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Dan Ballard

@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
mastodon 4.6.6
  • Open on kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him.

Works on Tor Browser (@torproject@mastodon.social)

Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy@hachyderm.io ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch@fosstodon.org )

0 Followers
0 Following
19 Posts
Joined November 02, 2022
Cwtch:
67ckzss7drn64k4z4lpcnyn2ivvmkeuho2yucqcgglw3ozcrmez2k3yd
Site:
https://danballard.com
Donate:
https://openprivacy.ca/donate/

Posts

Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jun 03, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @lykrast@eldritch.cafe
@lykrast@eldritch.cafe @foone@digipres.club oh not a bad call (the switch). The PS4 was my first contemporary console purchase, and having been otherwise Linux only at the time, it opened up a wide world of gaming for me and was quite satisfying. Given Linux gaming improvements and the lack of big single player exclusives for the PS5 I def have more fond memories of the PS4 still.
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jun 03, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @EdTheDev@infosec.exchange
@EdTheDev@infosec.exchange @foone@digipres.club i remember my first 128MB mp3 player still fondly. Huge improvement in having a bit of portable music from an mp3 player in size, battery life, and even arguably capacity even at that size. Was a no brainer back in the day. And yeah, my partner has in the last year dabbled with dedicated mp3 players again rather than relying on a phone
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jun 03, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @max@manmachine.me
@max @foone@digipres.club I have been very happy with the couple Kobo eink readers i've had over the years, starting back in 2012. When traveling, having a library in my pocket in my language and easy access to get more, that also reads well in bright sun, and dark, truly is amazing.
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jun 03, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @foone@digipres.club
@foone@digipres.club ha the Textblade from 2015 springs to mind for '"wow I gotta get that" and spent money to get access to' but not 'and were at least mostly happy with' since it was delayed years and years and shipped some bits to early access folks and collapsed but I had gotten my refund long ago. one more nail in my adult brain for also just ignoring hype and waiting till release of things and consuming reviews. https://www.fastcompany.com/91249548/waytools-textblade-pocket-keyboard
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · May 07, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
@TrevfromIreland@mastodon.ie i remember a club i went to that collected phones at coat check, and maybe, this needs to be a more widely adopted policy... i mean its still reactionary and mostly for private spaces, as tech just rolls forward obliterating public spaces...
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · May 07, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @TrevfromIreland@mastodon.ie
@TrevfromIreland@mastodon.ie So I remember many phones long ago being required to have a shutter sound, and a visible red light for recording, but unsure if this was industry opt in trying to get in front of this and then dropping it, or law that was dropped later. But seems like japan still has it https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/why-you-cant-disable-the-shutter-sound-on-japanese-phones/
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 30, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
@votetanille@socialbc.ca but yeah, I guess if the commitment to use AI is already an immovable accepted premise, picking not one of the US companies, and one that allows self hosting is some potential improvement.
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 30, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
@votetanille@socialbc.ca ok, i'm ranting about AI. let's try and bring it back to Cohere, the question at hand. All these problems listed above are production related and it is the same as any others. For a privacy and safety point of view, yeah, self hosting and not using a remote service can provide some safety, if you trust the company not to be exfiling all your queries anyways to their central servers for "future training" or "quality assurance". potentially competent in house IT could take measures to guarantee that depending on how it's self hosted version works. Given all these models are generated by companies that started by stealing all available human productions, I am a bit skittish on blindly trusting them after that but your millage may vary. Also with a background in open source and security, i'm above average skeptical about a lot of offerings... so i suppose factor that into how you process my skepticism here.
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 30, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

@votetanille@socialbc.ca also what's the value:

  • more courts are determining the output cannot be copyrighted, which is good and right, but could be a value problem

  • some open source projects are realizing the potential license threat since LLMs will happily reproduce copy righted material they were trained on and are considering any AI contributions tainted and unacceptable. It is I suppose TBD by the courts but do you want to take the risk incorporating a lot of that output now to find out later it's a problem?

