“Is this so-called news credible?”
It goes deeper than that. EVERY news agency has a bias/agenda. They may accurately report the facts of an event that happened, but slant the context as to why.
By reading multiple, even oppositional news sources, you can get an idea of what is happening.
Nobody has a news cast that goes:
Good evening and welcome to the news. 3 teenagers are dead after a drive-by shooting on Rainer Street at 3pm. No suspect has been charged or identified. NEXT STORY. A man attemped to rob the Alvins Jewelers on Swanson Rd late last night after hours. The would-be-theif then became trapped in the stores security system, and arrested when police arrived. NEXT STORY.
Nobody does that. It’s 20% facts 80% filler.
What’s on random screens in the background of movies / TV shows. People hate watching stuff with me because I’m always pausing it to look at that stuff.
Birds. Even in urban areas you wouldn’t believe how many birds there are. Not just pigeons and sparrows, but hawks and falcons will readily live in many urban areas too. Herons and egrets are particularly adaptable to urban areas and easy to find along rivers and ponds. In the spring and fall warblers will pass through as well, and I even see them on busy urban streets sometimes if there’s a few bushes or trees along the path. I’ve even had a few lucky owl sightings while walking in the suburbs at night.
Delightfully since I live in the southwest and grew up on the east coast, where they’re incredibly shy of people, we also have tons of bold urban ravens. In the late spring and early summer sometimes I see big flocks (recently independent juveniles?) just soaring and diving for the fun of it.
I was into Geocaching for a while and was always amazed at the things out in plain sight that people casually walked by and never noticed every day
Very true! And once you’ve done it for a while, you start to notice other cachers by the way they are awkwardly standing in unusual places trying to look inconspicuous.
Digital privacy.
It was very recently revealed in unsealed court documents from I believe 2013 that the Facebook app pushed a certificate to mobile devices that funneled all of everyone’s decrypted traffic through their servers. That means every webpage visited, every file sent and received, every word typed passed through and was stored on a computer at Facebook HQ. One engineer was quoted as saying that Zuckerberg had a particular interest in looking at people’s Snapchats. It was also revealed that Facebook had a data exchange partnership with Netflix where Netflix had open ended access to user’s private messages.
Now you don’t have to be a Snapchat or Facebook user to see how wrong and downright creepy that is, but if you bring it up with the average person you can see their eyes immediately glaze over. It’s hard to blame them, it feels like a hopeless situation and it’s much more convenient to pretend it’s not happening. People have been completely indoctrinated into abandoning their right to privacy. It’s a real shame because if we were paid as individuals what our data is apparently worth I’m sure that perspective would quickly change.
*Formatting
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
Also, what do you think we can do as a society to change the status quo? How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
Hope your pipe situation got resolved easily.
We had a pipe burst right at the entrance of our crawlspace a few weeks ago and it took a bit to realize. It was a nightmare and now we have to get some foundation work done.
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
A few to consider:
- Ditch Facebook and Whatsapp.
- Invest in a VPN
- Switch to Firefox for web browsing
- Install GrapheneOS on your phone
- Pay with cash where possible
- Switch to XMPP with OMEMO encryption for messaging with your favorite people
My eyes don’t glaze over. I’m FURIOUS that they even exist, and have been since they killed myspace.
I knew back in 2008 something wasn’t right about facebook. I had no idea what, but I knew they were sketchy.
By 2010, I knew they were invading peoples privacy. I’ve never had a facebook. And yet, they have my phone number. My mom has facebook, and she stores my phone number in her contacts list.
Thing is, what can I do?
Speaking of bulletins, when I first heard of the fediverse, I had the total wrong idea.
I thought it would be like you can post on Lemmy, as a bulletin, and Masodon users could see it on their end. (Assuming they were subscribed to the poster).
MY envisionment of how the fediverse worked, based on my misunderstanding would have made for a WAAAAAAAAAY cooler site/collection of sites.
And the fictional ideas I had to take it further would probably make the fediverse the dominant social media standard.
Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
