Spyke

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linux

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Canonical starts charging for Ubuntu LTS security updates

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It is not. The headline is completely inaccurate.

Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.

What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.

You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.

Edit: This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.

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Boost confirms switching to being a fediverse app after the Reddit app shutdown.

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kbin lacks an API with an equivalent feature set. Ernest is aware of this and it's on the bug tracker. Any working apps for kbin are using site scraping as a temporary workaround. In layman's terms it means the app developer is doing a lot of extra work that will mostly get thrown away when the API rework is complete. Artemis is the only one currently doing this off the top of my head.

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r/pics calls out spez' history as jailbait moderator, a former sub dedicated to actual CP. the post hit the front page with 15k karma in 4h, then got removed earlier today

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Thanks. Direct link to the pimp daddy comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36298422

It's not just that he allowed them to exist, he created a special one-of-a-kind "Pimp Daddy" trophy to award to the moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrophyWiki/comments/mohrlg/reddit_trophy_pimp_daddy/

There is some whitewash in the comments there: "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award for keeping things clean, but consider that he contributed the vast majority of those subreddits' content himself by cruising social media for salacious pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and the award is named "Pimp Daddy."

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(Mildly NSFW) Welp, I guess that's it. The single photo that got my ~10-year-old, 60k+ karma Reddit account "permanently suspended."

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Several image themed subreddits voted to change their rules so that only "sexy" pictures of Jon Oliver were allowed. (in practice, any picture of Jon Oliver) It was intended as a form of protest against subreddits receiving threats from the admins to have their head mod role transferred to any mod who was willing to reopen the sub.

This one was apparently too sexy for the Reddit admins to handle...

memes

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The BS asymmetry principle

This is where the argument for unconditionally providing equal air time to bad faith arguments falls apart, and where paradox of tolerance comes into play. One side demands tolerance for itself but argues in bad faith, and the other is inclined toward tolerance with others because it's what they would want for themselves. The latter is taken advantage of because the former does not return the favor.

The key to solving for the paradox is recognizing that there is a difference of scale:

  1. If one ideology demands tolerance for itself but is intolerant of all ideologies aside from its own, its intolerance is broadly scoped. There is more intolerance in play than tolerance.
  2. If one ideology grants tolerance to other ideologies except when their own is denied the same, then the intolerance is narrowly scoped. Intolerance is still in play, but it is a false inference to imply that those who champion equality must unconditionally surrender it to those who do not believe in it.

Pay attention to how many ideologies a school of thought is trying to silence and who their allies are. Unreasonable extremists can be found in all camps and their existence alone does not prove a movement's bad faith or your own righteousness. Reasonable people should exist, making it more important to focus on the goals of the movement and how its better stewards comport themselves. Remember that people who open their discussions with rudeness and toxicity are compensating for the insecurity of their debating point and already betraying their own intolerance. They aren't worth engaging with.

  • Who are the patient and reasonable people that are standing up for an ideology?
  • Does a leader for a movement rely on emotional appeals to unrelenting anger? Are they always angry and rude in a public setting, and primarily trying to appeal to those who behave in a similar way? Ignore their spiel and use someone else as your benchmark. (edit: But if this is the best they can offer and the leaders who are most frequently pushed to the top, this should be seen as a large red flag.)
  • What happens when you try to engage in a conversation with the patient ones? Do they keep a level head and respectfully agree to disagree with you while happily trading points, or do they go on the attack with ad-hominems when you patiently poke at the holes in their arguments?

At the end of the day there aren't any simple solutions and you're left with a critical thinking exercise that only works for you. Be one of the patient people who is a good advocate for your cause, but do not allow yourself to invest a disproportionate amount of effort engaging with someone who does not return respect. Seek out those who return that respect, regardless of their stated ideology, and you will both be better for it when the conversation is done. And hopefully the result of those conversations will help other people make up their mind about who is truly acting in bad faith.


Yeah this is a memes community, but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while. Feel free to quote/link/whatever.

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"Antiwoke" magazin on kbin.social posting bullshit like "how to end Wokeness" and "Time to reject the extrem trans lobby harming our society" How to report ? he is the moderator of that magazin.

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A troll is insincere yet playful.

I chuckled at least. A troll's motivation for the rise that they seek is largely inconsequential, as is the delivery mechanism. ;) Let's not go and disenfranchise the majority of the internet's trolling population with narrow typecasting!

While we're on the topic of trolling, are you familiar with Sealioning?

Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".

It's a rhetorical question, no need to respond. Someone else might learn something they didn't know before today. :)

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Is Kbin dying? I wanted to address the deleted thread and provide some insight into the current situation.

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Yeah, there is no need for "final solution" style accountability here. This was a project that a single developer was working on when the stars just happened to align and drive a lot of attention to it at once. A commercially oriented website in the same situation would struggle to deal with it and be forced to take out loans in order to expand staffing and infrastructure capacity.

