Congress continues to push for censorship bills to "protect the kids" online rather than passing comprehensive privacy laws that would protect all users from predatory data gathering and sales that target us for advertising and abuse.
@JamesGleick@cstross
Don’t worry! There’s probably an AI tool that’ll neatly revise it down to the precise target length. Even in iambic pentameter! 😬🤪😁🙄
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Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. 📖✍️ #LetReadersRead
I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
I've always believed that displaying the software version allowed malicious users to determine which vulnerabilities affect your software.
For example, NodeBB sends x-powered-by header, but only ever sets the value to NodeBB, this has been the case for many years.
The other line of thinking is that relying on security by obscurity is fallacious, but since it's only one facet of a broader security posture (the rest of it being keeping up with updates, writing as secure code as you can, reporting/bounty systems, audits, etc.), I honestly don't see a problem with transmitting as little information as I can.
The downside of hiding that information is that sites that gather statistics on fediverse software use wouldn't be able to discern software versions for NodeBB in their charts, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem.
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We’ll continue to toot here with news about the work of the Court of Justice of the EU.
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It was nearly two years ago that I wrote this article1 about the EU #ChatControl surveillance directive on behalf of the @cryptpad team.
Very little has changed since then. Experts in technology, law, and policy all agree that the proposal undermines basic European rights, that it will be abused by authoritarian member states, and that the proposed tech solutions cannot possibly do the job the supporting legislators have claimed.
Nevertheless, they have persisted, claiming the support of "expert testimony" that overwhelmingly consists of unsupported claims by lobbyists associated with law enforcement and defense contractors who stand to benefit financially from its implementation.
A vote is expected to take place on June 19th. These have been scheduled and delayed multiple times already, but this it feels like they might get away with it. There is a lot going on in the EU at the moment, and people are both distracted and tired from fighting this for so long.
I'll try to make resistance easier by collecting some suggested actions below, with links.
There are many challenges when designing federated applications. Here I share thoughts that I've been developing with the Commune group, as we envision a fediverse of agents, not a fediverse of servers.