Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Let’s take a deep breath and consider what’s happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.

    It’s entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it’s not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it’s eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.

    So the headline should read more like “German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement.”

    The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.


  • [Find in Page:] “Parent”=0 “Parents”=0 “Father”=0 “Mother”=0

    It’s their job to guard their kids from this content first and foremost. It’s their job to put it into context for their children. But the article doesn’t even mention that any of this is a humongous failing of parents.

    Next this commissioner will want to outlaw computer mice because they’re used to click pornographic content without verifying the age of the finger on the button. And roads because adult content actors use them to get to jobs.

    The way forward is not banning or making worse all sorts of useful tools as collateral damage in this “think of the children” campaign. It is to get all adult content everywhere behind a barrier toddlers cannot break. We were fine with porn mags partially obscured on the top shelf at a news agent when that was a thing. And the salesperson making sure the customer wasn’t a minor. The solution isn’t closing all digital news agents.

    And it’s quite telling that the existence of VPNs didn’t play a bigger part in this UK online safety initiative. Like it wasn’t obvious that when the west entrance to porn central was closed off, people wouldn’t naturally look for the ones in east, north, and south.

    Edited typo





  • I don’t think it will be a big win for the Palestinians. One reason why this hasn’t happened in the past is that there is no reliable, functional government in place that governs over all of the territory. You had Hamas in Gaza and the PLO in most of the West Bank and they don’t see eye to eye. This hasn’t changed. It will be difficult for these established governments to cooperate with a a fractured non-functional one so the benefits for the Palestinian people will only be patchy and homeopathic.

    So I fear recognizing a Palestinian state is actually an impotent, diplomatic gesture - like: “we see what’s going on there, it’s horrible, and we don’t have the resolve to do anything else to bring Israel back to the status quo ante.” It’s finger wagging at Israel more than actual support for the Palestinians. It’s a gesture that can easily be reversed as well, like the orange one moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. And I think that’s why these announcements of recognition fall on very deaf ears in Tel Aviv. It’s political theater for the audiences in the countries whose governments have announced this. “Look, we are doing something! (But we’re doing not that much really, we could do other things as well, isolate the Israeli government and/or cut it off palpably from necessary economic and military supply chain support. But we won’t. It’s a complicated conundrum, that Middle East. And we’re not quite ready to jeopardize the existence of Israel over this.)”



  • I think it is hard though, legislatively, as the RTBF already proves. It’s a terribly vague set of rules that put search engines in the position where they have to evaluate a claim and then sit in judgement over it with little to no oversight and then only a public form of objection if this somehow ends up in a court. This is not a good process. Adding more reasons to use a bad process doesn’t sound like a great idea regardless of how well intentioned they are.

    An issue I see are massive Streisand effects. One is occurring if you need to take a Google to court for not following up on your RTBF claim. Nobody really cared about your drunk driving incident from 2019 until you fill the headlines with your court proceedings. Now everybody knows. The other is this: let’s say Roberta became Robert. Calling him Roberta would be dead naming him. But if every time I framed it as “Robert Streisand (known until 2023 as Roberta Streisand)” I’m merely stating fact and I don’t see how many courts will intervene against that. Why can virtually everybody still dead name Chelsea Manning? Because every time her name was mentioned post transition they added this factual context. So all you will achieve in the end is that all trolls and dickheads will just use the legally defendable boiler plate phrase. And hang a much brighter lantern on the issue.

    Just to be clear: I’m not defending anybody deadnaming somebody else. I’m just looking at this issue, the RTBF, and I’m thinking of that road to hell and with what it is paved.




  • It turned out to be a Twitter clone from ten years ago and I realized I didn’t need that any more. If I didn’t need to reach some people who cannot overcome the hurdle the fediverse proper puts up before being enjoyable, I would not be using it today. But media popularity post-Elon-Twitter and relative ease of setup have given the platform relative heft. But it’s not open and not really federated so it’s masquerading and we don’t really want you know whose money is paying the bills behind the scenes either. If anything, the fediverse can learn from Bluesky a thing or two about onboarding people who cannot be asked to invest the time to make Mastodon enjoyable. It will take time, much more time, to get people, especially non-techy ones, to the new normal of being your own algorithm. I see Bluesky as a stepping stone in that direction that will survive in its own niche.


  • I think it’s safe to say these thoughts weren’t necessarily factored in in the first beliefs in reincarnation. A lot of this stuff is about thinking horizons. If you don’t know about the vastness of space, you think everything happens around you. So you must be reborn close as well. And then the universe is being revealed (still) bit by bit. If your science isn’t great, you could be forgiven for thinking the world is 6000 years old and maybe created in a week. But then your horizons broaden and there is a lag in how the new knowledge filters into these established belief systems. So if you tried to argue logically about a reincarnation system, yes, it would be likely that you could become a rock near a supermassive black hole or a slug on a planet far, far away just as much as an ant on Earth (depending on how you fared in life). But logic and belief are natural opponents. I think all the Dalai Lamas were reincarnated on this planet. So that’s odd then, isn’t it? Doubt lengthens the lag.