DJ Pure Applesauce @DJ_Pure_Applesauce@mastodon.social

a modest toot-prosal: nobody ever has to justify why they blocked somebody else. Nobody has the right to take up space in your brain-meats. Thank's

Google caught changing Android settings without user permission https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45546276

Facebook allowed job ads to exclude women https://boingboing.net/2018/09/18/facebook-allowed-job-ads-to-ex.html #seriousbusiness #sexism #Post

Which is true, make no mistake. Users often don't actually know what they want. However, users have made it pretty clear that features which are built exclusively to foster more interaction with a service are almost universally despised, even while producing more engagement. 3/6

This is why Facebook is struggling to get people to keep using their timelines. They keep adding pretty bells and whistles to get people to post, while ignoring that people aren't posting as much anymore because they hate the underlying, algorithm-driven experience. 4/6

Anyway, Twitter will force us all back to the version of their product that drives the most engagement / interaction, regardless of how it makes their users feel. And they'll keep adding things like online presence and threading in a vague attempt to become a messaging app. 5/6

And in 5 years or so, we'll be reading a lot of articles asking "what happened to Twitter?" and none of them will have the actual right answer, which is that social media services do not prioritize user experience over metrics, which is a penny wise, pound foolish approach. 6/6

Ask not the lawyers for advice, for they will say both yes and no

@Are0h Note: If you're in the US, Amazon's live tracking will let people see on a map where you live (or at least where your mailbox is). It will also show your name and city during checkout. They broke anonymity on wish lists.

Each time I read in the news that the next vocal assistant is "safe" and will "take care" of our private sphere, this time Watson from IBM, a small voice in my head says #bullshit!
How can you trust a black box or a company to which you will send a live audio stream of your life? You simply can't.
https://www.letemps.ch/economie/watson-ne-quitte-journee-sauf-decidez
80% users of various vocal assistant admit they are afraid of being spy'd.
https://www.letemps.ch/economie/assistants-numeriques-simmiscer-nos-vies

In case you missed it: I made a #Mastodon Shortcode for #Hugo, a static site generator. Embed all the toots into your #blog posts!

https://www.kevingimbel.com/mastodon-embed-shortcode-for-hugo/

Twitter is basically Mastodon with none of the features and all of the Nazis.

RT @pdacosta@twitter.com: "Social mobility is much lower in the US than previously thought and is lower than in virtually all other advanced economies. Mobility has fallen since 1980 which is precisely when inequality began to rise." https://hceconomics.uchicago.edu/news/3-questions-bhashkar-mazumder

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/pdacosta/status/966030188093083652

The future is here today : you can't play Bach on Facebook because Sony says they own his compositions

James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Facebook account, but it didn’t go up — Facebook’s copyright filtering system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth of his personal performance of a song whose composer has (...)
http://etraces.constantvzw.org/informations/13326

#Twitter CEO: conservative employees ‘dont feel safe to express their opinions’ https://www.recode.net/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-employees-conservative-trump-politics

Meanwhile, the EU has voted to kill the Internet as we know it and possibly aid in creating an even bigger surveillance machine in the process.

Civil disobedience is the way forward on this one. We redouble our efforts to create decentralised alternatives and if they’re deemed illegal by this myopic legislation, so be it. Fuck ’em. We go to jail if we need to.

If you had any illusions that the battle for personhood and human rights would be easier in our age, think again.

#article13

Why do so many WordPress projects start by updating code that was obsolete 4 years ago?

If she could see the future, how could she not know she was going to be busted?
Proof that occultism is total bullshit, RIGHT THERE. https://www.rt.com/news/438363-tarot-reader-scam-italy/