Late Night Blog

Here to share things I think about late at night.

Unfortunate to see but also the expected outcome.

The Internet Archive’s Press Release

Recap:

  • The Internet Archive had a long running program which lent out scanned copies of books.

They lent the scanned copies out to only one user at a time. Though this was likely infringement it was always let be by publishers.

  • In 2020 they created the national emergency library, which removed restrictions on borrowing.

Anybody could download a copy of any book. Even if hundreds of other people had check out a book you could still do so too.

  • Publishers got angy

I do not understand who thought full blow piracy was a good idea. That nor who thought covid invalidated copyright law.

Here’s to hoping they can recover from this lawsuit and future potential ones.

#internetarchive #ia #archive.org #technology

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

bluesky gains 2 mil users in a week

News about Bluesky's growth is spreading fast. With Brazil 🇧🇷 banning X it gained 2 million users in a week. Like any authoritarian action the government is being hypocritical. But normal people are trying different protocols.

PT Brazil, Lula's party, continues to use X while fining others for doing so.

This means it has much more than two million monthly active users. This makes it larger than all other social media protocols combined. It may or may not stay this way but I think it has a shot of doing so.

This is a very good development. First because everything is interconnected. Fedi does have a habit of blocking bridges but they are still there. I'm unsure if the bridges will still get the same treatment though. It's easy to be picky if you're the biggest. Less so if everybody is elsewhere and people want to participate.

It's also time for other protocols to get time in the sun. During the X exodus Bluesky and Nostr were in development but Mastodon seems to have squandered its opportunity. “Petty Fiefs” I've heard it called with so much defederation and cross-instance bickering while the development lags behind the other protocols.

Remember when the official Mastodon account said they may look into quote tweets and everybody on other software quote tweeted that post? That was funny.

Well I've never developed anything so maybe I shouldn't judge too much.

And how many times has Mastodon.social closed registrations even though there's 800k monthly active users across all of fedi while Bluesky can take on 2 million additional accounts in just a week with only a little lag. Tells me things are a lot lighter on the Bluesky side. Or they have more server power, but they're a non-profit so no venture capitalists bankrolling anything.

Not that I want Mastodon to die. But some competition might nudge them in the right direction. And it also might help them take an honest look at the toxic side of the fediverse.

In the meantime, I'll dust off my test Bluesky account.

@latenightblog.bsky.social if you want to follow me.

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

Collection of things I shared on social media over the last few months

Books

Blog Articles

Videos

News Articles

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

Some news of an extension in Chrome that gives any Google domain access to special APIs is going around. Secret is perhaps somewhat clickbaity as they were part of the repo for the last decade but most including myself were unaware of them.

The tweet that started it all

Credit to DM_Ronin@mstdn.social for the screenshot

Simon Willison’s Weblog breaks it down well. In short it gives basic telemetry and trouble shooting data.

There was a Hacker News discussion as well. I would give my thoughts but the conversation I stole a screenshot of expresses them perfectly.

hacker news discussion

A short post but thought it was worth sharing. No major scandal but another example of Google and their monopoly on the web.

#chrome #google #privacy

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

Ladybird was recently announced. It's a new browser engine being built from scratch with no planned revenue from defaults or ad. It's new enough the have not even released binaries yet but people have been sharing screenshots of it working on simple sites.

So far a lot of promise and development is being shown and this is very good news. Chrome is Chrome. Enough said. Mozilla is making in-ideal decisions. An unhampered FOSS option option is very great.

How we're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible is a post by Andres Kling (the lead developer of the project) that's a great breakdown of their goals and strategy. Certainly worth a read.

That is all on that specific topic. If you just want to hear about the new engine close off now. No value is truly going to be found by reading my commentary on internet drama.

Internet Drama Ladybird was announced and everyone cheered. Then came the drama. First came the policy on contributing.

Ladybird policy states it is politically and religiously agnostic as an organization

Policy link

You know the deal. Left wing fringe need left wing tool. Right wing fringe need right wing tool. Anything not explicitly left/right is woke or fascist respectively. I quite like this policy, there is no need a browser engine to tell you what appropriate tax code is or how many genders there are.

There have been some arguments that everything is political and FOSS software is especially political. The statement might not be wrong in a vacuum but a FOSS browser engine is very far removed from left v right politics so those should be irrelevant when it comes to browser development.

A stance on access to source code? Please. A stance on Google's business practices in the browser space? Sure. A stance on abortion? Please no.

With such a policy some people on mastodon started trying to dig up dirt on him. The worst they could find was a commit to change to gender neutral language that was closed in 2021.

commit screenshot

Followed by this response a couple days ago

response on twitter

Women do exist too so it probably would have been a good change. The reply was also a little prickly though he acknowledged that.

My thoughts are if this is the worst you can find on him then he's a pretty good guy to lead a FOSS team. But come to your own conclusions.

As luck would have it when I did research to find what people are saying about the controversy it looks like only a small number of people are powering the freak outs and harassment. A few dozen people federated with my Fedi server complained or hurled insults.

Lol he was literally called a Nazi for the no politics comment or commit rejection.

A few others spammed the git repo. Otherwise every video I've seen has just been celebrating it and every blog I've seen has only been celebrating it or condemning the unearned hate. Most people are just excited to see a good project come to being.

