Hey people,
I had such a topic on old HMF, and while it was never very active, I think this topic is underrated and important. So here we go.
Old threads (wont be reposted):
I begin with something⊠old:
But it is not old! It is kinda like a fiction plot, where the protagonist does something in the beginning of the movie that has a big effect on the end. Same applies here.
While it is questionable if this caused social media to delete Trump (they certainly did so before on other users) it possibly became something more legally forced since then as platform owners are more accountable for what the users do on their platforms.
And whatever your position about these specific moderation is, I want to point out that the âprovider privilegeâ is actually something very important. In my opinion it deserves to not be watered down.
The band which did thisâŠ
âŠbecame victim of thisâŠ
In the words of the drummer
âWell, they fucked with us, weâll fuck with them.â
I know there is no causality, but since we are about to enter the age of content filters and evasion is hardly possible, all I am left with is scorn. 
If you have given Facebook your phone number (and often all other basic profile information), it is apparently public now.
https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1378314424239460352
It is expected that FB soon contacts everyone who is affected.
Update, Facebook does not care about it and decided not to tell users who are affected. Because users canât change anything about it anyway. And on top of it: (sorry for vice)
Also, Facebook says they are unable to to determine who is affected even if they tried.
Luckily, third party websites seem to can do what FB canât: Use Ctrl+F on the data. 
Enter your phone here and see if it is part of the leak: (or previous leaks)
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Ainât so honest of themâŠ
Iâm luckily in the other group of ~1.5 billion.
There is this one Austrian guy, Nils Melzer. He is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and is one of those who get my attention for actually taking their job seriously.
Some time ago he decided to look into the case of Julian Assange. He collected evidence of illegal treatment on him with the help of multiple psychologists who spoke with Assange. Whenever he tried to contact officials of the involved countries (USA, Sweden, UK and others) he was denied further information and statements or was given fully censored documents.
One other disturbing element of this was how Swedenâs intelligence service applied a lot of pressure to the two Swedish women to construct a crime on him. All involved UK judges were either biased or had interest conflicts.
(note, one of the women deny these statements and accuse Melzer of victim blaming. What I write here is up to you to decide what to believe)
Melzer uses a certain term here that is quite bold: âBanality Of Evilâ.
This term was used by Hannah Arendt to describe Adolf Eichmannâs (one of the major organizers of the Holocaust) personality.
Eichmann in Jerusalem - Wikipedia
Her thesis is that Eichmann was actually not a fanatic or a sociopath, but instead an extremely average and mundane person who relied on clichĂ©d defenses rather than thinking for himself, was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of âgood societyâ. Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmannâs actions were in any way ordinary, or even that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional.
A person from the UN comparing the Europe/US system of states of law with the Nazis is something I am very not used to. 
The summary of all this is taken from this German site, you might want to translate it externally if you are interested:
Melzer is releasing a book about this today as well in hope to reach a larger audience. I donât want this post look like an advertisement, so no link, but if you are interested in places where to get it, these should be easy to find online.
Well Iâm not. Should I change my number? Iâm worried what it might be used forâŠ
Signal, a messaging app like WhatsApp which got an enormous boost of new users after Facebook announced to include WA user data into their social media data pool, did some fun ads on Instagram.
Well, letâs say they tried, as Facebook (Instaâs owner) blocked their ad account there. Big surprise.
But I like what the ads were about:
They just show you some key data of what FB knows about you.
Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into peopleâs lives, unless itâs to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use peopleâs data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebookâs world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what youâre doing from your audience.
I managed to pull many of my contacts to Signal in January. Signal is also not the only good alternative to WhatsApp. There is also Telegram and Threema. Who did not do that until now might want to check for alternatives.
Reusing my post from the general news thread:
What this is exactly?
Right after Nov 2019 Protests, Internet access was blocked from service providers for about 5-10 days and you could only access servers which were within the soil of Iran. Well, No one actually cared about the âonly within Iranâ part, but it was indicating something way more terrifying: National Internet (Intranet technically) or âNational Information Networkâ as they call it.
It is a mega program started 15 years ago, to make a data distribution network which is fully under control and has a limited, again controllable connection with outside of Iran. Itâs not gonna cut connection to outside, but mostly from it; So they could prevent leaks of things which they donât want them to be leaked.
