gregknicholson

It's also a really good example of how captions (this is a caption really, not exactly alt text) are context-dependent.

The caption you mention continues:

The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in the S-C arm, 65,000 light years away.

...which makes no sense (there's no maser visible in the image or mentioned in the article) until you realise that this image was uploaded for another article and is being reused here.

Evidently the website's content management system asks for caption text when uploading the image, rather than when selecting it for use in the article. The latter is the right way to do it.

If anyone in or near Iraq can read this, you can spread messages using person-to-person tools that don't need the internet at all.

For example, using the Scuttlebutt network (SSB), you can deliver messages from your contacts, using Bluetooth or just by being on the same wifi. They can be public messages, or encrypted private messages so only certain recipients can decode them. Manyverse (https://manyver.se) is a decent Android app for SSB.

There are other tools like Briar, which I don't know much about, but other people here may be able to help...

(I only want to wade in here on one narrow logical point, and avoid discussing the specifics of this case.)

If Stallman's past behavior was unacceptable, then he should have been fired for that.

Indeed!

The fact that he wasn't fired for his past behaviour doesn't necessarily mean that his past behaviour was acceptable.

Not firing him for his past behaviour may just have been an error of judgement.

If I get away with (say) stealing once, that shouldn't mean I now have carte blanche to steal anything without consequence.

a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry-with-us social networks.

Scuttlebutt is exactly this: https://scuttlebutt.nz

Sadly yes, because big businesses with insufficient concern for maintaining openness on the internet keep choosing siloed proprietary communication services, just because they're "more polished".

cough Mozilla cough Slack cough

There's no distinction between the "desktop" and "mobile" versions of GNOME Web. It's literally the same code (compiled for the appropriate processor architecture), just at a different window size.

I seem to recall (correct me if I'm wrong) that European courts ruled that “agreeing” to a very-long EULA for desktop software didn't constitute informed consent, because it's trivial to demonstrate that the users didn't actually read the entire agreement — even if they scrolled to the end, it's unreasonable to believe that most people read 10,000 words in 15 seconds.

So I assume that eventually these performances of consent-gathering will be legally judged meaningless.

Surely Google has an obvious competitor, right? Because otherwise it would clearly be a monopoly.

More generally, if enough people (including the author) think the content has merit, they will choose to support it (by which I mean “collectively supply all the resources it needs to continue”).

The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.

[dat]: https://dat.foundation/

[scuttlebutt]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.

As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.

Thank you for doing this!

1. Is it possible to use the open source Pocket client built into Firefox with any other server, e.g. by specifying another domain name in about:config?

2. Is there an open source implementation of compatible server software, that you could use to run your own server?

The answers to these questions will tell you whether Pocket is open source.

Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this.

I'm less forgiving. The Pocket service is proprietary - this technology couldn't fall into the right hands - and it directly competes against open web standards like RSS/Atom. I honestly don't know how they justify it against the Mozilla Manifesto.

Nice!

This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself.

Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style (ISO-8601 / xkcd-1179).

But nice!

The data comes from [Wikipedia's Current Events portal][1], so the site's author isn't directly choosing those sources.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

The sponsors are a business out to make money, not to make sound ethical decisions.

The way capitalism is supposed to work is that consumers (the capitalist synonym for “people”) avoid companies they don't like for whatever reason. The problem is this assumes consumers are reasonable.

The sponsor has little to gain by doing the ethically correct but publicly outrageous thing and standing by the innocent person, because there are more people in the angry mob than there are who would reward the sponsor for their sound ethics.

I've never used Facebook, so I don't know how well Diaspora can compete, but it seems like a possibility. For Twitter, there's Mastodon (and way-back-when there was identi.ca, its forerunner).

And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.

As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram

We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!

Happily, this is no longer true! https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/

They'll have a passably-functioning tool, which is a pretty low bar that I think we still set so low because we remember IE6.

But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.

Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.

This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!”

And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.

There's a rule of thumb that says any film advertised on the side of a bus is probably not a very good film.

This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.

By providing a coherent set of easy-to-use, privacy-respecting alternatives.

It makes it easier for those who _want_ to switch, but don't have the confidence/skill/energy to figure everything out on their own.

Similarly, Disroot made it easy to switch away from Google, by providing a complete (for my purposes) drop-in replacement; Ubuntu made it easy to switch from Windows.

I use Brief, a Firefox extension. It downloads items in the background while Firefox is open, which seems to be often enough that I don't miss anything.

Pocket directly competes against the open web (in the form of RSS/Atom). If Mozilla was a values-based organisation they would be promoting the open web at least as much as they promote their own proprietary system.

And yet the server-side part is still closed-source.

Mozilla's manifesto is just marketing now — it's obvious they don't really believe it any more.

This is one of the problems the Librem 5 is designed to solve.

GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here.

As with a lot of the FSF's messaging, I think the substance of the message may be correct, but the way they convey it just isn't effective.

If this is for a general audience(!), no-one was ever convinced by the 48th item in a list who wasn't already convinced by the 47th. You don't persuade people just by being right, and certainly not by banging on about the very many subtly-different ways in which you're right. Pick few strong examples and prosecute those decisively.

If this is a resource for campaigners, set out the audience and intent before you start. Preface it with something like “Here are various ways that certain aspects of Google's software can be seen as indistinguishable from malware. They may be useful counterarguments if someone suggests Google's software is trustworthy.”

If you don't read it too closely, it sounds like an advert for the very concept of doing activities away from Facebook, which made me chuckle.

“Exciting features include: Cycling through woods! Reading a story in a book made of paper! Now you can control what you see, do and think!”

The network is not the same thing as the provider. Anyone can use Mastodon for free, so Purism is part of a larger network than just Purism.

What we really need is a universal internet messaging protocol like Email, something that everyone agrees on and can deliver the rich experiences people expect today

I believe the lowest common denominator will eventually win, something like HTML or email. That may be Matrix.

I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.

Building a new (electric) car also produces emissions. It may be that we produce less emissions overall by continuing to use existing cars.