alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 334 Posts
  • 202 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • By necessity, Maryam’s reporting process is far from typical—she takes great pains to keep the authorities from knowing who she is, and has to work with a male family member to secure interviews. Sometimes, the process of scheduling an in-person meeting can resemble a game of telephone: she asks her brother to call a male relative of the potential subject to make the arrangements. When she wants to meet with a source in person, she must bring along a man to chaperone. She’ll also ask around to assess if the person she’s supposed to meet can be trusted to keep her identity a secret. “It’s really hard for me,” she said.

    Once the piece is ready to be published, Maryam removes all traces of her reporting from her devices, including deleting every email and call log, except for contacts with her immediate family. “If the Taliban checks my phone [and finds something], it will not be good for me. So, I delete everything,” she said. She only publishes the article after she has confirmed again that her subjects are comfortable with everything they’re quoted as saying. “It’s my job to keep her safe,” she said.









  • i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:

    The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.

    The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”














  • Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.



  • As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

    they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed



  • It’s been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn’t have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

    Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won’t break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency’s list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.


    The FCC will surely hear from many groups with different views on data caps, but Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems particularly keen on factoring consumer sentiment into the data-cap proceeding. When it announced the inquiry last week, Rosenworcel’s office published 600 consumer complaints about data caps that Internet users recently filed.

    “During the last year, nearly 3,000 people have gotten so aggravated by data caps on their Internet service that they have reached out to the Federal Communications Commission to register their frustration,” Rosenworcel said last week. “We are listening. Today, we start an inquiry into the state of data caps. We want to shine a light on what they mean for Internet service for consumers across the country.”






  • It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.

    i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that’s an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.


  • Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.

    hilariously you can see some of the reflexive defense of him over in the FOSS thread of this article. way too many people feel obliged to run defense for this guy and it’s just cringeworthy to watch


  • FYI: if you are an active apologist for Stallman in this thread, you will be indefinitely banned from Beehaw. to the extent that Stallman has salient critiques of anything he’s under fire for (as @t3rmit3@beehaw.org notes), his use of those critiques is almost exclusively to advance horrible, indefensible, actively harmful ideas. if you actually care about the merits of these subjects, nothing he argues is actually best argued from him. almost anybody else would be better served as a mouthpiece. and it is just incredibly silly to stand by the guy who took until 2019 to retract his belief that pedophilia isn’t harmful to children just because, as a foundational belief informing that position, he reasonably thinks we infantilize people between the ages of 12 and 17 too much