Link: “The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat”
The circumstantial evidence seems pretty clear that Telegram is now compromised, and working with the Russian authorities to give them access to dissidents’ supposedly-private conversations.
Posts categorised ‘Technology’
This morning I came across a new-to-me web client for Mastodon called Phanpy: https://phanpy.social/
The biggest innovation I find cool is that it takes boosts out of the main stream and puts them in “carousels” that appear every once in a while. I think this helps to keep my focus on the actual posts of the people I follow, while still letting me see boosts š It also has grouped notifications and threading for replies when you view a post. Nifty stuff!
Link: “Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws”
Another example of the dangers of facial recognition technology ā where the Iranian regime once used to rely on surveillance and informants to oppress women defying its mandatory hijab laws, now it’s increasingly able to automate the process.
Like of “sup” by Drew Schuster
By the time we got to school the next day, the IT person had disabled
net sendacross the network. Weād flown too close to the sun, and I forever learned my lesson: never read the docs.
This is a great post. I shared it with my partner and apparently he did the same thing at high school (different message though, lol). At my high school, we were just in an eternal arms race with the IT guy to find new proxy websites he hadn’t blocked yet so we could play flash games…
Link: “There is a decision being made about you in this box, but youāre not allowed to look inside”
An article about how bureaucracies in Australia and the UK have used black box algorithms to screw people over (welfare recipients in Australia’s case, immigrants and foreign visitors in the UK’s) with minimal oversight or recourse for the screwed-over.
Link: “MÄori are trying to save their language from Big Tech”
Great article. A MÄori-run non-profit, Te Hiku Media, has collected hundreds of hours of audio recordings of MÄori speakers speaking their language, which they want to create text-to-speech tools and the likeā¦ so of course, gigantic corporates have swooped in and tried to convince Te Hiku to surrender their data so they (the big profits) can sell access to the tools back to MÄori people for $$$. Te Hiku steadfastly refused, and also sought to educate others as to why data sovereignty is so important.
On Mastodon and Algorithms
As you’re quite likely aware, there’s currently a massive explosion going on in the number of active Mastodon users, driven largely by Twitter users looking to escape Elon Musk’s disastrous mismanagement of that site. What this has meant for me is that I’ve found myself following (and being followed by!) perhaps double the number of people as I was one month ago, and I ā¦
Wiki: novel-writing apps
There are a ton of different apps out there purporting to help writers work through the process of planning, drafting, and revising a novel. God knows I have tried out a number of them myself! Obviously, you can just write a novel in an ordinary word processor, or else in a plain text editor with MarkĀdown for formatting (the latter is what I keep coming back to as the most foolproof way for me to ā¦
Link: “How to Run Scrivener on Linux” by Ian Betteridge
I’ve been mostly using macOS for the last couple of years, but before that I knew the struggle of trying to run Scrivener on Linux. This is a guide to getting the current Windows wersion running in Ubuntu 22.04 or 22.10 (or an Ubuntu derivative) via Wine ā working and not looking horrible š
Arc and Orion Browsers
It had been a couple of months since I last tried Arc Browser, so today I thought I’d give it another go. I mostly enjoyed the experience of using it last time around, and I only stopped because it was using an enormous amount of CPU, so I wanted to see if it had improved. So far it seems like it has, which is good news š
But then while I was on this train of thought, I also revisited Orion ā¦
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; sheās also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.