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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 30, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

@votetanille@socialbc.ca

references:

  • https://www.404media.co/google-amazon-ai-search-mein-kampf-reviews/

  • oh right, anthropic's own research later determined a "mere" 250 sites or data points in their near infinite data collection was enough to noticeably influence models: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

  • https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ai-boss-says-ai-134000462.html

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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 30, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @votetanille@socialbc.ca
@votetanille@socialbc.ca a) super happy to see you sticking around here! b) i currently have a pretty multifaceted distrust of ai companies, that things like "private" and "secure" and "host yourself" are not remotely enough. b.1) generating LLMs still means mass data collection (stealing) and training. all these LLMs have stolen and uncurated material in them, which also means it's been trained on some very bad stuff too (russia was alredy caught years ago astro turfing tens of thousands of sites with "bad" opinions that all the top models of 2024 unquestioningly absorbed, which is why they all reviewed Mien Kampf favorably. All the "guardrails" in the world won't protect us properly. And all that guardrail work not oft talked about is usually outsourced to exploited workers in other countries for as cheap as can be and is traumatizing. So just making these products is beyond deeply problematic. b.2) They don't think at all, they are just predictive test on steroids. They will always lean into agreeing and reinforcing what the user is saying hence all the new research and talk of "ai psychosis". They easily and commonly "hallucinate" (lie). I really continue to believe their use is a lot over sold. b.3) there's a core anti worker bent to all this. All the providers want to destroy work. Just look at MS AI CEO gleefully declaring at the start of this year they want to "replace all white collar jobs with in 18 months". OpenAI or Anthropic is talking about turning "intelligence" into another utility like power and water that they can sell. They want to make everyone unemployed and hold all the power that powers the entire economy. I don't believe it will work but if it does, any economist or sociologist or anthropoligist can tell you that the "safe limit" for unemployment is much lower and their plan can only lead to full scale societal collapse. So their plan is to be like 10 dragons owning the entire world while the other 8.3 billion of us are impoverished, and if they get even close to that plan, everything collapses. 🤷‍♀️
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Apr 29, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @rebane2001@infosec.exchange
@rebane2001@infosec.exchange omg that works! thanks for the tip!
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Mar 08, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
thanks
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Mar 08, 2026
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social

Apparently it needs explicitly stating to my audience, trans women are women, there's no debate, please unfollow me if you'd want to "debate"

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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Aug 13, 2025
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @aboutsignal@mastodon.social
@aboutsignal@mastodon.social From the mouth of the averaged discussions of all the data meta could slurp up
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jul 19, 2025
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @parismarx@mastodon.online
@parismarx@mastodon.online awesome, thanks for the list, sharing. for privacy messaging cases (not saying you should add to your general purpose list, just FYI), I know as I helped co-found it, @cwtch@fosstodon.org is Canadian, and I'm fairly confident @briar@fosstodon.org is not american but cannot confirm
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Feb 27, 2025
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social
@cwtch@fosstodon.org sure helps that arch also has packages for flutter. that I think is gonna be a sticking point with other distros...
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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Feb 27, 2025
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social

Really cool to see the @cwtch@fosstodon.org community packaging it for Arch including scripts to build it (and minor patch to arch ui guidelines I am assuming). Will try to spin up an Arch VM sometime to try, but I'm just surprised and delighted to see this

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=cwtch

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Open post
dan_ballard
Dan Ballard @dan_ballard@kolektiva.social · Jun 23, 2024
Dan Ballard
@dan_ballard@kolektiva.social

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him. Works on Tor Browser (@torproject) Board @ Open Privacy Research Society (@openprivacy ) & developer on Cwtch.im (@cwtch )

kolektiva.social
Replying to @AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org
@AdrianVovk @mhoye if any software I ever released ever unexpectedly deleted a user's home dir I'd be beyond upset. The systemd team (and some fans) hardly seem to care and this attitude is a huge part of the problem. The response range of RTFM to "I guess we can add a bit more docs meh" entirely misses the mark for me. But is exactly what i expect from that team sadly. Unexpectedly deleting user data is beyond trust breaking and software I want to use and work on has a different attitude. One that when working on functions that could ever get close to that warn users, are wrapped in protects, etc. not ones that causally delete a /home directory. I think the reason I'm having a hard time articulating it here is because the entire point of view and user focus I and the systemd team are operating from are very far apart. If something has a chance to delete user data it needs so many warning and appropriate labeling. That this didn't and the team never apologized once is a very stark data point to me. As another angle. Unix apps arent traditionally huge on side effects and so again it's quite a lot for something supposed to be removing tmp files to kill a home dir. I don't care about mislabeling or functional drift. The fact no one at what sounds like many stages of development and then even reporting saw this as the problem that some of us do is the problem. Sorry this got long and ranty a bit but I'm trying to express the magnitude of the gulf I see here
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