rysiek

The web is a mess, bloated with data-gathering trackers, predatory UX, massive resource loads, and it is absorbing everything it touches. The Small Internet is a counter-cultural movement to wrangle things back under control via minimalism, hands-on participation, and good old fashioned conversation. At its heart are technologies like the venerable Gopher protocol or the new Gemini protocol offering a refuge and a place to dream of a better future.

Join me and be reintroduced to Gopher in 2021 and learn what this old friend has to offer us in a world full of web services and advertising bombardment. We will also explore the new Gemini protocol and how it differs from Gopher and HTTP.

We will explore the protocols themselves, their history, and what the modern ecosystems are like. I will briefly review the technical details of implementing servers or clients of your own, and how to author content as a user. Discussion will cover limitations, grey-areas, and trade-offs in exchange for speed and simplicity.

Through these alternative protocols we'll see the small internet in action.

Bring in the popcorn.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/346923

Forge Federation Needs Your Help 🤗

🚀 Join the forge federation matrix chatroom, or the (less active) gitea federation room.

Just to add to this, I firmly believe that forge federation is the crucial missing piece that would make moving away from repository gatekeepers like Microsoft Github viable for a lot of projects. Good to see work being done on it.

The contract also provides, provocatively, “Historical geo tracking data,” though it’s unclear what exactly this data consists of or from where it’s sourced. An email released through the FOIA request shows that Coinbase didn’t require ICE to agree to an End User License Agreement, standard legalese that imposes limits on what a customer can do with software.

Amazing. So not just helping with "blockchain analytics", but outright selling out their users' location data to ICE.

🤣

🤣 🤣 🤣

The prolonged slump in Bitcoin is making it more difficult for some miners to repay the up to $4 billion in loans they have backed by their equipment, posing a potential risk to major crypto lenders.

A growing number of loans are now underwater, according to analysts, as many of the mining rigs lenders accepted as collateral have now halved in value along with the price of the world’s largest digital token.

Investment funds were giving large crypto-miners loans to by specialized crypto-mining equipment backed by that same specialized crypto-mining equipment, which happens to lose value exactly when cryptocurrencies themselves lose value.

🍿 🍿 🍿

The amount of electricity consumed by the largest cryptocurrency networks has decreased by up to 50% as the “crypto winter” continues to eat at the incomes of “miners” and financial contagion spreads further throughout the sector.

The electricity consumption of the bitcoin network has fallen by a third from its high of 11 June, down to an annualised 131 terawatt-hours a year, according to estimates from the crypto analyst Digiconomist. That still equates to the annual consumption of Argentina, with a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days.

dear crypto,

I want to come clean, and I will likely tear a rift in the entire community while I'm at it and on my way out.

Over the course of these next few weeks I will be releasing 137.21GB of Telegram group chats and messages, of which I was not a part of. Why? This is all thanks to an exploit in October of 2019 that allowed one to access the group page with recent messages if proper permissions were not set up.

(...)

I do not know what it is about Telegram, but the alleged assurance of privacy and security meant that people became relaxed and let them express themselves freely.

A bit oldie, but very on-topic with the whole Elongate around Twitter.

Of course, major social media platforms banning anyone immediately raise concerns about censorship (and those abusing those social networks to spread a message of hate and division know how to use this argument well). Do we want to live in a world where a handful of corporate execs control the de-facto online public space for political and social debate?

Obviously, we don’t. This is too much power, and power corrupts. But the question isn’t really about how these platforms should wield their power — the question is whether these platforms should have such power in the first place.

And the answer is a resounding “no“.

Disclaimer: I'm the author