Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ @dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud

RT @hdevalence@birdsite.link
I keep getting promoted tweets from some Vision Fund advisor who really wants me to know that MBS definitely DIDN’T kidnap and dismember a journalist and that people talking about how that happened are “cyber-bullying” the Saudi monarchy

https://twitter.com/hdevalence/status/1221949677857230853

Words fail to describe how utterly disdainful of one's customers it is to use support people who literally do not speak the customer's language well enough to form a sentence and thus are incapable of departing from their script. To say nothing of how disdainful it is of human beings it is to use them for something that could be handled by a menu.

I'm convinced the point of using humans is to prevent people from just mashing buttons to bypass the menu. IOW they're CAPTCHAs.

Did you know, the EFF have a Twitter account but not an official Mastodon account? 🤔

I can't believe I actually put effort into this

RT @EFF@twitter.com

BREAKING: We’ve confirmed that the Ring doorbell app on Android covertly shares personally identifiable information on its users with third-party companies, including Facebook.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1221964298500501504

“Why patents are useless” (for the small-scale/non-corporate inventor) : https://youtu.be/OsIihrcqJYA

Short video essay from Jörg Sprave, inventor of various repeating bow-magazine systems including the Instant Legolas, and producer of The Slingshot Channel.

#fz_webvideos #intellectualproperty

@kick @StaticallyTypedRice @freemo @mewmew @xj9 Reminder that Switzerland dominates world pharmaceuticals because they didn't implement a patent system for medicine while everyone around them did.

Yesterday I wasn't sure about posting anything that would lionize a known rapist, even with the best of intentions. A friend sent me this powerful statement by Aly Wane, posted on FB.

I especially agree with the last line

Today in team meeting: urgent decision needed to meet strict GDPR cookie policy. Unanimous decision: let’s get rid of all cookies except some pure functional for language and navigation. Goodbye addThis, even Google Analytics and other third party bs. That went surprisingly well!
And related: a really, simple mainstream internet said to me: Google search sucks, referring clearly to the poor quality of the search results.
GAFAM is killing itself slowly... Super!

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@dredmorbius
Tired: Garbage in, Garbage out.

Wired: Human centipede garbage ouroboros.

@kragen @enkiv2 @dredmorbius @freakazoid Luckily, the Wikipedia article looks like it mentions an occurrence (I wasn’t aware of this one, actually). Bellingcat (which is a low-volume but very interesting investigative publication) apparently used it pretty heavily.

https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1137379896899067904

(A quote from the article that Wikipedia cites: “Now that Graph Search has gone down, it’s become evident that it’s used by some incredibly important section[s] of society, from human rights investigators and citizens wanting to hold their countries to account, to police investigating people trafficking and sexual slavery, to emergency responders,” Waters told Motherboard in an online chat.)

@kick @enkiv2 @dredmorbius @freakazoid I suspect that probably every competent spy agency is delighted with their chance to blackmail current and future politicians with the data they scraped, or to figure out how to get agents close to them, or who their family members are. Journalists don't seem to be doing much with this data, although I could be wrong about that? I suppose nobody can publicly admit to having it at this point.

@kick @enkiv2 @dredmorbius Actually I'm being too generous. The folks there were plenty comfortable with racist, homophobic, and transphobic language from the very beginning. If Moot had deliberately set out to build a Nazi indoctrination camp, I have no idea what he would have done differently.

@kick @enkiv2 @dredmorbius "sometimes people get punished for things we don't think they should be punished for" is not an argument in favor of not having any limits at all, so I'm not super interested in debating it.

@enkiv2 @kick @dredmorbius This is the argument 4channers make against outlawing revenge porn. "Women just need to learn to stop allowing boyfriends to photograph them naked, or accept that naked pictures of them are going to be on the Internet."

No. We live in a society. You publish shit that hurts someone else, you get hurt yourself.

@enkiv2 @kick @dredmorbius There's also the fact that people deliberately exploit immutable systems to publish stuff that's damaging. For example, there's kiddie porn in the Bitcoin blockchain.

#Qt will require an online account to download, apparently. Of course their 'justification' that this will make it easier for open-source users to report bugs & contribute since they'll already have an account doesn't make sense, since I imagine #KDE devs already have an account and most downstream users, (of software utilizing Qt), won't know, nor care what Qt is, so won't create an account.

Nothing but vacuuming telemetry. #Docker did this too.

Glory to #Linux package management.