Daniel Jackson

Lemmy is not opimized for google. There is some consideration when you run a full-javascript app like Lemmy, and to the best of my knowledge, Lemmy didn’t follow their guideline.

The link I provided says that pseudonymous data can be used to hide personalized data.

If you are a DPO, you can see the appeal and benefits of pseudonymization. It makes data identifiable if needed, but inaccessible to unauthorized users and allows data processors and data controllers to lower the risk of a potential data breach and safeguard personal data.

GDPR requires you to take all appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data, and pseudonymization can be an appropriate method of choice if you want to keep the data utility.

The owner of lemmy.one can use [email protected] to map it to an IP and/or email address. This becomes now personally identifiable data. But other instance owners can’t map it to any personalized data, so it is basically “anonymized data” for them.

You just have to provide a way to either

• To delete personally identifiable data
• Unlink the personally identifiable data from the pseudonymized data on your local instance.

Disclaimer, IANAL, YMMV, yaddy, yadda,…

Everybody is talking about the GPDR, but the GPDR when hosting in the EU, should be the least if your concerns. As I said elsewhere:

• Lemmy is not doing tracking/personalized-ads.
• Lemmy is only collecting IPs and email addresses as personally identifiable information. It’s not sharing them. So it makes GDPR compliance easy.

The real issue is Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which is a nightmare if you want to host lemmy legally. Realistically, the government don’t care about a few copyright infrigement by some guy/gal hosting a lemmy instance in their garage.

But, if you want to follow the law to the letter, the EU doesn’t have any fair use. So theorically, you need to allow users to only post creative commons images, with attribution. Or do some copyright checks on the content posted on your instance. Here is an EU video on how to comply with the directive, it’s a nightmare.

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As I said in another comment, the GDPR protects people. And the GDPR only applies to personnaly identifiable data (IPs, email addresses, street address, legal name, date of birh…) Lemmy only collect emails and IPs, and do not share them between instances. So it’s very easy to comply to the GDPR as long as you don’t do anything shady.

The EU has a marketing issue. They tried to pass legislation to prevent companies to collect data. But instead, company displayed a popup, kept collecting data, and blamed it on the EU. Everytime I see a popup, I blame ruthless data collection.

Actually, Lemmy is most likely violatiing the California Consumer Privacy Act, which, as opposed to the GPDR, gives the right to update/delete any data generated by the user, not only personally identifiable information.

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The GDPR doesn’t apply only to services hosted in the EU, but any services handling the data of an EU citizen.

This is why some news outlets in the US just decided to block EU users all together, out of laziness.

IANAL, but the GDPR doesn’t cover pseudonymous data. Actually the GDPR encourages data processors (= services) to use pseudomization.

Personally identifiable information are IPs, email addresses, street address, name, date of birth, … Lemmy only collect IPs and email addresses. And these are not shared between instances.

Whether the service is hosted in the EU or not, as long as it serves EU users, lemmy should provide a way to delete emails and ip information in a self serving way. (maybe by deleting the account) In the mean time, instances admins have to fulfil requests to delete emails/ips of EU citizens from the database.

Unfortunately, reclaimthenet.org has become more and more click-baity in their headlines…

This is what he said (from the reclaimthenet.org article):

“We’ve seen them; Snapchat, TikTok and several others, serve as places where violent gatherings have been organized, but there’s also a form of mimicry of the violence which for some young people leads them to lose touch with reality.

“You get the impression that for some of them they are experiencing on the street the video games that have intoxicated them,” he added.

(This is the source in French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpqbo7p38Y )

The ministers have been complaining about a “gamification” of the riots, where protesters push each other to destroy more stuff through social media. And that’s what he was condemning.

I’m not aware of him having requested deletions of riot content. That would, indeed, by worrying for a western democracy… But France civil liberties have been on the downward-trend since the 2015 Paris attacks. So I could see this happening. But data to social media companies have been requested, which is IMHO not alarming, but always makes me uneasy…

It depends to what you mean by “rich people.” Yes, climate shambled by the global north, or the to 20% richest citizens of the planet.

I agree that big corporations bear a big burden for climate change, like, for example, Exxon which knew about CO₂ since the 50s, and tried to hide it, and lobby against any regulation.

But saying that, us the 99% westerners don’t bare responsability by buying a new iPhone every year, is a lie.

