in this interview the guy behind the event (Mark Fitzpatrick) says this:

he’s also a flat earther:

this is a tweet from 2020: https://xcancel.com/CianMW/status/1267890378276876288

but, the organization which operates that hotline is still active: https://girightshotline.org/

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

The network never went down.

You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

🪦

The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢

Is this a spam campaign?

Five of the eleven comments so far (including one from OP) are all recommending the same service; all five are from accounts less than 2 months old with a one or two digit number of comments 🤔

These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉

What is xz attack thingy?

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

What you want is not an “uncensored” server, but rather a server that is moderated in a way that you find acceptable.

There is no such thing as an “uncensored/open” server. Or, when there is, it can’t last long. Every open server needs to delete some things, because if they don’t, their disk will soon be full of spam and CSAM and then the server will go away. Some servers claiming to be “uncensored” might allow nearly everything besides those two categories, but they tend to quickly become nazi bars.

Sorry i don’t have any specific suggestion, but of the 61 servers listed here hopefully there is one with a moderation policy that is to your liking.

there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this

You are very mistaken, this is a well-supported feature in most modern virtualization environments.

Here are XenServer docs for it. And here is VMWare’s “high-frequency” snapshots page.

Sometimes, law enforcement authorities only need to contact cloud provider A when they have a warrant for (or, perhaps, no warrant but a mere request for) data about some user C who is indirectly using A via some cloud-hosted online service B.

A(mazon) will dutifully deliver to the authorities snapshots of all of B’s VMs, and then it is up to them if they limit themselves to looking for data about C… while the staff of company B can honestly say they have not received any requests from law enforcement. (sorry my best source on this at the moment is sadly trust me bro; I’ve heard from an AWS employee that the above scenario really actually does happen.)

you could use the clipboard to copy the link and open it in another browser

I don’t think any of his stuff would seem shocking by today’s standards.

See this example earlier in the thread.

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

I wrote a comment here about why sealed sender does not achieve what it purports to.

If copyright holders want to take action, their complaints will go to the ISP subscriber.

So, that would either be the entity operating the public wifi, or yourself (if your mobile data plan is associated with your name).

If you’re in a country where downloading copyrighted material can have legal consequences (eg, the USA and many EU countries), in my opinion doing it on public wifi can be rather anti-social: if it’s a small business offering you free wifi, you risk causing them actual harm, and if it is a big business with open wifi you could be contributing to them deciding to stop having open wifi in the future.

So, use a VPN, or use wifi provided by a large entity you don’t mind causing potential legal hassles for.

Note that if your name is somehow associated with your use of a wifi network, that can come back to haunt you: for example, at big hotels it is common that each customer gets a unique password; in cases like that your copyright-infringing network activity could potentially be linked to you even months or years later.

Note also that for more serious privacy threat models than copyright enforcement, your other network activities on even a completely open network can also be linked to identify you, but for the copyright case you probably don’t need to worry about that (currently).

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

rare meta w

and later it will turn out that the AI solution was actually two clickworkers in a trenchcoat

Mattermost isn’t e2ee, but if the server is run by someone competent and they’re allowed to see everything anyway (eg it’s all group chat, and they’re in all the groups) then e2ee isn’t as important as it would be otherwise as it is only protecting against the server being compromised (a scenario which, if you’re using web-based solutions which do have e2ee, also leads to circumvention of it).

If you’re OK with not having e2ee, I would recommend Zulip over Mattermost. Mattermost is nice too though.

edit: oops, i see you also want DMs… Mattermost and Zulip both have them, but without e2ee. 😢

I could write a book about problems with Matrix, but if you want something relatively easy and full featured with (optional, and non-forward-secret) e2ee then it is probably your best bet today.

What’s the old saying, Ben Franklin said it if I remember right?

Those who would give up freedom in exchange for security deserve neither and will lose both.

The original phrasing was “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” but Franklin didn’t mean what most people quoting it today assume that he meant. (The author of that article is contemptible imo, being the sort of person who often writes things similar to the NYT Opinion piece which this thread is about, but I think his analysis of this particular quote is probably correct. You can read Franklin’s original use of the phrase in context here.)