Notices by Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 12
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Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 28-Dec-2018 18:57:24 EST 
Bob Mottram π§ β β
There are many evangelists for open source but not that many for software freedom. We're now in a time where the software freedom issues are really becoming obvious to the average person although they may not be consciously aware of them and may just think that their software is always bad and trying to trick them in one way or another or is doing things they don't want or havn't consented to. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 28-Dec-2018 18:29:41 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"And then, I found that everyone had my back. My Conservancy co-workers helped me out, people I was working with cut me slack, and so many people in the free software community offered me their support. The free software community works because we support each other."
-- Karen Sadler -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Dec-2018 10:08:02 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@silverspookgames To put it another way, under conditions of enforced scarcity required to maintain a hierarchical power structure most talent will be squandered or unrealized. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Dec-2018 12:24:39 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@gcupc Also reminder: the fediverse isn't anonymous. If anything it's more amenable to data mining than something like Facebook. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 22-Dec-2018 18:43:45 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"We will most likely succeed as an ecosystem, not as one βkiller appβ"
https://medium.com/@shevski/how-decentralised-are-you-a6539eeb27ff -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Dec-2018 14:50:45 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"Personal software should be personal: it should not scale or conform; it should chafe at strictures the same way you do, and burst out of any box that dare enclose it."
https://medium.com/@enkiv2/free-software-and-the-revolt-against-transactionality-3a44a1b7f96d -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Dec-2018 14:16:18 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@Hamishcampbell @kaniini Yes that's also important. When the silo scandals happen we need to be there with a compelling story about how the decentralized internet works and why people should join it.
On keeping instances running perhaps some distributed backup system would be a good idea, where you can restore from backups held by other instances in a mutual support network. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Dec-2018 14:10:20 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@kaniini @ailurocrat If Pleroma does take money from billionaires there will be strings attached. Billionaires don't want a functioning internet for the masses. They want ROI and to build another giant advertising silo. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Dec-2018 13:52:02 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@kaniini It's not really about features. I think @aral had a video about this a while ago. Hubzilla has way more features than Facebook. It could be said that it has too many features. Even gnusocial has more features than Twitter. You can do cashless bartering in gnusocial if you have the right plugin.
The reason why Facebook and Windows 10 have billions of users isn't because they're technically better than alternatives. The UI of Facebook is one of the worst I've ever encountered. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Dec-2018 06:08:45 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Police doing facial scanning of Christmas shoppers from an unmarked van in Leicester square, London. The thing on the tripod is probably a radio antenna and the front black sensor looks like a depth camera with pattern projectors.
I notice the van is jacked up, and I expect that's because if you have the engine running that would otherwise start oscillations in the scan which might make it hard to obtain small 3D structure of faces.
facial_scanner.jpg
facial_scanner2.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 16-Dec-2018 16:33:28 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Trying to install Plume, but cargo keeps trying to run things from inside of /tmp and failing for obvious reasons.
Being able to run arbitrary programs with full permissions from /tmp *is a big security problem* and I don't grok why anyone thought that was a good idea.
So although the idea of federated blogging with ActivityPub seems ok, my initial encounters with Rust have not been particularly agreeable and it's consistently trying to break my system security.
I'll give up on Plume for now. Bludit is way simpler and with far fewer dependencies. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 15-Dec-2018 18:10:56 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
structural_violence.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 15-Dec-2018 11:24:06 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@cacahuatl Yes that's the crux of it. What the AI is optimizing for is not accuracy but *ability to sell to advertisers* which can be something else entirely. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Dec-2018 09:58:16 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
catscan.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Dec-2018 14:13:55 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Even if it is opt-in, user profile directory popularity contests are not likely to have a good outcome.
Try not to design systems which foster personality cults. There's too much of that in the silos already. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Dec-2018 08:26:05 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"We need to become better at being humans. Learning to use symbols and knowledge in new ways, across groups, across cultures, is a powerful, valuable, and very human goal. And it is also one that is obtainable, if we only begin to open our minds to full, complete use of computers to augment our most human of capabilities."
-- Doug Engelbart -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 02-Dec-2018 15:05:10 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@measlytwerp @ekaitz_zarraga @aral @paul
I think this is illustrative of Mozilla's general approach.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rustup.rs/pull/645
And indeed it might not be currently active and might just log locally. If so then why call it telemetry instead of a log file, which is the standard terminology for local monitoring?
Also it might be harmless now, but maybe a few versions later... -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 01-Dec-2018 05:11:51 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
So many of the bad uses of computing - surveillance capital, the centralized cloud, the NSA, etc - could all come under the general heading of "oppression". -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 01-Dec-2018 05:10:12 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Computers are not just for oppressing people. You can do other things with them too. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 29-Nov-2018 12:48:16 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"I wanted to give freedom to the users, not the companies. Yes, I believe that a company ought to have control of its own computing. It doesnβt make the world a better place if Company Aβs computing is under the control of Company B. But liberating companies from this mistreatment is not my priority. Itβs humans, itβs people, that I want to liberate."
-- Richard Stallman
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