledwie 16 dniach od spotkania założycielskiego, zostaliśmy oficjalnie wpisani do rejestru stowarzyszeń KRS. Dziękujemy wszystkim którzy przyczynili się do finalizacji tego procesu!

#hackerspace #knyfyrtel #poznań #linuxcommunity

Here's a pano photo from my #Astrophotography early morning session at Strathnairn, ACT earlier this year.

https://www.desparoz.com/strathnairn-nights/

"It is important to be able to communicate freely", says Jérôme Poisson aka @Goffi in the NGI0 #podcast. He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on #XMPP.
XMPP is mostly known for chat but Libervia offers many more features such as blogs, fora, events & file sharing. It has gateways to other open protocols like #ActivityPub & email. He talks about Libervia, the political side of technology & offers advise about #NGI0 grants.
https://podcast.nlnet.nl/@NGIZero/episodes/technology-is-not-neutral-libervia
#FOSS

Wszyscy się już pochwalili na tych innych platformach i pewnie macie dość😀 , ale my bardziej z podziękowaniem niż samym #SpotifyWrapped.

Dziękujemy Wam za wszystkie odsłuchania i oceny naszego podcastu! My już szykujemy kolejne odcinki Zajawki, tymczasem zapraszamy do sprawdzenia zaległych odcinków i dodania nas do obserwowanych, gdziekolwiek nas słuchacie. Oprócz Spotify jesteśmy na Youtube, Deezer, Soundcloud i oczywiście PeerTube.

✅Zajawka na Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2sUCMiZ7q4hPKHgAiOCF6Q?si=3LVKnYLLQgOvLP5BIspMRg
✅Peertube: https://tube.pol.social/w/p/3AFiwJPmqdtDCnWKuchSNj
✅Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3WN3cwuROn6g2q0ln6GuTG21R9lHh90U
✅Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/pl/show/1001021522
✅Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sie-obywatelska-watchdog/sets/zajawka-podcast-watchdoga?si=b37f6446be6c4690953db5aa2c83c637&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Brakuje nas jeszcze na Apple Podcast i pamiętamy o tych postulatach🙂 , mamy nadzieję, że to tylko kwestia czasu.

Dobrego wieczoru i do usłyszenia! 😉

We really need to stop buying into the argument that #ClimateActivists are "radical" or "destructive". The opposite is true: the nature of the protests have been peaceful and, on the whole, pretty tame.

The idea that, say, sitting on a road is "radical", "extreme" and "criminal" came from a bunch of #FossilFuel aligned think tanks, parroted by the media.
Reject them.

The framing needs to be: Fossil fuel companies are radical, extreme, criminal.

#ALEC
https://newrepublic.com/article/175488/meet-shadowy-global-network-vilifying-climate-protesters

1/
W związku z wdrażaniem w Polsce Europejskiego Aktu Wolności Mediów (#EMFA) zwracamy uwagę na konieczność wzmocnienie niezależności polskich mediów, ochrony dziennikarzy i redakcyjnej integralności.

W liście wysłanym do Ministerstwa Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego zaapelowaliśmy o:

1. wzmocnienie gwarancji niezależności redakcyjnej dziennikarzy zatrudnionych w mediach publicznych,

2. prowadzenie wyspecjalizowanego ciała samoregulacyjnego,

My latest video on #solarpunk #urbanism . This will be one of 7 videos on the subject.
https://peertube.stream/w/fYNRk1mjT83UzFCZxvee3w
Peertube is always published early.

The Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (which is a government institution) published its report about how social media companies refuse to cooperate in the fight with scams and false advertising (because they benefit from it, obviously).

Facebook now blocks posts that link to this report.

https://buff.ly/49d7h7L

X's legal filing in the InfoWars bankruptcy case is both batshit crazy and also what you'd expect. It asserts that X owns every account, can do whatever it wants with them, and can inject itself into legal proceedings that have nothing to do with it.

This is why it's incredibly important that people invest in platforms that they own, and move toward federated/decentralized/portable, noncorporate social media as rapidly as possible

https://www.404media.co/xs-objection-to-the-onion-buying-infowars-is-a-reminder-you-do-not-own-your-social-media-accounts/

From unconstitutional searches, to emotional analysis technologies that have now been banned in the EU - learn more about the disturbing world of surveillance technologies in schools

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5463/studying-under-surveillance-securitisation-learning

🎧 Software Freedom Podcast: new episode 🎧

In this episode we focus on the 27 million euros cut of funding of the @EC_NGI initiative.

