Revisiting Gnu Social and liking what’s there

Gnu Social had grown a bit quiet the last time I used it. I changed identities a few times after trying twice to establish my own instance, and people got tired of trying to re-follow me and I can’t blame them (that’s one thing that works better on Hubzilla).

In general, because of its core users, GS brings a different and sometimes hopeful way of looking at many of the issues that concern me. I find views and opinions here that are hard to find on Twitter or Google+. The commercial networks have vast numbers of people, and still they worry about $.  On GS there is confidence regardless of the number of users and shaky platform it’s all built on.

Now Mastodon seems to be having a good effect on the rest of the federation, and brings in some new voices, some of them more mainstream. Eventually, I think that federated social networks will prevail over the mega-capital dinosaurs.

Gatekeepers to a better world

The last thing I read before going to sleep was the Twitter timeline of Dr. David Frawley, Vamadev Shastri, or whatever he calls himself.  At the top, there’s a picture of his meeting with Modi. Every second tweet is attacking Muslims.  There are tweets praising the new First Minister of U.P.

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Wanna buy my browsing history?

ISPs might do well at profiling the interests of some of their customers. But for people like web designers, writers or journalists, an average day might see them browsing an eclectic mix of sites on everything under the sun. And what if you’ve got a couple of people like that, or a bored teenager or two in the household as well? I wonder how useful this information might be to an advertiser?

So I just had a thought: rather than assiduously trying to cover our steps by using VPNs, Tor, Https Everywhere, Privacy Badger, or whatever, maybe an opposite strategy would be far superior.

A call to app or browser extension designers: give us something that can randomize browsing history. Automate sending our browser on a day-long crawl across multiple and sundry websites. The resulting web history would be pure gibberish, of no value to anyone. Furthermore, it would quickly become obvious what was happening: our browsing history would become just as worthless to the government surveillance agencies that are tracking us too.

Meanwhile on Mars

One thing The Expanse gets right is the immense frustration Martian colonists might feel in toiling to terra-form a barren world while knowing that their green, fertile home planet has been wrecked by greedy exploiters.  Science fiction is always more about today than tomorrow.

 

Unless I can change

Some days I feel productive, like my work is highly important, while other days I feel lazy, useless, accomplishing nothing.  That we are accomplishing nothing.   But, in either case, as long as our consciousness does not change, nothing is really being accomplished, or is capable of being accomplished.  We are running around in circles, chasing our tails, or gilding our cages.

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what google knows

In an age that border security services sometimes demand access to email passwords, and hackers manage to gain access to them without asking permission, it’s interesting to reflect on what such access conveys, especially in the case of Google.  Because even if we don’t actively use a Gmail account, it’s quite likely we have one that is associated with an Android phone or Chrome browser.  It’s worthwhile going in to have a closer look at that Google account to see what information Google is storing.  Fortunately that’s fairly simple to do, by clicking on the Account.

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Violence towards groups

Last summer, Tamil Nadu declared a bandh because of the dispute with Karnataka over water of the Kauvery River.  Aurovillians knew this was a day to lie low.  The guest house gate remained half closed, the town hall and all eating places closed, and whites were advised not to venture into the surrounding villages.  To do so would be to risk being hit by stone-throwers, or worse.

In almost every place in India where the writer has spent some time, there have been similar stories of violence. In Varkala there was a Swedish couple from whom local people attempted to extort money. In Meherabad there was the murder by goondas of Erico, and there have been several murders and rapes in and around Auroville.

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Avoidance of the personal pronoun

​The writer is thinking it could be an interesting experiment to completely avoid using the personal pronoun, and also to regard oneself habitually in the 3rd person.  Not as a pretension, but as a spiritual exercise, which, after all, reflects reality at least as well as the 1st person mode to which we are normally accustomed.  

It’s a difficult exercise.  In writing the first paragraph, the personal pronoun crept in: it was the first word written.  Formal writing also shuns the first person, so at least there is a convention to fall back on.  It would be even more helpful if there was some sort of alarm that would go off every time the personal pronoun is used.  But the word “I” is itself rather incongruous, and a little cumbersome to write on a tablet keyboard.