IRC: #techbytes @ Techrights IRC Network: Monday, January 03, 2022

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schestowitz-TR

-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-nitter.eu | Gerry McGovern (@gerrymcgovern): ""Then there is the laughable quality of software running on our gadgets. Software is the only kind of engineering that gets measurably less efficient every year." http://techrights.org/2022/01/02/article-on-digital-rights-in-2021-part-9/" | nitter

https://nitter.eu/gerrymcgovern/status/1478027520012427268#m

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-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 404 @ https://nitter.eu/gerrymcgovern/status/1478027520012427268#m )

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schestowitz

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Doing it Directly

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Being a teacher many of my battles for fair and ethical technology are within educational institutions. I've been raising awareness of digitally mediated abuse in schools and universities, such as invasive student monitoring and the degeneration of our schools' privacy and integrity as Google and Microsoft "infrastructure" intrudes into places it does not belong. I've written about the flexibility, equality and low-bandwidth ecological benefits of

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text based teaching methods - amidst which came the unexpected demise of Freenode.

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One of the most dreary and depressing figures of speech these days is that there's "No alternative". This total failure of imagination that haunts our parochial present and dead-ended institutions is really code for "I'm too lazy, stupid or frightened to do anything but what I'm told is okay". Those doing the telling range from vendors and lobbyists with clear financial interests in "no alternatives", to those trying to hide their having "no clue",

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or "no skin in the game".

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Popping that bubble by practically demonstrating the existence of alternative software and front ends is regular sport for me now. When institutional IT folks insist that I use Microsoft rubbish I politely explain I consider it a breach of my ethics and security and a threat to those in my care. We do a regular dance. "There's no alternative" comes the email. Bypassing their systems settles the "possibility of alternatives" question.

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Nobody likes being wrong, so they may attempt to restore a universe in which they are correct. If this childishly involves some kind of "retaliation" or interference, I need to point out that now constitutes wilful sabotage, workplace bullying and harassment. We must have faith in how people can suddenly "find a workaround" and remember that they are an IT service when careful language and demonstration is used to help them serve.

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Another way of saying this is that I've started to think about tech rights in terms of direct personal action. The only mind that can be changed is your own. The only expertise you can rely on is yours. I find the Digital Vegan analogy of personal preventative healthcare to be very powerful here.

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Acting as though you're already free and simply doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do is unrefined Kantian moral logic, and I think, a most vital pillar of the progressive Hacker Ethic. Every small effort counts, especially if purely motivated towards a greater good, and doubly so when you face overwhelming odds you'll fail. Any small success confirms the value of trying and has a big influence on others who see that it can be

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done. What has happened can happen Q.E.D.

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An observation I recently better formulated is that we've moved from a possibility oriented technological outlook to an impossibility centred stance. I think a difference between my generation and the present hacker generation is that the focus has shifted to "what you can't do" and how to get around artificial obstacles. Every corporation and government is obsessively concerned with blocking, restricting, rate limiting, excluding, banning,

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blacklisting, shadow banning, down-voting, disabling, taking-down, opposing, oppressing or censoring something. It's a radical departure from the mindset that built the internet and web. Kids today start out within a permission culture about what they "are not allowed to do" and expend vast amounts of mental energy in figuring out how to subvert, circumvent, reinvent, and roll-back restrictions.

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The reality about digital technology is, of course, that anything is possible. If a new generation can shake-off the disabling narrative of "inevitable technological domination" there are still infinite futures available to choose from. It's a spark that I see can be ignited in students, but is quickly extinguished by the cynics and nihilists who are invested in the status-quo of perpetual insecurity and fear.

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To stay optimistic I've had to concede that some people are beyond help. It's satisfying to take competent control of your technological affairs when others around you are struggling, and to help them. But those who can't be persuaded by good faith, reason, demonstration, or by appeal to their open-mindedness, should be gently edged out of your life. There's not enough time to go back and "save" everyone stuck in the mud and their cynicism might

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infect and weigh you down.

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Are we changing?

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Mixed in with despondency over the demise of our climate I've felt rushes of optimism and fellowship, noticing that global consciousness is emerging, hopefully not too late. In the quiet margins of ordinary life more people are actually doing digital detox and turning away from excess, indulgence, domination and dependency.