😀

#ladybird #foss #firefox #mozilla #chromium #google

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

The EU just withdrew from voting on the chat control bill. It's not gone forever but is a sign that they may not posses the political capital.

On the off chance you think it is good remember EU officials want exemption. Either 1: Those officials are child abusers or 2: government mandated backdoors are an abuse of power and they know it.

Nuff said

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

See what’s changing in Firefox: Better insights, same privacy

“Better insights, same privacy” “Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla”

  • Beyond the built in Google Analytics
  • Beyond the on by default telemetry
  • Beyond the ads
  • Beyond Pocket collecting your browsing history
  • Beyond upcoming Fakespot collecting your location
  • Beyond laying off their developers while giving millions to fringe political activists

Now we can have our searches tracked too.

Bite the bullet. Install LibreWolf.

#firefox #librewolf #privacy

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

This is an addendum to my previous post philosophy of my alt.

Pseudonymous discussions have played a significant role in shaping the society we live in today. In earlier times, anonymous pamphlets, coffee shops, and taverns were bustling hubs of intellectual discourse, where people discussed everything under the sun. These conversations led massive societal changes and the overthrowing of many kings.

All manor of fun hyjinks

Fortunately there aren't kings to overthrow at the moment. However pseudonymous speech continues to hold value in today's world. I recall all the large platforms banning individuals for expressing ideas that were later endorsed by the government (example: the lab leak theory).

There are increasing instances of harassment and doxing on both sides of the political spectrum. Strict laws concerning speech and expression are also being enacted across Europe as the world's tensions continue to rise.

Also the life expectancy of a Russian or Chinese journalist is not the highest.

I still believe psudononymous speech has value today. This does not mean one should be an ass and the worse should be shunned to their respective corners like Gab and Tanky Mastodon instances. But it's still important to be able to discuss all manor of things. That's yet another philosophy behind using my alt/pseudonym.

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

Recently I posted Bread to cheer me up and it has got me thinking about pseudonyms in general. This one's new but all my life I've been on some forum or social media under some form of pseudonym.

Sometimes the platform went kaput and sometimes I just stopped using it because I got busy or bored. I can't say how long I will stick around here.

My reasoning is everything I post is partitioned off into my own nom de plume. While a criminal investigation would probably link me to my account, anybody with a search engine or even who gets my IP won't be able to find me from my account.

In reality I'm fairly uncontroversial. I may have re-posted a slightly edgy meme. I also said that people having a meltdown over bridges over on fedi are being overly dramatic. But that's about it.

Like excuse me? You're talking about calling a lawyer because somebody made an instance on a federated network. Yes it's copying your posts like literally everything else on fedi. If being on fedi isn't legal consent to federate then fedi itself is illegal. Get off of here and go talk to yourself on an unfederated instance you dufus.

Okay I was a little nicer than that when interacting with others. Funny tangent aside time to get back on topic.

In one way writing microblog posts and regular blog posts is just easier when you're under a pseudonym. I can talk about my feelings and share wacky articles with the confidence of psudonymity. Even talking in person with people you totally trust there's always a hint of ego or fear of judgment.

There is also the lack of repercussions to things I do or say. This is not to say I intend to be mean or hateful. I still want to bring value, or at least indifference, to those I communicate with online. Still I have a few ways in which there could be trouble.

Talking about feeling down is a good way to get a firearm possession/carry permit revoked or have current or future access to sensitive technological systems reconsidered. Likely not the mundane “Bread to cheer me up” but there are always outlier cases.

Or perhaps a future potential employer see a slightly edgy meme and is unhappy about it. Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be the first to have an entirely online life. Who knows how it will turn out but I intend to avoid that.

Or perhaps future ideas change. If meta becomes the next gab to the fediverse could I end up on some eternal blocklist for supporting federation? Fedi citizens are sometimes overly dramatic like that. Refer to tangent above.

Precautionary as apposed to a specific need to hide my thoughts. But still peace of mind and insurance against a touch employer or friend with a search engine. I might be an anonymous troll demon according to Jordan Peterson. I might also be doing something that should be illegal according to Nikki Haily.

In reality? I'm just a dufus sharing feelings and half baked philosophies on the internet.

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi

A personal post tonight.

I been in sort of a rut lately. Personal stuff. I would hesitate to call it depression, if I did it would only be the garden variety. Calling it anything more would be an insult to people suffering from the real deal.

If it was caused by things I could fix (or at least mitigate) then I would be doing something about them. In my experience distracting yourself from problems you can fix leads to more trouble down the line. But it's not unfortunately.

So as the title states I plan to make some bread tomorrow night. I already added chocolate chips and raisins to my shopping list and I plan to make probably three or four big loaves with different flavors.

Can't have too much bread in the freezer and multiple loaves decreases the work to bread ratio. Besides cooking is always more rewarding when you plan to drop some off with family or friends.

I'm not exactly sure there's a moral to this post. Aside from me getting thoughts off my chest as a pseudonymous internet user. If there is it would probably be to try plan something if you're in a rut. Especially if you don't have a specific reason or do but can't do much about it.

If you can make your situation better then just a distraction is probably not ideal but an accomplishment of some form from cleaning to a walk has always been good for my mind. Same goes for a post like this I guess.

Hope you're all doing well internet strangers.

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The Socials Nostr – Fedi