Michael @mchlmc@social.coop

This passage from Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism just got a +100 relevance bonus in the wake of the #EU #copyright vote.

RT @openstreetmap
The EU Copyright Directive threatens OpenStreetMap. Find out more and how you might be able to help! https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/03/21/the-eu-copyright-directive-threatens-openstreetmap/

Big heckin' thanks to @wu_lee for all his work on getting the new infrastructure in place for accepting new #SocialCoop members. :)

Got a few process things to finalize, and if the proposal in the CWG passes, then we'll be on track to start getting in touch with the list of folks who've said they are interested in joining starting next weekend...

Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “We Thought We Were Searching Google, But Google Was Searching Us” #capitalism #facebook #democracynow #google #surveillance -->> https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/1/age_of_surveillance_capitalism_we_thought

What if privacy law was as strict as copyright law nowadays? You are not allowed to copy any private information about someone until 70 years after their death, even if it was non-commercial, and you can sue the heck (that is: €€€) out of someone if they do.
And then do the reverse to copyright law: copying anything copyrighted is the standard, creators who don't want it are refuted with "Oh, but you don't have something to hide, do you?", and Big Tech and Government actively help people to copy work from creators and to spread it further.

The digital world is a steady march towards a new kind of feudalism in which nothing is "sold" to us, only rented, making us tenant farmers of everything that was once our property.

My entire #FOSDEM journey has been worth it with this one brilliant piece of wisdom from Sage Sharp for newcomers:

Ask "what questions do you have" instead of "do you have any questions".

#OpenSource #FLOSS #FOSS #FreeSoftware

Who’d have thought that the difference between people as people and people as property would have come down to the intricacies of data structures and communication protocols.

If you want to know what did Facebook do (now) to provoke the wrath of Apple, this article sums it up pretty good.

tl,dr; Facebook are zero-ethics scum, misleading teenagers into giving them all their data for a few bucks.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/

Interestingly, TechCrunch claims that Facebook aren't the only ones playing dirty this way, with Google being similarly caught red-handed.

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour is parting with his considerable guitar collection (some of his guitars are art pieces which belong in music history museums, like Leo Fender guitar #001). He hopes the collected money will help palliate urgent problems around the world.

At the same time, this has the melancholic vibe of someone making arrangements for when these guitars won't have someone to play them anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E6mIYNO3So

#np #nowplaying

Google’s also peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/googles-also-peddling-a-data-collector-through-apples-back-door/

Almost as if… they’re both surveillance capitalists acting exactly as you would expect surveillance capitalists to act.

Via @laura

Ahh the satisfying feeling of "come-uppance"...

Apple have now revoked Facebook's enterprise certificate, breaking their ability to distribute internal iOS apps.

It came after news broke of Facebook's dodgy "research" app that paid teens and young adults for access to all their Internet data via a VPN - using their enterprise certificate to bypass App Store approval, in a clear breach of Apple's rules.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

Facebook is rolling messaging between WhatsApp Instagram and Facebook messenger into one.

While they claim to add end-to-end encryption (let's see about that), the silent part is about profiles, contact lists and access.

Internally, the founders of WhatsApp left over this and employees are rebelling. That tells you a lot about how user-hostile these changes will be.

Zuck wants more data. #DeleteWhatsApp.

Does your school give the data of your children to a random cloud provider in another country? Or does it what the capital of Switzerland does for its 35.000 students, keeping their data safe and secure in their own #nextcloud?

https://nextcloud.com/blog/next-big-open-source-win-capital-of-switzerland-moves-schools-to-nextcloud/

The internet used to be a city: it had its weird bohemian districts, its flea markets, its high-rises and back alleys. Now it's just a shopping mall, and I miss my old city so much

Today is the day by which the UK’s fat cat CEOs have already earned more than the average worker will earn all year: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/04/uk-ceos-make-more-in-first-three-days-of-2019-than-workers-annual-salary

Worker Cooperatives Are More Productive Than Normal Companies | The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-than-normal-companies/
#worker #workerowned #coop #coops

Google only allowing users to "pause" these data collections seems like a brilliantly devious ploy, to give users the illusion of control, while actually allowing Google to switch it back on whenever they like? I had previously switched off Location History but just found it was switched back on again.

"You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future under their very eyes."

"If solutions in the system are so hard to find, then maybe we need to change the system itself."

Stirring speech by Greta Thunberg at #COP24. Full video here https://youtu.be/HzeekxtyFOY
#ExtinctionRebellion

“Powerful technologies, and AI is no different, are neutral in themselves,” [Hassabis] says. “So it depends on society and humanity. How we decide to share the gains is also going to determine whether it is good or bad for the world.”

In other words: AI will fuck us up if we keep developing it under capitalism, so we better get that revolution started.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/dec/11/creative-alphazero-leads-way-chess-computers-science