federico @federico3@mastodon.social

webshit weekly http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2020/07/07/0/

The first paper on a COVID vaccine is out, and initial indications are VERY good. While we don't know how well it protects, the people injected with it wind up with MORE antibodies then people who actually GOT COVID, which is a good sign.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/01/pfizer-and-biontechs-first-vaccine-candidate

(Some people in Tech right now): No, but Microsoft has changed. It's really pro open source now. It's not the same company as before. People can change, you now.

(me): https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-forced-update-chromium-editorial

More than 15 years ago, Onion Service (at the time named Hidden Service) saw the light of day. From today (July 2nd), the Internet has around 16 months to migrate from onion services v2 to v3 once and for all. ⏰

Read more:
https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline

Today at 17:00 UTC, tune in for Kevin Bock's presentation of Geneva, a genetic algorithm that automatically discovers new ways to circumvent censorship!

Watch the live-stream here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksojSRFLbBM

💫 🐙 💫

#imv2020

in capitalist tech: massive user growth ---> lots of money (funding) available --> pay fancy people to do fancy scaling things

in community project: massive user growth ---> aaaah everything is really chaotic now, there are loads of tasks that nobody wants to (or can) do... it's like actual work!! I thought this was meant to be fun...

the solution to me is to scale out, not up, federate don't grow. but still, people seem more focused on big ideas that need to scale up to be successful.

We really need a FOSS search engine with, and this is important: its own in-house, FOSS crawler

DuckDuckGo burned a truckload of goodwill with me today

Their DDG-branded web browser for Android has a feature which [it doesn't matter what it does by design], but as a side effect it sends every URL you visited to DuckDuckGo's servers. That is the single worst thing they could do as a "privacy" focused web browser.

When this was pointed out to them, they doubled down. For a year. It took an HN front page (in the comments section they doubled down *again*) and 10 hours of arguing with them before the CEO stepped in and agreed to remove the feature.

webshit weekly http://n-gate.com/hackernews/2020/06/30/0/

OONI Probe Mobile 2.5 is out! 🎉 🐙 🚀

Why is this so exciting?

📌 Circumvention tool testing ➡️ Measure the blocking of @torproject & Psiphon

📌 5 new languages, including #Thai & #Indonesian (thank you Localization Lab community! ❤️ )

Update now: https://ooni.org/install/mobile 💫

Today at 14:00 UTC, tune in for Andrés Azpúrua's presentation on internet censorship, DNS poisoning, and phishing in Venezuela!

Watch the live-stream here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UDvVfjJ0Iq8

💫 🐙 💫

#imv2020 #Venezuela

@FLauenroth @z428 @markosaric That's the downside to one of the major reasons for the spread of "open source" software, that being its exploitation by those with no interest in libre principles as a means to free labour.

When you think about it that way, paying for libre software is the antithesis of that motivation, and hence one of the best ways to support software freedom as opposed to free labour.

Environmental web design & use tips:

* Wherever possible, choose text. Text is by far the most efficient (and as I like to illustrate, universal) medium.
* Make sure everything on your site has a good reason to be there. Avoid frameworks to further this.
* Compress your images & video.
* Especially avoid JavaScript, it adds significantly more processing effort to rendering.
* If you love something, download it. Buy it. Avoid advertising.
* Make sure HTML & CSS downloads fast.

Today at 09:00 UTC, tune in for Khairil Yusof's presentation of censorship measurement research in Southeast Asia!

Watch the live-stream here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AORNoRhgVmM

💫 🐙 💫

#imv2020 #SoutheastAsia #censorship

I somehow stumbled upon "Road and Bridges"[1] again today.

It had a reference to this essay.

The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community

Women make up 25% of the software industry but only 1.5% of open source development (as measured on GitHub 🤐)

Employers trying to make OSS contribution a criteria for hiring decisions will only further worsen the lack of diversity in the tech industry.

1. https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf

#Diversity #Inclusion #Tech #GitHub #OSS

There's a NimConf online conf. tomorrow http://conf.nim-lang.org/ 🤓

#nim #programming #conference

The Open Technology Fund (OTF) supported the creation of the global internet freedom community, but it is now under threat.

We need to support the OTF to save internet freedom.

Read our statement:
https://ooni.org/post/2020-06-19-save-internet-freedom-support-the-open-technology-fund/

#internetfreedom #SaveInternetFreedom #SaveOTF

Recent shifts at US Agency for Global Media & Open Tech Fund are very concerning. OTF has always been a supporter of open source tools (including Tor) fighting for internet freedom, and their funding transparency has built trust with users. It's time to #saveinternetfreedom!
https://saveinternetfreedom.tech/