Notices by ar.al🌻 (aral@mastodon.ar.al), page 8

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

https://ar.al/2018/07/30/out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire/

My response to Mariana Mazzucato’s article in MIT Technology Review titled “Let’s make private data into a public good”

Let’s not.

You cannot base a public good on a normalised systemic violation of human rights.

How about we take the billions that Google and other surveillance capitalists have been fined in the EU and invest them in organisations making ethical (free and open, decentralised, and interoperable) alternatives to surveillance capitalism.

#ethicaltechnology #ethicaldesign

End result :) #breakfast

Got my parents to start using Wire & Signal today. Didn't set anything up for them, just asked them to install from the App Store. They were up & running in minutes. They're in their 70s. Your argument that the alternatives are difficult to use is null and void.

#securemessaging

News flash: if your business plan is to make a billion dollars while decentralising the world, you’re interested in making a billion dollars, not decentralising the world.

A decentralised world, by its very nature, has no place for billionaires.

#blockchain #cryptocurrencies #rightlibertarians #venturecapital #icos

Dear fellow devs,

When you invest in a surveillance capitalist like Twitter & help them build their platform by making apps for them, using their APIs, etc., know that they’ll have your back. And by that I mean they’ll throw you under the bus the first chance they get.

We’ve all made the mistake at one time (heck, I made both a Twitter & Facebook app using their APIs and thought I was helping build the “open web” ‘cos I trusted Tim O’Reilly).

Just avoid it next time.

http://apps-of-a-feather.com

Phones LineageOS 15.1 is officially supported on

LineageOS is the successor to Cyanogenmod – a Google-free, freedom technology alternative to stock Android that isn’t infected with Google Play Services (Google’s surveillance services) … Version 14.1 is stable and runs flawlessly on older hardware but if you’re looking for a new phone, this list I compiled may help.

Web+: dat://ar.al/2018/07/03/phones-lineageos-15.1-is-officially-supported-on/

Web: https://ar.al/2018/07/03/phones-lineageos-15.1-is-officially-supported-on/

Reclaiming RSS

“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.”

https://ar.al/2018/06/29/reclaiming-rss/

#ethicaltechnology

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag: We're not sleepwalking into a dystopian future, we're there today

“In order to make any meaningful progress, we must at least agree that the Googles and the Facebooks of the world are not forces for good.”

https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/aral-balkan-and-laura-kalbag-were-not-sleepwalking-dystopian-future-were-there-today/

I’m very happy with how this interview we did with Nesta ended up. Laura and I will be speaking at Nesta’s FutureFest conference in London next week. (https://www.futurefest.org/)

I learned a new word today: Kyriarchy

(Thanks to @garbados)

Peer Web: dat://ar.al/2018/06/27/kyriarchy/

Centralised Web: https://ar.al/2018/06/27/kyriarchy/

https://mastodon.ar.al/media/ZH77v8tpC7-2-sXpLSo

Hey folks, Todd Weaver, who leads @Purism (they make the privacy-respecting Librem laptops and are now working on a phone) is on the fediverse… show him some love, won’t ’cha?

@todd

:)

Just asked Dell Ireland on Twitter to please explain to me why the exact same XPS 13 computer costs €630 more when it ships with Ubuntu – a free and open source operating system – than when it does with Windows 10.

https://twitter.com/aral/status/1005484980087197696

(I can only imagine it’s a typo and will be fixed. Otherwise, there are lots and lots of questions to be asked.)

#projectsputnik

https://mastodon.ar.al/media/i3w2ogAaDvgecPyn76M

Looks like it’s official now.

Another venture capital success story, another step towards greater consolidation/centralisation. Nothing surprising as this is how venture capital and exits work. It’s the system that proudly brought you surveillance capitalism.

#github https://mastodon.ar.al/media/qDAi8O4FfpNRowO04jE

The beauty of Mastodon is not only that it is free and open but that it’s federated. You can fork it without losing access to the network or your social graph. There’s no reason a hundred forks couldn’t exist.

Also, when did forking become an insult? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the biggest compliment you can pay a project. And if you fork and stay federated, you’re actually helping to strengthen the fediverse!

What you can’t do is force people to build what you want out of entitlement.

Speaking at Nesta FutureFest in July

I’ll be talking about how we can move beyond surveillance capitalism in Europe to fund and create alternative ethical technological infrastructure that’s not mired in Silicon Valley’s toxic business model.

https://www.futurefest.org https://mastodon.ar.al/media/Cg_JlQs1d8aT3G2WocI https://mastodon.ar.al/media/a8JRnZF27QPobVuBjUg

Our work with the City of Ghent on our Indienet project (https://indienet.info) gets a shout out in this month’s New Scientist, in Jacob Aron’s article titled “Stop being the product.”

“On the face of it, [it] sounds a lot like the old web, where people created simple pages hosted on computers they controlled. The crucial difference is that it used to be difficult to put things online without technical know-how – which is partly why easy-to-use services like Facebook are popular.”

“‘Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have the same business model,’ says Balkan. ‘If Cambridge Analytica can sway elections and referenda with a relatively small subset of Facebook’s data, imagine what Facebook can and does do with the full set.’”

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-share-price-privacy
https://mastodon.ar.al/media/Xhu0iw-w7iv-npI2pA4
https://mastodon.ar.al/media/j--N5nlPXAyidSlRcg8

The Difference Between Free/Libre and Open Source

“Free/Libre = Open Source + Ethics
<=>
Open Source = Free/Libre - Ethics”

—Christophe Lafon-Roudier, @Framasoft

#FOSDEM “cornerstone sponsor” is people farmer and titan of #SurveillanceCapitalism, Google.

Their business model is to track you on their own services and devices, across the web, and beyond and then use this intimate insight into you, your family, and your loved ones to manipulate your behaviour for profit.

Can someone remind me what principles #FOSDEM stands for again? Maybe Greenpeace is missing a trick by not having Exxon Mobil as a sponsor.

https://mastodon.ar.al/media/JKuneFOg0u33t5M4oBw

I want to make one thing very clear regarding #fosdem2018 #fosdem

A conference on freedom-and-human-rights-respecting technology should not have a titan of #SurveillanceCapitalism like Google as sponsor. The good people in our community shouldn’t have to choose between having a platform to meet up at and having their legitimacy usurped by association to whitewash such companies. I’m attending under protest to meet and chat to some lovely members of the community.

Google doesn’t belong there.