Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one
- Personal Site
- https://kylerank.in
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- https://kylerank.in/writing.html
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Technical author, FOSS advocate, public speaker, Linux security & infrastructure geek, author of The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks and many other books, ex-Linux Journal columnist.
Joined Apr 2019
Starting Sunday, WeChat and TikTok apps are contraband. You will have to break out of jail to install or update them in the US: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/tiktok-wechat-to-be-pulled-from-us-app-stores-as-of-september-20/
Kyle Rankin
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Building tech for freedom?
Is it intuitive, easy to use, focused, and consistent?
Does it have beautiful defaults?
Is it:
- Private by default?
- Secure by default?
- Usable by default?
Burying the lede: "AT&T engineers are creating 'unified customer identifiers,' [AT&T CEO] Stankey said. Such technology would allow marketers to identify users across multiple devices and serve them relevant advertising." #privacy https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/att-wants-to-put-ads-on-your-smartphone-in-exchange-for-5-discount/
@aral Yes! Yes! Yes! This is key! So many projects ignore design and pick horrible defaults. In many cases the developer designs the interface as an external representation of their internal code (I'm looking at you iptables and tc). If you understand the code then it makes sense, otherwise *shrug*.
Good design requires empathy. You must think of how someone else would approach your software without understanding the code. If your defaults make a user shoot themselves in the foot, it's a bug.
Kyle Rankin
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For 4 years my personal website relied ENTIRELY on javascript to display anything 🤦♀️ and none of these 4 years show up on the wayback machine, one of my biggest regrets..
Kyle Rankin
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Tourists on Tech's Toll Roads
https://puri.sm/posts/tourists-on-techs-toll-roads/
"We can’t accept being a tourist on tech's toll road, the future demands open highways accessible by everyone, where you can freely go where you want, how you want."
In response to the @nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/technology/apple-watch-is-a-private-road.html
"1984 was a typo. 255-91-1755. That's me. I've been reduced to a series of digits. My Social Security number is in thousands of computers that buy and sell my life story."
If you (like me) are watching #Hackers for the 25th anniversary, you should check out the novelization! So amazing and with subtle differences from the film.
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@kyle Nicely done. This ties in with a lot of related things like the right to repair.
Also your metaphor meshes well with my increasing belief that it's not about surveillance capitalism, it's actually surveillance feudalism. In capitalism people get to own things. In feudalism the serfs basically give up rights of freedom and property in exchange for the protection of the lord and manor.
Technically it's manorialism and serfdom if we want to be picky.
If you live inside a fortification where someone else writes the rules, decides who can enter, can force anyone to leave, decides what you’re allowed to have, and can take things away if they decide it’s contraband, are you living in a castle or a prison? https://puri.sm/posts/your-phone-is-your-castle/
Kyle Rankin
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Want to honor your free software heroes? Nominate someone who's doing a terrific job at empowering computer users for a Free Software Award by October 28th: https://u.fsf.org/357
Kyle Rankin
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@purism …and here's a quick Quake II demo using the #librem5 docked via usb-c (audio is from L5's built in speaker) - might be a bit more exciting than running #libreoffice (which also works):
If you think these hardware cryptographic security measures are actually about customer security and not vendor control, I have printers to sell you that reject refilled ink cartridges and farm tractors you aren't allowed to repair.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-for-enhanced-security-at-a-cost/
Kyle Rankin
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Well that was a new one: I was rickrolled by my dreams last night and the song is still stuck in my head.
Kyle Rankin
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libhandy 1.0.0 released. 🎉
We released it a bit in advance to let application maintainers update their submodules in time for the GNOME 3.38.0 release. 😀 That being said, we expect distros to ship libhandy as any other regular stable library. 😉
@polychrome What I wonder is what the delay accomplishes, outside of giving all these apps time to get the same data but without this specific identifier so as not to trigger the opt-in pop-up.
Also, if this is the state of things in the iOS app store, what does that tell you about Android?
- Personal Site
- https://kylerank.in
- Personal Bibliography
- https://kylerank.in/writing.html
Admin
Technical author, FOSS advocate, public speaker, Linux security & infrastructure geek, author of The Best of Hack and /: Linux Admin Crash Course, Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks and many other books, ex-Linux Journal columnist.
Joined Apr 2019
