Notices by Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net), page 7
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Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Oct-2018 16:17:10 UTC 
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Never trust figures of authority https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/03/judge-dredd-carlos-ezquerra -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 06-Oct-2018 12:14:21 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Why I'm excited about decentralized social networks https://tinysubversions.com/notes/decentralized-social-networks -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 01-Oct-2018 18:11:08 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
pontpanic2.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 01-Oct-2018 17:42:15 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
lovetriangle.jpg -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 29-Sep-2018 06:50:07 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
The past was what it was, and out of it we got the internet we have. That is, mostly a compromised corporate surveillance machine. The main question is always what to do with the future. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Sep-2018 19:19:38 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
My fediverse posts don't require a data center.
My instant messaging doesn't require a data center.
My blog doesn't require a data center.
My email doesn't require a data center.
Giant monolithic data centers are not an inevitable or necessary aspect of internet infrastructure. They're the product of a particular sort of business model based around advertising. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Sep-2018 18:56:37 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
I'm not sure whether this is a story or not. We have known for some years that there's a "collect it all" policy implemented by the spy agencies.
https://privacyintyqcroe.onion/press-release/2283/press-release-uk-intelligence-agency-admits-unlawfully-spying-privacy
I feel like I've been through the mill with this kind of stuff. The campaign against the snooper's charter in the UK, which included the legalization of "bulk personal datasets", was a really dismal failure. I think there is little chance that the government will reduce its indiscriminate spying on people just by asking them nicely via pressure groups.
Something which became clear to me after Snowden was just that all this spying is just how the British establishment stays rich, via leveraging insider knowledge obtained by illegal or quasi-legal methods. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 24-Sep-2018 22:37:07 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@freakazoid @aussierockman
Snowden's motivations don't really matter. He himself said early on that he could be the worst person imaginable, but that's beside the point which was the content of the disclosures and the huge gap in public understanding of how governments use bulk surveillance against their own populations.
It's easy to do lazy character assassinations on Wikileaks people. Assange himself seems like a dubious sort of character. But Wikileaks at its height around about 2010 did contribute something to public understanding which didn't exist previously. They also probably saved Snowden's life.
If there are lessons from Wikileaks it's that:
* The wiki idea didn't work. It's hard to wikify investigative journalism, which it turns out is an actual job and not easy to do on a voluntary basis.
* Transparency of institutions is good but on its own is not enough
* Revealing the dubious characteristics of governments does not necessarily change their behavior. There is not necessarily any democratic leverage from data availability.
* Creating a celebrity figurehead for your organization is a losing strategy which creates more problems than it solves. It would have been better if the figurehead of Wikileaks had been an anonymous-style computer animation of some harmless looking news reader. You can't imprison or character assassinate an animation. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Sep-2018 12:58:34 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"Open Source" served a particular purpose for a particular time. It helped to increase the adoption of Free Software by businesses, and thereby also more generally among the customers/users of those businesses.
But today that project is pretty much over, and we won. Nobody except for knuckle-dragging morons seriously doubt that source code should be publicly available. So really it's time to get back to talking about freedom rather than openness. How free are the users of this software according to the usual criteria? A lot of companies don't score well.
The problems of "open source" today are really ones of business culture and economics generally (surveillance crapitalism). The various isms (sexism, racism, etc) are not things which Free Software or Open Source ever set out to fix. The availability of Free Software is a tool, not a catch-all solution to social problems. The problem before Free Software was that only certain people had access to the tools, which were expensive. Now everyone who is willing to learn also does. It's a necessary but not sufficient step towards solving the bigger problems. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Friday, 07-Sep-2018 11:47:25 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Mozilla's creepy data collection https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/09/06/data-just-living
But don't be concerned, it's a 4-tier approach reviewed by someone or other.
The arbitrary requests for new types of user data are especially concerning. It's not hard to imagine what kinds of situations may arise from that.
Maybe I am just a far out anarcho-whatever, but surely it's not a completely radical idea to just use a browser and have a reasonable expectation that your activity isn't being collected and sent back to a central collection point to be analysed by "scientists" by default.
Also another important point. This type of data collection is neither necessary nor required for product improvement or bug fixing. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 06-Sep-2018 09:01:42 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@markosaric
Go to about:config
Search for telemetry
Turn off anything set to true. The priority here is to clear the fields which contain the telemetry domains. Once those are gone it doesn't know where to send the data. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 06-Sep-2018 08:39:47 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
@Drops They sell access to a database of telemetry data gathered from any Firefox user who doesn't actively turn off telemetry in about:config. Turning it off in preferences isn't enough. Their customers are Google and other search engines.
The business model is active and very detailed surveillance of the behavior of users as they operate the browser. Modern Firefox is a telemetry machine with some web browsing features. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 06-Sep-2018 08:09:13 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
To understand why Mozilla wants to do DNS over Cloudflare you need to understand the business model of Mozilla Coropration. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 01-Sep-2018 17:27:00 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Free Software Day event in Manchester, UK http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2018/UK/Manchester -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 27-Aug-2018 12:03:38 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Fixed the install for gogs on #freedombone. This was a strange one. I try to set the database up to make it maximally easy - i.e. so that you're not initially presented with a big list of technical options - but it looks like gogs is just zapping any existing database on first boot. My workaround is to populate the database after the daemon first starts. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Aug-2018 12:06:40 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Incidentally the video and audio quality here is unusually good. I'm much more accustomed to low resolution with dodgy audio at Free Software events. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Saturday, 11-Aug-2018 16:11:36 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
#introductions I am Bob Mottram and I've been on the independent web since about 2010, initially on Friendica. On other people's servers before that. My main preoccupation is developing server systems to make self-hosting easier but I'm also interested in mesh and antifragile self-organizing networks.
By most people's standards I am an old skool hacker, mostly with low level control and vision systems. Also ex-roboticist and former industrial worker. -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Aug-2018 10:44:26 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
"In Dmitrov, forty miles north of Moscow, Kropotkin and his wife subsited on the produce of their garden and the aid offered by Kropotkinβs many admirers. He was helped in his old age by anarchist friends from Russia and abroad and by the local peasants, who revered their new neighbor. Isolated from Russian politics and contacts with the West, Kropotkin devoted his time to writing and to activity in his new community. Life in Dmitrov offered him a chance to take part in the local communal organizations. He became a member of the Dmitrov Union of Cooperatives, the townβs self-organized government, and defended it against the encroachments of Soviet authorities until the destruction of the union and arrest of all its leaders in November 1920"
-- Jane Burbank -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 21:21:08 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
The Internet Was A Mistake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf2pqa-tbm4 -
Bob Mottram π§ β β (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 06-Aug-2018 06:26:59 UTC
Bob Mottram π§ β β
Wow. That Mozilla Cloudflare DNS thing makes me feel nauseous. The PR is that this will be making DNS more secure, but really they're enabling Cloudflare to surveil anyone using ff. In their blog they don't even consider that Cloudflare could be part of the threat model.
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