Notices by Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 4
-
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Feb-2019 15:42:25 UTC 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Moving the logs and the locus of communications from megacorps to individuals and communities then makes the terrain easier to navigate for future changes of a more non-technical nature. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 25-Feb-2019 18:34:47 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
According to the inferred interests I have a behavioral propensity towards golfing, enjoy hunting and shooting, go on cruise vacations and like to play Nintendo Wii.
IRL I do none of the above, but this kind of profile will be sold to advertisers as the version of me to target. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Feb-2019 15:41:01 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
The Spectre bandwagon may have passed, but the problem remains. Even if all future chips are fixed there are going to be vulnerable systems out there for years to come.
When buying new hardware it's a good idea to check whether the CPU is spectre vulnerable. There is a list of ARM CPU types which are vulnerable on the wikipedia page for Spectre. Things which appear faster and have more cores may actually be worse from a security point of view.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/google-software-is-never-going-to-be-able-to-fix-spectre-type-bugs -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Feb-2019 10:29:05 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
I'm sympathetic, but this seems like a sort of Wikileaks for Tech kind of idea.
https://www.speakout.tech
Unethical uses of technology and tech monopolies are old problems, but what's new is the pervasiveness of data gathering. It was seeing some of the unethical stuff being done behind the scenes by software companies and contractors which was one of the main factors which got me into Free Software in the first place in the early 2000s. When the source code is public there's a much bigger incentive against inserting antifeatures which then enable arm-twisting business models and data-for-sale.
Whistleblowing projects like Maven obviously does have some effect, but a better approach would be a campaign promoting the advantages of software cooperatives rather than feudal style organizations. The problem of Maven was really that only a few people get to decide in secret what Google does or doesn't work on.
If a whistleblowing approach for tech companies were successful it would mostly just reveal what we already know: that capitalism depends to a large extent on jettissoning ethics and cynically exploiting people so that a few can profit massively from the value extracted. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 22-Feb-2019 23:16:08 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Creepy. YouTube. Recommendations.
If I had autoplay left on then it would be playing unironic nazi videos.
So 2019 is maybe the year that I need to sort out my YouTube habit. Maybe just turn it into channel rss feeds so that I don't need to be involved with their web interface at all. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 21-Feb-2019 19:30:45 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
"Since the GDPR came into effect on May 25, 2018, many companies have simulated compliance with the law while manipulating users into granting them consent by means of deceptive interface design and behavioral nudging."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/french-data-protection-authority-takes-google -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 21-Feb-2019 09:14:42 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Replacing private monopolies with state monopolies (or vice versa) isn't really progress. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Feb-2019 15:48:24 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
So if WhatsApp users are looking to exit from the vampire castle but don't realize that servers exist, what's the best way to explain that they need to pick an XMPP server? The situation is similar for people leaving Twitter for the fediverse.
The usual answer is "it's like email", but this isn't very convincing because to anyone under 30 email has always been something made by Google.
The way I might explain it is that perhaps one day we will have a fully peer-to-peer internet, but we're not yet there and in the current version of the internet there are servers. The servers aren't magical and are run by real people like you. If you want to get out from the corporate hellscape then this means you won't want to be using a Google server or a Facebook ejabberd server as with WhatsApp. You need to find some other server to handle your messages. Hopefully one which isn't going to sell your data or push ads.
In the current internet you're encouraged not to think about the real underlying social relations. You're encouraged not to think about where your data is or who has control of it. You're supposed to believe that it's serverless or cloudy. In the decentralized internet you do need to begin thinking about these things and make decisions about who to trust. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 17-Feb-2019 13:36:32 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
It's curious how sometimes I subscribed to people on the YouTubes many years ago and then they suddenly resume posting again and they've completely reinvented themselves in an entirely different ideological frame.
Sometimes the change was for the worse and sometimes it was just...wuh?
It goes to show that while some people become set in their ways over time others go through a series of reinventions. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 15-Feb-2019 23:17:48 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
For p2p to become more mainstream the offline store and forward problem needs to be solved (equivalent to message archive in XMPP). This means that p2p systems need automatic zero knowledge distributed storage if a message can't be immediately transmitted.
Maybe maidsafe already solves this problem, but I don't know enough about it. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 15-Feb-2019 17:56:18 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
"Today around 1.5k young people walked out of school in Bristol alone. We’ve heard that the BBC were conducting interviews but refused to talk to anyone that might discuss rebellion."
This is so easily predictable. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 14-Feb-2019 15:10:23 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Douglas Rushkoff advocating breaking up Facebook. But Facebook is really in the "too big to fail" category now. Bigger than any nation, and more powerful in some ways although it doesn't have an army.
So antitrust against Facebook would be great, but I'm not expecting it to happen. If Facebook goes down it does so because there are enough deserters, which then leads to the question of what would result in enough loss of confidence. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Feb-2019 00:22:47 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Also if your career path leads you into a situation where you're personally helping to increase the fortune of the world's richest man then I think it's time to pause and reflect. Is this where the people who started open source wanted it to go? Even though it was always a business strategy that's far from clear. Did the people who started open source want the web to be centralized around AWS data centers? I don't think they did. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Feb-2019 00:06:34 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
I think this is one of the not so good fosdem talks.
https://ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2019/K.1.105/love_everyday.webm
It's a good illustration of how entangled open source became with some of the more regressive elements of capitalism. There's no thought or care for what Google or Amazon might be doing or where they might be taking the web. You just need to make sure you're on the right career path and and focus on community without considering the context in which the software exists.
It may be true that open source won, but the other question is what did it win, and for whom? With free software it's not so clear that there was any big victory and basic stuff like being able to use a phone without proprietary software is still hard. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Feb-2019 10:46:59 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
If the internet routers which ISPs supply came with a built in XMPP server enabled by default that would go a long way towards decentralizing communications. Modern routers are easily capable of running an XMPP server. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Sunday, 10-Feb-2019 09:58:52 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
MooGNU https://peertube.social/videos/watch/13aff225-00d2-4eb1-a6e9-6c4eedcd77b8 -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Feb-2019 14:31:53 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Eben Moglen - FreedomBox vs. Facebook (2010)
https://peertube.social/videos/watch/ae602b11-181f-4273-8b62-8faae9a96bac
500 million is small compared to what it is now. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 09-Feb-2019 10:31:10 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
It looks like some people are starting to insert html into their names. This isn't a good idea an I think it should be disallowed because it will lead to security problems. -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 08-Feb-2019 20:59:57 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Digital Empowerment in Rural India - powered by FreedomBox https://peertube.social/videos/watch/3cd45772-e177-4221-a66a-f8a796e0826c -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 08-Feb-2019 20:50:49 UTC
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
Internet - we need to go back! https://peertube.social/videos/watch/98c9e6ab-564f-4040-afbf-5ee9a08025c2
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the