Notices by Alex Schroeder 🐝 (kensanata@octodon.social), page 31

Speaking of The Plain Text Project: the first round of interviews with users of plain text is almost done. If you're interested in sharing your experiences using plain text, drop me a line at https://plaintextproject.online/contact.html

Recent events in my Google+ timeline have reminded me once more that the most important rule in communication is the principle of charity: interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Condemnations come easy. But it's easier to tear things down than to build them up. It's easier to wage war than build peace, to sow mistrust than to make friends. Be good. ❤️

Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem: "This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google Play stores. We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of track- ers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage."
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03603.pdf
My favourite site is still by @exodus
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/
Comprehensive. Digestable. Linked.

The result in Brazil reminds me of the sad fact that somehow the world is falling under the shadow of fascism again, on our watch. If you’re over forty like I am: who else are you going to blame? And those who did try to warn the rest felt the Kassandra effect. Every year the situation gets worse. And like the climate catastrophe, this Titanic will not change its course until it crashes into the iceberg, or so it seems. AfD got seats in Hessen, Germany. The shadow of fascism is everywhere.

When Hanna Arendt writes “ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies” I keep thinking of three letter agencies all over the world getting the ability to copy all our communications for later analysis. That’s how it begins, surely: as a way to fight terrorism.

Firefox is removing RSS features, but defaults to allowing third-party cookies.

Firefox, your priorities are wrong.

Remove the old RSS code, make it new. Block third-party cookies.

Or drop RSS like it was gopher+, and block third-party cookies.

Or ignore everything I've said and block third-party cookies.

Brutalist web design will never fade, because it is "progressive-ready". I can drop it in reader mode or override with local style *very easily*. That's amazing interactive design! No javascript required!

I was asked at work once to guess what the biggest risk to the company might be in coming years. The answer is always "That climate change has tipping points and that we're nearing or beyond some of them", but that's not really the answer they were looking for, I suppose.