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Despite the inspiring Greta Thunberg's of the world, I think a different movement is coming from my generation. A friend's daughter, aged about 11 would "RATHER DIE!" than carry an "uncool" phone, but I met two women under the age of 30 who carried dumb/feature-phones and (strongly) cited environmental choices - rather than "privacy and freedom", or fashion/looks. Maybe the "cool" of not wrecking the Earth will filter down to the kids soon. This

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week I met my first random "normie" running Librem on a fully rooted phone! When clearing out a hoarders house, we all felt enormous sense of shared relief at throwing out sack-fulls of e-waste. It felt like burying and grieving for a lost future.

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Fresh perspectives on activism

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The modest success of Digital Vegan has mainly brought me conversations from other computer scientists, academics, sociologists and philosophers, because it's a quite cerebral text. It has also brought passionate comments from advocates with whom I would generally disagree or not associate, including spiritual healers who tell me how 5G is unbalancing our auras (about which I have no evidence).

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I ponder whether maybe the title and the metaphor was a bit frivolous? No. Surely this is all a good thing. If one thing unites us in a hyper-polarised technological world it is surely our shared discomfort with the technological apparatus itself.

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I'm wondering about how my practised tech-realism will evolve in the coming years. If nothing else, writing Digital Vegan and practising the lifestyle has made a profound impact on the psychology of my teaching.

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For example; In cyber-security we posit different classes of actors, like nation states, corporations and organised or individual cyber-criminals. It's a taxonomy of declining usefulness in a world where nation states have cyber-offence programmes that operate with disregard for civilian "collateral damage", in which corporations are blatantly criminal - though able to get away with it - and in which the force of law is used to attack mums and kids

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who share their favourite movies while billion dollar monopolists pay no taxes.

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In Cyber Realpolitik, attribution is an afterthought. It doesn't matter who is blowing up your world, it matters how, and what you can do to stop them. It also matters why. So instead I now focus on a spectrum between ignorance and malice, which offers different models to confront. Openly hostile technology, such as the NSO spyware, is somehow easier to deal with because the perpetrators dig their own graves. The public will naturally and openly

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apply correction using what remains of the force of law or other means to stop them.

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Covertly hostile technology, such as from Facebook, or Google is coming into the public mind more clearly now. Examples are pre-installed "vendor malware" like router backdoors in Cisco or D-Link products, or Zoom thinking they would get away with selling users personal data, or Google's aborted FLoC. Countless acts of computer crime are perpetrated by a Big-tech industry that increasingly sees itself as above the law.

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This stuff is more difficult to defend against because it wears a veneer of legitimacy. In that fight we have to hold up the brighter moral light, banishing the shadow of Big-Tech as "infrastructure" and expose it for the naked power-grab it is. Attempts by its lobbyists to paint it as "necessary" or "standard" in government, healthcare, schools and academia need crushing. Support of whistle-blowers and leakers, and hacking back against these

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enemies seems a necessary condition of modern life.

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More insidious problems occur when designers and policymakers are technically and psychologically incompetent, operating under distorted ideology. They are disconnected from the reality of actual users who have real lives. Real people make real political, moral and risk choices through technology. And people have needs that are invisible through the incumbent market lens. Thoughtless assumptions that we'll all just merrily go-along to get along with

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every new thing are arrogant and pernicious. Examples are Apple's failed client-side content-scanning gaffe, Windows forced updates, the Audacity "telemetry" faux pas, and other examples that aren't malicious, just conceited, patrician, condescending and bloody rude.

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These are the most interesting technological transgressions to confront, because those harming society may indeed believe they are helping. It's very much a "road to hell" situation. In that fight we confront the power of small groups to have undue influence over the lives of others without scrutiny and consequence. Tactics are support for transparent, good governance of open projects, sensible codes of conduct including checks and balances that

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prevent takeover by special interests, diversity, heterogeneity and end-user control of technology.

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Libre Software (Free Open Source) is still the best route to achieving this. However, we saw again this year with the log4j bug, and TikTok stealing from OBS, how unpaid Free software volunteers subsidise a parasitical tech industry who sell other people's code as their proprietary product and then whine about its faults.

