Notices by Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)
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Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 20-May-2018 20:52:40 CEST 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Consent to data use is one avenue towards improving the internet, but too often it's merely about being bamboozled by some legaleze or some strange icons and clicking "I agree*. That's not really meaningful consent though. I think genuine consent will only be possible within community managed systems in which you or someone you trust stores the data. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 20-May-2018 20:42:39 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Five or more years ago the situation looked quite hopeless, but especially in the last year or so I think people are becoming more aware of how data is collected and used and starting to question that.
Way back in the "Freedom in the Cloud" talk Eben Moglen said that what matters is "who keeps the logs", and it's becoming a lot clearer now how that power differential plays out at scale.
We're now beginning to see some legilative action in the form of GDPR. That needs to also be accompanied by individuals and collectives taking back the logs and running the infrastructure. Fortunately things seem to be going the way I had hoped, but it's slow progress. The fediverse is an aspect of that, but it also needs to be a wider phenomena than just social networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIpIZFFN5PI -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 20-May-2018 16:18:41 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Efail: A Postmortem https://medium.com/@cipherpunk/efail-a-postmortem-4bef2cea4c08 -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Sunday, 20-May-2018 00:33:12 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The aristocracy are a good example of how people get trapped in roles and systems which are not of their choosing and how traditions which don't make much economic or other sense can persist nonetheless.
The aristocracy represents the worst aspect of the society. The nepotism. The bowing and scraping to self-appointed authorities. The unearned but conspicuous wealth which actually comes from the population at large. The political correctness of the BBC who will never utter a critical word. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Saturday, 19-May-2018 15:06:48 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Here come the security nihilists https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/internet-privacy/encrypted-email-and-security-nihilism -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Saturday, 19-May-2018 09:58:26 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@kaniini @dansup @mmn @Gargron I'd just like to interject. It was Qvitter which started the wave of expansion of the fediverse. In the Twitter exodus of Feb 2016 people searched for a Twitter alternative and found Qvitter and the few Quitter sites. For a while my timeline was going crazy and it was at that point I realized that some kind of filtering was needed. Sites like shitposter.club started at that time. About a year later something similar happened with Mastodon. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Friday, 18-May-2018 00:59:49 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
On geomonitoring. If you're carrying a baseband receiver connected to a battery then your position is logged every few seconds and the data stored by telcos. This isn't a new situation, it's been going on for at least a decade (probably longer). The resolution from triangulation especially in urban areas is good enough to tell who is sleeping with who.
This is why there's often advice to leave mobile phones at home if you attend a protest. Even if you use a burner phone the geolocation connects one phone to another within the tracking software.
So nobody in 2018 should really be surprised by this. By now the tracking systems will be in a highly advanced stage of development, probably using AI and unsupervised learning to make inferences and guess future movements based on historical patterns. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 17-May-2018 22:38:33 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The software industry is irksome, but I don't completely hate it. It's supremely fashion-driven and also has a lot of other unresolved problems with class/gender/race.
Software development has its pluses and minuses in terms of the specifics, but I've always loved software as a creative medium. As Joseph Weizenbaum once said, software is an infinite universe of possibilities only a tiny corner of which has been explored so far. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 17-May-2018 11:10:42 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
"Having spent hours of my life debugging and working around issues with Docker's storage, my current attitude is enough of this complexity, just let me use a directory backed by the local filesystem, dammit."
Wait...Does this mean that Docker is not the scorching hot ubertech it was made out to be and that my stubborn insistence upon bare metal and minimum complexity was right all along?
:thinkingrms:
https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2018/05/16/revisiting-using-docker -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 17-May-2018 08:21:45 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@natecull Large organizations are good at producing conformity. They have to be, otherwise they wouldn't be large organisations. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 17-May-2018 00:33:14 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Welcome To Cyberia https://archive.org/details/WelcomeToCyberia -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Thursday, 17-May-2018 00:20:37 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The reason why the 3D web didn't happen was initially that graphics capabilities just weren't up to it. But the main reason was that producing interesting 3D content takes a level of skill which is beyond even most technical people and the tools needed to make such content even today are highly complex. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 23:59:52 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The fact that that the presenter is an academic (or an actor playing one) also reflects the biggest demographic of people who were using the web at that time. 1996 was towards the end of the "profdoctor" phase in which the web consisted mostly of the profile pages of academics. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 23:10:07 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The Internet As It Was In 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTKIgdfoHxM -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 22:59:08 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
@cwebber https://github.com/bashrc/TheJargonFile -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 22:00:55 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Telemetry is more insidious than blatant ads in your face. The user doesn't necessarily know its there. There is no visual indication, and users have no awareness how detailed the information gathered in the background can be. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 21:05:12 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
I hate to be one of those well-actually people, but...
Well actually I don't think this is FUD. It's not necessary to collect system specifications from every Ubuntu install in order to improve software. Even if Canonical isn't going to fingerprint users and track them it's not a good idea to collect data which can be later maybe sold and abused in that way.
Actually also I think it's Canonical that's "poisoning the well" here. Free Software isn't supposed to be about reporting back to the mothership. Canonical has no natural or other right to collect data about its users, and it shouldn't be behaving like a surveillance capitalist. Instead, it should be setting a better example of respect for users.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX0uci4gvHI&t=2847s -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 17:57:58 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Blasting off on #freedombone, like a massively state subsidized Elon Musk enterprise, is Rocketchat.
Rocketchat is ok for small family and friends type groups. It's not federated like XMPP or Matrix, but does have some integration with a few other systems. It's also only available on x86, so you can't install it on an ARM board.
The user interface is not completely batshit, so this is a viable option for some use cases. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 12:17:26 CEST
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Bias in BBC reporting isn't new and in the broadcast era before the internet people would just believe whatever appeared on TV or radio and assume it was an honest account. These days there are many more sources of information, including directly from protagonists and so it's possible, if you're paying attention, to spot the ways in which some news organisations twist information to serve a particular agenda.
https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/12767/clashes-dozens-die-why-bbc-reporting-not-clear-about-who-killers-and-killed-were-gaza# -
Zash (zash@social.umeahackerspace.se)s status den Wednesday, 16-May-2018 04:07:50 CEST 
Zash
Version 0.10.1 of !xmpp server #Prosody released!
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