Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan @vu3rdd@octodon.social

Free as in Facebook.

Referring to any service offered without charge in exchange for behavioral tracking, ongoing surveillance, or other monitoring and sale of any such information to third parties.

http://dctr.pro/25l

Open source search engine!
https://findx.com 💃

#opensource #libre #search #searchengine #googlealternaitve #duckduckgoalternative

Mozilla has a petition asking Facebook to stop tracking people's browsing off the site unless they opt in to it. Frankly I think the solution is to remove the ability to track people across sites from the web entirely, but I signed the petition anyway. Facebook has taken a huge hit to their reputation, so now is a good time to be putting pressure on them to change their ways.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/campaigns/facebook-update/

The "Simple Mobile Tools" #Android apps are really nice. I use many of them and really recommend to have a look at them. https://simplemobiletools.github.io/ #FreeYourAndroid

I finally launched that version solving algorithm I keep going on about and it's rad as hell and you should read about it here https://medium.com/@nex3/pubgrub-2fb6470504f

I hope some of you might have seen my updates on my current book reading. It is a book about a 90 year old #coop from #Kerala

If not, you can check here. https://mastodon.social/@prashere/99719945966277147

I was happy to know that yesterday Leftword Books have organized a book release function on this same book by #Kerala CM #PinarayiVijayan and #Marxian economist Prof. #PrabhatPatnaik and Kerala's Finance Minister and also one of the co-author of the book Dr. #ThomasIssac

I wish someone would modernize Gnoetry, a human-computer poetry creation app - https://github.com/michel-slm/gnoetry

Builds a corpus from given texts, matches words to metric patterns you choose. Then you say, "regenerate from here to here automatically" and it picks other words, maintaining the meter.

Outputs beautifully printable poetry booklets.

I am consistently intimidated by the amount of knowledge I need to internalize in order to become a competent developer.

Finished writing the blog post about read receipts today.

"Read Receipts Considered Harmful"

https://asininetech.com/2018/03/19/read-receipts-considered-harmful/

Our Sean O'Brien on #Aadhaar security: "Whenever a security researcher looks at an official government Aadhaar app, there are blatant privacy problems and sloppy cyber-security, such as sending data over the Internet unencrypted." http://www.businesstoday.in/opinion/columns/bad-aadhaar-cybersecurity-tramples-on-the-right-to-privacy/story/270425.html #privacy #security

https://mastodon.social/media/Wlspe8upr_33BonTE8o

Fun fact: the umbrellas Google provides for around the campus say "Don't be evil" on them. I'm pretty sure that rather than reminding everyone that this is a Google motto (I don't recall having seen it anywhere else on campus) it's actually an admonition to the employee not to steal the umbrellas.

The LibrePlanet program is full of extremely interesting stuff

I'd really love to attend

https://libreplanet.org/2018/program/

Speaking of root passwords, I once got a call from Microsoft:

MS: "Hey, Sean, we heard you might know how to break into Windows 2000 machines without the password."

Me: "Umm..."

MS: "We lost the administrator password to some of our machines. If you can change it for us, we won't ask how."

Me: "I'll see what I can do."

When Microsoft locked themselves out of their own operating system, they called the Linux guy to get them back in. (I used SystemRescueCD.)

Today I learned: the All India Radio signature tune was composed by Walter Kaufmann, Czech refugee to India, in 1936.

https://qz.com/287319/remembering-the-jewish-refugee-who-composed-the-all-india-radio-caller-tune/

Kaufmann later moved to the US, and served as a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music during 1975-1984. IU Press published some of his books: "The ragas of South India", "The Ragas of South India", and "Musical Notations of the Orient".

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Kaufmann%2C+Walter%2C+1907-1984%22

The tune in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuS-UiaKiVk

I'm a copyleft nut but I've got plenty of critiques of the FSF and I don't uncritically revere Richard Stallman, really I don't,

but wow do I love this artwork

Illustrator: Nathan Fox http://www.ba-reps.com/illustrators/nathan-fox

Published in: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201611/are-we-forfeiting-control-over-our-digital-lives

Mark S. Miller said something really clear at Rebooting Web of Trust: ~"There's only one case in which you need a blockchain in a decentralized system, and that's when ordering matters such as in the double spending problem." Yes!