@aral@fungible_thadius Remember too that Myra Hindley and Rose West and Ruth Ellis were cis women. Let's tar all cis women with the same brush - or maybe not. We could all be sensible and epathetic human beings and condemn violence wherever it comes from and condemn the USA for having so many guns available with no restrictions.
The US understands the threat of foreign tech companies/apps gathering data on US citizens and manipulating their behaviour and is looking to ban TikTok.
Dear @EU_Commission, here’s an incomplete list of foreign tech companies/apps gathering data on EU citizens and manipulating their behaviour:
- Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) - Alphabet, Inc. (Google, YouTube, etc.) - Twitter, Inc. - Microsoft (Windows, etc.) - Snap, Inc.
The US understands the threat of foreign tech companies/apps gathering data on US citizens and manipulating their behaviour and is looking to ban TikTok.
Dear @EU_Commission, here’s an incomplete list of foreign tech companies/apps gathering data on EU citizens and manipulating their behaviour:
- Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) - Alphabet, Inc. (Google, YouTube, etc.) - Twitter, Inc. - Microsoft (Windows, etc.) - Snap, Inc.
@aral@EU_Commission What about Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast, Paramount Global, and Netflix? All of their apps demand total access to everything on your system under a pretense of "preventing piracy."
Elon Musk doesn't care about others' views and question. If the work of an entire team can be easily handled by a robot, that team is nothing but an unnecessary business expense. @aral
Folks, it’s encouraging to see more of you writing alternative text on images here so people who use screen readers can also take part but please make sure the text really is the equivalent of the image.
So, for example, if you’re posting a screenshot of some text, don’t just say “Excerpt of article” or “A tweet by so-and-so” but actually copy/paste the text from it (many platforms let you do this with images these days).
Folks who use screen readers have the right to hear what we see.
“I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999 … But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality … I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.“
“I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999 … But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality … I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.“
@aral@cancel "tried all the silver bullets recommended by Hacker News, used kafkaesque request forms to prove legitimity, contacted the admins of some blacklists."
oh my gooddd. as someone who's had to do this in recent memory just because the domain name *extension* was flagged as "bad vibes" i feel this article in my bones.
yes, spam is an issue, but email deliverability has become a shitfest.
jeezaus
and this is a good heads-up. big tech will obviously try to throttle mastodon too =/
It might be a good time to take a look at WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/) and their hosted services Write.as (https://write.as/) and WriteFreely Host (https://writefreely.host/) and consider owning your own #blog on the fediverse instead of contributing to the walled gardens of the folks who bequeathed you Twitter.
@aral I have had my own write.as blog for a couple years now. I love the minimalist approach to writing and reading. I also appreciate that both me and my readers aren't being exploited for financial gain, and that my writings are truly mine. We need to bring back blogging for the sake of blogging, not for financial gain.
@aral I've had an account at Medium since before Mastodon existed. It has its good sides, but it goes through drastic changes too often. When it was new it was super easy: signed up with my Twitter account and started writing. Then they went to more paywalled articles.
I haven't posted there in a long time.
I looked at #WriteFreely and its ilk and I'm still curious, but for now I'll stick with my trusty WordPress blog that I've had since 2010.
Today, you can choose not to drive a Tesla if you don’t want Elon Musk, Inc. knowing everywhere you go.
Tomorrow, you might have to limit where you live because you won’t live in a Google Home and reconsider having 20/20 vision again in exchange for the artificial lens company seeing everything you see.
Privacy is not something you can “vote with your wallet” on. We either protect it as a human right or we lose it altogether.
By the way, if you think the artificial lens bit is hyperbole, think again. Quite a few years ago now I was sitting at dinner with some CEO of some startup that had developed a free tool they said helped people with dyslexia read more easily.
So, as I do, I asked him my favourite question: “how will you make money with this?”
He looked at me like I was rather daft before answering, matter of factly, “well, we know what you’re reading.”
