Tag Archives: social-networking

Diary

Vikshepa Posted on by

I have the house to myself as D has gone up to Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee for a personal meditation retreat with Hagit. I was invited but didn’t feel like being in the proximity of thousands of Israeli weekenders. Although Tabgha itself is a more private place; it’s mainly a Christian pilgrimage center.

I do enjoy these weekends home alone though, and if I want to get out, there are lovely walks in this season. We had three days of rain now, which should bring lots more flowers. The poppies were the big surprise this week, and I took lots of photos of them.

Around the house, I have plenty to do if I feel ambitious – trimming hedges, which shoot up quickly in the springtime, and planting some lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora), which in Hebrew is called “Luisa”. From Wikipedia, I see why: it is named after Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of King Carlos IV.

D also booked a plane ticket yesterday to the UK, to visit neighbours / friends who are spending a year there. I probably won’t be joining her for that trip either. I don’t want to fly frivolously anymore, going somewhere for the hell of it, just for a few days. Unfortunately, the Europeans still seem to be encouraging lots of domestic flights with tickets that are cheaper than equivalent land transportation. Such flights should be taxed to a level that make it less worthwhile to fly. Trains and buses could be subsidized with the income from taxing flights.

Diary

Vikshepa Posted on by

I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There’s more to do.

Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn’t get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don’t want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.

VPNs

According people who understand these matters better than me, VPNs are becoming almost a necessary feature for privacy on today’s web.

I have been experimenting with some of them lately. I started with Njalla. It worked well with MXLinux, I activated through a script in the terminal. The cost was, if I remember rightly €6 per month for one device, and it was not possible for me to choose a local server.

ProtonVPN has both a free and a premium plan. The premium version costs about the same as Njalla, but is for 8 devices. There are servers all around the world, so I was able to find a local one. Linux support is through a dedicated gui app. However I found the app to be buggy under MX Linux / KDE. After I got rid of it, I had a hard time getting back into the Internet. The app works fine in my aging Samsung phone however – it’s still working there, till I cancel the subscription.

Now I’m trying Mullvad VPN – I came upon it by chance since I have started to use Mullvad browser. This also has a Linux GUI app for Linux, which works well for me, so far (2 days). It costs about the same as the others, and is good for 5 devices, which would be enough for all our computers and phones. Like ProtonVPN, there are servers around the world, including local servers that we can use. The speed seems fine.

Mullvad browser

Mullvad browser is a new browser produced by Mullvad VPN company in cooperation with the organization behind Tor browser. After reading a review on it in The Verge, I am giving it a try. So far it seems quite usable; like a slightly downgraded version of Firefox. One noticeable “feature” is that the actual size of the browser window is smaller (evidently they are trying by this means to standardize the canvas size, which is one of the things that trackers use in order to establish a unique browser fingerprint). There are also no sync options, and the addition of addons is discouraged. I will probably use it in conjunction with my other browsers.

The country

I haven’t been listening too much to the depressing news. My assumption is that it is in the interest of our wise leaders to create a fracas or maybe start a little war in order to distract people from the other harmful stuff they have been up to. Nothing unites the (normally divisive and polarized) Israelis better than a healthy reminder that it is surrounded by enemies. Starting a minor war offers a win-win situation. You can easily start one by sending border police into the Al-Aqsa mosque to beat everybody up, raiding Syria night after night and then bombing Gaza again. Everyone will feel sorry for the Jews cowering in their shelters over the holiday. The people will unite against external threats that are, with a stretch of the imagination, just real enough to be believable. After weeks of warnings about the dangers of Ramadan, it seems that the holy month got off to too quiet a start.

Interoperability

Vikshepa Posted on by

I am not so worried about a few big tech companies embracing fediverse, because if a couple of them do, it may draw the even bigger fish in too, meaning that for the first time we will have interoperability between major social media companies.

If we like the unique feel of Tumblr, the rapidity of Twitter, the artistic community of deviantart or the targeted boosts offered by Facebook, etc. we could choose one of those services knowing that we can still them to stay in touch with our friends on other networks.

That will still not be enough to persuade many of us to join those commercial networks, but we will finally be able to read posts sent by our friends, and they will be able to read ours. If that happens, it will be great, because it will no longer matter what service people decide to join.

Even the big companies may eventually see that interoperability is to their advantage – they will simply need to shift their attention away from all kinds of devious behaviour that aims to lock in users by force, and towards offering the best experience possible. When people are no longer held captive, they will be able to demand more.

If I already enjoy being on Facebook, but can also see there all the posts of my friends on Twitter, I will end up spending more of my time on Facebook, which is eventually better for Facebook.

The only real danger, as far as I understand it, is that as with email, it could become a playing field mainly of a few big operators. Because in order for it to work properly, there is quite a high bar to reach. It has to be done with a slew of protocols and security standards. But new email companies and services, even non-profits run by a few volunteers, do manage to break in, and even manage to be innovative in what they offer.

I think this will be the same with the fediverse. What will eventually persuade the big companies to open up and be interoperable will be government regulations or other necessities, rather than “competition” from Mastodon. But the availability of common free opensource protocols like ActivityPub is showing the way forward.