Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Are you planning to celeberate #SoftwareFreedomDay? DFF has released its announcement fot this year events by proposing three key topics:
- AI - Challenges to Face and Actions to Take
- Communication Decentralization - Why and How
Lessons Learned from the Past, Actions to Take for the Future

https://digitalfreedomfoundation.org/index.php/170-software-freedom-day-2023

Are you a scientist who's active on Mastodon and does research in #ornithology, #ecology, #naturalhistory, or a related field? I want to follow you - please reply and introduce yourself! (And please share so this reaches more people!)

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)

For those of you (most of you, I suspect) who're required to use Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, or Facebook technologies every day to do your job, but (as you should) resent it... I encourage you to alert 'the powers that be' that you'd rather not. If they ask you what you'd prefer, tell them: something that doesn't make us a pawn of a $trillion US corporation. Some known-good options I use daily are listed here: https://tech.oeru.org/updating-oer-foundation-web-services-february-2023 The local options are many & entirely unmarketed.

"Klein says he belongs to the Painted Feather Woodland Métis. The entity is not recognized by the Manitoba Métis Federation or the Métis Nation of Ontario. It's a for-profit company based out of a single-family residence near Bancroft, Ont..."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/kevin-klein-indigenous-manitoba-government-1.6876688?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar

As now everyone seems to be mad with that "degoogling" thing, I'll reiterate my point: I won't stop using services that are accessible and usable for me as a blind screen reader user. Period, full stop. You can be a thousand times open-source, have good intentions and be saint angels in flesh, but if your service is not accessible *and* usable by a blind user, I cannot perform my daily tasks, be it for work, hobby or leisure, hence I won't use your service. Make your services accessible and usable for everyone and then preach about degoogling, de-appling, de-microsofting and de-whatevering. #Angry #Blind #Accessibility

We are starting a tech worker-cooperative on Southern Funen, Denmark. And looking for inspiration, knowledge and comrades - so please share!

Our praxis will be something like offering local and democratically organized tech-infrastructure to people and organisations with compatible values (not-for-profits, local-orgs, coops, informal groups, activists, etc.). Our ambition is to operate with planetary and intersectional feminist principles: http://futurologi.org/7-principles-for-planetary-coops/

#cooperative #WorkerCoop #NotForProfit #SmallTech #PlanetaryCoop

"The Tragedy of the Commons" was written by a eugenicist and was effectively debunked as ahistorical fantasy decades ago. More propaganda in the service of privatizing public space and resources. Pass it on. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

If you are looking for a bad example of how to communicate after a cyber breach, Microsoft is providing a teachable moment. They either haven't figured out how China-based hackers access its services or don't want to share what caused the "error."
At the very least, it can serve as a good reminder that while open-source has security "concerns," we can't hide them.
@dangoodin of @arstechnica has more on the "open question."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/us-senator-blasts-microsoft-for-negligent-cybersecurity-practices/

#cybersecurity #governance #incidentresponse

Instead of going to work today, let's build a world that doesn't deprive people of life's necessities, a world where nobody is forced to choose between exploitation and death.

So, as an update to the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule, the U.S. Senate is currently working on *another* misguided bill to try to protect children from the imagined evils of the internet, this one called the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

You can read about it here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/kids-online-safety-act-heavy-handed-plan-force-platforms-spy-young-people

Among other things, the bill would require user age-verification by internet platforms.

Linux sound gurus:

Does anyone know a way to permanently disable pipewire in Ubuntu 22.04? It keeps respawning the process and for some reason if pipewire is running (along with PulseAudio) that blocks web-video playback. I kill the process to get the video to play but the next time I try to run a video pipewire shows up again as a running process. Frustrating...

In 2019, TWENTY-SIX percent of Black adults were barred from voting in Kentucky.

26%!

Then the new Dem governor's executive order cut that number dramatically, but it's still very high: 12%.

But even that order is under threat. https://boltsmag.org/kentucky-rights-restoration-governor-election-beshear-cameron/

Scientists develop game-changing vaccine against Lyme disease ticks https://www.newsweek.com/lyme-disease-tick-vaccine-developed-1815809

Read in our latest newsletter (and subscribe):

- Anti-drone bill threatens journalism (joint letter with @@CenDemTech)
- Lawmakers seek to limit recording of police
- Civil society speaks out against bad internet bills (ACLU, @fight)

https://mailchi.mp/freedom.press/anti-drone-bill-threatens-journalism?e=fe28d28019

Notably -- and justifiably -- furious piece today from @pluralistic about Elon Musk's constant lies and the latest Tesla epic scandal. https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/

While this goes on, governments not only fail to enforce the law. They actually protect this uber-sleazebag's bad acts (and those of lots of other companies).

the anarchist in my bloodstream wants to find a way to enact the many small overlapping affinity group model where we can disperse and re-engage fluidly as the situation demands and maybe it's just feeling stuck in the model where the structural model is to grow big and homogenous to be stable

@siderea If you are in the UK, btw, there is a UK bill that is seeking something similar in mandated censorship and surveillance, forced weakening of encryption and forced age verification where content deemed to be of a sufficiently adult nature (not just covering porn).

Wikipedia has said if this passes they will block the UK from Wikipedia if needed.

Signal has said they will cease to operate in the UK. Apple among others have raised concerns.

More details here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/uk-government-very-close-eroding-encryption-worldwide

As a blind Mastodonian who is made happy by alt text every day, I'd like to request anyone who feels inclined or able, to post and describe insects. I've really enjoyed the occasional alt text describing flying and crawling things.