Lifehacker: “If you use Firefox, you can make it a better browser by installing add-ons. Yes, that’s what Mozilla calls them—they’re talking about what everyone else knows as “extensions.” Whatever you call them, there are good ones out there that can help you do everything from improving your privacy to getting around restrictions you’ll encounter… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
The Myth of Online Privacy: Risks, Dangers, and Solutions
MakeUseOf: “Privacy these days means something completely different than it did even a decade ago. And the only things we have to blame for this are the internet and ourselves. In the age of the internet, we’re only as “private” as the tools we use allow us to be, which isn’t much. While you rejoice… Continue Reading
The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment
Wired: “Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German programmer is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative to Twitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Elon Musk’s ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users. Rochko began developing Mastodon shortly after leaving university in 2016. He was a fan of… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 12, 2022
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 12, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading
Thinking together Steps to an ecology of mind
Subconscious – Gordon Brander / on Substack: “While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold. Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for… Continue Reading
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
The Atlantic: “It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to… Continue Reading
Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon
ZDNet: “Now that Twitter is under new (and controversial) management, a decentralized open-source alternative has seen surprising growth. Here’s how the Fediverse works and how you can get started…It’s difficult for most consumers to wrap their minds around the concept of the Fediverse, which has a lot of technical jargon and wonkiness associated with it.… Continue Reading
How to know if breathwork is right for you
Mashable: “Breathwork tutorials are popular on social media, but experts say beginners should be cautious. Breathwork seems like one of those self-help techniques that you could easily learn on social media. After all, there are countless tutorials on YouTube and TikTok, along with numerous testimonials on Reddit. And anyway, could it really be that difficult… Continue Reading
Gmail will no longer allow users to revert back to its old design
TechCrunch: “Google announced [November 8, 2022] that it’s making the new Gmail interface the standard experience for users. The company first released the new interface earlier this year but allowed users to revert back to the original view. Starting this month, users will no longer have the option to go back to the old interface.… Continue Reading
How to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation online
Washington Post: “Anyone with an internet connection can watch breaking news unfold in real time, or at least some version of it. Across social media, posts can fly up faster than most fact-checkers and moderators can handle, and they’re often an unpredictable mix of true, fake, out of context and even propaganda. This kind of… Continue Reading
Mastadon – Democratizing Social Media
“Mastodon’s popularity is soaring, and it’s all due to the chaotic actions of one man. As people explore what else is on offer for social media, Mastodon has emerged as a viable open-source alternative, with no ads. Reuters has an explainer, as does CNN, New York Times, and the Guardian.” [via Metafilter] NOTE: Follow beSpacific… Continue Reading
Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks
MIT Technology Review: “…A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry.… Continue Reading
