#halloween #witches #skating

Some witchery taking place

If you're a Medium subscriber, you can read these - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.

My latest Medium column is "The Internet Heist (Part I): The early days of the war to control the future"

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-i-3395769891b0

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We deserve a better future than locked-down XR headsets that spy on users and bystanders. Our participatory session Friday with @accessnow will address how we can steer this technology towards respecting human rights. (hosted by #XRSafetyWeek) https://www.eff.org/event/building-human-rights-metaverse

@ryan Hi, I've been using #mailinabox for a couple of years. I'm very happy with it - pretty much "it just works", easy to use, regular updates, reasonable support forum, and it helps (of course) if you've got some IT background. It is NOT suitable if you want to customise/hack the install, and it requires a clean Ubuntu server 18.04. I run it from home on an Intel NUC and it's been great.

Imagine a government agency ordered Apple to include hashes of all documents they wanted to track into that kiddie porn database. Suddenly the government knows who's got that antivax meme JPG. Or tax protest DOC. Or an environmental report PDF.

And it's just hashes! Apple won't know what they're tracking, so they can't say "no".

Now tell me you honestly believe no government *ever* will take advantage of this invisible monitoring power.

This random rooster kept showing up in my yard today, so I set up the most Wile E Coyote-ass trap to get rid of him

Finally they figured out how to make wireless earbuds that you can physically tether to your phone so you don't lose them

@michal And if you are on #facebook, they don't remember your birthday until the computer says... Definitely kind of sad 😔

July 14th. Vive la republique. Go the revolution. (Truly time Australia had our republic.)

@mogwai_poet #dryrot is a thing (see wiki) - it's fungal rot of timber, and not so much to do with water.

@stardenver @antekone@mstdn.io @kubikpixel It can be a nuisance, but (at least for) for Microsoft and Google, getting your server recognised as non-spam is not too hard. Annoying but just jump through their hoops.

@Blort Re security and spam. Spam filter uses grey-listing and all the usual envelope and DNSSEC checks. Greylisting seems to work well, I normally have no spam. Security is sensible, with regular updates. Can be hosted in "the cloud" (but cloud IP addresses often blacklisted), or at home if you can get a fixed IP address, no blocked ports, and a non-blacklisted address.

@Blort I've been happy with MIAB for a couple of years - hosted on an Intel NUC at home. Been no dramas, but it would help if you know the basics about IP, DNS, mail, etc.

@Gargron Go for it ... start just-right and work up from there. (Don't make your first a top-spec box, have fun with cheap and easy midrange while you work out what your doing:)

@abcnews@quey.org https://quey.org/@abcnews/104895008128042649 Bees need more than they get from just almonds (too little nectar) - sounds like another step towards colony collapse!

Software engineers are constantly subjected to the same conundrum Blaise Pascal faced when he wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.”

@aemylt Now the big questions - what to do now? where to do it?