Are there reasonably okay options to paying digitally without the surveillance part (or at least less of it as compared to credit cards?) Blockchain is a nonstarter due to the practical limitations in sustaining proof of work and stake.

What a great thing it is, to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it.

The UCI has not yet responded to a request for comment, but a Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on individual cases. All visa applications are carefully considered on their individual merits in line with the immigration rules,” adding: “We have been working closely with organisers to ensure that participants of this event are clear on the visa application process and timelines.”

Give them Visas on arrival. They sure will cycle/arrive early. That is if they need visas.

Hello. The horrible loss of life in this crisis is clear for all to see. Even though there is so much confusion on what is coming out of Ukraine, I wonder what is really the situation of government control like. Is the Ukrainian government controlling major areas or is the Russian army having an upper hand?

A perspective about NSO that I find important but not usually covered is how their success is related to centralized mobile phone operating software. One vulnerability exposes billions of devices. Perhaps if we had FOSS mobile OS options as mainstream installations, it would not be as easy for these companies to hack almost anybody at once.

For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week's terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise signup effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are from existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff.

The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that in so far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.

In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.

After upgrading to 0.15.1, I activated the signup form. I haven’t had to deal with the daily trolls. Not ideal but it helps.

Last night, Burkina Faso defence minister denies rumours President Kabore has been detained

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/burkina-faso-defence-minister-denies-rumours-president-kabore-has-been-detained-2022-01-23/

I like the app. Good work on the tutorials and it feels overall like a well done package.

I have been to two cities in West Africa: Lagos and Dakar. My experience was no different from other parts like SouthErn Africa and The Horn.

On to financing the project. They need to find $1B to get the project done and I wonder whether this was a tactical move to build confidence on their credibility while fundraising.

Question 1 - yes, ansible is run on your local machine.

Kate + RStudio.

I spend a lot of time working in R so RStudio is a practical choice. It could be better in many ways though, which is why I use Kate for general editing tasks.

Hey - just checking in. How is this "news"? Is it because Ukraine is in the news?

This is very interesting. Now I wonder if my mind thinks best about code in native language or the language I first encountered code in.

Lemmy. Fairly obvious why.

Very interesting read. Supplement this with James Scott's State Simplifications: Nature, Space and People

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9760.1995.tb00035.x

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Some journalist also making that case that this Hamdok threat is being used to bargain with the military especially on appointments.

Don’t forget the whole idea of federation is that an instance with 10 members is not limited to those members only on content sources. I like it when more instances interlink and therefore reduce the centralization risks while keeping network benefits.

Watamu is quite something.

Been looking for a reliable VPS in the region for low latency and stuff. Hair-pinning Europe is not a good gesture for an "African" instance but we are pragmatic.

Public participation is a key variable in budget processes. The problem though is that the theatre of participation is less by affected residents and more by executive offices.

Nope! I would rather deal with spam than everyday surveillance.

Empire be looting since forever:

These artefacts were taken in 1868 after the battle of Maqdala between the British and Ethiopian empires. Some of the objects had been offered in an auction in Britain in June by a private seller descended from a British soldier who fought in Maqdala.

This is cool. Aramia gĩcĩgĩ.

Thank you. I missed this one yesterday. Banned them for spamming.

This is a brainstorm post, not a peer-reviewed paper on moderating fediverse :) Mods with finite resources cannot compete with automated systems. The signal to noise ratio will keep increasing if a new account can post 10 items immediately they join. The alternative could be restricted signups (signups by invitations, recommendations) even though a low hanging fruit could be temporal throttling for new users. Something got to give in the long run.

I agree on the need for a technical friction on new users ability to post -- and especially on the main communities that are federated with other instances.

Good stuff @dessalines@lemmy.ml. Successful upgrade on these shores.

If you look at their funding sources -- and therefore the structure they are constrained in -- you will notice there is a certain pro-American, anti-other sensibility. Philanthropies, while they look all well meaning (and most evolve into reasonable places for social change), they also serve to 'launder' the shady histories of their founders. Chen Zuckerburg Foundation does not sound as ironic promoting privacy compared to if this was done by Facebook.

Funding is a VERY tough position to figure out in human rights work, and while I know people need to be paid even when they are in so called non-profit (my preferred word here would be non-monetary gains, since profits could generally be social benefits, but I digress), I also believe wherever you knowingly take money from models you in strategic ways.

Also, consider this recent post on how social indexology reproduces hegemonic relations at the global stage: https://baraza.africa/post/10070

The article critically examines how the neoliberal ethos has influenced the racialised ranking of countries using indexes, or what I propose to call social indexology (SI). SI refers to the use of quantitative metrics to measure the performance of countries based on selected indicators, often drawn from a pool of Western and neoliberal variables associated with governance, corruption, development and other value-loaded concepts. The article critically examines the methodological, ideological and cultural shortcomings of SI and how it reinforces existing racial stereotypes about the presumed natural differences between ‘advanced’ European societies and ‘backward’ Global South countries. These racialised imageries have continued since the time of Enlightenment, colonialism and slavery and persist even under global neoliberal hegemony today. The use of SI metrics for the purpose of quantified measurement and ranking gives it the appearance of being ‘scientific’ and as such has the implicit ideological power of making the racialised inequality of peoples and countries much more acceptable and natural.

I have a very tough time decoupling these lists from their market-led and sponsored base.

Indeed, it would be quite a whole discourse. When network effects are not gated in a private company, perhaps we could be on to other issues like quality of service, and selling things, not behavior. Things like storage standards, backups, portability etc. But here we are, asking how to make WhatsApp better, and Amazon more diverse.

Ironic how after every public crisis, these centralized platforms emerge stronger and more accepted in the everyday life. Perhaps because the issues that are framed as problematic are not against their existence -- like EE2E debate, Cambridge Analytica, 2020/2021 censorship tirade linked to COVID and US Elections.

The other point, Twitter in Nambia :), I think we should not assume it would be better. The point, as I see it, is centralization, not nationalism. A Nambia billionaire may be just as worse as a Silicon Valley billionaire. Individual <> Individual, Individual <> State: The market wants to mediate those relations and I think not all domains need the market. Other mediation strategies like collective ownership at the community level can succeed, given time and good will.

Thank you for the article. Renata (the author) has been very consistent on the asymmetrical global relations of technology we contend with. part of me feels the privacy agenda has created a lot of blindspots in public discourse and issues of technological self determination (at the individual and collective level) have been put on the backburner. Fediverse and its enabling protocols offer both networked value AND reasonable sense of independence. Definitely a small piece of the bigger puzzle but yeah, surveillance discourse without (de)centralization aspects is a major blindspot in popular discourse. E2EE on Facebook apps sounds quite an oxymoron.

See this too:

In 1984, Palestinian American intellectual and Columbia University Professor Edward Said famously argued that Palestinians are denied “permission to narrate”.

More than 30 years later, in 2020, Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, analysed opinion articles published in two daily newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – and two weekly news magazines – The New Republic and The Nation – over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that “Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways – yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-companies-are-trying-to-silence-palestinian-voices

The good thing with science is that new evidence leads to change in belief systems. The trouble, in these times, is instead of acknowledging the 'metastable' state of what we know, and hence recommendations, there is an assumption of absolute knowledge.

Is this a case of people getting what they deserve? Persistent poor service delivery as a result of blind support to/for ANC?

Welcome to Baraza, and hopefully you will share more about the safaris you have been to or would recommend.