Notices by mathew (mathew@universeodon.com)

Since printer discussions are going around again:

Never buy a laser printer that doesn't have PostScript. (It used to be an expensive extra, it isn't any more.)

Never buy a laser printer that requires driver software. (If it has PostScript, the most it should need is a PPD file to use with the PostScript driver your OS already has built in.)

Avoid buying inkjet printers. If you must buy one, get one that you can refill from bottles of ink, and make sure it supports IPP or AirPrint so you don't need drivers. Never buy an inkjet printer that takes ink cartridges.

These days, the only reason printers need driver software is that the manufacturer wanted to cut development costs for a product that they don't expect to support long term. That or enshittification.

Following these guidelines doesn't guarantee your printer won't suck, but they make it much more likely that it'll be at least OK.

Beyond that, check reviews for the cost per page, and buy accordingly.

#printers

@zombiecide @rodhilton Hyperloop was a massive success at its actual goals.

https://mobile.twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688

@rodhilton @Crookhorne@mstdn.social That said, clearly Elon doesn’t care about the climate crisis, just look at his private jet usage. Private jet from San Francisco to San Jose? Yeah, he’ll do that rather than use one of his own cars.

@gnutelephony About a year ago when I was still using Linux as my work desktop, Fedora went through a whole patch of brokenness. After each update one of X11 or Wayland would generally be broken; typically after the screen powered down it wouldn’t power up again. I used to log in after each update, open a terminal and get the reboot command ready, trigger screen off, see if it would turn on again, and if not hit enter to reboot and switch window system.

I can see why people like ChatGPT. I asked it “What would happen if I stuck my dick in the Large Hadron Collider?” and it gave me a very detailed and plausible sounding answer, whereas CERN didn’t even reply to my email.

Here we see an example of the perfect application of stick-on googly eyes.

- Facebook launched a tool claiming to clear your history — that didn't actually delete anything.
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/20/facebook-launches-clear-history-tool-but-it-wont-delete-anything>

- Facebook kept shadow profiles, data about people who had never signed up for Facebook or used the product. They probably still do.
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy>

- Facebook stated that you have no expectation of privacy on social media.
<https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/facebook-reportedly-thinks-theres-no-expectation-of-privacy-on-social-media/>

- Facebook uploaded 1.5m people's address books without permission, and claimed it was an accident.
<https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-million-users-email-contacts-without-permission-2019-4>

- Facebook paid kids to install spyware on their phones.
<https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/>

So, after all that you want to trust Facebook this time? That's up to you. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I don't believe Facebook will genuinely federate, and if they do then I sure as hell don't believe they'll moderate acceptably.

- Facebook found thousands of QAnon groups with millions of followers — and did nothing.
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/11/qanon-facebook-groups-growing-conspiracy-theory>

- Facebook refused to allow vaccine ads, but allowed antivax ads.
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-axed-pro-vaccine-ads-from-hospitals-and-health-orgs-let-anti-vaxxer-ads-slip-through>

- Facebook picked Breitbart as a high quality trusted news source, even though the site has a long history of racism and homophobia. (One example story about that, feel free to do a search for more.)
<https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/26/media/facebook-news-breitbart/index.html>
<https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/breitbart-virginia-shooting>

- Facebook was used to incite genocide in Myanmar, and failed to moderate appropriately.
<https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/>

- They then refused to help with investigation of the genocide.
<https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia/>

- Facebook donated to far-right politicians including one who described himself as "David Duke without the baggage".
<https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1184983336327888896.html>

- Facebook brought in The Daily Caller to fact-check posts.
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-brings-in-rightwing-news-site-the-daily-caller-to-factcheck-articles>

(continues)

First of all, why shouldn't we trust Facebook to federate and interoperate?

- Facebook originally supported chat using standard XMPP. <https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/breaking-facebook-to-launch-jabberxmpp-support/>

- Then they dropped support for XMPP in order to force people to use their chat client. It wasn't enough to require that people have a Facebook account — they walled off access via any third party client. <https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/04/facebook-chat-api-empathy-pidgin-stop-working>

- Facebook originally supported RSS feeds.
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9452359/how-to-get-facebook-page-rss-feed-everyone>

- Then in 2015 they dropped support for RSS feeds.
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28204978/facebook-rss-feeds-have-stopped-working>

- Of course, Facebook still support RSS today — as a way to get data *into* Facebook.
<https://www.facebook.com/help/work/420814338383806/>

- Facebook originally supported the open oEmbed standard, which would you to embed posts on your Wordpress site (or other web site). Then they blocked that.
<https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-instagram-drop-support-for-wordpress-embeds/383847/>

(continues)

- Think people might be encouraged away from Threads into the Fediverse via account migration? Facebook blocked an application that would let you export your own friend list for use in other social media systems.
<https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/content/225390/facebook-blocks-contact-exporting-tool-for-google-chrome/story/>

Next up, why shouldn't we trust Facebook to moderate?

