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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m not saying that “you can’t make this complaint because you made an account here”. I’m saying “only an idiot can make this complaint because this is how all distributed systems work without exception”. There isn’t a single system out there that is connected to anything outside of itself that isn’t susceptible at some level or another to exactly what the OP is complaining about.

    This includes the router you have between you and the Internet at large.

    EVERY distributed system retains copies somewhere for some duration. And ANY of them can be (pretty trivially) modified to just retain everything for as long as there is storage to hold it. If you want privacy you’re going to need end-to-end cryptography, but that means no discussion sites like this.

    So my objection to the OP’s complaint is that it’s just stupid. Because it applies to literally every piece of technology they likely use to post the complaint, but for some reason it’s Lemmy that’s being singled out.







  • I have a ridiculous judgement against me in Germany. (Complicated shenanigans around an inheritance where the authorities’ legal representatives did shady shit specifically to unload an estate that would have cost them.) Technically I owe the city of Frankfurt something like 50,000€ in fines.

    I’m comfortable with this.

    Why?

    Because good fucking luck enforcing a European fine on a Canadian citizen resident in China. Even if they catch me out when I visit Germany (which I have done a couple of times without incident since the judgement was levied against me), watch the judge make grumpy-faces at attorneys who sent legal documents in German to a Canadian in China whose repeated requests for translated versions was denied. Their case will vanish in a puff of legal sanctions and I’ll make fucking sure on top of it that it becomes a press circus.

    EU types are almost as bad as American types for thinking their laws are extraterritorial. I love rubbing the fact that they aren’t in their faces.


  • Lemmy isn’t my favourite platform. Not even close. I’m not sure it’s even in my top ten.

    What I am attacking is the rampant ignorance over a fundamental aspect of technology. A distributed system by its very nature has copies. Sometimes the copies last for a few milliseconds (think your router) and sometimes the copies last effectively forever (think the Internet Archive). And there is nothing you as the user can do to change this. There is also nothing that prevents someone from making the delete side of things not delete things. (Yes, this includes your router. How do you think “wiretaps” of modern digital communications systems work?)

    In the case of ActivityPub this is even more egregious a level of ignorance. The entire point of federated software is to copy and spread content, so if you have even half a brain cell you’re going to have to know that there will be copies of everything you’ve ever posted on servers other than the one you posted it to. And yet we have stupid twats like the OP whining about the GDPR as if it is even slightly meaningful in a distributed system that crosses outside of EU’s jurisdiction.