SAFE Network @safenetwork@mastodon.social

"We think we’re searching #Google; Google is actually searching us. We think that these companies have #privacy policies; those policies are actually #surveillance policies." #SurveillanceCapitalism #FuckOffGoogle

While trying to convince us all that they take user #privacy seriously, Google is prohibiting ad blockers in Chrome. Trackers will be able to follow your activity across the Internet - and Google will be able to continue collecting its ad-based revenue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/05/30/google-just-gave-2-billion-chrome-users-a-reason-to-switch-to-firefox/

I just tweeted at a friend when he asked about why I don't have a Instagram account

"Why have you not got a mastodon account?

It's time to start taking a side in the technology and culture discussion. The future isn't more walled gardens, more celebrity, more attention grabbing, more of the same crap we have.
It's time to get radical and out of the comfort of the status quo of centralised ownership."

Quite like my quick fire rant... Just came off the top of my head

if you want to know what's happening in HK

read

https://www.hongkongfp.com

In my free time I am gladly translating @Tutanota into Slovak language.
They are looking for volunteers for other languages which are not yet supported. Please join me and translate #Tutanota to your language!

For more information please check this page:
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/tutanota-translation-project/

#PrivateEmail #EncryptedEmail #SecureEmail #Email

A not too bad article about one man's journey from alt-right fodder to some version of left wing via the YouTube recommendation algorithm.

I had no idea that something known as "BreadTube" existed.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html

"The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

Reinforce was a huge success. In a talk at an A.I. conference in February, Minmin Chen, a Google Brain researcher, said it was YouTube’s most successful launch in two years. Sitewide views increased by nearly 1 percent, she said — a gain that, at YouTube’s scale, could amount to millions more hours of daily watch time and millions more dollars in advertising revenue per year. She added that the new algorithm was already starting to alter users’ behavior."

RT @devonzuegel@twitter.com

We've all been targeting 10k steps a day because some Japanese pedometer company thought the character for 10,000 (万) looks like a person walking... https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1134954401997529088

Russian Investigative Journalist Hospitalized After Arrest On Alleged Drug Crimes https://www.npr.org/2019/06/08/730910617/russian-investigative-journalist-hospitalized-after-arrest-on-alleged-drug-crime?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=world

Arrests of journalists and media workers https://gnusocial.no/url/1482194

"Betrayed by an app she had never heard of" - How TrueCaller is endangering journalists https://www.privacyinternational.org/case-study/2997/betrayed-app-she-had-never-heard-how-truecaller-endangering-journalists

"Often when we think about the right to privacy, we think of the right to be let alone, unmolested by the state. But the digital age has given rise to industrialized data mining, content curation, and automated decision-making, all of which undermine democracy and intensify social divisions. It calls for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy—one that can appreciate both the collective and individual nature of this right." https://newrepublic.com/article/154026/digital-privacy-class-issue

- a microSD card weighs somewhere around 0.4g
- the highest capacity microSD that's easily available is 256GB
- a trebuchet can throw a 90kg projectile over 300m

90kg worth of microSD cards is 225,000 of them

Therefore a trebuchet can throw 57.6PB of data over 300m

This would have the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created