Jon P
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jdp23.thenexus.today
Jon P
@jdp23.thenexus.today
250 followers 290 following 650 posts
Organizer, activist, privacy advocate, strategist, software engineer ... psytrance, tarot and more. He/him they/them. Also @thenexusofprivacy.net
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jdp23.thenexus.today
I really liked how Claude "is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviors" but they got around them by innovative techniques like "tricking it", not telling it their malicious goal, and lying to it.

Who, who could have predicted that bad actors would do something like that?
At this point they had to convince Claude—which is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviors—to engage in the attack. They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails. They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided the full context of their malicious purpose. They also told Claude that it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm, and was being used in defensive testing.
November 14, 2025 at 4:48 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
And here's a handful more aurora pics from Washiungton state, all taken between 5:15 and 6:05. By that point the clouds had gotten fairly dense and the substorm was waning. Still, a very good night! (5/5)

#aurora
Aurora, with green on the bottom, yellow in the middle, and red above, fading to purple and merging into the dark sky On the left, reddish aurora above a tree. On the right, blue sky above another tree. The divide is very sharp, almost like they are two separate pictures matted together. Bright green aurora in the middle of the dark sky. aurora with green on the left, yellow in the middle, red on the right. To the right, dark sky.
November 12, 2025 at 5:16 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
This green aurora was completely detached from the ones in the previous pics. We saw it starting as a small blob to the east and then it gradually stretched across the entire sky. It was visible to the naked eye although the color was very faint.

#aurora
A very vivid green aurora, stretching across the whole picture, with blue sky above and below. At the bottom, trees.
November 12, 2025 at 5:13 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
This was just a bit after the previous picutre, so maybe 5:45 or 5:50. It's amazing how the colors change ...

#aurora
aurora with purple at the top, reddish pink, yellow, and green at the bottom.
November 12, 2025 at 5:12 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
More aurora, 11/11, 5:40 pm. It was darker by now, and the clouds were coming in

#aurora
Aurora with green on top, reddish pink and a bit of purple in the middle, and more green below. At the bottom, trees; at the top, dark sky, with stars visible
November 12, 2025 at 5:11 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
Aurora from Snoqualmie Point, Washington state! These were all taken from 5:15 - 6:00 or so -- it wasn't even fully dark for the first one. (1/N)

#aurora
Pink aurora, bright in the center and fading as it gets farther out, merging into a dark sky above, and little fluffly clouds in front of it. Below, green aurora, and trees.
November 12, 2025 at 5:09 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
Excellent article! I'll have more to say once I digest it more fully ... but one imporant thing to highlight in the short term:

