Here we spot wild Bardfinn Bluesky activities.
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BardWatch
She/Her
Anti-Hate-Brigade
3mo ago
(text post)
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#324717
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Reported by:
- BushWasRight : BIPOC
Bard spotting on Bluesky 11 December 2024 
- 16
- 6
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Since Nixon and Reagan, everything the Republicans have done to criminalise things is to convert a large swath of People Who Will Never Vote Republican into inmates / felons
That is their whole strategy. Half a century+ now.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Lee Atwater. Consultant to Reagan, chair of the RNC from '89 to '91. Architect of the Southern Strategy; explained how every Republican policy was a sidechannel attack to criminalise specific human beings
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Atwater & the consulting firm Black, Manafort, Stone, & Kelly (yes, that Manafort; Yes, that Stone) are instructive of what we will be dealing with. BMSK's first client was
Drum roll please
Donald Trump.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black,_...
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I have a tech question —
How does BlueSky create the — wait
atproto.com/specs/crypto...
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
How does BlueSky create the ECDSA signing & encryption keys?
Are these expensive, one-time (or very infrequent) key generations, or are these being generated relatively inexpensively on the fly by i.e. SSL acceleration silicon / cloud GPUs?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Setting aside the question of "But third parties could still see metadata network graphs (follows, likes, reposts)",
What I am wondering is,
How computationally (and thus financially) expensive would it be to use ECDSA encryption to swap ephemeral keys between parties
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
ATProto is built to be extended
How viable or how infeasible is the scenario where an account's bio/photos/text content is encrypted, the keys to that distributed to select others, to defeat drive-by screenshot / drop-in driven harassment
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Would this be a viable "private account" option or is this making an account with 20k followers 20k times heavier on what might be the most computationally expensive feature of the service
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Alice requests a keyswap from Carol
Carol approves the request
Infrastructure uses ECDSA & maybe some perfect forward secrecy to trade some PRNG / TRNG OTPs, held by each client / web session
… okay I'm seeing a difficulty. For every person let into the circle, that's a potential breach of the key
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Because this isn't one-to-one, it's one-to-many (to-the-power-of), key management quickly becomes a problem, in that all recipients have to be disclosed the same key.
And there's ways to handle that with ACLs, but then we're at "why not just use Signal for that use case"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I had this idea bouncing around in the back of my head as a potential valueadd that bluesky premium might offer. From long before the current situation. This was just me finally having the impetus to rubberduck.
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Boris (@bmann.ca):
Yes this is possible. My last company designed a private encrypted file system github.com/wnfs-wg
It uses a skip ratchet
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
This is novel stuff to me; my knowledge of pkm is circa 2001 era with a bit of "here's why pgp's web of trust is infeasible"
Time for me to start reading a lot
Thank you
Boris (@bmann.ca):
In which case, add @soatok.bsky.social's write up to your list.
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Jesse (@misctakes.com):
I don't know anything about all this but is there a way that one could basically make a microblogging interface on top of Signal?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
It already exists on Signal, but is a feature they call "Stories" and requires (at least, in the ios app) taking a photo or video.
support.signal.org/hc/en-us/art...
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Well, that page says it can just be text, but my ios client was demanding a photo
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Jesse (@misctakes.com):
Ah yeah I forgot about that! So there's a proof of concept there. Seems like combining that with the social graph here could be a viable path?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
"In Theory". I recall last year reading threads in which the devs were telling people to use i.e. Signal for DMs because they were not up to the task of providing the same level of trust assurance / security assurance that Signal offers \ implementing that complexity of coding
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
We have DMs now — but IIRC they're not ATProto, but a separate chat message function
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Corollary — sometimes, for the Nazi, it's better
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eva (@eva.computer):
thinking about additional fields that could be associated with your did/repo on ATproto
a third party licensing agreement field would help inform developers who are using firehose data to build their apps on what they can and can't do commercially with the data you broadcast
eva (@eva.computer):
obviously the terms you sign with bsky (or any appview) to post on and use the service would supercede that
thinking it would work something like shutterstock
you sign a TOS/agreement with shutterstock to host/publish your data, but third parties accept a license associated with your data to use it
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
IANAL IANYL etc, I did read thru the TOS & was surprised to find no explicit language conveying a license from BlueSky to the end user for particular uses of content hosted
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
So your idea might be a Good Thing enabled by sparing TOS language
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I think that I would like to point out an important moment from the history of Reddit's trust thermocline.
www.tomscott.com/reddit/
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The text of it.
It speaks to how Reddit's own gap in trust & safety policies - maintained in the nominal interests of defeating censorship - enabled rampant bad faith abuses, and the trust thermocline inversion - the need to disassociate from Reddit in interest of one's own Goodwill.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The short explanation of Goodwill, here, is "It would substantially harm me, personally and professionally, to continue to be associated with this social media platform — because the platform chooses to continue to be associated with [toxic phenomenon | entities]"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
What I've come back to repeatedly is that Tom Scott is absolutely correct, here.