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There is a difficult flip side to this that borders on "victim blaming" which I find an ugly but inescapable sentiment within myself. It is not just the policymakers who are ignorant. The degree to which people are wilfully ignorant about technology, and wish to push away responsibility and reduce it to "magic" is societally damaging. It cannot remain "someone else's problem", and education may not be sufficient. We may need new rules to cope with

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technological democracy. One thought is that smartphones and social media might be subject to similar concerns as alcohol and tobacco. Future generations may look back in horror at a society that allows toddlers to use connected tablet computers, as we think of Victorians who sent their children up chimneys.

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Perhaps we Digital Vegans seem "difficult" or deserve "special needs" stickers - but it's increasingly evident that an informed oppositional, actively non-cooperative, dissident class is precisely what technology needs to steward it at the moment. That it comprise technically well educated and experienced voices who cannot be daubed "Neo-Luddites" is essential. For every Zuboff, Doctorow, McNamee, Tufekci, Rushkoff, Lanier, and Lessig we need a

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hundred more insightful and courageous voices.

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But we also need action. It must be ordinary, everyday, visible, effective and lasting. People willing to quit their job rather than take digital abuse or engage with immoral technologies should be applauded. People who will use and promote alternative privacy and freedom respecting technology, and open-source Libre software coders who will maintain, document, package, test and distribute alternatives are the machinery of moral change. Big-Tech will

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not be taken down because someone wrote a book about "how mean and horrid they are".

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On the whole I feel people are getting more, not less tolerant of difference. They are more aware of the digital abuses against them. Presently they are vicariously emboldened, for "shrill refuseniks" to speak up in their place. Hopefully that dissatisfaction can be converted into a will to take personal action as more and more are curious about how they might learn and help too.

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Happy thoughts for 2022 and beyond

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I feel optimistic that many techno-doom stories are passing teacup storms. It's the spirit of our age that we ruminate on our worst nightmares, egged on by fear-mongers. AI isn't a thing. Machine learning ain't all it's puffed up to be. Its dark faces are mainly manifestations of existing malevolent social cybernetics now illuminated by computing progress. We ought to attack those root causes and the maniacs pushing them, not promising technologies.

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Face recognition may be banned in Europe within a year along with killer drones and illegal mass surveillance. I can imagine a future when the CCTV cameras in our streets are taken down - perhaps only because visual surveillance has shifted to more effective and invisible modes. With respect to rights, "to be forgotten", "to repair and reverse engineer what we own", "to choose free software", "to use end-to-end encryption free from backdoors"…

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Europe is on the right track.

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Certainly there is corruption in Europe - so bad in fact that European Patent Office (EPO) looks lost to all hope of reform. However, if the new government of Germany is really what it seems, it may be time to put some faith in the rule of law and institutions again, however weak they seem now. In 2022 the ECJ is likely to let individuals bring actions against foreign tech-giants. Unexpectedly our UK DPA has not diverged from GDPR and the Online

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Safety Bill, despite some authoritarian attacks on speech and privacy, bolsters other rights and is empowering against big-tech abusers.

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Face it, cash (anonymous street money) is here to stay. Two years ago we thought Coronavirus might be spread by contact with money. We now know that fomite transmission doesn't happen. All those stores that stopped handling cash must now concede they continue to do so for financial gain, and are acting in a prejudicial and exclusionary manner. Wise economists have warned of the extreme dangers of removing stabilising state-backed physical currencies

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from circulation.

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Gong forward, we'll figure out how to recycle our phones and use them less. E-waste will come into mainstream discourse in 2022 and campaigns to "not buy a new phone" will likely meet brutal resistance and disinformation from the industry and become a speech/censorship battleground. Regardless, because of rising environmental and ethical awareness the technological society will have to find a place for all four 'R's, recycling, reuse, reduction and

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rejection. All-together these support resilience through functional diversity. A technological society without space for dissent and abstinence will fail.

