Isn't the point of a scapegoat to kill the goat instead of yourself? That sort of shell/front company is like a fuse that blows protecting the main company from the consequences of their actions.

Senator... they sell ads.

You mean... The serfs, locked into their pace of toil, are mewling about the harsh treatment of their fiefdom lords.

Oracle knows their cries. They just don't care. They buy up tech with users that are locked into it and are rich enough to pay, but not rich enough to go elsewhere. It's rent-seeking. Usury. An anti-social leech upon society providing zero benefit while they suck as much wealth as possible out of the host long enough so they can move onto destroying the next good thing.

yeaaaaaah, except for the part where "freedom from surveillance" and "safeguards against hate speech" never actually show up anywhere in [the sales pitch](https://pixelfed.org/), which really only mentions "Privacy and safety".

The "freedom" and "hate speech" parts are from the "Digital Platform Charter of Rights".... which, sure, is also made by the same guy. But Pixelfed being decentralized... he really has bupkis to say about you starting your own pixelfed server catering to... gay black jewish clansmen for the resurrection of the 3rd Reich. There are currently 3 sex servers catering to... kinks, implied nudity, and... the french. The charter is really a pile of aspirational goals. It's 30 bullet points. And of course, you'll notice "freedom from surveillance" isn't the same thing as free speech, which doesn't show up anywhere. No, they aspire to a lot of moderation. "Zero Tolerance Policy", "Moderation teams", an "Intersectional Approach", "Moderation Tools", "rate limits and thoughtful friction".

And this:

"Right to Deletion: Upon request, a user's data will be permanently deleted from the platform, subject to legal or safety exceptions."

. . . How exactly is this expected to work if I'm running a pixelfed server following the federated protocols?

Yes, any Linux dev can just walk into a random RHEL customer and demand source code.

If they get told "no, we can't, we agreed not to share the altered open source code" Then the dev can for sure sue Red Hat for taking their code and making it closed sourced, a clear violation of the GPL.

Which is all well and dandy. It'll only take a single customer to simply turn around and make the source code publicly available. Thank you GPL for all your fore-sight. .....EXCEPT they're making all their customers sign an agreement where they can no longer openly share the open-source GPL licensed source code with ANYONE.

And so any linux developer can go to any of their clients, ask for the source code that Red Hat gave them, and if they say "no", then the lawsuits start flowing.

Cute.

But they've agreed to play in the open source pool:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
        source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
        1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;

There's some other methods and clauses in there about how they can do that... but they MUST share the source code. No extra fees (past delivery), requirements, agreements, hoops, or any such thing. Otherwise every contributor to Linux can sue their pants off. There's no going back from this embrace. We're in this together now.

Oh wow. It's Reggie Fils-Aime. Ninento's bean-counter. Of course any dev or gamer is going to spot this as the obvious bullshit it is, but Zuckerberg has been seeding the managerial circles with his flavor of propaganda and it's weird to see the wealthy elites turn on one of their own. They usually just worship the pile of money as always being right.

I still think the whole thing is just a PR stunt to get everyone to talk about anything other than the congressional hearing.

Just the central authority. of course. And the admins in charge of IT at the central authority. All those who can bribe the admins. Cops with warrants. Hackers. Criminals, and HOLY SHIT have you thought about the security aspect of this AT ALL?

Anonymized LOCATION data? How does that work? Most anonymized data is bullshit. Location though? Double bullshit. If it sends location data, it needs to at the very least know the location of other people in the same location. So the location is... what? the gps coordinates run through a random function? If they can decode it and match it up, then ANYONE can decode it and it's no longer anonymized. It's one of those things where if it's really anonymous, then it's useless. If it's useful data, it CAN'T be anonymous.

And I've read up on this one. It does NOT use GPS data, so you're just guessing at your bullshit, so fuck you. It uses blue-tooth to ping other devices that also run the software. That way they only know you were within X distance of other users. Which is MUCH more sane, but still carries with it a boatload of potential issues. It has to have some sort of timestamp (or be implicit from when it's sent) and the other users you've had contact with. If they limit messages home to the central authority to once a day and a simple list of those you've had contact with (with no repeats), then it's not AS horrifying. Abuseable. But less terrible. As it's completely useless unless most people use the app, it's really tempting for authority figures to mandate it or try to slip it in as being "helpful", but that hopefully isn't going to fly.

If it can't track location, just what the fuck is it sending to the central server?

How does it know who you've had contact with?

If it's a contact tracker that "can't identify close contacts" then just what the hell is it doing?

Imagine you wanted to tank a community though.

Fire up a million users (or a few new users every day from now till forever) and have them shit-post random crap. Inane bullshit vaguely on topic. Human enough to be indistinguishable from the unwashed dirty masses of people who post online. While I know Slashdot us more or less used to this, the signal to noise ratio will plummet and no one will bother wading through a giant pile of otherwise undetectable bullshit. You're imagining in-depth conversations to see "what it means to be human". But we've already determined the test parameters. They're a few sentences or paragraphs given a title's prompting. That's how modern online communities work. The new public square is the comment section.

That's an awfully expensive funeral. But I loved him in "The Interview" so I guess he's worth it.

. . . Why did someone give someone else a billion buckeroo Disney dollars?

What did they get in exchange for it?

Unless this was just freely given with not expectation of compensation or exchange for anything, suuuuuuuure, it's not money. But if I was giving someone else 101857.24568009 BTC then I would most certainly expect something in return. You know, LIKE MONEY.

Alright, it's a non-event then. Don't get me wrong. It's good to have these stories. Journalists doing their job. Sorta. Saying it has traits like the 1918 pandemic is alarmist and typical bullshit journalism. But 2020 has everyone on edge for the other shoe dropping. And apparently 2020 is some sort of caterpillar with serious arch support.

You're going to have to give a pretty detailed definition of "dignity" if him getting insulted by your terms doesn't count while your examples are somehow better.

And I'm pretty sure calling him an idiot is going to violate any definition you could give. So what's with the hypocritical hate-speech?