Calling for the help of the fediverse!
Help spread the word of our browser extension Consent-O-Matic that helps automate answering those ever-present cookie consent pop-ups.

It's developed by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and free to use for Chrome/Edge, Firefox and Safari including for iOS.

Also, it's open source, so if you have a bit of technical skill, you can help us improve the rule set for greater coverage.

https://consentomatic.au.dk

I've been running mail servers and writing email software since the dialup days of 1995. I guess by today's trends, that could brand me a holdout.

But we're still hosting mail for hundreds of company domains across dozens of mail servers, all in a nicely packaged system that's always just an "apt install" away.

The landscape has changed over time, and, yes, it is annoying dealing with the imbalance that the behemoth mail providers represent these days.

But there's a lot to be said for not bargaining away your digital autonomy.

I saw @mwl selling his "Run Your Own Mail Server" book and jumped to pick up a copy. Not so much because I had a need for it (though it'll be interesting to compare notes!), but because I strongly support the idea that email is still a shared ecosystem and love that Michael is sharing the knowledge to encourage folks to continue to participate.

Long live the open Internet.

#ryoms

Seen a couple takes about the Hachette case along the lines of “the Internet Archive should’ve stuck to just archiving the Internet and not testing new theories of copyright” and uhhh... I’m not sure what it is you think the Internet Archive does, outside of testing new theories of copyright.

#InternetArchive

Left: the University of Copenhagen using photos from Fridays for Future marches to advertise its "sustainability" commitments

Right: the University of Copenhagen calling on a team of cops to arrest Greta Thunberg and its own students.

Solidarity with Studerende Mod Besættelsen for your courage - Academic Boycott Now!

https://www.instagram.com/studerendemodbesaettelsen/

#Palestine #Genocide #StopGenocide #Gaza #Sustainability #ScienceMastodon #BDS

Happy Birthday to the LVFS

9 years ago today I wrote 4 little PHP scripts and pushed it to OpenShift which was the beginning of the LVFS. We've since rewritten it in Python, switched the deployment from "sudo git pull" on the server under my stairs at home (literally) to deploying onto AWS with Terraform.

In 9 years we've onboarded over 140 vendors, shipped ~110 million firmware files and added support for ~85 firmware update protocols for ~1600 different devices. I'm pretty happy with that.

I am begging software projects to release programs as tarballs or plain old static binaries. I don't know what a Helm chart is. I am not installing an entire Kubernetes cluster. Docker breaks LXC and firewalls and is constantly breaking for mysterious reasons. I would rather submit myself to hours of `./configure && make && make install` frustration than try to hack through the endless hellscape of containerized deployment systems.

Magit is the tool that makes me fire dozens of commits weekly without getting in the way or triggering RSI.

Rebasing, branch and worktree management, amends, fixups and all other important functionality is 3-4 presses away.

https://emacsair.me/2024/08/09/magit-4.0/

Good work @tarsius, keep rocking.

Support magit project financially or by spreading the word, especially if you benifit from it financially or it saves your precious time.

#emacs #magit #git #foss #floss #funding

Being truly comfortable in your own masculinity looks like this 👇

A year ago all the alternatives to diesel in rail people in my timeline were posting about hydrogen

This summer they're all posting about HVO100

*If* you re-use cooking oils it's not too bad. But there are not nearly enough re-useable oils to cover the demand. So you need virgin oils, and that means resources. Making HVO100 *really problematic*

Railways: want an alternative to diesel?

E
L
E
C
T
R
I
F
Y

That's it

https://www.duh.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/pressemitteilung/hvo100-und-b10-scheinloesungen-beim-klimaschutz-beenden/

every single cent the EU seizes from bigtech in penalties should be redirected to fund @NGIZero

anyone with me?

in case you haven't heard yet: EU is planning wild budget cuts in the area of open source funding in their HORIZON program. This directly affects NGI big time.

dear @EUCommission , please continue funding NGI . If you don't there will be less and less tech and people left that are willing to develop and run europe's vision of a free and democratic internet.

Just got this captcha and the ancient Monty Python fan in me is vibrating

It is important that voice assistants only listen when a user says the wake word, but this is not an easy task! To increase the accuracy of microWakeWord, we need recordings from people from all over the world saying wake words.

We created a website that allows you to help us by recording yourself with your phone or computer and contribute them to the collective. We're starting with one wake word, and are working with the community to decide which to add next.

https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/

One thing no one ever talks about being an adult is how much time you debate yourself on keeping a cardboard box because it's, like, a really good box.

Drastic budget cuts for FOSS, by the EU, and the explanation given is that "because lots of budget are allocated to AI, there is not much left for Internet infrastructure". https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/17/foss_funding_vanishes_from_eus/ So here is one more way that the fever over "AI" bullshit does real harm. Infra projects that protect security, privacy, and other vital needs will be underfunded so that more money can be thrown into the "AI" black hole. Sigh.

YAY! My newest ACM Queue article is up at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3674953

It's part of a tongue-in-cheek series called "You Don't Know Jack", and it's about Bufferbloat and the LibreQoS project.

On Mastadon, they're @LibreQoS, or https://libreqos.io/. Have a peek!
#bufferbloat #latency #QoE #LibreQoS #ISP #OpenSource #FLOSS

It’s finally time to release my newest project: https://www.followthecrypto.org/

This website provides a real-time lens into the cryptocurrency industry’s efforts to influence 2024 elections in the United States.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #elections #USpol #lobbying

A router from Australia

SANDY TOKSVIG: yes, the windows NT kernel was first introduced to the public in 1993. it is still used to this day! windows 11 states that its kernel version is NT ten point oh.

ALAN DAVIES: and uh, what's the NT for?

SANDY: new technology. it replaced the previous--

DAVID MITCHELL: new technology? the new technology kernel?

SANDY: yes, and the filesystem, NTFS, is the--

DAVID: new technology file system. and - to be clear - this is from nineteen ninety three?

ALAN: yes, but you have to consider that it was new at the time.

DAVID: oh, i have to consider... everything was new at the time! that's what "new" means! i-- when i was born, i was new! but they don't call me "new david", do they? because - by definition - things stop being new after a point!

AMERICAN CELEBRITY GUEST: ok, but, like... you know, like, with the... the other one was like, the old one, right? so they--

DAVID: but you must understand that anything that has ever been replaced by anything ever could be described as "the old one", right? it's a completely useless name! "hello, my name is new man, my father is old man, because i'm new and he's not and we don't need to specify any further details!" it's madness!

AMERICAN: yeah, but [laughs]

DAVID: so what happens when they replace the new technology kernel, then? do we get the new new technology?

ROB BRYDON: i think it would be, they rename the new technology to old technology, and the replacement gets called new technology. so the NT kernel is now the OT kernel, and--

ALAN: i bought a new fridge last month.

SANDY: moving on!

❝
I was sitting in front of him telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things … were wrong. And that I, one person, was right. He basically •couldn’t• believe me.
❞

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/07/ai-students-and-epistemic-crisis.html