ChuckSplatt @[email protected]

Mozilla’s now director of public policy once asked me, with a straight face, why I was giving them a hard time and holding Mozilla to a higher standard: “we’re just another Silicon Valley tech company.”

But that’s not what you tell people publicly, is it, Mozilla?

Still, it’s time y’all got this.

Mozilla is a half-billion-dollar for-profit corporation – whose CEO makes >$3M/yr – that has a foundation do its PR.

https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/

#mozilla #SiliconValley #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism

Because that is the core of Software Freedom/Liberty: the right for a Person to take a software that expresses a [political] view they disagree with, obtain a copy of that software with equal capability as the distributor, modify that [political] view to be more amenable, and then redistribute it without any additional licensing burdens.

It's never about what specific views or capabilities are in the software itself. Heck, you could fork and purposefully add bugs and it is still no less Freedom respecting.

I find it incredibly surprising that many #FOSS or #FLOSS folk take the 0th pillar's "freedom of use" to mistakenly mean "freedom of usage by creating a software feature" instead of the true intended meaning: "freedom of usage under the license conditions".

Because that's what RMS has always been about: the software licenses being symmetrical in power between the distributor of software and receiver of software. It creates a level playing field in terms of what "politics" are contained in the software.

#Tusky still does not violate the #FLOSS 0th pillar, yet another explanation:

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/tusky-is-nonfree/6448/36

Well, #MongoDB CEO certainly has an IMHO unusual way of looking at #OpenSource and #community. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/mongodb-ceo-tells-hard-truths-about-commercial-open-source

Update Firefox as soon as possible (to 67.0.3), there's a 0-day going around: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-18/

So Gab has decided that their own code that they spent $5M of investor money developing is so unsalvageably bad that they're going to use Mastodon's code instead, with the added bonus of leeching off of our apps (with Gab apps being banned from app stores)

This is an early warning to fellow admins to be vigilant and domain-block them on sight, when/if they appear (unconfirmed whether they intend to federate), and to app devs to consider if blocking Gab's domains from their app is necessary.

Why You Don't Own Your Tech: Companies abuse copyright law to lock you out of your devices, and give themselves a monopoly on repair and customization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JgcbtxURA4

So, I've imported ~25Gb of music from the Free Music Archive on https://open.audio using this method.

It worked beautifully, and it's now available for the whole #Funkwhale federation. Follow this library from your Funkwhale instance and you'll have access to it:

https://open.audio/federation/music/libraries/ce1fb6d4-fae6-464a-a34a-bdd46209ee82

You can also visit https://open.audio/library/ directly to listen to all this new content! (you don't need an account ;)

How to write good git commit messages

https://juffalow.com/other/write-good-git-commit-message

To the Tumblr refugees: welcome!

Having been on the Internet for over thirty years, I have one piece of advice for creative folks working online:

Control Your Platform.

Don't build a business around Facebook, Tumbler, G+, Geocities, MySpace, AltaVista, or any of these other third parties that claim to offer quick and easy results.

They all go away. Every one of them.

Build your own site. Use third parties to steer people to your site.

Third parties are the devil--useful devils, but devils.

It's 2018 and this municipality needs to explain internet users how to browse a website without using Google.

https://twitter.com/SouthDundasLIVE/status/1052585003652182017

The ticking #PHP timebomb. 62% of all websites still runs PHP 5.X version. "These branches are now EOL, are insanely popular, and are unsupported --the perfect conditions of plentiful targets with bad security that draw in attackers."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/around-62-of-all-internet-sites-will-run-an-unsupported-php-version-in-10-weeks/
#Infosec #Security

Chrome 69 will keep Google Cookies when you tell it to delete all cookies
https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088?s=21

(submitted by jwildeboer)

Ah, there's an English version.

tl;dr: Swiss tax app stores all data (including plaintext passwords) in public AWS bucket, dismisses researcher and national CERT as a hoax. WTF??

https://www.secu.ninja/2018/09/19/swiss-tax-app-stores-all-data-publicly-in-the-cloud/

BE 👏 GAY 👏 DO 👏 CRIME