GlacialTurtle

To get around pay wall: https://archive.is/RHuUy

Excerpts:

While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot."

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200."

These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.

[...]

Haaretz has gathered testimonies from active-duty soldiers, career officers, and reservists that reveal the unprecedented authority given to commanders. As the IDF operates across multiple fronts, division commanders have received expanded powers. Previously, bombing buildings or launching airstrikes required approval from the IDF chief of staff. Now, such decisions can be made by lower-ranking officers.

"Division commanders now have almost unlimited firepower authority in combat zones," explains a veteran officer in Division 252. "A battalion commander can order drone strikes, and a division commander can launch conquest operations." Some sources describe IDF units operating like independent militias, unrestricted by standard military protocols.

'We took him to the cage'

The chaotic reality has repeatedly forced commanders and fighters to face severe moral dilemmas. "The order was clear: 'Anyone crossing the bridge into the [Netzarim] corridor gets a bullet in the head,'" recalls a veteran fighter from Division 252.

"One time, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We responded as if it was a large militant raid. We took positions and just opened fire. I'm talking about dozens of bullets, maybe more. For about a minute or two, we just kept shooting at the body. People around me were shooting and laughing."

But the incident didn't end there. "We approached the blood-covered body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was just a boy, maybe 16." An intelligence officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned the boy wasn't a Hamas operative – but just a civilian.

"That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us for killing a terrorist, saying he hoped we'd kill ten more tomorrow," the fighter adds. "When someone pointed out he was unarmed and looked like a civilian, everyone shouted him down. The commander said: 'Anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians. Everyone's a terrorist.' This deeply troubled me – did I leave my home to sleep in a mouse-infested building for this? To shoot unarmed people?"

Similar incidents continue to surface. An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants. "Standard procedure requires photographing bodies and collecting details when possible, then sending evidence to intelligence to verify militant status or at least confirm they were killed by the IDF," he explains. "Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants."

A look at Bluesky's claims to being decentralised, written by Christine Lemmer-Webber, who helped create ActivityPub (the protocol that lies underneath Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube and others).

The best way to understand the reason for this difference in hosting requirements is to understand the underlying architecture of these systems. ActivityPub follows an message passing architecture (utilizing publish-subscribe architecture prominently for most "subscription" oriented uses), the same as email, XMPP, and so on. A message is addressed, and then delivered to recipients. (Actually a more fully peer-to-peer system would deliver more directly; all of email, XMPP, ActivityPub and so on use a client-server architecture, so there is a particular server which tends to operate on behalf of a particular user. See comments on the fediverse later in this article for how things can be moved more peer-to-peer.) This turns out to be pretty efficient; if only users on five servers need to know about a message, out of tens of thousands of servers, only those five servers will be contacted. Until recently, every system I knew of described as federated used a message passing architecture, to the degree where I and others assumed that federation implied a message passing architecture, because achieving the architectural goal of many independent nodes cooperating to produce a unified whole seemed to imply this was necessary for efficiency of a substantially sized network. If Alyssa wants to write a piece of mail to Ben, she can send it directly to Ben, and it can arrive at Ben's house. If Ben wants to reply, Ben can reply directly to Alyssa. Your intuitions about email apply exactly here, because that's effectively what this design is.

Bluesky does not utilize message passing, and instead operates in what I call a shared heap architecture. In a shared heap architecture, instead of delivering mail to someone's house (or, in a client-to-server architecture as most non p2p mailing lists are, at least their apartment's mail room), letters which may be interesting all are dumped at a post office (called a "relay") directly. From there it's the responsibility of interested parties to show up and filter through the mail to see what's interesting to them. This means there is no directed delivery; if you want to see replies which are relevant to your messages, you (or someone operating on behalf of you) had better sort through and know about every possible message to find out what messages could be a reply.

[...]

The answer is: Bluesky solves this problem via centralization. Since there is really just one very large relay which everyone is expected to participate in, this relay has a god's-eye knowledge base. Entities which sort through mail and relevant replies for users are AppViews, which pull from the relay and also have a god's-eye knowledge base, and also do filtering. So too do any other number of services which participate in the network: they must operate at the level of gods rather than mortals.

[...]

I'm not sure this behavior is consistent after all with how blocking works on X-Twitter; it was not my understanding that blocking someone would be public information. But blocks are indeed public information on Bluesky, and anyone can query who is blocking or being blocked by anyone. It is true that looking at a blocking account from a blocked account on most social media systems or observing the results of interactions can reveal information about who is blocked, but this is not the same as this being openly queryable information. There is a big difference between "you can look at someone's post and see who is being blocked" to "you can query the network for every person who is blocking or is blocked by JK Rowling".

[...]

The reason for this is very simple: we have seen people who utilize blocklists be retaliated against for blocking someone who is angry about being blocked. It was our opinion that sharing such information could result in harassment. (Last I checked, Mastodon provides the user with the choice of whether or not to send a "report" about a block to the offending instance so that moderators of that server can notice a problematic user and take action, but delivering such information is not required.)

