Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 6

@lightone FYI as per my suggestion, there is now a category on socialhub.network called "fediversity", for sites like fediverse.party that provide guides, stats, visualizations etc as a service to the fediverse community. @tao from fediverse.space is the founding admin there:
https://socialhub.network/c/fediversity

Today I learned that #Scuttlebutt now has realtime chat apps, a #CLI client called #Scat and a GUI one called #Gester:
https://github.com/stripedpajamas/gester

Microsoft refusing to sell #Huawei licenses for its #MateBook laptops could be great news for #GNU/ #Linux:
https://klgadgetguy.com/2019/05/27/microsoft-waves-goodbye-to-huawei-as-they-decline-orders-for-windows-os-for-matebooks/

If MS do the same to all Chinese laptop makers, chances are they will either collaborate on a GNU/Linux distro, or create one each. It seems logical that as soon as the Chinese government realizes it doesn't have to allow proprietary OS controlled by US corporations to be used in its territory, it will forbid them, as it already does with their internet services.

@carcinopithecus no ;) What I'm getting at is that the bloated beasts we still call "web browsers" stopped being that some time ago. They've become something more like a JS thin-client for mainframes operated by #DataFarming corporations. A browser than only parsed the web (HTML/CSS) would be much less bloated, require fewer updates (I'm guessing), and wouldn't need #NoScript et al.
@alcinnz @ohyran @ckeen @arunisaac

I wonder if #Searx could be used to create a meta-meta-search portal, which randomly picks 3-5 other Searx instances to send search queries to, and uses the usual methods it applies to results from the big search engines (pruning duplicates etc)?

It appears that #Diaspora have quietly dropped their buggy, awkward #XMPP chat feature. I just logged into my D* account for the first time in a while and I can't see any sign of it. Anyone know what happened there? If they have given up on integrated chat, that's a shame considering that @jcbrand made a pull request to replace their half-finished #JSXC integration with one based on #Conversejs *and* maintain it.
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7336#issuecomment-280913242

Long post about recent security breach at Matrix.org potentially affecting the version of #Riot available in the gOgle Prey Store:
https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-android-security-update-2b3f655ad739

"The F-Droid release of Riot is not affected — this only affects the Google Play Store app"

Hey Moxie, what was that again about Gogle being a more secure way to distribute the #Android apps for #Signal? It boggles the mind that anyone believes this.

Looks like #OpenStreetMap is now being blocked by the Great Firewall :/

Yet another good reason to resist #Crippleware wherever it rears its ugly head. #Microsoft is deleting all the #DRM-encumbered ebooks sold through its failing online store:
https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

Make no mistake, FB and the rest of the corporate tech giants will do their best to make any internet rules - national or international - work in their favour, and make life hard for smaller players. Just as they have with the #EUCopyrightDirective. But it's also an opportunity for tech activists and civil society groups to do the opposite, and get rules on things like #Dataportability in #OpenFormats, that empower users to transition from the#DataFarms to community-scale #EthicalTech platforms.

#RogerMcNamee makes some good points about the carefully crafted gaps in FB's regulation proposals:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/02/mark-zuckerberg-fix-the-internet

... but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The internet is a global medium, like the telephone or postal networks. It does make sense to have international treaties on user rights and internet regulation, so the operators of every website, big or small, can follow one clear set of rules that apply in every jurisdiction where the net can be accessed.

In that scenario, who do regulators try to blame for that DIY livestream? The ISPs that supply a standard consumer-grade net connection? Do they have to vet everything their customers do before they do it? We've had this debate before, many times, over copyright violation, child abuse representations, and so on. The free and open internet, as we know it, cannot exist if ISPs face these liabilities. With all due respect to #JacindaArdern, they are *not* the publisher, they *are* the postman.

Making people host their own #LiveStreams, by leasing server resources and setting up #FreeCode streaming software, just shifts the problem sideways. Then instead of FB, the #PrivacyCommissioner and the #ChiefCensor would be blaming whichever ISP leased use of their server to people who used it for objectionable streams.

It worries me that regulators in #NZ don't understand the difference between a publisher and an ISP. Publishers have editors to check content before publication and are liable for what they publish. ISPs moderate after-the-fact, if at all, and users liable as the publisher, not the ISP. Offering free #LiveStreaming services to the public wouldn't be practical if every stream had to be vetted in advance:
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/386257/facebook-tells-privacy-commissioner-it-hasn-t-changed-its-livestreaming-at-all

I vaguely remember there being some #SoftwareFreedom issue with #FontAwesome. Was it just the attribution requirement, which has now been canned? Everything else looks fine to me:
https://khan.github.io/Font-Awesome/license/

Kudos to creator #DaveGandy for coming to the party on this. Please consider giving him the attribution he asks for, even though you're not legally obliged to. It's really not much to ask.

#WardCunningham said:
> "I have consulted https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ in order to understand this request. I'm not there yet. Maybe you could elaborate in terms used in the overview, client and server, for example. I imagine this could be implemented as a wiki server-side plugin similar to what we have done with RSS. Since the plugin would be receiving content it would help me to understand how you would expect identity to be handled."

Totally above my paygrade. Help?

I've made a request, from an end user POV, for the SmallestFederatedWiki to be able to receive new wiki page creation requests via #ActivityPub:
https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki/issues/122#issuecomment-479028377

Can anyone with AP dev experience (and ideally familiar with #Nodejs) help explain how this might from a dev POV?
#FedWiki

@bob but I wouldn't say that WikiLeaks hasn't been effective. A lot of the other whistleblowers that came forward since they started (Manning, Snowden etc) may never had done so without that example. Various journalists in the adware news media (eg the Guardian but also others) got braver about actually doing journalism, instead of cheerleading for their preferred version of corporate globalization. Policy has been softened, at least to some degree, because of the backlash.
@MatejLach

@bob yes, but at present, most of those dark patterns are implemented with... Javascript! #MakeJavascriptOptional and chances are you'll see a lot less of them.
@jankoekepan @bob

It's long past time for more web designers to have a serious think about how to #MakeJavascriptOptional. #StaticSiteGenerators are a good start, and I'm seeing them used more and more. One benefit for the person running the site is that static sites use less bandwidth and server resources to serve the same information, and I image they're easier to maintain over time.