Or just mark the resource as private and only serve it to the user who created it until they associate a post with it.

You would probably need a separate server to stage images like this, as your main image server probably shouldn’t have a login wall, which probably slightly complicates things but not badly.

Yes. Section 230 has no requirements that someone needs to form a non-profit or anything like that. It applies to anyone who has responsibility for a website that accepts user submitted content, or more widely anything on the Internet not created by yourself. whether a private individual or a giant corporation.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 describes it in more detail, but to give you an example, even forwarding an email from someone else to a mailing list has some protection (https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/batzel-v-smith)

Anyone in the US considering running a public Lemmy or Mastodon instance should check what their obligations are under the DMCA and Section 230 and do them.

Section 230’s protections and limitations are documented here: https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 - note that the limitations are not unlimited but generally if you act in good faith you’ll be covered for almost all of the non-copyright related situations you’re concerned about.

The DMCA requires you take action to protect your forum, notably registering an agent (which can be you!) with the Copyright Office, and posting contact information on your website. https://borgheselegal.com/news/44-internet-law/85-reducing-company-website-liability-steps-to-verify-dmca-safe-harbor-compliance has information on how to remain DMCA compliant, but basically it means responding to take down notices in a timely manner. It’s bureaucracy you don’t want to do, but it’ll protect your website from Sony if someone uploads the whole of Morbius to it.

Remember when you’re panicking about evil people posting to your website that there’s a whole host of websites everyone knows about such as the various American *chans that have never, to the best of my knowledge, been the subject of a raid.

I haven’t used their non-Thinkpad branded latops, but their Thinkpads are the best laptops you can get. They’ve had some periods where they weren’t great, but somehow even the crappiest Thinkpad over the last 15 years was better than the other major laptop makers. Reliability is always difficult to measure, but I’ve never thrown out a Thinkpad because it stopped working, and I’ve been buying them since 1999. My Lenovo Thinkpads go back to shortly after they took over from IBM, and I still have them all and they all work.

One important thing they haven’t done is sacrifice everything to fads or blindly copied Apple when it’s clear Apple’s decision was boneheaded: they didn’t give everything 1mm deep keyboards (you can type on their keyboards! Fancy that!), there were no “USB-C only, no regular USB or HDMI ports” Thinkpads.

Even budget Thinkpads are high quality machines. I wouldn’t recommend anything else at this point.

It’s almost identical to Twitter before Twitter adopted “The Algorithm” about 7 years ago and stopped showing people posts in a chronological order. There are some differences though, some annoying, and the latter is mostly being worked on:

Positives:

• Chronological view
• (Though this seems to upset people for some reason): Choice of server - including start your own if you’d prefer
• Up to 500 characters, or even more if your admin allows
• Very few Nazis, general anti-Nazi stance by most admins and servers that tolerate Nazis tend to end up being defedded (disconnected) from the core network though they can federate with one another.
• "TW"s, ways to ensure posts are collapsed by default unless you want to see the contents

Negatives:

• Search doesn’t really work. Plain text is generally unavailable, and you’re supposed to use hashtags. People are recognizing it doesn’t work though and are discussing how it should work. But no consensus yet.
• Quote tweets are not here yet
• TWs only collapse the text, not graphics, for some reason.
• Reading reply threads is broken - your server generally only sees a subset of replies and you have to visit the original post on its home server to see all the public replies.

The other thing to watch for is the community. While it’s way less, well, Nazi than Twitter’s, it’s also regularly compared to an HOA, people who post a lot get a lot of meta criticism about how they post, which is… ridiculous.

In general, despite the negatives, I like it, the only thing I miss are some Twitter accounts that were fun to follow. Otherwise it’s a better experience over all, but it does need some of the wrinkles ironed out. Many of the limitations I described in “Negatives” are there for well meaning reasons, but in practice I think they went too far.

I’m not directly familiar with either, but syncthing seems to be about backing up, so I’m not entirely surprised it’s file oriented, and jellyfin doesn’t look like it’s about user maintained content so much as being a server of content. So I’m not entirely surprised neither would support S3/Minio.

