Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

I've really been enjoying how easy it is to write simple, useful GUI applications for the #Librem5 and I wrote two posts this week that describe how I wrote a simple screenshot and flashlight app:

https://puri.sm/posts/easy-librem-5-app-development-take-a-screenshot/
https://puri.sm/posts/easy-librem-5-app-development-flashlight/

More worrying for me: what happens to the data if one of these DNA companies fold? It's a valuable asset they will be tempted (if not required) to sell. Think of the well-funded companies who would line up to buy it...

It's happening. People are becoming aware of the #privacy implications of services around them and are voting with their feet.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/23andme-lays-off-100-people-ceo-anne-wojcicki-explains-why.html

In a world where everything must be "connected", this means ever more eWaste (and wasted developer time) when companies inevitably pull the plug. Since the software and protocols are proprietary, customers can't revive them or switch services.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/smart-scale-goes-dumb-as-under-armour-pulls-the-plug-on-connected-tech/

Apple canceled the project to encrypt iCloud backups two years ago due to pressure from the FBI because it "would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects" #privacy

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT

Update: I gave up and decided just to fix my tags. I used Picard for the first time and it made what would have been a horrible task surprisingly easy.

I have a well-organized but inconsistently-tagged music collection, so it's frustrating that music apps rely so much on tags and infuriating that most remove file browsing entirely.

Update: Kashmir Hill's piece in the NYTimes today describes a US startup that's providing law enforcement the exact kind of facial recognition tech I was warning about in China. China's present surveillance state is becoming our future. #privacy https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Popey suggested I try out yad and I like it! Looks like it supports some more use cases than zenity, is supposed to be lighter weight, plus it's faster to type. Check out the file dialog on the Librem 5!

I discovered today that zenity works as well on this screen as it does on a regular desktop to create basic shell-driven GUI programs on the #Librem5 so you can expect to see some simple apps from me in the future.

1. Buy medication I never have bought or even searched for before at local pharmacy w/ credit card
2. Go to car, decide to test #Librem5 cellular by visiting my account on mobile.twitter.com
3. Immediately see ad for type of medication I bought!

No location tracking possible on this Librem 5 (used browser, not native twitter app), so either a crazy coincidence, or near-real-time reporting between CVS and #adtech w/ linking between my name, card, and twitter account.

Something I didn't know I was missing but now use all the time on my #Librem5 is writing a shell script to perform a task along with a local .desktop file to run it from the home screen. Adding notify-send commands gives me feedback as the script runs in the background.

This is a fun story describing the security measures Tiffany used when it moved millions of dollars of jewelry down to street to a new location: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/nyregion/tiffanys-store-closing.html

It's refreshing to see a major vulnerability with vanilla advisory pages and no branding. Anyone but the NSA would have registered ecc.fail or ecception.org to pair w/ their BH submission.

If your app wins this war, maybe you won't care, but history tells me tech giant dominance is temporary. All those devs writing proprietary msging apps today are writing tomorrow's abandoned code. We'd all go much farther if we went together. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

We still haven't learned the lesson. The next decade promises even more duplicated effort as each org reinvents proprietary e2e encryption protocols on private networks in the name of privacy, but with the effect of making compatibility almost impossible.

Is it really better that FB has three incompatible msging apps they now have to wrangle into one new proprietary protocol? In the 20 year fight to own the market, all we have to show for it are mountains of abandoned proprietary code, dead networks, wasted efforts.

These companies went fast alone, but they didn't go far. The last 20 yrs show few real innovations in msging. How many attempts has Google made? If they all had worked together, you wouldn't have a half-dozen incompatible messaging apps with similar features on your phone.

The buildings full of devs he references all labored over the past two decades to reinvent the same messaging wheel, but w/ a network they owned. Libpurple plugins serve as a graveyard of proprietary chat protocols--failures to capture the market, wasted dev effort.