Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org
Joined May 2019
Shamar
boosted
The Irish DCP is an absolute mess. As an Irish citizen, I am embarrassed about this to no end.
A few weeks ago, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties published a report on the the DPC's inability to process major GDPR cases. Many large cases must proceed through Ireland because of loads of HQs being in Dublin and Ireland. https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/2021-gdpr-report/
This week, the national annual budget was published here. The DPC received an additional €4.1m in funding pushing their total funds to €23.2m. This news was accompanied by this statement https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/data-protection-commission-statement-budget-2022 where all is happy and green.
I have been in Ireland now for 3 years and I remain vastly unaware of irish critical citizen movements in the 'technology' area. I wonder if you might know of any @ephemeral @annika @mairin @seachaint @torrejuseppe @aral or other Ireland-close fedi people? Would be keen to support actions in this space.
Shamar
boosted
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is what you get when you try to have a tenant regulate their landlord.
Google, Facebook, etc., own Ireland right now.
All they have to do is raise the spectre of pulling out and taking Irish jobs with them to have the government shaking in its boots.
You expect these folks to regulate? If so, I’d like to talk to you sometime about a bridge I’m selling in Brooklyn.
#InstitutionalCorruption #gdpr #enforcement #ireland #privacy
@brion@mastodon.technology
Compilers are artifacts.
Evilness is a human thing.
If you help something controlled from evil people to spread and kill alternatives, you are evil.
Now #JavaScript is controlled by people so evil and on so many levels that they deserve no forgiveness or redemption.
So if your compiler support them (through #JS) you are evil.
@miriamgreco@mastodon.uno
#Jami è un progetto #GNU che offre chat e videoconferenza peer-to-peer con cifratura end-to-end ed è sviluppato da una piccola azienda canadese che fornisce servizi ed un server di orchestrazione (opzionale) per le organizzazioni che necessitano di sincronizzare i client durante una videoconferenza.
Durante i lock-down francesi, ha avviato una sperimentazione con il governo francese presso un centinaio di scuole per la didattica a distanza.
#Matrix (ed il client multipiattaforma #Element) è un protocollo opensource federato che veicola lo scambio di messaggi, audio e video fra utenti con cifratura end-to-end.
Entrambi sono meno noti di #WhatsApp, #Signal o #Telegram semplicemente perché non hanno la forza commerciale di questi colossi e perché tendenzialmente i sistemi centralizzati (come #Google, #Facebook, #Twitter etc) che amplificano la visibilità dei loro pari, minimizzano invece la visibilità di competitor che oltre a sfidare il proprio market share, sfidano la narrativa del network effect attaccando il cuore del loro business model.
Perché non ci può essere pubblicità targettizzata senza accurate profilazioni psicologiche individuali costruite sulla base dei dati personali sottratti agli utenti.
E non si può sottrarre impunemente quei dati se il software che gli utenti usano è libero (o almeno open source) e se quei dati non passano dal tuo server.
@miriamgreco@mastodon.uno
Oibò, chi finanzia Jami?
https://jami.net/
Ed Element?
https://element.io/
Lo stato finanzia strade e ferrovie, può finanziare anche la scrittura di infrastrutture informatiche pubbliche.
È già in PC e cellulari da decenni, in effetti, solo non è uno Stato europeo che noi possiamo sperare di influenzare con un voto democratico.
Ed in effetti oltre a sorvegliarci uno per, estrae profitti dalle nostre economie attraverso i nostri dati.
Lo stato dovrebbe finanziare lo sviluppo di software libero (o almeno open source) nell'interesse pubblico.
Ma dovrebbe anche porre condizioni legali stringenti alla sua diffusione, per evitare quello che potremmo definire inquinamento cibernetico.
Una condizione ad esempio potrebbe essere un limite superiore alla complessità di un singolo programma / libreria. Ad esempio un numero massimo di branch logici tale da permettere lo studio del componente in meno di una settimana. Oppure una suite di test con branch coverage totale e documentazione human readable di ciascun test. Oppure ancora il divieto assoluto di trasmettere dati non tecnicamente necessari per soddisfare una esplicita richiesta dell'utente.
I browser web mainstream sono tutti da buttare, comunque.
Non sono evoluti, sono artificiosamente complicati.
Shamar
boosted
@quinta @informapirata @miriamgreco @andre123 Tecnicamente c'è una distro linux pensata per le scuole di lingua italiana della provincia di Bolzano (FUSS), e anche sodilinux mi pare abbia preso qualcosa da del lavoro che era stato finanziato con fondi pubblici (che poi però erano finiti)
Hi @ekaitz_zarraga, how are you?
