Everyone can make stupid mistakes, and the amount of repercussions that you can end up with can be really small or really big regardless of the actual significance of what you said or what you did, because the world does not hold a single, consistent set of morals and opinions, nor are we good at passing judgement in a fair and consistent manner.
Furthermore, context matters, but context is the first thing that gets lost online.
Something that was said or done in one context can be perfectly fine in that context while at the same time that thing can be completely unacceptable in another context.
We need not and we should not strive to keep a record of everything. It is important that we are able to forget.
The world at large is not capable of ensuring due process. Real lives of innocent people are ruined. People are driven to suicide. All because the public formed a narrative about someone based on incomplete or otherwise inaccurate information.
You are talking about incognito mode / private browsing right?
When I open an incognito tab and search for “latex”, the entire first page of results is still all about LaTeX for me and I would bet my left hand that this is not universally true.
In other words, you are still seeing personalized results.
Yup, I tried the same thing. I would guess they are still doing some sort of server-side personalization and/or identification, they just don't continue to track you via cookies. For me it wasn't that surprising, I tried doing this from an IP address associated with a large CS dept.
> If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.
“Just delete it”.
Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and:
1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them.
2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available.
So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google.
“Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple!
The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today.
We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted.
If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results.
Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly.
Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites.
Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever.
But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.
But Google does cooperate with DMCA. The difference there is that that content deemed in violation of copyright is actually illegal for anyone to distribute; legal responsibility extends all the way to the website owner.
Unless content falling under "right to be forgotten" is ruled privileged and not legal for public distribution, any artificial roadblocks to their discovery will merely present a business opportunity for their circumvention.
It is that simple. Just the same as in real life. If you're "saying, likeing, sharing" things that "don't represent who you are" maybe you should take some time for introspection rather than demand the world to follow your narrative.
Information you, yourself, post publicly to the internet is public. Just the same as if you got up in Times Square and shouted it using a megaphone.
Information that is factually accurate that is posted publically on the internet isn't under your domain to censure. This falls heavily in the camp of "freedom of my speech not freedom of your speech" that seems so common here.
Information that is posted by others that isn't factual is already covered by libel and slander laws so doesn't fall under here.
The internet should be, and for the sake of truth has to be, immutable. The "right to be forgotten" is the right to break any concept of online reputation.
If you want to control your narrative, maybe don't post thoughtlessly and publicly.
> If you want to control your narrative, maybe don't post thoughtlessly and publicly.
I am not posting thoughtlessly. What I am saying is that there is just a million ways that anything can be interpreted in the future that you have no way of foreseeing.
Even a silence can be interpreted in such manner. Should we be able to retrospectively edit the past if it somehow concerns us? Seriously, given how stirred up things are, it's not unrealistic to imagine that someone would want you to "feel guilty" of not posting something in the past.
This is not a tech problem (at all). This is a social problem that had existed since forever, but now uncovered by technology's availability. And if the agreed solution to the "world's gone mad" is to grant one legal ability to alter other's memories, then the world's truly gone mad.
Honestly, it's times like this that make me incredibly fucking sad for the future of humanity. It's bad enough that there are people dealing with a tragic and imminent situation, but to then immediately make this about yourself is absolutely loathsome.
Also, the comments on the live YouTube broadcast of 'they deserved it' or 'serves them right' or 'what now, NRA' are fucking repulsive. Seriously, I don't know how to fix this problem, but it makes me so incredibly angry to realize just how few people can empathize with the plight of others.
> Please don't install PeerTube for production on a small device behind a low bandwidth connection (example: a Raspberry PI behind your ADSL link) because it could slow down the fediverse.
Sounds like PeerTube is vulnerable to a sorts of denial of service attack from bad actors that would join and then limit the bandwidth to extreme amounts.
Hasn’t this been solved already in other P2P protocols? Couldn’t they have built upon an existing protocol that protected them against this?
Regardless of that specific problem, it would be wise to build upon an existing protocol (e.g. IPFS), because it would help prevent future problems AND it would increase traction of federated content sharing. The more people use a single protocol, the more all applications benefit in latency, speed, availability; but also in future development.
This is the part that I find somewhat unfortunate about Peertube. This means that only ActivityPub clients that support WebRTC will be able to access Peertube media. Right now, I think this basically means just modern web browsers. It bothers me somewhat that an early, potentially major ActivityPub service is going to limit full functionality to the few existing major web browsers. That's the opposite of what I want from a federated protocol. (Someone correct me if I've got any of this wrong.)
Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.
ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested).
In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
> and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.
Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat.
> [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media.
ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)?
It is, but I don't see how web browsers would need to interact directly with ActivityPub. That's just a way to settle on a json structure everyone will be using in their web application (that acts as AP client), as is the case in Mastodon.
Here with PeerTube the client interface doesn't interact with AP to watch videos or get them. It just requests the list directly to the server.
WebRTC libraries exist outside of browsers. What video-capable software are you hoping to use this with that isn't a browser and isn't able to be wired up to a library?
My concern isn't about any current AP clients; it's that we'd be cutting off a whole dearth of potential future AP clients by making it the general expectation that all viable AP clients support WebRTC, and thus the task of building a client goes from the relatively simple "support json over http" to "support those + WebTorrent/WebRTC", which (despite what you say) isn't trivial (unless the client is in-browser/webview). Even if "just hook up a library" were a viable solution, the requisite increase in complexity/LOC/bugs would be really unfortunate. If this were the case, it seems to me we'd lose a lot of potential future diversity in AP clients.
I'm having trouble finding any complete WebRTC implementations outside of browsers, do you have any examples?
This issue (i.e. not building upon an existing protocols such as IPFS or bit torrent tech) is persistent within the alt-net / distributed-net community and means that MANY services have fickle/hacked-together (in the bad way) feel to them. Even stuff like Riot.im (which is built on top of the Matrix protocol) has a sluggish/react-js-overload feel to it.. plus the deep&wide stack makes it incredibly hard to understand/trust the system in a meaningful way.
Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.
So speaking from the Riot/Matrix perspective, this is a really interesting phenomenon which we are painfully aware of. For context: we built centralised comms apps before creating Matrix. So we have a direct side by side comparison, and reckon it’s about 6x more effort to do the decentralised equivalent. On the UX side, our centralised apps were actually pretty polished and lightweight - sadly they are gone now (hence in part Matrix), but you can get an idea from stuff like https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/.
So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is:
* Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit
* Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype)
* Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction
But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices.
That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs.
And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.
Good to hear that you are dedicating attention to Riot's UI which is currently the only decentralized app I use :). Less often really is better when it comes to UI, case in point: having to admin Google Apps could be great but is in fact a pain due to sluggish JS redrawing plus constantly re-arranged navi-bar(s)/icons/text/etc. causing one to NEVER be properly fast with it which is a pain for anyone working on daily admin tasks for an organisation (me).
Also, thanks for drawing attention to my ignorance when it came to the protocol aspect: can see key players ARE built on proper protocols.
(just to be clear: I’m responding to the “UX of decentralised apps is crap” bit of the parent post rather than “build on existing protocols”, given peertube and riot and mastodon etc all build on well defined protocols.)
If their goal is to be "decentralized" that might not fit the bill (depending on your definition of decentralized). I wouldn't consider Tor to be decentralized.
What's more it's a bit sad that only a small part of the content can't be served by those small peers making them useful instead of harmful to the network...
When I change whois privacy to enabled and press save it just says "Unable to update the contact."
This happens both with my .com and my .net domain.