stanley lieber (https://stanleylieber.com) said this to me once during a heated debate on the best web browser (mothra v links2). The quote stuck with me ever since.
@kcarruthers trying to see what he is talking about in the way back machine but it's not obvious to me. Can't anyone find what is missing and screenshot it?
@tante seems to be the standard approach of Microsoft (and basically any other tech company), when they build something nobody likes (I'm getting flashbacks to the 90s wrt Internet Explorer...)
Remember the Simple Sabotage Field Manual? It was good in 1944. It might come in handy now. We don't have to be on the barricades, getting beaten by the police. We can be the person in the meeting, asking for clarifications, sending the report back for revisions, dropping the tool when it's inconvenient, complicating the processes, being slow on the uptake and lax in quality control. Even if we have to work for an evil corporation for evil ends, we can still help. https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
Remember the Simple Sabotage Field Manual? It was good in 1944. It might come in handy now. We don't have to be on the barricades, getting beaten by the police. We can be the person in the meeting, asking for clarifications, sending the report back for revisions, dropping the tool when it's inconvenient, complicating the processes, being slow on the uptake and lax in quality control. Even if we have to work for an evil corporation for evil ends, we can still help. ...
Even if you specifically don’t have a high need for privacy, routinely using privacy tools — from ad-blockers and privacy VPNs to privacy focused messaging and ToR — is a huge help to people who DO have that need
Normalizing the use of privacy tools helps protect access to them, by undermining arguments that “only criminals use X”. It also helps to make anti-privacy restrictions less tenable for corporations, as they risk blocking or restricting too much legitimate/customer traffic.
There are also knock-on social effects of normalizing privacy. If using Signal, for example, is seen as just normal behavior, then it’s less likely to freak out an abuser when their victim uses it “for work”. If private email services are normal, then it’s less likely a corrupt org will flag it as whistleblower activity.
Do these advantages also mean it’s harder to find and prevent malicious activity and crime? Yep. And that sucks. But it’s a good trade: I’d happily miss a few criminals if it means protecting good people’s ability to escape danger or hold power accountable.
There are also knock-on social effects of normalizing privacy. If using Signal, for example, is seen as just normal behavior, then it’s less likely to freak out an abuser when their victim uses it “for work”. If private email services are normal, then it’s less likely a corrupt org will flag it as whistleblower activity.
Now that it's no longer possible to rank in web searches, unless you're a content farm or a major publisher, it's a good time to ditch SEO, drop keywords, use descriptive headlines instead of catchy or clickbait ones, and write for humans. SEO won't help anyway, so let's help the readers who care.
People sometimes argue that we're wasting computing resources and I agree. As a counter measure, I try not to upgrade my phones and laptops, but I'm also trying to keep my virtual server small. I rent it for 15.-/month and it comes with 2 cores, 6G RAM and 75G disk space. As it turns out, hosting a fedi instance, and a blog with images, a podcast and a PDF collection takes a lot of space. And so I'm being stingy: I'm not uploading media files onto my fedi instance since those files should be on the blog and I don't want to waste the space.
Hopefully, once I'm confident that my social media expiration really works, I can start posting images and movies to social media again because I'll know that the extra copies will get deleted again after a few weeks.
But until then, it's text only posts and links to media files, if at all. #FrugalComputing
People sometimes argue that we're wasting computing resources and I agree. As a counter measure, I try not to upgrade my phones and laptops, but I'm also trying to keep my virtual server small. I rent it for 15.-/month and it comes with 2 cores, 6G RAM and 75G disk space. As it turns out, hosting a fedi instance, and a blog with images, a podcast and a PDF collection takes a lot of space. And so I'm being stingy: I'm not uploading media files onto my fedi instance since those files should be on the...
@internetarchive At various points in Chinese history, rulers came in who wanted all knowledge of previous rulers expunged. They went often to very ... extreme, let's call it ... measures to accomplish this erasure.
