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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@teletekst/117465911664404378 The failure to harness and control digital technologies is getting harder to hide. #cybersecurity incidents on vital infrastructure, near daily data leaks by all sorts of organizations and businesses compromising the #dataprivacy of millions of individuals. While the well-known #techbros invented #surveillancecapitalism and now blow "AI" bubbles, one can't help but think that the much broader #digitaltransformati...

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  Alright, fresh #mastodon web interface has landed on mastodon.social. Now its a question of finding the time to explore it 😍

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  A new Open Risk Academy course is a deep dive into the #Overpass API, one of the main mechanisms for querying geospatial data from #Openstreetmap. The first part of the course covers underlying OSM concepts and the core elements of the #Overpass Query Language. More detailed description: https://www.openriskmanagement.com/academy-courses/deep-dive-overpass-api-part-i/ Course access (registration required): https://www.openriskacademy.com/course/view.php?id=96

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  The Open Risk Academy and Manual depend on #php so alas they will be offline until further notice due to the #php2shell vulnerability. #riskmanagement

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  RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:b25yty2pan3t46bvuhk3f6ea/post/3myhc57xg2c22 🖖 back to php-nirvana. Thanks Ondřej Surý.

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  Local Wikipedia is an interesting concept to filter Wikipedia content around a specific place. There is also a complementary approach used by some OpenStreetMap clients to provide Wikipedia links to nearby points of interest. Two of the best early Web projects complementing and enriching each other. #localwikipedia #wikipedia #openstreetmap https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/

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  #NRC is among the most respected Dutch newspapers and their setting up a #mastodon server is a beacon on the path to a democratic #DigitalCommons Short term it shows it is indeed possible for any modest organization not to be hostage to remote techbro overlords. Longer term it means probing more seriously into how a decent new digital economy could work. Each profession (from journalists, to retailers and taxi drivers) must figure this. There is no free digital lunch. @NRC@nrc.social @Marlo...

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  RE: https://social.ftm.nl/@EricChrSmit/117036253076647168 #BigTech is an aberration and it is important to see it as that, rather than accepting "this is just how things are". Even in the context of our flawed democracies and economic systems the historically unprecedented concentration of power and influence in the hands of a tiny oligarchy is extraordinary. We actually have far worse and difficult #sustainability problems to solve, but we will simply not get there as long as big...

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  A very tangible way to think about how much we have lost from the decades-long oligopoly strangling digital tech is to compare desktop versus mobile capabilities around #creativecoding #algorithmicart #livecoding and similar creative pursuits across music and visual creations. The #opensource frameworks available for desktops are mind boggling in diversity and capabilities, are arguably among the most sophisticated uses of personal computing. Comparatively, there is almost nothing on mobile.

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  An awe-inspiring aspect of all these extaordinary space missions of the last decades (which we were the first generatio and so very lucky to witness🙏) is how *familiar* these alien landscapes, whether on a icy comet, on Mars etc. how they immediately generate a sense a "place". Which in retrospect makes perfect sense: They are all just different fragments of the same icy-rocky disk round the Sun that Earth is part of. But before these missions we never had the vision https...

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  RE: https://social.coop/@afewbugs/116838061340666577 Same wish, but for us on planet Earth, not just the UK 😅 We'll probably never get rid of status symbols and conspicuous consumption has always been such a symbol, but maybe we can decouple them from massive environmental footprint.

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  RE: https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/116841799092682308 The denser the urban environment, the less it makes sense to use cars as the primary means of transport.

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  "Towards a Post-Social Media Studies" "For two decades, “social media” has been the master lens through which scholars have understood digital communication - an era defined by user-generated content, networked publics, and participatory culture. That era is drawing to a close" A timely review of the transformation of #adtech #socialmedia (which were never really "social") into algorithmically driven content delivery platforms Can the #fed...

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  The #fediverse uses the terms distributed (or decentralized) #socialnetworks a lot. There is even a Wikipedia entry [1] about them 🖖 Which is fine, except it is strangely redundant term as there are no "centralized" networks. A network is either a network, or it is one of Zuck's databases to which everybody's browsers connect, *pretending* to be a network 🥶 People have been ranting about this for ever [2] but hope springs eternal 🙏 [1] https://en.wikipedi...