What makes it more disgusting is the human resources theyâre using; Itâs not high ranked military elite, Itâs basically a start-up company called âAbre-Arvanâ (Arvan Cloud) which was opened by a few university graduates 5 years ago. Now theyâre way bigger, and according to documents operating the âinternet block if necessaryâ thing. Banality of Evil as some people said, using ordinary young people to do what theyâre trained to do without even knowing what exactly theyâre making, thinking of it as âusefulâ.
The impact is not concerning, yet, but the Climate Change itself was also not concerning at first and look where we are now.
Some of you might remember my lengthy topic on old HMF about the upcoming upload filters. Some updates regarding this:
Meanwhile, the EU Commission released a guideline chart how the Upload Filters are required to work:
https://twitter.com/PiratKolaja/status/1400824187447611393/photo/1
If you are out of the loop for all this, check out this summary. It is from shortly before the final vote but still accurate.
An interesting article related to 
, the initial reason for the reform, YouTube not giving enough money to the industry (read: not necessarily to the actual artists) is a thing of the past.
Now we have filters for nothing.
Wish that YT would just stop shoving down crappy commercial music down my throat or other âtrendyâ bs thatâs not interesting to me. Oh and maybe stop asking for a my credit card info or a photo of my id / driverâs license whenever I want to watch a âmatureâ video.
Luckily I (Germany) donât have this ID stuff⊠yet. With a proper ad blocker it is a nice website. I just wish it had more competition. Too bad hosting videos is such a costly thing to do for a new website.
Does anyone of you wonder why Apple suddenly began rolling out surveillance on cloud images and soon even images on the userâs phone?
Sure we learned that this is an act to fight child abuse. And I believe that is true. Still, why now and why so suddenly?
Here comes the interesting spin, but first you need to know about a detail of US lawsuits.
Discovery, in the law of common law jurisdictions, is a pre-trial procedure in a lawsuit in which each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from the other party or parties by means of discovery devices such as interrogatories, requests for production of documents, requests for admissions and depositions. Discovery can be obtained from non-parties using subpoenas. When a discovery request is objected to, the requesting party may seek the assistance of the court by filing a motion to compel discovery
The company might consider to wait with the release of documents shortly before the deadline and then drop a truckload of them so the other party has a hard time to find evidence for their position.
Okay, what court case could motivate Apple to release this as part of their truckload of documents?
âŠ
Correct, the case Epic Games vs Apple!
Apple fraud executive Eric Friedman told colleague Herve Sibert that Apple is the greatest platform for distributing child pornography.
That is a statement that even a company like Apple cannot ignore.
There is not much of a moral of the story here, but it still amazes me what the causal chain is here. It also tells much about Apple which knew long before (Feb 2020) their message services are used for stuff like that. But now acts when it becomes public. Though in their defense they could also just need that long to work on such a solution.
Another interesting detail from said Discovery documents (though I think it is from the lawsuit Epic Games vs Google): Apple and Google team up to be a âduopolistâ in the app market.
Another really interesting detail is this:
Which answers the question: Why do Apple and Google take so much from app revenues? Not because it costs so much to maintain the infrastructure, it is because most is given to telcos!
And how much would it cost Google if they allow Samsung, Amazon and so on have own app stores?
Seven Billion $.
"SEVEN BILLION MY FRIENDS!" - Morrocan protester
Sources: https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428415009860714500
You can say what you want about Epic Games and their attempt to milk the users like the big(ger) corps. But this whole thing dragged very interesting facts to the light.
If you think the EU is doing a rest after enforcing upload filters, worry no more!
A small group of EPP (conservative party of the European parliament) including nobody other than Axel Voss, the guy behind upload filters pretty much, proposed the Digital Service Act in the summer last year.
The most worrisome part of it is the idea that censorship of one EU country should be applied to all EU countries. For example if you make use of your free speech to criticize Viktor OrbĂĄn, the president of Hungary, and that is illegal in Poland but not where you live, Hungary can censor that anyway.
Today the European Committee on Legal Affairs which the group of EPP members are part of, voted in favor of this proposal. We have to see how it develops from here.
That⊠seems like a really irresponsible way to utilize a union of countries that barely has any tangible effects, and enforce one countryâs internal rules on another. Wonder what theyâd say if one of those countries decided to do something to their top 1%; would they support the other countries enforcing that too through the rules of the EU? Good grief, I hate how conservative-minded political groups try to take advantage of things.
