Notices by Alex Schroeder 🐝 (kensanata@octodon.social), page 19

I miss how totalitarian tyranny enabled by cybernetic automation used to be seen as a bad thing.

MIT Media Lab imploding

Media Lab director Joi Ito secretly accepted money from Jeffrey Epstein after he'd already served time for sex offenses.
In response to the revelations, Ethan Zuckerman and Nathan Matias are leaving.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/mit-jeffrey-epstein.html
Also, Marvin Minsky is accused of having been a customer of Epstein's sex trafficking network.
Joi Ito is still on the NYT board. #epstein https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-165d-5ec2-65cd-399958008108

The existence of a generic "legal name" implies the existence of a more powerful "illegal name".

#silentfox
By default Firefox opens a connection to push.services.mozilla.com at startup. There also seems to be a unique identifier for your Browser instance. I don't know what happens with it and therefore I don't like it and prefer to disable the feature:

dom.push.enabled = false

This possibly breaks push notifications though. Do they really all get routed through Mozilla's servers?

Did you know that you don't have to be a Norwegian citizen to vote in the local election in Norway?

If you are from the neighbouring Scandinavian countries you just have to live here. If you are from another country you have to have lived here for a few months.

The election is in two weeks, but you can vote today and the next week also. Find your closest booth at valglokaler.no

And vote Green Party!

Did you know that you don't need X-Windows for graphics on Linux? Here's a few console programs that can display graphics using the framebuffer:

- fbi
Display and manage images directly from the command line.

- links2
A simple web browser without CSS and JS, can display inline images when switched to graphics mode with the -g param: 'links2 -g'

- mplayer
Play videos straight from the console! Can be a little tricky.

(And yes, I used a 5:4 monitor the screenshots.)

:crt_w_prompt: :blobowo:

Being a zoomer is cool because you have absolutely no recollection of 9/11 so the infinite imperialist crusade that followed has no apparent motive whatsoever beyond "we did it because we wanted to", which is probably much closer to the truth anyway

As much as we should push for Free/Libre or Open Source software, if there’s one thing I hate more than anything its DRM. DRM makes it so you don’t even own the things that you purchase.. I say that’s bullshit.

support DRM-Free sources:
https://fckdrm.com/
#FCKDRM #DRMFree #SoftwareFreedom #GOG

All the time zones I need.

Hell, it happens to me all the time. On my iPhone, Siri is turned off. And yet, when the head phones are plugged in and I try to start my podcast playback, there is always a chance of activating Voice Control by chance instead of starting playback. And since that records a few seconds of me swearing, the wind blowing, and nearby people speaking random stuff, I fear a lot of Apple contract workers listen it trying to figure out WTF I wanted to say. But all I want is to disable this shit.

I recommend people just turn off voice assistants whenever they can. That includes smart watches and the like! If you don’t depend on them, then there always the chance of activating them by mistake and of voice samples getting sent and stored where they don’t belong and listened to by people you don’t like. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to the people around you, either.

OK, now I found the document it is referring to. Nice domain name!
https://useplaintext.email/

I laughed at this one:

｢"But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?"
This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.｣

I don't agree with the suggestion that *strong* and /emphasis/ is just as good as using a different font weight and slant, unless the email client does that for you. It sounds a bit like cheating? Or like a very reduced HTML subset?
Well, that would work for me…