around the web

the Trinet and the rest of us

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Discouraging post from a programmer about what he calls The Trinet (the internet as dominated by Google, Facebook and Amazon). Whether you accept the premise or not, the post piles on statistics regarding big three dominance. Conclusion: "we will have even more vivid exchange of information between people, but we will sacrifice freedom." Vivid!

Crooked Timber commenter doug has a list of basic suggestions for avoiding the Trinet, the main one being staying off social media. Not vivid!

One of doug's recommendations is using Webpage Archive to take html snapshots of current webpages. Unlike Wayback/Internet Archive, which supposedly captures everything on the web, this utility allows users to save pages and then adds them to a searchable database. As it describes its mission: "This can be useful if you want to take a 'snapshot' a page which could change soon: price list, job offer, real estate listing, drunk blog post... Saved pages will have no active elements and no scripts, so they keep you safe as they cannot have any popups or malware!"

From August, a somewhat relevant Vice piece: "Rural America Is Building Its Own Internet Because No One Else Will." Wireless on top of grain elevators, etc.

Update: Paragraph three above added after posting.

crit of stallman crit

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Actrons posted a critique of Richard Stallman that manages not to say what he objects to about Stallman or what he believes in opposition to Stallman.

The subject appears to be a large schism in Linux over the GNU public license. Actrons' evidence that Stallman is in the wrong appears to be that Stallman was inordinately cranky in a YouTube interview.

From Wikipedia and hints of content in Actrons' post, this apparently relates to mudslinging between "open source" and "free software" advocates over the license. Somehow the pendulum has swung and the free software group (Stallman) is seen as obstructionist and capitalist and the open sourcers are somehow not capitalist. Last I read about this, open source was a corrupted version of free software ideals because it allowed a proprietary system to borrow what it needed from unrestricted source code without giving anything back. Now it appears the GPL is impeding the open sourcers from doing something they want to do. Just thinking aloud -- more study is obviously required.

Actrons has done a good deed by offering a modified Windows 10 that doesn't report all your home activities back to the mothership. No link, since Actrons isn't linking to it from his blog -- spread by word of mouth, i.e,, bulletin board (hat tip rene)

palast on dore's show

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Journalist Greg Palast has been a (largely ignored) obsessive on Republican election fraud, going back to the Bush vs Gore days and "purged felons." He's done extensive research on the Trump victory and says it follows the GOP pattern, this time with aggressive use of a dubious device known as "cross check," supposedly weeding out double voters but in fact eliminating voters with similar names. So, if the Orange One stole the election using these machinations, why don't the Democrats challenge it? asks Jimmy Dore on YouTube.

The Dore-Palast discussion is initially frustrating because it omits the DNC's dirty tricks against Sanders, concentrating solely on Republican schemes in the general election. In attempting to answer Dore's question, Palast notes that Al Gore went on to become a billionaire after his 2000 loss (let's assume that's true), and opines that if he'd challenged the system he wouldn't be invited to sit on boards -- he'd be "destroyed." Clinton isn't willing to say the Electoral College needs to be rethought, she thinks it's a great feature of our democracy, according to Palast.

Both Dore and Palast are baffled at all the energy the Washington media are putting into the Russia-stole-it narrative (which is palpable rubbish and a joke around the world) while ignoring the "Palast material" (again).