val @val@oc.todon.fr

2023: canadian mint releases new coins with the king's face on them. if you squint you can see a getty images watermark

La loi imposant aux plates-formes le retrait en une heure des publications « à caractère terroriste » validée par le Conseil constitutionnel https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2022/08/13/la-loi-imposant-aux-plates-formes-le-retrait-en-une-heure-des-publications-a-caractere-terroriste-validee-par-le-conseil-constitutionnel_6137979_4408996.html

Misuse of Twitter’s Alt Text Feature Draws Criticism From Accessibility Advocates - Katie Deighton @ The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/misuse-of-twitters-alt-text-feature-draws-criticism-from-accessibility-advocates-11657879200 (soft paywall)

The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images — the alt text descriptions - Theresa Vargas @ Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/20/nasa-images-accessible-text/ (soft paywall)

To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.

How was Facebook used by students in the 2010s? We cannot show you, that version of Facebook is not hosted anywhere.

How did MySpace look around 2009? We don't really know, the Wayback Machine only shows a limited amount of static content, and there may only be a few surviving screenshots

What correspondence did Vint Cerf have as president of the ACM with other luminaries of computing industry and research? We do not know; Google will not publish his emails.

What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary.

What did the British cabinet discuss when they first learned of the Coronavirus pandemic? We do not know; they chatted on a private WhatsApp group.

What books were published analysing the aftermath of the Maidan coup in Ukraine? We do not know; we do not have the keys for the Digital Editions DRM.

How was the coup covered in televised news? We do not know; the broadcasters used RealVideo and Windows Media Encoder and we cannot read those files.

We have to ask ourselves how we are going to preserve and transmit knowledge about our age to the next generations. Knowledge about an age where information is produced, consumed and discarded within hours, days or months, or where it's only stored on the server rooms of a handful of corporations, with no guarantees that those businesses will exist in the future, and with no way of accessing that information unless a certain set of regulatory, hardware, software pre-conditions are met.

That's why projects like the Internet Archive deserve more recognition and funding. That's why web scraping should not only be a civic right, but a civic duty to the next generations. Otherwise all the knowledge about the great age of information will be transmitted orally - with all the distortions that such transmission implies.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-digital-dark-ages/

This, right here, is why companies everywhere should not use social media alone for service status updates.

The fact that Proton's status page says we should go to Twitter for "more information" means that Proton is less accessible to folks without Twitter accounts. And that's no good.

yess this looks awesome

We'll have critical #vulnerabilities and apps will be unsafe as long as time-to-market and hype-driven development trump engineering best practices and honesty ...

No amount of dumbing-down of devices and thus of society will make us "safer".

On the contrary, only transparency will.

Si vous avez le droit de vote et pouvez y aller, faites-le s'il vous plaît.

Le premier tour des législatives a lieu aujourd'hui ! Le prochain sera le 19 juin.

Ces élections sont extrêmement importantes, ne laissez pas perdre votre voix s'il vous plaît.

Rappel aussi que la carte électorale n'est pas obligatoire !

PS: si vous pouvez mais ne le faites pas, vous avez aussi la possibilité de voter quand même pour d'autres personnes qui elles n'ont pas le droit de vote !

I forget other people aren't disabled and are fully functioning cos I'll be reacting in horror and sympathy to their normal day thinking they'd be on the floor in pieces, just completely obliterated from work. But they're like... fine? And then they go to a night club afterwards?? I couldn't imagine, wtf

Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented

A feature of email is that my inbox is an immutable copy of everything I received no-one can change.

With email, I can prove I've been harassed, sent malware, wrong links, illegal orders by my employers, the date of an event I've missed because it was wrong and I'm innocent, etc.

With Google AMP, the sender will be able to "update" those emails and deny his mistake, hide proofs, fake the history.

This technology put people at risk.

#SaveEmailFromGoogleAMP

A question for @thunderbird: do you have any plan to fight against AMP, the Google initiative to make email "dynamic" (read controllable from home / enabling tracking / "updating" content I don't want to be updated) and thus killing the main feature of email: being an immutable copy of stuffs people send me?

#SaveEmailFromGoogleAMP

From https://amp.dev/about/email

> Embedding AMP within an email [...] add a MIME part with a content type of text/x-amp-html. It should live alongside the existing text/html or text/plain parts. This ensures that the email message works on all clients

You can be SURE that most of these AMP "rich" email won't have text/plain nor a text/html useful content

Can we hope for email providers to reject every AMP "riches" emails? Or will Google also take control of our inboxes?

#SaveEmailFromGoogleAMP

Mastodon 2.6 will introduce a new privacy setting, better suited for your most important toots.

This is great: "stable" coin project relies on community governance, so a hacker borrows $1b, uses it to get a 67% voting stake, votes that the project should wire them $182m, then pays back the huge loan and exits -- all in the space of 13 seconds. The "stable" coin immediately crashes.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/18/23030754/beanstalk-cryptocurrency-hack-182-million-dao-voting