That said, to Bluesky's credit, this is an issue that is being openly considered. There is an open issue to consider whether or not private blocks are possible. Which does lead to a point, despite my many critiques here: it is true that even many of the things I have talked about could be changed and evaluated in the future. But nonetheless, in many ways I consider the decision to have blocks be publicly queryable to be an example of emergent behavior from initial decisions... early architectural decisions can have long-standing architectural results, and while many things can be changed, some things are particularly difficult to change form an initial starting point.

[...]

I've analyzed previously in the document the challenges Bluesky has in achieving meaningful decentralization or federation. Bluesky now has much bigger pressures than decentralization, namely to satisfy the massive scale of users who wish to flock to the platform now, to satisfy investors which will increasingly be interested in whether or not they can see a return, and to achieve enough income to keep their staff and servers going. Rearchitecting towards meaningful decentralization will be a big pivot and will likely introduce many of the problems that Bluesky has touted their platform as not having that other decentralized platforms have.

There are early signs that Bluesky the company is already considering or exploring features that only make sense in a centralized context. Direct messages were discussed previously in this document, but with the announcement of premium accounts, it will be interesting to see what happens. Premium accounts would be possible to handle in a fully decentralized system: higher quality video uploads makes sense. What becomes more uncertain is what happens when a self-hosted PDS user uploads their own higher quality videos, will those be mirrored onto Bluesky's CDN in higher quality as well? Likewise, ads seem likely to be coming to Bluesky

A common way to make premium accounts more valuable is to make them ad-free. But if Bluesky is sufficiently decentralized and its filtering and labeling tools work as described, it will be trivial for users to set up filters which remove ads from the stream. Traditionally when investors realize users are doing this and removing a revenue stream, that is the point at which they start pressuring hard on enshittification and removing things like public access to APIs, etc. What will happen in Bluesky's case?

Here is where "credible exit" really is the right term for Bluesky's architectural goals. Rearchitecting towards meaningful decentralization and federation is a massive overhaul of Bluesky's infrastructure, but providing "credible exit" is not. It is my opinion that leaning into "credible exit" is the best thing that Bluesky can do: perhaps a large corporation or two always have to sit at the center of Bluesky, but perhaps also it will be possible for people to leave.

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In-depth piece on the use of private detention centres that Biden and Kamala claimed they were going to close. Documents abuse of detainees, detainees being held in solitary confinement as punishment when asking for the paperwork they need to complete their applications, and the massive commercial growth thanks to private prisons converting to become detention centres instead:

But as record numbers of asylum-seekers continued to arrive at the southern border in the past three years, the administration has relied increasingly on privately operated immigration detention centers. The centers that DHS recommended be closed have remained open, continuing to hold thousands of detainees. And even though overall immigrant detention has fallen under Biden from the all-time highs during the Trump administration, the US now concentrates more of its immigrant detainees than ever in privately operated ICE facilities—the same ones Biden vowed to drive out of the sector.

Part of that shift is tied to an executive order he signed less than a week after taking office, one barring the Department of Justice from renewing any contracts with privately contracted prisons and jails. The ban, importantly, didn’t apply to immigrant detainees. Some of those private contractors quickly converted criminal jails into immigrant detention centers, signing new contracts with ICE. In 2021 about 79% of all ICE detainees were held in privately run detention centers; by mid-2023 the percentage had jumped to more than 90%, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the South, which absorbed much of the shifts in detention flows, the portion was even greater. In Louisiana, for example, about 97% of detainees are now overseen by private companies. Such shifts have helped some of America’s largest private prison contractors rake in more revenue during the Biden administration than ever.

[...]

Decker’s organization is part of a coalition that has conducted more than 6,000 interviews with detainees inside the nine Louisiana detention centers since 2022. They’ve compiled stories of beatings, sexual assaults and attacks with pepper spray and tear gas. Detainees reported being shackled in five-point restraints for as long as 26 hours, unable to eat or use the restroom, and left with cuts on their wrists and legs. They described conditions inside the centers that included rat infestations, black mold, leaking ceilings and worm-infested food. “The pattern repeated especially in the privately run facilities is that the companies are actually profiting by offering substandard quality of food, clothing and medical care,” Decker says. “Less than the bare minimum.”

[...]

But in 2021 the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights division conducted an investigation into allegations of abuse at Winn. The subsequent DHS report, published that November, raised “serious concerns” about substandard conditions, inappropriate use of force by staff and numerous “serious medical and mental health concerns.” A DHS memo written a month later recommended that Winn “be closed or drawn down” and that ICE immediately “discontinue placing detainees at Winn until the identified culture and conditions that can lead to abuse, mistreatment, and discrimination toward detainees are corrected.”

But Winn never closed. When ICE’s five-year contract for the facility expired this May, the Biden administration renewed it. The precise terms of the deal haven’t yet been made public, but Winn continues to hold hundreds of detainees.

ICE and the White House didn’t respond to questions for this story. But the agency has previously defended conditions in all of its facilities by declaring that it “is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody.” It has emphasized that it uses “multi-layered inspections, standards, and an oversight program” to continuously review the detention centers to ensure humane treatment as well as comprehensive medical and mental health care.