Retrograde @Retrograde@oldbytes.space
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Gemini
- gemini://retrograde.dk
Retro computing enthusiast and Commodore 64 aficionado.
Software professional, hardware dabbler.
Humanist.
Joined Oct 2018
Retrograde
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google antitrust filing thread from @fasterthanlime@twitter.com
RT Lock (with permission):
Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which.
Unordered list of fun things I learned:
- google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out
- google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation
- Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you've probably experienced (surprise!)
- Google is willing to do almost everything to prevent people from circumventing their ad exchanges
- This is what AMP is about
- Google habitually insider trades on their ad exchanges in every way you can think of and every way you can't. Too many ways to list here.
- The exchanges are also rigged so that google wins on bids where they aren't the highest bidder.
- A large amount of people inside google are aware of all of this
- If Google ever tells you some change will increase your ad yield, run. In fact anything they tell you is a lie
- Google has worked with Facebook and Microsoft to discourage them from increasing user privacy, lamenting occasions where they prioritized their reputation over their collective business interest
You can read the full unredacted document for yourself here:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf
Been many years since I last listened to Ministry but their new album Moral Hygiene is now in heavy rotation. \,,/
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New #weblite overview post: It's (or rather it will be) a family of specifications for a lighter-weight Web without scripting and focused on being simple enough to implement relatively easily, but still mostly compatible with existing simple sites.
The current plan is for the draft specs to go in the Weblite Codeberg organization. We should be able to accept contributions without a Codeberg account via email, though it may be more cumbersome than we'd like.
The main hub for conversation is currently the #Weblite tag on fedi, which isn't really optimal as hashtag searches are sometimes unreliable and don't necessary see everything. We'd like to get a better place to talk for that reason, maybe IRC/XMPP/Matrix, maybe mailing lists, maybe something else.
The specs currently planned for the first round are XMLite, HTMLite (based on XMLite's data model), CSSLite, and a bundle of recommendations for protocol and URI support. Standardizing HTMX as a user-agent feature for scriptless interactive applications more sophisticated than forms and links has also been floated and seems like a popular idea.
The main people who have actually started work on things are @alcinnz@floss.social (who's most of the way through writing the first draft of the HTMLite specification as I understand it) and myself (I've sketched XMLite in informal terms and I'm currently admin-ing the Codeberg organization). Please pitch in if you have anything you'd like to contribute, use the #weblite tag so we can see it!
Is it me or is HTTP/3 a terrible idea? 😒
I am sick and tired of constantly reviewing settings in web browsers to see if they have snuck in some new tracking mechanism that I get to disable because "your privacy is important to us".
I am sick and tired of all the black UX that goes into this, like opt out instead of opt in, or at least providing top level choices like, say, Fuck NO I'd NEVER EVER Like You To Track ANYTHING Now And In Every Perceivable Future. Like sync'ing every setting in your profile except tracking related settings, because hey that way you might by mistake opt out of tracking on another installation where you really wanted to be tracked. The list goes on and on.
Browsers are critical infrastructure and clearly an open source stamp on them fails in itself to provide any meaningful shield towards capitalist subversion.
I'd like a browser with a license that explicitly rules out *any* kind of commercial entity or interest contributing or directing development.
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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/
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Get off Facebook. Get off every Facebook service. Block Facebook. Don't work for Facebook. Don't provide services to Facebook. Find every way you can to get them out of your life and support others in doing the same.
They are ethically indefensible.
https://gizmodo.com/leaked-facebook-docs-depict-kids-as-untapped-wealth-1847763431
Datasheet sites are basically an infested swamp of hustlery, similar to almost any song lyrics site...
Just had the experience of a site showing an entry for a hard-to-find IC I was prowling for a datasheet to. They have a seemingly legit page for the IC with a few details and a link to the datasheet. You click it and is informed that you need to sign in to access the datasheet.
OK, I took the bait, since the IC is hard to find as I mentioned. I create the profile (throwaway details of course) and finally reload the page with the datasheet link promping me to create the profile.
... Only now that I'm signed in, there is no longer any link and apparently they do not have the datasheet and were only pretending to have it to get you to sign up.
Well, screw you too. 🤬
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TIL: If you use the default Python extension in VS Code you have to enable Telemetry to get it to load. That is some shit right there.
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Full user access to general purpose computing is not any weirder of a demand than that a calculator should not charge you extra to use primes congruent to 1 mod 4 on Tuesdays.
"XXX needs your permission to enable desktop notifications" - no you *really* don't. Because I *already* *actively* took away your capability to do notifications because *I* *do* *not* *want* your notifications!
Since when did it become OK for software to try and pull a Carthāgō dēlenda est on its users?
To just blatantly ignore user choice and keep nagging? This is even a service I am paying for, for crying out loud.
I hate how technology has become a means for companies to remotely manipulate u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ herds of assets instead of a tool of enlightenment and liberation.
It didn't use to be like this.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
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War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
We Value Your Privacy
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Me: Type a credit card number into a website using chrome.
Google: You added a new card to your Google Account
o_O
I'm sure there are very good reasons, but I'm sad that the #Kotlin built-in delegation support does not allow the delegate to be dynamically changed.
In short, it lets you implement an interface by supplying an object implementing the same interface, automatically forwarding all calls to it. But you can't change the instance, once specified.
It would have made this parser's state machine beautifully short...
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Another lost treasure of the internet is the sci.electronics.repair FAQ.
http://www.walshcomptech.com/repairfaq/REPAIR/F_tshoot.html
Just look at this goddamn thing. Thousands and thousands of words, chock-full of battle tested wisdom, enough to help anyone with some motivation solve their problems. Zero monetization, zero bullshit. What ever happened to that Internet? I sure do miss it.
I miss the time when you could write a web server in 50 lines of code. :|
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Gemini
- gemini://retrograde.dk
Retro computing enthusiast and Commodore 64 aficionado.
Software professional, hardware dabbler.
Humanist.
Joined Oct 2018
