Digital Freedom

• Twitter didn't monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices
• Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.
• Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.
• whistleblower wanted to take action to prevent potential sabotage by a rogue employee. He learned it was not possible for Twitter to secure its production environment.
• Mudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter's data. He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.
• Twitter had no software development lifecycle, and misled both the FTC and its Board about this fact for a decade.
• Mudge informed Agrawal that there were thousands of failed login attempts to Twitter's engineering system every day. Agrawal did nothing.
• Twitter did not keep backups of employee computers. They used to, but then the system broke, was never fixed, and execs decided this was good because it meant they couldn't comply with regulators.
• "Every new employee has access to data they do not need to have access to."
• Twitter does not have licenses for the machine learning models it uses in its most basic products.
• Twitter knowingly allowed itself to be infiltrated by, or otherwise a tool of, many governments.
• After Agrawal became CEO, he wanted to present materially misleading information to the Board, overriding Mudge's objections. Other employees raised similar objections. Ultimately it seems the material was shared anyway, and Mudge described the presentation to the Board as fraud.

The bill prohibits a covered company from (1) requiring developers to use an in-app payment system owned or controlled by the company as a condition of distribution or accessibility, (2) requiring that pricing or conditions of sale be equal to or more favorable on its app store than another app store, or (3) taking punitive action against a developer for using or offering different pricing terms or conditions of sale through another in-app payment system or on another app store.

A covered company may not interfere with legitimate business communications between developers and users, use non-public business information from a third-party app to compete with the app, or unreasonably prefer or rank its own apps (or those of its business partners) over other apps.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/65791

“PayPal seems to be moving in the direction of social credit and restricting transactions – that’s concerning,” PayPal co-founder, and now Tesla and Twitter CEO, Elon Musk

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/65096

Government collusion with a corporation to silence citizens’ first amendment rights.

Another conspiracy theory confirmed.

it's a little crazy that someone had to pay $44BN for the public to gain access to this information

Apple monitors your every move in the App Store and its News and Stocks apps and then uses that data to sell ads targeting you in those same apps. To meet its growth forecasts, experts expect Apple to start selling ads in its Maps, Podcast, and Books apps, meaning it could replicate this model across more of its services. Much more of your activity could be monitored in the future.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/63526

Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office distributed a blacklist of 201 trucking companies that participated in the Freedom Convoy Protest in February

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/63440

The apathy of the majority will allow governments to easily take away our physical cash and replace it with CBDCs, ushering in a utopia (or dystopia) of financial surveillance.

To us people, CBDCs represent a full-frontal assault on our ability to have sovereignty over honest transactions between ourselves. To the government, it is the most perfect tool for modifying the behaviour of its subjects since we all decided to voluntarily upload our lives onto social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. To the banks, CBDCs represent an existential threat to their existence as going concerns.

Imagine you are the “other”. The others in any society are those who are economically exploited, either by virtue of their ethnicity, their immigration status, their religious beliefs, and/or their accent. Their exploitation is allowed to continue by the majority because the majority are led to believe the others deserve their lowly station due to their supposedly deficient qualities.

Now imagine that you and the rest of the others decide to try to change your circumstances by nonviolent means. You march, sing songs of protest, and generally engage in non-violent civil disobedience. You use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo to organise and galvanise. Your movement grows to be quite large, and you decide it is time for a march on the capital to show the country how unjust its discriminatory policies are.

Prior to the big march, the movement continues to gain viral levels of visibility by effectively generating and disseminating heart-wrenching images from other smaller protests around the country. The government gets nervous. The police try to fight back by using tried-and-true tactics like firehosing and sicking attack dogs on you and your fellow peaceful protestors. Images of children mangled at the hands of the supposed protectors of the people sway public opinion against the government. That, as history has warned us, the government cannot abide.

The police inherit a new tool, the CBDC. Instead of carrying out overt acts against the protestors to stop the upcoming march on the capital, the police decide to ask Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and other platforms to hand over all data on anyone their algorithms believe were involved in the movement or sympathetic to it. On the days leading up the march, these individuals are completely frozen out of the financial system.

At this stage of the CBDC-verse, all economic activity between citizens occurs using digital money, and no other former currency (like physical cash) is accepted or even exists. The protestors and those who support them are thus unable to fill their cars up with gas, unable to purchase a bus, train, or plane ticket, unable to dine at a restaurant, unable to purchase food and water at the grocery store, and ultimately unable to organise effectively– so the march on the capital never materialises. You can’t march if you are starving or can’t get to the march in the first place.

If Tumblr were to add ActivityPub support, it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app. It could also provide Tumblr users with an entry point into the so-called fediverse without having to face some of the complexities that are involved with signing up for Mastodon for the first time.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/61972

She pointed out that under the new leadership, Twitter is “taking child exploitation seriously.” However, there is still much work to be done. There is an ongoing lawsuit against the social media platform that began before Elon Musk purchased it. The plaintiffs, John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 were minors who were sexually exploited, and videos of that exploitation were posted to Twitter. When the two, who are now adults, begged Twitter to remove the content, Twitter refused.

cross-posted from: https://community.nicfab.it/post/17993

As Twitter users fret over the direction that new owner Elon Musk is taking the company, masses of users have hopped over to Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative. Since October 27, when the SpaceX and Tesla CEO formalized his Twitter takeover, Mastodon has gained nearly 500,000 new users, effectively doubling its user base. But what is Mastodon anyway, and should we all be getting our accounts set up?

