µ-Posts (What is this?)

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.

What it's like to fly these days? Despite Ryanair claiming that it's completely safe, they do absolutely nothing to remind people to keep the 2m distance in the queue. Also, I could only find two disinfection points at Stansted airport and those that I found were completely used up. I would expect the flight industry (i.e. airlines and airports alike) to behave more responsibly in the current circumstances.

Australians have suprise me. They came up with a fairly reasonable proposal to redraw the relationship of news organisations with Facebook and Google. See the explanation at politico.eu.

It looks much more sensible than the recent EU regulation that I wrote about earlier.

A nice talk by rysiek about decentralisation and about his project called samizdat. He also stresses the importance of static websites.

The talk itself can be found here and the transcript/notes of the talk here.

This is pure gold, a fairy tale about social networks and the current state of the web: The Serfs of Facebook, by Zach Alberico 😀

#HongKong swiftly approves a law effectively extending the Great Firewall of China to Hong Kong. There is no doubt that this is the end of Hong Kong that we know today. Source: https://protonmail.com/blog/china-censorship-hong-kong/

Wow, Replika.ai is yet another of Black Mirror's predictions coming true. See the review by Quartz on youtube.

This is scary https://www.nothingprivate.ml/

Edit: also check out https://amiunique.org/fp and https://panopticlick.eff.org/.

We all carry symbols of modern-day slavery in our pockets https://ethical.net/technology/the-slavery-supported-the-device-in-your-pocket/