Notices by Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 3
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Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Mar-2019 19:28:40 UTC 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
This might be a piece of news I missed, because I havn't been a Gmail user for a long time.
It looks like Google is now claiming that Thunderbird is an "insecure app" and turning off IMAP support - with predictably dire consequences for non-techy Gmail users who use Thunderbird as a client.
So it seems that Google is doing similar monopolistic lock-in stuff that Microsoft pioneered. Thunderbird of course doesn't display ads and so this is why Google want Gmail users using the web interface or some official Google email client which does show the ads. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Mar-2019 14:46:56 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
If Zuck really was going to end-to-end encrypt a significant fraction of Facebook data then his business model would become about as buoyant and The Titanic.
So whatever encryption he implements is likely to be backdoored or where there's a ghost participant (the GCHQ suggestion). The ghost participant could also double as an ad bot. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 21:24:16 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The famous quote from Homage to Catalonia about "when I see a worker in conflict with his natural enemy - the policeman - I do not have to ask myself which side I am on" reminds me of Lisa McKenzie's comments about how for most of its history the working class has been written about exclusively from a bourgeois standpoint. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 18:38:53 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
"The first huge difference (and the biggest disappointment for the entire FOSS community) is that LF's Community Bridge is a proprietary software system"
[Stops laughing after a while]
I guess the Linux Foundation shot itself in the foot again.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/mar/13/lf-community-bridge -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 12:13:54 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
- Everyone on one big virtual server creates a digital feudalism
- Generic interfaces create consistency and familiarity, but are boring
- Advertising as a business model creates moral hazard in the economics sense
- Moderation isn't something you can outsource to a separate department
- Centralized systems can't effectively moderate, or only do so in a feudalistic manner
- Apparent ease of use is often due to hidden labor or the cost/complexity pushed elsewhere as externalities
- Celebrities and brands can only really operate as such within centralized information architecture. Outside of that context they become paper tigers
- Personal information should not be a tradable commodity
- The more destructive elements of society come to monopolize centralized platforms unless actively repressed
- Showing the user more of what they're already seen leads to bad outcomes. Don't try to algorithmically second guess what the user wants
- Algorithmic timelines which users can't control degrade and interfere with their ability to communicate with each other, ultimately to the point where they lose confidence in the platform
- Screen clutter is an inevitable outcome of an advertising business model
- Allowing organizations to buy influence in a community makes the community less real and therefore less desirable to be part of -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 11:11:11 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Guifinet Barcelona. These are all the nodes currently marked as working or as access points.
The nodes format for guifinet is csv rather than json, but this is arguably more efficient in terms of bytes downloaded.
guifinet_barcelona.jpg -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 09:36:28 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Quick Mesh Project https://www.qmp.cat/Documentation -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Mar-2019 23:54:40 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
I sometimes imagine that somewhere there must be a Ministry for Messing Up the Internet. It would be like a Monty Python sketch.
Each day a new idea would arrive in the intray of an official who looks like a young John Cleese. They would form a large pile of papers.
[reads] "Make a protocol so complicated that nobody can understand it. No the Sematic Web has already been tried".
[reads] "Ban all the cat photos for spurious copyright reasons. No, we already have an upload filter in progress to do that".
[reads] "Fill Tim Berners-Lee's socks with elephants. No - much too silly."
"Ah yes, [reads] make a giant man in the middle that everything on the internet has to go through like a sausage machine and get squirted out on the other side, hopefully in the correct order. Bernard, get Cloudflare on the phone immediately." -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Mar-2019 20:25:43 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
confessional.jpg -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Mar-2019 13:37:50 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines-02 -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 11-Mar-2019 11:34:49 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Rewarded Products have users/victims "pay" for in-app stuff by watching ad videos.
"Users can elect to watch a video advertisement and upon completion be rewarded with virtual goods or in-game currency."
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/03/supplement-your-earnings-with-rewarded.html -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2019 13:45:40 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Perhaps the lack of data indicates to Google that a user must be a conspiracy theorist. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2019 13:37:27 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Suggesting David Icke conspiracy videos. I have literally no idea where this came from. I don't think I've ever expressed any kind of interest in David Icke on YouTube or elsewhere, but then YouTube probably doesn't have a lot of data about me because I'm not using other Google services and use Tor browser much of the time. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Mar-2019 12:57:08 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
From The Register
the_register_zuck.png -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 08-Mar-2019 19:32:31 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Reflashed libreCMC routers
librecmc.png -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 08-Mar-2019 00:18:09 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
It's easy to get nostalgic for the Quitter era fediverse of 2015-16, which was smaller and mosly consisting of some anti-capitalists and Free Software holdouts in the smoldering ruins of StatusNet. Some people from that time dropped off the map as it got bigger and noisier. But actually I think the fediverse is better now because its a lot more diverse, and has somewhat successfully absorbed multiple waves of casualties from Twitter and Facebook. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Mar-2019 23:13:10 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Zuck appears to be experiencing another privacy epiphany. In "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking" he describes how he plans to revamp chat for ubiquitous e2ee and ephemerality of data, focusing more on chat as the primary mode of interaction on Facebook.
In the part about encryption he also described what is usually called "lawful intercept" and so what this probably means is an implementation of the ghost listener scenario described by GCHQ in which an extra hidden participant is silently added to the chat, unknown to the users.
He also describes the location of data being important, but only in terms of decisions about where to build data centers.
Although it's a long post all it really describes is something similar to the state of XMPP today, but without any onion routing possibility and non-federated with Zuck still very much in control of the data. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Mar-2019 14:01:42 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Anyone have opinions on WebAuth? Tired or wired? https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 01-Mar-2019 23:09:37 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The Chinese surveillance state and its insecure mongodb deployments https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/massive-database-leak-gives-us-window-chinas-digital-surveillance-state -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Feb-2019 08:42:34 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Beagleboard will apparently release a new model called Beagleboard AI, but it will be $100 and with a spectre vulnerable CPU. Making new hardware with non-fixable CPU bugs is a non-starter.
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the 
