For me, what [Meet, Skype, Teams, Zoom] all do is offer convenience and ease, with underlying complex technology, but nothing truly immersive. I keep thinking it’s because we’ve turned business tools into communication tools. It’s like using PRWire to send holiday cards.

Ali on Twitter

Many people effectively rate a computer today on how well it can access social media, and a computer that can’t is therefore useless. This means you permit these companies to determine when the computer you spent your hard-earned money on should go in the trash. That decision probably won’t be made maliciously, but it certainly won’t be made to benefit you.

These are private companies and they get to decide how they will spend their money and time. But we, in turn, shouldn’t depend on them for anything nor expect anything from them, and we should think about finding ways to extricate ourselves from them and maintain contact with the people we care about in other fashions. On our systems in particular this will only get worse and it doesn’t have to. The power they have over our wallets and our public discourse is only — and entirely — because collectively we gave it to them.

TenFourFox Development: Another way social media is bad

I don’t think a liberal arts education makes you a better person. It ought to enable you to more accurately describe things. […]
On the one hand, of course, no education will prevent you from putting your mind to really troubling purposes. At the same time, there’s a lot of thinking in Silicon Valley that is there to describe reality in a way that wouldn’t immediately seem plausible. […] It allows very wealthy men, usually, to escape confrontation with what they really are doing. […] There are all these tech CEOs who believe they are the victims of random meanies on Twitter. And you think, how can you be so blind so as to not understand what the power differentials are here?
These are philosophical ideas that allow them to do this, even if they’re not very good ones. The ideas allow for an obfuscation of reality rather than a more penetrating analysis of it.

This Stanford professor is confronting tech’s billionaire philosophers - Protocol

nevver:

Adam Harvey

alls-well-that-ends-weird:

unlimited-shitpost-works:

winneganfake:

greenycrimson:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.

Cailbre d/l:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

How to use cailbre to remove DRM:

http://www.geoffstratton.com/remove-drm-amazon-kindle-books

Seconding calibre as a brilliant tool for ebook management in general. 

calibre is good

and it’s free and open source software!

Cailbre helped me properly access ebooks my dad bought for me ages ago whose encryption keys had been outmoded and were no longer available for my new laptop’s os! Nearly 15 of the books he’d given me I hadn’t even had a chance to read before then, but the free copy of cailbre I got online had all of the old, outdated encryption program keys!!

10/10, It’s good software!

Among the tools it is offering, Amazon’s image recognition product is the most controversial. […] Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces. City supervisors in San Francisco banned its use, saying the software is not only intrusive, but biased - it’s better at recognising white people than black and Asian people.
Mr Vogels doesn’t feel it’s Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.
“That’s not my decision to make,” […] “This technology is being used for good in many places. It’s in society’s direction to actually decide which technology is applicable under which conditions.
“It’s a societal discourse and decision - and policy-making - that needs to happen to decide where you can apply technologies.”
[Vogels] likens ML and AI to steel mills. Sometimes steel is used to make incubators for babies, he says, but sometimes steel is used to make guns.

Amazon’s next big thing may redefine big - BBC News