Kyle Rankin @kylerankin@mastodon.social

It's so heartening to see a steady stream of stories about ethical tech. News about the #privacy impacts of your tech choices is hitting daily news, but now with the message: "it doesn't have to be this way." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/personaltech/ethical-tech-consumer.html

Locking customers out of running software on hardware they bought isn't "fundamental security." So many in #infosec patronize you in the name of security, but with the goal of control. "Give us the keys, you can't be trusted to drive." If you have to root it, you don't own it. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/cryptography-failure-leads-to-easy-hacking-for-playstation-classic/

That's what I love about these Google messaging apps, man. I get older, they stay the same age. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-allo-to-shut-down-in-march-of-2019/

It makes sense that MS would base their browser engine on Chrome, given how hard it is to get developers to test a site against Firefox, much less the other browsers out there. I suspect most developers even tested against IE for "legacy mode" before they tried Edge.

@kylerankin when Andrew Tanenbaum, who created MINIX, started flaming Torvalds over making Linux. He got in one little fight over a microkernel, (shortly after that we founded Linux Journal).

@kylerankin In west Helsinki born and raised, on computers was how he spent most of his days, coding in BASIC on a VIC-20, buying an Intel when he had more money,

Now this is a story all about how my OS got flipped, turned upside down, and I'd like to take a minute, just one or two, to tell you how Linux became the kernel for GNU.

@kylerankin For what it's worth, I follow my own advice on this: I left a well-paid, interesting job after leadership said almost exactly the same things. If they are willing to compromise your personal life and family, what else will they ask you to compromise?

If your leadership says this, leave. Startups that operate this way don't care about or value you. They are either in it for a short term exit, or plan to churn through employees (including you) as you all burn out. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/11/27/elon-musk-workers-should-put-80-hours-week-change-world/

It's much easier to understand #serverless apps once you realize they are just CGI scripts from 20 years ago, but with proprietary interfaces so you are locked into one provider. #devops

NPM with a reminder about why software supply chain matters: https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116 and ICYMI, I posted some thoughts on the digital supply chain about two weeks ago: #infosec #reproduciblebuilds https://puri.sm/posts/protecting-the-digital-supply-chain/

@kylerankin If only you could have heard them laugh when I explained that people in ad tech sincerely believe that folks hate ads only because they aren't relevant enough.

@kylerankin They were shocked to hear about addiction psychologists advising on UX design, data broker biz, tracking cookies, gamed search results (site acquisition based on page rank) and all the resulting implications.

I had some great conversations over Thanksgiving with family answering their questions about societal, #privacy problems caused by the ad tech industry. Regular folks are waking up to the issues and want solutions/alternatives.

If "Open Core" is more than just Embrace, Extend, Extinguish for startups, the current examples aren't reassuring. #FOSS is treated as free alpha product development during seed round funding. Post-series-A it's all proprietary all the time.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” -- William Gibson, Neuromancer #CampFire

@kylerankin Some could argue @iRobot is skating pretty close to the zeroth law of robotics here...

"Turner stressed that any spatial information shared by iRobot would not be used in Google’s lucrative ad-targeting business." #yet #privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/31/18041876/google-irobot-smart-home-spatial-data-mapping-collaboration

The general public is starting to realize that the multi-billion-dollar ad industry built around targeting and manipulating you to buy stuff you don't need can be used to target and manipulate you to do other things (like vote a certain way).