Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 14

@enkiv2 I take your point, but there are both commercial and social motives for offering people a quicker alternative to a CS degree, especially one focused on practical understanding and useful skills. For example #Enspiral run a code academy for activists who want to gain tech skills they can apply to social enterprise and NGO work. The last thing on their minds is helping tech corporations to drive their workers wages down.

@enkiv2 similarly, while I agree that increasing the supply of workers with coding skills could have an effect on tech wages in the future, that doesn't justify leaping to the assumption that organizations teaching people to code are simply dupes of the tech corporations and their owners. There are many ethical motivations for running code academies, such as upskilling workers for social enterprise and NGO work, or even just empowering people to understand the tech they use every day.

@enkiv2 there's a lot of good analysis in this piece, but also a lot of assumptions which I strongly disagree with, many of which revolve around completely ignoring the agency of geeks outside their role as employees, and the influence of social movements in tech like the software freedom movement and CreativeCommons. For example, hackathons have nothing to do with priming people to create VC-funded startups. This is a bizarre assumption that nobody who has been part of a hackathon would make.

Now that I've successfully got root on my Android/Linux device, it would be great if there was an app I could use to swap out all the proprietary apps for their free code counterparts from F-Droid. Or at least to help me distinguish the free code components of Android from the free code components, and maybe give me some guide of what can be harmlessly swapped out and what risks breaking the OS if I remove it.

You know that feeling you had last time you had a big spring clean and got rid of a whole lot of dusty old crap you never use? That's me banishing all the proprietary gOgle apps from my mobile now that I have root :-D

It seems crazy that I have to go to such lengths to get admin rights on a device I own, and uninstall bundled apps I don't want. I seem to remember an anti-trust law suite that successfully forced #Microsoft to stop bundling Internet Exploiter with Windows in a way that made it hard to remove or disable. Could we use that precedent to liberate #Android from compulsory #GoogleApps?

Oh no! It likes like trisquel.info has been blocked by the #GreatFirewall :( Why would they want to block a GNU/Linux distro site?

It's been estimated that FarceBook's current revenue could be replaced by charging each user US$5-10 a month.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/05/what-if-we-paid-for-facebook-instead-of-letting-it-spy-on-us-for-free/

But I suspect that what FB costs to operate and even make a modest surplus is much less than that. One question that intrigues me is this; would a FB-a-like cost more in less to operate, in aggregate, if we replaced it with a federated platform?

Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote a book asking how one can compete with "free"? Let's reframe the question. How do we compete with free *and* amoral? How about by doing cheap and ethical? How about by replacing trustless, dehumanizing "platforms" with a return to human-scale organizations based on bulding trust?

@Matt_Noyes @bhaugen @mayel @matslats 1. support/ join existing commons and cooperatives, and help start new projects where there are gaps. 2. help theorize and map the space so we can understand how the various initiatives can join up and support each other, and where the gaps are.

Kitchen #ProTip: got a pot with burnt food stuck to the bottom? Soak it overnight in a solution of water and salt. In the morning, the burnt scum will lift right off.

Some free code apps I haven't got working on Android 4.2.2 yet, so I'll follow up with the developers. User ignorance may be the problem in some cases ;-) I intend to write some blog pieces on what works out-of-the-box, what works with some tweaking, what needs bugs fixed for 4.2.2 support, and so on.

The 1968 uprisings were 50 years ago. My generation had our uprisings in the mobilizations around the corporate globalization summits (G8, GATT, WTO, IMF/ World Bank, MAI, WEF etc), which kicked off about 1998. Will we see our children's generation rising up in horror at the world they're inheriting in about a decade? Sooner?
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018658208/sound-archives-1968-the-year-the-young-took-charge

@aral @dredmorbius @aral I've been seeing FB ads everywhere in the UK. One was played in the cinema, a fake mea culpa that blamed their business model and its structural problems ("data misuse" and "fake news") on trolls and other third parties. It also claimed that a mythical "we" (the owners, engineers, and users of FB) are going to take back the internet, rhetoric totally borrowed from folks in the #fediverse and the rest of the internet freedom movements. Orwell must be rolling in his grave.

Just discovered the #Briar secure messaging app. Like #GNU #Ring and #Tox client it needs no server to pass messages between users (#P2P), and like #ServalProject aims to be able to do so even without an internet connection if the handsets are close enough together
https://briarproject.org/how-it-works.html

'The Architecture of Open Source Applications' is a set of free books (gratis *and* libre - #CC #BY 3.0) intended to help programmers learn about the various ways of structuring an applications, and which ones to use in which situations
http://aosabook.org/

"We need to pioneer technical, organizational, and financial forms that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing. We must be able to avoid the coerced and undisclosed surrender of personal information and digital identity to third-parties who may or may not be reliable stewards of such information." - David Bollier, 'From Open Access to Digital Commons', published in '#OursToHackAndOwn'