DataKnightmare @dataKnightmare@octodon.social

Dataminr Helped Police Use Tweets To Surveil BLM Protests - https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twitter-dataminr-police-spy-surveillance-black-lives-matter-protests/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%2520Intercept%2520Newsletter

it’s fucked up to see governments say “how will we pay for it” because it just means they’re owned by capital. capital gets to say what they can and can’t do. you can’t solve poverty, an entirely artificial condition, because it’s too expensive. you can’t build homes for the homeless, it’s too expensive. you can’t own networking infrastructure, only comcast and verizon can do that because — you guessed it — it’s too expensive. “it’s too expensive” means you have to let The Market decide who lives and who dies.

Bundeswehr will switch completely to Matrix messenger
https://www.golem.de/news/messenger-bundeswehr-will-komplett-auf-matrix-chat-wechseln-2005-148407.html

(submitted by rv-de)

i. it is better to delete code than to write code.

ii. the more code software has, the worse it becomes.

iii. the best software is that which does not exist.

iv. merely good programmers solve problems. truly great programmers do not confront them in the first place.

v. the greatest programmer of all is the humble farmer who spends his days in hard and honest labor growing food for his family and people, who has never in his life heard of a computer, and never will

Companies consider abandoning open office layouts to prevent disease spread
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/health/coronavirus-office-makeover.html

(submitted by tekdude)

in Norway the debate among experts is apparently between a badly designed centralized app and using Apple/Google APIs....
like, assuming that one wants to implement digital contact tracing, alternative options are not contemplated. both approaches have serious issues.
Norwegians have a society based on trust, and most people have automatically granted trust to tech companies that are ubiquitously used at the institutional level, like Apple/Google/Facebook.

It is amazing, and also depressing, watching national- and global-level strategic health/science/politics communication being done over Twitter, a platform expressly designed to make communication hard.

People resorting to Tweeting screenshots of Tweetstorm essay screenshots, because they need to discuss and fact-check complex logical arguments line by line, and Twitter just didn't think that was an important use-case and actively wanted to disincentivise it.

That makes my programmer soul sad.

Dear any platform designer:

If you ever find yourself saying "but nobody would ever need/want to use my platform to do X"...

Just close your lips at that point. Your future trial in the court of public opinion will go better if there's no record of your self-incriminating statements

The Malleable Systems Collective is a new group that's launched just December 2019 and looks really exciting.

<< Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.

This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power>>

https://malleable.systems/

h/t @jfred

The toddler has started using the words 'maybe' and 'probably'. Time to inoculate her against frequentist interpretation.

Emergenza Covid-19 e misure tech: i progetti internazionali, le soluzioni adottati dagli Stati , a che punto siamo in Italia https://www.valigiablu.it/coronavirus-emergenza-tecnologia/ #contacttracing #Coronavirus #COVID-19 #Post

Google Is Tracking People's Movements in Their Communities During Coronavirus
https://www.newsweek.com/google-tracking-peoples-movements-their-communities-during-coronavirus-pandemic-1495915

(submitted by codermobile)

Leaked Amazon Memo Details Plan to Smear Fired Warehouse Organizer
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-details-plan-to-smear-fired-warehouse-organizer-hes-not-smart-or-articulate

(submitted by minimaxir)

#Zoom is taking it to a new level - after leaking your webcam data to anyone who knows your computer's IP for Mac & leaking your data to Facebook on iOS, Windows 10 is next with leaking your login credentials.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-alert-zoom-client-can-leak-your-network-login-credentials/

French companies benefiting from state aid can't buy back shares
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-france-business-buybacks/french-companies-benefiting-from-state-aid-cant-buy-back-shares-minister-idUKKBN21H0RI

(submitted by thg)