Please don’t contact me to “well ackchyually” me and explain MITM attacks and how your terrible ISP inserts ads into your unencrypted web pages and how you were able to make a Gemini client out of a whistle and some shoelaces. If you don’t want to make your website content available to stupid old computers, then don’t.

Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World - joshua stein

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

(via Apple rebuffs Facebook criticism, says iOS anti-tracking features are about ’standing up for our users’ - 9to5Mac)

We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much, @Twitter

Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a login I do?
We can’t go on together
With suspicious login alerts (suspicious login alerts)
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious login alerts

(with heartfelt apologies to Mark James, and Elvis Presley, of course)