Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 4 Posts
  • 1.37K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.

    [Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:

    1. UK follows Saxon tribal law, while Brazil follows Roman civil law. I am not sure but I believe the former requires both sides to dig up precedents, and that puts a heavier burden on the smaller side of a legal litigation. While in the later, if you show “ackshyually in that older case the defendant was deemed guilty”, all the judge will say is “so? What is written is what matters; if the defendant violated the law or not.”.
    2. The Americas in general are notorious for sloppy law enforcement. Specially Brazil. Doubly so when both parties are random nobodies.

    So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.

    Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.


  • For context:

    There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”

    So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.

    I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:

    1. False positives becoming more common.
    2. The burden will be considerably bigger for smaller platforms than bigger ones.
    3. It gives the STF yet another tool for vendetta. The judiciary is already a bit too strong in comparison with the other two powers, and this decision only feeds the beast further.

    On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.



  • It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.

    That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)

    I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:

    • HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
    • since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue
    • those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
    • Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
    • I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN

    That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.

    *I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.










  • As usual for Latin America, law enforcement is abysmal in Brazil, specially in matters that don’t involve violent crimes. If the amount of money is small, a police report is toilet paper; if the amount of money is big, the process might take a literal decade to go through. (That is not a bug of the system - it’s a feature against the population.)

    For small amounts you’re also “encouraged” to use the pequenas causas (small litigations) system. That basically means you, a literal nobody with zero law expertise, against a team of lawyers of the corporation/mafia/business you’re suing.

    So in practice the law does not benefit customers whatsoever here. At most, it’ll give corporations an easy way out, when it’s proven they’re stealing your data: “Mr. Judge, I’ll throw some money on that thing’s snout in exchange for its data. It should be enough, right?” “Okay, justice has been served. Next case.”