• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: October 27th, 2023
  • kreynen@kbin.melroy.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Spam attack on Twitter/X rival Mastodon highlights 'fediverse' vulnerabilities
    5·
    9 months ago

    @Kbin_space_program@kbin.social

    @ardi60@reddthat.com This has not been my experience at all. There was/is a lot of spam lingering on KBin long after it was removed from the federated source. I don’t know if that’s an issue with the removal being done in an unfederated way (bulk deletes at the db level), a sync issue cause by the recent kbin.social outages or just a general federation bug.

    My kbin.social account has been @'ed in hundreds of comments and some of the most popular Kbin magazine where Earnest remains the sole moderator were flooded with spam.

    Even this morning I tried reporting spam from a kbin.social account only to be told it had already been report… and yet 16 hours later the bot is still posting with this account.

    I’m glad you’ve found kbin.social usable through all this, but the spam is tbere.

  • kreynen@kbin.melroy.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024
    4·
    9 months ago

    @ginerel@kbin.social a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I’d like to learn more about that.

    The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content…

    Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal

    I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards “fresh” content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.

    Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.

    Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.

  • kreynen@kbin.melroy.orgtoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•How was your start into the open source community?
    8·
    1 year ago

    @shapis Almost 20 years ago, I followed Lawrence Lessig’s RSS feed. He made a request for software that could be used to advance slides on a remote computer. I knew AppleScript fairly well and thought, “how hard can that be?”. I wrote a one script that would “listen” for the text “Next Slide” in iChat and then try to advance whatever was open in PowerPoint. I wrote another script with a basic UI so the presenter could easily “type” Next Slide while presenting. It was basic, but it worked. I think I shared the code with an MIT license. Even though the code was free and Dr. Lessig already agreed to meet with a class about IP Law at the university I was working for at the time, he also contributed $50 to my project. He could have just downloaded the scipts and used them without paying anything, but that simple act changed my life. I realized that some people who could afford it would pay for code I even when I was giving away. Most people don’t, but enough do that I’ve been able to continue contributing my code, helping to fix bugs in other people’s code and sponsoring other projects today.

    https://archives.lessig.org/indexb00c.html?p=2897

  • kreynen@kbin.melroy.orgtoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•aaron swartz day
    159·
    1 year ago

    @anzo this comment originally posted on a Reddit ELI5 thread might be a better starting point for people who aren’t familiar with Aaron’s legacy and the controversy around his death.

    I’ll actually try to explain this like you’re five, because that doesn’t ever seem to happen on here anymore.

    Aaron Swartz was a man who was a part of a whoooole lot of really cool things. He helped to make a thing called “RSS” which helps people learn all the stuff they want to without going to all the different websites that that takes. It’s like if you want to make a sandwich, but normally you’d have to go to a bread store, a meat store, a cheese store, and a vegetable store. RSS makes it so you can get that all at once (and enjoy your sandwich much more easily).

    Aaron also was part of a group of guys who helped give out information from “PACER”, which is a big system full of information about what happened at courts. But, even though all of this information should have been free, they charged people for it. Imagine if each time you asked your teacher a question you had to pay a quarter. Even though that’s their job, and it should be free, they made you pay. Well that sure did make some law-people mad. They started to investigate Aaron, but eventually stopped when they realized Aaron was right.

    Aaron did some more stuff, too. You know this website you’re on? Aaron was a big part of it at the very beginning. A lot of people call him one of the founders, but that’s not entirely true. What is true is that Aaron helped to shape and mold and make this website what it is today. It’s like when mommy buys you Play-Doh. She actually started it, but you’re the one that made the amazing sculpture out of it (with help from your friends, of course).

    Aaron also did something that made some people pretty mad. You see Aaron thought that information should be very free. He though that people like you, and me, and everyone else should be able to read as much information as we could on stuff. He thought that the work that scientists did at colleges should be seen by everyone! So he went to MIT to access JSTOR, basically a virtual library of science, and went “out of bounds” according to MIT. He went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go, and went there to try to get all this information and science from JSTOR, which he was actually allowed to do. The problem was like this though. Imagine Aaron went to the library. He can check out as many books as he wants, right? What Aaron wanted to do was check out every book, and make sure that everyone around the world had the same chance to read them that he did. But in order to check out those books, he had to go behind the desk, which was a no-no.

    So what happened is that Aaron got in trouble with JSTOR, the library, and with MIT, who is pretty much the librarian. Eventually, JSTOR decided they didn’t think Aaron did anything wrong, and didn’t want to try anymore. MIT was a little slower though, and didn’t say much. Then the US Attorney’s office came in. They’re like the cops that might come to the library. The owners of the library didn’t think that you did anything wrong, and wanted the cops to leave. The librarian didn’t answer as quickly though, so the cops stuck around and kept asking Aaron questions and checking through his pockets for stuff.

    This whole thing was very scary for Aaron. Aaron didn’t have a whole lot of money, and if he got in as much trouble as the cops wanted to put him in, he would have to give it all up, and go to prison for a long time. This scared Aaron a lot. This was especially tough for Aaron because he had been really sad for quite some time. It was a special kind of sad that doesn’t go away with a tight hug from mom, so it was especially hard to deal with.

    On Friday, Aaron hung himself. Some people think it was because he was so scared of the cops that he just couldn’t deal with it. Some people think it was because he was so sad that he just wanted it to go away. But most people think it was a combination of the two.

    There are a lot of people talking about it now though, because if the cops hadn’t been so mean to Aaron, he’d probably still be alive today. This makes people very sad and very angry, because Aaron was a very smart, very kind person. We wanted him to stay around much longer than he did, and now we want to make sure that nothing like what happened to Aaron will happen to anyone else again.