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Kevin C. boosted

“It is highly disturbing that we still have to have to say this, but websites dealing with such sensitive topics should not track their users for marketing purposes. Your mental health is not and should never be for sale.”

privacyinternational.org/repor

I still think it is pretty inexcusable. A core bit of OS functionality should not be at the mercy of whether or not some backend service is up and running. The online piece(s) of it might go down, but the local search functionality should still work! There is no excuse for the whole search window to render as nothing more than a solid black rectangle.

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According to a Slashdot article that I just read, the problems with Windows Search have been resolved, with no need for everyone to edit their registries.

The problem was, in fact, Bing. For reasons only known to Microsoft, the Windows Search functionality apparently uses the Bing backend – even for doing local searches. There was a service outage today, which caused the frustrating black screen to appear.

kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020

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Windows Search down for many

TL;DR: The issue is reportedly related to Bing, and the “fix” being suggested involves using RegEdit to disable Bing integration. Not for the faint of heart!

It's also pretty inexcusable . . .

kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020

I really shouldn't laugh so much at someone else's misfortune or frustration. Still, as a 20+ year software developer, I have to wonder why anyone would have expected the plan to use a brand new “app” to count votes for the Iowa caucus to actually work out. It is never a good idea to make the first real-world use of a new application be something important and so publicly visible.

kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020

Kevin C. boosted
Kevin C. boosted

The cost is there, however. It is paid in privacy, in attention, in the bits and bytes of our data caps being nibbled away, in electricity, in time . . . .

It is time to start looking for better ways.

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On the flip side, people have finite amounts of time and money. People want information, entertainment, etc. People are reluctant to pay for access to websites, especially since most people are paying for their Internet access in the first place.

Advertising fills in the gap, providing money to run the websites, pay for the content and the software . . . and apparently at little to no cost to relucant people unable or unwilling to pay monetarily.

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kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020

The tagline of theregister.co.uk/2020/01/29/b reads:

Brave, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla gather together to talk web privacy… and why we all shouldn't get too much of it
Browser makers keep coming back to the need to please advertisers

And therein lies the rub.

Websites cost money to run. Content costs money to create. Software, such as web browsers, cost time and frequently money to create and maintain.

As the saying goes, “there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.”

Kevin C. boosted
Kevin C. boosted

Long explanation of distributed git workflows I sent to a client to explain the SourceHut approach 

Kevin C. boosted
Kevin C. boosted

Hey #blogging #fediverse, tell me your favorite blogging engine and why you like it!

Bonus Q: Does it have an API for clients?

PS: if you fine folk could boost this beyond my instance, I'd appreciate it.

Kevin C. boosted

One approach to learning git is to treat it like a necessary evil, something distracting you from the actual thing you're trying to do - you just want to write your program, god dammit. The better approach acknowledges that git is a tool you're likely to use every day, many times a day, for the next 30 years or more, and investing the next few hours into learning about it.

If anyone is curious, I have documented how I set up Drone.io last weekend to automatically build and deploy my Hugo website when I push changes to my personal Gitea server.

kevin.thecorams.net/posts/2020

Kevin C. boosted

So I was recently asked why I prefer to use free and open source software over more conventional and popular proprietary software and services.

A few years ago I was an avid Google user. I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and used their products everywhere. I used Gmail for email, Google Calendar and Contacts for PIM, YouTube for entertainment, Google Newsstand for news, Android for mobile, and Chrome as my web browser.

I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive (which were all in Google Docs format). I used Google Domains to register my domain names for websites where I would keep track of my users using Google Analytics and monetize them using Google AdSense.

I used Google Hangouts (one of Google’s previous messaging plays) to communicate with friends and family and Google Wallet (with debit card) to buy things online and in-store.

My home is covered with Google Homes (1 in my office, 1 in my bedroom, 1 in the main living area) which I would use to play music on my Google Play Music subscription and podcasts from Google Podcasts.

