Andreas Textor @atextor@chaos.social

Always keep this in mind: While the global spreading of the #Wuhan-type #Coronavirus is changing the world as we know it, it is likely to be a short-term disruption. #climatechange however is a far bigger issue, addressing the basic conditions for human life to strive on Earth. So please do not forget about long-term challenges seen the dramatic evolution of current events.
Comic snatched from @melinux.

so erbärmlich - diese berichterstattung. in der sondersendung des ard werden mittelklasse-einfamilienhaus-mit-garten-im-vorort-familien danach befragt, wie sehr sie doch leiden, während sie bei sonne im garten an der tischtennisplatte stehen oder im eigenen klettergerüst hängen. und gejammert wird, weil fußball ausfällt.

währenddessen im haus gegenüber: 4kinder, 3-raumwohnung, nix garten, nix klettergerüst und im park von den bullen angepampt, weil zuviele.

RT @sclawr@twitter.com

please, tech people. PLEASE. if you dont have a background working in healthcare/medicine, stop the hackathons and just give money.

the potential to do harm is too high, and designing for medicine is a thing. health communication/tooling is a specialty, not a weekend project.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/sclawr/status/1243664430296154114

Manche Reiche spenden jetzt Geld. Das finde ich super. Noch besser fänd ich eine Vermögenssteuer und einen höheren Spitzensteuersatz um die Unmengen an Geld wieder reinzuholen, die wir jetzt wegen #Corona ausgeben müssen.

If one has questions about running self-hosted, federated enterprise-ready setups in small or large scale, which allow easy collaboration without licensing cost, feel free to ask.

I may happy to run something like that for myself :X

And created some Ansible roles to deploy it within a day or two on CentOS 7 servers.

https://git.shivering-isles.com/shivering-isles/infrastructure

#AMA #federation #selfHosting

Looking for an #opensource alternative to take back control over data that resides outside of your control at web service? Check out http://opensource.builders!

So I was recently asked why I prefer to use free and open source software over more conventional and popular proprietary software and services.

A few years ago I was an avid Google user. I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and used their products everywhere. I used Gmail for email, Google Calendar and Contacts for PIM, YouTube for entertainment, Google Newsstand for news, Android for mobile, and Chrome as my web browser.

I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive (which were all in Google Docs format). I used Google Domains to register my domain names for websites where I would keep track of my users using Google Analytics and monetize them using Google AdSense.

I used Google Hangouts (one of Google’s previous messaging plays) to communicate with friends and family and Google Wallet (with debit card) to buy things online and in-store.

My home is covered with Google Homes (1 in my office, 1 in my bedroom, 1 in the main living area) which I would use to play music on my Google Play Music subscription and podcasts from Google Podcasts.

I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google account to buy movies, TV shows, apps, and Google hardware devices. This was truly the Google life.

Then one day, I received an email from Google that changed everything.

“Your account has been suspended”

Just the thing you want to wake up to in the morning. An email from Google saying that your account has been suspended due to a perceived Terms of Use violation. No prior warning. No appeals process. No number to call. Trying to sign in to your Google account yields an error and all of your connected devices are signed out. All of your Google data, your photos, emails, contacts, calendars, purchased movies and TV shows. All gone.

I nearly had a heart attack, until I saw that the Google account that had been suspended was in fact not my main personal Google account, but a throwaway Gmail account that I created years prior for a project. I hadn’t touched the other account since creation and forgot it existed. Apparently my personal Gmail was listed as the recovery address for the throwaway account and that’s why I received the termination email.

Although I was able to breathe a sigh of relief this time, the email was wake up call. I was forced to critically reevaluate my dependence on a single company for all the tech products and services in my life.

I found myself to be a frog in a heating pot of water and I made the decision that I was going to jump out.

Leaving Google

Today there are plenty of lists on the internet providing alternatives to Google services such as this and this. Although the “DeGoogle” movement was still in its infancy when I was making the move.

The first Google service I decided to drop was Gmail, the heart of my online identity. I migrated to Fastmail with my own domain in case I needed to move again (hint: glad I did, now I self host my email). Fastmail also provided calendar and contacts solutions so that took care of leaving Google Calendar and Contacts.