What saved the knowledge from extinction?
Essentially piracy. Copies of forbidden texts made and circulated in the underground, stored for when, inevitably, said ruler dies and the texts could be resurfaced.
“Don’t say “Europe should invest in secure communications”, write out that the European Commission should procure a secure email solution that does not fall under US spying legislation” https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/europe-must-invest-in-xyz/
Tomorrow, I'll be taking time off from my regular work fighting cybercrime to help my fellow citizens with another important task: exercising their electoral franchise by casting ballots.
In 2020, I decided to sign up to work for my county here in Colorado and help out at the largest polling location, the University Memorial Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I'll be working there again this year.
One takeaway I've learned from working at the polls is that my election officials, led by the Colorado Secretary of State and Boulder County's clerk and recorder, have put an enormous amount of thought and work into preparing the election process to be incredibly transparent, fair, and accessible to any eligible voter.
This year, I trained with dozens of other people in my community to learn how to assist voters with this process. The training was rigorous, and included about 12 hours of online training and a day and a half of training in person. People hired for more senior positions attended additional training, but I wasn't interested in being a Lead. I wanted to help voters with registration and using the electronic Ballot Marking Devices (or BMDs) so I have been working as an "ePollbook and Tech Judge" this year.
The cybersecurity aspects of what we're doing are no joke. We are required to memorize multiple long, complex passwords for different systems we need to log in to. We will also have at least two different multifactor authentication systems in use to protect the access to our accounts.
Our training also included some topics I wish we didn't have to learn about: Conflict de-escalation, information about election misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and how to respond if someone engages in violence in a polling place. I guess this is the world we live in, now. I don't like it, but I'm glad the people running our elections are clear-eyed and focused on what we need to know to stay safe while helping others.
Today was an incredibly long day. While many people used the touchscreens - I checked in 22 voters myself - many more of these first-time voters told me they wanted to do it "old school," marking the paper ballot with a pen.
Tomorrow, it's going to be an even longer day, since polls open earlier and close later. We're expecting long lines all day. It will be an all hands on deck situation in the Voter Service Center. And I, for one, cannot wait. It is thrilling and very, very encouraging to see so many young, first-time voters decide to take this leap into a new form of public engagement.
So tomorrow, I hope (if you haven't already) that you can get out to the polls where you live. I'll be there, and so will thousands of my compatriots, bipartisan election workers who will help you register, or get you a ballot, or maybe just hand you an "I Voted" sticker. Give them a thumbs up or a nod - they're doing important work, and they'll appreciate it.
Tomorrow, I'll be taking time off from my regular work fighting cybercrime to help my fellow citizens with another important task: exercising their electoral franchise by casting ballots.
In 2020, I decided to sign up to work for my county here in Colorado and help out at the largest polling location, the University Memorial Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I'll be working there again this year.
I didn't know Lennart Poettering was on fedi. Started reading a thread about D-BUS and as soon as I read the word I said to myself: I bet the systemd people are going to replace it. And what do you know, a dozen posts later, there it is.
I mean, I just read this stuff out of mild interest because I use Debian and Debian uses systemd and a few years back I started writing service unit files for the things I do and it wasn't too bad. I'm still in the process of migrating them over, though. Not all of the services I run have switched.
I didn't know Lennart Poettering was on fedi. Started reading a thread about D-BUS and as soon as I read the word I said to myself: I bet the systemd people are going to replace it. And what do you know, a dozen posts later, there it is.
I mean, I just read this stuff out of mild interest because I use Debian and Debian uses systemd and a few years back I started writing service unit files for the things I do and it wasn't too bad. I'm still in the process of migrating them over, though. Not all...
recently I've had more young people asking me for advice on this and I'm like why do you want advice from me, I failed completely at it. I have a tech salary so I host a few queer people in need when I can, that's it, that's the bare minimum a socialist should do and it does not a commune make.
