Eric Case @case@mastodon.technology
The Internet was built as a kind of decentralized democracy. Change is slow and messy but it protects us from a single entity forcing their will on us.
When you move your data and social graph to a closed platform you vote for authoritarian rule.
Such choices never end well.
Any single entity that thinks they can protect a huge pile of valuable data forever is as naive as I once was.
We must stop taking the easy road or picking things based only on their UX.
Learn to use decentralized systems and teach others or the free internet won't survive.
Remember, open source means you can compile your own version if you don’t like the upstream. It absolutely does not mean you get to cajole the authors into including your own pet features.
As a hypothetical, suppose a fediverse client bans Nazis but you want a version that enables them. Download, modify, and compile that sucker! It’s open source: do what you think needs to be done. But you literally have no right to insist the author makes a pro-nazi precompiled version available for download.
Damn, sounds like Tootdon for iOS is going away: http://blog.mastodon-tootdon.com/entry/2019/06/24/111336 — anybody have fave alternatives?
A single regular expression hosed Cloudflare yesterday.
Before I go off to celebrate Midsummer by being in bed sick (Swedish woes), I want to share a small update.
#Tusky will keep blocking servers which actively promote fascism. This in particular means Gab.
We will get our next release out just in time for the 4th of July.
Don't even try to debate us about Free Speech. This is our speech, exercising #ANTIFA views. And we will keep doing it 
We will post a bigger update at a later time about what this all really means.
Ta-Nehisi Coates video • The transcript of his comments to Congress on slavery reparations was good, but hearing him speak is really powerful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcCnQ3iRkys #linkblog #reparationscoatesslaveryamericapoliticstootme
"The New Wilderness" by Maciej Ceglowski https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm
"[T]he giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold."
This morning isn't so much "technical debt" as "technical payday loan".
RT @adrien_jeanneau@twitter.com
The inception bar: a new phishing method
https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-phishing-method/
LetsEncrypt
I first started running gnusocial some time in 2015. I would have started earlier but I only had a single TLS certificate to be used sparingly and didn't particularly want to run it unencrypted, given firesheep and all that. Self-signed certs were also an annoyance since they tended to produce a lot of browser warnings.
The cost and complexity of obtaining CA certificates was a limiting factor before LetsEncrypt.
"A Decade at the Fruit Company" by Don Melton (video) https://vimeo.com/110571205
Pretty fascinating look at the origins of WebKit and Safari inside of Apple.
More nerding on the Apollo program: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/1078
I wrote a blog post about the differences between JavaScript and iOS developers, from a hippy-dippy "we're all the same, but also different, let's learn from each other" angle. I hope you like it.
https://ashfurrow.com/blog/learning-from-other-programming-communities/
For a taste of the new Apollo 11 film -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_(2019_film) -- check out this 20-min film about Apollo 17 by the same folks: https://vimeo.com/192013765 -- and this interview with its director: http://moveablefest.com/todd-douglas-miller-apollo-11/
