Freddy @freddyym@social.privacytools.io

Delighted to learn the brilliant UK-based Big Brother Watch has just launched their own podcast. For anyone who doesn't know them, they're one of the main privacy groups in the UK (they feature as one of the 'defenders of digital rights' in my upcoming course) https://podcast.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/podcast

#privacy #digitalrights #surveillance #uk #podcast

This is the kind of git commit messages I would like to write: https://dhwthompson.com/2019/my-favourite-git-commit

https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/

I'm just gonna leave this here . . .

Wrote an article for Glimmer the other week: "Building a More Privacy-Centric Web"

https://glitch.com/glimmer/post/write-as-privacy-centric-web-platforms

The New Commons https://robert.winter.ink/the-new-commons

State-Based Contact-Tracing Apps Could Be a Mess

https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-contact-tracing-app-fragmentation/

"Google no longer providing original URL in AMP for image search results"

Time to share this one again before it's too late:

How to fight back against Google AMP https://markosaric.com/google-amp/

Achieving accessibility through simplicity

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-27-accessibility-through-simplicity/

The House Is Voting on Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, Again. The Bill Still Needs More Reform

https://www.thedailyfodder.com/2020/05/the-house-is-voting-on-section-215.html

@yarmo Microsoft loves free labour, domination of technology and control over developers. That's why Microsoft "loves open source".

Microsoft as an entity does not love user control, privacy and transparency, which is why it still does not and never will "love free software".

Wish I could recommend cool free and open source games to people on here in good faith but I honestly can't because the Culture is so toxic. I was just playing openspades for example, and a player used the n-word and the f-word that is a homophobic slur in five consecutive messages, and when I pointed it out other players claimed it "wasn't worth bringing it up" or even worse asked "why are you offended?" followed by complaints about censorship etc when I obviously took issue with it.

This is an issue with the Free Software community as a whole, either utter indifference to open racist remarks or full-on support of them in the name of "freedom of speech". It stems from the culture of 4chan's /g/ board and infests anything that is open and fairly decentralized, since that draws them in. They know they have a foothold in these spaces because they always have, far before GNU Social and Pleroma. They may not be a majority in terms of actual developers, but unfortunately, by and large make up the most enthusiastic userbase of FLOSS software.

If you are an administrator of networked FLOSS software or a developer of it you have a responsibility to do something about this rampant racism and homophobia instead of letting your free platform sit on idle and feeling smug about yourself for self-hosting. I urge you to check right now if anything you are hosting, from chats to games to file hosting services, is being used by this toxic side of the community and if so to put a stop to it. They feel encouraged by the platforms they are given to the point where they have the fucking balls to join any given server, say the n-word, and expect nobody to take issue with it. If they want a platform, they ought to pay for it themselves or maintain their own fork, etc. Just stop sponsoring their bullshit with your free hosting and labor and they will rightfully feel less emboldened to be assholes out in the open.

#deplatforming #antifa

Sen. Ron Wyden Wants To Stop the Government From Spying on Your Internet Searches

https://reason.com/video/sen-ron-wyden-wants-to-stop-the-government-from-spying-on-your-internet-searches/

SourceHut donated €1,000 to PeerTube for their v3 efforts, you can help too:

https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap

We have link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" which allows you to indicate than an RSS feed is available for a webpage, but it would be cool if we *also* had a tag for downloading the OPML file which represents all of the feeds that the author themselves follows, so you could exponentially grow your subscription list with good blogs

Just got another email from a blind user of SourceHut thanking me for caring about accessibility in my work. And honestly, it wasn't difficult. I don't understand why my peers in web development seemingly couldn't give a rat's ass about accessibility. Maybe because at their level of complexity, to them "accessibility" means "a shitload of aira tags and a ton of work", whereas at my level of complexity it means "just keep it simple and don't do anything particularly stupid"