Here are some other alternatives that I moved to:

Gmail → Fastmail → Self-hosted (via Cloudron)
Google Contacts → Fastmail → Nextcloud Contacts
Google Calendar → Fastmail → Nextcloud Calendar
Google Search → Bing → DuckDuckGo
Google Maps → Bing Maps → OpenStreetMaps and OsmAnd
Google Analytics → Matomo Analytics
Google Drive → Nextcloud Files
Google Photos → Nextcloud Files/Gallery
Google Docs → Collabora Office (Nextcloud integration) and LibreOffice
Google Play Music → Spotify / Plex → Spotify / Jellyfin
Google Play Movies/TV → Plex → Jellyfin
Google Play Audiobooks/Books → Audible/Kindle
Google Play Store (apps) → F-Droid / Aurora Store
Google Android → Lineage OS → Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone (coming soon?)
Google’s Android Apps → Simple Mobile Tools
Google Chrome → Mozilla Firefox
Google Domains → Hover
Google Hangouts → Matrix and Nextcloud Talk
Google Allo → Signal
Google Podcasts → PocketCasts → AntennaPod
Google Newsstand → RSS
Google Wallet → PayPal and Cash App
Google Voice →Ting Mobile

Migrating away from Google was not a fast or easy process. It took years to get where I am now and there are still several Google services that I depend on: YouTube and Google Home.

Eventually, my Google Home’s will grow old and become unsupported at which point hopefully the Mycroft devices have matured and become available for purchase. YouTube may never be replaced (although I do hope for projects like PeerTube to succeed) but I find the compromise of using only one or two Google services to be acceptable.

At this point losing my Google account due to a mistake in their machine learning would largely be inconsequential and my focus has shifted to leaving Amazon which I use for most of my shopping and cloud services.

The reason that I moved to mostly FOSS applications is that it seems to be the only software ecosystem where everything works seamlessly together and I don’t have to cede control to any single company. Alternatively I could have simply split my service usage up evenly across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple but I don’t feel that they would have worked as nicely together.

Overall I’m very happy with the open source ecosystem. I use Ubuntu with KDE on all of my computers and Android (no GApps) on my mobile phone. I’ve ordered the PinePhone “Brave Heart” and hope to one day be able to use it or one of its successors as a daily driver with Ubuntu Touch or Plasma Mobile.

I don’t want to give the impression that I exclusively use open source software either, I do use a number of proprietary apps including: Sublime Text, Typora, and Cloudron.

https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/

Ich habe meine Studierenden im dritten Semester eine Datenselbstauskunft machen lassen, und darüber wurde eine Hausarbeit geschrieben. Viele schöne Erkenntnisse darin.
Das werde ich wieder machen, und noch ein bisschen in geordneterer Bahnen leiten.

Easy to use, end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer, zero knowledge free/open everyday tools are a prerequisite for human rights and democracy in the digital network age.

We don’t have them.

They should be the norm.

We have a lot of work to do.

https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology

#SmallTech

Git is planning to switch to SHA-256 soon. This is all great news, but the best thing is the command to convert an existing repo to the new hash. It reads like a shitpost and gets better with each argument:

git convert-repo --to-hash=sha-256 --frobnicate-blobs --climb-subtrees --liability-waiver=none --use-shovels --carbon-offsets

Source: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/811068/cfeb6a67b8dfbe47/

OH: wenn das Vereinigte Königreich um Mitternacht die EU verlässt, wie viel Platz wird dann frei?

1GB

#dorfleaks

RT @cstross
How much space will Brexit free up in the European Union?

1 GB

@aral @xerz

We did not suspect that Google is since 2013 not only **a** sponsor, but **the main** sponsor, of the Free Software Foundation Europe @fsfe :
https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus-2013.en.html . Thanks for the hint!

This is like if ExxonMobil was financing Greenpeace.

Just like for the SFC @conservancy above, we removed the #FSFE from the white paper.

#GAFAM
#SurveillanceCapitalism

maybe Rust for microcontrollers isn't ripe, but C started to grow mold already

#EthicalWebDev by EDRi: a guide to developers on how to move away from third-party infected, data-leaking, unethical and unsafe practices.

Thanks to @danny for sharing this with me as it's very relevant.

https://edri.org/ethical-web-dev/

I don't want to watch your fucking one hour tutorial video where you ramble on about shit!!! WRITE FUCKInG DOCUMENTATION

"Nobody talks about the real reason to use Tabs over Spaces"

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_talks_about_the_real_reason_to_use_tabs/

This is a pretty compelling reason. Esp. if you are writing open source code.

Dear everyone who is considering making a video of yourself talking rather than just writing the *exact same words* into a text file, a blog post or a PDF:

Unless you're specifically targeting people who literally cannot read...

Please don't.

Sincerely, A Person Who Doesn't Have Literal Free Hours To Hear You Slooooowly Say Something It Would Take Me Five Seconds To Read And Also I Can Ctrl-F It

Looks like piracy is due for a glorious resurgence. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/27/streaming-tv-is-about-to-get-very-expensive-heres-why