Dave Lane @lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz

Given the Gates Foundation role in limiting vaccine access and promoting the mutation of new variants, once we run out of Greek letters, I propose new covid variants be named after Windows versions.

Covid XP, Covid Vista, Covid 11, Covid for Workgroups.

Based on this consent-theater, ad-tech scammers claim that they can harvest your data, retain it indefinitely, and sell or give it away to anyone they want, and that this is all totally cool with you because if wasn't, you wouldn't have "consented."

Enter the GDPR. Under Europe's landmark privacy regulation, companies have to ask you a plain-language question confirming your consent to *every* piece of data they collect and *every* use they plan on making of that data.

4/

Here's the theory behind Europe's GDPR: if an online service wants to collect, store and/or process your personal information, it has to obtain your real, informed consent for each of those activities. In theory, this should have exterminated surveillance-based "behavioral" ads. In practice, nothing of the sort has happened...yet.

1/

did you know that #mastodon web UI has OCR built in? so when you are posting screenshots of text, a transcription of the text to put into a description of the image is literally one click away. when uploading image into a toot, just klik 'Edit' and then 'detect text from picture'. that's it.

please help sighted people. it's costing you two extra clicks.

#accessibility

@lightweight
I guess other governments are doing something on open source as well. But the fact that it ended up in the coalition agreement really gives an idea of the importance of the topic. That I find really cool.

Sad to see this Adobe / Docusign pseudo-security bollocks gaining ground. I guess it makes some people rich, but it adds nothing in terms of security or legal standing.

There are plenty of ways to electronically "sign" a document without trying to fake my own signature with a mouse on some proprietary website. *sigh*

@lightweight Lots of great synergy between government and open source

Hopefully more public funds can be used to support more foss public goods

I just want you guys to know that the multiple *years* I've had my music on Spotify and iTunes have still made me less money than the first two weeks of the same albums on Bandcamp.

Please support artists directly if you can.

If the new German government coalition contract requires open-source software for public/government projects, then does that mean it requires the monetary system, which they require all citizens to use, to be open-source, or at least interoperable with open-source software and money?

The answer will obviously be "no", which is how you know what actually matters for central planning and control. Your public school's video conferencing app does not.