Joseph Nuthalapati @njoseph@social.masto.host

Announcing Meme It So! It's a Star Trek The Next Generation Meme and GIF Generator, inspired by Frinkiac.

It has every line of dialogue spoken on STTNG tied to screencaptures. Which makes it good for looking up lines as well.

https://memeit.so/

cyberpunk is a dystopian aesthetic. the fact that our world is tending toward it (and fast) is an overwhelmingly bad thing

"Did your data get breached by Facebook in its vast, ghastly, 500,000,000 person valdez? The lovely folks at Digital Rights Ireland are suing Facebook under the GDPR for money damages and they'd like to sign you up to be part of the lawsuit."
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook
https://www.digitalrights.ie/facebook/

Congratulations to Jonathan Carter on his re-election to Debian Project Leader! https://bits.debian.org/2021/04/2021dpl-election.html

**‘Frightening’: Weekend shutdown in Delhi as COVID grips India**

"India faces a ferocious new coronavirus wave with another record high of 234,692 new cases on Saturday."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/17/frightening-weekend-shutdown-in-delhi-as-covid-grips-india

#news #bot

I reviewed the latest major release of LineageOS! #android

https://www.xda-developers.com/lineageos-18-1-review/

New #blogpost: “Misinformation about Permissions Policy and FLoC”.

Lots of people have been spreading the often-unnecessary advice to add a Permissions-Policy response header to their sites, and some have been going so far as to ask FLOSS maintainers to patch their software to make this the default.

If you read the actual proposals and W3C specs, you’ll find a different story.

Everybody: please calm down, take a deep breath, and read before you make such prescriptive advice.

FLoC is terrible, but telling everyone to add a magic “opt-out header” in every situation conveys a misunderstanding of everything you need to know about the opt-in/out process.

@aral FLoC, combined with the identity-focused UID2 will seriously undermine our privacy.

As the EFF puts it: "Deployed together, they could be a potent surveillance cocktail: specific, cross-context identifiers connected to comprehensive behavioral labels."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/after-cookies-ad-tech-wants-use-your-email-track-you-everywhere

Clean up the web!

Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side: will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?

https://cleanuptheweb.org/

#CleanUpTheWeb #FlocOffGoogle

Just in case @Liberapay is your thing.
Briar has an account there:
https://liberapay.com/Briar/

Shout out to the 26 patreons pledging support over there. (and to anyone else, with whatever means).

The logical (unfortunately) next step: #Bitcoin miners buy old fossil fuel power plants and fire them up again. Le sigh. https://www.nysfocus.com/2021/04/13/new-york-bitcoin-mining-threat/

Dear #fediverse and especially #foss and #activitypub tech enthusiasts amongst you ..

At #SocialHub we're preparing a great event in the form of two webinars and a workshop in April, for representatives of the European Commission.

The topics are #ActivityPub #Interoperability and #FediverseFutures within the EU.

Interest for the event came from EC itself, who via @NGIZero - funder of many great AP projects - approached SocialHub to organize.

You can help prepare and certainly join the Event!

Just heard about this. I've been using Decentraleyes for awhile, but didn't realize it hadn't been updated in a long time. This is a fork and is much more actively maintained. https://www.localcdn.org/

@feneas (Federated Networks Association) is a member-run organization that supports the development and popularization of federated networks of all kinds. It runs online services for the federation community, including a Discourse forum, a Gitlab instance (which hosts fediverse.party dev) and a matrix homeserver. Please consider volunteering to help run #Feneas services, giving a donation, or joining or renewing your membership:
https://feneas.org/membership/

Just got to read the cooperative software manifesto, and I like it, especially

People who are coerced into using proprietary technology deserve our empathy and invitation into our movement, not condescension.

Y e s ! This is one of the most toxic aspects of FSF and RMS. You can't expect me to harass my peers into using software that hinders their work. You can't both gatekeep free software and call yourself the leader of computing freedom.

While we agree with the Ethical Software Movement[, ...] proliferation of incompatible copyright licenses which prohibit software from being legally combined creates more obstacles than opportunities for our movement.

This too I like. Licences are dangerous stuff, and also generally useless stuff so long as they don't hold in court. IMHO we should use licences to keep source open and community to achieve and protect software freedom.

Language is constructed collectively and is always evolving. It is counterproductive to our movement to refuse to collaborate with people because they use the words "open source" or "free software" to describe their work.

Amen.

IIRC @be is the author of this document, I wanna say thanks, this is really nice.

"what if humanity became obsessed with reversing hash functions and used up all their energy resources to the task" sounds like something a cryptography researcher in 1996 might errantly come up with

@njoseph cf. https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/05/cheatneutral-offsetting

Instead of thinking about technology in terms of good/evil/neutral, I'm trying to think about it in terms of system dynamics and feedback loops.

The accelerationist perspective of technology is that it acts as a reinforcing feedback loop that continuously overpowers or breaks out of existing balancing feedback loops to produce increasing change.

However in a social context, technology can act as a balancing feedback loop that maintains existing social dynamics, overpowering reinforcing feedback loops from culture that would otherwise lead to change.