Notices by Dave Lane 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 2

I'd love to see this succeed: https://antitrust.nextcloud.com/

@bhaugen @alcinnz I've posted rather a lot about it https://davelane.nz/tppa-select-committee-redux-2018-edition & https://davelane.nz/suggestions-aotearoa-new-zealands-digital-strategy & https://davelane.nz/mshostage & https://davelane.nz/procurement among others.

I can't believe that no one is talking about the threat to our sovereignty presented by NZ's adoption of the #CPTPPA and the implications of secret suits brought by, for example, foreign owned tech corporations who might secretly sue (or threaten to do so) the Crown if NZ gov't has any policy that prefers domestic suppliers of cloud services. It's ridiculous that we'd accept such constraints on national policy (i.e. loss of sovereignty).

@swansinflight CatalystCloud.nz? Nope, they're still NZ-owned, far as I know.

Whoa, only just saw this: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018883758/should-official-govt-data-be-hosted-by-overseas-cloud-providers This all needs to be on-shore with *NZ-owned* (not US owned!!) hosting providers. https://catalystcloud.nz is totally right about this.

This is really frustrating (but entirely unsurprising) to see: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/lobbying/486527/how-well-connected-lobbyists-ask-for-and-receive-urgent-meetings-sensitive-information-and-action-on-law-changes-for-their-corporate-clients We need to knock the 'revolving door' on the head, and end this corrupt practice.

@airshipper you'll notice how all AWS 'deals' involve them 'generously' providing 'training'. What you don't see is that the training only for AWS' proprietary APIs & processes, and it's largely non-transferrable. It's designed to create consutants who *only* know how to provision AWS services, thereby effectively locking them (and their customers) into the AWS monoculture. MSFT is desperately trying to copy that approach with Azure. @cjnielsen

@airshipper in effect, the NZ Gov't is giving AWS a PR win while probably offering tax breaks so AWS can dominate the domestic cloud market - it's as if the NZ Gov't is importing digital possums not realising it'll kill our indigenous digital bird life. Our gov't is really really crap at anything related to tech strategy. Their credulous love for foreign corporations smacks heavily of either hopeless naivete/incompetence or corruption. @cjnielsen

@mako principle driven ("ideological motived") people committed to developing 'worse software' - but that's 'free' - compared to proprietary software... provide a 'cultural subsidy' that is a net cost... until the 'free' software ends up being better. It's about commons-based peer production. Fascinating.

What a great talk by @mako describing how #FOSS' brilliance is sometimes co-opted by the proprietary world where they succeed creating a (self-interested) market for things that communities do gratis out of kindness & trust... https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

Can anyone remember an amazing early #FOSS graphical tile project with quirky branding from back in the mid-2000s - I can't remember the name (used the tiles on my desktop with glee, as they were rich and superb in their design). The branding featured weird cut outs of JFK driving a school bus making absurd statements about how great this library was. It was quite amusing & over the top...

Listening to #RNZ on recent damage to the #telco network. @paulbrislen is featured... If we're wanting to improve communications resilience, surely it makes sense to exploit the fact that cellphones can talk to one another directly rather than depending on telco cell towers & backhaul... The telcos would probably fight it, as it limits their ability to 'clip the ticket', but gov't should mandate it as a civil defence/resilience measure. See https://serval-project.org (a #FOSS project) for details.

I run a bunch of #FOSS services on cloud VPSs I'm in charge of... a good number are on Ubuntu 18.04. With its impending loss of support (as a LongTermSupport instance, it gets 5 years support from Canonical) I'm going to move them to a bigger piece of ice floe (i.e. 22.04). Moving to a new VPS provider (German-owned, so no US Cloud or Patriot act implications!) will also reduce our hosting costs by better than 50% while improving my deployment consistency. Boom: win-win-win-win!

How do we maintain communications in the face of climate calamity events? https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018881865/preventing-a-communications-blackout-in-the-next-big-disaster One approach is to regulate the telcos to mandate that cellphones can talk to one another directly, without going via a celltower. Telcos don't want to do that (because they can't track & clip the ticket on all communication), but it's possible: there've been #FOSS projects to do so for years, including the ServalProject - http://servalproject.org/ - which was initiated after the Haiti earthquake.

Friend of mine came by recently with his laptop so I could hand over my Scout group leader role (including Gmail & Xero accounts to him). His MS Windows 11 laptop had the charming feature of having the mouse freeze for 5 seconds after every button click. Couldn't imagine getting tired of that. He was resigned to its frailties. But it's no wonder why people hate computers. Most don't know anything other than Windows. Poor sods.

We need leaders who actually say: "We need to change the way we live. The way we've been living is broken, and cannot go on - 'business as usual' isn't a viable option. We, among the world's richest people, need to dramatically reduce the energy we use so others can afford to use a bit more. It's not a bad thing: we can have better lives by using less energy!"

@jeremy_pm could be. The electorate is certainly unsophisticated enough to fall for it... Here's hoping.

to be fair, biofuels is sorta missing the point. We need to *reduce* energy use, not switch forms (trading off CO2 for land use, which will also add CO2). Similarly hydrogen. But why stop the frickin' bottle return scheme?! It's already 30years overdue.

Listening to RNZ now, I'm appalled by gov't's decisions to roll back climate action commitments due to natural disasters caused by climate catastrophes. Who was it who said that 'humanity is the only species that will be unable to save itself from extinction because doing so isn't cost-effective'?

Anyone here using (or have thoughts on) SimpleX? https://github.com/simplex-chat