Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ @dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud

"Relatedly, contemporary fediverse interfaces borrow from surveillance-capitalism based popular social networks by focusing on breadth of relationships rather than depth. [...] What if instead of focusing on how many people we can connect to we instead focused on the depth of our relationships?"

-- @cwebber (https://dustycloud.org/blog/spritely/)

yes amen

I don't know if they still have it but Fox News used to have a regular segment where they showed clips of leftist activists being interviewed on the street and every single time they made the activists look like assholes.

... because they got to choose the clips their audience got to see.

All they needed were for people to make one mistake in what they said and that is the five second sound bite that would make it on air.

Evey time.

Technological Archaeologist

Tactical Semiotician

Supervintage

I can't believe I need to say this but do not ever allow yourself to be interviewed by fascist instigators at demonstrations. No, you can't 'own' them. It doesn't matter how informed you think you are. They control the editing process and they can _and will_ make an ass of you.

If you do manage to give a flawless interview with absolutely nothing they can exploit in it? It won't see the light of day.

You can't win so please, stop playing their game!

@dredmorbius it took me a while to understand that you're recommending outline.com

TODO make software so terrible that the word “crapware” comes back into vogue as a direct result of your work

*‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims*

"More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html

"The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family? …"

#China #Xinjiang #Uyghurs #HumanRights

"Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/17/firefox-mozilla-fights-back-against-google-chrome-dominance-privacy-fears

American Heart Association Launches Massive #QuitLying Campaign Aimed At E-Cigarette Industry https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2019/11/15/american-heart-association-quitlying-campaign-ecigarette-vaping-industry/amp/

A new report from @FinancialTimes says "When you visit WebMD & enter your stuffy nose & sore throat into its 'symptom finder,' & then get a diagnosis (it's lupus!), [ad platforms including] Facebook, thanks to a data-sharing agreement, know about it." https://mashable.com/article/google-facebook-tracking-online-health-activity-webmd/

"collapse" joins "submit" in the list of verbs I would rather my web browser not use

>nearly 500 homes lost
>not even summer yet

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-17/nsw-bushfires-500-homes-destroyed-firies-scramble/11711898

Remember, our corporate political sponsors don't benefit from climate change, so it can't exist.

I feel like there's a relevant RATM song for this.

Friendly reminder that your DMs and "followers only" posts are all visible to your instance administrator, who (in addition to their hosting provider) can be compelled with a warrant to disclose the contents to law enforcement.

If you want to organize political protests or engage in activities that law enforcement would take an interest in, fediverse servers are not the right place to do that.

Banning cop/law enforcement accounts literally does nothing to help you, just FYI.

Proof-of-Concept of the new signalling system done without removing the old one.

Can anyone test on Safari please? Open a new tab, open the JS console, and navigate here:
https://cdn.test.occrp.org/projects/samizdat/index.html

Then, reload (so that the service worker kicks in); you should see "ServiceWorker: yes" in orange.

Make sure that you see this commit ID in the console and in both places at the page bottom: c223b08c

If all of this is true, check if in the console you have messages saying: "SamizdatInfo received!"

It's about that time of year when people start wondering things like "hey, why isn't DECEMber the tenth month of the year?"

So it's time for my little lecture on Romans, calendars, and our friend Gaius Julius Caesar.

I'll be posting it as a tootchain replying to this one, but if you're impatient, here's the whole thing: https://gist.github.com/joyeusenoelle/3754e00a37fe81aa43aad3eb9543f3ce

So: “Why isn’t the new year on winter solstice?”

The answer, honestly, is that the Romans had no fucking idea how to run a calendar.