I’m quite tempted by fed.brid.gy (turning your indieweb site into a first class citizen of the fediverse, basically become your own instance), but I really like being part of the #socialcoop instance. I only really actively look at the local timeline (and passively I see a bunch of interesting stuff from elsewhere that gets boosted). Would be a shame to lose that.
Month: December 2017
Our team away afternoon at the start of November was a trip to The Glassroom, a ‘pop up tech store with a twist’. It was set up in a space in central London, by Mozilla and the Tactical Technology Collective, and upon entering it looks pretty similar to an Apple store. Cool white colours and ‘products’ on pedestals, even a Genius bar (though here named the Ingenius bar).
The topics of the exhibit were personal data, personal data security, and privacy. It’s purpose was to get us thinking about the kind of information that is stored about us online, who owns that data, and what they are doing with it.
We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.
— Eric Schmidt, when he was CEO of Google
Going to start doing the 8 Day Data Detox (https://datadetox.myshadow.org/detox), should be interesting to find out what data I’m inadvertently leaking online.
Can’t wait for PeerTube to become a thing. I get antsy everytime I watch something on YouTube.
When I’m being mechanically turked by ReCaptcha, who’s AI is benefitting? Is it in the public good or did a big corp buy them out?
Anyone use huginn?
“Huginn is a open source system for building agents that observe the world and act on your behalf.”
I actually really like the idea of digital personal assistants. Sometimes a timely digital reminder can stop my lizard brain from putting the kibosh on my frontal lobe. The problem, as with most things, is that they’ve been hijacked by commercial interests, who wish to harvest your attention, not support your intention.
Oh yeah, FDroid got a What’s New feature, and orgzly got an Agenda view. Libre software that I use getting new features, love it.
"Which smart speaker should I buy?" How about – none of them? Or at least phrase the article – "do I actually need a smart speaker"? Tech journalism is often horribly complicit in upgrade culture. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/01/amazon-echo-google-home-sonos-one-which-smart-speaker-buy
Browser plugin idea: something like those (admittedly annoying) anti-virus browser extensions that tell you if a search result is ‘safe’, but it tells you whether the organisation behind a particular result is safe for humanity or not.