Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net

We're indoctrinating our entire population into thinking that they can't function without the miracle (**spits) of Zoom/MS Teams/Google Hangouts/Webex, etc. Well, that's bullshit. Talk about sowing learned helplessness & foreign corporate dependence. Why aren't our national educational authorities (yes, NZ Min of Ed, looking at you) organising a far more cost-effective, proven, *local* services for education, like using BigBlueButton? They have *no idea* what they're doing with regard to tech.

Anne Wagner of FOSTA/SESTA is now pushing to go after OnlyFans https://www.vice.com/en/article/4avpe3/ann-wagner-fosta-onlyfans-csam-doj-letter

There's a You're Wrong About episode that traces the bad faith framing of a lot of this, a pivot strategy from anti-porn and even satanic panic (!) propaganda pushers https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/human-trafficking/id1380008439?i=1000465289965

(Sorry for the Apple Podcasts link, it's the only webpage they've provided for individual episodes.)

hiding details of the material reality of how software operates and where data goes from users is bad, and calling that "good UX" is capitulating to the proprietary way of thinking that produces dark patterns and SaaSS

And the digital Dark Age analogy is, I think, a compelling one. I've fleshed it out here: https://davelane.nz/darkage

TIL

1. us congress recently passed a law to make it illegal for ISPs to charge an equipment fee on hardware that you already own, yay

2. at&t fiber-to-the-home evades this by placing secret authentication keys into their otherwise standard combo wifi router + ont (fiber modem).

so you ahem, could, wink, use your own equipment, but the service won't work when you do 🤢

Popular webcomic "The Oatmeal" no longer asks people to follow them on #Facebook, #Twitter, #instagram etc. Here's their explanation as to why (contains minor swearing):

(from https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people )

PS Currently if you want to follow them, visit here:
https://theoatmeal.com/pages/subscribe

Abolish copyright https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/1/22558292/police-officer-video-taylor-swift-youtube-copyright

WHY DO SO MANY COOL OPEN SOURCE WEB APPLICATIONS DEPEND ON DOCKER, HOLY SHIT LEARN HOW TO WRITE PROPER SETUP DOCUMENTATION

I refuse to run Docker containers inside of Linux Containers so my options are…
- Install manually and make upgrading a pain in the ass
- Don't use the app

As much as I would *love* to use it, the reliance on Docker for managing 100% of the stack is a *hard* no. Figuring out how the image has changed between releases would make manual maintenance absolute hell and I am unwilling to shoulder that burden.

Not everyone is *able* to use Docker and not everyone is *willing* to use Docker. By not supporting any other deployment method, you are preventing some individuals from using what could be *the* application they've spent years looking for.

Let the admin decide how to architect their own systems. They know their backend better than you do.

(reposted because jake wanted to boost)

@fribbledom I have three, dunno which is the most controversial, but let's go with this one:

Writing a program for an imaginary model user is stupid and produces inferior UX. If you don't have a real user at hand, write a program that you yourself would like to use.

proprietary (no source code included) s/w is like supermarket packaged goods without ingredients label. And you know how bad that would be.

It's not that everybody reads the list of ingredients, but that *anybody* could, & that organisations can randomly sample to confirm the list adds up.

We need this for software just as much as food:

- 20% evil, sends data to Google
- 38% screwed, displays adware based on that data
- 17% previous purchases shared with Amazon
- 26% audio history to Apple

Just published Google lawsuit evidence indicates that like always retained users' location data, even if disabled in user interface, to the extent that its own employees flashed LineageOS on their phones to avoid tracking. Full thread on https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398353211220807682

#privacy #google

Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there *are* other ways to do things and other ways to be, that there is not just one civilization and it is good and it is the way we have to be. -- Ursula K. Le Guin

“Current trends in the automotive industry point to a future with you locked in a remote control car, your vendor holding the remote." https://puri.sm/posts/locked-in-a-remote-control-car/