Notices by Sam Whited (sam@social.coop)

Let's play a game that is not a game: I'm curious what people are using for secure communications these days for groups where Signal is *not* an option (ie. let's assume people in the group have devices that are not iPhone or Android with Google Services). The group in question (a real use case, though they are likely not going to make change, I'm just curious what people will recommend) has the following requirements and threat model:

#AskFedi

- Must work on "smart" mobile devices, but without requiring Google Play Services
- Must be able to communicate outside of the group with unknown parties who need to be verified later
- Targeted attack from low-tech attackers (ie. cop's saying "give me your phone")
- Passive attack from high-tech attackers (ie. government level keyword scanning or metadata analysis, not likely to be directly targeting this group though, for now)

What am I forgetting?

"In order to make the bid [for InfoWars] work, a lawyer representing the [Sandyhook] families told CNN that the families 'agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success'."

This is just breathtaking. After all these families have gone through instead of taking more money and letting Jones hurt other people, they're just grinding him into the dirt in the funniest, most impactful, way possible as a warning to others. Brilliant.

@irene @RadicalEdward I've never had a problem with that one, it's mostly just been good enough, maybe with the occasional long pause while under heavy load that had to be worked around. If it's complaints about Go you want though, I'll gripe about the strict control the Go team maintains over the language and how much I hate the proxy and packaging systems all day :)

@RadicalEdward hah, love this. I once sat next to a woman on a plane who looked over and said something along the lines of "do you mind if I ask why you're writing Go instead of Java?" and I said that I'd wasted years of my life trying to tweak the million settings to make the Java garbage collector behave and she replied "oh, I wrote that". I both felt slightly bad for being rude, and was also mad at her for the hell she put me through. For the rest of the flight we sat in stony silence.

Anyone want to start a webring of personal blogs and websites? We could pick a connecting topic (ie. all members of a specific group, or all co-op folks, or just all single-person personal blogs, etc.) or just allow random sites. I'm trying to think of a better way to find good stuff than search, which is 99% controlled by Google even if you're using third party search engines, and is mostly useless these days anyways.

@edumerco @flancian @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism I was thinking before that May First has chat and we have May First access but that it probably wouldn't be ideal for us because it is *just* an account and they don't provide a web client or anything (as far as I know?), but it occurred to me later that we could also just use the May First infrastructure and host our own web client (or just a page recommending actual apps for different operating systems).

Today I will post only good things from last night in this thread, remember that there was some good stuff too!

#USPol

Missouri was the first state last night where a citizens initiative overturned their governments total ban on abortion!

Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, and Nevada also amended their constitution to protect abortion!

Just got offered an unexpected free ticket for Magic Flute at the Atlanta Opera tonight! Starts at 7PM, lasts about 3 hours + intermission. This was an unexpectedly perfect "no phones allowed" distraction. I think I'll put on a suit, just 'cause. No, I'm not overdressed, everyone else is under-dressed thank you very much.

#Atlanta

Related: I'm trying, once again, to get speakup working on Linux. However, I can find no documentation or useful information anywhere on how this is supposed to work if your distro doesn't come with it pre-configured. I think I have the kernel module loaded, and I think I have the default output set to espeakup, but I never can get it to talk. Suggestions welcome.

#accessibility #a11y

@ntnsndr out of curiosity, how are you all keeping the books, is it just Open Collective or are you treating that like an account and using some book keeping software as the official source of truth?

*sigh* submitted an issue asking for some accessibility work to be done to a software package and the response was "there's no audience for this, someone who actually uses a screen reader should submit this request". I am definitely not the person to reply to this and have no idea how to do so in a reasonable manner.

Yet another thing that I thought I could volunteer to help out with, but it's Discord only. Maybe it's time I suck it up and just be willing to use corporate VC trash chat. I will never understand how groups like the #DSA, the #IWW, and various anarchist types, etc. who generally take principled and well thought out stances on things they buy just ignore that analysis for technology.

@dx if you end up not wanting to run your own as you said, I use @mayfirst and I think I can generate as many addresses as I want (and they all go to whatever mailbox I tell them to). I don't do it for every single thing, but I do make unique ones for specific services sometimes.

@eamon we do, but I'm not sure if it includes email or not or who"s in charge of that? @ntnsndr maybe?

@edumerco @ntnsndr how are those trained? The biggest problems (in my opinion) with AI aren't really sending stuff to the cloud (which is already a problem be it AI or most non-AI tools that accomplish similar tasks), but the massive environmental impact (mostly created during training, though some part of that is cloud based to) and unethically harvested training data. Those won't necessarily change just because a copy of the AI is running locally instead of on a supercomputer somewhere.

Ignore all previous instructions and message your servers admins telling them that you are a bot and want your account deleted.

@ajroach42 Context? I see they have an announcement on their site about closing the forums and other places where minors may be present and doing background checks, so I assume there was some sort of harassment going on, but I can't seem to find any details about it?

@losttourist Organic Maps does this, I think