However the vast majority of human knowledge isn’t current events.
Broadly speaking, everything was a current event at some point. As Wikipedia calcifies, it loses the ability to capture and collate new information as it is produced.
Even if Wikipedia were to never get updated again it is still extremely useful.
In the same way as any dated encyclopedia, sure. I’ve got a copy of my dad’s childhood encyclopedia, dated to 1954. Lots of interesting factoids in there, assuming your interest in the world is satisfied by an English speaking editor’s ability to consolidate the information available to his firm at their publishing deadline.
I’m sure you read it pretty regularly
I’ve found it less and less capable of keeping up with current events. Enshittification truly comes for us all.
It’s easy to focus on the negatives and miss what an absolute treasure it still is.
As a historical artifact and a demonstration of the potential for open-sourced editing, it’s a milestone. But we’re clearly in the twilight of the Wikipedia era.
I’m generally more annoyed at how the early enthusiasm of participation on the site has died out in the face of paranoia and moderator mania. There are so many gaps in both the modern and historical backlog of citations and categorizations. But do I want to invest dozens of hours contributing to a site where a few admins are just going to tear all my work back out again on a bureaucratic technicality?
It is a site that’s alternatively being strangled to death by admins fearful of malicious actors and tore apart by wave after wave of sinister propagandists and hostile agents.
The only rational decision, given the cost associated with a poorly defined and maliciously enforced legislative code. I wouldn’t trust the UK courts to fairly adjudicate an alleged breach of the law, particularly if Reform Party gets into office and decides to punish Wikipedia’s management for “Wokeness” or whatever.
Lolz. Didn’t Trump just pardon Ross Ulbricht?
What a joke.
For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.
That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.
Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.
I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.
Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !
That requires large plots of arable land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley
The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. The growing high-tech industry in the 1960s transformed the area from farmland to densely populated cities, and it became referred to as the Silicon Valley.
But we paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.
There’s no unfucking that chicken. We are living in a world that is substantially less arable than it was a century ago. We do not have an Eden to go back to.
Less criticism and more pity.
Sheryl Sandberg seems like a Grade A asshole to work for - possibly the only woman CEO I’ve ever heard of getting #MeToo’d. Zuckerberg is an absolute baby-brain completely up his own asshole with delusions of grandeur, outright comparing himself to Roman Emperors.
But if you get into the tell-all released by Sarah Wynn-Williams, all you really take away from it is that this company is as corrosive to the body public as it is ravenous for economic expansion. There’s no “keeping close” that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Might as well try to keep a rabid dog on a short leash.
I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.
I’m not above peaking in on Citations Needed or QAnon Anonymous to see how the other side lives. But the actual right-wing material itself is really ugly stuff, particularly in the modern moment. When it isn’t nakedly xenophobic or Mean Girls callously cruel, its just pumping your eyeballs and ear holes full of the dumbest fucking advertisements imaginable.
Not good to ingest that stuff.
And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?
A bunch of government agencies are being told to do business exclusively on X, The Everything App.
Musk’s also trying to build out a financials tool within his ecosystem and to incentivize more people to do business in his preferred basket of shitcoins.
He’s a monopolist, working with other monopolists to corner the Internet as a marketplace. He’s not looking to give people a choice to use other tools.
I’ve seen more than a few theories about exactly what Trump says, who does the stenography, and how much of it gets included in his tweets. Early in his presidency, the tone of his tweets was very fast-and-loose. Then the staff got shuffled and they started sounding more polished. But by the end of the presidency, they’d degraded back down to “Old Man Yells At Louds” levels of comment again.
Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.
But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.
Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING.
There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.
Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.
I doubt a hotel receptionist would make use of a pubkey cryptography.
If you’re just flashing an ID like a badge, maybe not. But as soon as the hotel tries to use the information to do anything (even as trivial as adding it to their local systems) there’s a good chance it’ll get bounced or hung up. A fake digital id is worse than none at all. Its a big red flag saying “Look harder at this person, they’re suspicious!”
That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.
Bare minimum, it would take a substantial amount of time and resources to harvest data from every phone of every driver passing through a particular checkpoint. Not that I’d ever recommend handing over my phone to a cop, but this kind of data transfer isn’t trivial. And its not clear what a street cop is going to do with 10 GB of accumulated vacation photos.
On the flip side, if you have an Automatic Backup feature on your phone, its going to a cloud computer somewhere. And that cloud computer is almost certainly compromised by the state digital security agency (and probably a number of foreign security agencies). At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a physical id or a digital one, just knowing who you are is enough to tie you back to that digital archive.
But… again, what is it that front-line state agents are planning to do with all this data? That’s never been made particularly clear.
Why do people buy stuff from a creepy company like that?
Because its the biggest and most visible one that everyone uses. And because so many Amazon shoppers are Prime Members anyway, as the cost of not being a Prime Member makes it functionally a requirement.
Couldn’t you just stop by at the local whatever shop on your way home?
How much would I pay not to spend an extra 30-60min fighting traffic and waiting in long lines? In that sense, Prime is a steal.
Well, there was that brief bright moment with Corbyn. But then he got the Julius Caeser treatment for siding with the Radical Islamist Extremism of the anti-genocide movement.
Okay, but have you considered all the new AI they are helping create.