Notices by Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 27
-
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 04-Jun-2018 06:51:48 EDT 
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Microsoft couldn't give a rats ass for software freedom. They despise people like me. All their ventures into FOSS, including funding the Linux Foundation, are narrowly self-serving. They continue to extort FOSS developers with software patents.
Microsoft are about as ethical as a drone strike on a wedding party. I've been around in software for a long time, so have seen their manoevrings. They boasted about the extensiveness of their cooperation with the NSA and bugged Skype after they bought it (read the Snowden docs). -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 03-Jun-2018 17:33:55 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
(sigh)
Ok, so unless Bloomberg are now in the fake news business it's official. Microsoft is buying Github.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github
There is no way that any code I wrote will fall under the dominion of Microsoft.
Therefore in the coming week I'll be moving out of Github. Initially I'll just self-host on Gogs, but I'll also be looking for a secondary host as backup for cases where my own server is down or doesn't have enough bandwidth.
I'm sure that this will be rough for a lot of projects. Many things currently point to Github. Some will side with Microsoft, believing that they are allies of FOSS or just favoring convenience over disruption. When Microsoft is involved this is always a mistake. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 03-Jun-2018 12:48:12 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Five years after Snowden, and what do we have?
We have more encryption. There wasn't much on IM back then, and most sites were http only.
Whether it's better encryption than five years ago is debatable.
The tin foil hats came off. Five years ago if you were saying that the NSA was bugging laptops and listening to domestic phone calls you could still have plausibly been accused to wearing radio wave resistant headgear. The Snowden stuff blew all that away.
The letter agencies had substantial PR failures but successfully chordoned the narrative off around terrorism. Occasionally things strayed off-message but mostly there was no talk of economic espionage. It was pretty much confined to terrorism.
Public awareness of what letter agencies do increased a little.
Governments passed legislation rubber stamping the illegal practices which the Snowden documents had revealed were going on. It was notable the governments did nothing to reign in their surveillance of their populations, and instead expanded existing programs. In the UK the battle against the snooper's charter was some combination of tragedy and farce.
Snowden himself remains free, sort of, but his personal situation looks dicey long term. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 03-Jun-2018 10:11:13 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Warning: Fake trials, camps and child abductions in America https://theintercept.com/2018/05/29/zero-tolerance-border-policy-immigration-mass-trials-children -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 17:55:26 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Tired: Neuromancer, the dystopian scifi novel
Wired: Neuromancer, the utopian scifi novel -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 09:02:28 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
I don't think trending hashtags are a good idea, but if they are being added then have the trends limited to the current instance only. I think gnusocial does it that way.
That is, avoid creating global signals about multiple instances. Global signals will be used to cause disruption. They facilitate celebrity cults or the dogpiling of particular users. On Twitter we can see how this kind of thing works out.
In technology as in biology, loosely coupled systems are what tends to work. Global information tends to result in monoculture and allows a problem in one place to rapidly spread everywhere. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 08:32:56 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@gcupc @kaniini Trending hashtags are really global or multi-instance messaging methods. With enough manipulation an adversary can send a global signal into the network via this method, causing widespread disruption effects.
An advantage of federation is that adversaries can be contained and it's difficult for them to globally push their agenda to a large audience. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 06:04:06 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Oh yes -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 05:43:32 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@lnxw48a1 SourceForge ended really badly too. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 31-May-2018 05:29:40 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 30-May-2018 13:53:13 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Updated CryptPad to the latest version on #freedombone. It now has a new kanban app which is a bit flaky but works. So now you can collaboratively kanban on the mesh. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 29-May-2018 19:01:26 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
It's hard to believe now, but in the 1980s and 1990s neoliberal policies enjoyed a high level of support. Narratives about the benefits of privatization and outsourcing tended to be believed back then.
Now it's a very different situation. The old guard hang onto power with the same policies as 30 years ago, but few people believe in them anymore and it's more like going through the motions because "this is what we've always done".
It's possible that the next generation of politicians might have a very different attitude. I think it's also possible that we're entering into another "age of revolutions" because there's a kind of perfect storm of economic, environmental and social problems impinging from all sides. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 28-May-2018 15:45:02 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@gc If this happens I think they will try to buy the biggest instances, pour money and developers into making the user experience - particularly on mobile - as slick as possible and then add ActivityPub extensions which make it incompatible with other instances. After enough time had passed they would then drop support for ActivityPub and OStatus.
That's pretty much how web 2.0 pushed out the earlier federated groupware systems.
Ways to work against this are:
* Make it easy to block bad instances
* Discourage very large instances with thousands of users, which will be the most attractive for colonization.
* Promote general awareness of the kinds of tactics which have been used in the past against federated systems
* Encourage users to value community above convenience. Colonizers will try to dazzle users with convenience and shiny/trendy features.
* Create a lot of noise if there is any company trying to subvert open protocols with their own extensions.
* Make it easy for users to switch instances, aka "nomadic identity" so that they can "vote with their feet" if an instance starts adopting bad policies. The difficulty of moving from one instance to another is definitely something which colonizers will try to exploit. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 27-May-2018 11:00:10 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Pleroma icon looks clearer -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 27-May-2018 05:37:21 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
A quite detailed profile of Jordan Peterson's academic career by someone who worked with him.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html
I'd put Peterson in the same sort of category as Steven Pinker and other pop intellectuals or pseudoscientists. It is possible to dress up personal prejudices in the language and mannerisms of science, or just to ignore decades of research results if they're inconvenient to the narrative. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 26-May-2018 07:01:25 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@maxlath I was trying to explain to someone the other day how Windows is now a remotely managed OS. It's like computing was in the 1960s/70s, I said, in that the server/mainframe/cloud is king and it can push arbitrary stuff onto users. The feudal analogy is not accidental. The Windows user is really peripheral to the system and has no real control over their typing terminal. If Microsoft wants to push an ad onto your desktop or fuck around with settings in the background they can do it. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 26-May-2018 05:43:45 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Federation venn diagram -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 26-May-2018 05:38:20 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Christopher Lemmer Webber on MediaGoblin and ActivityPub https://medium.com/we-distribute/faces-of-the-federation-christopher-allan-webber-on-mediagoblin-and-activitypub-24bbe212867e -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 25-May-2018 09:38:24 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 24-May-2018 18:55:56 EDT
Bob Mottram π§ β β
So here's a heretical thought. Should there be a new encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia? Maybe using ActivityPub and fediverse accounts.
Wikipedia was the poster child of an open approach, but somewhere along the line it became something else.
If we started Wikipedia again from scratch what features should it have to mitigate the problems which the legacy Wikipedia encountered?
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the