Notices by Alan Zimmerman (alanz@social.coop), page 12

review of "The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America" by Sarah Igo

"The midcentury fear that a subliminally designed newspaper advertisement could invade your headspace seems laughable compared to Facebook ads tailored to your browsing history, friends, and previous clicks."

http://www.publicbooks.org/privacy-cultures/

It's amazing that proprietary social networks have managed to create systems that elicit the most engagement out of negative emotions. Looking at Facebook/YouTube/reddit comments is like watching a perpetual shouting match

Web+

My new site progressively enhances the centralised Web with peer-to-peer functionality using the DAT protocol. It’s a Web+ site: a little bridge between the centralised Web and the Peer Web.

Peer web: dat://ar.al/2018/06/26/web+/

Centralised web: https://ar.al/2018/06/26/web+/ https://mastodon.ar.al/media/1dw4DNXcAmY6TRvoRxY

you may not like it but lisp is what peak programming looks like

I very strongly believe the future of the web is people taking back control their space rather than relying on the convenience of using the services of corporate structures.

These places time and time again have proven they do not have our interest at heart and exploit our desire for convenience for their gain.

We gotta flip the script and stop expecting places who have never had our interests in mind to change.

We can do better. We don't need them.

"What do feel you get out of your minor in electrical engineering?"
Me: "A constant sense of wonder at the fact everything is not currently on fire."

I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?

.@mhall119 is developing an ethical alternative to #MeetUp called #GetTogether.

There's already a flagship site up and running:

https://gettogether.community/

The dev is working on #ActivityPub support and is requesting feedback on what more needs to be done:

https://github.com/GetTogetherComm/GetTogether/issues/60

If you're interested in helping federate GetTogether, join the discussion at the link above.

#Alternatives

“If you want to make a safe place to create... you have to start by making the most vulnerable people safe first. So you have to take the people who have been most marginalized, most pushed away from conventional tech and say ‘you are going to be at the center of this, you’re going to be the first people we reach out to, to say does this work for you? Does this meet your needs?’”

—Anil Dash on CodeNewbie podcast

https://www.codenewbie.org/podcast/from-tech-blogger-to-fog-creek-ceo

@rysiek This illustrates nicely one of the most powerful things about federation, namely that the entire network can't just disappear due to the closure of one organisation. For this reason, I'd bet that the fediverse will outlive all the current centralised social networks.

Maybe #scuttlebutt does not scale up to the internet, but it looks like human scale and given the gossip nature and connecton modes one would probably not exceed following the dunbar number of people anyway?

The Vala language, in which I implement Odysseus, is (much like CoffeeScript is to JS) a relatively simple transpiler to C. One who's main job is to add additional typechecking & abstract most uses of function pointers, void pointers, & memory management away behind pretty C#-like syntax.

That is it parsed it's own Syntax to an AST, typechecks it, compiles it down into an AST for C, and has the C compiler parse that again to output assembly.

Not a bad language, I much prefer it over Java.

I've uploaded my first video to https://share.tube/ (Peertube) It's my "How to import a workspace to Krita" video. Peertube is going to be the main platform I post videos to now. 😎 🤘

https://share.tube/videos/watch/75fe7034-48aa-4ec1-8425-0582fff42df6

#krita #peertube #sharetube #art #creativetoots #creative #mastoart

#latestagecapitalism
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country

I saw boosted onto my timeline a slashdot story being hysterical about "Google adding DRM" to android apps.

First, that's misleading. They are adding digital signatures to them. You know, to help prevent tampering with the files you are installing. Sort of DRM, but I don't see them panicking about Debian using signed .deb files.

Second, the link wasn't to slashdot. It was to federati.net. We're used to mastodon not tracking us. But apparently some GNU Social instances do. 😠

Hm, so far I did accounting with ledger on my own, now I need some kind of easy visualisation and data entry via a web interface. Is there something you can recommend?

#ledger #plaintextaccounting #askmastodon

To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/25/to-distribute-or-not-to-distribute-why-licensing-bugs-matter/

@alcinnz

> We need to find a way to finance our user-facing software/hardware

- No need to search further: the multi-stakeholder cooperative is the solution: user members are charged a fee, working members make a living, investing members get a return and everybody gets a vote.

"Mark’s manifesto isn’t about building a global community, it is about building a global colony – with himself as king and with his corporation and the Silicon Valley oligarchy as the court."

"Where Mark asks you to trust him to be a benevolent king, I say let us build a world without kings."

A very well-written article with a lot of quotable sentences.

https://ar.al/notes/encouraging-individual-sovereignty-and-a-healthy-commons/