The limits of owning your own infra to seize the means of production come down to who is keeping the bare metal alive on the rack. Of course only a relatively small portion of the #fediverse is affected by this particular outage. The major servers are “unperturbed” and folks might have to notice that certain accounts aren’t active right now if they weren’t aware of this cluster outage on our host’s host.

Remarkable growth for an otherwise obscure open source decentralized platform with a singular appeal that Elon Musk cannot control it. These charts show the steep sudden growth of new Mastodon servers appearing to absorb the exodus precipitated by his takeover. These charts don’t capture the astonishing brain drain, however. Until you make the effort to go see who has discovered another way, it’s hard to grasp why this place feels so suddenly different.

💫Nerd Alert: Learned how to resolve my mastodon server issues and will be opening up federate.social for a new cohort of applicants today. Hoping to attract 50% newbies and 50% folks looking to jump off of a chaotic crowded big instance. Stay tuned. #GetFederated Why join my #fediverse instance?
⛔️I’ve already blocked (defederated) several nasty servers for troll-free trust and safety.
🆘I respond to reports and enforce the clearly posted rules.
👨🏻‍💻Guidance and support learning a new way to do social media.
🌐A more focused federated feed

If I launched a Mastodon server that espouses my values regarding tech, media, data and democracy would you join? #TwitterMigration If you tapped the fourth option in the poll above, well here you go. #TwitterMigration theguardian.com/media/2022/nov…

My best advice for dipping your toes in masto as elon’s husk takes shape…

https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1587237655628103682

Already have small core of familiars posting comparable content #OnThere at a steady clip along with all new voices I’ve never met before. I’ve been playing around for a weekend and already my notifications for masto have overtaken my twitter notifs. You have to work at it tho.

funny how things settle once the executive depositions are scheduled subtweet cheatsheet

Bekah Mercer suing Alexander Nix for £16M for causing downfall of her precious Cambridge Analytica. Nix insists to High Court that his comments captured undercover by C4 are not to be taken literally, blaming others for stonewalling the ICO investigation
🔐law360.com/articles/15243… “Nix, who was chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, also denies that the company was "engulfed in scandal" following a series that aired on Channel 4.”

Weird then how CA/SCL claimed it needed to go out of business because being engulfed in scandal chased away all their clients

It’s all very 1980s. Mortgages are expensive. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest t-shirts are a hot commodity but so are satanic panics. A dark cloud of nuclear war looms large. Indy music sounds like The Cure. Conservatives have a weird way of promoting censorship. A virus politicized England’s PM is a woman and Charles III is in the spotlight… just free associations how the 2020s are like the 1980s … everything old is new again

Remarkable to see FTC draw out the mindset of A/B split testing as a catalyst for breeding deceptive design patterns in UI toward a harmful UX. #DarkPatterns ftc.gov/reports/bringi… no one worried that covert, unethical, profit-driven automated psychological experiments on non-consenting subjects would yield harm but who cares because chart go up

California’s latest data privacy law aims to switch privacy default settings from off to on for everyone by protecting minors. I prefer granting all people equal protections but the USA only has the political will to protect children from mass data abuse. nytimes.com/2022/09/15/bus… California is also convinced of its own exceptionalism, that its rules drive the whole market, such as in auto emissions. But the CCPA/CPRA has not had the same effect in my view, as a person seeking expanded #DataRights without residing in California or the EU.

Incoming

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1570574563943264256

There were so many “cambridge analyticas” that Facebook couldn’t possibly make good on its audit. It had to deflect deposition at any cost.

Absolute clownshow but hey it’s super fun so why worry

https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1570131071328571394

Same trick that Cambridge Analytica used to weasel word their statements. Are you using Cambridge Analytica interchangeably with SCL because they aren’t. Are you using TikTok and Bytedance interchangeably because they aren’t.

Honestly, I don’t know why anyone trusts any online reviews. It’s a fraud-filled free-for-all.

https://twitter.com/TruthinAd/status/1570025286841864194

FTC to companies: Employing fake review services is a deceptive practice that violates FTC ACT. (!) Ever been approached by fake review fraudsters to attack your competitors? FTC wants your story at reportfraud.ftc.gov

https://twitter.com/FTC/status/1570059750284591105

Dear @Twitter ads: when i turn off ads personalization and then block draft kings bc i don’t want mobile gambling ads that gesture is not a personalization signal to quickly serve me more mobile gambling ads Seriously. When you block an advertiser that’s in the sub category of a harmful product like mobile gambling then there’s a damn good chance the appropriate UX here is to stop serving me competitors of the original block, that being draft kings

Not only did Zuck help create his biggest competitor, he did so knowing they were cheating his company. Facebook may have noticed Bytedance using the scrape-and-retarget hack likely originated/perfected by Cambridge Analytica.

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1567645013613363202

“Monthly Bytedance % of Spend from Policy-Violating Ads” is one hell of a chart label! Holy smokes!

I remember it was @AP that reported on Flynn’s failure to disclose his employment at SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. He went on to plead the 5th to Senate Intel Committee when probed on that sore subject. AP article from August 2017 in link. Conclusion of Vol5 of SSCI Russia Report in screenshot which investigated SCL, PSY and Flynn’s own digital op shops. apnews.com/article/north-…

Our data leaks all over the place. It even leaks within companies and they have no idea where it’s going. This is an illegal way to engineer platforms. Platforms that fail to enable #DataRights must be rebuilt. It was pure hubris to design them otherwise. theintercept.com/2022/09/07/fac… No one at Facebook knows what happens to your data. You can see why paying mega fines and settlements is better for Zuckerberg’s business than re-building Facebook from scratch. You can see why he’d rather retire his essentially unlawful apps and focus on something else entirely.

Started another semester of @DarkData today. So lucky to have candidates who range from BFA, MA, MPS, MS, MFA, to a PhD candidate. Student representation across 3 colleges at @TheNewSchool including Parsons, New School for Social Research, and Schools of Public Engagement. Syllabus skeleton:
Part 1️⃣:Concepts
🗄️Origins
🗳️Data Politics
👥Data Selves
👣Privacy
👁️Visual Surveillance
👀Attention Economy
Midterm: Pitch for Zine
Part 2️⃣: Comparative Study
🇺🇸 & 🇪🇺
🇮🇳 & 🇨🇳
🌍“Rest of World”
🔜Special Topic
📑Zine Publishing Workshop
mfadt.parsons.edu/darkdata

Update: Bekah Mercer is now suing Alexander Nix for doing her the ‘favour’ of running Campaign Analytica/SCL into bankruptcy/insolvency as to enjoy the moratorium on data protection act violations which the UK ICO described and affected all registered voters (not just 87 million)

https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1258585386428792832

Weird “Payback suit” acting as Dynamo Recoveries after Bekah Mercer already achieved absorbing Cambridge Analytica/SCL into Emerdata Limited and Nigel Oakes got defence gigs/assets as SCL Analytics Ltd

https://twitter.com/zamaan_qureshi/status/1548115634415751168

Adtech is at its core an immoral and dangerous business practice that reveals its injuries to the innocent during ground war in Europe and the rollback of civil rights in America.

https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1542796900843364352

data privacy is a fundamental human right and stealing it save money on your ad spend is costing society somewhere else

Congress discovering the marketplace of advertising identifiers that are used to re-identify us up the adtech and data broker supply chain. These IDs provide cover for data collection practices and help gaslight consumers about anonymization. #DataRights wsj.com/articles/lawma… Dobbs will put focus on data brokers and the trafficking of targets for vigilante laws

https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1540324531491020801