I was reminded of the Detect Missing Ad-blocker WordPress plugin made by Stefan Bohacek.

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.

Why, yes, I could!

Privacy is over-rated. It's not unimportant, but what I mean is privacy is an over-used trigger word, easy to mention, but it (the lack of it) is not one of the main harms of big tech. The main harms of big tech are more subtle, to do with opportunity cost, diverting the direction in which societal tools are built, towards capitalism investment value return, away from the shapes of technology that would be in society's best interests and values. Wish we had a word to express that. Oh, we do, thank you Cory Doctorow. Enshittification.

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#enshittification #bigTech

These are some of the talks I'm most interested in, at FOSDEM '23.

I won't be there in person, I'll be watching some from home and in the matrix.

By Tracks or Dev Rooms | Times are UTC+1

Special Extras

• Sat 18:00 Book reading: Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream — “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

Main Tracks (Janson, K Building)

There are a lot of good main track talks.

• Sat 11:00 Can we do an open source chip design in 45 minutes? — The state of free and open source silicon
• Sat 14:00 Linux Inlaws — A how-to on world domination by accident — the story of this podcast and its tech stack
• Sun 12:00 Rosegarden: A Slumbering Giant — How a 20-year old OSS project is still going strong — music composition and score software
• Sun 12:00 Practical Computerized Home Automation — “Home automation is an elusive technology — often desired, rarely achieved. This talk explores a successful ten-year home automation deployment, outlining the challenges that derail many attempts. It will cover technology choices, programing basics, and a dozen successful applications.”
• Sun 13:00 Podcasting 2.0: it's all about Interoperability — How Podcasting 2.0 will save the Open Internet
• Sun 14:00 Decentralized Social Media with Hachyderm — The unexpected Mastodon cooperative that broke Silicon Valley
• Sun 15:00 Running a Hybrid Event with Open Source — The Plumbers Experience
• Sun 15:00 Clear skies, no clouds in sight. Running a 14 person company on only free software. — They say it can't be done, they say it's too much work. But is it really? After 5 years of running Prehensile Tales on entirely free software I think I can answer this.
• Sun 16:00 Matrix 2.0 — How we’re making Matrix go voom
• Sun 16:00 The End of Free Software — How the Cloud threatens FOSS and what we can do about it

And one of the Keynotes I'd like to call out:

• Sun 17:00 Open Source Software at NASA

Great news: someone at the EU understands that public services must not foist Big Tech on their citizens.

F-Droid.org tooted the news yesterday: “EU Pilot project — De-monopolized access to EU applications”

What does this mean and why is it important?

I recently framed a take on this issue as “FOSS Apps Live In FOSS App Stores”. Free (Libre) Open Source Software apps should be distributed in such a way as to be available to everyone, not only to Apple's and Google's users.

Don't lock a FOSS Android app in Google's proprietary store!

Many of us are looking to FOSS solutions in order to keep our digital lives under our own control. We don't accept that any Big Tech company should hold the keys to a vast swathe of our digital life.