Weasel @wildweasel@computerfairi.es

This warms my heart.

"What would you do about the Internet access for our (yet hypothetical) young teenage kid?"

I wouldn't want them to get hurt online, but I wouldn't want to control their actions either. Banning the thing would not help, but not doing anything about it poses real risks...

Oh wait, isn't it the same with sex ed (and, for example, road rules, or maybe substance abuse, even if to lesser extent)?

You cannot stop young teenagers being interested in relationships. They will try to do their (often stupid) teenage things. What you can do, though, is to educate them. What's safe, and what's not. Why the rules are the way they are. How to avoid risks. How not to ruin someone's life by carelessness.

Apparently there is a whole curriculum "Online safety" posted at gov.uk which sounds absolutely sensible. Whether there are good teachers and materials, and whether parents are aware that internet talk is as important as birds and bees talk, that I don't know.

That makes me think that there's much that still can be done.

I was thinking about "let's ban all the phones and social media for under-16s" trend. It is true that children are exposed to all sorts of harmful content online. It is also true that for some vulnerable children, online is the only place they can feel safe. It is also so important that being an adult without a smartphone is basically an impossibility.

It is clear that banning phones and social media will not stop many, especially older children, accessing the Internet. It will hurt those who need the access the most.

One potential solution could have been parental and teacher moderation. Who can decide what's good for their child if not their guardian, right? But this is also not great, because there is very real risk of parental abuse (including unhealthy controlling behaviours), as well as potential for undue control from the teachers and maybe even governments (i.e. "report the kid who looked up lgbt topics to authorities").

I was really conflicted, until Atsuko asked me one simple question...

(tbc)

Malicious compliance 😂👇

Crash retail. Video game stores in 1983. #videogamehistory

I find that recently the #1 criteria on which I pick software, and sometimes the only criteria on which I pick software, is "does using it feel degrading?" https://retro.social/@ieure/111896783289262241

happy #portfolioday i push pixels with my paws and with code #pixelart #webgbcam

https://maple.pet/art
https://maple.pet/tech
https://maple.pet/webgbcam

@daedalus When I tell people "I only program in anger or self-defense" this is what I mean.

An important aspect of the hacker ethos is the "got so mad at broken proprietary thing that I fixed it myself" attitude. It runs explicitly counter to the cop mentality half of infosec has these days.

this was a fun style departure for me! i hope to do more of these soon :)

if you want something like this, hit me up! https://maple.pet/commissions

QRT https://hachyderm.io/@datarama/111892933900642622

@ifixcoinops reminds me of how ordering pizza online was used in the film The Net

> As we were developing the story and coming up with different things that Sandra Bullock's character could be doing, that she was working at home and we also wanted to express her loneliness, it was actually Irwin, the director, who came up with, "What if you could order pizza over the net?" I remember at the time I was thinking, "Well, why would you want to do that? You can just call somebody and just order pizza." [But] what we wanted to say is that she doesn't want to have any contact with any humans directly.

https://collider.com/the-net-sandra-bullock-pizza-net/

and now we've wrapped around to "I'm going to use a phone specifically because I don't want to have to interact with this company's awful software"

“Bluesky could be the future of content moderation”.

I 100% disagree.

Yes, the protocol offers a plethora of ways to filter content and ensure you never come across, say, Nazis.

But that’s not what content moderation is. Content moderation is making decisions. It is either welcoming or refusing certain types of content on your platform.

If you’re letting everyone in, and telling your users "but you have control!", you’re not moderating anything. You’re just quitting.

https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/111887524210529466

I'm kinda horribly broke again and need to get back to getting out of my storage units, but at the moment I can't even pay for them, let alone the shelving/truck/time I'd need to be able to move out of them. So if you're able to donate something, that'd be really helpful!

https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing

What if I told you there is an immensely popular operating system that you likely used it at least once, but did not realise what it was?

In fact, it is so popular and important there is an IEEE standard based on it.

It is uncanny how immensely popular AND immensely obscure this system is.

It is scary that until today I have never even heard of its reference desktop implementation.

The system is called "TRON".

🧵 thread~

NCAmp.wsz

https://skins.webamp.org/skin/bab99b937db15fe02786b1c020e5371f