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I can't find the schedule for today's livestream...

Cindy Cohn, director of the #EFF, is speaking now 👏

The EFF stands out among other advocacy organizations because their communication is always highly factual and free from hyperbolic analogies and FUD.

Just now, Cohn pointed out that Google does not, in fact, sell user data. Google *monetizes* user data. And she explained the difference.

When criticizing Google (or any other business), it's important to be factually correct, or else they can simply shrug and say "no, we're not selling your data and never will".

Not long ago, I defended Microsoft / GitHub because people where saying that Copilot violates opensource licenses or even "steals code".

It's not a given that a model trained on opensource code will generate copyright infringing output. If it does, it should be easy to show a couple of examples as evidence. Right?

Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are amazing organizations.

For decades, they've been pursuing incredibly ambitious missions, entirely funded by donations and unimpaired by the greed of shareholders and politicians.

Their operating budget is tiny; the services delivered to humanity are priceless.

@downey Exactly. I'm aware that Wikipedia has more funding that they require.

Perhaps surprisingly, crowd-sourcing all the knowledge of humanity, in dozens of different languages and making it freely available worldwide...all for a tiny fraction of the resources allocated to relatively simpler platforms for microblogging (*) and instant messaging (**).

(*) Twitter sold for $44B
(**) WhatsApp sold for $19B in 2014

Before someone corrects me, I should point out that the valuation of Twitter and WhatsApp isn't strictly correlated to their operating costs or their complexity.

Everyone here knows that a platform equivalent to Twitter could be redesigned by a small group of opensource contributors and operated by a handful of volunteer sysadmins 😁

@downey

The market value of Twitter and WhatsApp comes from their established user bases, and from the expectation that those users will somehow remain loyal when aggressively monetized...

Well, good luck! 🦄

@downey

@codewiz

As a collection of human knowledge should be liberated using Ward Cunningham's federated wiki concept. Of course then the would be unnecessary and would lose that sweet sweet cash so not ever gonna be something they promote.

@downey Federating Wikipedia on multiple domains scattered around the world wouldn't really make encyclopedic knowledge more available or more useful.

You can already link across wikis using standards like InterWiki, but ultimately plain web urls work just fine.

Perhaps more resilient to government interference? But the entire corpus of Wikipedia is officially available for download, and mirrors are allowed.