- Facebook continued to actively promote posts that its own internal teams concluded were "bad for the world", because they had high engagement.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html>

- Facebook allowed right-wing web site The Daily Wire to break Facebook's content rules and use coordinated sockpuppet accounts for self-promotion, even after being told about it.
<https://popular.info/p/facebook-allows-prominent-right-wing?no_cover=true>

- Facebook allowed climate change denialists to be exempt from a supposed Facebook fact-checking program, because they spent money on ads.
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-arbiter-truth-fact-check-mark-zuckerberg>

- Facebook refused to count Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech and ban it.
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/facebook-algorithm-found-to-actively-promote-holocaust-denial>

(continues)

- Facebook decided to make politicians exempt from all acceptable content rules.
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-anything-politicians-say-is-newsworthy-and-exempt-from-platforms-rules>

- Facebook banked millions of dollars from the hate groups it allowed to continue to use its platform.
<https://gizmodo.com/facebook-has-banked-nearly-1-6-million-from-splc-desig-1838467645>

- Facebook helped Nazis advertise to people that their algorithms thought might be interested in fascism.
<https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-nazi-metal-ads-20190221-story.html>

- Facebook refused to moderate manipulated video.
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/24/facebook-leaves-fake-nancy-pelosi-video-on-site>

- Facebook blocked black people from talking about racism.
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-while-black-zucked-users-say-they-get-blocked-racism-discussion/2859593002/>

Next, why shouldn't we trust Facebook with fediverse data?

- Remember how Facebook user data was sold to Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook acted outraged? They were so upset that they hired the person responsible.
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambridge-analytica-joseph-chancellor-gsr>

- They also lied about when they knew about the problem.
<https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20829603/facebook-cambridge-analytica-email-complaints-months-earlier-claim-september-2015>

(continues)

I hate threads of posts on sites like this and generally don't indulge in them, but there are apparently people who think Facebook deserves a chance to federate, moderate and be trusted with our data, so here we go.

To avoid spamming people's timelines I plan to use the "unlisted" option after the next post, so that posts only show up for people who click into the thread.

(...and then I made the first post unlisted by mistake. Power user move right there. Well, I'm not going to delete and repost it all now. Click into this post to see the thread.)

Also, I'm highly likely to mute notifications for the entire thread, and if you start sealioning or nit-picking details about individual events then get ready to be blocked, because it's not about individual events, it's about the pattern of behavior.

(Oh, and of course this isn't a definitive list of bad behavior by Facebook; it isn't even all the stuff I've personally heard about.)

@ljrk @catsalad @mozilla @torproject @eff "They're okay with not blocking everything (like YT)"

The problem with that theory is that AdGuard blocks YouTube ads. It also uses EasyList-syntax blocklists just like uBlock Origin does. In fact, uBlock Origin's wiki points to AdGuard's documentation as a source of information on writing blocking rules.

The only thing I've found that AdBlock don't want to block is paywalls (presumably because of the DMCA), so I just subscribe to a set of community-maintained paywall removal rules in standard format.

People should definitely switch from Chrome to Firefox, though. Google's sleazy attempt to sell user tracking in the browser as "ad privacy" is enough reason for that.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

@goatsarah @Uilebheist @nske @cstross Right, they’re all made in China, so that’s not a plausible decision criterion. But you can include other ethical concerns in your decision.

The argument that if you can’t be morally perfect you might as well not try at all, well, I see that as morally bankrupt.

@nske @cstross @Uilebheist Optimized for cops too apparently.

https://petapixel.com/2022/12/09/raspberry-pi-under-fire-by-creators-who-are-upset-it-hired-a-former-cop/

@Uilebheist @cstross @nske It’s not so much that they employed him, it’s that they were proud of it, went after their own customers when called out, and remain unapologetic.

Sure, you can’t boycott everybody, but in cases there are less offensive alternatives — and in this case there seem to be plenty — I still think boycotts are plausible and effective.

I mean, your argument is the one a lot of people will use to stay on Xitter.

@gordonmessmer @Migueldeicaza @mattdm @maxsteenbergen Some people want Red Hat's support.

Other people are quite happy to support Linux themselves, but want to run commercial Linux software that is only supported on distributions identical to RHEL.

@fabiank83 @rodhilton Apple wasn’t the first mover for smartphones. There were smartphones with touchscreens before the iPhone.

http://meta.ath0.com/2013/11/17/the-sony-ericsson-p900/

(Also, the iPhone was pretty crap at first. No MMS, terrible battery life… but Apple steadily improved it. And FWIW I’m typing this on an iPhone.)

@rodhilton @fabiank83 Yeah, if you come up with a narrow enough contrived definition of “smartphone” you can argue that Apple pioneered it.

Apple didn’t invent multitouch either, of course; they bought it from Fingerworks. The iPhone was a minor improvement on previous smartphones in some areas, worse in others, using existing technology. That’s what Apple has always done well: take other people’s inventions and polish the design repeatedly.

@rodhilton @Crookhorne@mstdn.social Another piece of fossil fuel industry PR. The battery pack in my first Prius lasted 15 years, and old batteries have resale value for the valuable metals inside so they get recycled. Replacing it could have been done for $2000 or so plus labor, but that was more than the car was worth at that point so the whole thing went for recycling.