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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
    When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

    Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

    They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

    They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

    It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

    I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.



  • I’m in the camp of welcoming meta to the fediverse, BUT - not bending over backwards.

    If they start making changes that affect federation for them, then that is their problem. Treat meta as a platform, no different to mastodon.
    Remember that the fediverse consists of more than just Mastodon.
    If meta makes a change and suddenly pixelfed can’t federate properly with meta anymore, it’ll be a shame, but it does not mean that pixelfed should make changes and add workarounds so that it is able to speak to meta again.

    Meta might think they have the power to do this, but they only have that power if we behave like they do.
    If instead we take an attitude of, it’s fine for you to be here, while you are being a good citizen, but if you start making demands - you are on your own.


  • I mean I find it quite ironic really that The fediverse has been screaming about how threads/meta will destroy the fediverse, but in reality - it is the fediverse destroying itself from the inside with this nonsense take.

    And really - who wants to be part of that, it’s actually batshit when you take a step back and think about what is being said:

    “I don’t want anything to do with X and I don’t want anything to do with anyone else who has anything to do with X either”

    OK, right now it’s meta. But let’s talk about lemmy, there are people on the fediverse who think the creators of lemmy are problematic - so what happens when we get “I don’t want to associate with lemmy.world but also I don’t want to associate with anyone else who does associate with lemmy.world”

    Some instances defeded mastodon.social for problematic moderation, but they did not defed other instances that do still federate with mastodon.social.

    It seems like an extreme reaction, and if the fediverse does die, it will be the fediverse itself that implodes rather than being destroyed from any company on the outside.


  • Nah, can’t scroll past this one without commenting - because so many things that have been said matter of factly are just plain wrong.

    1. Dogs just like people have their own personalities, just because SOME dogs can be trained to ignore fireworks, it does not mean ALL dogs can be - some dogs - just like people, suffer from various anxieties, it can’t be helped.

    2. The main point you seem to be missing - yes you can stay in and chill with your pooch on the ACTUAL day that fireworks are expected to be going off, but what you cannot do - is stay in and chill with your pooch for weeks before and weeks after the actual day, because people randomly decide to let them off.

    The fact that you brand everyone a bad dog owner if their dog cannot tolerate fireworks though, is the thing that made me need to comment, what a stupid thing to say. That’s like saying that if your child suffers from anxiety then you are a bad parent.








  • I feel like outside the federated system, meta would rely on geographic metadata (eg IP address) to identify if a user was within the scope of the GDPR or not. But they aren’t going to have access to any of this information, when they receive the data from another server in the fediverse. There will be zero way for them to identify if a user from any server in the fediverse would be applicable to the GDPR or not, because any user from any country can basically sign up anywhere. It will be difficult for them to argue against that - since it’s highly publicised that when Mastodon was struggling under the strain of the massive influx of new users - that people were being advised to find an instance that aligned to their interests rather than just their geographical location. Indeed I am on a Scottish server - where I arrived in 2019, but I have recently started another account on a US server ( allthingstech.social) so I would indeed be a user protected by GDPR on a US server. Because Meta have no way of knowing where a user comes from, the only thing they can definitely legally do - is process data from their own known users - but they are crossing into dangerous territory the second they start trying to process data from users outside their own instance. In my opinion anyway.

    And no I don’t mind debating at all. There needs to be a lot more debate, and a lot less death threats and screaming matches online - in order for us to start resolving anything.

    Edit:
    The GDPR applies to data on people. So in your example - it doesn’t matter how Meta got the data, the point is that they have data on citizens that are protected by the GDPR, the fact that the data arrived indirectly via a US server, doesn’t remove the protection afforded to the EU citizen


  • Meta can have the data, that part yes you consent to by using ActivityPub software, though there is a whole other argument to get into later about whether “normal” users really understand that. But no Meta absolutely cannot process that data, for creating shadow profiles or anything like that - unless the user explicitly opts in. GDPR is quite clear that you cannot infer that a user agree based on some other influence (in this case the user using ActivityPub) - the user MUST have been presented with a dialog explaining what Meta would do with the data and giving the user the option to say they agree or disagree with it.


  • You bring up an interesting point, because of how the fediverse works, every server (that has an active subscription) essentially has a mirror of the original data. So if Facebook have data from people who never consented to that, then they would surely be breaking GDPR rules? GDPR rules say that they can only PROCESS the data (or mine it - if you want to use a more realistic term) if a user has explicitly agreed to that, implicit agreement doesn’t count. So this is going to interesting to see how they manage this - providing that they don’t process the data and simply present it, as is - they don’t break GDPR, but the second that they start processing it, they breach GDPR. Now - they can process data that belongs to their users, but they would have to write code that ensures they don’t ingest posts from any user that is not a meta user - for the purposes of harvesting it.





  • There is a theatre attached to our house. It has only existed since 1991, before that it was a single story machine workshop, and before that - all manner of other things. There is a large Theatre Pipe Organ in it, and we host midweek groups who come down on their special outings (WI, Probus Club etc). One day we had one of these groups in, and as usual when they left we went around the building checking the toilets etc to make sure everyone was out. Most of the time people arrived by coach, but sometimes if the group was closer to us, and a smaller size, they came in cars.

    This day we checked everyone was out, and as usual quite exhausted - we locked up the building and went through to the house for a smoke and a coffee before heading back through to tidy away the plates and bowls and start collating the left over scones, butter, jam, cakes etc so store in a fridge and pick our way through over the next several days.

    On returning back to the foyer - the fire extinguisher which sits on a bracket on the wall, was sitting upright in the middle of the floor. It couldn’t have fallen off the bracket, because it would be laying in it’s side near the wall in that case. It was sitting upright - a good 3-4 metres away from the wall. There is simply no way it could naturally have ended up where it was - without someone physically putting it there. But the building was locked, and we would definitely have noticed if it was there when we locked up the building and left, because we would have had to walk around it to leave the building.