Karl Austin @[email protected]

This is absolutely wild: a Nepali student who flew to the UK to take up a university scholarship with a valid visa and proof of his uni place was detained at the border and held in custody for 12 days, leading to him losing his place.

Adding insult to injury, while a spelling mistake in his bank letter was part of the reason for disbelieving him, the Border Force's letter to him made several spelling mistakes https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/26/treated-like-a-criminal-nepali-student-wrongly-detained-at-uk-border-loses-uni-place

I'm curious, how do you prefer to consume information online?

Would be amazing if you could boost for improved statistical rigour and all that jazz. #poll #content #information

Edit: the poster is NOT my work it's: Jane McFayden, Rachel Malic and Laura Parker (on Mastodon mstdn.social/@LauraParkerUX)

New poster about designing for users with dyscalculia or low numeracy.

Check the page for it in the DWP Accessibility Manual which is a great resource:
https://accessibility-manual.dwp.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/accessibility-posters#designing-for-users-with-dyscalculia-or-low-numeracy-skills

I've added it to an old blog post about 'Plain numbers'
https://blog.chezleskrus.com/2022/03/13/plain-numbers/

Most people don't know enough about it, so glad the poster is now available

#numeracy #dyscalculia #neurodiversity

For a long time, when I'd read a comic with Lex Luthor in it, and he'd be... I dunno, conspiring with a guy who's super power is that he is mediocre at riddles, and maybe Solomon Grundy or someone like that, in order to launch their army of poison turtles into Metropolis, I'd scoff and say, "it's unrealistic that the world's richest man would waste his time and money on something that's only going to showcase to the world how incompetent he is."

I owe DC comics an apology.

I’m disgusted that protecting the reputation of the platform is more important to some people — including some Black people, what the actual fuck — than making sure people are safe, physically and emotionally.

That’s some nasty shit.

And to the “it’s just growing pains/join the right instance” crowd: Black people shouldn’t need a fucking Green Book to navigate the physical or virtual world.

PSA: If you have m.bbc.co.uk, m.bbc.com, ssl.bbc.co.uk and/or ssl.bbc.com (which all do the same as www these days) bookmarked or in scripts etc. please update them to www.bbc.co.uk (UK folks) or www.bbc.com (everyone else) as I'm going to turn off m. and ssl. in the new year. Tech debt which serves no purpose.
Boosts would be appreciated 🙌🏻

"The idea that technology can provide a silver bullet to solve complex societal issues does not stand up to examination"

The Online Safety Bill will make a bad situation worse. Having context-blind algorithms scan our chats and images for whatever any government says is harmful will put all our privacy at risk of overreach.

Read the full article by our Policy Manager, Dr Monica Horten.

#OnlineSafetyBill

https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/cybersecurity/2022/11/online-safety-bill-make-life-harder-victims

Eigg isn't connected to the UK national grid. Instead we generate 90% to 95% of our electricity from wind, sun, & water (hydro). Community-owned Eigg Electric was switched on in 2008. Islanders are trained and employed to manage it. Electricity costs 28p per unit/kWh. Before 2008 each property had its own diesel generator. Now we have 24kW of wind, 110kW of hydro, 170kW of solar PV, storage batteries, and a back up generator. Next challenge is #netzero #renewables #eigg http://isleofeigg.org/eigg-electric/

There's an ugly storm brewing in EU software security legislation that could seriously impact open source software development. Those of you in the EU should read this article and do some lobbying. The goals of the legislation aren't unreasonable, but the conformance-testing burden would totally overwhelm the OSS community. The legislators need to rethink how they approach the burden and responsibility of auditing. https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/

In the replies of new Black folks on here discussing the harassment they’ve faced, and slurs they’ve had thrown at them, I’ve seen white users respond with suggestions that they should move to better moderated instances – I even saw one guy say ‘you should just move to a black instance’. The usual line they take is to (patronizingly) talk about how the protocol lets you move instances, and so you can just find an instance with policies that suit you.

IMO, this behavior is (and should be more widely seen as) anti-Black; users should be reporting it, and instance admins should be banning for it.

Firstly, it shifts the blame for the abuse solely to the recipients – ‘it’s your fault for not picking an appropriate instance!’ It also makes the commenters themselves feel all smart for knowing the ins and outs of the protocol (even when they often have no idea what they’re talking about), which is honestly just annoying as fuck.

Secondly, it sweeps the fedi’s historical + continuing anti-Blackness under the rug by making racist abuse into a technical discussion rather than a cultural one. It serves to assuage the consciences of those making such comments, because they can just point to the safeguards that are *technically* there, allowing them to forego self-reflection.

Cumulatively, the effect of these kinds of comments is to push Black users off the fedi, or onto instances that can be blocked/marginalized/attacked by white users. This is segregation, plain and simple, and it’s absolutely shameful.

SO! Fellow admins, I’m gonna be reporting such behavior + suspending accounts that do it from instances I moderate. I’m gonna encourage users to report this shit too so that I can take action. How about you?

The @EU_Commission should and could start a Working Group on protecting decentralised solutions like #Mastodon and others from the copyright extremists and other (patent) trolls to establish ActivityPub as a true open way for citizens to communicate and liberate themselves from centralised, non-EU companies. It's a HUGE opportunity, IMHO!

Great article detailing the troubleshooting and tuning of an overwhelmed Mastodon instance: https://nora.codes/post/scaling-mastodon-in-the-face-of-an-exodus/

Based on a cursory look, it appears that the fediverse is adding new accounts at almost 3x the rate it did in the period after E-Day (Oct 27). Almost 120,000 new accounts per day! (Corrected from per hour - sorry)

Public Money, Public Code 🇪🇺

Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?

We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.

Code paid by the people should be available to the people!

https://publiccode.eu

#FOSS #OpenSource