Facebook “morally bankrupt”

Facebook are ‘morally bankrupt liars’ says New Zealand’s privacy commissioner

“Facebook cannot be trusted,” wrote Edwards. “They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions. “[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm.

“They #dontgiveazuck” wrote Edwards. He later deleted the tweets, saying they had prompted “toxic and misinformed traffic”.

Women making clothes for West face sexual abuse

Revealed: women making clothes for west face sexual abuse

The sexual abuse is only one of the forms of mistreatment they suffer.

UK businesses using AI to monitor staff

UK businesses using artificial intelligence to monitor staff activity

“Dozens of UK business owners are using artificial intelligence to scrutinise staff behaviour minute-to-minute by harvesting data on who emails whom and when, who accesses and edits files and who meets whom and when.”

Chrome, Safari, and Edge to prevent disabling of click tracking

Chrome, Safari, and Edge to prevent disabling of click tracking, just another reason to use Firefox https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to-prevent-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/

How writers can get work done better with Git

Link

On the editing side, though I use and really prefer text editors and markdown, I had never thought to place every sentence on its own line (sentence = line). That simple idea in itself is kind of revolutionary and could do wonders for writing structure. Imagine if school children could be taught to write like that. It makes paragraph structure so much more transparent.

Have used pandoc, except that when you are working on a document with others who only know MS Word, early on in the process, it’s already gone into Word, and you aren’t going to keep converting it back.

I still need to read more carefully about using git. Since I’m not a programmer, I have only ever used it in installing or updating software (like hubzilla).

Modem Router

I’m returning the shiny new modem-router the phone company sent me and have bought a new one over the counter instead. The phone company’s modem came with a long contract that involved agreeing to all kinds of data collection. They can probably gather this anyway, but at least I don’t have to agree to it. My sons, who, I’m sure are smarter than me about such matters, say that they are already resigned to the fact that nothing we do online or offline is private anymore. My only response is that at least we should resist, even if our resistance isn’t effective. “Like Palestinians,” I say. “And where does it get them?” they respond. I suppose freedom is a state of mind. If we make choices, even when they are inconvenient, difficult or even dangerous, we grow in spirit. When we just accept the default options, we are cowed, enslaved, though we may not realise it. The awareness of our subjugation only comes when we begin to resist a system and sometimes get pushed into compromises. But small acts of resistance restore the sense of our integrity.