If you’re a Twitter purist who likes to use basic functionality like private DMing, quote-tweeting and user-friendly onboarding, Mastodon might not be for you. But if you’re looking to try something new on the social internet, then why not give Mastodon a whirl? Elon Musk isn’t there!

That would suggest total user numbers might be less relevant than engagement. Sensor Tower data show while time spent across top social media apps has increased over the past few years, some apps are more addictive than others. Time spent on TikTok has increased 26% from the first quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of this year, that data show; while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have also logged double-digit percentage increases. Over the same period, time spent on Snapchat and Twitter declined 26% and 6%, respectively.

Subscribers might never be as lucrative to social media platforms as their advertisers, but the sector will struggle to grow without them.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/56321

The minutes do not specify what support the FBI was providing to the Canadian police, though it is implied that they were providing financial and intelligence-related support.

It is possible that the FBI was investigating US citizens who donated to the trucker convoy movement via GiveSendGo, as hundreds of Americans allegedly donated to the convoy via the platform.

Big Tech has censored voices of truth and freedom, including the President of the United States! They work hand in hand with the corrupt DOJ and FBI to spy on you.

Learn how they do it and what you can do to protect yourself from Big Tech.

Take away the power of Big Tech by getting off of their platforms. We’ll show you how to do it and make it easy and safer!

My wife, an immigrant from Ukraine, her Facebook account is private. It actually does not have her name displayed on there. It’s not in English. She only uses her account to send indirect messages and to look at family pictures. My wife sent her a direct message, identifying herself as Steve Friend’s wife. And within 20 minutes of sending that direct private message her Facebook account was suspended for violating its terms of use.

This evening Bank of America canceled popular conservative Twitter user Catturd’s podcast account. No reason was given.

The reason offered was that the Towson store needs to negotiate benefits with Apple via the collective bargaining arrangement that comes with a union. To be sure, the approach isn’t unique to Apple. Excluding unionized stores from new benefits has also been a flashpoint in the labor dispute at Starbucks where about 250 cafes have voted to unionize over the past year. Like Apple, Starbucks rolled out a series of new perks at nonunion stores, including raises and student-debt coaching, while saying that it can’t legally provide them unilaterally to sites with union activity.

While Apple’s decision could dissuade employees in other cities from unionizing their stores, but it also could further upset workers, especially with more employees likely to unionize soon.

Shares in PayPal are off more than 6% (or around $5BN in market cap) in early Monday trading after a massive internet campaign to cancel accounts went viral in response to the company's now-reversed policy that would fine users $2,500 if they were to allegedly promote "misinformation" or "hate."

“Looks like they’ve disabled Account Closure over at Paypal to prevent customers exiting their platform. No doubt there’ll be the usual corporate-speak on “temporary technical issue” inbound.”

PayPal has removed the ability for users to close their accounts.

That tells you how bad the situation is.

Short $PYPL

Violation of the “Acceptable Use Policy constitutes a violation of the PayPal User Agreement and may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation,” PayPal writes.

The updated policy prohibits users from using PayPal for activities that:

“Involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable … (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) … (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation … or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/45906

If they had a subpoena, then it could have been challenged, but if they take the phone, then they get everything. They get lawyer client privilege material. They get business material. They get First Amendment protected material. They know who’s working along with Mike Lindell to try to do whatever he’s doing. . . about undoing the election.”

The surveillance state is watching...

Sebold told The Drive that DEP never visited or inspected the truck in person. He believes DEP decided to flag the truck based on the Facebook Marketplace listing. An overreaching state government agency has weaponized a social media platform to combat tighter and tighter environmental restrictions on gas/diesel-powered vehicles. L

"The ‘full stack’ of internet service providers are allied against conservative voices, and federal lawmakers need to take legislative action to protect conservative voices and restore trust in our information environment,” Thibeau said.

“Isn’t it funny that internet copyright standards are only ever enforced when a leftist organization files a complaint?” he asked. “Courage is a Habit used public information from the ASCA to expose their radical agenda to make kids trans.”

One anonymous source alleged that this invasion of privacy “was done outside the legal process and without probable cause.”

“Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena,” the source added, reporting that there was no existing subpoena for these private messages.

These vendors blocked the specification because of their fear of the future. Web3 will not allow these entities to have control over their users or their data, ending the decades long surveillance and user data acquisitions.

On 1 Sep 2021, after multiple revisions and years of design and development by the W3C DID Working Group, the Mozilla Foundation filed a formal objection to block approval of the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 specification. This is years after the Mozilla Foundation’s Internet Health Report stated:

The Internet remains decentralized, but the things we do on it every day are controlled by just a handful of global technology giants. These companies are starting to look more and more like monopolies of the past. Given the importance of the Internet in our lives, this is not healthy.

Soon after, it became public that two other formal objections were also filed. This time by Google and Apple. This means that three of the four biggest browser vendors had voted to block the DID 1.0 Specification.