timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Privacy-wise, Matrix is worse than Slack for public rooms.

Don't hit respond yet, read further.

With this whole freenode mess, some of the online communities I'm part of moved to Matrix. Despite how much I personally love IRC (that's top-notch privacy-wise for public rooms), I have to admit the overall Matrix UX is order of magnitude better and more in line withthe 2021 standards. It lowers the barrier of entry, and I'm all in for that!

However, there's a *massive* catch: the read status. Every time you can see a message on a public room, Matrix will show your avatar next to the said message to materialize you "read" (at least saw) it,

There's currently no way to disable this feature, be it on synapse or dendrite. The read status gets broadcasted to *all the room participants*, including bots.

Some bots are autojoining all the big room as soon as your open them. It's not clear who operate them, they don't ask nobody's consent before joining. You can assume this presence data is actively getting stored and mined by them, it's trivial to do. I implemented such a POC in a couple of hours yesterday night (I obviously turned it off and deleted the data after showing it to some friends).

Back to my initial punch line: this situation is worse than it it is with Slack. At least, with Slack, my read status stays between me, Slack corp and the people they decide to share the data with. With Matrix, it's open bar, private data for everyone.

The Vector team seem not to care too much [1] and are not considering this situation as urgent.

We absolutely need a way to disable these read status on a per room (or space?) level. As free software devs, we should be able to protect our peers and users privacy. My presence status, be it on a public chat is definitely *not* a public data that should carelessly be shared.

[1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2527

W czwartek jest Global Accessibility Awareness Day #GAAD. W piątek będzie duża konferencja, którą chyba nawet poprowadzę. Ale co z czwartkiem? Wymyśliłem, że mogę tu na Mastodonie opisać, jak badać dostępność cyfrową stron internetowych. Jednak za stary jestem, by robić dla nikogo, więc chcę mieć pod tutkiem przynajmniej 10 polubień lub podbić. Aco!

We will present Sxmo, the Simple X Mobile environment for Linux smartphones at the AlpineConf tomorrow at 14:30 UTC (16:30 CEST / 10:30 EDT). You can join live or watch it later at your leisure. See https://lists.alpinelinux.org/~alpine/devel/%3C9637f9fa-7efc-6fed-6635-a66c1cefca8%40dereferenced.org%3E for details.

Zbliża się Global Accessibility Awareness Day #GAAD. Będę tu wrzucał łącza do ciekawszych wydarzeń. Dzisiaj #Blackboard Academy Catalog
https://bbacademy.blackboard.com/webapps/bbgs-cloud-portal-BB5a1c513488149/app/portal/homepage?locale=en&dir=ltr

"C be like"

by 111x6sevil-natas

Zrobilem sernik z tzw. okary sojowej czyli pulpy powstalej po produkcji mleka sojowego.
I jest to zajebiscie dobre, dalbym kazdemu fediwersumowiczowi po kawalku :D

"Installation: we recommend that you use Docker."

what I'm supposed to see: "hey, it's a simple one-liner! Such clean install, much wow."

what I actually see: "we couldn't figure out how to install this thing on anything but our own machine, but hey, here is a well-compressed image of our entire disk, use this instead so that we can stop trying"

@seachaint YES! THANK YOU!

> After an audit of the algorithm, the resume screening company found that the algorithm found two factors to be most indicative of job performance: their name was Jared, and whether they played high school lacrosse. Girouard’s client did not use the tool.

https://qz.com/1427621/companies-are-on-the-hook-if-their-hiring-algorithms-are-biased/

Wow, was I off-mark there!

And it's just.. Yeah, if you're being bullied you need to stand up for yourself. But if you're getting pushback or become Main Character of Twitter for a day or two, especially if you have a following already, the best way really _is_ to "just ignore it".

That can mean giving your account to a friend to deal with torrents of abuse for you, or Logging Off for a while, but the point is that you shouldn't land in "it should be illegal to @ me".

University of Minnesota banned from Linux kernel development and a purge begins:

"Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University and rip out your previous contributions"

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2FfM%2FTsbmcZzwnX@kroah.com/

I'm currently working on a #Pixelfed client called Resin, designed to prevent social media addiction. To hear more about it, check out:

https://github.com/natjms/resin

And for more about its design philosophy:

https://njms.ca/posts/ethical-anti-design.html

I keep thinking of Robert Ashley's motto for my old music department, "If you're not weird, get out" and how to make a more nurturing, undergraduate-focused version of that.

I don't want normies to get out. I want them to de-normify at least temporarily: Be weird. Have fun. Do something absurd with your whole heart. Make something beautiful out of rubbish. Make something ugly our of pure tones. Find the place where your system starts to fail and sit there for a bit.

Anyone have a good (open) corpus or generator of human names that covers a good amount of the different types of names people can have?

Preferably tagged with ethnicity or nationality. The names don't have to be real, just representative.

@eumiro@fosstodon.org maybe?

honestly my biggest achievement is getting my chaos lesbian selfie on wikipedia