Shamar @Shamar@mastodon.social

“I’m against surveillance capitalism but Google’s service is listed first on my app because it is so popular” is the “I’m against the tobacco industry but I offer anyone coming into my home a cigarette because smoking’s so popular” of tech.

If you offer people easy access to cigarettes without so much as a warning about the risks, you might want to reconsider whether you really are against Big Tobacco or whether you’re doing their bidding.

"Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most."

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

A #Montenegro court found on Tuesday an investigative journalist, who was researching organized crime groups, guilty of drug trafficking and criminal association.

International #pressfreedom organizations labeled the verdict as unfair and demanded his immediate acquittal.

https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/9125-montenegro-convicts-journalist-of-criminal-association

Restore Distribution Symbolics XL402 Genera 8.3 #lisp #machine #scsi2sd #computing #hacking

My god it’s full of stars

Tip #2: Life Hack, when you sign up for anything online, put the website's name as your middle name. That way, when you receive spam/advert emails, you'll know who sold your info😏!
#privacymonth #advocate4privacy

@Shamar @ckeen @freakazoid well... https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9647-taming_the_chaos_can_we_build_systems_that_actually_work

@freakazoid and if you're a sysadmin, you're screwed, since the developers will jump into the latest and shiniest iteration of managing dependencies and deploying stuff with npm, with no regard to how that can actually work in production.

Once you get the code, you're on your own. Asking the dev about the deploy? Ha! "Works on my machine", with their very specific Node version and very specific npm version.

Yes, I am triggered by Node and npm mentions very much.

RT @libreoffice@twitter.com

LibreOffice 6.2 is coming! Discover what the localisation community has been working on in this release, and how you can help to translate the user interface and press release into your local languages: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/01/15/libreoffice-6-2-community-focus-localisation/

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/libreoffice/status/1085124721736335360

hacker's gon' hack.

@xj9
This is good food for thought. I hope this discussion is continued. I don't have a strong opinion on any of it yet because I haven't put the time needed for researching and contemplating as of yet so I find these debates fascinating, as long as points are being made and it doesn't become people attacking each other instead of each other's philosophies.
@Shamar @DJWalnut @dtluna

@mala @paolo I am tempted to tell them: you want to treat video sites as "pirates"? Fine, let's trade:

You get this, but in exchange every time you erroneously ask a video to be taken down, you pay a HUGE fine. And there are felony charges on top of that, since you have to sign a document stating that you certify that that particular piece of content is infringing.

Yes, this includes right to quote, parody, fair use in the US, and all of that. Dealing with this complexity is now on you. Enjoy.

Rust: yay, good, nice language, keep up the good work
"more Rust on WASM": *extremely worried looks*

@z428 fair enough. In my experience the main barrier is the aura of mystification that proprietary technology companies (of all sorts) have erected around their tech, to protect themselves from #DIY competition (eg home repairs competing with new sales). People get tricked into believing it's too complex for a non-specialist to understand (mostly it isn't), so they don't try. My #1 tactic is just encouraging people to keep trying. Also I like to use colourful analogies with everyday objects

@grainloom both GNU and Linux are 0.5

-> 0.5/0.5=1=0.5+0.5

@paolo "mixed feelings"? Really?..

We already have 28 largely incompatible copyright regimes across the EU (look at quoting rights, or parody). This will get worse, not better, with how unclear Art13 is.

We already also have Internet gatekeepers like Facebook or Google. They can afford deploying filtering technology; in fact Google stopped opposing the Directive at some point, as they recognized it will help them further stratify, making competition even harder.

Hacking math education with Python - Teacher, programmer, and author Peter Farrell explains why teaching math with Python works better than the traditional approach #maths https://opensource.com/article/19/1/hacking-math