In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.

If your kids’ school laptops are surveilled, they’re surveilled by someone. Let’s call that someone Joe. Joe is a person who took a low-paying job that lets him surveil your kids. Joe likes his job, because he gets to surveil your kids. He gets to turn on the camera and look in your kids’ room. He gets to read the chat messages your kids send to their classmates.

Your kids would be better off without Joe in their lives. Joe is not a source of security. Joe is not protecting your kids; Joe is a threat to them.

“A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.

Regulating a money scam that uses art as a token isn’t regulating art, it’s regulating money scams.

Suing your former customers, now there’s a way to make people want to do business with you!

Once again, copyright maximalists fail to understand the medium they profit from, and propose to destroy it.

The display of hypertext always involves the active participation of both clients and servers. It has never been dictated solely by document authors. A given hypertext document (e.g. a web page) may involve resources drawn from many servers, including ones not under the control of the document’s author. In addition, client behavior may vary from that expected by the document’s author; in matters as minor as the selection of font size, or as major as whether to display images or execute script code. This separation of control is a fundamental feature of the medium, and gives rise to many of the medium’s strengths: for instance, the development of servers, clients, and documents may advance semi-independently, serving different interests.

Users may choose clients that they believe will better serve their needs. In many cases, users have chosen clients that take steps to mitigate the power of advertisers to control the medium: see e.g. the adoption of pop-up blocking (pioneered in Netscape plug-ins and minority browsers like iCab and Opera) and the later adoption of anti-malware technology such as Google Safe Browsing by Firefox and Opera as well as Google’s own Chrome. These choices have strengthened the medium, making it more usable and thus more popular: imagine how unpleasant the web would be today without the pop-up blocking developed 20+ years ago.

I quit software but I still grow beans!

This is a spam blog. The real report is here:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

If only we could be sure that $400 drones will only ever be used to kill tanks, and never to kill neighborhoods …

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement at the time of the unionization that it had “no objection to these Cognizant workers electing to form a union,” but that it would not bargain with them. “We are not a joint employer as we simply do not control their employment terms or working conditions—this matter is between the workers and their employer, Cognizant,” the spokesperson said.

NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect …

It’s not only what you can do, but what it won’t do to you.

Using your computer is not wrong. You shouldn’t be punished for it.

Using your computer is not an imposition on someone else. You don’t owe anyone for the privilege of using it. You have already paid for it. The OS vendor doesn’t have a lien on it; they aren’t paying you to rent ad space on your desktop.

You bought it, you own it, you can break it if you like but it’s not anyone else’s place to tell you what you’re allowed to do with it.

Your computer is yours – just yours – and it shouldn’t be spamming you with ads, filling itself up with junk, or telling you “you’re not allowed to do that because of the OS vendor’s deals with Hollywood”.

I’m not anti-commerce or anti-corporate. My preferred browser is plain old Google Chrome (with uBlock Origin). I buy games on Steam. The game I spend the most hours playing on my Linux system is Magic Arena, hardly an anti-commercial choice. But that’s my choice. I buy computers from Linux-focused vendors (currently System76) and I expect my computer to be mine, not the vendor’s to do with what they like.

Did cars peak around 2016? That’s when you could get a plug in hybrid, with Bluetooth audio, a rear view camera, but no spyware or mandatory subscriptions. Sure they’d pester you to get SiriusXM but you could just say no.

Free Software started as a political movement about the rights of computer users to learn, share, and improve the systems we use. Open Source was the business-friendly depoliticized version.

If I memorize the text of Harry Potter, my brain does not thereby become a copyright infringement.

A copyright infringement only occurs if I then reproduce that text, e.g. by writing it down or reciting it in a public performance.

Training an LLM from a corpus that includes a piece of copyrighted material does not necessarily produce a work that is legally a derivative work of that copyrighted material. The copyright status of that LLM’s “brain” has not yet been adjudicated by any court anywhere.

If the developers have taken steps to ensure that the LLM cannot recite copyrighted material, that should count in their favor, not against them. Calling it “hiding” is backwards.

To be clear, you’re looking for someone to both cover the costs of hosting your videos and serving them to the world, and pay you?

Some proposed design principles:

1. It’s a car.
2. It’s not a goddamn TV.
3. It’s not your goddamn ads platform or subscription service.
4. It is, however, a piece of life-safety-critical equipment.
5. Because it’s a car, the driver wants to deal with car stuff like driving, navigating, fuel, roads, obstacles, and not killing people.
6. They also want to make it passably comfortable by messing with the heat or AC, the fans, the windows, and the fucking moon roof.
7. Messing with your phone while driving is Actually Illegal these days in civilized parts of the planet. This is for good reason: people get killed that way.
8. If the car requires messing with your phone, or messing with something that is basically your phone, then you have failed.
9. There should be a big knob with a fan icon on it. Turning this knob all the way to the left causes the fan to turn off all the way. Turning the knob all the way to the right causes the fan to turn on all the way.
10. If I ever have to use a touchscreen to control the side mirrors, I will become an extremely unhappy ape.

Here’s what this sounds like to me:

george@aol.com and george@hotmail.com do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.

It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn’t work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That’s okay! It’s okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!

There’s no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.

Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it’s really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user’s first guess must be right.

Specifically, any fascist group is a conspiracy to commit murder. As such, there is no “free speech” reason to tolerate fascist organizing.

Edited to add: Discussion of fascist views is a different matter. I specifically mean people using your stuff to organize fascist groups or activities. If they’re trying to rally people into a group that wants to murder Jews or LGBT+ or socialists or liberals, then they’re not just discussing views — they’re conspiring crimes, and you don’t have any good reason to support them under “free speech” principles. Even the libertarians object to “force and fraud”.