Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net
Nat Tuck
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An article about legal interest in the EU on Right to Repair stuff: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/europe-guarantee-right-to-repair-ifixit/
Pressure in the right direction, though the biggest threat (at least in the US, don't know EU law here as well) to the right to repair is the use of *intellectual restriction laws* to obstruct repair / reverse engineering / jailbreaking.
Nat Tuck
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Set copyright to 10 years
Do you own a drill? A saw? A vise? Are you in the United States?
Some jerk has introduced a bill to make you a felon:
Nat Tuck
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"So, there you have it. It is tinfoil-hattedness to raise these concerns. The one area in computer science where tinfoil-hattedness is of absolutely importance is cryptography; and the maintainer of the only Haskell entropy package dismisses these very valid concerns as tinfoil-hattedness."
https://leonmergen.com/on-the-state-of-cryptography-in-haskell-c272fb0b6478 (Medium)
Very good read, especially since I want to discuss crypto later!
Nat Tuck
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Did you know that @Fitbit can track your sleeping patterns or even whether you are having unprotected sex? Wondering what @google could do with this data?
Sign the #NotOnOurWatch petition to the @EU_Commission to stop the merger!
https://pvcy.org/googbit https://nitter.net/privacyint/status/1274747659102892033/photo/1
Nat Tuck
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FINALLY! Ramsey Orta, Who Filmed The Police Killing Of Eric Garner, Released From Prison
Orta was serving time for a gun possession charge that he said was set up by the police.
https://gothamist.com/news/ramsey-orta-who-filmed-police-killing-eric-garner-released-prison
Nat Tuck
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Anyone else finds the word "deeplinking" and the court battles around it completely bonkers insane?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking
I mean, this is linking. It's the whole point of the Web. Why do we even need a separate term for that.
Nat Tuck
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Happy five year anniversary of twitter keeping us safe from dangerous postings.
Nat Tuck
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we're 80% funded 🖤 https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform
Nat Tuck
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Zoom acquired Keybase today.
Keybase helped me to identify a trend in the software industry: using a pretty UI to cover up the disruption of an open ecosystem with a closed, centralized replacement. Keybase seemed cool on the face of it - making encryption easier is a laudible goal, and PGP certainly could use the improvement. But, thanks to Keybase, now I ask different questions upfront.
Beware the Keybase formula:
1. Integrates with an existing, open ecosystem
2. May have open-source clients, but server is closed source and does not federate
3. Pretty UI and good marketing
4. VC funded
Nat Tuck
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I'm disappointed that the state of open source video conferencing software is so bad. There are two apparently mature projects based on WebRTC. One thinks I'm going to allocate a new hardware server to it to run a version of Ubuntu so old that it no longer gets hardware support updates (and hence won't run on a new hardware server). The other one thinks that I'm going to have users install exactly Google Chrome to use it. Neither of those things is true.
@marksherman This video, titled "Git and Github for Poets" seems relevant to your interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCQHnlnPusY&feature=emb_title
Nat Tuck
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It's still not a perfect trolley meme for this situation, but it's much better than the previous one than screamed “hurr durr cApITaLiStS want to kill us for profits”
Open source self-driving software is definitely something the world needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y67XKPmtY8
Nat Tuck
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"But if I want Self-Criticism Virtue Points, criticizing the Grey Tribe is the only honest way to get them. And if I want Tolerance Points, my own personal cross to bear right now is tolerating the Blue Tribe."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Nicely done Scott, nicely done.
Why is it important to control your own computers?
One more reason: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/02/apple_hong_kong/
The world clearly needs more "smart" devices, as indicated by this factory reset procedure for GE light bulbs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo&feature=youtu.be
Buying home routers for OpenWRT is annoying. The used market especially can result in getting some weird stuff. I just spent like three days figuring out how Shaw had messed up the firmware on my newly acquired refurb Netgear WNDR3700.
