Jack Allnutt @jack@allnutt.net

ICANN's Chairman says the community's opposition to the private equity takeover of .ORG is making this "a challenging time" for ICANN and the Internet Society. Let's keep challenging them to stand up for nonprofits' speech. Sign the petition at https://savedotorg.org.

My brand

"What's it like updating a legacy application?"

Given how many posts about instance admins being involved in, at best, very unproductive beefs is not exactly convincing me that this decentralised moderation concept actually scales. I’m getting the feeling that mastodon is essentially becoming a chaotic web of mini-Twitters now run by people who are unaccustomed to power and therefore ill-equipped for it and often outright dangerous.

(Except my instance admins, who are sweet angels of course)

When reading source code comments...

TFW: You connect to a server, and it is out of disk space *so* badly that bash completion won't even work

OK we need to stop with the argument : "we can't block trackers because then the web won't work anymore." I have been using Brave, Firefox (with Privacy Badger & HTTPS Everywhere), Samsung Internet with Disconnect (& built in tracking protection) & Safari (with Better blocker and 3rd party cookies disabled) for years now. I can report: the web works mostly fine without the tracking. In fact, it's great.

Connection reset by pear.

Holy shit, Samsung Smart TVs straight up send "snippets" of things that you watch back home to "to provide you with customized Smart TV experiences".

https://www.samsung.com/us/account/privacy-policy/

Search that page for the text: "Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched."

#infosec

Monopoly for Millennials: "Forget real estate. You can’t afford it anyway."

OK Boomer. Fuck you Hasbro.

(Yup, that's a real Monopoly version you can buy)

"A distinction must be made between advertising and "adtech" - digital analysis and advertising software. Traditional advertising was about building a brand. It used to be like this: if you read a newspaper, the newspaper didn't read you either. If you watched TV, the TV didn't see you either. The Internet has changed that. If you watch a video on Youtube today, Youtube will be watching you. Surveillance is at the heart of the business model. I call it "people farming"." - @aral

What kind of dystopian corporate malarkey is this?

This is from Qualtrics BTW. If you don't know, it's an "experience management" company that sells analytics rebranded as magic

A CRISPR baby but the only change is that there is an SQL injection attack coded in to the genome so that if it is ever sequenced, it drops all the tables in the company database