Notices by Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)

If you teach development, the first thing you should be teaching… before HTML, CSS, JS, etc., is ETHICS.

Teach your students to avoid 3rd-party surveillance-based APIs/components. Teach them to de-centre themselves… to build tools owned and controlled by the people who use them.

How Apple and Google will cure COVID-19 and how you can opt into it if you want to keep your job

https://ar.al/2020/04/11/how-apple-and-google-will-cure-covid-19-and-how-you-can-opt-into-it-if-you-want-to-keep-your-job/

Watch the recording of my interview with Al Jazeera live this morning (contains quick summary notes).

#Apple #Google #ContactTracingFramework #COVID19 #SurveillanceCapitalism

On the General Architecture of the Peer Web (and the placement of the PC 2.0 era within the timeline of general computing and the greater socioeconomic context)

https://ar.al/2019/02/13/on-the-general-architecture-of-the-peer-web/

Just wrote a thing on my thoughts on the Peer Web and where I see us going with #Hypha.

Google/Facebook are to the health of our human rights and democracy what Philip Morris is to the health of our bodies and what Exxon Mobil is to the health of our habitat.

If you’re a doctor, you do not get sponsored by Big Tobacco. If you’re an environmentalist, you do not get sponsored by Exxon Mobil. If you’re a privacy advocate, a human rights activist, or a democrat, you do not get sponsored by Google, Facebook, or any other surveillance capitalist.

It’s that simple.

#Corruption

Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius: A
page by page translation

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~mcgrew/Siderius.pdf

#astronomy

DRM is never in the interests of individuals. I’m lookin’ at you, USB-C.

From the Any Application That Can Be Written In JavaScript, Will Eventually Be Written In JavaScript Department*

Node-OS: http://node-os.com/

OS.js: https://www.os-js.org/

* See Atwood’s Law and The Rule of Least Power

#javascript #nodejs

Goodbye, Instagram.

#DeleteInstagram #DeleteSurveillanceCapitalists

Sometimes you just have to stick a screwdriver in it.

So I’d love to be more involved with the local community here in #Cork, having moved here a few months ago. Any folks on here from the area? Fancy organising (or know of existing) FOSS/decentralisation (not blockchain)/ethical design events?

#Ireland #meetups #community #local #foss #EthicalDesign #decentralisation

Dear Fediverse,

Soon, some venture capitalist will put $5 million into a startup that offers free fediverse accounts with unlimited storage, etc.

Unless every other instance instantly blocks such a service from Day 1, you can kiss your fediverse goodbye and say hello to a new Gmail. Once network effects kick in, they will make the rules.

It _can_ happen here but you have an opportunity to kill it before it does.

#centralisation #fediverse