4chan is just a bunch of people pretending to be racist/homophobic/… for the lulz. Only a minority are hardcore trump supporters, neonazis, …

This argument was already settled https://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/22/tech/web/pronounce-gif/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

Born to a poor ethnic Georgian family in the town of Gori […], Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party […] and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings and protection rackets.

Local thugs/mafia-leaders raising to power in Russia/USSR is not a new thing.

Do you read your own links? Literally the first line is

Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum is a debated subject and remains unproven

Yes I do. You literally removed the next part of the sentence:

Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum is a debated subject and remains unproven, though multiple sources argue evidence exists demonstrating that the Russian government attempted to influence British public opinion in favour of leaving the European Union.
[…]
Data released by Twitter in 2018 identified 3,841 accounts of Russian origin affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, […] which collectively sent over 10 million Tweets in “an effort to spread disinformation and discord” […] with a “day-long blitz” on the day of the referendum
[…]
British Journalist Isabel Oakeshott stated in an article for the Times: "As part of my research I uncovered controversial information about links between Arron Banks and his associate Andy Wigmore and the Russian embassy in London. […] Arron Banks was the largest donor to the Brexit campaign. Prior to the donations, Southern Rock, Banks’ underwriting company was technically insolvent and needed to find £60m to meet regulations. It was saved by a £77m cash injection, […] from another company, ICS Risk Solutions. […] Around the same time, September 2015, Banks, along with Andy Wigmore, started having multiple meetings with Russian officials posted at the Russian embassy in London

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2022/eu-states-exported-weapons-to-russia/

Regarding the french weapons. I’m not an expert on the subject. It sounds like old deals which were paid at time of delivery. Cancelling these deals right at delivery, after the weapons were manufactured, would have meant telling private companies that they can’t recover costs for items already manufactured. These defense contractors would have sued the hell out of the state.

Also, this article focuses on EU countries at the time of the invasion. The UK was excluded, since it wasn’t part of the EU.

The UK was by far the biggest weapon exporter to Russia before the invasion of Ukraine

They literally said there’s no risk less than 4 months prior to Russia’s invasion

The German government on Thursday declassified a top-secret security assessment on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from 2021, only four months before the outbreak of war, which claimed energy supplies “won’t be jeopardized” by increased dependency on Russian gas.

Can we stop talking about Nord Stream 2? I don’t understand the fixation on Nord Stream 2. The thing was already controversial in Germany before it was even supposed to be turned on. There were pushbacks from the general population way before the invasion of Ukraine. And at the end it never got turned on! Who cares?

The controversial opinion displays an exceedingly naive view of the risks posed by Germany’s significant reliance on Russian gas deliveries, which had continuously grown in the years prior to Moscow’s war. It also rejects concerns by Eastern European partners like Poland and Ukraine, which had long warned the Nord Stream 2 undersea pipeline designed to carry natural gas directly from Russia to northern Germany would increase the risk of energy blackmail by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

First of all, Poland was also depending on Russian gas, so it was a little hypocrytical from them to call for Germany to stop the dependence.

Also, up to the begining to the war, Ukraine was still indirectly importing Russian gas, so it’s the pot calling the kettle black IMHO.

Energy is a very difficult topic. Where should have Germany got their supply? It’s easy to criticize with 20/20 hindsight. But given the context at the time, it was not the best decision ever, but it was as insane as people make it sound like today.

I’m not sure what any of these points have to do with my original point, but let me answer a few of them, which I think are lacking context.

Yeah, maybe if the Germans hadn’t ignored everyone’s advice against Nordstream after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

Who’s advice? It was mostly the US and the baltic countries. The US because they would prefer to sell their LNG to Europe at a markup. Their advice was not without interest.

Also gas supply are 25 years contracts, Germany (at the time) could not get out of Nordstream 1 without paying heavy penalties. Getting out of Nordstream would have most likely created a EU-wide recession, which could have lead to a wave of right-wing populism, most likely fed by Russia.

This was a very difficult situation. The “germans should have gotten out of nordstream” is a very simplistic argument lacking context.

And the Ukrainians are more than a bit pissed off at the French continued supply of weapons upgrades to Russia in the period as well.

Which weapons? The Mistral-class ship sale was canceled and France paid heavy fees, and sold them at heavy discount to Egypt.

The Dutch have the same issue with Russian money as the UK does. Problem for Russia is that those funds have been seized now and will be used to repair all the material damage that Russia has done with its indiscriminate shelling.

