SqueⒶky Pancakes @squeakypancakes@sunbeam.city

The book that is mandatory reading at every data collection and aggregation company

@mike_hales @mako

Free Software needs many things, such as a focus on diversity, a more deliberate way to fund itself without depending on corporatism, and increased interest in other human factors like accessibility.

I believe that coops can be helpful to deliver improvements on those fronts.

A timely reminder.

#Art13 #Art11 #saveyourinternet

microsoft announces a $80 surface usb-c dongle so you can connect your other dongles to it

The #bookshop kobo.com sells lots of non-DRM eBooks!

However, they also sell lots of DRM eBooks, all mixed together with the non-DRM, and no filter to sort them out

This makes it very difficult to look for non-DRM books on #Kobo.

So, to solve this problem switching.social presents the Unofficial Kobo Search page, which lets you find non-DRM books available on your country's Kobo site:

https://switching.social/unofficial-kobo-search/

Any feedback very welcome.

#eBook #eBooks #Books #DRM

Twitter was not bad because "hashtags this" or "trends that". Twitter was bad because:

1. Centralized.
2. They forced you to ID yourself with a phone number.
3. They hand your data to third party companies.
4. Most governments were using it to ID people saying bad things about them.
5. Ads and corporative campaigns.

Reclaiming RSS

“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.”

https://ar.al/2018/06/29/reclaiming-rss/

#ethicaltechnology

You can lead a horse to water but you can't teach it to fish for the rest of its life.

there are so many people out there trying to be good to one another

it's a goddamn crime capitalist society hides and persuades others to hide it too

From the Solarpunk Aesthetic tumblr:

Biotechnologist Marin Sawa and her University of London research group have created a proof-of-concept for printing solar cells onto paper using carbon nanotubes and cyanobacteria.

This technology is "[...] capable of generating a sustained electrical current both in the dark (as a ‘solar bio-battery’) and in response to light (as a ‘bio-solar-panel’) with potential applications in low-power devices."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01084-4

https://solarpunk-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

I've written a lot, in other places about how the modern web is a trashfire. I'm not going to re-hash all those ideas here, but I'll sum up:

- Massive downloads for no reason
- Arbitrary code execution
- Tracking you constantly (advertising)
- Increasingly silo'd
- Tracking you constantly (NSA Panopticon)
- Bad Laws (we'll discuss this at length.)
- EME/DRM in browsers