Ah, right. I forgot that they’re based in Sweden. That’s understandable if it’s simply a lack of familiarity with the language, but, still, I would expect a company like Mullvad to at least have one native-equivalent English speaker to look over their public facing English stuff. None of this is the end of the world, ofc — I’m just mildly surprised.

I was not aware that KDE Connect ran on Windows! This is great to hear for recommendations. Thanks for spreading awareness!

Yeah, it definitely rehashed the trope, but I still think that movie is underrated.

I honestly forgot that this game existed. I remember it being very well made, but I could never fully get into it for some reason.

There are a surprising number of grammatical errors in that blog post. Did anyone proof read it, I wonder?

Orchis Italica

Thank you!

What plant is that?

Am I correct in understanding that you are inferring that the security guards would be likely to do what the police did?

Regarding that, I found this:

The school district also has its own police force with four officers and partners with local law enforcement, according to the document. Secondary campuses have staff who patrol door entrances, parking lots and perimeters of campuses. [source]

If that’s what you are referring to, it isn’t exactly what I meant. I was more referring to a dedicated static armed security force that watches entrances to the school.

What if the security is competent?

But the bomb i meant is a different scale. if recreational or scientific explosives are what you want are you really going to do so using an actual truckload of industrial fertilizer?

And in that case, the collection of explosives could potentially be a passive threat to others. Imo, the laws surrounding it should depend on the context — ie threat to public safety.

I was trying to say that the hardware cost to host it may not be expensive, but the management cost could be quite costly.

What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.

It’s likely both. The ratio, however, I’m not sure of.

How about supporting users who want to improve their community instead of finding a new one?

I support that as well. My initial point was from the perspective of users not originating from lemmy.ml being annoyed with how lemmy.ml is administrating itself. If the users of lemmy.ml wish to stay to try and improve it, then I fully stand behind them, but, at the same time, I still support lemmy.ml’s autonomy.

It’s breaking the stated aim of open federation by tampering with comments, posts and mod records, which in turn get propagated or de-propagated to connected instances, right?

I’m not convinced that this is in conflict with the aim of federation. The whole point is to give people the power to create their own instances with their own rules instead of having to rely on a single central authority. The network isn’t necessarily distributed — it’s decentralized. An instance can administrate their content as they see fit. An instance cannot alter the content produced by any other instance. An instance can only manage the content originating from itself.

but 1) one instance (particular a significant one like ML) affects other instances

Would you mind being more specific?

they’re breaking the spirit of their own software by shamelessly abusing admin powers, in turn helping to normalize that behavior to the Lemmy side of the FV.

Hm, well, it depends on your perspective. The whole point of the Fediverse is to give people the freedom and power to control how they interact with the service. A server has the freedom to associate with the users that they wish in the same way that you have the freedom to consume what you wish. The spirit of the software is to enable people to have this freedom that otherwise wouldn’t exist with a large central service. The way I like to look at the Fediverse is where each instance is like a country, and each community is like a regional/state/provincial government within the country, and federation between instances is like cross-border policies between nations.

a supposedly transparent […] social network?

I’m not sure what you mean by “transparent”.

a supposedly […] user-run […] social network?

It is user-run, in that any user can create an instance.

a supposedly […] P2P social network?

It’s not P2P. A P2P network would be distributed. The Fediverse is decentralized.

No government would ever allow coins like Monero to become main forms of currency.

It depends on what you mean by “allow” and “main form of currency”. Afaik, in the US (and the rest of the west), at least, there are no laws regarding what form the medium of exchange should take for the exchange of goods and services. The dollar is simply the standard currency to make payments to the government. For example:

United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts. [31 U.S. Code § 5103 (archive)]

Accepting random alt coins would also come with the expense of having to track them and their wallets separately, exchange costs, volatility, etc, so over time just a few will become generally accepted by businesses.

Is that just a statement of fact, or is that supposed to be an argument against Monero? I’m not sure what the point of that statement is. In any case, I don’t see any issue with that outcome — it would simply be a market decision.

And yes, the most likely consequence of long-term crypto usage is that users will centralize into a few trusted platforms who will get the Lion’s share of tokens and power.

I’d say that this is still TBD, but yes centralized control is a concern, as it would break the current designs of cryptocurrencies (as far as I currently understand their designs, that is). Though, note that there is a difference between central ownership of coins in circulation, and central ownership of the network (of course depending on the design of the network — I feel that proof of stake would be vulnerable to this).

I agree with both statements.

For sure. What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to be confident in the privacy of software if one were to treat it as a black box, ie an average consumer.

Hm, I feel that it’s inaccurate to say “we wouldn’t be able to tell”. It’s not exactly a black box system — the app would have to run on an operating system, and if you are able to know what the operating system is doing, and what instructions are being executed by the CPU, then you can know exactly what the app is doing.

What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to treat software as a black box and be sure of its safety without having to fundamentally audit it.