Notices by Dave Lane 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

I occurs to me that using proprietary software is a bit like paying someone to include you in their protection racket. (and if you're not paying in $, you're paying in loss of privacy and/or data sovereignty... or all 3).

Yes, we need all of these gone. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/bust-em-all-lets-de-monopolize-tech-telecoms-and-entertainment They have way too much power, and no one's providing oversight. They're a law unto themselves and that bad for just about *all of us*.

@danie10 Nice one. I'm on a similar journey. Ditched Disqus comments on my blog and have been implementing Matomo for all my analytics (running my own instance via Docker). It's a very nice option!

Yes, this modus operandi, used by Microsoft and other faux-#FOSS "friends" does ring very true, especially if we consider the Linux Foundation: http://techrights.org/2020/09/27/proprietary-monopoly-github/ This is how the proprietary incumbents can use their exploitative profits to destroy those with far better ethics (and software).

Wow, this is full on: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2017/europes-dire-dependency-on-microsoft/ Gov'ts around Europe (and, I would hope, elsewhere in the world) are realising how dangerous and expensive their dependence on Microsoft is. It's a damning epidemic, and they need to take evasive action.

Wow - I'd LOVE to find a full English translation of this article: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/bildungswesen-entlarvung-der-haeufigsten-microsoft-mythen/ (my German's ok, but not good enough to do it justice)

Hah. This rather relevant post just arrived in my inbox from the Free Software Foundation: https://my.fsf.org/give-students-userfreedom

In NZ, if we're teaching kids in high school how to do digital art, these are the tools we should be using: https://opensource.com/education/13/5/teaching-blender-students We shouldn't be using the "first hit's free" proprietary tools (from foreign multinationals like Adobe) that will force them into a continuous cycle of paying to access their own creativity once they leave school.

Clearly MicrosoftNZ is trying to convince people that it's "trustworthy" for high privacy applications like those related to health. PR like this: https://www.privacy.org.nz/news-and-publications/statements-media-releases/moving-data-to-external-servers/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2019/06/26/low-consumer-trust-in-new-zealand-should-we-be-okay-with-it/ https://news.microsoft.com/en-nz/2018/10/04/microsoft-partnership-opens-doors-for-aranz-medical/ Seems absurd *anyone* would think one of the Frightful Five is "trustworthy". They're all about creating impressions rather than realities. A multinaltional corporation can't be "trustworthy".

At a recent meeting where Min of Ed staffers were present, between sessions I heard them talk about wanting to do a "what is blockchain" course... *sigh*. I told them that blockchain was the least of their worries. It's definitely mostly hype. Same with AI. The Min of Ed would do better by giving staff enough tools to understand how their tech policies are needlessly making a couple generations of NZ learners hostages of monopolistic foreign proprietary software corporate...

For those in the fediverse following this up - here's a link to the app: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/it.niedermann.owncloud.notes/

Has anyone I know tried this non-Google ReCAPTCHA alternative, ReMAPCHA? https://wiki.hsr.ch/StefanKeller/wiki.cgi?ReMAPTCHA - it appears to ask people to do things that will improve the quality of OpenStreetMaps data... I like the sound of that! Perhaps NZ Gov't could use this instead of Google's service (which is used to train Google's AI, but is quite US-centric).

@syndikalista We use Mautic for that extensively. It's far more powerful than Mailchimp. Here's how we run our own: https://tech.oeru.org/installing-mautic-php7-fpm-docker-nginx-and-mariadb-ubuntu-1604 but you can also use Mautic's hosted service.