🤔 Wanna know more? Alex and Bonnie shed some light on the history of this European project and share the newest developments in this case.

https://fsfe.org/news/podcast/episode-26.en.html

#SoftwareFreedom #FreeSoftware

Education has naturally changed, and adapted over time. But, in recent years, the adoption of data-intensive technologies within school environments has been rampant. And it’s putting education at risk.

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5456/unavoidable-rise-edtech-educational-spaces

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 94

Keeping up with links shared on your feeds with Sill, a new open protocol with Leaf, and PeerTube is starting to test their mobile app.

The News

Sill is a new app that aggregates the most popular links that are posted in your network. Sill connects to both your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and gives a combined overview of all the networks, as well as the option to filter the links. It not only shows you the links, but also shows you what people you follow have posted about these links, and sends you a daily email update. Creator Tyler Fisher describes Sill as an open-source passion project, and says he wants to make it sustainable, and is thus thinking about potential ways to make revenue. Fisher also says that he is ‘committed to always keeping the basic Sill web client free’.

The Leaf Protocol is a newcomer in the space of decentralised protocols, a peer-to-peer federation protocol. The Leaf protocol is working towards what they call an ‘agentic fediverse’. The Leaf Protocol is developed in tandem with the product named Weird, which provides people with a simple homepage on the internet. Underneath this website is Leaf, which provides the possibility of federation with other versions of Weird, as well as other potential products. The team has written here on how Leaf compares to ActivityPub and ATProto, as well as about capabilities and identity to see how it holds up to Christine Lemmer-Webber’s ‘recipe for making the “Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)”‘.

One of PeerTubes main goals for 2024 is to release a mobile app. PeerTube has now started testing the first versions of the app, available for both Android and iOS. They note that the app is still under active development, with some features missing.

Ghost’s latest update on their work on implementing ActivityPub shows that they are working on two different types of readers: an inbox for long-form content, and a feed for short-form.

The Links

• A new way to describe the Fediverse and its opposition to Big Tech – Elena Rossini.
• Key Transparency and the Right to be Forgotten – Soatek, as part of their series on E2EE in the fediverse.
• How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse.
• Loopless.app is a third-party Android app for short-form video platform Loops.video.
• This blog is now federated natively to lemmy – db0.
• Raccoon for Friendica is a new mobile Android app for Friendica and Mastodon.
• This week is Support Week for ActivityPub for WordPress.
• Discord is working on profile connections for Mastodon and Bluesky.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• ActivityPub Discovery is a new (draft) report by the SocialCG Discovery Task Force.
• ‘I spent the last year working on the Fediverse. Here’s what I’ve learned.’
• OpenVibe’s latest update supports for tagging users on multiple platforms.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-94/

📢 ZAKŁADAMY STOWARZYSZENIE 📢

Miło nam ogłosić, że już w tę niedziele odbędzie się spotkanie założycielskie poznańskiego hakerspejsu Knyfyrtel. Po miesiącach działania jako nieformalna grupa, w końcu przystępujemy do oficjalnych kroków i składamy wniosek o rejestrację stowarzyszenia w KRS.

📅 KIEDY? 24 listopada 2024 (niedziela), godzina 16:00
📌 GDZIE? Łazienki Rzeczne w Poznaniu (ul. Piastowska 71), sala A

#poznan #hackerspace

This is how I and any sane person reacts to AI

#Meme #AI #ScamEconomy #Web3 #Tech

💻 WARSZTATY Z GITa - CZĘŚĆ IV 💻

Przypominamy, że dziś kolejna część warsztatów z Git-a na Politechnice Poznańskiej. Ostatnio nauczyliśmy się pracować na zdalnym repozytorium. Natomiast tym razem zajmiemy się rozwiązywaniem konfliktów. Warsztaty prowadzimy we współpracy z Kołem Naukowym Spektrum. 🙂

📍 GDZIE? Polanka 3, sala 201
⏰ KIEDY? 20.11.2024 (środa), godzina 17:00

#warsztaty #hspoz #knyfyrtel #politechnika #spektrum #hackerspace #gitgud #poznan

Twitter’s Birdwatch is Fundamentally Flawed

Earlier this week, Twitter announced an initiative to combat misinformation on their platform that they call Birdwatch.

How Birdwatch works: Volunteers sign up (assuming they meet all the requirements) and can add notes to fill in context on misleading tweets. Other users can rate these contextual tweets as helpful or not helpful. All of these “notes” and ratings of notes are completely transparent.

Credit: the Birdwatch website
Credit: the Birdwatch website

At its face, Birdwatch is an attempt to scale up the existing fact-checking capability used during the 2020 U.S. Elections while also crowdsourcing this decision-making.

I will give Twitter credit for two things, and only two things, before I get into the problems with their design.