Interesting project, thanks for sharing!
They lost my respect by signing this https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ together with so many #GAFAM bootlickers.
Shamar
boosted
"Attenzione a imputare la responsabilità di violenze a chi esprime opinioni gravi, infondate o altro, ma pur sempre opinioni, che sono libere e tutelate costituzionalmente se non configurano reati.
Intrapresa questa strada, con la stessa motivazione potrà essere zittita ogni voce"
Vitalba #Azzollini su Twitter
https://nitter.snopyta.org/vitalbaa/status/1447095769266335747
Shamar
boosted
Stop Firefox from sending keystrokes to Mozilla:
* Menu > Settings > Privacy & Security
* Scroll down to “Address Bar - Firefox Suggest”
* Disable “Contextual suggestions”
* Disable “Include occasional sponsored suggestions”
Or switch to LibreWolf: librewolf-community.gitlab.io
Shamar
boosted
Mozilla’s now director of public policy once asked me, with a straight face, why I was giving them a hard time and holding Mozilla to a higher standard: “we’re just another Silicon Valley tech company.”
But that’s not what you tell people publicly, is it, Mozilla?
Still, it’s time y’all got this.
Mozilla is a half-billion-dollar for-profit corporation – whose CEO makes >$3M/yr – that has a foundation do its PR.
https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/
Shamar
boosted
ROFL!
Subject: [oss-security] CVE-2021-42013: Path Traversal and Remote Code Execution in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 and 2.4.50 (incomplete fix of CVE-2021-41773)
It was found that the fix for CVE-2021-41773 in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.50 was insufficient. An attacker could use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the directories configured by Alias-like directives.
Shamar
boosted
@wolf480pl
I guess you either make it easy to do it right, or you make it hard to do it wrong.
Making it easy has a side-effect that you make it easier to do it wrong (http headers, e.g.)
Making it hard has a side-effect that you make it harder to do it at all...
Shamar
boosted
My uncle just finished 1.6 kg, 700 pages long dictionary of Northern Sami, a language spoken by around 20,000 speakers.
Sami are an indigenous people who have inhabited large parts of Northern Europe spanning from Russia to Norway for millenniums.
He has dedicated his life to advocate for their rights and preserve their languages and culture. This book is a major contribution in an effort to ensure that this ancient language will be passed on to future generations.
It's not matter of dismissing anyone.
#Facebook (like #Google and many others) is both an addictive drug for each of its users and a toxic poison for their whole society.
People addicted to these platforms need help. But you cannot help them by becoming addicted yourself.
Arguing that Free Software is invisible if it's not there, is arguing that Free Software should legitimize these business models.
In fact, you are right: Open Source might well be more visible exactly because it serves those companies.
But while it might be more visible, it's useless in term of Freedom.
The only way a person or organization can fight the power and the oppression from these corporations is by refusing them all together.
You might, theoretically, be there to try getting people out. But you must be very careful to not attract people there instead. Not to mention the issue of not being manipulated yourself!
It's not easy at all and to be honest I don't know anyone who managed to do so, so far.
People can do whatever they want, but following them on these platform is not going to help anyone, but to further empower the platforms and enrich those who own them.
@mycroft@mastodon.social
Shamar
boosted
🇳🇱
"Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. Only exceptionally gifted individuals or especially noble communities rise essentially above this level; in these there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints. Viewed from this angle, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are near to one another." - Einstein
Shamar
boosted
Shamar
boosted
As many of you know I have a love for all the logical razors that exist (did a post a while back). Einstein's razor is one of my favorites. It is usually paraphrased as:
"everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler"
The original quote is a bit more complex as:
"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience"
Shamar
boosted
Holy crap. Malware hidden in a strand of DNA hijacks the computer that analyzes that particular gene sequence.
The problem is that entering #Facebook and similar surveillance platform creates several bad side effects for everybody:
1) you legitimize it, while not being there AND being some sort of "tech-savy" makes people question their own dependence on it
2) with your presence, you increase the lock-in of everybody else through network effect
3) you let them monitor you AND the people who interact with you.
Also, if you want to be on Facebook to help people locked there, you should always be careful to never upload there contents that might attract people from the outside and instead only add links TO the outside, so that people can experience the rest of the Web.
But I would not say that "not being on Facebook" means being invisible: on the contrary it can makes you stand outside.
@mycroft@mastodon.social
Joined May 2019
