Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
@Gargron @fdroidorg That is incorrect and the GitHub issue shows it. The F-Droid team asked for .apk files of the Google Play build as it was compliant with F-Droid policy. Not a new flavor.
Mastodon made a change to the version they provided to F-Droid (the GitHub version) that broke policy. F-Droid even went out of their way to tweak policy in Mastodon'a favour to not require complete removal of the in-app updater, just a good explanation.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Help needed: are there any graphic designers who could help create matching #FDroid category images for missing categories? My "quick hack" doesn't really fit: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/13059
Thanks in advance!
PS: if the same could be done for the additional categories in the #IzzySoftRepo that would be great 
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
@iThreepwood @fdroidorg this whole drama actually went down exactly because F-Droid distributed the developer signed version at the beginning, but for this to work, F-Droid needs a reference APK that complies with F-Droid policy, which then in turn became to much work for the Mastodon team to upload, so they asked to get switched to the F-Droid owned signing key.
In other words: F-Droid tries their best, but sometimes upstream developers won't/can't cooperate
This turning so much #FreeSoftware #Android work towards this huge focus on locking everything down and limiting things. #Android started out as a much more hackable mobile OS than any major one before it, and that's why it became so popular. Locked down devices have their use cases, like for journalists and whistleblowers. And computing devices should not be easy to abuse. Locking down devices is also useful for maintaining monopolies. All this is also limiting the promise of mobile computing.
I see a shift in how people think about #privacy in #software. Now that people are aware of how bad software can be for privacy, I see a lot of pressure to not include useful functions because they might appear to be invading privacy. #Android permissions are a good example: so many people are rightly concerned about location tracking, as represented by location permissions. The first question is ask when seeing a suspicious one is: do I trust that app's people and process to do the right thing?
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Truly disturbing information. You certainly should not trust any large tech companies, but #ByteDance makers of #TikTok is emerging as just about a worst-case scenario. Support #decentralization
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/tiktok-spied-on-me-why/
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
🤔 What are your favorite #OpenSource / #FreeSoftware projects on the #Fediverse that we should collectively try to convince to move away from mastodon.social and toward other instances, so more people can easily see and interact with them?
📋 Give them an @-mention in this thread!
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren, wir begrüßen Sie zur tagesschau!
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Last year we announced we would be joining Mastodon to explore an alternative to today's social media.
We’re excited to announce we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta, with hopes to open to the public soon.
This is just the beginning. Read more about the launch of our instance, including how to join the public waitlist. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-social-mastodon-private-beta-announcement/
Now given that this strategy was conceived and driven by #BillGates, I see no way he can be trusted to do anything but the same in any of his endeavors. That is his clear track record over decades. His "charity" work is also driven my #monopoly mentality, and often directly tied to his investments. Like he's investing in #nuclear and giving "charity" money to promote it as a solution to #ClimateChange .
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
"“We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali, it can now translate all of Bengali,” James Manyika, a Google vice president also interviewed by 60 Minutes, said on the segment. “So now, all of a sudden, we have a research effort where we’re now trying to get to a thousand languages.”
This is how their hype undermines startups actually serving their communities, like @asme's lesan.ai.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
And section 6.2
“Thus the risk is that people disseminate text generated by LMs, meaning more text in the world that reinforces and propagates stereotypes and problematic associations,
both to humans who encounter the text and to future LMs trained
on training sets that ingested the previous generation LM’s output."
What is #Microsoft actually good at? Going thru their key products, it is clear they don't create new paradigms, they make often buggy implementations of ideas from other people: #BASIC #MSDOS #Windows #Word #Excel #browser #Bing #Cloud #dotnet. One thing they are clearly good is building a #monopoly. So it seems what they are good at is seeing good ideas, "embrace and extend" to control it, then building monopoly profiteering.
"it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff"
There are lots of promises of good around #AI #GPT #LLM etc. This all is being developed by the same owners, people and culture of #BigTech and #SiliconValley that announced "privacy is dead" and that they are "making the world a better place". They aim to disrupt whatever they can to become wealthier from it. That is what #VentureCapital is all about. Even if this tech is a good idea, the forces driving it now have a proven track record of decades of causing harm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Well look at this report that's intended as the context for the meeting:
* Funded by Futurewei (Huawei's US arm)
* Executed by a consultant directed by LF
* Does not mention OSI or FSF or Stallman
* Seems to omit non-commercial players from "community" (obviously I haven't read it in detail yet)
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/open-source-fragmentation
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Well look at this. Linux Foundation is running an invitation-only gathering to define "an open source credo, or statement of common value" in Geneva in July.
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-congress/
I wonder who has been invited?
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
I wrote a blog post: How to use the new F-Droid libraries, like @calyxos https://f-droid.org/en/2023/05/02/three-client-libraries.html cc @fdroidorg
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Hello, world!
Following recent changes at Twitter, the new home of the X.Org Foundation is here on Mastodon. Please follow for the latest in the Linux graphics world and the freedesktop.org community. Going forward, we will no longer post to Twitter, but we're so excited to join the Fediverse!
A pattern popularized by the #SiliconValley is taking innovative social ideas, and building structures where wealthiest portion of society gets to live them, leaving everyone else behind. #OpenSource is a great example of this. Kubernetes is a case in point: it is built collaboratively by a bunch of #BigTech competitors, they are enjoying the benefits of #UserFreedom and #FreeSoftware, but for their users, they stick them with #tracking and proprietary lock in.
Joined Aug 2019
