keverets @keverets@librem.one

🎄🎄 Join your #fediverse friends for #AFediverseChristmas!! 🎄🎄

How are you celebrating #Christmas this year? Whether its at home, abroad, with family or behind a screen, you know that the fediverse is always online! Join us for a nice chat!

We've set up a Christmas room on Matrix.org. Go to https://app.element.io/#/room/#afediversechristmas:matrix.org and create an account. See you there!! 🎉🎅

Dear web developers and admins,
please stop embedding Google's hideous #ReCaptcha into your websites. Its algorithm is faulty, forcing regular users to click dozens or even hundreds of fire hydrants, bicycles, or traffic lights each day. It puts a 'suspicious activity' flag on users who won't obey to Google's business model - such as people who don't sign into Chrome, use anonymity VPNs, or use browser extensions to suppress common tracking mechanisms. Enough is enough. Stop it.

Have you tried inviting someone to join you on Mastodon?

✅ You can invite people to join your Mastodon instance by clicking on "Invite People" in the bottom left corner of the desktop interface. This lets you generate customised invitations to suit your purposes. Share the generated links with those you want to invite.

Many instances which are officially closed to new members still allow sign-ups through invitations from existing members.

#MastoTips #Mastodon #FediTips #Invites #Invitations

Please note: everyone who's doing all this performative work to get something Chrome-like to respect their privacy and agency instead of switching browsers is actively making the ecosystem worse by showing the webdev community that it's fine to ignore non-chrome browsers.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/105395458892625466

Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a chokepoint for online payments. This means their arbitrary policies often decide what you can read - or watch - online. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/visa-and-mastercard-are-trying-dictate-what-you-can-watch-pornhub

Stop Paid Content on CBC

... CBC management has launched a new marketing division called CBC Tandem. Its purpose is to sell corporations the opportunity to disguise their advertising as our journalism. CBC is using its resources to help advertisers trick Canadians.

They call what they produce “paid content”. And it’s insidious. It looks and sounds like the news stories and podcasts we produce. It’s found on the same websites and apps. But it’s not news, or even information. It is advertising that pretends to be news. And we believe strongly it must stop.

CBC Tandem promises corporate clients they can “leverage” the CBC’s reputation by aligning their message with the “trust Canadians have in our brand”.

That reputation was built by people like us - generations of journalists who earned your trust by informing you faithfully and truthfully every day. “Paid content” does not leverage that reputation, it makes a mockery of it. ...

https://www.stoppaidcontentoncbc.ca/open-letter

The term Fake News dates to 1989 when prepared propaganda Video and Audio "News Releases" (VNR/ANR), packaged to look like native news, began appearing on local TV and Radio stations. The CBC are going down this path.

It's not "leveraging trust", it's #betrayal.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fake_news

#CBC #FakeNews #PaidContent #NativeAdvertising #VNR #AVR #Propaganda #advertising #canada

Jailbreaking is not a crime, and offering an alternative app store shouldn't be one, either. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Early-app-store-on-iPhone-sues-Apple-alleging-15791279.php

Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'

Get Ready for False Side Effects

"...if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality."

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/get-ready-for-false-side-effects

When @HP unilaterlly withdrew its "free ink for life" plan for its rental ink customers, they demonstrated the danger of devices that can be updated by the manufacturer in ways that owners can't override. https://www.consumerreports.org/printers/hp-ends-free-ink-for-life/

"Pleins d’objets « connectés » sont en panne partout dans le monde puisque le service de cloud AWS est en panne dans un ensemble de datacenter "us-east-1", qui est proposée par défaut il me semble lors de la création d'un projet AWS aux États-Unis."

https://twitter.com/Signez/status/1331753023878598656?s=20

I’m told that many Germans are stockpiling cheese and sausages in anticipation of a COVID lockdown — planning, in other words, for a Wurst-Käse scenario

No matter how you may feel about fingerprint scanners on phones... this is a very impressive #PinePhone mod!

https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/jurehy/pinephone_fingerprint_scanner_update/

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

Oh, HP, never change.

First you tricked people with a fake "security update," that blocked cheap ink, then you invented rented ink, and now
you've redefined "free ink for life" to mean "$0.99/month, forever, or else."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer https://t.co/B7OAjMb0WD

Apple's anti-repair tactics on the new iPhone 12: https://youtu.be/FY7DtKMBxBw

Genuine parts swapped between brand new iPhone 12s won't work properly until swapped back.

Most likely explanation: Apple intentionally ensuring no one can self-repair or use a third party service. Not a new MO for them by any means.

Despicable behavior. Remember this source of e-waste when Apple pretends to care about the environment.

Massachusetts voters pass right-to-repair expansion opening up car data

https://www.engadget.com/motor-vehicle-data-question-1-081059455.html

Some good news from the US elections today :)

And here's the sting in the tail: if you opt for "Amazon exclusive," you are locked in for SEVEN YEARS. Amazon silently made the switch to "no hassle returns" and clawed back half its creators' money, with no chance to opt out.

Amazon gets to change its deal with creators when it wants to, but the creators don't get to change their deal with Amazon. For seven years after they spend thousands to produce their own audiobooks, they are locked to Amazon, regardless of Amazon's policy changes.

6/

To #Google users: you can lose all your Google accounts if Google decides so. There won't be any trial, and no option for appeal.

That's privately-held fascism in some way.

#degoogle

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10