It says he was arrested for activities unrelated to Mastodon, just happened to be working on an unencrypted backup which was also seized. No clue why he was arrested.
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
If you want to go out and stand on the side of the road with a sign there’s no problem.
If you block people from going to work or going home then you start to gather a little bit of attention
There have been an increasing number of protests where people have damaged power substations, Shot up public places and driven through crowds of people.
The FBI doesn’t have time or manpower to screw around. They’re not raiding someone’s house because some people are noisy about government. By the time they’re Knocking on your door they already have some substantial proof of wrongdoing.
Probably the same. This bears repeating: All your information online is and always has been available for others to collect and see, from FBI to advertisers. If you want any amount of protection, it must be with E2E encryption for which you own the keys.
We taught online safety in the 90s. Did we all just collectively forget this in the last two decades?
They stopped teaching about computers. I tutored high schoolers about 10 years ago and they didn’t know how to use computers fluently. It moved to the realm of expecting parents to teach to their kids along with taxes and career planning.
Speaking of which, I grew up in the 90s pre Internet, and started using the Internet in middle school. Definitely never got any official Internet safety lessons. Maybe I was a little too early? Idk. But by the time I was 30 schools were not teaching this at least from what I saw
The other day, I spoke to an 18 year old who didn’t know the difference between “copy and paste” and “cut and paste”. I want to know what the hell they’re doing in IT classes. Do they just assume that kids these days are good at tech because it’s so ubiquitous? Because that’s a dangerous assumption
Yeah pretty much. As soon as facebook broke the ice on “never use your real name on the internet” it was over. Now we have entire generations that were introduced to the internet as one that was ruled by social media sites. They were never even taught the same online safety stuff that we grew up with.
We taught online safety in the 90s. Did we all just collectively forget this in the last two decades?
All of those people signed up for Facebook and thought their data was private because they marked their page private. While they post with their real name. With a company that will collect your data and do whatever the fuck they want with it.
You need to consider anything and everything you post to the Fediverse to be part of a public, everlasting record. At least in it’s current state, the Fediverse is not the place for privacy oriented users.
Ok … so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs … yea there aren’t DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don’t exist … you should presume DMs are public.
The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place … essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn’t know about and probably couldn’t do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) … try a google search for mastoodn content.
This is all public internet stuff, you’re basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.
As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives … it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn’t have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.
I’ve argued this elsewhere … I like the fediverse and am here out of principle … but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time … because it’s about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast … in retrospect I wouldn’t be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn’t ready IMO, it’s still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.
What about 2013 seemed more favorable to the fediverse than now? Twitter, reddit and Facebook were pretty useful at that time - I don’t think I’d have left.
Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.
These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the “Google” era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being “free”.
In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it’s a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.
If the fediverse represents the soon-to-be-replaced web 2.0 of the past, what do you see replacing it and why do you think that will be incompatible with the fediverse apps?
I could see some block chain security/authentication features added to federated apps, and hopefully end-to-end encrypted DMs will be enabled by that same technology too. I’m just having a hard time imagining something “new” that will replace this completely.
There will probably be several TikTok-like entertainment platforms, likely filled with ad-friendly AI generated content that is 100% under corporate control and costs almost nothing to produce, but that type of platform attracts a different audience than what we have here.
I don’t think the fediverse necessarily needs to be replaced. We still have, afterall, Twitter going hard and strong after nearly 20 years! THe fediverse may very well go strong for many years to come, and that’d be a good thing … it’s nice!!
In an ideal world … what would replace this? IMO, technology that basically gives every person a secure home on the internet in the same way that (most of us) can have a secure home in real life. Control, ownership and privacy over what you consume and publish and how. That technology would need to involve a number of things on a number of levels, but I’d bet it’s quite viable today, it just needs buy-in and people to have the time and resources to build it.
The blockchain’s use of decentralization is pretty much a security measure. If you want to rule out the blockchain entirely, you’d still need to address the immutable and transpartent components. Only using one block once published moving forward is quite different than the fediverse. Then there’s smart contracts too. It’s a massive improvement to various current online platforms, to say it’s merely decentralization is highly misleading.
Edit: So far, web 3.0 has yet to impress me and I’d be surprised if it does anytime soon. But blockchain tech is not simplistic and can be setup for anonymity as well.
Possible doesn’t mean easily doable, unfortunately. Technically speaking, I don’t know how hard it would be for the fediverse. I get the sense that overall it’s been a mismanaged aspect of the ecosystem for a long time.
It touches on a broader issue of to what extent the software ecosystem enables users to exist on the fediverse at large as a single user or through a single interface. At the moment, it’s basically not really a thing. Arguably, if the fediverse wants to make any claim to being an actual “federated universe” rather than just separate FOSS decentralised platforms (there is a big difference IMO) … then it should definitely be a thing.
In relation to DMs, then, in a “true fediverse” the answer would be simply something like integrating matrix into your interface such that you and I could easily start a space on matrix and start chatting there if we wanted to.
