Matti Minkkinen @mmin@scholar.social

Is there a word for the lack of perspective that causes techies to create "privacy" solutions that boil down to:

"Don't trust that guy, trust me!"

... while not realizing that to the general public, that's effectively the same thing?

Sure, YOU trust yourself. Why should I?

(See: ProtonMail, Tutanota, much of the Fediverse, any "I'll host it for my friends" FOSS solutions.)

We need to build and advocate systems that don't require the end-user trust us blindly. Such trustable architectures do exist, usually by separating concerns and distributing power. We can build systems which actively curtail techie power.

(The GPL itself is such a tool.)

This is a fundamental principle guiding my work; it's one of the reasons #Mailpile will never directly provide a hosted service offering.

I feel like it's a principle not many techies share with me, and I'm not sure how best to advocate for it.

Greatest-ever shredding company slogan: "The Future Is Here And Everything Needs To Be Destroyed."
https://boingboing.net/2019/09/08/om-nom-nom-2.html

Anyone know of scandals in sociology involving data faking or unethical practices? I only find these 'blackbuster' events in psychology, political science and economics. https://twitter.com/BreznauNate/status/1170243599671283713

Periodic reminder to move your free software projects out of Microsoft GitHub.

Here's my collection of public free software hosting sites.
https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Free_Software/Hosting

Self-hosting a Gitea instance is also a good option if you have a server.

#MicrosoftGitHub #GitHub #FreeSoftware #Gitea

#CoryDoctorow from the same podcast:
"Mark Zuckerberg will tell you that there's no way to imagine a search engine or a social media tool that isn't spying on you and taking your information and trying to manipulate you, right? He'll tell you that some dude came off a mountain with two stone tablets saying 'stop rotating thine log files and start mining them for actionable market intelligence, right? That never happened."

NEW: We analysed 136 popular web pages about mental health in France, Germany and the UK and found that websites share users' personal data with advertisers and other third parties. Some also leak depression test results.

More here: https://privacyinternational.org/campaigns/your-mental-health-sale https://twitter.com/privacyint/status/1169120404415418368/photo/1

I think about this tweet a lot:

#showerthoughts #future #past #time

#GMail is harmful to e-mail ecosystem; its antispam blocking policy matches too many valid messages as spam.

It blocked LastPass email leak warning email, because it contained "a link" to a leaked site.

It blocked an e-mail from goverment agency addressed directly to me.

It discriminates all non-gmail servers, and it's pretty much impossible to own a private SMTP server these days, because GMail will classify everything as spam.

It's not how e-mail should work.

Consider dropping GMail.

Facial recognition is now rampant. The implications for our freedom are chilling -

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/18/facial-recognition-is-now-rampant-implications-for-our-freedom-are-chilling #rr

basically if people would just carve off 5% of the sci-fi panic and anxiety and spend that energy being legitimately concerned about how if you tell a computer "learn the rules of this game", the rules it will come back to report to you will be dripping with systemic inequality that must be directly confronted instead of excused or praised as infallible because "a passionless computer did it"

we'd all be much better off

WHAT PEOPLE THINK ETHICAL ISSUES IN AI ARE: wow.... we're creating... new life........

WHAT ETHICAL ISSUES IN AI ACTUALLY ARE: techbros worshiping the almighty algorithm, not caring to look at what bad patterns the machines are picking up (racism, sexism, etc) and how to avert them, and overreliance on neural networks meaning that said algorithms are treated as magical black boxes where nobody wants to (or can, really) point out exactly how the equation works (and why it may be faulty)

The gentle #Giraffe is facing a silent #extinction

#Environment News: Populations of the world’s tallest mammals, the Giraffe are quietly, yet sharply, in decline. Giraffe numbers across #Africa fell 40% between 1985 and 2015.

https://m.timesofindia.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/the-gentle-giraffe-is-facing-a-silent-extinction/articleshow/70710608.cms

#wildlife #Extinction

(Please RT) How would you feel about news publications hosting their own Mastodon instances?