@proti@lemmy.world not all heroes wear capes. Thank you for making my day!

Bad bot.

It has been public for a long time that they have access to your contacts and metadata (who you talk to, how much, when, from where, etc.) That was bad enough. But this is the first time I’ve heard about accessing message content. Really chilling.

Funny that the surveillance state suddenly forgets to surveil when it is the one under the spotlight.

Loops is actually pretty great.

This is truly horrifying. Even more so that the world is watching it happen with precious little protest.

That’s true, there are some projects to bring features like street view/360 view, interactive business listings, internal views, etc. In my area, I still have to switch back and forth between Google and OSM, but some areas are much more complete. It just depends on where you live and which specific features you rely on.

It will never come from scraping a copyrighted source, as that would be fundamentally against the ethos of the project 🤷

For clarification, Organic Maps was the project that has been accused of mismanagement. A significant portion of that community departed to create this app, CoMaps. The goal from the outset was to create a more transparent and open community, hence the name, community maps or CoMaps.

CoMaps is a fairly recent fork of what was already an excellent app, but likely with poor management ethics behind it. I’ve been extremely impressed by the rapid pace of development on a pretty sizable project. There are already hundreds of small (and a few not so small) improvements over the project it was forked from.

It’s a very different approach. Personally, I could never fit OSMand into my daily routine, but this one has been great.

It’s not a reskin, it’s built from the ground up. Although it is technically a fork of a fork (not OSMand).

For me, much more user-friendly and intuitive and even quicker. They both use open street maps data, but I think they are worlds apart. I haven’t done any testing with OSMand for a couple years, so I couldn’t tell you which specific features are different.

I find it very easy to read, day or night. It’s quick to add a destination for navigation. It’s very easy to create updates directly from the app that will upload to OSM.

Sometimes I forget how brutal the early 2000s were.

Having a number of different editors allows manipulating the discussion and concensus protections built into Wikipedia.

Depending on the topic, it may not be necessary. A complimentary article about a new technology product or company founder just takes a few press releases that get picked up. Manipulating world events and leaders requires more coordination.

Although manipulating the sources cited is a great way to manipulate Wikipedia. You have to recruit 10-40 people to act as a group of editors to manufacture concensus across topics. Or you can just create a website or series of press releases.

“Hey, this small-town museum has an article about a historical event. It must be true. Link it at the bottom.” Or “well, this local newspaper article says it is happened, so into the article it goes.”

Even more effective, especially for political groups, is just publish dozens of supportive articles, while miring competing articles in edit wars and the bureaucracy that comes with it. For sources, just cite expert books that are favorable. It’s not easy, but hiring or recruiting 10-40 editors is trivial for political entities.

We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower. It can and has been infiltrated by corporate and political groups, and even creative vandals.

It’s the most valuable digital property in the world. You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

I had the same reaction! I had to log into the screwy web portal and test it to realize it was something else entirely.

They literally will and are.

If they built out a Mastodon network with government support, then it would.

This has not been voted on to my knowledge. This article is just about the cosigners officially submitting the bill.

Uh, Mastodon exists?

There is a learning curve, and different people have different approaches. Yours is to dive in, which means you will learn a lot quickly. I always go too slow and do a lot of smaller experiments along the way. I make fewer major mistakes, but am slow to adopt new software.

You will make it through this frustration and be actually helping others figure things out before you know it.

Don’t worry about the copying and pasting. Strangers on the internet care more about your success and well being than corporations anyway. I’ve been involved with the open source community for decades in one way or another and I have never - not once - encountered malicious code in a support forum.