The phrasing of Ernest's initial post suggests that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of and can't be openly discussed until the gates are closed. I understand the frustration and optics problem that comes with "easy and important fixes" sliding on the schedule (i.e. the topic of the other thread), but look at it this way:

  • Ernest is too slammed with work to be consciously creating more work for himself.
  • He needs the spam and bot problem to go away so ASAP so that it stops taking time away from him. This includes the missing moderation tools, spam/bot campaigns that are operating at a scale that those additional tools would have difficulty addressing regardless, and the issues he can't talk about yet that were hinted at above.
  • If he is waiting to push out a fix to problems that would greatly reduce his workload, there are very good reasons for it.
  • If he is not able to push out fixes that reduce his workload, it stands to reason that fixes unrelated to them are also sliding.

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/kbin project management costs, financing, future plans

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And if they are scoped realistically.

The contraction we're seeing in the tech space this year is in large part a consequence of venture capitalist funding. A significant portion of tech sites were being funded at a loss, with the idea that profitability could be achieved after establishing a userbase. Rising interest rates pushed the VCs to put pressure on the companies they invested in: "no more free lunch, realize our gains now". This is why you see a rash of tech sites abruptly restructuring (Discord) or completely collapsing (gfycat). Reddit falls somewhere between the two, because it's likely they're seeking an IPO and they don't care about the fate of the website once they cash out. Twitter is ruled by an emperor with no clothes. Facebook can't make as much money as it did prior to the added government scrutiny, and the Zuck has been frantically trying to diversify his company these past few years.

This is a long-winded way of saying that ernest deserves a lot of praise here for being realistic and up front with the operating costs of running the largest kbin instance. lemmy and kbin draw inspiration from the social media platforms that came before them, but can't budget for growth the same way that their predecessors did. It's not going to be cheap, they aren't going to get the free lunch that prior social media platforms had, and ernest needs to proceed with the well-being of both himself and his project in mind.

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Reddit subs that offically migrated to Lemmy?

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Just take it slow. Migrations tend to happen in waves, and we've got several more ahead of us even in the most ideal scenario for a Reddit exodus. The next pivot point will be at the end of the month when the bulk of account deletions will hit the server. From there it depends on peer pressure, how the quality of the site continues to decline, and how many more times /u/spez throws tantrums in the public media.

If you truly want to take your community with you, the best thing you can do is go cold turkey on Reddit yourself, regardless of whether you choose to self-delete or not. Deleting is better because it reduces temptation. From there, anyone who cares about timely updates from you will have to content themselves with waiting for others to repost, or they will need to follow you.

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We should defederate from lemmynsfw

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many of us would like to simply have full federation and curate content ourselves, though it's understandable that moderation needs to happen in some cases.

Agreed. I think the emphasis needs to be on usage of NSFW tagging, and making sure users have the ability to block magazines that they think are borderline (or just bad at tagging their content) without having to click into that magazine.

That said, I would not be opposed to a middle ground where entire instances can be flagged as NSFW so that their content is automatically tagged. 1) Instances should be able to voluntarily tag themselves like this so that all posts originating from that instance are automatically tagged, and 2) admins of other instances should be given the option to flag other instances as NSFW to their local instance as an alternative to defederating. There is still some room for overreaction with #2, but it's still putting control in the hands of that instance's users whether they want to interact with that content or not.

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lemmy.ml is no longer shadowbanning kbin.

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Pretty much this. It still gets a lot of flack for being operated by the developers of Lemmy, but there are a large number of users and communities that exist on lemmy.ml for no other reason than it being one of the larger original instances. Most operators of high-volume instances are unlikely to take action against lemmy.ml unless a situation develops that gives them no other choice.

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Petition for lemmy.world to close registrations.

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I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.

If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you're expecting from others. :P


Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)

  • Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
  • You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had "eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand". [2]
  • You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It's a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it's also a given that you shouldn't be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
  • A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
  • Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god's gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.

There's no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don't. You aren't worth anyone's energy, and I'm only bothering with this summary for everyone else's sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world's side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.

I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they're probably thinking it)

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Reddit subs that offically migrated to Lemmy?

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Since there is always some sucker to be found on Reddit who enjoys taking orders and licking boots, no sub can really defend against this move by Reddit admins. Which is probably why some other mods decided to maliciously comply instead.

Yeah, pretty much. To not reopen you have to have absolute confidence that no one on the mod team will succumb to the temptation to steal ownership of the sub. The fact that some subs have fallen prey to this (like /r/piracy) is why mods have been wringing their hands and reopening subs left and right.

Honestly this shit is early IRC drama all over again; kick all the other ops from the channel and it belongs to you, provided those people aren't registered in the ChanServ. /u/spez is the ChanServ, and he's letting everyone know he's willing to look the other way.

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Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted

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Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.

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[Serious] How can a person "rejection-proof" their life?

It means you aren't suited to run a public facing business. There's nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I'm equipped to do well and things that I'm not. I shouldn't let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don't want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I'm better off letting someone else run that side of a business.

As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don't believe you'll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.