Notices by BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏 (herrabre@mastodon.xyz), page 4

The witches.town shutdown is a micro-lesson in why SaaS is problematic and why the Federation model of "idealistic admins run code for community" is no improvement.

If you depend on other people for your computing, let alone for your identity online and social life - you will get screwed WHEN (not if) their needs and yours diverge.

Accounts closed, instances shut down, software upgrades with unwanted "features", privacy concerns: all inevitable.

Sorry... 🙊

Echo Chamber vs Stockholm Syndrome.

I posted a very similar sentiment to my Facebook wall today (I do have one, still...). OMG the reaction was different.

I was told there was no difference between Facebook and Mailpile, all tools could be used for good or evil. I was told Boz was a total nice guy in person. I was called arrogant for judging Facebook employees and management.

These were all people I trust and look up to. Smart people.

I'm shaken.

@Barcode So, in Iceland we have this dairy product called Skyr, which is technically a cheese but is eaten the way you'd eat yoghurt, often for breakfast, maybe with berries or granola and a bit of milk or cream.

Skyr, a milk product, reacts with carbonated drinks exactly as you would expect.

How do I know? Because it's really funny to gross hung over people out by having Skyr for breakfast with fizzy orange soda instead of milk/cream.

Huge, milky, greyish-orange bubbles...

I may have to avoid Mastodon until this #DeleteFacebook thing blows over.

It's pushing all my "people being wrong on the Internet" buttons. All of them.

Friends! Stop being idiots! Please!

The fact is, the Fediverse does not protect your data or the social graph AT ALL. Anyone who wants to harvest your data, can. It's virtually all 100% public!

At least Facebook has some speedbumps.

If we replaced Facebook with the Fediverse tomorrow, privacy would suffer immeasurably.

Me: Browsing Twitter.

Daughter: Look! Dancing!

Me: Yes, they're dancing. They're anarchists. As you grow older, people will try to teach you that anarchists are bad. Don't listen to them. Most anarchists are good people.

Daughter: Look! An owl!

https://boingboing.net/2017/03/14/pothole-in-your-neighborhood.html

Advisory privacy in communications protocols is worthless in the exact same way turn signals are worthless in traffic.

I mean, people can still totally run you over if they want...

Also: Beware Binary Thinking.

We have more adjectives than just "awesome" and "useless" for a reason!

@bob @maiyannah Excuse me if I'm repeating myself.

Advisory privacy is IMO undervalued. It doesn't prevent bad actors from doing bad things, but it does prevent accidents when people are playing nice.

"Advisory to delete posts after 10 days" as a made-up example, is an insurance policy against unknown future problems. If you already have the problem (a bad actor now), it obviously accomplishes nothing.

But if the bad actor shows up next month, he has less to work with, and you are better off.

@cwebber Simpler is to just make the hidden service side default-deny, people have to be white-listed somehow to get to use it.

Since I'm introducing unreadable/untypeable addresses anyway, may as well also autogenerate them and rotate regularly.

The money thing is something I've pondered, find interesting, but I keep coming to the conclusion that it doesn't solve the problem well enough to justify the complexity.

Easy to forget that e-mail being zero-cost in terms of cash is a huge feature.

While singing daughter to sleep, I figured out a relatively clean solution to making chat-over-email not break Mailpile's scaling assumptions.

This means I've also figured out how to use Mailpile and its search engine for content that has a much higher update frequency than e-mail does.

Chat, Twitter... IRC, Fediverse? Maybe, maybe.

Obviously, I am not supposed to work on this right now. Other things are more urgent. But it's nice that the path towards such things is coming into focus.

We should all make a point of naming and anthropomorphizing our cron jobs. 🐈 🐶 🤖

This will prepare us for a future full of AIs that need humane treatment, love and e-cuddles. ❤

In other news, I'm starting to tinker with "remote access" settings for Mailpile: integrating Tor hidden services and PageKite, integrating Lets Encrypt. Making it easy to access a personal Mailpile from afar.

It's a funny feeling to try and boil years of work (PageKite) down to a single check-box. But it's also oddly satisfying.

That kind of simplicity was the point, after all.

User-friendly, remote access to a running Mailpile is a very exciting feature. Very, very exciting.

Man, the deadline for the Mailpile job applications seems soooo faaar awaaaayyyy.

But it's not even a week now... https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/

I just can't wait to find out who I will get to work with.

Good morning Mastodon!

I want to draw attention to the fact that Mailpile wants to hire folks to help make our software available to Windows and Mac OS users.

Our mission is user privacy, Free Software and online independence for all. And we'd like Mailpile to be a diverse, inclusive, human-friendly and family-friendly place to work.

If you also care about those things, please help spread the word - and if you have the skills we need, check out https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/ and consider applying!

Prediction:

Software will be used to mitigate #meltdown and #spectre, slowing everything down.

In 2020, a new line of Intel CPUs hit the market where you pay a premium for "virtual security extensions" (VSE) that let you turn off the mitigations.

Google, AWS buy truckloads.

Intel profites.

Yay!

I suspect people trying to find alternate CPU architectures that don't suffer from #Spectre - like bugs have misunderstood how fundamental the problem is.

Your CPU will not go fast without caches. Your CPU will not go fast without speculative execution. Solving the problem will require more silicon, not less.

I don't think the market will accept the performance hit implied by simpler architectures. OS, compiler and VM (including the browser) workarounds are the way this will get mitigated.

@cypnk Yeah, that sort of thing is standard here.

You buy a SIM card with a "video" package that gives you all-you-can-eat video on their provider of choice, but everything else costs extra, and rates are high. Or "social" or whatever.

Unbundled data SIMs end up being almost unusable because the caps are so low and you have to keep buying more BW all the time. Or at least I did.

It's so bad I actually just roam on a SIM from the U.K. all the time. It's cheaper and better service.

@cypnk This has been going on since dial-up, having a public, fixed, reachable IP is considered a thing for "businesses" and is priced accordingly.

IPv6 won't solve this, because the firewalls and security are now entrenched and considered mandatory. Mostly for good reason.

Tooting my own horn, this is why I created PageKite. 🙂

Tor hidden services are also awesome, but only if your users all have the TBB or equivalent and never need to type or remember URLs.

"When I'm upset, I become extremely scatterbrained," he thought to himself as he poured coffee, put the mug down and went to the bedroom to close the window. "Oh, I already closed it. Where's my coffee?"