Notices by Alan Zimmerman (alanz@social.coop), page 8

There is a Black Friday alternative:
Buy Nothing Day.

http://abillionpeople.org/buy-nothing-day/

@natecull even with full knowledge of the German music industry and its desires to jealously guard copyright, its slightly jarring to watch a youtube and find its available in UK one week but not the next, and to look at the bit below and see about 6 rights organisations all scrabbling like rats to get a fraction of a euro cent for music that is 30-40 years old.

Worse is to see it happen with rave music tracks of 1990s when part of the subculture was no one gave a shit about copyright..

I wish copyright didn't hate archiving and hate the preservation of history and knowledge and human emotion.

Currently the only defense against copyright is trillionaire Internet oligarchy and surveillance capitalism, which is not an especially great trade. But it's the world, upheld by treaties and legislation, that our elders and betters (ie, Disney and Google, between them) chose to create.

Let that sink in: I am unable to retrieve 5-10kb of text/information, because someone thought it to be necessary to bundle that little nugget of information with hundreds of kb to several mb of javascript bullshit to make some menu glow when you hover over it, or track you for consumer-manipulation purposes.

THIS is what is keeping other countries with low bandwidth internet connections out of our information world/age.

'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.'

'The extent of tracking [...] differs between categories of apps; in particular, news apps and apps targeted at children appear to be among the worst in terms of the number of third party trackers associated with them.'

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03603

A remarkable new scam: buy a smartphone app, record user interactions, and replay them with bots to fraudulently increase ad clicks and therefore revenue!

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to

Seems very hard to detect, as it's using real user data to make bots appear human.

Peak temp in Cape Town this morning at 11am was 38.1C or 100.6F #heat

@cwebber what do we want? to abolish time!
when do we want it? ... shit

Motorola Becomes First Smartphone Company To Sell DIY Repair Kits To Its Customers

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/10/23/1526248/motorola-becomes-first-smartphone-company-to-sell-diy-repair-kits-to-its-customers

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/527
here we have an issue opened on GitLab from someone who is mad about the AGPL, featuring our favorite lies and fish:
- "the AGPL is not an open-source license"
- "the AGPL is unfair to companies because it makes them publish code instead of being able to charge consulting fees"
- "open-source/free software is synonymous with software that is licensed in a way that is convenient for my company"

Trying out Zotero to manage my bibliography with notes (until now I've been using a manually annotated BibTeX file). Looks very nice so far.

https://www.zotero.org

A kind patch for GCC by Matthew Garrett https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-10/msg00399.html

Slowly but surely moving my posts over from Medium to a Wordpress blog. I think the best way forward for We Distribute might be to live on a Wordpress instance with ActivityPub enabled.

It's not ideal, but it will allow me to continue fediverse coverage while I build my blogging stuff on the side. At the very least, it means that development of postModern would no longer be a blocker, and it might help the development of the WP ActivityPub integration too.

YouTubers Will Enter Politics, And The Ones Who Do Are Probably Going To Win, and they have now actually Won seats in Brazil's Federal and State Elections #politics https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/brazils-congressional-youtubers

'Why bother with P2P when you still need to guarantee uptime?'

https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/why-bother-with-p2p