Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

To the best of our knowledge, the #Librem5 is the only smartphone around with a OpenPGP smart card reader. In this post I talk about why that's such a big deal: https://puri.sm/posts/your-own-personal-enclave-the-smart-card-reader-on-the-librem-5/

Twitter led the migration of tech orgs from the rest of the Bay Area north into SF. I suspect many will follow their lead to a distributed workforce w/o SF's high cost of living. Big implications for SF economy mid-term.

Surveillance vendor NSO Group pitched hacking tools to US police forces that would "turn your target's smartphone into an intelligence gold mine" #privacy #infosec https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8899nz/nso-group-pitched-phone-hacking-tech-american-police

@HalvarFlake Welcome back!

@tomosaigon FOSS's duplication of effort is nothing compared to proprietary software, which reinvents every wheel with new proprietary protocols clients and servers every time and when they inevitably abandon the code, it is just thrown away.

All those distros are sharing a LOT of tech, protocols and code between them and there is a lot of compatibility between them. The differences between them are small compared to the similarities.

@johns The only docker I use is for pie crust. #containerpuns

It doesn't have to be this way. Messaging isn't complicated. We solved this more than a decade ago. You have five incompatible messaging apps on your phone because greed drives companies to ignore compatibility and optimize for vendor lock-in. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/lessons-vendor-lock-messaging

Internet messaging is so broken that FB alone owns 3 incompatible apps. Google has *6*, not counting the ones they canceled: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/google-unifies-messenger-teams-plans-more-coherent-vision/

How many more cloud-connected devices have to turn into bricks before people realize they don't own the hardware, they only rent it? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/wink-smart-hub-users-get-one-weeks-notice-to-pay-up-or-lose-access/

@feld Only at gigabit speeds. At regular wifi speeds I've never noticed much of a hit.

So @Sonic's gigabit fiber is so fast that I couldn't perform an accurate speed test in Qubes because Xen network virtualization overhead capped my speeds. ~250Mbps in a dispvm, ~500 in sys-net, ~980 on a different Linux computer.

Update: I'm 400 pages in and it's quite the page turner! I never heard people say that about War and Peace, so either most read it when they are too young to appreciate it, or all the Gibbon and Durant has changed my threshold for "page turner" #whynotboth #itsreallygoodtho

My brain is weird. I walk past a bowl of soup on the kitchen table and immediately a soup-based parody of Salt-n-Pepa's Shoop enters my head. ("Girls what's my weakness?" "Ramen!" "OK then")

Sourdough schmourdough.

@dallin That's the strategy I imagine--by having the technology in place you create a chilling effect and don't have to review the surveillance or actually do your job as a manager. The mere knowledge of being surveilled, even passively, changes a person's behavior.

This kind of patronizing remote control isn't limited to IT and management. Many tech companies, in the name of security, exercise the same kind of remote control over your computers without your permission. I wrote about the phenomenon here: https://puri.sm/posts/consent-matters-when-tech-takes-remote-control-without-your-permission/

Managers who could only measure productivity by butts-in-seats are turning to surveillance software and always-on webcams to measure butts-in-seats at home. If you don't trust your employees and can't measure their productivity, maybe you are the problem. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/

Well that's pretty encouraging. It looks like when people are better informed about #privacy trade-offs and must opt-in, instead of being forced to opt-out, many prefer the privacy-preserving option. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/half-of-americans-wont-trust-contact-tracing-apps-new-poll-finds/

Here's one in likely many #IoT startups that go out of business from #COVID-19, leaving customers with bricked hardware. Vendor lock-in from cloud-dependent devices using proprietary APIs causes so much e-waste when those services eventually go away. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/after-prolonged-service-outage-petnet-shuts-down-citing-coronavirus/