Notices by Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

@jdmcg yeah, gonna get in front of the staff on this one. Just forwarded the similar email I sent to the deputy principal I sent to the similar email from 2023, to which I received no useful response and suggested it'd be great to have more engagement this time around so I can assist CHS provide better equity of opportunity to their students, especially those surprisingly astute ones who choose to run Linux rather than an Adobe-supported platform.

@Salty @jdmcg The burden needs to go the other way. The free & #libre option must be the default. Let the kids choose to pay when they're older. The status quo is indistinguishable from a drug dealing business model. Schools aren't teaching principles, they're teaching proprietary vendor products. That's actually ethically and pedagogically indefensible.

@Salty I gotta admit, it makes me quite angry to think that someone would take the side of the expensive, elitist, platform-restricted tool over the egalitarian, multi-platform, freely available, and easily viable tool set.

The traditional excuse: "this is what industry uses!" just doesn't wash. It's a farcical argument that's pandering to US corporate interests, and shows a lack of equivalence in many other aspects of EdTech where the 'industry tools' aren't available to schools.

@jdmcg

@radicalresilience @herr_irrtum @Salty @trib @meejah @jdmcg I've been using Ardour for my recording... it's not always straight forward, but it can do *anything*. And it's come a LONG way since 2017.

@radicalresilience @herr_irrtum @Salty @trib @meejah @jdmcg for most things, Jack is no longer required. I don't use it myself. Modern Linuxen have pipewire for sound device management, which has a Jack compatibility layer if you want.

@Suiseiseki I call them Libre to be clear - here's more detail: https://tech.oeru.org/foss-libresoftware-its-about-clarity-and-values They're also free (in both senses). But when I talk to school staff who've got no idea of what I mean by 'libre' or 'free', I use a term they'll recognise. When I establish rapport with them, I'll explain in more depth.

Just got an email from my boys' highschool's deputy principal asking me to purchase an Adobe creative suite license (with student discount) for them so they can take part in art classes.

I've responded asking how we can ensure that kids who can't or won't run Adobe products on their computers (e.g. Linux users) will be accommodated by the school's arts programme. I asked them to promote the open source options, Gimp, Krita, & Inkscape which are, in the HS context, totally serviceable.

Looking at that Delta flight from Minneapolis that landed upside down in Toronto, I can't quite imagine how it could've flipped over like that without catastrophic destruction... that there're only a few injuries, only a couple serious, is hard to believe. But thank goodness it wasn't more devastating.

@Suiseiseki @lispi314 yup - have you seen this? https://davelane.nz/self-serving-generosity MS do it at an industrial scale.

@Suiseiseki because individual schools can't afford people who could keep such services running, and there're economies of scale to be had. NZ is *so* small, that a local NZ company would be run by people known, personally, to those at the various schools. Doing nasty things would rapidly result in reputational damage here (much moreso than in the US due to the difference in scale).

@Suiseiseki eventually, I'd love to see this sort of situation in NZ: https://davelane.nz/openschools - which would make what you suggest both possible and probably desirable... but one step at a time.

Ugh, on the rare occasion when my boys' school contacts me to do something, like consent to them taking part in a field trip, I'm usually presented with some hokey proprietary webservice from a 'plucky' NZ company. It's invariably hosted in the US, behind CloudFlare, with endless Google, Facebook, and other iffy offshore dependencies (looking at my uMatrix extension). Why can't they just be local, libre solutions funded by the Ministry of Ed, hosted by some NZ company here?

The conventional wisdom suggests that WhatsApp provides 'fully encrypted' messaging between parties. I know that the Fediverse has a disproportionately high population of folk with a credible understanding of advanced cryptography... Can any of you tell me whether we can *prove* that the code running in the actual proprietary WhatsApp client is implementing uncompromised end-to-end encryption that only the sending & receiving part(y|ies) can decrypt? Or are we just taking Meta's word for it?

@be yes, I guess my point is that, unless we can see the code that's gone into the actual clients we're using, at both ends, it's impossible to say with confidence that the encryption is sound... The real evidence it's *not* sound is hard to determine for sure, but over time, the weight of evidence might prove it's not (or Meta might be sitting on their knowledge of what's being sent via their messenger for some very high-value situation, e.g. global power dynamics)...

@be in any case, as I say in https://davelane.nz/proprietary, if we're dealing with proprietary clients that we can't build ourselves with a full tool change we can verify ourselves, we're forced to put our trust in 3rd parties with every interest in betraying us if that increases shareholder value. That, to me, is an oppressive liability, which is why, to the extend I can, I avoid being subjected to it.

@be bingo - I suspect that because Meta controls both ends of every communication via WhatsApp, there're ways they could 'legitimately' claim 'E2EE' while still having full knowledge of the content of each communication (e.g. having 2 streams of data going via their central server, one E2EE, the other split at the server). & yes, I believe Signal has fewer negative incentives plus there seem to be possible alternate llibre clients (but the central server code is proprietary as I understand it).

I predict, in the coming months, it will become untenable for any non US organisation or gov't to claim their complete dependence on US BigTech is justifiable or acceptable.

The best thing that might come from the new US administration is that every other country in the world abandons US big tech on the grounds of clear & present threats to their digital sovereignty (took them way too long to work that out!). That'd be a tremendously beneficial (and cost-saving!) outcome for the world and could mean the death of big tech. Win-win. Bring it on.

How is it possible that anyone, never mind a local or national politician with some influence, can still promote 'growth' as an economic strategy without being ridiculed from all sides?! Probably for the same reason we still have the same folks seriously talking about #TrickleDownEconomics like an early 80s gold-plated dickhead, secure in the knowledge that most people neither give a crap, nor know any more than they do. The state of the world is relentlessly depressing.

I wonder how many of us are making the world better with our livelihoods... and how many making it worse, for ourselves and others we don't know (and better for shareholders who already have far more than most).

I wonder how many of us are honest with ourselves in making that assessment. I wonder how many of us actually think about it.