The scale at which the oligarchs corrupted London is much bigger than what it was for the entirety of the Netherlands. Also, the Dutch didn’t vote for Brexit which, in the case of Brexit, was heavily russian-influenced.

The counter offensive isn’t stalling, they haven’t put a fraction of the hardware into the battle yet.

They won’t even put half of their hardware into battle, that would be suicide. They need reserves. The Ukrainians will have to cross mine-fields in front of trenches, with almost no air support. If they put even half of their hardware and men into a counter offensive today, they will just be leading their material and men to the junk-yard. This is especially true given how well Russians dug their positions. And Russia still have its aviation in reserve, underutilized, as opposed to Ukraine which has been stretching its air-power thin.

2nd point, I noticed they are 25k-strong? I’m not familiar with Russia’s military but that sounds like a really small number to invade Moscow (unless the majority if the troops are committed elsewhere and only a few left to defend), or I’m overestimating Russian defensive capabilites. But I honestly don’t see how he shows how bad it could be since I don’t think he’ll be razing the city? Or I’m missing something? Maybe that’s why Putin let him be?

My prognostic (= I have no proof, only time will tell) is that this is a purge (like in 1941) with Prigozhin as the figure head. Prigozhin has been saying for a month that the regular Russian army was incompetent. Multiple German military experts have been saying that a purge was possible.

IMHO, this is a way for Putin to get rid of his army high command, which he has grown tired, and replace it with his best buddy Prigozhin, without any blame on Putin.

Again, only time will tell if I’m right. I could be totally off.

I’m not sure how “useful” it is to have a 50 thousand man strong army marching towards your capital while you’re trying to spin a “everything going according to plan” story

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the 2023 version of the 1941 Red Army Purge when Stalin growing tired of his army command executed most of his army leadership.

Of course all of these are just speculation.

As for English sources, you just need to choose well. Reuters and AP are respectable sources with no strong bias […]

Until recently Reuters used to use the Ukrainian’s government inflated numbers for Russian casualties. I think English sources reuse Ukraine’s information without fact-checking them way too much. At the end this is also an information war, and Ukraine has been twisting the reality a little bit in its communication (of course, much much less than Russia)

This is a British news paper. The UK has made a point to be as blindly aggressive towards Russia as possible. I think this is to compensate for Brexit and catering to Russian oligarchs for years…

I much prefer German, Dutch and French newspapers, they are much more nuanced on the situation of Russia and Ukraine.

Putin is not in the best position, but he is not in the worse position either:

• Russia is really good at defending and attrition-based war, like they did Chechnya and Georgia. They now dug their trenches, and just have to protect, this is why the counter offensive is stalling.
• Prigozhin is a useful idiot. He is here to show “how bad it could be.” Putin uses Prigozhin to show himself as man of restrain, as opposed to Prigozhin who looks and sounds like a lunatic. If Progozhin was really an issue, Putin would have taken him out months ago.
• The sanctions against Russia are weakening, the BRICS are all buying from Russia without restrain, helping to fund Putin’s war. The BRICS are either on Russia’s side or indifferent to the war.

Of course, this is far from a success across the board. I think Russia never expected Finland membership’s of NATO, this came as a blow for Putin and Russia. If Sweden candidacy is, hopefully, ratified, it’s check-mate for Russia in the Baltic. I also think Russia never expected Western Europe to do that well without Russian gas. Germany is now the second biggest supplier of weapons to Ukraine. This is really a blow to Russia.

Anyway, my point is that Putin is far from being done, unfortunately.

Also I avoid British and American media on the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s becoming borderline propaganda with no nuance. We need to be realistic, and really understand the situation to vote for the politicians pushing for the right decisions.

If humans have a bot-like behavior, it’s okay to mark them as bot. If a human is only posting to promote products/astroturf, who cares if it’s misclassified, it doesn’t add anything to the discourse. IMHO, that’s good riddance.

And in my solution, at the end the instance owner takes action, it’s not like there is no human recourse.

Because there is no karma system on lemmy (thank goodness, I’m against karma), you can easily create a 1000s of bots which will upvote your post and bring it to front page.

The solution is not some custom anti-abuse system which can be game. (Stuff like “you can’t vote because of the age of your account”, …) IMHO, the solution is bot detection. Since everything is public an an instance, somebody at some point will start scraping instance to detect bot behavior and inform instance owner. It will come with maturity.