Robert Virkus @enough@mastodon.cloud

Google now knows when its users go to the store and buy stuff

Google already analyzes users’ Web browsing, search history and geographic locations, using data from popular Google-owned apps like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the Google Play store …

The new credit-card data enables the tech giant to connect these digital trails to real-world purchase records in a far more extensive way than was possible before.

http://thelink.is/gsurveillance https://mastodon.ar.al/media/-kmjNkOd7tTcx2sfARg

It's not so much that people forget about Usenet as that they forget why it died.

It got spammed to death.
It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.
It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.
There was no viable business model for providing the service.

https://redd.it/3c3xyu

#dreddit

🌐 A list of useful links for Mastodon:

List of instances:
https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list

Tool to preview the timeline of a specific server:
http://www.unmung.com/mastoview

Status of the federation:
https://mnm.eliotberriot.com/dashboard/db/mastodon-network-overview?refresh=1h&orgId=1

Search the users you follow on twitter:
https://mastodon-bridge.herokuapp.com/

A translator bot: @translator

With news of Unroll.me selling user inbox info to Uber, lots of people are repeating "if you're not paying for it, you're the product."

I've said before, and will continue to say, that that is the wrong formulation. Sometimes you pay for it and you're still the product – look at US ISPs. Sometimes you don't pay for it and you're not the product – free software.

The real question is whether a software or service empowers users, which can't be boiled down to whether you paid.

and while I'm at it. We've been working on finalizing my contract terms, and I'm capped out at 20hrs / week, so please respect my time.

And regards to this being a paid position, I am asking for a bare minimum to cover my bills from Gargron. And if you want to help me further, knowing that I "work" outside of my billed hours, I'd highly appreciate it if you supported me on Patreon. (which is also gonna help me cover taxes etc)

https://www.patreon.com/maloki

@stefanieschulte @mayel @coopchange @ntnsndr Whoops - US Eastern time

Reminder: #Coop Toot-up tomorrow from 10-11am! We'll be discussing #platformcoop instances like #socialcoop, and whatever other #coopy things folks feel like talking about. One question I have in particular for the community:

If the traditional symbol of the #coops movement is the
🌲 🌲

Should the symbol of #cooperation on #Mastodon be the twin...
🍍 🍍 ?

@mayel @coopchange @stefanieschulte @ntnsndr

https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.08065

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 years of research and deployments

Carmela Troncoso et al.

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview[...]

"Countless #platformcoop and initiatives supporting them have developed rapidly over the past 2 years. This #ecosystem challenges the practices of the #sharingeconomy, and the often #misogynist ‘win at all costs’ culture of #SiliconValley.
The #Internet can be owned and governed differently. The experiments now already underway show that a global #ecosystem of cooperatives, in collaboration with Free and #OpenSource movement, can stand against the concentration of wealth"
https://platform.coop/

Proposal: tFormat (toot format) – an idea I originally had for Twitter when they were going to implement annotations but didn't:

A standard syntax to extend the semantics of toots.

e.g., tReplace: Edit a toot:

/replace "something" with "something else" in mastodon.ar.al/@aral/15180

(Creates a new toot referencing old one. Clients know to display edited toots in a special way to highlight edits.)

tCheckin:

/checkin <lat> <long> "place name"

etc.

Thoughts?

CC @Gargron

Well, the Internet Archive has surpassed itself: full in-browser emulation of the early Apple Macintosh has been made-available.

http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-emulation-comes-to-the-archive/

It is a work of love, beauty and, quite frankly, skill.

The Internet Archive are really making an effort to preserve our IT history.

Fascinating, and also terrifying! 🙃 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/