• They’re distributing the power to fact-check bad tweets to their users rather than hoarding it for themselves.
• They correctly emphasized transparency as a goal for this tool.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

The Fatal Flaw of Birdwatch’s Design

There’s an old essay titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security, that immediately identifies two problems with Birdwatch’s design. They also happen to be the first two items on the essay’s list!

• Default Permit
• Enumerating Badness

This is best illustrated by way of example.

Let’s assume there are two pathological liars hellbent on spreading misinformation on Twitter. They each tweet unsubstantiated claims about some facet of government or civil service. Birdwatch users catch only one of them, and correctly fact-check their tweet.

What happens to the other liar?

What happens if Birdwatch users can only identify one out of ten liars? One out of a hundred? One out of a thousand?! Et cetera.

(Art by Khia.)

To be clear: The biggest flaw in their product design is simply that their “notes” and “fact-checks” are negative indicators on known-bad tweets.

This will create a dark pattern: If a tweet slips past the Birdwatch users’ radars, it won’t be fact-checked. In turn, users won’t realize it’s misinformation. A popular term for the resulting conduct is coordinated inauthentic behavior.

This already happens to YouTube.

https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

Hell, this is already happening to Twitter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4

How To Fix Birdwatch

I wrote an entire essay on Defeating Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior at Scale in 2019. I highly recommend anyone at Twitter interested in actually solving the misinformation problem to give that a careful consideration.

(Art by Swizz.)

But in a nutshell, the most important fix is to change the state machine underlying Birdwatch from:

• No notes -> trustworthy
• Notes -> misinformation

…to something subtly different:

• No notes -> unvetted / be cautious
• Notes ->
  • Negative notes -> misinformation
  • Positive notes -> verified by experts

This effectively creates a traffic light signal for users: Tweets start as yellow (exercise caution, which is the default) and may become green (affirmed by notes) or red (experts disagree).

What Would This Change Accomplish?

Malicious actors that accomplish Birdwatch evasion will only manage to encompass their message in caution tape. (Metaphorically speaking, anyway.)

If their goal is to spread misinformation while convincing the recipients of their message that they’re speaking the truth, they’ll have to get a green light–which is ideally more expensive to accomplish.

Bonus Round

I would also recommend some kind of “this smells fishy” button to signal Birdwatch contributors that this tweet needs fact-checking. Users might self-select into filter bubbles that Birdwatch users are totally absent from, and in turn come across things that are completely unvetted and possibly ambiguous.

While I have your attention, here’s a quality of life suggestion, on the house:

Being able to link claims together (e.g. reposted images with a false claim, n.b. like how the minions memes on Facebook) to deduplicate their claims about reality would save a lot of unnecessary headache.

(Anyone who has used Stack Overflow will appreciate the utility of being able to say “this is a duplicate of $otherThing”.)

What If These Fundamental Flaws Remain Unfixed?

Although Birdwatch will probably meet the immediate goal of scaling up the fact-checking efforts beyond what Twitter can provide (and satisfy the public relations requirements of tangibly doing something to combat this problem), propagandists and conspiracy theorists will simply become incentivized to evade Birdwatch contributors’ detection while spreading their lies.

As I said above, coordinated inauthentic behavior is already happening. This isn’t some abstract threat that only academics care about.

To the aid of the malicious, most users will confuse tweets that evaded detection with tweets that didn’t warrant correction. This might even lead to users trusting misinformation more than they would before Birdwatch. This would be a total self-own for the entire Birdwatch project.

#bullshit #computerSecurity #enumeratingBadness #misinformation #SocialMedia #Technology #Twitter

W Parlamencie Europejskim zakończyły się wysłuchania kandydatek i kandydatów do Komisji Europejskiej. Nadstawiliśmy uszu, żeby wyłapać co tam planują w departamencie big techów i systemów rekomendacyjnych.

Podsumowanie tradycyjnie na:
https://panoptykon.org/wysluchania-kandydatow-do-komisji-europejskiej-platformy

Ruszyła kolejna fala migracji z X/Twittera, więc dziś w #OkoPress przyglądam się alternatywom:
https://oko.press/ucieczka-z-twittera-przyszlosc-mediow-spolecznosciowych

Co ciekawe, wszystkie – Fediverse, Bluesky, Threads – przynajmniej w jakimś stopniu twierdzą, że są zdecentralizowane. Mówię więc "sprawdzam", razem z @cwebber , @blaine i @ben .

Nie będzie dla nikogo zaskoczeniem, że #Bluesky i Threads mocno naciągają to "zdecentralizowanie." Ale sam fakt, że wszystkie realne alternatywy dla Twittera promują się decentralizacją jest znaczący!