Mastodon, or: Can Nazi use Free as in Freedom Software?
Short answer: yes, they can. Regardless of what some websites are saying. Mastodon is “an alternative to Twitter”. Mashable just wrote that: “Mastodon.. in many ways it’s like Twitter, but it is also so not like Twitter… What makes it stand out? It has better privacy controls than Twitter. Also, neo-Nazis are explicitly banned.” and then, 2 lines below: “Mastodon is a type of free and open source software (FOSS) known as “GNU social.
All the absurdity of modern copyright, in ONE removal
Today’s copyright law is ridiculous and offensive, to say the least, and this week it’s Mr Roger’s Neighborhood" turn to prove it. Andrea James writes on Boing Boing that "Over the weekend, two episodes of Mister Roger's Neighborhood "Conflict" series unexpectedly appeared on YouTube after being unavailable for three decades. YouTube quickly removed them, but to many, the timing felt related to Trump's plans to defund PBS." The full story is here, but I’m not mentioning it it because it may “be a message to Trump”.
After Yahoo, it's Amazon's turn to show why a percloud is needed
On February 28th, 2017, a “cockup at Amazon facility in Virginia, US” caused its S3 cloud storage to fail. This fault led to “major websites and services - including Imgur, Medium, Trello, Yahoo webmail, the Docker Registry Hub.. falling offline, losing images, or left running like treacle. Basically, that outage “knackered half the internet, it seems, because it all relies on S3 to store data online”. Just to stress: this is one S3 region that has become inaccessible, yet web apps are tripping up and vanishing as their backend evaporates away.
What the CIA director forgot to say about millennials
Former CIA director Michael Hayden recently said that millennials may leak secrets because they are “culturally different”. OK but.. please let me point out some of the culprits for such a difference, and the fact that those same culprits had been clearly named and described more than three years ago. Mr. Hayden said that millennials have different instincts than the people who hired them and this cultural difference may be the reason why “millennials leak secrets”:
Dumbphone is the new Smartphone. Especially for traveling
On the left: the “new” Nokia cell phone. On the right: why they may be a HUGE commercial success.
That digital divide in Fiumicino airport
(this is a translation of my Italian post of 2012 on the same issue. I’ve done it because the problem, and the need to solve it as imagined below, are still there)
The airport of Fiumicino offers a good example of the real, and really serious digital divide that afflicts many Italians. That divide is not the lack of broadband connectivity, smartphone or computers: it is the lack of knowledge and capability of using those tools for doing something that is actually, really useful for themselves. In the Fiumicino’s case, this can be seen by connecting three facts.