Many of us feel a desire to rescue the Community by rescuing the Platform.
I've done Rescue The Platform. Over and over.
The upsides are few and tiny, the downsides massive and egregious.
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!bardfinn
"Trust thermocline inversion" neighbor just say decline in trust 😂
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Whch is why every transgender person I know and most of the ones I don't know are screaming at the top of our lungs that mainstream society learn from history so that WE are not doomed to repeat it
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Yoel Roth (@yoyoel.com):
One of the things we all really need from platform T&S teams — honest, authentic, human conversations about the impossible tradeoffs involved in this work — is made effectively impossible by the deranged ways a small number of people treat platform staff when they speak publicly. Ask me how I know.
Lea Kissner (@leak.bsky.social):
The ratio of the amount of harassment and stalking that the CISO gets vs the head of T&S is bonkers.
(This is not an appeal to the monkey's paw)
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey.com):
the stories Yonatan and I have lol
saudades (@saudades.bsky.social):
i know yoel left after elon bought twitter, very publicly, but until then he allowed the worst dogshit in the world to bubble up there, including libsoftiktok (responsible for shooting/hate crimes) and so on. why should we trust him now?
Lea Kissner (@leak.bsky.social):
If you think that Yoel was singly responsible for making Twitter's T&S policy decisions, then I fear you are mistaken.
Bsky's Jolliest Girl 🎄🤶🎁 (@stalinatrix.kawaii.social):
honest question, and bearing in mind i have no idea who yoel is or what role he played at twitter at any point in time: assuming he was the head of t&s during pre-elon twitter, is part of his job not fielding these sorts of complaints in a responsible manner? cuz aaron doesn't seem to be doing that
Bsky's Jolliest Girl 🎄🤶🎁 (@stalinatrix.kawaii.social):
I mean yeah people can be deranged, especially to someone in that job. I don't doubt that. but is that what's happening here? it seems like an inability of bsky as a company (and aaron being in the relevant role here) to adequately address users' concerns at all
like, literally not one comment
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey.com):
Typically, no, a T&S lead does not discuss individual moderation decisions (e.g. why someone's friend was banned, why no action was taken on a specific report).
Obviously for a higher profile case, you'd expect potentially some messaging, but it wouldn't necessarily come from T&S (think: CEO/COO)
Bsky's Jolliest Girl 🎄🤶🎁 (@stalinatrix.kawaii.social):
then who would you say is the face on the company that we ordinary people can interact with on here? because it's not the CEO. believe me, I wanna be effective about this, not busy angrily yell into the void, but that seems like all we can really do right now. you can see that right?
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey.com):
The buck stops with Jay, and I'm not sure that harassing^H^H^H^H^Hloudly yelling at Aaron is actually helping at this moment in time. Fundamentally Jay needs to see this will cost the company and network more to keep JS than to ditch him.
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey.com):
so this is probably one of the most effective things, besides pointing out the numerous violations of policy that JS has actually done on-platform.
bsky.app/profile/bord...
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And it will only be effective in shaping policy if one of these are met:
1) it grows to a significant slice of the core users (likely to buy in to such)
2) it makes the news
3) the core users close out their infrastructure (blocklists) & accounts
Bsky's Jolliest Girl 🎄🤶🎁 (@stalinatrix.kawaii.social):
I think fundamentally popular movements are going to fail the trans community rn. we're being abandoned by our allies bc we become a liability politically and we're too small to make that much of a difference. you're simply not going to get most of those things
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
1) is possibly less likely, because there will be / are slush funds who will straw purchase premium, if policy is shaped by the dollarvote;
2) is not foreseeable because there's no question of misfeasance via a lacking AUP; they have "standard" AUP policies
3) remains, but is herding cats
borderless (@borderless.bsky.social):
I mean, 2 & 3 are already happening. A blogger reached out to quote me, and popular bsky cowtools have gone into maintenance mode + a few large amounts have left for mastadon.
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
...Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Knowledge drop in this video - under the (first) Trump admin, transgender people were removed from the list of those memorialised by the official US Holocaust Remembrance. The official overseeing the event stated that this was done "because there were no transgender people in Nazi Germany".
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Which, point blank, makes the GOP & the Trump ideologues Holocaust deniers.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And the person whose responsibility it was to remedy this, just threw up his/her hands, saying "I'm retiring in two months, this isn't my fight any more"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Second knowledge drop - the Nazis prosecuted / persecuted transgender people under a synthesis of / piecemeal of laws, ones which targeted homosexuality, public obscenity, breaches of public order, etc.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Third - in Weimar Germany, they (too) debated whether the term prevailing label (then, "transvestite") was appropriate and dignified and offensive and inclusive etc.
In zines.
And that after the Holocaust, "transsexual" was adopted as more appropriate, dignified, inclusive, etc
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Fourth knowledge drop: the Berlin police stood up for trans* people at some point in Weimar Germany.
