My only good shot from totality (after I remembered to take the filter off the lens! 🤦♂️🤣). Totality was amazing and so I was drinking it all in. Temps dropped a good 10 degrees F, mosquitoes came out, the birds stopped singing, everyone’s solar lights came on, and it was incredibly dark. Really amazing! And then it was over and everything started returning to normal!
It's very disappointing that potentially as many as 60 million US citizens may lose their affordable Internet access because the US Congress has politicized things and so far failed to act:
This was an easy blog post for me to write! There is so much wrong with the State of Nevada’s request for an injunction to prevent Meta from rolling out end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger. For starters, WhatsApp has had E2EE since 2016, Apple iMessage since 2011 … and more.
Hopefully the district court in Nevada will agree and NOT allow the injunction! We’ll see.
Spending much of my day as a volunteer election worker helping at the polls. Today is both the Vermont Presidential Primary (part of “Super Tuesday”) and also “Town Meeting Day ” where we vote on our town budget, school budget, and yes, for a new fire engine 🚒 and a new ambulance 🚑 🙂 . My particular role is a fairly easy one.. I stand near the tabulator machine in case there are issues with it.. and I give out stickers! 😃
For ppl in the USA still thinking about making tax-deductible contributions before midnight tonight, here are my entirely-subjective suggestions for US organizations to consider who are working to make the #Internet better in some way:
- The Internet Society - (Yes, this is my employer!) There are still 3 billion people with no Internet access - and governments around the world are seeking to restrict what we can see and do. We need your help to defend the Internet! https://www.internetsociety.org/donate/
“Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative.” - part of a brilliant graduation address by Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) to York University.
A great piece about science fiction, optimism, pessimism, fatalism, humane agency, Luddites, tech bros, inevitability, and the need to always seek alternatives… and to find hope.
@darius@evan@noracodes And that’s certainly a valid concern. Attempting to run your own email server in 2023 is an exercise in frustration. (And yet I know a good number of people who still do.)
@evan@darius@noracodes A challenge is that the VAST majority of users don’t want to run servers or do anything technical like that. They just want to connect and communicate with their friends, discover new interesting people, catch up on news, follow celebrities, learn new things, etc.
They don’t care about centralized vs decentralized. They just want to connect with the people they care about.
Centralized systems made this easy, removed friction.
@darius@evan@noracodes I am having such MAJOR flashbacks to the early 1990s when I seem to recall that some number of SMTP administrators were adamant that they were not going to send or receive email from aol.com, because it had all these “newbies” who didn’t understand how the Internet worked and who were going to pollute all the messaging of SMTP-based email, particularly because they came from a commercialized, advertising-supported system…
At the State of the Word address this week, Matt Mullenweg was asked about support for the plugin, and he commented that less than 5,000 sites had installed it. So he wasn't sure how interested people are in it.
So... if you have a WP site, let's start installing that plugin and making more sites available via ActivityPub! 😀
It's great to see that #Threads is getting serious about offering #ActivityPub integration so that communication can happen with #Mastodon and the broader #Fediverse.
We NEED open, interoperable protocols that for this kind of communication and interaction. It's a key way to unlock the walled gardens that control so much of messaging.
And it's great to see a company the size of Meta getting behind ActivityPub. Kudos to the teams involved.
Way back in 1990, I had the opportunity to spend 6 weeks as a field worker for an ice drilling project on the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet. The researchers were drilling to retrieve an ice core to study climate change.
When my time at the camp was over, I had the chance to hike to the edge of a glacier before leaving. It was all an amazing experience!
Ever since, I have paid attention to news out of #Greenland … and it’s not good🙁
I look for patterns. I connect dots. I share what I see.Working for a bigger, stronger open #Internet for everyone. Writes on #InternetAccess, #DNS, #AI, #WordPress, futures. Focused on Low Earth Orbit (#LEO) satellites at Internet Society.#Wikipedia editor. Volunteer with #Rotary, #ITDRC, #IETF.Speaker, author, podcaster, livestreamer.Been online since 1980s - still remember USENET and UUCP. Lives in #Vermont. Spricht Deutsch et un peu de français. Enjoys #curling.#tfr