Notices by digitalRightsNinja (digitalrightsninja@fedi.at)

@fsf I recently noticed at a university where the science school had no computer labs - just a few machines in lobbies running Windows. No one used those lobby machines. All the students used their own laptops. Every single student ran Mac or Windows. And a majority used Google docs not LaTeX. These students took the easy way out on every decision. This really contrasts with what FSF is saying about being eager to learn.

I discussed software quality with one of the students. They were convinced proprietary s/w was better quality.

So FSF has a lot of work to do just to turn around the attitudes of students themselves. Maybe just that school is hopeless.

@fsf I’ve wondered what #FSF’s attraction to #DCU is based on. DCU’s app is proprietary closed-source and exclusively distributed in Google and Apple stores.

It’s really a bad idea to use #DigitalFederalCreditUnion because their website proxies through #Cloudflare, a privacy abuser. For the moment, it looks like they only use CF for their sales site not the login host. But many CUs actually let CF be a MitM on their logins and sensitive financial transactions. DCU’s poor judgement could spill over to the transactional site at any time. #DigitalCreditUnion is not a good #CreditUnion to endorse.

Also worth noting that Cloudflare is antithetical to software freedom, according to ¶2 of this article:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/cloudflare.md

@strypey Apparently you’re trying not to judge Weinberg’s action in 2003 by today’s standards.

Your perception is perhaps a bit like the controversial question of whether the British gov should apologize for chemically castrating Alan Turing. Of course by today’s social standards, people are rattled to the core by how Turing was treated in that despicable shit-show history. But some take the stance that it’s unfair to judge historic actions by today’s social standards because today’s social wisdom simply did not exist then, and you cannot expect historic actions to have a vision of future social norms.

However, Weinberg was a scumbag in 2003 /even by the social standards of that time/. I remember 2003. I remember as social networks emerged many were instantly known to be exploitive & abusive even by the wisdom of that time. Myself and others with a sense of privacy appreciation were already fighting privacy abuses.

So Weinberg is not off the hook. But more importantly, apart from the money-driven craze to exploit and extract, Weinberg inherently had no shred of respect for privacy at a time when many did. When privacy movements were underway, Weinberg did not give a shit about privacy.

The moment he pivoted to appear to embrace privacy (DDG formation), it was actually just privacy /theatre/, not privacy, that appealed to him. So many people remain fooled by Weinberg’s mastery of privacy theatre for marketing purposes. He is no champion of privacy and obviously did not have a dramatic change in values in a short span of time. And the bits of the article you skipped prove that.

@strypey @zeh @alcinnz

#DuckDuckGo (#DDG) can directly be blamed for plenty of shit:

http://techrights.org/2021/03/15/duckduckgo-in-2021/

@strypey @zeh @alcinnz

Indeed mojeek.com is not the only non-tech-giant #searchEngine (+crawler). From strypey’s mentions + some of my notes:

* #Mojeek ← does their own crawling
* #Metager.org ← does their own crawling
* #SearchMySite.net ← avoid (Cloudflare)
* #Searx ← just proxy software, many instances
* #4get ← another proxy software, about a dozen instances: https://4get.ca/instances
* #Gigablast ← does their own crawling, but what happened?.. they were dissolved last year & seem to now be www.alltheinternet.com
* #Ombrelo ← a proxy but more advanced than the others (filters/downranks Cloudflare sites)

#YaCy is notable because it’s a crawler that you can install and operate yourself. YaCy instances can be public-facing and they can also share indexes with each other fedi style apparently. Some Searx instances tap YaCy instances.

I would love to find a searx or 4get instance that rejects the tech giants, but aggregates from YaCy, mojeek, gigablast, metager, maginalia.nu, frogfind.com, & wiby.me.

And I would love it even more if it would make replacements:

* #StackExchange → #AnonymousOverflow
* #YouTube → #Invideous
* #Medium.com → scribe.rip
* #BBC → BBC’s onion site
* #NYTimes → New York Times’s onion site
* etc.

search.fabiomanganiello.com makes some of those replacements.

@alcinnz
Are you aware that Cloudflare sees all your searches on that site? Any privacy seeker/enthusiast would naturally be revolted at the idea of a tech giant having a view of all their searches.

Are you aware that Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that blocks various groups/demographics from access to ~20%+ of the web?

@strypey @zeh