Notices by Phil (phil@fed.bajsicki.com)

Normalize sending people plain text files instead of making them log in to proprietary services to read your two pages of notes.

There's zero reason to use things like Word or Google Docs for purely textual, written word.

There's zero reason why I should register with a service and use up a thousand (or more!!!!) times more bandwidth than I would if I downloaded your 2 kilobyte text file.

A direct link. Give me a direct link. Send me an email. Magic-wormhole it. Whatever.

Just be aware of the cost to the alternatives.

The fonts loaded by Google Docs alone could carry books and books worth of text. The javascript they push on end users itself is freaking massive.

Stop being sheep, use notepad.

/Yells at clouds

/rant

@goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org Congratulations!

@evan@cosocial.ca @richlitt@mastodon.social
I don't understand this North American (I've seen the same sentiment from friends in the USA) bias for ignoring ROE.

Civilians, despite what other countries may have suggested by their actions, are not valid targets for military action.

To see this kind of sentiment is rather worrying, frankly.

@verita84@shit.poster.place No, it's really not over for the independent web.

It's over for Mozilla, though.

The reason the web is closed in the first place is because groups and companies like Mozilla are constantly striving for interoperability with corporate, mainstream platforms.

It's okay to be different. It's okay to lack features. It's okay to be gopher or gemini. It's A-ok to make your web site literally an index.txt file and make your visitors copy-paste URLs into their address bar.

Fancy, flashy, and full of advertisements isn't an "open web." It's a prison for rats. And the main way I have seen Mozilla combat this is by... remaining compatible with the mega-cancerous developments Google has been pushing into the Internet.

A set of standards and specifications that are intrinsically anti-consumer is one we should reject, rather than emulate. Mozilla has failed on that front.

How about no?

You're way overstepping with this, poisoning the entire ActivityPub ecosystem.

Let me break this down for you...

https://bajsicki.com/blog/loops-video-terms/

In short: if you really intend to federate, respect your users and their data.

Implementing federation while keeping these terms is a severe breach of trust, and would poison the entirety of the network in an way which will cripple ActivityPub, and undermine the very foundation of what AP stands for with regard to privacy, data ownership, and control over what we post to the network.

Hopefully that's not your intention. Is it?

#mastodon #admin #dataprivacy #datasecurity #fediverse #federation #ActivityPub #privacy #security #copyright #consent #instagram #tiktok #pixelfed #loopsvideo

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/dansup/statuses/113841956808397142

@kaia@brotka.st (it's actually a wrapper for git but nobody can tell because it's proprietary and intentionally breaks compatibility)

I spent some time writing and realized that the #FediBridge people are absolutely crazy.

For all of its flaws, the #fediverse has pretty great controls and awareness of #consent, licensing, media ownership and #privacy.

These people, however... I just can't believe that someone can be this short-sighted. It's difficult for me to call them anything but bootlickers, since FediBridge only ever benefits corporations and the businesses which they integrate with. There's no real benefit or gain for ActivityPub-based networks, that I can see.

There's this argument, which says that the transition from proprietary social platforms should be easier if you can stay in touch with people from the other platform.

Yet that's a flawed take. Sure, it's right on its face, but it misses the more important part: it takes away any incentive to actually switch networks if you can stay on the proprietary one.

Why would you switch to Fedi if you can interact with folks here from BlueSky, Threads, or whatever other evil platforms there are?

You wouldn't, because you don't need to any more.

So here's a thread where I lose my shit, because I never truly thought that anyone can be this... let's just say, ignorant.

RE: https://fed.bajsicki.com/notes/a231ifisjx

@kaia@brotka.st dude's blood must itself work as a vaccine by now

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Naw, this can't be real.

@kaia@brotka.st Jesus. This should be part of the documentation, not something locked behind Discord...

I really thought MS was at least above that.

@kaia@brotka.st Link? I wanna see this.

@vertigo@hackers.town @gsuberland@chaos.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I don't think we're arguing separate things here. It's all one issue, it merely has multiple facets.

1. Corporations are secretive because they want more money.
2. Corporations hold on to low-level control over devices via baked-in firmware which then interacts with the drivers, and only through the driver proxy does the device respond to user requests.
3. Since the firmware isn't available or accessible to the user, there is no file format or inter-op API here, even if the firmware has an "API" (well, kinda) of its own for receiving instructions and returning data.
4. Each firmware has its own proprietary set of instructions, there is no standarization or interoperability-by-default. The vast majority of that work is offloaded to the OS kernel, which not only means the kernel has to juggle gajillions of different calls and translate them between different devices... there is also a very clear performance loss because of these additional (but necessary due to the proprietary nature of the situation) overhead.
5. I would kill to be able to pipe shell output from my Linux computer to PowerShell on my Windows laptop by just writing into its process (or an stdin socket) mounted into /proc/lan/192.168.1.167/[pid] instead of... well, I tried setting this up before and gave up when I realized this isn't as easy as it should be.

So... yeah. I think we're very much in agreement. I just don't think focusing on software is going far enough, because the problem isn't rooted in software. It's hardware/ firmware that's the real issue, and that snowballs down into the software implementations which need to make concessions for all the arbitrary idiosyncrasies that proprietary computing brings along.

@vertigo@hackers.town @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @gsuberland@chaos.social Agreed on most counts, but there is another side to this: hardware.

Hardware is extremely difficult to design, and even more difficult to manufacture. When it came to Amiga, sure.

But then you have modern hardware which is on an entirely different level of complexity. How could anyone address that when it's pretty much all proprietary?

Linux, I believe, couldn't function effectively if the corporations chose to withhold participation, because hardware support would be a much more difficult task than it already is.

Then there's all the black-box software that we can't get rid of in our physical CPUs... and while I vaguely understand its utility, I don't think it's justified considering the privacy ramifications. "Trust me bro" isn't good enough when it comes to accessing all my personal files and information.

So... what's the alternative? How can a person have actual freedom in the way they compute and use software, if not on these (shitty) terms?

Hell I'd be stoked to have a fully free and open source little machine which runs (an arguably bloated) Emacs and a web browser.

But it doesn't seem like there is anything like this. Even the 'very freaking secure' Talos II has a pile of proprietary hardware and software that it relies on...

What's the way?

Bruh.