Notices by Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) (tokyo_0@mas.to)

@dalias @ska A thought experiment: Your child has cancer. Your only access to e-mail while you're at work is via your Android handset. The hospital is set to send you the results of their biopsy today, to confirm the extent of the tumor. But since a few hours ago you haven't been able to collect your e-mail and you don't know why. You tried calling the support line but the queue was too long for you to wait in your 45-minute lunch break before you had to be back at your desk. The hospital doesn't give out results over the phone for information security reasons.

Do you care now whether your Android phone works? Technology isn't only about technology.

request: legally mandated national public holiday whenever there's a shindo 4+ earthquake between 1am and 8am 🙏

@dalias Good points - thank you for giving it some thought and sharing these. So basically they've done to the web (in principle) what they did to Usenet: put themselves at the centre of it then break it for everybody else, before abandoning it themselves as well.

I'm not quite ready to give up on human ingenuity just yet, though. There were things that made old Google search genuinely good. I'd like to think there are ways we can use those principles even with the web we have today.

Surely it'd be possible for someone to rebuild the Google we had in 2009 (or whichever year had peak functionality and the best search) based on the research papers that were published around that time about the technology. Can't we just do that? What are the obstacles? Are the papers locked away somewhere, or just very expensive? Or does it come down to resources or storage? Surely they published some details to show everyone how great they were.

From the story:

"He admitted that the post was false, but said he had seen claims that halal food had been provided in past disasters, which made him angry and led him to think, 'Why are Muslims given preferential treatment in Japan?'

'I posted this because I thought that this kind of thing would happen in the latest earthquake as well and that Muslims would be given preferential treatment,' he continued."

- - -

Why isn't he being prosecuted for this? If the Yomiuri can find him, the police should be able to.

🗞️ Yomiuri: Islamophobic disinformation on meals served at evacuation centers spread after Kumamoto Earthquake
https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20260916-348953/

日本語版
読売：熊本地震でＳＮＳに根拠なき情報「炊き出しでイスラム教徒に配慮」…食事提供の自治体は「宗教的対応していない」
https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/20260912-GYT1T00285/

#Islamophobia #Japan #Kumamoto #news #racism #racismInJapan #religion

Somehow Japan has turned me into someone who sees a news report and says "oh, it's just a volcano at risk of erupting" and then goes on about my Saturday.

I feel sick.

Was just checking some links I used regularly last time I was working hard on kanji study.

One didn't load at all - an incredible blog full of homespun charm and 1990s styling, which featured most of the over 2,000 kanji taught in Japanese schools with illustrations and descriptions from the work of Shizuka Shirakawa.

There was a time when I referred to that blog every day.

Now it's just...gone. All that time. All that effort. What must've been years of someone's life, vanished.

From another perspective: You can think you're achieving nothing with what you post or share online, when you're actually changing someone's life.

We're used to thinking everything online will live forever. It's not true 😔

I can find the information elsewhere. I have the source texts authored by Shirakawa. And parts of the site are archived in the Wayback Machine (although the character encoding isn't quite right, and the images don't all load).

The content isn't so much the point.

The point is... that site helped me so much. And I never said anything. They never knew. They must've worked so hard. And everything they built is gone.

Perhaps they, too, are gone.

(I'm making jokes but I'm really quite pissed off about this. Fed up of seeing the bad guys winning. The only reason anything is being age-gated is big tech lobbyists and politicians who would rather damage those they are elected to protect than hold platforms accountable for the harms that go on there. Going to have to try to think about something else for a bit.)

Maybe teenagers will rediscover IRC and make it great again 😈

They wonder why people are tuning out from news. It's literally all bad news! Even when it looks like good news, someone or later you find out it was bad news. I don't think people are unwilling to know things. I think they are just unwilling to play a repetitive game where powerful people make their lives worse and they're supposed to act surprised.

@dalias They think it won't affect them. They will continue to think this until they have to start verifying their own identity, at which point some will proudly say "I have nothing to hide" (knowing they've hidden the things they have to hide elsewhere or can shelter via their privilege) while the rest will say "why didn't anyone tell me" despite the fact that various organisations and people have spent literal years telling them.

That "9 in 10" British parents support age-gating social media doesn't really tell you anything about whether it's a good idea given that a majority of British voters supported Brexit.

Maybe it's time we revisited web directories.

@lakelady @gbargoud @deirdrebeth @stux Nothing about a stadium no one can walk to "makes sense".

@baronvonj @tristan @stux Except they do, because they're one car further forward for every cyclist or pedestrian walking past them as they're stuck in traffic in their air conditioned car ☺️

@baronvonj @tristan @stux I can understand them wanting that. What I'm struggling with is how that would prohibit putting a lane less than half the width of a vehicle lane alongside it.