Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net
Nat Tuck
boosted
Happy five year anniversary of twitter keeping us safe from dangerous postings.
Nat Tuck
boosted
we're 80% funded 🖤 https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform
Nat Tuck
boosted
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
boosted
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
boosted
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
boosted
"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.
Luckily, sometimes the world gets a VW Bus and a video camera into the right hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByRKF1INOcU
Note to self: Don't put two routers on the same network with the same IP address.
Mozilla: The problem wasn't that you couldn't push updates fast enough, the problem is that you built an innately broken system. If you cease to exist, my browser should still work in five years. And you shouldn't be preventing users from running software of their choice to begin with.
Nat Tuck
boosted
Eben Moglen in his keynote at #republica:
"The federation of all services is not an inconceivable idea....This is the intended goal of the little gesture I call #FreedomBox: the manufacture of simple, inexpensive, self-administrating servers that we can hold in the palm of our hands and distribute throughout the world like apple seeds."
VIDEO: "Why Freedom of Thought Requires Attention"
Good job Mozilla. Not only did you foist this addon signing bullshit on #firefox users and then forget to renew your signing cert, you made your broken browser continuously check for certificate validity and disable already installed and working addons.
Someone really needs to put in the effort to maintain a de-crapified Firefox fork designed to keep working even if Mozilla and all the companies who give them money cease to exist.
Switzerland is planning to run an election over the internet. Turns out their software has a backdoor that would allow the election administrators to undetectably alter votes.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/13/principal-agent-problems.html
The security requirements for an election are pretty straightforward. The #1 threat is the people running the elections. Anyone running an election who downplays that point should be treated as actively engaged in election fraud.