@shreyanjain.net, affectionate atmosphere sighting! 🍾
And for the AT Protocol ecosystem (affectionately, the atmosphere) as a whole, the stakes are high
October 22, 2025 at 6:29 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
"Wow, if growth continues at this rate, by the end of the year every particle in the universe will have a fedi account!"
Fediverse. user growth (Feb 2024): a chart with numbers slowly climbing to a bit less than 10,000,000 and then suddenly shooting up to 49,462,875
October 8, 2025 at 11:42 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
And here was my take in the aftermath of last December's events (from the "Epilogue-in-progress" section of privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-and-... )
And while Blacksky has (very deservedly) gotten the most attention, there are a lot of other valuable moderation services out there as well. The XBlock Screenshot labeler, opt-in pronouns, Laeleps, profile labels to see who's a new or changed account ... my Bluesky experience is hugely better because of them, and there isn't anything I know like them on other social networks. These community labelers are a huge win from Bluesky's perspective. If labelers run by different marginalized communities can provide safer experiences for community members, Bluesky will be a safer place for marginalized people – so a safer place for everybody. Not only that, there are obvious cost advantages outsourcing Trust and Safety (and the need for context-specific expertise) to volunteers or non-profits. But community-run moderation services like Blacksky have a lot less power than Bluesky Trust and Safety. While community-run moderation services can hide harassing posts from their subscribers, they have no ability to limit the broader reach of harassing posts or prevent pile-ons. The official Bluesky moderation service is the only moderation service with the ability to ban users, the only moderation service whose labels are automatically visible to everybody, the only moderation service that's not limited in terms of the number of labels that's applied each day, the only one with significant funding ... So if Bluesky Trust & Safety is going to continue to side with and encourage harassers, there's only so much the community moderation services can do. Not only that, the volunteers running moderation services are often targets of harassment themselves. Why should they donate their labor to a well-funded corporation that isn't trying to protect them?
October 6, 2025 at 4:29 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
I'd phrase it differently. Hannah had been banned for the "hammers" non-threat before that. Aveta was at the center of events related to Bluesky's moderation, where instead of enforcing their policy against racist speech they eventually decided to suspend the racist user on other grounds.
“A user with a virulent racist history wishing harm on a BIPOC is different from the same comment in a debate about MCU versus DCEU movies from otherwise well behaved users,” Obasanjo wrote. “A legalistic discussion of whether ‘someone should push you off of a tall building’ is a ban worthy offense misses the point completely. The question is whether you tolerate openly racist people wishing harm on BIPOC on your app or not?”
October 6, 2025 at 4:18 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
It's easy, just like email! Here's a simplified diagram ...
The Pepe Silvia meme: a white man with a beard and a tie stands in front of a wall with lots of papers taped to it and lines in red drawn. on top, gesticulating
October 5, 2025 at 1:23 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
Exactly. In mid-December 2024, Rose said they were pushing it out to early this year ... and then crickets. I wrote about this in the Epilogue-in-progress of privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-and-...
If the Battle of Wormtongue hadn't happened, even with all the other problems, it's easy to imagine an end-of-the-year subscription launch being a huge success for Bluesky. We really need an alternative to Xitter, and desite the problems there are some very promising things about Bluesky –Blacksky, XBlock Labeler, and other feeds and moderation services, the energy in the ATmosphere. If I thought that Bluesky had gotten over Jack Dorsey's "moderation is bad" attitude, and if I thought they were intent on sharing their success with the community (including trans people and other long-time users who helped make them successful), then yeah I'd totally buy a subscription. From a timing perspective, there was a great opportunity to package a deal and tie into holiday-gift giving ("the perfect gift for people and polycules who want something new" ) and the energy of a new year and people making resolutions to get off of Xitter and start spending money more intentionally instead of giving it to fascists and anti-trans bigots. As well as ending the year on an up note, bringing in a quick few million dollars would also allow them to share a bunch of it with the community, increase investment in solving Trust and Safety problems, and give Bluesky more flexibility in fundraising. But no. As the wide support for borderless' Reskeet this if you refuse to pay for BlueSky+ until trust & safety decides to prioritize marginalized users highlighted, launching subscriptions in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Wormtongue would have thrown gasoline on the fire – potentially leading to calls for a boycott, sharp pushback on anybody advocating supporting Bluesky, a lot of cis Blueksky supporters saying anti-trans things in response ... not good.
October 4, 2025 at 7:45 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
Yes, Bluesky's default moderation briefly labeled the account with "intolerant" -- and then removed it. Here's the complete sequence (from privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-and-...). It's interesting that the bit about how him engineering a harassment campaign is usually elided.
Wormtongue first joined Bluesky on December 1, but waited a few days before actually skeeting. On December 6, he skeeted a link to an article he's written article that's part of a coordinated anti-trans smear campaign. He then returned to his lair on Xitter and shared a screenshot of a Bluesky post by a trans person who had (quite fairly in my opinion) compared him to David Duke. In response, his normal followers (who are known for harassing people on Xitter) harassed the trans person on Bluesky so badly that she shut down her Bluesky account. To me, Wormtongue's behavior clearly violated Bluesky's Community Guidelines, which prohibit harassment and promoting hate.1 Most Trust & Safety professionals who have weighed in see it that way too. Of course Wormtongue could argue that he wasn't explicitly suggested harassing the person whose posts he screenshotted and shared to his followers who routinely harass people. Similarly he could claim that he wasn't promoting hate, just sharing a news article. Yeah right. From a Trust & Safety perspective, these are classic examples of bad-faith "rules lawyering" – and as any experienced moderator or competent Trust & Safety professional knows, letting people get away with rules lawyering encourages harassers and provides a roadmap for how they can get around the community guidelines. At first it seemed like Bluesky's Trust & Safety team initially saw it that way as well, because on December 6 they suspended Wormtongue's account.1.5 But then Wormtongue's account was quickly unsuspended, and instead labeled it as Intolerant.2 And then the next day, Bluesky suspended Wormtongue's account again. And then Bluesky unsuspended Wormtongue's account again, and removed the label.3 For some reason trans people and allies weren't particularly happy with this sequence of events. Who could have predicted?
October 2, 2025 at 4:36 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
Here's a quick summary from the "What's past is prologue" section of privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-and-... -- there are lots of links in the article.
But as noted startup guru Clausewitz once observed, no plan survives contact with beta testing. Things came to a head in May 2023, just a few months into Bluesky's invitation-only beta. First, Bluesky suspended the account of a trans person for telling a cis white male influencer “WE ARE GOING TO BEAT YOU WITH HAMMERS.” Next, Bluesky didn't take action when a cis white woman who had made multiple racist remarks suggested that a Black non-binary person should get shoved off of someplace real high. And then to top it off, when it turned out that people were embedding racist slurs in their handles, Bluesky initially didn't take action – and didn't communicate with the community. For some reason trans and Black people and their allies weren't particularly happy with this sequence of events. Who could have predicted?
September 11, 2025 at 2:47 AM
jdp23.thenexus.today
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cox...
Groucho Marx, in a tie, from the movie Duck Soup. Subtitles: Then it's war!
September 6, 2025 at 7:04 PM
jdp23.thenexus.today
@rudyfraser.com is the pdsls.dev inspector intentionally blocked here? if not I think I ran into a bug, I get "Invalid request" on my posts with a blacksky.community URL.
A screenshot of PDSls. At the bottom: Error: InvalidRequest
September 5, 2025 at 5:04 AM