> Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.
I don't think a very convincing or strong legal argument is "I don't want to do that thing that works that I have to do legally, because I just don't like it" RT: mastodon.social/users/Sarahp/s…
Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/mastodon-says-it-doesnt-have-the-means-to-comply-with-age-verification-laws/
@rude Mastodon software doesn't have any way to plug in an age verfification service so how as a Mastodon operator who doesn't code comply with MS laws? Furthermore Mastodon is AGPL so if you moodified it and have open reg you need to now host your changes somewhere.
> Mastodon software doesn't have any way to plug in an age verfification service
Correct. So it would be against the law to host a Mastodon server with open registration in such a jurisdiction until the software can comply with the law.
This also means Pleroma may have to add this functionality as well if the legal pressures arrive on our doorstep too.
@jonah not quite, you have to be able to prove they pirated it. Just because we are certain they did doesn't mean we have the specific logs or other evidence proving it.
Also in jurisdictions where it's not illegal to download the pirated content, only to publish it -- they have to have proof they were seeding it.
This is mostly how they seem to be escaping culpability for now. And it's probably a good thing for all of us that they can't just look at files on a disk and say "hey, you got this illegally" without having more proof than that.
The ai companies keep arguing that the law needs to change, but that's like a burglar arguing that the prison sentences are too long, because if I steal 1000s of items, I'll go away to prison for the rest of their life.
We need to keep these damages because we need to reign in corporate exploitation.
"#Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors"
Precedent set? Both of my #Scarfolk books were downloaded and pirated from the LibGen 'shadow library'. Compensation would be nice. Anyone aware of other class-action lawsuits I can join, or have any other legal pointers?
Anthropic PBC told a pair of courts in July that a judge’s order approving class-action status for authors’ copyright lawsuit over millions of pirated books put “inordinate pressure” on the company to settle a case that could kill the company.
this is creating quite the Streisand effect too. Now so many people are going to know how to pirate books from Library Genesis / Annas Archive because people won't shut up about it
yeah but they keep posting stuff like "Look, all my books are for free on Library Genesis! This means Anthropic was trained on it! Hey everyone, go search for your books on there!!!"
If you've been a Usenet consumer for downloading binaries you have probably encountered the need to subscribe to an indexer to find quality content. This is not so much different from a private tracker for torrents.
Governments have basically lost the ability to build large IT systems. And politicians keep thinking the solution is giving trash like KPMG money to “fix” the problem they literally created. cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/sa…
If you want to see a horror show of an API design, here you go. Newznab will return HTTP 200 responses for errors. You have to parse the XML to figure out if there was an error or not.
Analýza: Snaha některých evropských politiků zničit poslední výspu digitálního soukromí nebere konce. Klíčové hlasování v Radě EU se očekává 14. října, Česko je proti – a v menšině.
Temer ctyri dekady jsem zil a vubec nechapal, proc je vytezovani faktur tak velky byznys. Proste firmy si mezi sebou posilaji faktury, ty si pridas do ucetnictvi, zaplatis ... vsecko v cajku.
Pochopil jsem, az s prichodem na americky trh.
Borci poslou fakturu:
Invoice To: Martin Pay $3700
92.7% faktur je potreba doresit. Kam poslat penize. Ze maji fakturovat na Unreleased Ltd. Za co jsou to penize. Jestli je to zaplacene.
Open AI re-enabled Chat GPT 4O for paid users after complaints that GPT 5 wasn’t warm andfriendly enough.
Is caring that much about a computer program which is completely incapable of experiencing emotions or friendship emulating these things weird to anyone else? Or is my neurodiversity just showing? People also have AI significant others and spouses, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Four more accounts to #Fediblock. JimmyTruth@c.im, JimmyTruth@aus.social, J@gardenstate.social, and JimmyTruth@ohai.social. Thanks to @admin for getting these taken care of as well. I can't even imagine how bloody stressful this is for you guys. There is no way you should have to basically be dealing with this child's antics.
