Notices by dragestil (dragestil@hostux.social), page 4

@nantucketebooks my theory is that most people are simply politically apathetic, but it could still help to try to spread the message without the expectation that they'll care immediately. Raising awareness and planting the seeds are still quite achievable imo.

@nantucketebooks it could also be easier to talk about free software with people who care about politics especially about personal freedom. They are more likely to get the message. If they have the will to influence others the message could travel even further.

What's with all the fake grass here in Australia? It's definitely not a thing in North America/Europe.

Nice petition

Udemy: Stop making DRM an unnecessary requirement for accessing paid video content

https://www.change.org/p/udemy-udemy-stop-requiring-unnecessary-drm-support-for-paid-video-content

Just read the government response to FOI request "Rationale for funding Google & Microsoft software for public schools in New Zealand" submitted by @lightweight.

tldr is "lol no"

https://fyi.org.nz/request/23870-rationale-for-funding-google-microsoft-software-for-public-schools-in-new-zealand

@arstechnica hate to break it but there's probably a better way to spend $14 a month than on a proprietary malware.

For starters, an @fsf membership is $10 and that comes with the fun of making the world a better place

Hi @drwaus, I read in your latest newsletter that Victoria will implement a standard rental application process, which sounds like an improvement indeed. As a somewhat related question, do you know if it is possible to obtain property data from public sources? Both realestate.com.au and domain.com.au are bad for privacy and freedom.

@floreani is this the skill passport thingie?

@floreani the skill passport is also about verification, but skills and qualifications of people to potential employers. I wonder who asked for such things? Because I don't see any benefits at all but on the flipside they pose risks to people's freedom and privacy

@brewsterkahle this made me wonder if anyone has gone to Washington to argue for the case of free software and against propriatery software? @fsf #freesoftware

@gfkdsgn @rms @fsf @fsfe @art kind of sad these days nobody holds a sign for free software afk

A smart city should not be built on spyware, or entice or even require citizens to use nonfree software. But what would be a smart city that respects people's freedom? It could be as simple as having api endpoints for city services, with publicly available reference/official free client implementations. The backend is less important whose freeness does not affect citizens freedom. The service cannot be SaaSS, of course.

@Suiseiseki Yup, unfortunately. Same with ads and tracking. Many tend to look for the best half measures like ad blockers and browser extensions, while ignoring the foolproof method of avoiding proprietary apps and blocking all (nonfree) JavaScript or choosing a free browser that does not support js.

Proprietary software controls its users and exercise its power on them on behalf of its masters, often corporations.

The Man Amazon Erased

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/man-amazon-erased

@lxo I didn't like nnrss when i tried it two years ago, and I don't remember exactly why. Looking at my notes it seems to be a combination of

1. polling all RSS feeds blocks (emacs or gnus) startup
2. setting nnrss-use-local to fix the first problem caused some feeds to be missing
3. Refreshing mail with g becoming slow, it's bad idea for a less important thing (RSS) to affect a more important one (mail)
4. it seems to be contacting random feed servers too often

@lxo maybe there's a config that would work but the nnimap+dovecot combination was ironically simpler to set up and seems more reliable, with the support for fulltext indexing from dovecot too.

@berniethewordsmith On GNU/Emacs, a cron timer running an rss-to-maildir convertor (e.g. f2md), followed by a mail server (e.g. dovecot) that serves the maildir as imap, followed by gnus nnimap

I'm not kidding, that's how I read RSS on my laptop and it works fine.

All events involving technology use e.g. hackthons should include in the registration form a "digital dietary requirement", with checkboxes like "vegan (free software)", " vegetarian (corporate open source)" and "meat (megacorp spytools)" etc.

@rms would be hilarious if megacorps warn about each others software based on free software values. One can only dream.

Want YouTube links automatically redirected to a random invidious instance? It is trivial to write a URL rewrite function in emacs and have it transform all links you click before they are opened in a browser, and the function can be as expressive as you want. In Firefox? You need a fully fledged web extension, signed by mozilla, with limited functionalities. And if you write one yourself, any iteration big or small requires a new Mozilla sign to work properly across browsing sessions.