Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop), page 49

Also that fingerprinting is a requirement of getting a broadband connection.

@rick_777

Good point. In fact there was a whole decentralisation stream, not just one talk. Has been for the last few years I think...

Do they have an official Twitter account? If so, would make sense for them to have an official fediverse account somewhere. Or an instance. Definitely some individual Mozillians have accounts.

Then caught a panel discussion with Esra'a Al-Shafei and Mahsa Alimardani about data in oppressive regimes, how citizens can operate online when surveillance is routine and dissent is dangerous.

Learned that in Iran the state had taken the source of Telegram (which is used as both messenger and a social network) and set up it's own replacement. And to not use it was a mark of dissent.

Source alone will not change the world, and can sometimes enable repression. Politics and ethics are vital.

Good take by Cory Doctorow. Apple will only ever do what they see as profitable. It could be that with declining sales and changing public perception they are seeing repair as a service as one alternative avenue for profit. Unfortunately they will do it as a form of rent-collection, not an open ecosystem of repair. So it may be Apple’s goal that Apple devices will become more repairable, but only by Apple. And only if and for so long as it is profitable.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/04/how-about-no-monopolies.html

Went to a great afternoon session run by @dajbelshaw and @mayel on decentralisation and ActivityPub, and how they're harnessing it to enable sharing of educational resources on MoodleNet.

To begin we shared what each of us understood decentralisation/federation/distribution to mean. Some peeps very experienced in ActivityPub were there, including @sandro.

Also interesting to learn of the existence of CommonsPub - https://gitlab.com/OpenCoop/CommonsPub/Server - a generic ActivityPub server.

#mozfest #activitypub

Saturday lunchtime Tim BL gave a talk on Solid. People were queueing out the door to get in. I caught some of it on screen but not loads. When Tim talks about it it sounds pretty exciting and positive. If you go to the Inrupt website it sounds like corporate newspeak. I fear that venture capital will never truly want what is best for the world on general, just whatever lines the pockets of the investors.

#mozfest #solid

Went to a session on Scuttlebutt with Soapdog and crew. Decentralised and offline messaging. We role played in grouos as Earth and Mars, each with our own network that synced when our Mars envoy went to Earth and brought the messages back. Fun demo of ssb and I finally got an account, though I'm not using it actively yet.

Wonder is there any possible ssb/indieweb bridge?

#mozfest #scuttlebutt

I met someone working with Purism on the Librem 5 phone. The libre phone that's free all the way down the stack. Built on Debian and GTK. They have a very strong focus on privacy. Also interested to discuss how they could make their phone repairable and long-lasting.

#mozfest

First session on the Saturday was thinking about smart homes and IoT devices and how they can unfortunately often be used as tools of control and domestic abuse. We brainstormed ways in which they could be produced to stop that from happening.

#mozfest

interlude at Towards Collapse last night

Musique concrete meets concrete mixer. Particularly enjoying the use of old CRTs playing VHS of e-waste and flytipping.

On a scale of utopian to dystopian I'd give it a solid dystopian. That said, everyone seems very friendly.

https://towardscollapse.bandcamp.com/

Also at the Science Fair was Project Lantern, a great project making devices that can be deployed in a disaster zone for building an information sharing network. Built on a thing called LoRa. 3D printed casing.

https://www.lantern.works/

#mozfest

At the Science Fair met the awesome Ash from the Highlander Center in Appalachia. As part of Southern Connected Communities and with the University of Tennessee they've set up a community ISP that gets far better speeds in their rural area than any of the commercial ISPs ever gave them (and for less cost). Looking forwards they might turn it into a coop.

https://www.highlandercenter.org/

#mozfest

Had a great time at #MozFest last weekend.. got to try and document it a little before I forget.

(side note: currently doing this offline while on the tube with Indigenous, to be posted later... awesomeness from #indieweb swentel)

Nae Pasaran was really good. Shows that principles matter, solidarity matters. What might seem a small gesture could have big repercussions.

Also I feel unbelievably angerered every time I see anything about the coup in Chile, the complicity of foreign governments and corporations in the atrocities they committed, pretty much to protect financial interests, is sickening.

@douginamug Cool! It's so nice that this little part of history has been documented. Hoping to catch it tonight.

@nicksellen Indeed! Let me know if you see it, can compare notes.

Anyone used/set up gollum wiki or fedwiki?

I like the fact that gollum is just a git repo behind the scenes - makes it easy for me to understand how the distribution works. And the interface is very simple.

fedwiki I always feel a little confused by. But admittedly I have never dug deep into it.

I think I'll donate $4.20 a month to Soma, and probably switch off the personal Funkwhale instance I set up. Cool as it is, if I'm streaming music from internet radio, and listening to albums I own when offline, I might as well just copy the files to my phone directly, rather than the Funkwhale/Subsonic Rube Goldberg machine. Saves me hosting fees per month.

@fresheyeball LineageOS, without Google apps/services.