Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is arrested in France over allegations that his platform enabled terrorists, CSAM, money laundering, fraud, etc. Since I heard the news, I couldn’t stop thinking about these memes:
Platform responsibility
Author Archives: Ali Reza Hayati
What should AI do?
Quote
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
Joanna Maciejewska
Sacrifices
You gotta sacrifice something to get something in return. My boss taught me a life lesson today. We were talking about the wrestling match between Rahman Amouzad and Kiyoota Kotaro in Paris Olympics and how Rahman unbelievably lost the match after dominating all of his previous opponents without losing even one point and he told me something erudite.
He said sometimes you want to prevent losing 2 points and end up losing ten for that. You gotta give the two points and fight for a better position to win.
It’s exactly like that in life. You gotta sacrifice something to get something. It’s just how life works. You gotta give the two points in life so you can continue fighting and getting more. If you stick to the two points, you end up losing everything else.
Human captcha
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have captcha on us? Like when people want to interact with us, we would make them solve the captcha. Are you human enough? They would be forced to answer it with real answers.
A list of random questions would be presented to people:
- Are you racist?
- Are you sexist?
- Are you a bigot?
- Do you support fascists?
- Do you support terrorists?
- Have you ever discriminated against a group of specific people?
- Do you respect people’s privacy?
- Are you a cheater or a betrayer of trust?
- Are you a professional liar?
- Do you secretly do what you preach against?
- Are you a snob?
- Are you trying to interact only to use me for some benefit?
These are just few questions I had in mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could present people with this kind of captcha?
What would you put on your human captcha?
Should we use content warning for everything we post on social networks?
No.
Fastest Object Ever Made by Humans
Link
Blogging
I love blogging. If you know a little about me or follow this blog, you surely know I don’t use social networks, they’re not built for me, but I love blogging and writing about what matters to me on my blog.
I try my best to keep my blog updated but sometimes it gets hard. It’s not only publishing, the server, the program behind the blog (WordPress), plugins installed on it, and some other stuff, such as the domain, needs to be update and taken care of.
Keeping stuff running may not be hard but publishing and being updated is. It’s not that I write and publish because I have to, but sometimes expressing yourself and finding the right way to publish something on your mind is hard.
I have a lot of stuff on my mind that I want to share with people but most of the times it just won’t make it to the blog. I just don’t find a way to put it here. I can’t find the correct words, the correct format, sometimes the correct source, and sometimes the correct category for what I want to share so time passes and I just let it go.
I’m sometimes tempted to create a social network account and write small posts there. Sometimes I think about creating a small micro-blogging platform on this blog and use that but I know it’ll be temporary and a waste of time and energy.
Sometimes I think about closing this blog. Just delete everything and shut it down. No online presence whatsoever. Last time I did I got a bunch of emails from friends and readers telling me they miss the blog. It was a joyful feeling knowing someone cares about what you publish online and actually reads them.
I don’t use any tracking or analytic program on this blog so I have no idea how many people read my posts. The blog is not commercial and it’s not even reader-based, its sole purpose is to give me a safe space to publish what I want.
Blogging is hard. Writing and publishing while you preserve your own standards is hard. Keeping it updated is hard. But even with all that, blogging, writing, and being a part of this great community of indieweb bloggers is so awesome that it’s absolutely worth it.
This morning I woke up thinking about deleting this blog and letting it go. I thought real hard about destroying my last home online but I needed only one click to open up my blog and take a look at it to stop.
This post supposed to be a goodbye post but it’s not. I only need to start writing again to feel good about what I have here. I’m planning to keep it alive for a long time and I hope I can succeed doing so.
Privacy and data regulation
I’ve recently come across a lot of posts questioning data and privacy regulations. What is more common among them to describe privacy regulation as failed or worthless is that the dis-services we might use need that data to function.
That is far from truth. No flashlight app needs to access my contact list. No shopping site needs access to my microphone. No museum needs to know where I’m precisely located to show me a famous painting. Privacy regulation is exactly for that.
Privacy regulation is not there to make sites dysfunction, it’s there so the site won’t sell my personal information to data brokers. It’s there to make sure my privacy won’t be violated solely because I bought a new mobile phone.
My privacy is valuable to me and it should be protected. Regulation is there to protect my rights while also giving you a choice. You can consent to data collection and I can tell the dis-service to not to do so. It’s a choice, much like free speech.
I want my freedom of expression no matter what. Now I can choose to say something or be quiet but I want this right to be protected. Much like that, data should be regulated so you can choose to share it or not and also reverse the choice if you change your mind.
EU, no matter what some people might say, is the leading continent on protecting its people regarding data and privacy and I admire their work. It might not be complete, it might need a lot of work to be as good as it needs to be, but their work is nonetheless admirable.
Privacy and data should be protected, regulated, and violators should be punished. It’s the way it should be and I hope it’s the direction all countries take. We should force our lawmen to follow that route and we should help them with civil protests against violators of our privacy.
Specially now, that free (as in freedom) tech had a lot of progress and made it possible for people to experience same experiences and technologies without being forced to give away their personal information to giant corporations and data brokers.
Digital friends
I have digital friends. Friends who I love dearly. Digital friends, for me, are ones who I consider friend but I’ve never seen them and our relationship remains over internet.
Today someone mentioned a friend of his who know each other for more than 11 years but never seen each other. They even traveled to each other’s cities but missed the chance to meet, yet remained friends for over a decade and done so much for each other.
From lending money to each other to buying presents or consulting on important matters, they’ve gone through life knowing they can rely on each other.
It is fascinating that two people who have never meet in person can care about each other this much. I have dear friends who I have never met yet they’ve done so much for me. They share stuff with me, have bought stuff for me when I couldn’t, gave me information on stuff I needed to know, talked to me about interesting things, and helped me through various matters and I’m so grateful that I have these people as friends.
I’ve seen them care about me more than my non-digital friends and that makes me so happy. Digital or not, I can call them friends and it just makes me feel better knowing there’s someone somewhere in the world who may not be physically near me but is in my hear dearly.
Tech features
More I grow up, more I realize I choose my tech to fulfill my needs. not to use features the tech just gives me. I won’t suddenly feel a new need because an app or device has it. New technologies are often designed and made in a way to manipulate you into using them and I choose to resist that.
That is one reason I use free software. Free software is about freedom and that’s what gives me choice and lets me do my computing how I decide. Computer user freedom is about letting people decide how their computers and programs work and being able to change them to make sure it does what we ask them. Plus, we can distribute our copies (including copies of our modified programs) so we can help others as well.
It’s not that we always change or modify programs, I won’t change anything most of the times, but it’s about our rights. Think of software freedom in the way you think about freedom of speech. We may not have something to say but we certainly would like to have the freedom just in case.
Free software is the practical answer to our computing needs. It’s a right and it should be default way of computing. Computer user freedom makes sure that you’re in charge. It makes sure that the program won’t seduce you or create new needs, it just does what you ask it to do. It will satisfy your current needs, and nothing more. If you need a feature, it can be implemented in it, by anyone you decide. Most of the times the developers update programs so you won’t need to do anything but if the developer doesn’t upgrade or implement something, you can do it yourself or ask someone to do it for you.
Free software won’t manipulate you to do something, it won’t create new needs for you. If it does, you will have the ability and total power to modify it to stop doing that. Free software is all about empowering users over their computers and programs. It’s about putting you in control of what you own.
Free software is that superhero that won’t decide good and bad for you, it only puts you in power to decide for yourself. It’s that superhero that prevents the greater harm, which in this case is digital slavery, and puts you in charge of your own computing.