I’ve come to the conclusion that for this to happen it needs to happen at the UI/client/app level. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens in not too long a time. An app that understand and works well with all of the major platforms and gives you a single and well designed interface for working with all of them from a single space. This way the platform developers can focus on their specific funcionality and backend while the app/client developers can focus on the UI and the challenge of bringing things together. I see it as similar to the way we all have email apps that easily bring together multiple email clients.
thanks for the link, explains it very well. how bout my activity, like IP address, up/down votes, clicks on links, favorites and whatnot, is that federated around or how does that work, i.e. who has access to it?
As far as I know (which isn’t too far, because I’m not a Beltway bandit anymore), the Fediverse isn’t on the FBI’s radar in any meaningful way. It /might/ be on the radar of the information contractors they hire for bulk data gathering and analysis (Palantir, ZeroFox, Dataminr, probably others these days) but none of me have heard anything specific.
Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.
Oh the FBI just happened to visit when they unencrypted the database? How convenient!
The FBI surveils targets prior to executing raids. It’s possible they deduced that there was some useful information available on the target’s laptop and acted in such a way to capture it easily.
Yeah the ‘happened to have a bunch of unencrypted data laying around’ bit seems odd. Would make sense if they got picked up for something else and that was the bargain. Fucked if I know though
Not really? If you’re trying to debug something, or if you’re gearing up for an upgrade (like the Mastodon upgrade this week that’s giving a lot of admins grief) it’s plausible to have one of your backups locally to mess around with. As an example of this principle, I run Part-DB-server to manage my workshop inventory. For various reasons I migrated from a hosted MySQL database to a local SQLite database, and I’m in the process of moving back to the MySQL database. To facilitate this I have a copy of the SQLite database that, as needed, I run SELECTs on to backfill details on entries. I have a local copy of that database on my laptop, in other words.
It’s also plausible that the kolektiva.social admin was mocking up a clone of the service on their laptop to test something.
Without more data (gentlebeings, start your FOIA requests) I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to speculate. We might learn something that we can use later.
There was never any lag in service. I’m on that instance. I believe the person was raided due to their activism and had a backup of some data but not the actual server. They made an announcement and told people to change their passwords. Many lost a degree of trust but are being as transparent as possible with members. kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150
Does anyone have a eli5 explanation/read/video of being federated? When I joined lemmy i thought it was lemmy exclusive thing, but now it seems being federated is a copy of your data shared among servers that multiple communities/applications use including outside entities, such as lemmy communicating w/ mastodon? Or am I way off? Any explanation would be greatly appreciated help me get up to speed.
Lemmy & KBin & Mastodon & Misskey & Calckey & others all use the ActivityPub protocol to deliver posts to your inbox no matter which account / software created the post in the first place.
How the posts are interpreted changes a bit depending on what software was used to create and display your inbox.
This is very much like how email works in Outlook & Gmail, but how the labels or tagging changes depending on which you use.
The thing that gets me with this, is that Windows 11 is genuinely good in my opinion, and now that a lot of the launch day bugs have been ironed out, it’s much nicer to use than Windows 10 from a UX and usability standpoint.
I feel similar with Edge. Vertical tabs, the good Microsoft integration (in my case for work), good performance, it’s a totally usable web browser.
And then Microsoft squanders all of that with these invasive marketing decisions. I hate every time I start Microsoft Edge for the first time, there’s these undismissable full window prompts to sign into my Microsoft account, obviously this crap that’s been posted, the way Windows 10 was aggressively marketed onto Windows 7/8 users, it all leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
Working in help desk and PC repairs, I’m not looking forward to the amount of tickets and retail customers coming in confused about all this, think it’s a virus, think that they must upgrade or else, that they did accidentally hit yes on this and now their machine isn’t familiar to them anymore.
People seem to applaud this. But in reality, this is an attempt of making money in cost of the user privacy. So in the end, if Reddit does not pay, then the end users will pay for with their data being public. As a former Reddit user, I am not a fan of this, even if it makes Reddit look bad.
And what data should that be? A random username, created with a disposal email using a random password generated by firefox. Dont see how it has any value to anyone, even reddit.
So you think the entirety of Reddit is using random usernames, with disposal email and a random generated password via Firefox? Really? Is this what you say on every data breach that involves user data? Even if that was true, an account getting hacked would be bad. Even old accounts that are no longer used by their owner could be used to spread shit and no one knows who is hacked and not. This is valuable. But that's besides the point. According the article the passwords and accounts are safe.
Users have private discussions or any other stuff, including their real email address and who knows what else. This is bad. This is really bad for the end user. The hackers try to make money, just like any other data breach. Only CEOs would try to talk this good.
To anyone who used Linux once upon a time and got scared off - try it again. Nowadays so much works without any config, driver support is so much better and, at least with my last year using Fedora, it’s incredibly stable.
And if you get stuck, ChatGPT is so good at helping you through the experience. Also, IMO, once you spend a week or so to get used to Gnome desktop environment it’s better than both windows and macos.
I really wouldn’t tell anyone to rely on ChatGPT for technical support. It’s fine if you already sort of know what you’re doing, but it has a tendency to “lie” very convincingly and come up with either broken or even potentially harmful solutions
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