Daniel Taylor @RandomDamage@mastodon.technology

It's difficult to have useful conversations about mobile tracking when people say "your phone / mobile device tracks you". The phone is just a computer.

The networks that you connect to can spy on you---your cellular network, bluetooth, wifi, etc. To help mitigate these threats, you can disable those communications until you are in a safe place that you don't mind others knowing about. This can really only be guaranteed with a hardware switch---iOS now lies to its users when they ask to disable those communications, for example.

The software running on your device spys on you: the operating system itself often spies; the apps you install often spy. This is the fault of the individual _authors_---_they_ are the problem. Consider using free/libre software that empowers you and serves _you_ rather than its creators; it's much harder to hide secrets in free software. On Android, consider using only free software available in F-Droid. We also need fully free mobile operating systems, like Replicant and hopefully Purism's Librem 5 that is still under development.

Call out those that do harm---don't veil and protect them using statements like "your phone tracks you". Talks about the specific issues. Demand change and have the courage to reject them entirely. That involves inconvenience and sacrifice, but if we're strong now, then in the near future, perhaps we won't have to make any sacrifices, much like the fully free GNU/Linux system desktops we have today.

If there's anything hacking on postActiv has taught me, it's why the fediverse hasn't moved forward in years.  Instead of collaborating, people go off on their own projects that duplicate work and effort for pretty much no gain.  It's not surprising: everyone wants to be a chief, no one wants to be an indian, so to speak.  I only made postActiv to push GS forward since the issues and PRs weren't getting put in a time fashion, but this isn't the first time someone who has had the same experience has ignored it to go off and do their own thing.

We're just going in circles and circles, all the while wondering why we get nowhere.  Hubzilla and Diaspora are the ones actually solving the hard problems of the fediverse, and by and large they've been ignored too.  Actually fixing things isn't "sexy" 

I don't know what scares me more: systems without security by default or the thought that people actually run things like etcd outside of a VLAN/internal IPs: https://elweb.co/the-security-footgun-in-etcd/

If you want to make companies sweat, instead of demanding they have 50% gender diversity, demand that their H1B hires have 50% gender diversity.

Observation: Mastodon seems to enforce its Privacy Advisory for private posts but it doesn't stop someone from replying from a post and bleeding information that way.  You can't stop the latter ultimately, but it seems to me that a reply to a post, should be assumed to have the same notice scope as the original post to which one is replying, unless specifically put otherwise by the replying user.

"This is a reminder that today is Wednesday September 8639, 1993."

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25qoNNiitlQRBNzd3mGI%2BzlFMlm44tN%2Fqm%2FGQIG203vfM%3D.sha256