Steve Foerster 🇩🇲 @stevefoerster@mastodon.oeru.org
Writer, technologist, educator.
President, https://newworld.university
#OER, #MOOC, #CBE, #mlearning, #stackability, #southsouth, #GlobalEd
Other interests: #Dominica, #vegan, #DnD, #econdev, #startups, #crypto and #defi (within reason), #FOSS, #seasteading
Friendly! Feel free to reach out.
Joined Jul 2018
Celebrating #CanadaDay by listening to bilingual propaganda from Diana's childhood.
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
Metaphorically, We are all cleaning ketchup off the wall.
When a bumper crop of seaweed makes it look like Cthulhu is emerging from the deep.
On social media, few things are more annoying than saying "let that sink in" or "read that again".
If what you're saying is even slightly as profound as you think it is then it's unnecessary. And if it isn't then it just makes you sound like a tool.
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
uspol-adjacent TechPost
Following the recent SCOTUS ruling, many have been trying to publish resources to help people find reproductive healthcare. They often wish to do this anonymously, to avoid doxxing.
There’s no shortage of guides on how to stay anonymous online. I recommend using the Tor Browser in a disposable Whonix VM. The Whonix Wiki has a good guide to anonymous publishing.
Few guides cover stylometric fingerprinting. Stylometric fingerprinting is one of the most common techniques for de-anonymization, used by adversaries ranging from trolls to law enforcement.
Common advice is to use offline machine translation to translate works to and from another language. Argos Translate and Marian are two options that come to mind.
Adversarial stylometry: Circumventing authorship recognition to preserve privacy and anonymity shows that machine translation alone isn’t nearly as strong a method as manual approaches: obfuscation (hiding your writing style) or imitation (mimicking another author). These approaches have excellent success rates, even among amateur writers. The aforementioned Whonix wiki page lists common stylometric fingerprinting vectors for manual approaches to address.
Limiting unusual vocabulary and sentence structure make for a good start. Using a comprehensive and highly-opinionated style-guide should also help. The Economist has a good one that was specifically written to make all authors sound the same: The Economist Style Guide, 12th edition (application/pdf).
For any inexperienced writers: opinionated offline grammar checkers such as LanguageTool and RedPen may supplement a manual approach by normalizing any distinguishing “errors” in your language, but nothing beats a human editor.
Further reading: How we authenticate a document, by OrphAnalytics SA.
#POSSE note from https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/24/stylometric-fingerprinting-resistance/
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
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Hello my fellow USians:
#Briar is a phone app that lets you send secure messages via a mesh network, including via bluetooth. https://briarproject.org/
#Manyverse is a social networking phone app that lets you write posts which are cryptographically signed and which can propagate via a mesh network including bluetooth. https://www.manyver.se/
#Ripple is a "panic" app that can hide or delete data. It can be used with f-droid to remove entire apps. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.guardianproject.ripple/
On balance I've enjoyed all of the latter day #StarTrek series, but #StrangeNewWorlds is the first one that really makes me miss 26 episode seasons. #SNW
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
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If you are involved in Open Education at your institution, please consider adding your perspectives on this research being done by Leo Havemann at the UK's Open University
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
The young queen listened anxiously.
"Food is indeed plentiful here but it's causing sickness throughout the colony," reported the Prime-Gatherer.
The queen's mandibles quivered. Since forming her own hive, she'd had her mettle tested regularly, "Our ancestors used to debut-harvest here, what happened?"
"Modern earthlings' profuse salt consumption has made them toxic to us."
"Then we must seek a new debut-harvest planet," the queen decreed.
#uspol How both sides probably see the #MisesCaucus takeover of the #Libertarian Party.
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
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I wish archive.org had a way to submit corrections to metadata. I encounter many tings that I can't find initially because things like the title or the authors are incorrect.
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
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The past tense of "todo" is "tada"
Re: "Education meets the #metaverse", my question is what, if anything, is so different this time around from when Second Life rode the same hype cycle nearly twenty years ago? #BrookingsYidanPrize
https://www.brookings.edu/events/education-meets-the-metaverse-the-promise-and-the-worry/
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
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Are you interested in #OpenBadges and #VerifiableCredentials?
Join us next week for a Badge Wiki barn-raising session!
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
Heardle (only time I'll post about this)
It's amazing how your brain can instantly recognize a song from a one second snippet:
#Heardle #102
🔊🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
A roiling sea of anguish, anger, annoyance; raw emotion churning like burning sewage.
"This," The Void said, "is where I put the screams I am given."
"I thought they just went away."
"Eventually. I don't mind storing them here until they fade."
"It's ugly. And beautiful."
"Yes."
#MicroFiction #SmallStories #TootFic
Steve Foerster 🇩🇲
boosted
Would you like to hear a story about a Native American man in the 17th century who managed to fuck over the British not once, but TWICE?
Let me tell you about a fellow named Epenow. ( 🧵 )
Apparently the Russian military has the "St. Peter Principle", in which people in a hierarchy tend to rise to the level of respective incompetence of whoever was recently killed in that same position.
Writer, technologist, educator.
President, https://newworld.university
#OER, #MOOC, #CBE, #mlearning, #stackability, #southsouth, #GlobalEd
Other interests: #Dominica, #vegan, #DnD, #econdev, #startups, #crypto and #defi (within reason), #FOSS, #seasteading
Friendly! Feel free to reach out.
Joined Jul 2018
