Notices by Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 35
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Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 12-Feb-2018 03:27:42 EST 
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@charlag I think the basic problem here is underspecified protocols. Ambiguity about signing or status flags can be avoided if they're in the spec. Also advisory privacy was always a terrible idea, certain to result in leaks. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2018 18:08:44 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
For a long time Google was able to gain mindshare among software engineers. They were seen as being engineer-friendly. "One of us". I think it's past time to start reigning that back. Make sure that whenever the company is mentioned it doesn't get an easy ride. That uncritical statements aren't allowed to stand. Also that people working at Google don't get any particular special treatment. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 11-Feb-2018 04:06:07 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Sometimes the current condition of technology seems hopelessly borked. Can I have a browser which isn't funded by Google or the US state department? (which might not be all that separate when you consider the lobbying). -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 09-Feb-2018 06:25:19 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Tested out #Nextcloud 13 on #Freedombone and it looks like it installs without any issues. By default server side encryption is enabled, and there's also additional end-to-end encryption in this version. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2018 14:48:39 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
instanceblocked.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 08-Feb-2018 14:10:32 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
One thing which nobody is paying attention to is that LetsEncrypt - a public benefit corporation based in California and run by eight people - has become a single point of failure. If LetsEncrypt were to suddenly go away for some reason there would be a lot of trouble. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Feb-2018 14:17:44 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
I, for one, do not subscribe to the cult of Musk. These "self-made men" are always a mirage obfuscating many other people's talents. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Feb-2018 10:25:51 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@selfagency Facebook has been bad for a long time and the US presidential elections were a sham anyway. Even if Hillary had won the reign of neoliberalism and militarism would not have ended. There might have been not so many problems with Nazism domestically, but there still would have been an imperialistic foreign policy.
Even without election interference there are plenty of reasons to dislike Facebook. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Feb-2018 06:17:18 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@dajbelshaw I used Hubzilla for quite a while, and although the fediverse which is based on OStatus/ActivityPub is a lot more popular I think that the Hubzilla zot protocol is a much better way to go in the longer term. In particular, zot has key based identity rather than domain based identity, which allows users to easily move from one instance to another or to run the same identity from multiple instances giving fault tolerance. That solves a bunch of problems which have been longstanding in the fediverse. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2018 18:13:25 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
So here's a policy proposal for the next US administration: a Grand Repeal Act. Roll back all of the bullshit introduced by the last few administrations. Cancel homeland security and the TSA. Completely defund Gitmo so that they have no option but to close it for good. Demilitarize the police and ban their electricity weapons. No military hardware should be going to the police at all. Defund the NSA and cancel their bulk collection powers. Pull the funding from private jails. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2018 08:13:25 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Watched the #FOSDEM Monero talk. It's nice that Monero fixes some of the failures of Bitcoin, but it's still based upon proof of work which is pretty disastrous from an environmental and decentralization point of view.
The questions were revealing. On the question of how Monero would stop five companies in China from controlling all of the hash power, like Bitcoin, the speaker avoided it and answered some different question about transactions. Proof of work with increasing hardness over time always favors the already rich who can build hashing factories at great expense. They might not be able to do it with asics, but for them that's just an implementation detail. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 04-Feb-2018 06:52:13 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@aral @Framasoft Also see https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2018 13:17:02 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
So you might think that software development is broken, that there are too many bugs and that developers never know what they're doing. But I think if you go down the route beyond simple bug bounties into bug futures and bug derivatives and bug derivative swaps - turning the making and maintaining of software into gambling bets - then there's the potential to really bork FOSS development in a major way. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2018 06:16:54 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Even within a relatively simple web app like Edith notes I notice that there's Google stuff once again - fonts and jquery links.
Google links hardcoded into Free Software apps is a problem, because it allows the company to spy on the activities of users. Not the content, but who uses what and how often. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 03-Feb-2018 05:55:16 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
It would be a good idea for #FOSDEM to re-evaluate their association with Google. What do Google stand for? How much of their software is actually open source these days? Is Google just openwashing at these types of conferences by promoting closed stuff and opaque algorithms behind APIs? -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 18:45:36 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@h Intel ME, AMD TrustZone and also the recent Meltdown/Spectre bugs which were really chip design flaws highlight that what's really needed are open chip designs which can be independently checked. Even if the known problems are fixed if CPUs continue to be black boxes then we can expect more similar design flaws in future. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 18:37:15 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"No one really knows how many thousands of people have died as a result of the freefall in government support, but to get just an inkling: between December 2011 and February 2014, the Department of Work and Pensions reported that 2,380 Britons previously on disability support were found dead no more than six weeks after receiving notice that they were having their benefits cut because they had been determined to be 'fit for work.'"
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 13:14:21 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
On the hope of regulating technology companies into not being evil, or being a bit less evil. Evil lite. I don't think this is going to work unless by regulation they mean the rigorous application of anti-monopoly laws. Just levying fines or talking in a stern manner isn't going to cut it, because that's happened to Microsoft and Google in Europe previously, with no subsequent behavior change.
I think a much better strategy than trying to regulate international megacorporations is to invest in democratic control of information infrastructure. Municipal mesh, funding Free Software development and things similar to that. If you're going to regulate then do things like switching IT funding for schools and publicly run organizations from Microsoft and Google software licenses to FOSS and FOSS-based maintenance. Zero percent of public money should be going to the usual monopolists.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/audio/2018/feb/02/digital-dystopia-taking-back-control-podcast -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 08:24:35 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Added the Edith notes system to #Freedombone. Edith is ultra simple and fast. Just navigate to your subdomain and append a title (mydomain/mytitle) and it creates a new note. Type anything you want and everything gets saved automatically. No buttons to press or distracting UI or delays. The most minimalist system possible.
You could use it for shopping lists or writing book chapters, or whatever.
Optionally you can add a login if you don't want millions of random internet users to be able to access your notes. I might make that the default just to be on the safe side. Also, I don't think there's any Markdown formatting support as such, so this is just WYSIWYG in the most literal sense.
https://github.com/sunny/edith -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Feb-2018 05:20:21 EST
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@aral Yes. I don't remember if they were sponsors in previous years. They might have been. In the more distant past, pre-Snowden, Google was considered more favorably. But now they're just a giant spyware company which has long since abandoned support for open standards.
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