µ-Posts (What is this?)

While being stuck in England because my flights were cancelled, I watched a Moshe Vardi's talk that aptly argues against Cyber Libertarianism, why we can't reach (economic) equilibria and more. His OWLS talk is here youtu.be/BipEbkdbVNc.

IT'S OFFICIAL: @gitchat@twitter.com now natively speaks Matrix!! Read all about what it takes to add native Matrix support to a large existing chat app, and bask in the glow of a world where FOSS chat is increasingly FOSS, open & interoperable once more :D 🎉🥳🍾🌉🚀 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix​

I'm just incredibly tired of having to deal with the cookie pop-ups everywhere. Is there any legitimate use-case for third-party #cookies, apart from advertising? If not, we should just finally ban them (legislatively). Those that want to track us will use browser fingerprints anyway...

"Parliament wants to boost #sustainability by promoting #reuse and #repairs and by tackling practices that shorten the lifespan of products."

A huge win for the #RighttoRepair 🙌 🛠️ : https://bit.ly/3misaVW​

Okay so Google killed their Buzz, Wave, Talk, Picasa, URL Shortener, Google+, Hangouts and now essentially even Photos. I'm leaving Google unwillingly more and more every year. I wonder which of the last products of Google which I still use (Google Scholar, Translate, Drive, Maps, Youtube, and Android) is going down next...

Mobilizon has been released! Check out the official announcement:

Mobilizon. Your events. Your groups. Your data.

Go behind the scenes of the design of #Mobilizon, our new tool to free your groups and events from Facebook.

https://framablog.org/2020/10/27/mobilizon-your-events-your-groups-your-data

From next year on, all software developed by the city of Munich will be Free Software. This year they will already select five projects to start with. https://www.golem.de/news/nach-limux-aus-muenchen-will-schnell-open-source-auf-den-weg-bringen-2010-151702.html (de)

Mental note for myself: restarters.net have a great wiki https://wiki.restarters.net/, full of tutorials and other material for people that prefer to repair laptops, phones and other electronics rather than throwing it away.

Last Sunday the UK/US/CA/AU/NZ/IN/JP govts issued a statement asking tech companies to add backdoors into E2E encryption. This is a big deal: unfortunately backdoors do not work. Read about our alternative: combating abuse via decentralised reputation.🔒 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix-without-backdoors

Who reads privacy policies and terms of use these days? Turns out that some people do and, moreover, they then make a short summary of the most important parts. Check out https://tosdr.org/ and https://privacyspy.org/ 😉 (and also tosback.org).

I love Michael Lewis' idea to create a dedicated search engine for personal websites (read his explanation here and here). I've added myself to the database so now you can find me (and much more) on https://searchmysite.net.

Cool talk by Bartosz Milewski on defunctionalization, called Replacing functions with data (he also wrote a blog post on the topic). In particular, I liked the idea at the end that, since functions can't be serialised, defunctionalization can help with distributed computation.

Edit: There was also an interesting talk "Deconstructing Lambdas" by Chris Penner on a related topic.

The end of my first day of quarantine. I'm staying in my flat and eating food powder. It feels a bit like being an astronaut with an abundance of gravity. 🙂 It's thirteen more days to go, wish me luck!

We’re proud to officially announce the Fairphone 3+ 🙌 It has improved cameras, upgraded software and even more fair materials, but here’s the twist: The exact same modules can also be used to upgrade the Fairphone 3. 🌍 📱 Read more: https://bit.ly/2D2uIpJ

I'm supporting Matt's initiative to make RSS great again. It's one my favourite web technologies. I used it already on my first ever website I made in 2005.