I guess I can talk about my experience with the times we worked towards that problem I could never solve, namely: how to get queers to do mutual aid when we don't know how to stay together.
1. You can't put a bunch of queer ppl in a space and say "it is forbidden to date, that's dangerous". That would be like telling cats not to jump. Bonding intimately to one another is kinda what we *do*.
2. When people are intimate they are liable to emotionally hurt one another.
Then you pair a subculture built from reified trauma, where any conflict is considered to be abuse, any hurt is violence, any disagreement is DARVO etc.; where the figure of the abuser is seen as a sort of duplicitous infiltrator to be rooted and cast out with prejudice; where the group is the first time the queer person ever felt accepted so they're liable to pedestalise others and thefore, when things go hurtful, to splitting and disposal; you pair this subculture of callouts, where the more you denounce the safer you are from your time on the wheel, against a material condition of wars and economic crises, against a world that deny us food and shelter and visas and medicine.
The result of this combination is that the first time there's a relationship conflict, both sides are incentivised to call the other an abuser as soon as they can, because whoever loses the narrative war in the abuser:victim binary also loses the support they need for shelter and medicine and collective self-defense etc. Moreover anyone not directly involved in the conflict is incentivised to get the fuck away, shut up and not get involved, lest they pick the losing side in the final narrative and be deemed an enabler. I.e. people are pushed to do the exact opposite of what we need, which is collective solutions to structural problems. Everything gets individualised, ascribed to failures of moral character of specific bad people, whose number somehow seems to multiply the more purges there are. So every relationship breakup splits the entire group into subgroups that never talk to one another again, even in the face of actual literal nazis stockpiling fucking guns, to literally fucking shoot at us. But no we can't have a gun range or an estrogen distro or a food forest, because Rebecca from Stuttgart punched a wall once when she was distressed and then she was deemed violent and problematic, and her bff Sarah who would have money to share now will never talk again to Marina who knows farming or her wife Dersima who could hook you up with immigrants.
> A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let's not kid ourselves: we don't have communities.
(The Broken Teapot)
recently I've had more young people asking me for advice on this and I'm like why do you want advice from me, I failed completely at it. I have a tech salary so I host a few queer people in need when I can, that's it, that's the bare minimum a socialist should do and it does not a commune make.
I guess I can talk about my experience with the times we worked towards that problem I could never solve, namely: how to get queers to do mutual aid when we don't know how to stay together.
@elilla oh god I feel every fucking word of that in my bones. Dead fucking on, every single word.
Nearly ten years of being in queer online spaces has completely disillusioned me from the idea of community. Nobody's willing to just take a step back and say "hey, okay, take a deep breath everyone, let's talk about [feud of the day] like adults, mkay?"
@elilla
This experience is what made me become a social worker for homeless kids instead.
When my illusions about our community eventually fell apart, I decided to put my skills to use in a setting that isn’t built on illusion.
It’s being a front line medic in the fight against capitalism. And there are casualties, there is triage, but there are no illusions. All of this is real.
We (including my colleagues here) just stoicly keep on doing what we do, knowing that it won’t change anything in the here and now of the bigger picture.
Sometimes we see kids making it, often enough we see them not making it.
It’s about staying focused on what you can provide rather than what you can’t.
But also, not doing this alone, knowing I can take myself out of it at any time and have someone covering for me, not having to take it home with me.
@elilla
This experience is what made me become a social worker for homeless kids instead.
When my illusions about our community eventually fell apart, I decided to put my skills to use in a setting that isn’t built on illusion.
It’s being a front line medic in the fight against capitalism. And there are casualties, there is triage, but there are no illusions. All of this is real.
We (including my colleagues here) just stoicly keep on doing what we do, knowing that it won’t change anything in the...
25% of the people in Switzerland would vote for Trump, which is just shameful. On the other hand, that is less than the percentage of peple who vote for the Swiss extreme-right party SVP. Which gives me some hope for that segment…
Gregory's Server