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  People who think/wish that worsening climate fundamentals leading to #heatwave events will suddenly sensitize society to environmental #sustainability are probably counting themselves prematurely rich. Just a few years ago we had a planetary scale biological #pandemic risk event which is now almost forgotten. As soon as stress subsides prevalent cultures and mental models reassert themselves, like an elastic band that returns to its base state Real change does happen but is infuriatingly slow

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  @tante@tldr.nettime.org "AI" is no different (in this respect) from the adtech surveillance thing. People screamed and screamed about the risks to society. Zuboff wrote years ago the definitive book on #surveillancecapitalism but the odious engine is still more or less intact, printing billions of profits every quarter, buying the souls of regulators, politicians etc. Except... there are a few cracks here and there. You never know when they might grow and the whole damn immoral cons...

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  #EuroDaCe is a new project to compile a #crowdsourced database of public information about #datacenters, with a focus on facilities operating within Europe and towards estimating their environmental footprints (carbon and water usage). Critical geospatial information is sourced from #openstreetmap but must be further processed and combined towards creating the desired impact metrics. Description and first release are available here: https://www.openriskmanagement.com/eurodace/

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  The concept of an "AI" PC keeps swirling around those days. This time its #Nvidia with an #arm CPU and a GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores(...) but running... windoz 🤣 Anyway, #linux support might happen at some point but unclear if there will ever be a "new era" for #personalcomputing After the explosion of #smartphones , #surveillancecapitalism and tech oligopolies the trend has been dumbification and disenfranchisement. But one *can* envision a different tim...

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  The #OpenSource Strategy is an important new statement from the EU - maybe the last chance towards European #digitalsovereignty The aim is to strengthen Europe's open digital ecosystems by supporting the development, scaling, deployment and sustainability of open source technologies across both the public and private sectors. Read about: * Why it matters * Who benefits * Current challenges * Concrete approaches * The EU's Objectives * EU actions already in place https:/...

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  Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, what the #fediverse calls "normies" are 99.8% of the population. In a normal distribution, being here is a statistically notable 3-sigma event🤣 Its not the case that #mastodon (or #bluesky) are "dying", but in terms of actual impact: changing the online experience for the *vast* majority of people, its obviously zilch - as has always been Yet maintaining faith in these proof-of-concept projects feels important. Its...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@pojntfx/116345677794218793 The cynical take is that the current furore about #digitalsovereignty focuses on cloud and office software procurement by the public sector only because there exist some European providers that could gain market share. Mobile-linked identity and payments is super essential for vast numbers of Europeans, but since there is hardly any competitor to the US duopoly, everybody just keeps quiet as if it's a non-issue. This is non-sensi...

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  Seems like an important discovery... The belief that life ingredients and the processes that make them are unique to Earth might be the last anthropocentric myth to fall? Life as a fundamental something that happens in multiple places (whenever the physical environment is conducive of course) makes more logical sense. https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/16427903

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  In the end we have to admit that we (as societies) are suffering much more than needed because we are still culturally very bad at politics. Not the performative cheerleading politics and polarisation around arbitrary "issues" invented for distraction, but the deep politics of directly debating and addressing the stuff that really matters: societal welfare within planetary boundaries. No reason to be defeatist, it's not like it is known how to do this. #sustainability...

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  RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/116211610043917134 The dramatic and terminal twist is that nobody who had any leverage over this choice (politicians, regulators, investors etc.) pushed back when it was still possible. Not only in the US, where this abomination originated, but nowhere else either. It's only full blown fascism when larger parts of society partake in the moral failings of some power group. And this is, alas, what we have witnessed.

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  The focus of early web was text (http is #hypertext after all). Text is powerful. You can share poetry with text. Searching text made Google a giant. Sharing snippets of text made Twitter a minor giant. But once money chased eyeballs, the focus changed to visual media. Less cognitive load. Text requires literacy, image does not. The early "lack of vision" was corrected with acquisitions. Google bought Youtube. Facebook bought Instagram. Finally TikTok came along. Pulp fictio...

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  The early Web had a quality that has been lost ever since: it was *simple* Download #httpd , #netscape write some #html by hand and boom, the concept of a networked digital society is born. It first started going pear shaped with #LAMP . The complexity of a full blown database was not justified for most use cases. As proven decades later by the popularity of #sqlite and #ssg approaches. The final blow was when #bigtech got into the act. Immense complexity for the simplest things became a moat

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  In the early days people would #dualboot #linux on windows desktops for years before eventually commiting to switch 100% Maybe the same approach could work now for #android mobile phones given pure linux phones still struggle to be daily drivers? Assuming a fast and seamless switch function, it could be a practical way to smooth the transition: Keep access to critical apps while test driving and helping the development of truly free and #opensource mobile computing. https://www.theregister.c...