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________ ________ _____ / ___| \/ o| _ |@ __ \ \*`--.|o. . | | | | | \/ `--. \ |\/| | | | | | __ /\__/ / | | \ \_/o/ |_\ \ \___o/\_| |_/\___/ \____/ News from the Free Internet Issue 5, January 16, 2021
1. Opening Thoughts: Cyberspace is Oozing Into Meatspace
2. Gemini and Gopherspace News
3. Tech News
4. Cyberspace Musings
5. Classifieds
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You might not need jQuery!
by littlejohn <littlejohn@sdf.org>
While Issue 4 of Smog was still in the making, I struggled for a while with whether or not I ought to include any mention of that thing that *everyone* on the Internet is talking about these days. And by "that thing" I mean, of course, the latest events in the US.
On the one hand, history is a bit like a tractor engine -- when it roars right under your window, you can try to ignore it, but it'll keep roaring nonetheless. Besides, while I do want to keep Smog politics-free, tech companies were involved enough that it's hard to keep the politics out without leaving some very relevant tech out as well.
On the other hand, I have a personal rule that trumps (no pun intended!) all other interests: I don't express opinions about the politics of a country where I don't live. I'm wrong about things that happen in *my* country on a daily basis. I barely understand the many cultures of the United States, and their interaction, and the everyday problems US citizens face. To attempt to analyse them wouldn't just be rude, it would be outright stupid.
Nonetheless, during the last week, it's become obvious that how and why tech companies get involved in public discourse during public crises is a problem that has outgrown the events on January 6th. At this point, if you'll pardon my very awkward stretching of the metaphor, there's a very loud tractor engine noise coming from the server room, which is very much my territory, and about which I can talk without the fear of being rude to my friends from across the pond.
And when the tractor engine noise finally dies off, there will be a lot of hot questions that the tech industry will have to answer, and which the tech industry is not at all keen on answering too soon.
Chief among them is the question of responsibility and resources. Clearly, despite their many claims to the contrary, it seems that social media companies, cloud companies, and App Store wardens, do in fact have the means and the resources to police their communities, and remove content that they find objectionable.
So why is it a problem when it's not about politicians and political declarations, but about "regular" people, and about sexism, revenge pornography, or animal abuse? Why is it that, when politicians are involved, CEOs think problems can only be solved by taking an active and responsible stance *today* -- but when it's about people who don't hold an office, they can only be solved through self-regulation and clear moderation policies, and that it's, like, a *process*, man, you can't just solve it overnight? Why is active and permanent content moderation essential in some cases, but an unreasonable burden that would stifle tech progress in other cases?
Some leaders, like Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, have also woken up to the sudden realisation that it could've easily been them on the receiving end of the ban hammer. This has caused them to issue some very embarrassing platitudes, like this one: “the fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing.” If I had to guess who came up with *that* nugget of wisdom, my first guess would have been a 10th grader with a bad attitude. (Look, we're not too proud of our officials on this side of the pond, either, okay?)
(If you're into platitudes, you can read more of them here).
This still raises some interesting questions though. A CEO can, in fact, pull the plug on *anyone's* loudspeaker without any checks and balances. Just ask anyone who's had to put up with Youtube's moronic content moderation schemes, for example.
This has always been the case -- why Breton waited until 2020 to be so perplexed is anyone's guess. But where do we go from here?
Should we enact some "checks and balances" for politicians' accounts? In that case, how is it fair to *everyone else*? Let's entertain, for a minute, the thought that this is, indeed, a problem of ensuring that speech remains free -- perhaps the long arm of private interest is now of a length comparable to that of the law, so speech should be protected from the interests of private enterprises as well as those of the government. In that case, why exactly should politicians' speech by "free"-er than that of others? Why should holding an office grant one a stronger voice than that of the citizens on whose payroll they are, and to whom they ultimately respond?
Should we enact some "checks and balances" for everyone, then? Who would get to enforce them, in that case? If governments were any good at enforcing checks and balances and ensuring everyone's voice is heard, social media wouldn't be the lucrative business it is today. On the other hand, if we exclude the state, we're left in a position that's no better than the one we're in today: real checks and balances are one bad quarter away from being replaced with a rubber-stamping script in order to cut operating costs.
I have no good answers to these questions, or in any case, none that I can present without breaking my "no talking about what politicians you can't vote for or against do" rule.
(Cory Doctorow might have a few good ones though.)
There is one thing that I am very certain of though: that, in the coming years, we will see sweeping changes in this field. In an uncanny twist of fate, it's not that the real world has caught up with cyberspace and is trying to police it. It's the other way 'round: cyberspace started oozing into the real world, and the real police and the Internet police are fighting over who has jurisdiction in the dirty areas.
For probably the first time in Western history, several companies have taken political sides in a way that even the most inept or technology-illiterate politicians can understand and quantify. Even the ones who happen to be on the side that the tech giants took realise it could have easily gone the other way.
This time, companies didn't take political sides by speaking for or against a proposed bill, or by donating to one of their foundations. These are declarations of principles, which weigh next to nothing in the world of politics, where politicians will passionately defend a principle today, and vote against it tomorrow, or vice-versa. They took political sides through direct action, in terms that everyone can understand.
If Twitter, Amazon, Apple or Google were cats, they wouldn't just be out of the bag right now -- their litter boxes would be filled with half-digested bits of the bag which they themselves tore, and enthusiastically chewed, just a few days ago. (Of course, they're not cats. Cats are cute and cuddly and little blobs of -- admittedly somewhat sociopathic -- fluffy love. Tech giants are nothing like that, except for the sociopathic part).