I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google account to buy movies, TV shows, apps, and Google hardware devices. This was truly the Google life.

Then one day, I received an email from Google that changed everything.

“Your account has been suspended”

Just the thing you want to wake up to in the morning. An email from Google saying that your account has been suspended due to a perceived Terms of Use violation. No prior warning. No appeals process. No number to call. Trying to sign in to your Google account yields an error and all of your connected devices are signed out. All of your Google data, your photos, emails, contacts, calendars, purchased movies and TV shows. All gone.

I nearly had a heart attack, until I saw that the Google account that had been suspended was in fact not my main personal Google account, but a throwaway Gmail account that I created years prior for a project. I hadn’t touched the other account since creation and forgot it existed. Apparently my personal Gmail was listed as the recovery address for the throwaway account and that’s why I received the termination email.

Although I was able to breathe a sigh of relief this time, the email was wake up call. I was forced to critically reevaluate my dependence on a single company for all the tech products and services in my life.

I found myself to be a frog in a heating pot of water and I made the decision that I was going to jump out.

Leaving Google

Today there are plenty of lists on the internet providing alternatives to Google services such as this and this. Although the “DeGoogle” movement was still in its infancy when I was making the move.

The first Google service I decided to drop was Gmail, the heart of my online identity. I migrated to Fastmail with my own domain in case I needed to move again (hint: glad I did, now I self host my email). Fastmail also provided calendar and contacts solutions so that took care of leaving Google Calendar and Contacts.

Here are some other alternatives that I moved to:

Gmail → Fastmail → Self-hosted (via Cloudron)
Google Contacts → FastmailNextcloud Contacts
Google Calendar → FastmailNextcloud Calendar
Google Search → BingDuckDuckGo
Google Maps → Bing MapsOpenStreetMaps and OsmAnd
Google Analytics → Matomo Analytics
Google Drive → Nextcloud Files
Google Photos → Nextcloud Files/Gallery
Google Docs → Collabora Office (Nextcloud integration) and LibreOffice
Google Play Music → Spotify / PlexSpotify / Jellyfin
Google Play Movies/TV → PlexJellyfin
Google Play Audiobooks/Books → Audible/Kindle
Google Play Store (apps) → F-Droid / Aurora Store
Google Android → Lineage OSUbuntu Touch on PinePhone (coming soon?)
Google’s Android Apps → Simple Mobile Tools
Google Chrome → Mozilla Firefox
Google Domains → Hover
Google Hangouts → Matrix and Nextcloud Talk
Google Allo → Signal
Google Podcasts → PocketCastsAntennaPod
Google Newsstand → RSS
Google Wallet → PayPal and Cash App

Migrating away from Google was not a fast or easy process. It took years to get where I am now and there are still several Google services that I depend on: YouTube and Google Home.

Eventually, my Google Home’s will grow old and become unsupported at which point hopefully the Mycroft devices have matured and become available for purchase. YouTube may never be replaced (although I do hope for projects like PeerTube to succeed) but I find the compromise of using only one or two Google services to be acceptable.

At this point losing my Google account due to a mistake in their machine learning would largely be inconsequential and my focus has shifted to leaving Amazon which I use for most of my shopping and cloud services.

The reason that I moved to mostly FOSS applications is that it seems to be the only software ecosystem where everything works seamlessly together and I don’t have to cede control to any single company. Alternatively I could have simply split my service usage up evenly across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple but I don’t feel that they would have worked as nicely together.

Overall I’m very happy with the open source ecosystem. I use Ubuntu with KDE on all of my computers and Android (no GApps) on my mobile phone. I’ve ordered the PinePhone “Brave Heart” and hope to one day be able to use it or one of its successors as a daily driver with Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile.

I don’t want to give the impression that I exclusively use open source software either, I do use a number of proprietary apps including: Sublime Text, Typora, and Cloudron.

https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/

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