Notices by Éamonn (eob@social.coop)

Abuse of government surveillance is in living memory in Europe

Even if you trust your current government to bypass encryption to protect children, a future government may abuse that power

https://www.globalencryption.org/2024/12/european-union-member-states-speak-up-for-encryption/

@nazokiyoubinbou Yeah, this is an unethical tracking technique called fingerprinting

By combining together browser window size and a bunch of other browser attributes, it is sometimes possible to uniquely identify you

It is unethical, because it can be used in place of a cookie for tracking, even if the user has disabled or restricted cookie use

The W3C's recently published Privacy Principles note has a section on "privacy labor"

This is a very interesting framing of the issue of tech companies putting too much of the burden of protecting privacy on the person using the service

https://www.w3.org/TR/privacy-principles/#privacy-labour

I celebrated St Patrick's Day by spending some time checking with a mailing list of fluent Irish speakers in my company that the translated text of a consent user interface was idiomatic Irish.

It's challenging to express a complicated yes/no decision on UI buttons in a language that does not really have words for yes and no.

#introduction

Glad to be here on social.coop. I’ve long been attracted to the co-op ideal, and looking forward to seeing how it works.

My socialist, anti-nationalist politics were formed growing up in working-class Dublin, sickened by the carnage from both sides in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”.

I’m fighting the fight for privacy within a big-tech company in San Francisco, leading a team building user-interface changes that give people more transparency and control over their personal data.

@zir4n @5ciFiGirl Thanks for the feedback. Yes, perhaps the language of the posts is over-dramatic and does not have enough nuance.

A more nuanced wording might use something like "unprotected people" or "people without access to air conditioning". And maybe the wording should say something about how important the length of time exposed to the excessive heat, which is another factor.

I'll see if I can come up with other wording, perhaps citing a reputable source

@raphaelmorgan Thanks for the kind thoughts!

I've updated the bot as you suggested to add city and state.

I've also added a US-specific version of the bot at @heatwave_usa

@raphaelmorgan @meganL Thanks for the feedback!

Given the unexpectedly large amount of interest in this bot, I'm planning on spending some time to improve it, and all this feedback is helpful

@MichaelBishop @heatwave Good point.

I have created a second bot, @heatwave_usa , which is for heat waves just in the USA, and I configured it to present the temperatures in Fahrenheit

@heatwave And apologies to Americans, this is a Celsius-speaking bot

If there is enough interest I might deploy an alternate Fahrenheit version of the bot

@drwho @heatwave This is the formula I used:

https://github.com/eobrain/heat-wave/blob/main/wetbulb.js

Strictly speaking, wet-bulb temperature can only be measured by a physical device, but this formula seems to be a reasonable estimate based just on temperature and relative humidity

As Ellen Ullman observed, we build computer systems the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins

All software development is iterative

All software plans are wrong

The only way we advance is by learning from failures

@evanprodromou Testing if my reply gets back to Threads.

Let's also see what happen if I mention my threads account: @eobrain@threads.net

I just deployed a Mastodon bot that posts forecasts for the most dangerous upcoming heatwaves

You can follow it at

@heatwave

To determine how dangerous a heatwave is, it uses wet-bulb temperature, which is the temperature that a body can be cooled to by evaporation

Sweating works to cool you because generally the wet-bulb temperature is lower than body temperature

As wet-bulb temperature increases and approaches body temperature, people can no longer cool themselves by sweating and will die

@AnarchoNinaWrites Is this what you are referring to?

(Dulles's involvement in secret surrender negotiations with an SS leader in Italy, and Dulles's later protection of that SS leader from prosecution at Nuremberg)

https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/100927/huebel-lingen-allen-dulles-oss-and-nazi-war-criminals-dynamics

@garbados When Means spoke 43 years ago the competing ideologies were capitalism and Marxism, which he lumps together as "European"

I wonder how the speech would be different today when environmentalism is also a strong political force. Would Means consider environmentalists allies, or would he also lump them with the "Europeans" because he would regard their reliance on science as "despiritualization of the universe"

(If anyone else is interested, the speech is at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/russell-means-for-america-to-live-europe-must-die )

Walmart is unashamedly reporting that it is observing how customers' use of prescription drugs affect how much they eat, as tracked by how much food they buy on the store

The U.S. needs real #privacy laws

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/06/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-food-business

@ntnsndr @activitypubblueskybridge Looking at it from a Mastodon client it looks like a Frendica group is indistinguishable from a Mastodon bot that automatically boosts every post that mentions it

It would be easy to hack together an actual Mastodon bot that acts like that

The hard part would getting the conversation going

Also hard would be scaling it so anyone could create such a "boost-my-mentions bot" for arbitrary topics. Doing so, you might just end up recreating Frendica

@markhughes @blake @snarfed.org I wish it were possible to avoid servers, but I don't think it is

I think you need servers involved in at least the initial connection setup

Most people's devices are behind gateways and don't have their own globally accessible IP address, so you cannot just reach out and connect to them

And then there is the key exchange problem. How do you set up a secure channel without a server-based key exchange protocol?