Daniel Wroclawski and I wrote about Ring sharing video footage without a warrant or user consent. https://www.consumerreports.org/law-enforcement/amazon-shared-ring-footage-with-police-without-a-warrant-a6093504500/
There's a Canadian company - Allanson International - making UV lights you can bolt into existing home ductwork for sanitizing your air; not a big deal if your windows are open all summer, but come winter when we're all buttoned up this will be important, IMO.
Inspired by a recent set of toots by @SexyCyborg I picked one up and just finished installing it. Dirt simple, took ten minutes.
I really think #OpenStreetMaps can learn a few tricks from #GoogleMaps, and how they "nudge" contributors, especially the occasional contributor, who are very likely motivated very differently from the typical "active contributor."
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You know that thing where people make fun of a terrible opinion by writing it in a mixture of upper and lower case? It's probably not a good idea.
Screenreader software used by blind or partially-sighted people interprets capital letters as the beginning of a word.
This means that a phrase written as "FiNe PEopLe oN BoTh siDeS" will sound like gibberish.
If accessibility matters to you, try to avoid doing this.
The case for leaving the perfectly manicured lawn behind:
https://www.cbc.ca/life/home/the-case-for-leaving-the-perfectly-manicured-lawn-behind-1.6449477
"Already, 5,000 Londoners are on to it: borrowing anything from sound systems to sewing machines from a catalogue of around 50 items. They are the pioneers of the Library of Things (LoT) model, which helps people to save money and reduce waste by affordably renting out household items. They’ve collectively saved around 50 tonnes of waste from landfill since it all began."
https://www.positive.news/society/the-library-of-things-coming-to-a-town-near-you/
Stolen from bird site screenshot w/o description:
"The #COVID lockdown has demonstrated 3 things:
* Our economy collapses as soon as it stops selling useless stuff to over-indebted people
* It is perfectly possible to reduce pollution
* The lowest paid people in the country are essential to its functioning"
I enjoyed this article: Is Google Dying? Or did the Web grow up? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/
#StreetComplete's new alpha now has support for a #layers, i.e. map #overlay's that enable only specific quests in a very convenient way!
Read more also about the history of that feature in #westnordost's blog:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/westnordost/diary/399378
Feel free to test it out and report bugs!
Do you authenticate to various websites with your Github, Google or Facebook account? Be careful, if you get blocked by these companies, there's virtually no recourse and you might have a serious problem!
https://nextcloud.com/blog/big-tech-accountability/
Imagine if YouTube was shut down.
It would be a literal tragedy for the human race. Billions of hours worth of creativity would disappear in an instant.
"That would never happen!" some believe.
But it already has.
Remember Google+? All of it's gone forever.
Or remember all that media stored on MySpace? It's vanished.
We must stop depending on Big Tech to archive our data. Their mandate is to profit off our data, not preserve it.
10 years ago Tor Books dropped DRM on all their ebooks.
Tor's still publishing books without DRM and doing just fine.
Tim Hortons app found to have significant privacy violations.
"The app also used location data to infer where users lived, where they worked, and whether they were travelling. It generated an “event” every time users entered or left a Tim Hortons competitor, a major sports venue, or their home or workplace."
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and-announcements/2022/nr-c_220601/