keverets @keverets@librem.one

I find it super frustrating how well constructed #Google #privacy PR is. They are masters of taking one little problem, making an a solid privacy improvement to it, then using it to distract people from their giant surveillance capitalism machine. Something like that is only a privacy improvement for people who are fully in Google's ecosystem. Switching to using Google Fi encrypted calling would be a net privacy loss.

End-to-end encryption is what makes a digital message truly private, read only by its intended recipient. https://ssd.eff.org/en/node/50

Thoughts about reading

When I was a child I got interested in reading, books, politics, science and the world because all this topics where present in my home. Every morning a newspaper arrived at our home and was lying on the table, accessible for everyone. Every month additional magazines my parents subscribed to arrived and if I walked into the home office of my parents I found shelves of books about various topics.
This way I started to read the newspaper, the magazines got interested in various topics and started to read books.
I wonder if we lose these natural way of discovering all this stuff these days? My daily newspaper is a online subscription I read on my smartphone or tablet, same is true for the magazines I subscribed to. Regarding books, more and more books are ebooks which only exists in my ebook reader or as ebub file in a folder of my computer. https://social.schiessle.org/display/3bdd55ed-6261-7c66-6a7c-4c3780303596

i dont remember where i stole this clip from but its perfect

website made by someone who describes themself as "a dipshit who doesn't know how to use computers" and hosted on a raspberry pi or some random VPS: loads instantly, well designed, easy to navigate

website made by fortune 500 company, with teams of designers, programmers, and servers in 8 countries: takes a full minute to load, layout shifting around the whole time, breaks if you have 1 browser add-on, the page you want can only be accessed via a third party search engine, gets worse every year

Happy to announce that the new version 2.10.2 of our Android app landed in F-Droid and Google Play over the weekend 🎉

This one brings in a lot of fixes and improvements from Conversations, and adds a new in-call dialpad feature.

The dialpad will be valuable for people who use the app with XMPP gateways such as https://cheogram.com/ and need to navigate automated phone systems.

Watch this space for upcoming releases of the Snikket iOS app and server software too 🙂

RT Lock (with permission):

Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which.

Unordered list of fun things I learned:

- google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out
- google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation
- Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you've probably experienced (surprise!)
- Google is willing to do almost everything to prevent people from circumventing their ad exchanges
- This is what AMP is about
- Google habitually insider trades on their ad exchanges in every way you can think of and every way you can't. Too many ways to list here.
- The exchanges are also rigged so that google wins on bids where they aren't the highest bidder.
- A large amount of people inside google are aware of all of this
- If Google ever tells you some change will increase your ad yield, run. In fact anything they tell you is a lie
- Google has worked with Facebook and Microsoft to discourage them from increasing user privacy, lamenting occasions where they prioritized their reputation over their collective business interest

You can read the full unredacted document for yourself here:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf

I'm sure you've all signed already the #10YearPhone campaign by repair.eu, right?

https://10yearphone.com/

Thank you!

#RightToRepair

Vizio's free ride is over. The nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy has filed suit against Vizio to force it to comply with the GPL - and this legal challenge has the potential to change the game for GPL enforcement in a profound way.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

You see, the Conservancy isn't suing on behalf of the copyright holders whose code Vizio is illegally using - it's suing on behalf of the *users* of free software who are injured by Vizio's attack on the commons.

8/

Me, 1991:

Woaaa! Robots are cool! 🤖 👍

Me, 2021:

Figuring out that I am asked by a robot (a web server) to prove that I am NOT a robot, and that I can't as it would imply to execute javascript code from a company (Google) that I block because -among others- it helps guide US killer-robots to their targets (project Maven), it owns dozens of drone companies and the patent portfolio of Boston Dynamics... 💣 💥 🤯