Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
Admin
Cyborg rights activist, designer, developer.
Joined Apr 2017
HSBC CEO, Fink Tell Saudis Future is Bright Post-Khashoggi Furor
Undeterred by Khashoggi murder, global executives return to Saudi Arabia
Fuck these assholes. Guillotines are too good for these bastards.
Aral Balkan
boosted
RT @dpcarrington
How do you deal with a climate denier? “I don’t” says @gretathunberg
#goodanswer
#youthstrike4climate
#guardianlive
Aral Balkan
boosted
RT @friends_earth
“I am not the leader of this movement I am part of this movement. Everyone is equally important.” @gretathunberg #GuardianLive #YouthStrike4Climate
I will be keynoting at UX Australia 2019:
http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/news/second-ux-australia-2019-announced-aral-balkan
Tickets go on sale on May 1st.
I don’t find myself in the Antipodes too often so looking forward to the chance to hopefully catch up with some of you then :)
Aral Balkan
boosted
Does anyone own a Purism laptop? Are they actually sturdy? How's the battery life?
“Où l’on ouvre une école, on ferme une prison!” – Hippolyte Laroche
(Where we open a school, we close a prison.)
Pop!_Planet has now released a Pop Classic icon pack that you can easily install to get consistent icons back under Pop!_OS 19.04.
Just updated my post to highlight that:
https://ar.al/2019/04/20/fixing-the-icon-regression-in-pop_os-19.04/
Aral Balkan
boosted
@datenteiler @albin @aral There's a difference between "right/ability to tinker" and "requires tinkering to work".
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral This and the poor touchpad support were the main reasons I switched to Mac after 8 or 9 years as a staunch GNU/Linux person. I’m so much happier with my OS and my computer than I have ever been before.
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral This is actually a thing.
It is visual consistency that helped me make the jump from macOS to Linux many years ago.
I’m not a techie plus a very visual user, and if it weren’t for @elementary OS' much-derided styleguide, I would probably still sit in my gilded iCage wondering what might be on the other side.
I had tried other distros, but being unable to see the beauty of code or licenses, you’re left with the GUI and UX – and coming from macOS, most felt like an assault on the senses.
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral Since the Pop icons are a fork of Papirus, I would recommend installing Papirus and using these. Papirus is in the Ubuntu repos so an easy "sudo apt install papirus-icon-theme" is all you need.
Your fix has the disadvantage that the Cosmic Pop icons won't receive updates anymore, while Papirus has regular updates.
https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme
Aral Balkan
boosted
"Meanwhile, a list of Google Policy Fellows for 2014 included individuals from a range of nonprofit organizations whom one would expect to be leading the fight against the corporation's concentrations of information and power, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Future of Privacy Forum, the National Consumers League, the Citizen Lab, and the Asociacion por los Derechos Civiles."
- Shoshana Zuboff
pg. 126, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
#SurveillanceCapitalism
@aral called this "institutional corruption". It seems more like infiltration to me. It is more consistent with their government lobbying efforts and swapping of employees between the US government agencies and Google.
This doesn't mean that EFF is corrupt as a whole, but Google infiltrates some of their employees into it, Facebook hires some EFF employees as privacy specialists etc.
But given a long enough time span, it might even lead to institutional corruption once the employees appointed by surveillance capitalists rise in ranks at these institutions.
- Shoshana Zuboff
pg. 126, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
#SurveillanceCapitalism
@aral called this "institutional corruption". It seems more like infiltration to me. It is more consistent with their government lobbying efforts and swapping of employees between the US government agencies and Google.
This doesn't mean that EFF is corrupt as a whole, but Google infiltrates some of their employees into it, Facebook hires some EFF employees as privacy specialists etc.
But given a long enough time span, it might even lead to institutional corruption once the employees appointed by surveillance capitalists rise in ranks at these institutions.
Aral Balkan
boosted
Hello WordPress users,
Do you know sources of good privacy-friendly themes for WordPress? (i.e. without any trackers)
(It's possible to remove trackers manually, but this is a request for themes that respect privacy by default.)
Me: there is a design problem here👇
Linux folks: 🎶 upstream, downstream, sidestream, slipstream, any stream but my stream 🎶 👈🤪👉
Remember folks, corporations are your friends and democracy is the enemy.
Vote neoliberal or conservative today to find out more.
Aral Balkan
boosted
After years of insisting that DRM in HTML wouldn't block open source implementations, Google says it won't support open source implementations
https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html
Indie Web Server 8.2.0: Cascading archives for an evergreen web
https://ar.al/2019/04/20/indie-web-server-8.2.0-cascading-archives-for-an-evergreen-web/
I just released version 8.2.0 of Indie Web Server. This version brings with it a cascading archives feature to make it easier than ever for you to support an evergreen web and not break existing links as you evolve your sites.
If you want to understand why I’m so pissed off about such a “minor” thing (icons, pfft!) it’s because this year I will be showing my Linux desktop to 1000s of people at conferences and I want to challenge their preconceptions about FOSS; to know that FOSS can be beautiful.
Fixing the icon regression in Pop!_OS 19.04
https://ar.al/2019/04/20/fixing-the-icon-regression-in-pop_os-19.04/
Admin
Cyborg rights activist, designer, developer.
Joined Apr 2017