And for those who are interested, this Jimmy dude has way too much time on his hands. Here are all of his accounts, well the ones I got anyway. I would suggest reporting these to your Mastodon admin. This guy's a nut! R@cr8r.gg, J@hear-me.social, Jimmy@mastodon.art, J@podvibes.co, Jimmy@wehavecookies.social, JimmyTruth@mstdn.party, JimmyTruth@mstdn.plus, Jimmytruth@mastodon.world, J@archaeo.social, JimmyTruth@ohai.social, J@privacysafe.social, Jimmy@liberdon.com, j@gofer.social, JimmyTruth@techhub.social, J@masto.social, JimmyTruth@mas.to, j@clttr.it, J@metalverse.social, J@convo.casa, Jimmy@theres.life, R@rettiwtkcuf.social, J@galacticsocial.network, J@toot.kiwi, J@social.boger.dev, J@mastodon.enitin.xyz, J@karibu.social, R@mastodon.de, R@goingdark.social, Ramonsalazar@rassilni.com, Ramonsalazar@mastodon.bida, Ramonsalazar@masto.nu, R@jmm.kr, R@social.veraciousnetwork.com, R@silicon.moe, R@bookstodon.com, R@expressional.social, Ramon@cyberplace.social.im, J@breeze.town, Ramon@social.cologne, J@ruhr.social, ramonsalazar@muenchen.social, Raymond@troet.cafe, J@salmon-skin-roll-official, top R@kanoa.de, JimmyTruth@mastodon.uno, R@jmm.kr, R@toot.fan, J@undefined.social, J@moris.social, Jimmy@mastodon.cc, J@dizl.de, J@tty0.social, J@weird.autos, J@strangeminds.social, J@equestria.social, J@illegal-in-nepal.org, J@friends.ravergram.club, Raymond@berlin.social. I'll, add to this toot if I find any more accounts of his.
Today, we celebrate the close of the June 2025 Outreachy Internship round!
Congratulations to our interns on their amazing contributions and growth.
We sincerely thank and appreciate our mentors + community coordinators for their support and collaboration.
This isn’t the end, it’s the start of many more contributions to the open source ecosystem. Together, we continue to build a more inclusive tech future. 💙
Ehrlich: wenn ein paar Leute im Beitrittsgebiet, das weniger Menschen als NRW umfasst, nun nach 35 Jahren beginnen, mit der deutschen Fahne (immerhin ein Symbol demokratischen Engagements von Hambacher Fest über Paulskirche bis Weimar und Herrenchiemsee) und der Hymne zu „fremdeln“, dann ist das ungefähr so bedeutsam wie der sprichwörtliche Sack Reis, der in Peking umfällt. Hat Ramelow, den ich menschlich eigentlich bislang durchaus schätze, einen solch populistischen Kram nötig?
🔐 Tuta Mail introduces key verification to strengthen end-to-end encryption and defend against MITM attacks 👥 Users can now verify contacts’ public keys via QR code or manual comparison. If skipped, Tuta defaults to TOFU (Trust On First Use) for seamless encryption 🧩
Hey everybody, I've been playing the alpha of a creature collecting roguelite with accessibility for blind and other disabilities, there's also a demo on steam. The dev is trying to fund more development of the game so that it doesn't have to released with anything missing as the planned release date was September. If you like indie devs, roguelikes, and accessibility in games, please consider backing!
1/ A new EU plan could expand access to personal data for US immigration and law enforcement.
This proposal document (see article) was released without a press announcement or much mention at all, yet it contains alarming plans.
Under the US's Visa Waiver Program (VWP), countries whose citizens can travel to the US without a visa already have to let US agencies search their police databases to see whether travellers have been involved in terrorism or serious crime.
According to Google, #Conversations_im is now also collecting users’ email addresses.
Pretty much the exact same thing that happened to Quicksy about a month ago¹ is now also happening to Conversations.
An app update I submitted ~48 hours ago passed review without any issues. A subsequent update just now, which contained very minor bug fixes, was rejected because I failed to declare that I’m collecting email addresses.
Someone or something at Google started to hallucinate that #Quicksy is collecting the user's email address and would not approve the app update until we declared that in our data policy.
The sign up process in Quicksy hasn't changed in 7 years. I don't even know where the user would enter their email address and I'm not aware of an API that collects this automatically.
One of the main reason I do not publish my apps on the Play Store is to avoid Google's unproductive process, and to not have anything to do with their obscure reviews.
that sucks. Whatever LLM (or worse, human) they're using to do this obviously needs to be trained a thing or two about the difference between email addresses and JIDs 🙄
I admitted to collecting email addresses because it is the fastest way to get the release out, and now I’m appealing the decision. Let’s see where this is going. Spoiler: very likely nowhere. Google doesn’t make mistakes.
Are you certain that they actually mistook XMPP addresses for e-mail addresses? Perhaps they're just referring to those e-mail addresses collected by some XMPP servers when signing up or something similar?
Google rejected my appeal and included this helpful screenshot to demonstrate that Conversations is collecting email addresses.
Extending this logic means that any app with a free form text field is technically collecting users social security numbers. Because the user could potentially enter that.
the indentations that your keyboard makes while you are slamming your face into it must be hurting. I'm sorry you have to go through this - again. I've got mad respect for your patience over the years. Not sure if I could bring that, to be honest.