Let's see how they fare out of the bag now.
The neat hack of the week comes in the form of Presto, a Gemini app (HA!) that allows you to follow SIDC's alerts.
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Amfora, one of the most popular Gemini clients around, needs testing for its beta branch. This is something that anyone who enjoys Gemini can do, regardless of how much programming experience -- or technical experience in general -- they have.
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Twinq is a simple, light Gemini browser written in modern C++ using Qt. The project is still in its early stages and lots of features are missing, but it's taking off nicely, and the implementation is simple, straightforward, and easy to hack on.
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Solène Rapenne, Vger's author, shares some of her insights regarding Vger's security model.
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Debian discusses vendoring -- again
The problem of "vendoring" -- packaging dependencies along with a particular packet, rather than packaging them separately -- is popping up on the Debian mailing lists again. This time, it was prompted by the depressing amount of effort involved in packaging greenbone-security-assistant.
This mailing list thread tells the story
Certainly, this raises at least as many problems about Debian's packaging infrastructure and policies as it raises about the state of packaging software *in general*. Unsurprisingly, alternatives like Flatpak are frequently brought up, but sometimes it's hard to escape the question of whether that *solves* the problem, or just works around it...
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Intel CEO Bob Swan is Stepping Down
It seems like it's just yesterday that we were talking about how Intel's fortunes have been changing, and that some of its shareholders are... less than happy about it. Turns out enough of them were unhappy enough that Intel will get a new CEO, in the person of Pat Gelsinger. Some of you may remember him as the co-author (together with John Crawford) of one of the thicker 386 programming books way back in the 1980s.
What this means for Intel remains to be seen. This isn't Gelsinger's first Intel rodeo, but Intel's position is not too enviable, and if you read the PR bull^H^H^H^H^H^H^H news, you kind of get the feeling that most of the steering effort is currently in the board room, rather than the helm.
Meanwhile, the semiconductor industry isn't standing still!
Samsung's next Exynos SoC will have an AMD GPU
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Celebrating 20 years of Wikipedia
Has it been 20 years already? Wikipedia is turning 20 this year! What started as a modest community project has outshined, and outlived, some of the most ambitious multimedia products of the 1990s (yes, Encarta, I'm looking at you!). The anniversary website has a trove of stories about how that happened, buried under the bland, enthusiastic-but-hopelessly-corporate facade that we've come to expect from the Wikimedia in the last few years.
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Debian Bullseye freeze started
It's official! The freeze period for Debian 11 has begun, starting January 12th, with the hard freeze expected to start on March 12th.
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The Wine team has just announced the release of Wine 6.0, which includes a bunch of fixes for copy protection mechanisms, an experimental Vulkan rendered for WineD3D, improved raw input devices support, and may, many other goodies!
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("Back" as in "All the cool kids sit in the back of the class")
Let’s Encrypt's workaround for old Android devices
One of our readers recently poked me about this very relevant piece of (slightly older) news which I haven't featured because my news filter is really just a randomly-wired, caffeine-battered bundle of neurons that are currently useless for any other purpose.
Let's Encrypt successfully tackled an interesting challenge: the IdenTrust certificate, which Let's Encrypt used for cross-signing back when it was young, is set to expire. Let's Encrypt has issued its own root certificate in the meantime, but lots of Android users stuck on old versions never got an update that includes that.
As our reader rightfully points out, this is "ammunition for [their] argument that not-valid-after is an inconsequential field (one of many) when validating certs TOFU style". It's also an exceptional reminder that encryption and privacy are not purely technical problems. There's a lot of organisational politics and negotiation involved in it, too -- which, despite the bad reputation these things get, tend work out when done in good faith.
Is the Microphone mute button on Amazon Echo Flex for real?
After a quick exercise in reverse engineering it turns out that yes, the button is, most likely, "for real"!
O. Westin has a series of wonderful short -- *really* short -- stories that makes creative use of the limitations (and opportunities!) of Mastodon. But this is not just an experiment in writing. There's beauty and infinitely many riddles in these stories -- there's more to them than just being short enough to fit in a series of tweets. Check it out!
Smog and your friendly editor does not endorse any of the products, services, organisations, individuals or technologies mentioned below. However, I do not *not* endorse them, either!
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Smog runs ads on any topic for free and will never charge or accept money in exchange for publishing an ad. However, your friendly editor reserves the right to say no to an ad, or to stop running it at any time. That being said, I don't plan to say "no" to anything that's legal and civil.
Ads are published in random order, for up to 4 consecutive issues, re-shuffled each time. Ads will have to be no longer than 8 lines, wrapped at 72 columns, for a grand total of 576 characters. I encourage creative expression with ads though -- use ASCII art, sed one-liners, whatever you want!
If you'd like to see your ad here, drop me a line on littlejohn@sdf.org.
If I get interesting letters from my readers, I will publish them in the following issue. I encourage you to send your thoughts on your friendly editor's email address: littlejohn@sdf.org. If you would rather *not* get your letter published, please make a mention of it.
Want to see your writing in Smog? I will gladly publish or re-publish original articles, as long as they're not illegal or offensive, and if you're willing to license them under a license that does not prohibit free, non-commercial distribution and derivative works.
Please note that Smog is a non-commercial project with built-in SEO deterrence, an audience of maybe 12 people, and a business model that is best summed up by the word "nope", so all payment is in hipster points. If we are ever in the same pub, I will also buy you a beer (or a non-alcoholic equivalent!)