Because I thought you were obviously wrong about the 7000 years thing, here’s a history of trademarks by some guy named Olivier Pierre:

Since ancient times, merchants have been using signs or marks in trade to distinguish their products. Registrations came much later, in the 18th century with the establishment of Intellectual Property Offices.

[…]

The use of trademarks dates back thousands of years, however we can’t date their origins with precision. Some of the earliest forms of identification of marks date from Prehistory. For instance, the Lascaux cave paintings in France show bulls drawings with marks on them. Experts believe that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock, long before literate societies. That was about 15.000 years ago.

The Egyptian masonry from some 6,000 years ago shows distinguishable quarry marks and stonecutters signs, to identify the source of the stone and the laborer who carried out the work to claim their wages. There were creative entrepreneurs who marketed their goods beyond their localities and sometimes over long distances. Wine amphorae marked with seals were found inside the Tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun who reigned between 1336 a.c. to 1327 a.c. over ancient Egypt.

I’ve gotten so used to think of trademarks as registered trademarks, but it makes sense that it has existed much longer in the literal sense. The earliest known law however dates back little more than 4000 years, and there’s nothing about trademarks there, so I think it’s fair to say trademark law is a lot more modern. :)

Sorry for being entirely off-topic.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.

Not saying it’s a good platform. It’s still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.

Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.

It’s too bad Cohn didn’t get to talk more about Mastodon.

If you have a reading mode in your browser it works well on that site. :)

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

I like the idea of keeping track of my hikes using GPS to be able to remember exactly where I’ve been, but I don’t trust the kind of data gathered by a smart watch with any company out there, and I don’t want to drain my phone by keeping the GPS on constantly. If this has good battery life it sounds interesting to me.

I’m generally sceptical of introducing another screen into my life though. Something about smart watches just seems inherently intrusive even if the software itself isn’t spyware.

Isn’t a bit of the challenge with the software to write something that supports the very modest hardware?

I’m so tired of open source developers being treated like public persons of whom relentless criticism for any character flaw, big or small, is fully justified. I’ve been guilty of this as well.

We’re talking about a bunch of highly qualified nerds who have decided to give away their work for free. Of course many of them will have some quirks. Everybody has bad days, and on the internet a few moments of weakness will haunt you forever.

It’s of course worth keeping the questionable things in mind, but the FOSS community also needs to get better at letting people enjoy things. Most of us are only human.

I think the user you responded to misread “piracy” for “privacy”. I did too at first.

Can’t rally add anything helpful, except that if I were to do piracy I would want privacy. The way the wind is blowing it’s a matter of time before windows starts snitching on its users.

404media had an interesting inteview with a Kenyan “data labeller”. He talks about his jobs working with AI companies, and how he had to pretend being all kinds of things. He’d work at least 18 hours a day, constantly switching between roleplaying different characters of different genders to people who thought they were talking to AI.

So even people who think they are talking to robots might be sexting some underpaid guy in Kenya.

Yeah, it’s tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that’s the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it’s not quite there yet for me. So for now Mozilla is my best bet in spite of everything.

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I’m uncomfortable with using software that’s full of stuff that I hate, even if it’s disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.

I was thinking the same thing when I read this:

A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.

Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.

Oooh, neat community! Joined!

I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.

That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!

It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.

I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.

Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)

Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?

Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.

How was it? Did it feel lively?

I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.

Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.

In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.

Managed to refuse… In more than half of the cases. That does not look good. By any reasonable standard failing in one of a thousand would be disasterous.