rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

If you dont vote third party this is pretty much what you sound like.

this is going to be my new go-to.

https://xkcd.com/1782

"Why companies struggle with recalcitrant IT" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/18/why-companies-struggle-with-recalcitrant-it

"Airlines are […] now advised to turn the plane off and on again every 51 days, to stop its computers displaying false data in mid-flight."

Love our glorious computerized future

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/18/21329453/kfc-russia-bioprinting-lab-chicken-nuggets-sustainable

its funny how i used to want websites to have scripts running on them. "ajax" or whatever it is we called it. because that way it didn't have to reload the whole page each time you clicked something, so it was faster, since the internet connection was slow. but now i kinda want sites to refresh the entire page when you click on something because the internet is fast now and the thing thats making the web slow IS the scripts

https://github.com/lhoursquentin/sed-bin

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

GNU Terry Pratchett

Reading into browser vendor debates about how to reduce fingerprinting, e.g. enumerating installed fonts: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4055#issuecomment-536063793

There seems to be widespread disagreement about whether this is even possible. Tab Atkins from Google says: "[G]oing from 400 bits to 40 bits of identifying information achieves precisely nothing, since you only need 33 bits to uniquely identify every person on Earth."

We really need a FOSS search engine with, and this is important: its own in-house, FOSS crawler

#Humor

Facebook policy changes fail to quell advertiser revolt as Coca-Cola pulls ads https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/26/facebook-policies-hate-speech-advertisers-unilever

Years ago now I worked a gig that was doing some crap with ISP-grade software that was not great for privacy/safety.

When I realized what was going on I started making noise. I began filing bug reports against privacy/safety/freedom breaches I identified, they got ignored. I finally went up my management chain going "We can't sell this, it's abusive!"

I dunno if it was my cage-rattling or someone else's that got to the CEO, but he eventually announced to the company something to the tune of "We're not alone in this emerging market. If we don't do this, others will anyway so really we're not doing anything that won't happen anyway"

And that stuck with me, because at the time I didn't have a coherent argument against it. Now? My stance on it is pretty solid-- we need far more ethics training than we get now, and we need a union or unions to back up refusal to do this crap on moral and ethical grounds.

So many people in tech feel helpless because they can just ultimately be replaced. It may HURT to replace some people, but the entire industry is kind of a meat grinder and everyone is just a cog in the machine. If you refuse to turn, the org cuts you and spends 3 days to 3 months training a fresh grad to replace you, depending on role.

People need the training to identify the misuses of what they build, the conviction to refuse to build abusive software, and the backing from their peers when they put their foot down. We don't have any of that right now.