keverets @keverets@librem.one

Latest from Doctors without Borders (MSF):
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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) condemns in the strongest possible terms the killing of two MSF staff family members during an Israeli offensive on Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, Gaza, Palestine. Six other people were injured in the attack.

Late on the evening of 20 February, Israeli forces conducted a military operation in Al-Mawasi, located on Gaza’s coastline, during which an Israeli tank fired on a house sheltering MSF colleagues and their families. The attack killed the daughter-in-law and wife of one of our colleagues, and injured six people, five of whom were women or children. Bullets were also fired at the clearly marked MSF building, hitting the front gate, the building’s exterior, and the interior of the ground floor.

Ambulance teams were delayed for more than two hours by the shelling in the area, but were later able to reach the site and bring the wounded, some sustaining burn injuries, to the International Medical Corps Field hospital in Rafah.

"The amount of force being used in densely populated urban environments is staggering, and targeting a building knowing it is full of humanitarian workers and their families is unconscionable."
Meinie Nicolai,
MSF General Director
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Read it in full on their website:
https://www.msf.org/msf-strongly-condemns-deadly-israeli-attack-msf-shelter-gaza

Layoffs are happening because upper management has a herd mentality across tech companies and because we've become a conventional company more focused on the next quarter than on the long term.

Layoffs are happening because our leadership team are all billionaires or near-billionaires who have no idea what it is like to be rank and file any longer.

Layoffs are happening because our union isn't strong enough to fight back.

Layoffs are NOT happening because we're being replaced with AI.

Signal still requires phone number to get started, but supporting usernames as identifiers after that -- a significant improvement.

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-launches-usersnames-phone-number-privacy/

Interesting bit of #OpenStreetMap #OvertureMaps related news:
Niantic, the company behind #PokemonGO and #Ingress have joined the overture maps foundation.

I don't mind them joining Overture... but it is kinda weird to me that they're not nor have they ever been corporate member of the OSMF... which is like.... Their entire business revolves around OSM yet they never contributed to OSMF.... and now they're paying Overture... hmm

https://pokemongohub.net/post/news/niantic-joins-overture-maps-foundation-gets-access-to-59m-pois/

I hastily threw together a version of #Conversations_im that has no address book integration and doesn’t ask for Contacts permission.
This seems to have made it through Google Play review just now meaning the app is no available on Google Play again.

No indication from Google that they were in the wrong and hallucinated the whole "uploads contact list" thing. Instead I had to walk the path of least resistance and remove the useful and entirely harmless feature of address book integration.

POV: a few years ago you uploaded a bunch of games into Google Play that:
- are fully Free Software
- don't gather any user data
- are fully local, no ads
- are complete and finished
- don't really need updating.

One of the games was removed because of "missing privacy policy". Others - I don't even know, they didn't bother to tell me 😜 Seems like the idea that some apps may simply respect the user and not exist to mine for data is unfathomable to Google.

#googleplay #google #android

To celebrate Conversations being back on the Play Store and to deny Google their 15% cut I made the app free for the next ~48 hours. 😜

If you are new here: Check out #XMPP. It's federated, provider and vendor independent instant messaging. It’s great!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations

Or get it from #fdroid - That version even has address book integration and public channel discovery! 😂

Microsoft: I swear have no knowledge about you besides what you tell me.

Microsoft: I insist I have no knowledge of your location.

Microsoft: The weather in Parkville, Maryland where you are is sunny and 35 degrees.

Oh dear. It's very funny that Air Canada tried to pull the “well, the AI chatbot lied, not *us*" as a legal argument. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

I guess this stuff is plenty obscure, huh?

So, folks, there's a new browser engine dropped (a while ago, actually). It isn't based on WebKit and it isn't based on Firefox, it is written from scratch for a hobbyist operating system SerenityOS by some awesome/crazy people. The browser, called Ladybird, actually can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, OpenIndiana and Android.

It can pass Acid3 and render Github page well (note that Firefox and Chrome circa 2018 cannot do that!), and it has decent JS and afaik wasm support.

Their site is https://ladybird.dev/

I am not related to the project in any way, just amazed that it exist, and I think it deserves more love and publicity. And optimizations for low-end computers. And privacy features. And so on!

"Nobody can read the source code of Chrome. Not alone, not as a team. Humans don't live long enough. Any group that claims to have gone through the code and de-Googlized it is lying: all that's possible to do is some searches, and try to measure what traffic it emits. A thousand people working for a decade couldn't read the entire thing."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/drowning_in_code

Appealing the removal didn’t yield any result. Google just repeated the same statement "the app was removed because it uploads the contact list" without even acknowledging any of the arguments I made in the appeal.

I understand that most of my audience here on Mastodon is more ideology aligned with F-Droid but the app sales on Google Play store have contributed significantly to me working (almost) full time on #Conversations_im.

Without the revenue from Google Play I can’t afford this.

Google have been quietly de-listing #XMPP apps from their Play store one-by-one for made-up reasons. Today they finally came for Conversations (https://gultsch.social/@daniel/111929074071688694 ).

@fdroidorg doesn't have these problems, and they additionally rebuild from source, supporting reproducible builds (so unlike the Play store, you know the published source code matches what's in the app you download). With their recent enhancements (https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.html ) I'll be recommending it to more people.

The BBC extends its Mastodon experiment for another six months: "We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub." #Technology https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2024-02-extending-our-mastodon-social-media-trial?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

"There are Mastodon servers operated by governments for their official government accounts, and this is the perfect use case for them — because they get to control their entire IT infrastructure, and we get to see and subscribe to these important announcements."

(👆also true for public service media broadcasters or universities)

Good interview with #Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko: https://www.platformer.news/mastodon-interview-eugen-rochko-meta-bluesky-threads-federation/

HT @ChristophKappes

“Banning Flipper Zero devices is tantamount to banning a multi-tool because it can be used for vandalism, or banning markers because they can be used for graffiti,” EFF’s @legind told @Motherboard. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a388g/flipper-zero-ban-canada-hacking-car-thefts

Absolutely agree with this @organicmaps are amazing

https://mstdn.social/@W_Lucht/111903110020482060
Have I my mentioned how totally awesome @organicmaps's new "Outdoors map style" is - a mode that highlights tracks and trails?! It's absolutely splendid, and amazingly accurate even for small paths (built on OSM).

By the way: #OrganicMaps is fully offline, requires no registration, has no ads, no tracking - and works very well. So it depends on donations, like the fediverse does! Use and support them if you value it