Yeah it took me a while to realize what S3 is intended to be too. But you’ll find “Blob storage” now a major part of most cloud providers, whether they support the S3 protocol (which is Amazon’s) or their own, and it’s to be used precisely the way we’re talking about: user data. Things clicked for me when I was reading the DoveCot manuals and found S3 was supported as a first class back-end storage system like maildir.

I’m old though, I’m used to this kind of thing being done (badly) by NFS et al…

It’s not always possible but it’s generally good practice to configure your applications to use external storage rather than file systems - MySQL/PostgreSQL for indexable data, and S3-clones like MinIO for blob storage.

One major reason for this is that these systems generally have data replication and fall over redundancy built-in. So you can have two or more physical servers, have an instance of each type of server on each, and have these stay synchronized. If one server goes down, the disks crash, or you need to upgrade, you can easily rebuild a set of redundant servers without downtime, and all you need to do is save the configurations (and take notes!)

Like I said, not always possible, but in general the more an application needs to store “user data”, the more likely it is it has the ability to use one of the above as a backend storage system. That will reduce, significantly, the amount of application servers that need to be backed up, and may reduce your need to consider using NFS etc to separate the data.

Yes, I did watch the video, I’m not sure why you’re telling me to watch it again.

The fact they admitted that the processes were shoddy does not mean their processes are not, actually, shoddy.

You shouldn’t trust someone because after being criticized they own up to some of their mistakes. You should trust them only after they’ve actually fixed them. Owning up is only a first step.

Again, trademarks generally have a scope in which they’re valid. Pornhub only needs to sue a restaurant if it plans to open a chain of restaurants or otherwise enter the catering industry.

I love the fact they say they’re sharing the information with “Au10tix” which sounds like the “handle” of a “hacker” (insert 31337/1337 here) in a low budget TV series.

The situation as of yesterday, with the allegations by GamerNexus, was basically “OK, they’re not reliable or a good source of tech content, good to know.”

It didn’t matter whether they were “good people who are just overworked” or “Advertising-dollar addicted charlatans”. We knew that the average YouTube channel doing, say, graphics cards comparison probably had better methodology and would give a fairer review than LMG is capable of doing.

LMG is not capable of producing good reviews right now because it is so obsessed with quantity that it doesn’t have time to produce reliable accurate content.

Yes, there are humans in the chain, and humans make mistakes, but in LMG’s case, the mistakes are systemic.

This morning we have the added bombshell of the Madison allegations about the toxic workplace culture. This means it’s not just any more about avoiding being misinformed, there does, actually appear to be evidence that a sizable number of people at LMG are just awful, awful, people.

It is possible, but unlikely, these allegations are false: unlikely because they’re corroborated by Madison’s boyfriend who heard them contemporaneously, and because Madison left a GlassDoor review at the time she left LMG.

Every company is a mixture of sociopathic jackasses and good people who care about their work and want to produce things that people like. Any criticism of any company generally takes that into account: when we talk about LMG being irredeemably evil, we’re not saying that the janitors are bad, or that the team that manages their website are rotten people, but we are saying and have to acknowledge that the sociopathic jackasses are in control and are in sufficient power and quantity that the company itself is beyond hope.

It’s true they have to defend it, but only if there’s actual infringement. Generally trademarks have a scope in which they’re valid. A restaurant and a porn website seem unlikely to ever be within scope, to the point I suspect if the restaurant ever renamed itself to PornHub, it’d be more likely to be considered infringing GrubHub’s trademarks than PornHub’s owners.

Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted

Yes, that’s true.

That’s your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would’ve let you through anyway

Perhaps you should ask yourself why I wrote “it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van” rather than “It probably won’t let me get past without clicking on the van.”

I was reporting what happened, not some wild guess I made without testing.

Which made me wonder why (1) it would reject invalid answers and (2) it would confuse things no human would, eg "Bus bus bus… no that’s a van, that’s clearly a van, it has Bob’s Plumbing written on it… it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van sigh.

I mean, if the aim is to train an AI, why are you ignoring the human’s answers? How do you say “No this isn’t a f—ing bus you idiot” to the captcha system? I never saw anything allowing us to do that.