I really don't think you should have to, but if you split it into "username" and "XMPP server" would that help, or do you think it would annoy / confuse users too much?
when the field is empty, the placeholder (text in the background) shows `username@example.com`. The field also validates what appears like e-mail addresses. I think that this might have confused them.
When entering a domain that does not exist, Conversations shows "server not found" immediately. When entering a domain that does exist, but is not associated with an XMPP server, Conversations freezes for some time. Maybe that timeout should be reduced?
I would suggest filling the compliance paperwork stating that your app collects XMPP addresses (as stated in the field label), which may look like e-mail addresses but are actually not, unless an identical e-mail address exists.
I think you should mention in the appeal that you don't collect jabber id because it's only stored locally on the device and used to authenticate with origin xmpp server, so the app doesn't collect anything.
Yeah, of course they'll just type @hotmail.com and reject it again.
This kind of thing would have been easier if XMPP didn't have that no-SRV fallback behavior, if SRV records were always required, so you could tell by the existence of SRV records whether a domain was a valid XMPP domain without connecting to the fallback address.
right, that's the ones we know are curl. The ones saying curl in the user-agent. We can't know how many additional ones there are without the user-agent set
Berlin, 29 August 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.1, the first minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity in office environments, is now available at https://www.libreoffice.
LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for
Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for
all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress,
Draw, Math …
I've been dabbling a bit more with AI-driven development and have a basic windows RSS reader joining my Sports Scores and Image Description Toolkit apps.RSS Quick, A Basic RSS Reader for Windows 1.0 Available theideaplace.net/rss-quick-a-b…
I’ve been dabbling further with AI-driven development and have another app for exploration. This time it is a basic RSS Reader for Windows I’m calling RSS Quick. Get the full details an…
@menelion I use VS code, a GitHub Copilot subscription, and then various frameworks. My sports score and image description tool kit apps were python. RSS quick is a C sharp WPF application because I find the accessibility better for graphical apps. I also, as I think I have been in my blog post, want to be transparent that I am using AI for a sizable part of my development. I have the ideas and the understanding of what I want to happen and am using AI to help me deliver it more rapidly.
Absolutely with you in this. I'm a developer myself, so I'm, so to say, more nitty-gritty into details and write large parts of the code myself, but I extensively use Claude Code now.
Default handshake timeout is hardcoded (10 seconds) and doesn't respect --connect-timeout parameter. In some cases 10 seconds can be not enough or too long to "establish a connection"...
Co by pro Česko znamenalo, kdyby odešlo ze Severoatlantické aliance? Pražská lídryně Stačilo! Jana Maláčová ve Studiu N odmítá odpovědět. Hnutí přitom prosazuje referendum o vystoupení z NATO i EU. Celý rozhovor najdete na herohero.co/studion
Tak jsem ten díl poslechl cestou z práce. Uff to je síla. S tou paní to jde z kopce. Jen výkruty a mlžení.
Člověk chce pochopit o co jim jde a jak na věc nahlíží. Ale nedozví se nic. Respektive dozvíme se jen zvláštní pravidlo: Když je něco rozbité, tak to zrušíme.
rude
in reply to feld • • •feld
in reply to rude • • •@rude it's a great way to see Mastodon's funding blown on stupid legal fees, yes.
"We don't have the means to comply with the law" is not the same as "it is not technically possible to comply with the law".
If you run a server with open registration, you absolutely could hook in an age verification service.
I expect if the government chooses to target them they will lose.
Blurry Moon
in reply to feld • • •feld
in reply to Blurry Moon • • •@sun @rude
> Mastodon software doesn't have any way to plug in an age verfification service
Correct. So it would be against the law to host a Mastodon server with open registration in such a jurisdiction until the software can comply with the law.
This also means Pleroma may have to add this functionality as well if the legal pressures arrive on our doorstep too.
rude
in reply to feld • • •I doubt they would pursue the software itself. More likely end up playing wackamole against mastodon instance owners.
Laws like this are limp and unenforceable. They might as well make a law banning all minors from the internet.
feld
in reply to rude • • •@rude
> They might as well make a law banning all minors from the internet.
Yes that's where we're going
Jonah Aragon
in reply to feld • • •feld
in reply to Jonah Aragon • • •@jonah not quite, you have to be able to prove they pirated it. Just because we are certain they did doesn't mean we have the specific logs or other evidence proving it.
Also in jurisdictions where it's not illegal to download the pirated content, only to publish it -- they have to have proof they were seeding it.
This is mostly how they seem to be escaping culpability for now. And it's probably a good thing for all of us that they can't just look at files on a disk and say "hey, you got this illegally" without having more proof than that.
Jonah Aragon
in reply to feld • • •feld
in reply to Jonah Aragon • • •