In a very "My denial that trans* people are criminals is raising a lot of questions already answered by my denial" way
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Fifth knowledge drop: there was a woman who manufactured brassieres for transfemmes & who kept a community of trans people in communication via a newsletter. She was caught because she placed an advert in a newspaper, and prosecuted under an obscenity law,
Paragraph 184
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Paragraph 184 was specifically a law prosecuting "dissemination of pornographic writings".
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Sixth knowledge drop: Hirschfeld's institute, during WWI, urged trans people to refrain from gender affirming clothing as a principle of safety, due to the social presumption of espionage & criminality
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Noticed in a footnote of a primary source the professor is showing in this talk, the "moral justification" for prosecuting trans* people in Nazi Germany is explicitly laid out as being contrary to the inherent "manly outlook" (patriarchal order) of Nazi Germany's social order
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Literally (and this is well known)
They persecuted trans* people because the existence of trans* people threatened to destroy their entire social order, by Nazi reasoning, to shatter fragile mainstream masculinity
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And - no surprise - the transgender woman subject that he's discussing, died in a concentration camp, because of the court finding that she was not amenable to conversion therapy / legal discipline.
He cites 50,000 +/- people who are trans* being murdered in concentration camps
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
He discusses a transmasc individual whose persecution was primarily driven by
her neighbours denouncing her to the Gestapo
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The denouncement opened the door to the Gestapo picking her up for aiding Jews.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And this all is in the larger context of
A mass deportation effort of "illegal aliens"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
A mass deportation effort that required hierarchical deputisation of the local law enforcement branches in service of the deportation effort
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I do not believe Luigi Mangione is / was an Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist.
I do believe he is going to become the precipitator / martyr of one, however.
Pearl Clutch For You (@mrpersonman.bsky.social):
He was motivated by morals
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
With every passing day, it becomes more and more clear that Elon Musk has absolutely no notion of what a fiduciary duty actually is.
Eileen 🍒 (@absolutereality.blog):
This has been shown to be a faked image. Would you mind retracting and deleting?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Thanks for letting me know
Eileen 🍒 (@absolutereality.blog):
No problem! I would love to see a Bluesky functionality where everyone who has interacted with or viewed a post that is later labeled as misinformation gets a notification about the labeling. I don't know if that's even possible or not.
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juniper 🏳️⚧️ (@blahaj.rodeo):
notifications tab was wild this morning. looks like someone is making bot accounts that impersonate generic trans girls
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
They were probably programmed to follow all accounts named in the pattern \b.+\b 🏳️⚧️
acking🏳️⚧️ (@acking02.bsky.social):
ive been getting them as well which could confirm that. can i cook them with regex injection? is that a thing
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
A honeypot account might catch them, might not. They might be set to follow only on account creation
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
"Why is Penny awake at 0230 hours" is an excellent question - one which only Penny's brainmeats hold an answer to, and responsibility for solving for Zzzzzz
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Probably the answer is connected to this truth:
No matter what combination of words I or any other member of a vulnerable minority couches it in, bigotry-exempt members of majorities are not going to recognise that societal acceptance of successful sociopaths is a nightmare.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Mostly I am in need of several dozen hours worth of therapy and a Xanax
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I'm sad, and angry, and frustrated.
I don't express these emotions directly because … there's no utility to doing so. It won't make me feel any better! And it will not change any of the things other people are doing! Things that they do on purpose, things they do from ignorance, things that harm.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I'm sad that America forces [demographic] to have to get kicked in the ribs and bury victims of bigotry executed under "subtle" and "clever" colour of law, before going, "whoops, should have fixed that sooner", and is demanding the cycle repeat again
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Angry about that, too.
Sad and angry about other things
Things which can't be named in public, lest watching sociopaths light upon them and exploit them.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I'm awake at Oh Dark Thirty in part also because we really, really deserve better than social media platforms that host salonfahige psychopaths
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
I'm also really, really concerned that the only answer to "How in the heck did a news article containing First Person Space Clue Moral Panic go live on a major news outlet" is that "multiple editors at outlet are being paid to approve stories that violate journ*listic ethics"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
"You know who else read books? … " is some kind of red flag about the abandonment of meaning
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The way I think about things right now,
There is no protest or pushback or shaming or boycott or counterspeech that meaningfully addresses a case of a national news outlet that chooses to go that route & call it newsworthy
it smacks of mining ChatGPT for editorial direction
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
You can't fix that
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Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
@kiraculous.net I am grateful for you
@potzer.xyz I am grateful for you
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
hugs and kisses
Kiraculous the Cyborg🏳️⚧️ (@kiraculous.net):
kisses and hugs
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I am certain you do not wish to argue that several years ago you assaulted me at Tanglewood Forest. Several of your fellow company members have chased me and thwapped me with Amtgard -legal boffer weapons on Company Road while I was making announcements on behalf of Kingdom Officers.
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