It was a genuinely nice place before Gamergate. I think that’s why it attracted such a diverse and interesting audience and why the media came to it in the first place.

Gamergate weaponized its flaws, and then the introduction of “the algorithm” a couple of years later amplified everything that was going wrong with it.

But there’s also no denying that problematic though it was, Elon Musk made it much, much, worse…

Still not really relevant. The BBC’s role is to report objectively and impartially. Posting a “Trans are perving on lesbians” thing as if it’s a giant problem that lesbians are facing when there’s no serious problem with trans people harassing lesbians and when your source is a self-admitted rapist isn’t being objective or impartial. It’s taking a side.

No, you don’t get a pass for effectively lying to the public because a higher proportion of the public wants to hear “Trans people are sexual harassers” than want to hear that Black people are.

They’re not showing transphobes to tear them down. Transphobes are being allowed to make the programming.

I’m not in favor of defedding the BBC, but let’s not pretend they have some legitimate right to punch down on a harmless, vulnerable, minority, be it trans people, Jews, or anyone else.

They don’t have a liberal stance. They will cover some issues of importance to liberals, but they’ve always tried to being in conflict with the party of government. The last time they got into conflict - and this wasn’t “being liberal” so much as wanting to show a diverse set of opinions - was during the Thatcher administration, and they had conservatives like Rees Mogg appointed to their board as a result.

On top of which, British “liberalism” is pretty sick at the moment when it comes to LGBT rights. Even the Guardian, which was a liberal newspaper at one point, has no problem posting transphobic material from their regular columnists or overblowing anti-trans “scandals”. They’ve had trouble keeping staff (one example) because they didn’t want to be associated with the transphobia of the UK part of the group.

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Even if AI isn’t further “abused” in similar ways to those described in the article, it’s going to ruin the Internet anyway. There’s very little motive to publish a web page when some robot is going to copy its content and regurgitate a bastardized version of it to someone who’d otherwise have used a search engine to find it.

What’s left of the web are inevitably going to be marketers trying to game the results (think thousands of websites claiming Acme Widgets are the best, now that there’s actually an incentive to do so because while no human would read such sites, bots have no such qualms) and the occasional ecommerce website. Maybe some social media. And the rest will be a paper thin construction resembling the pre-2000 Internet built by the same types of people who built Lemmy and Mastodon - missing search engines and public visibility because nobody wants their system to be eaten by the LLMs. Such constructions will never attract the large audiences, those audiences happy to have every question solved by asking a computer programmer designed to produce things that look like answers. And, in the unlikely event they do, they’ll get the unwanted visibility that results in them being sucked into the LLM databases.

It was a nice run, but I’m not seeing a happy outcome. We started this all, the public bit, the bit with hypertext and images and so on, in the early 1990s, and by the mid-2000s created something truly great. The LG Prada clones (iPhone and Android) seemed to take us in the wrong direction, as did social media, but I never expected something to happen so fundamentally dumb and damaging to the Internet, as this.

they both hate truths, so keep spreading truths about them.

Yeah, it’s really working for Donald Trump, he’s not been trying to get into the news or been obnoxious or lied or anything like that since the truth was reported about him ;-)

The real way to cover Elon Musk is the way Trump should be covered but isn’t: just don’t. Don’t at all. If you feel you must, make a point of not covering what he’s done unless he’s 100% truthful and can back up any statements about the future he makes.

Is he lying about minorities on Twitter? Ignore him.

Is he claiming he’s going to release something in six months? Wait six months. You can report on it if it’s true and newsworthy?

In the mean time, why is the media still on Twitter? It’s like journalists covering Trump from cages inside of Trump rallies while he literally calls them terms Goebbels invented like “Lying Media”. Just… don’t turn up, don’t cover the rallies directly (oh sure, report some of the extremist rhetoric, but you don’t have to point a TV camera at him and allow every word he utters to be broadcast live to your audience), etc. And likewise, the media doesn’t need to be on Twitter, it’s not a place to “stay in touch” with the people who read your articles, or the people you report upon, you shouldn’t be there.

Will never happen though. Not my quote but fairly accurate: it’s called “the media” because it’s mediocre.