We tend to think of Google Search as the gold standard, the comprehensive, personalised, convenient, quick and reliable option. The one for getting things done. The experience that other search engines can only aspire to.
But, as we know, Google Search is designed around the financial goals of the advertising business. Can we understand just how far that misaligned incentive has warped the whole experience? What if a search experience were designed in a different way, around what's good for us, what's important to us, our real values? I don't mean just the same kind of search experience but with adverts stripped out. I mean if the whole system, from content publishing through to browsers and apps, were redesigned. How unimaginably different might that look? And as we obviously can't jump straight to that world, what insights does this give us about improvements we could seek in our current world?
Anyone still thinking Google Search is “good”, after learning about what is going on behind the scenes, is missing a perspective on what “good for us” would really look like.
“Have you ever wondered why every cooking recipe on the web has a twenty page biopic preamble? Because Google likes it better that way.”
Announced by @davx5app@fosstodon.org, the good folks at DAVx5.com who make the libre/open sync for CalDAV/CardDav/WebDAV, that connects Android/Outlook/Thunderbird to standard calendars, address books and file shares: they are now looking at designing a “push notification” standard for the DAV family of libre (open) standards.
Yay! Fantastic!
With push support, my family would get instant, efficient updates to our shared calendar and address book whenever any of us add an entry, for example.
The most interesting thing about this, for those of us who care about liberty and choice, is that the push delivery system should not be locked in to google/apple but should be able to use the UnifiedPush.org open standard that lets each end-user choose their preferred push provider. (See my other posts on UnifiedPush.)
I was just preparing a Merge Request to contribute upstream, when I noted,
You can review my merge request in the web UI at my TraxLab (gitlab) repo. Obviously you can't click the “Merge” button (until Forge Federation is done — there's an awesome project to check out).
It still grieves me that open source devs push me into working with Microsoft Github. Sure I understand the argument to use it “because it's convenient right now and 'everyone' is there” but to me there's a more important value I wish to uphold:
Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools.
Last week I was setting up Draupnir on my matrix test rig, in order to become familiar with Draupnir deployment before I integrate it with PubHubs.
Now I need to address end-to-end-encryption (E2EE). PubHubs exclusively uses encrypted matrix rooms, and Draupnir doesn't yet have E2EE functionality built-in. (Why is that? Moderation in public rooms is Draupnir's main use case, and for several reasons public matrix rooms are usually not encrypted. However PubHubs is different.)
There is a generic solution for adding E2EE to a matrix bot, and it's called Pantalaimon, an “E2EE aware proxy daemon for matrix clients.” So this week I'm setting up Pantalaimon.
You know that feeling when they send you a PDF to sign? “Simply print, sign and scan!” Or the more sophisticated ones, “Sign it digitally in our partner's secure signing system!”
Well, thanks to this awesome open source SignaturePDF, created by 24eme.fr, now we can sign a PDF file digitally, in our own home network.
Communicate confidently and respectfully with the public
Congratulations to GNU/Linux.ch and FSFE-CH for this initiative! I love what you're doing here. I think maybe I want to get involved.
I'm a FLOSS dev and thinker, and recently blogged about how we need to be doing exactly this kind of campaign. I'm delighted that you are! Though I'm no PR expert I have some ideas. In my Social Media Links for A People-Centred Community, the messaging I made up begins,
I also want to automate, with Ansible, as much as possible of the set-up that is required before running that playbook. I aim to document here what I have done and open questions about it. The numbered steps here correspond to the manual instructions in that documentation linked above.
I hate intrusive advertising on the web. I always install ad blockers to manage my own experience but I often forget that many of my friends and family are oblivious and see ads as a routine annoyance. Presumably they assume it's an inevitable part of modern life. And they don't even see the adjacent class of content, the invisible, nefarious, mass surveillance and tracking.
Could I do something to help my friends and family? Presumably these people are likely to share my values.
I've been waiting for this ever since I heard about it last year. Now available in the UK, I bought mine from Hive Books .
“In this hopeful story Ada and her friends join a movement that started back in 1983. Their courageous adventure of software freedom and learning how technology works is a wonderful way to introduce young people everywhere to the joys of tinkering!”
—Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
How powerful! What great makers and engineers we can inspire! Let's get a copy into every library and every school!
UPDATE: Look! David Revoy, awesome software-freedom artist famous for Pepper&Carrot, drew this impression of Ada — great to print as a poster or (dimmed) as a screen wallpaper — creative-commons licensed CC-BY-SA. Hi-res downloads, licence, etc.
Grown-ups: read Cory Doctorow's book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (ebook, audiobook, USA); or from Hive (hardback, UK). “When the tech platforms promised a future of “connection,” they were lying. They said their “walled gardens” would keep us safe, but those were prison walls. The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction... Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate.”