“Many browsers and anti-spyware applications are designed to reject and delete third-party cookies. Adobe ensures that cookies can always we [sic] set even if third-party cookies are blocked.”
Thinking more people are going to engage with you on mainstream social media “because everyone’s there” is like thinking people at a stadium concert are there to listen to you. It‘s only true if you’re one of the ones on stage. Not so much when you’re huddled in the nosebleeds.
Forget the numbers. Forget about “going viral” (leave it to the psychopaths in Silicon Valley to make virus-like behaviour aspirational). Embrace the joy of interacting with one another on a human scale.
@aral "Forget about “going viral” (leave it to the psychopaths in Silicon Valley to make virus-like behaviour aspirational). " OMG SO TRUE!!!!!! LOL!!!
@aral If you are on a centralised network to grab some short term benefit for yourself, you lure in other people to be victims of the whims and harms of that network. You are reinforcing the monopoly. You are 'causing' the problems.
"But there are more people on the Titanic than in the lifeboats"
Think longer term, and think community, not just of yourself.
@aral No single person is a rockstar by his own account. Ultimately the asshole on top is just a useful idiot for others who benefit from his actions. In capitalism it is “greed” that flaws the system. But in every system “power” is the end goal. And power should be governed, by laws. That’s the trouble with asshole Elon. He is a puppet of those who discovered “Freedom of Speech” as a ticket to power without control. It is time the legal system kicks in, and ends this.
@aral: This is a natural outcome of loose marginal tax rates at the high end of income. Levying high taxes on the rich is prosocial, in part, because it gives the zillionaires a motive to re-invest that income, and to spend it in ways that zillionaires are known to like but aren't taxable, such as naming museums after themselves. By taking that motivation out of the equation, the sort of people primarily motivated by hoarding money get a strong advantage at the money-hoarding game.
Here’s an idea: let’s call people “people” on the fediverse instead of “users” whenever we can.
Compare:
“There are 42 users on this instance.”
vs
“There are 42 people on this instance.”
Which acknowledges our humanity more?
Language matters. We don’t need to perpetuate mainstream technology’s othering/colonial framing of “us” – designers/developers/other “clever folks” – and “them” – the users (usually one step removed from “dumb user” and usually the ones who get used).
We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.
Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.
I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.
It’s a lightweight free and open live-steaming server. (We use it at Small Technology Foundation for our streams at https://owncast.small-web.org)
And you can follow people’s Owncast servers from the fediverse and get notified when they’re about to start streaming, etc. (e.g., hit the follow button on our stream and enter your Mastodon/fediverse account) :awesome:
Saying you work in Big Tech because you want to “change it from within” is like saying you’re a butler for the royal family because you want to overthrow the monarchy.
@aral yeah, that’s also why many CEOs regret going public: changes might happen, but mostly in the direction of shareholders’ interests 😖
Still, if you think about individuals working in big tech, they have a chance to learn a lot, grow, help others, and bring different points of view both in and outside the company. And while big companies usually do not stray too much from their paths, people can and at some point they might bring something which is valuable to everyone.
Linux really needs to remove the “privileged ports” security theater bullshit.
We’re no longer living in the mainframe era. The security properties of the Internet are different to mainframes. This is actually an anti-feature that either complicates life or actually compromises security (when folks run servers as root and forget to drop privileges , etc.).
If anyone has any sway within the kernel team, etc., please do your thing.
Linux really needs to remove the “privileged ports” security theater bullshit.
We’re no longer living in the mainframe era. The security properties of the Internet are different to mainframes. This is actually an anti-feature that either complicates life or actually compromises security (when folks run servers as root and forget to drop privileges , etc.).
@aral
It seems that the Russian parliament might unblock twitter now?
@aral What did Trump say about shooting someone in a crowded street?
@aral I have a duty to my readers to endure the shooting of puppies so I can report on the shooting of puppies.
#twitter #journalists #journalism