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Bitcoin and "Proof of Waste" ponzi schemes may be usurped by taxable yet anonymous low-energy e-currency. Some kinds of non-fiat electronic cash may even become practical, useful and popular, but not if they are owned and run by private corporations. Finding the sweet-spot of decentralised ownership without proof of work will be hard. We may have to live for a long time with different kinds of money, some more fungible, some more private, some very

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volatile, and people may find it hard to understand the advantages and risks of each.

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Other things I am hopeful for, 5G and anti-vac paranoia will fade with renewed popular belief in science and continued total absence of evidence (which is not evidence of absence) of harm. Maybe Bezos, Branson and Musk will stop their dick-waving. Personally going into space for nothing but egotistical attention should become a mark of shame, not pride. Further along, in post-pandemic boom, education and health-care can be restored. And the world,

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albeit a warmer one, will keep turning.

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I'll still be a Digital Vegan - an Electronic Epicurean - because it's a philosophy of celebrating good technology. That means rejecting bad technology along with low-quality people who see it only as means dominate and extract rent from others, along with uncritical people who passively assent to technological abuse and claim it is "inevitable".

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Yes, Digital Veganism is also about "changing the world" and "social justice", but changing the world is not about stopping bulldozers, Neo-Luddism, blocking traffic, daubing slogans, toppling statues, vandalising 5G masts, shouting down speakers, DDOSing servers, or handing out pamphlets. Those are easy things because they externalise struggle.

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The really hard stuff is the little things that actually change your own life and soul in a way that is dangerously infectious. I act because I am following my heart, and assert that is a good enough reason on its own. I don't need to justify why I think Microsoft and Google are grotesquely immoral (although I could write a book on it). I simply refuse to use them and that's the end of it.

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If your thing pisses-off even your closest friends for a while, you're probably in to something real. Follow that moral instinct. Do things that are embarrassing, make yourself feel small, excluded or weird in a world where social non-conformity feels like death. Then realise, you're still alive and it didn't hurt. It felt good. The bad-old world died a little, not you.

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Now watch those friends congratulating you. They want to be a little more like you. These repeated acts of social self-immolation are deadly to the status quo. The system relies on you being a hopelessly lazy and insecure narcissist who cares more about the judgement of others than your love for them. It needs you to be comfortable and greedy for the latest powerful hardware, not a soldier who adapts, improvises and overcomes to achieve more with

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less. It cannot adapt to fatal strategies.

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Instead, make it awkward for others to not support you in what are very reasonable and modest requests, so that the absurdity of our silent acquiescence is forced to a head. Don't feed the machine. As philosopher Rick Roderick put it "People aren't afraid of dying any more, they're afraid of being seen wearing the wrong trainers." Put on a pair of the wrong trainers and join me in a little mischievous Digital Veganism in 2022.

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^^^ drafts, rawq

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> Hi Roy,

Jan 03 22:03

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> I think Part 10 here will be my last in this series.

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> You okay with that?

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> That will free me to work on some other essays. Maybe you would be

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> interested in publishing some on similar tech rights and free software

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> themes?

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> I did work on another today that's a bit weird and maybe "too academic"

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> let's talk about them sometime when you have more feedback.

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Hi, good evening,

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I really looked forward to part 10. Refreshed the page, saw it was work in progress circa 6pm, went to get a nap, woke up to catch up.

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Yes, I see you've set aside some text from the original page (I made a local .html copy). It makes sense, IME, to generally have a large text file in which to type or pin down notes and then integrate these into a broader idea when the time is right or opportunity arises. I have lots in the pipeline about GitHub and EPO. Today I had a very meaningful dialogue with the chief of OSI, who seems sincere about trying to understand and

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tackle the problem.

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Techrights is very flexible about topic and scope, though I worry sometimes about IRC channels devolving into "COVID chat"; people have different ideas and it's mostly off topic except when we deal with aspects like "contact tracing".

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I'm going to plunge into the text now, assuming part 10 is complete. I took Tue and Wed off work, so this week I should have more time to do more videos and even articles. News is dying down anyway (in general), so I don't expect 2022 to be any better for "journalism" than 2021 was. We truly 'took advantage' of the vacuum in reporting/investigations.

*Disconnected ().

Jan 03 22:12

*Now talking on #techbytes

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