Wrote a blog post about experience of using the @kde #PlasmaMobile on @PINE64 #PinePhone as a daily driver.
https://blog.bshah.in/2019/12/20/plasma-mobile-as-daily-driver/
The New York Times did a piece on smartphone tracking.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html
New Signal blog post about a new technique that could allow for easier migration between devices and usernames.
@sir's PinePhone review: https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/18/PinePhone-review.html
So the Verge article for which I wrote some thoughts about Jack Dorsey announcing #Bluesky is out and it used only a few sentences from what I came up with, so I wanna share the full thing...
I was asked, if Twitter did indeed adopt #ActivityPub instead of coming up with something new, would it be better or worse for the decentralized social web?
Cloudron is fascinating piece of software I found out a few days ago. It makes it super easy to self-host a bunch of applications like Nextcloud, GitLab, Wallabag, etc.
They all have one-click installers and SSO with your Cloudron user accounts. Also, it supports encrypted backup to various cloud providers like Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Google Cloud, etc.
The only two downsides I've found are that it costs $30/mo and isn't FOSS.
If you use a Visa or Mastercard credit/debit card you can opt out of having your transaction data used for "marketing reports" here:
Visa: https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do
Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/privacy/data-analytic-opt-out.html
It would be cool if someone made a SoundCloud ActivityPub clone. There's a lot of podcasts being created and no good place to put them on the Fediverse.
Apple: "users can disable Location Services at any time"
Also Apple: oh yeah you'll still see the Location Services icon appear, even when you have it switched off, because you can switch it off but, I mean, you can't switch it *off*...
https://gizmodo.com/apple-seems-to-be-tracking-iphone-11-when-location-serv-1840204086/
Well it's done. ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355
I've been trying out Jellyfin today, and I gotta say it's pretty nice. It's a fork of Emby before they went closed source and a good FOSS alternative to Plex.
Here are the excuses of Richard Barnes for why he voted to sell .org to Ethos private equity.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_org/
Looks like all of Facebook's services are down right now.
What a shame /s
#facebookdown
If we saw more Android phones being sold without Google Play Services I bet this problem would go away pretty quickly.
As much as I dislike China at least Android phones sold there don't have all this Google crapware preinstalled. Although knowing China they probably have something much worse.
Other apps like Amazon, Bing, and even Facebook work just fine without needing to be signed in at the operating system level. There is no excuse for Google to require so much system access for apps that clearly don't need it.
I would use more Google apps on my phone if they behaved like normal apps from other developers. My biggest gripe with them is that they force you to sign into your Google account at the operating system level (which I refuse to do) and then proceed to slurp up all your data.
Why do I need to give Google basically root access to my entire Android phone just to use the Google Search app? Why can't I sign into just that app?
Machine Learning on Encrypted data without Decrypting it
https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/11/22/encrypted-machine-learning.html
I'm a computer science student at the University of Massachusetts and the founder of the Hoxly Corporation.