Don Thompson @guardeddon@social.cleverlibre.org

Manuscript for Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch. In the British library.

I'd like to make contact with someone who knows about pedestrian navigation for the visually impaired. Can anyone intro me? If not pls boost to your networks

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our global video archive.

There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.

What happens if that archival footage becomes unprofitable?

#tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism

Finding Geospatial Accounts on Mastodon

Besides following hashtags, such as #GISChat, #QGIS, #FOSS4G, and #OSGeo, curating good lists is probably the best way to stay up to date with geospatial developments. To get you started (or to potentially enrich your existing lists), I thought I'd share my Geospatial and SpatialDataScience lists with you. And the best thing: you don't need to go through all the >150 entries manually!

http://anitagraser.com/2024/02/03/finding-geospatial-accounts-on-mastodon/

Can’t wait!

I’ll be talking on the crypto wars, the surveillance biz model, & how in the late 90s we won strong encryption but lost privacy. What does this history tell us about defending core privacy infra like Signal from attack now? & how do we avoid the mistakes of the 90s?

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2024/keynote-meredith-whittaker/

Why the House of Lords can and should delay the Rwanda Bill

Using the Parliament Acts, peers can force the House of Commons to think again

This is an argument why they should do so in this case

By me, at Prospect

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/64673/why-the-house-of-lords-can-and-should-delay-the-rwanda-bill

24 seconds to view the product images on Amazon’s website

Earlier this month I finally retired my Motorola G4 that served me well for testing web performance for over half a decade. The new device that I got is the Nokia C02 (view specs). In terms of CPU and RAM, it’s the lowest-end Android smartphone I could find that was released by a mainstream brand in 2023. According to Speedometer, it’s about 25% slower than the 2016 Motorola G4. Yes, slower.

Did I go too low? I…

https://šime.eu/2

"Matt, tracking on the web, it's just how it is. If we get rid of it so many companies will die off."

There were companies before tracking tech. There was advertising before tracking tech.

Tracking tech is just how they can pay the least, to get the most. It's not a right. It's not a given. It's not required.

How did it work before? You made good products and the stuff that was most popular rose to the top.

Ban tracking tech. Hamstring predatory and scammy products that survive on targeting.

Douglas Allchin, Jonathan Osborne, and I have a new paper out about teaching science in this age of online misinformation.

The idea is simple: we tell people to trust the science, but we rarely teach students about the social processes that make it trustworthy.

https://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2024JCST.pdf

We’re excited to announce that we’re supporting #ActivityPub Test Suite and investing in the establishment of developer tools to ensure compatibility among ActivityPub implementations. This #interoperability also benefits users and will lead to individuals having more control over their data.

https://sovereigntechfund.de/tech/activitypub-test-suite/

How frequently do you use an RSS reader?

Please boost for more representative data.

Pleased to see @fesshole reach 1k on Mastodon - it's tricky for us to build up followers here as we don't know anyone. If you can help by spreading us around that would be fab - and you'll enjoy it more too as Fesshole is best when replies are lively. Also follow @anon_opin for rotten opinions that are occasionally ok.

@guardeddon checkout the interactive map, they cross link the data with how much each country is extracting gas.

I loathe airports. I particularly loathe the security theatre at airports. And what I particularly loathe about it, is just how utterly useless it is. Why do I waste my time dealing with any of it when, apparently, you can just walk on to a plane. Absolutely useless.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68118500

Whistleblowers flagged 300 scientific papers for retraction. Many journals ghosted them
Saga highlights how slow, opaque action by publishers threatens the integrity of the research literature

https://www.science.org/content/article/whistleblowers-flagged-300-scientific-papers-for-retraction-many-journals-ghosted-them

Afraid of content jobs being taken over by AI? Then write for humans.

Stop padding, stop vamping, stop over-explaining the background, stop putting the answer to the question below the fold, stop click-farming, stop writing for machine indexing, and stop putting a single word anywhere in the piece for any reason other than to make it a better piece of WRITING for HUMANS to read.

If you write for machines, you deserve to be replaced by an #LLM.

#SEO #enshittification

@ricmac Congrats to the migration off Substack and to Eleventy/Buttondown. In the same spirit I would also consider migrating away from Google Analytics to something more privacy focused. I am a big fan of @plausible.

Cool to see #DuckDB and #MovingPandas on Action to analyze flight data #ADSB
https://tech.marksblogg.com/global-flight-tracking-adsb.html#generalising-routes

@swearyanthony

I used to work at Very Large Multinational Company and the Legal department was quite clear in "don't email us. always call".

@idealaw