Neil Alexander @neilalexander@mastodon.social

⚠️ ATTENTION ALL WEB DEVELOPERS!

Unless your GDPR cookie warning has a single "Reject All" button for opting out of all cookies for any purpose/advertiser, and it is not obscured from immediate view behind menus or additional clicks, you have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to claim that you care about our privacy.

So stop being assholes, stop patronising us and go fix your stupid website.

So if you really are wondering where Brexit came from, look no further than your local newsagents or paper stand.

I didn’t really intend for this to turn into an ageist rant but then consider that the average age of MPs in Britain is also 50, and there are many career politicians on the benches that are even much older than that.

They, too, are disgusted at the idea of consuming more moderate media. The country is being ran by old men.

Newspapers have influence over these older generations for free.

Meanwhile younger voters are staring in complete disbelief as their futures are ripped away from them.

Is it really a surprise that older voters generally voted for Brexit and younger voters generally didn’t?

If older generations bothered to fact-check and to consume a greater spectrum of media then their views would become much more moderate too. It’s just that most of them can’t even imagine buying a different newspaper – especially one elsewhere on the political spectrum – let alone consuming their news from the internet where who knows what they might see.

The most popular newspapers in Britain by a large margin are right-wing publications. They’re basically the original Buzzfeed – not edited with integrity but by shock value.

Younger people don’t tend to buy newspapers because we increasingly discover the news online, even from social media. Often we discover news from across the entire political spectrum because that’s the nature of social media. We just don’t need newspapers.

The only people buying newspapers are the older generations.

The most insulting thing about Brexit is that it has been forced upon younger generations by older ones who only hold their opinions because a right-wing newspaper told them so.

Older generations don’t fact-check as weren’t ever taught to. They don’t get their news from multiple news sources as they didn’t ever have to. They didn’t question what they were told as they were reprimanded for doing so.

Instead they read the same newspapers, day in day out. They receive their opinions by osmosis.

BEST. 404. PAGE. EVER.
#raspberrypi #lookaroundyou

I don't envy kids growing up today. I really don't.

Remarkably we try to teach children about online safety and data permanence (e.g. "don't post it unless you're happy to see it on a billboard in five years") and yet one day they will grow up, search their own names and realise that their parents didn't feel this applied to them.

Really disturbing when parents continuously post pictures and publicly document every step of their children's development online. Searchable by and visible to anyone for years to come. Indexed, saved and archived by every search engine and crawler on the planet. Undeletable.

"The Lovejoy Effect" • noun

A term describing the labelling and categorisation of innocent individuals as bad actors by the state or media, based on their usage, development or promotion of tools that may have been used or adopted by criminals or terrorists.

Etymology: "Won't somebody please think of the children?" – Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons, 1996.

Examples in action: Tor and onion routing, end-to-end encrypted messaging services, Bitcoin and crypto-currency, mesh and overlay networking.

Yggdrasil Network v0.3.4 is released! 👋

Includes a number of switch fixes, revised (and more robust) multicast peering mechanism, better support for macOS AWDL peering support with other nearby Macs (that don't even need to be on the same Wi-Fi network!), some admin socket fixes. Plus the usual bug fixes and dustings of magic.

Builds: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/builds.html
Changelog: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/changelog.html

#yggdrasil #meshnet #meshnetworks #decentralised #e2e #decentralized #network #ipv6

So I ask you this: while we're all too busy ignoring them, editing selfies and trying to editorialise our lives online, how can we honestly and in good faith sit back and dictate to these people that they should "just go and get the help they need"?

On the whole, our own unwillingness to see uncomfortable material, or to share anything that makes us look less than 100%, is exactly what makes social media so unapologetically hostile towards people who are struggling with their mental health, body image or anything else.

Positivity in social media is a well-studied phenomenon. People who are negative online tend to drive away engagement because reading their pain feels too much like taking it on personally - we all know but don't like to admit that sympathy for others has a best-before date.

On the other hand, it must be equally difficult to talk about and to share your feelings openly online only for your friends to scroll past and ignore it. How can people be expected to truly present their real unedited selves online when the rest of us feel so awkward seeing it?

It's no surprise that people who struggle with mental health stay away from social media. On one hand, it's difficult enough to sift through carefully considered and curated posts where your friends draw the best possible version of themselves when you already feel less than.