Notices by Dave Rahardja (drahardja@sfba.social), page 7

The FaceTime ads were some of the most human of tech ads. It really showed how technology got out of the way of humanity. https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/111792353417015546

@annaf @Daojoan And at whose expense?

I find it especially aggravating when non-US posters scold US voters for planning to vote for Biden.

Look, I get it. Biden sucks. I hate him too. But the alternative this year is Literally Hitler, But Worse. I can assure everyone that allowing Trump to win will be far worse for the USA and the world than anything Biden might do. We do not want a Fascist USA Global Superpower, and that is what we will very likely get with Trump.

Maybe these posters have a voting system and coalition-based Parliament where they live, where they’d be justified in writing off a candidate like Biden. But here in the USA, our voting system is rigged and unforgiving, and we must vote accordingly.

I might also note that telling Biden voters to vote 3rd Party is also a well-known technique used by Republicans and foreign disinformation sources to secure a win for Trump. These posters are inadvertently playing into their hands. https://progressivecafe.social/@TonyStark/111755995729739680

@thomasfuchs Meanwhile, Mac users

Network.

Connected.

Wrench.

“Hackers can infect network-connected wrenches to install ransomware”

#internetOfShit

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/network-connected-wrenches-used-in-factories-can-be-hacked-for-sabotage-or-ransomware/

@zdl Sorry, nope. I’m not spending any more energy engaging with you.

@zdl Which nations are those, specifically?

@zdl I doubt the accounting for many of those claims.

“Italy and Russia have been wheeled out as examples of countries that spent far less on Y2K, and yet have emerged unscathed. But claims that the Italian government spent only £1.6m on on the bug are misleading. According to GartnerGroup, £1.6m is simply the running costs of Italy's year 2000 co-ordination office. The figure takes no account of the billions spent by government departments and Italian businesses testing, upgrading and replacing equipment and software. Russia, strapped for cash, has genuinely spent far less than the UK, but its work is far from over.”

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Was-Y2K-a-costly-non-event

“'Nobody knows exactly what Russia spent because a lot of the information is not published, but I estimate that the government and its agencies - including the military - spent around $50m and Russian businesses around three times that,' Terekhov [head of Russia's Competency Centre for Y2K] said.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2000/jan/09/y2k.observerbusiness

Once in a while I have #hunches about a software system that keep nagging at me, and over time it usually becomes clearer why something has been bothering me.

Tonight’s moment of clarity is that there is a fundamental problem with the #Fediverse, and it is that SERVERS CONTINUE TO OWN MY IDENTITY ON THE NETWORK. They may not be *commercial* servers, but they are still *someone else’s computers* over which I have little control.

Moving between servers is a high-friction activity: I lose all my posts and all my friends. Sure, I can reimport those lists in my new home, but my friends would have to rely on a forwarding note I left in my previous server to find me. I sure hope that old server won’t block my friends or go out of service, because then they’ll never find me.

On the #Fediverse, SERVERS CONTINUE TO CONSTRAIN MY AUTONOMY. Finding the “right” server becomes a high-stakes game for newcomers. I don’t have numbers, but I suspect that users would rather quit the Fediverse entirely rather than relocate their presence to another server when their first one turns out to be bad, because the experience is such a cognitively expensive exercise, and there’s always the looming threat that the next server is going to be just as bad, and they’d have to repeat the process over again.

I think #ActivityPub conflates the idea of servers as *communication nodes* on the network between which packets are sent, and servers as the means of *identifying users* on the network.

Users need IDENTITY PORTABILITY on the Fediverse, where their presence can be easily transported between one server and the next, and their state entirely restored wherever they go, without needing previous servers leaving breadcrumbs in order for friends to find them in their new home.

This may seem like trading off one complexity for another—a username/password for, say a cryptographic key or some sort of federated identity—but I think having ownership of one’s identity, and being able to pack up your entire presence in a duffel bag and take it somewhere else will bring us one step to a social network made for the PEOPLE, not the nerds.

#Fediverse #IdentityPortability

The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.

I started working at Honeywell Aerospace (AlliedSignal back then) in 1998, and by that time people were already working on Y2K issues. We were in the GPS navigation business, and there were real issues that would have caused aircraft navigation to go awry unless they were fixed.

People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing. https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/111670219441506220

@thomasfuchs I agree. I wouldn’t mind if this were a service that is separate from any particular instance. I could pay some $amount to a service to whom I grant read access to my activities, which can then recommend me posts not just from my instance, but from the entire (decent, non-creepy) Fediverse, so it can help me find accounts that I would otherwise *never* see, even on my Federated timeline.

The service must be entirely user-funded and take no advertising money, though. Otherwise, I’d just be volunteering my data into yet another marketing meat grinder.

@kbg @mekkaokereke Every time someone brings up “states’ rights”:

Haha I love this Australian anti-COVID PSA.

AVOID INFECTING PEOPLE YOU DRONGOS

Eww #ai #crap

The closer you look at it, the worse it gets.

@goatsarah That’s true, WELL IT’S TODAY ANYWAY

WE MADE IT! We’re turning this thing around! ☀️ Sunlight here we come! ☀️

#WinterSolstice2023

This is excellent reporting. Reuters somehow got their hands on seven years of internal #Tesla service records, as well as internal communications from service technicians and engineers.

What they found is pretty shocking to me. Repeated catastrophic failure of suspension parts. Power steering suddenly disabling itself. Evidence of denying warranty coverage. Failures that forced a recall in China that continued to be shipped in the US.

Pretty damning stuff.

#cars

“Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective”

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

@marioguzman We had a joke when iOS 7 came: We now have incredible high-res displays with super-accurate color, so let’s remove all detail from the UI and replace it with a vast expanse of white.