Whilst I’ll agree with your statement some people prefer a service to use rather than self hosted.

Great! They can prefer that. Lots of people (most people probably) even need services, because they lack the skills and / or equipment.

That doesn’t change the simple truth of “the only infrastructure we can trust is our own.” My goal with that statement is to educate people as much as possible NOT to trust the third party services they’re using, even if those services supposedly care about privacy and security.

I’ve also seen a huge outpouring in recent weeks of people who are suddenly very eager to learn about and use self hosted infrastructure (or get access to someone else’s self hosted infrastructure). For some reason, I wonder what that could be. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I for one intend to encourage the shit out of it.

The barrier to entry to get Self Hosted Matrix working is unfortunately pretty high. Matrix is a great tool, but getting it working requires advanced skills and (in my limited experience) hours of troubleshooting.

That being said, I’m associated with an organization that wants to help activist groups self host matrix. If you know a group with need, check out https://rmfuni.org/.

Given everything going on in the world, I can’t say this often enough:

The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.

https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost@lemmy.ml

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

This is something I wrote on a recent post. I think it’s something that we should help as many people as possible understand:

This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.

• People are like “Don’t they understand that it’s a war?”
• Most of these people think we’re idiots for thinking of it as war.
• Their high spending donors think we’re idiots for thinking of it as a war.
• They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can “get on with business.”
• They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).
• They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think “What a bunch of yahoos!” (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad’s literal words).

My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.

• “This will all blow over.”
• “You just watch, the system will slow all of this down.”

See, it’s not just our “elected dems in office,” who don’t seem to get it, it’s the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the “elected dems in office,” because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that’s why we keep seeing it.

EDIT:

The only way we’ll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They’re not “spineless cowards,” they just DON’T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people’s highest values are

• Stability.
• Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn’t really effect them that much).
• Maintaining their comfy “compassionate upper class” culture.

They DO genuinely care about

• Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
• Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn’t really cost them anything).
• Sound fiscal policy.
• Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
• They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they’re able to do because they’re rich / influential.
• On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.

Faced with chaos and instability they will

• Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things “back to normal.”
• Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
• Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to “find their center.”
• Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).

Importantly,

• They DO NOT see you as being “like them,” “their people,” or “part of their culture.” They’re actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
• They usually honestly think that that’s because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don’t think they OWE you anything.
• When I say culture, I’m not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I’m talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
• They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
• They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for “the good they’re doing in the world” and “how they were able to help people” the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
• This doesn’t mean they’re bad people or lack compassion for you.

When we’re asking our congressmonsters to fight, we’re asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT’S why they’re angry.

They’re NOT cowards. They just don’t actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren’t in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.

Who says they aren’t? Elon has zero problems with double standards.

100%. I watched a video on TFE where there was a minister guy saying the Earth is flat because the bible says so and that any evidence to the contrary is manufactured by (literally) Satan and the US government and that they may not be able to prove it one way or the other, but they have to have faith in the word of God.

There’s literally nothing you can say to that.

I read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.

The gist of it was

• A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
• A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
• A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn’t, they move on.

As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.

Of course these aren’t hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it’s a definite trend.

The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It’s UI appeals to those people.

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I’m actually doing two classes on alternating weeks, but they’re both

“Here’s basic opsec principles and now we’ll talk about a bunch of tools that are useful specifically for activism in (against) the current political climate.”

I’m doing a basic class where we’ll just try to help people organize in safer ways (Telegram is like the number one organizational platform right now). One of our goals there is to try to set specific projects / organizations up with dedicated Matrix servers and help them get non-technical people to use them.

We’re also doing a more advanced class where we want to help people set up their own hardened laptops and (for those able to secure the hardware) GrapheneOS phones. That will probably be like Unit 2 of that class. We want to start with threat modeling and help people figure out the tools they specifically need to do their work.

UPDATE:

I’ve had a chance to read through it.

• It’s short, to the point, an easy read, covers a lot of bases. I think that makes it an excellent starting point for people at the beginning of their journey.
• It doesn’t contain a lot of specific information, but I think it’s a good thing to have literature that’s just a general overview as a starting point.
• Stylometry is far from an exact science (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11707938/). However, I bet this won’t stop the current administration from using it (and possibly falsely accusing people because of it), so it’s good to know about.
• This will be extremely useful as I’m creating my lesson plan and I will probably pop it out to the class on day one as suggested reading.

Overall: Great resource and very timely. Thank you.

I would add, that if you’re planning to make a lot of use of tor, and run tor hidden services locally, syncing the Monero block chain over tor (possibly to multiple local machines) and solo mining on old slow computers is a great way to generate a bunch of random tor traffic.

I’ll read through this. I’m teaching a free class on cybersec / opsec to members of local activist organizations starting next month, so resources like this are potentially really useful.

Tokyo police bust alleged prostitution ring targeting tourists Police harass, arrest and fine sex workers while politicians complain that the sex industry exists.

FTFY.

I don’t think Elon knows about second year.

Mint.

It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.

I’ve gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it’s so stable.

I’ve managed to ditch every single one of those except LinkedIn. We simply CANNOT get new clients without it. The lockin to that platform is truly terrifying. LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.

Having worked on a couple of Matrix deployments over the last year, that shit needs to be simpler and easier, yo? Once the Matrix server exists, it’s easy enough to get people to use it.

Contrast it’s ease of deployment with Mumble for example.

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This comment may be aiding in the creation or sharing of malicious software.

I feel like between Ukraine and Israel / Palestine, the UN has really been revealed as a symbolic and largely impotent by design organization that can mostly be blown off with impunity by powerful nation states.

I was curious about the exact same thing, but it’s a 671B parameter model and I only have 3 GPUs.