What are your favorite sci-fi novels?

Not necessarily the classics you *think* you should say (we'll leave those for Twitter/X), but rather the ones you actually read and loved.

“Free speech administration” that’s funny to hear. Whoever believes that has a fundamental misunderstanding of what Trump’s administration actually believes in.

I want to talk about something that some people may find offensive, and that I can’t talk about on Twitter to not get shadow banned as I have to rely on reach for my work.

The first time I attended Chaos Computer Congress was over 15 years ago. It had the best parties in town, and we would sneak in for the nightlife.

As I rekindled my interest in politics, computers and the internet, I became more aligned with the CCC’s mission: hacking the planet to hold power to account.

While I was already disappointed with some of the CCC’s policies – particularly on things like COVID and Bitcoin – this year was the first time that I seriously lost hope for and trust in the CCC as an institution – starting with its opening speech.

The CCC’s opening speech sets the theme for the event. This year, it was dedicated to the global rise of fascism. Speakers talked about Germany’s protests against the far-right AFD, about Donald Trump, LGBTQ and abortions, and pro-democracy protests in countries like Georgia.

But not a single word was lost to the genocide in Palestine.

Checking the CCC’s schedule, I merely found a single talk on Palestine, which explicitly made clear that it did not take a stance on whether Israel was right or wrong in its operations.

There were still a lot of great talks at the congress, and many assemblies showed their solidarity, but this complete lack of mention is what really stood out for me.

To understand what a hackers congress has to do with genocide, we need to take an uncomfortable look at Nazi Germany.

What enabled the Holocaust 80 years ago was not just a bunch of bloodthirsty eugenicist maniacs high on ungodly amounts of speed and their fascist ideologies. It was the streamlining of exploitation and murder to never before seen efficiency, with the help of new, more efficient technologies.

It is these same advancements in technology that are fueling the genocide in Palestine today. It’s surveillance on an unprecedented scale, evermore invasive spyware, AI enabled targeting and automated drone warfare.

You can think of Palestine what you want, but this technology is being exported from Palestine to the rest of the world today.

It’s facial recognition systems and license plate scanners that Israel uses to enforce apartheid that you’ll soon see scanning your biometrics for your next flight on holidays, or your car on your next trip to work.

It’s spyware companies that test their products to soon sell them to governments around the world targeting activists, journalists and opposition.

It’s psychological warfare utilizing dating sites like Grindr to social engineer Palestinians into spying on their peers and extort their sexual preferences.

Just last month, the a16z portfolio company Skydio, which is a major Israeli military contractor, was caught providing its surveillance drones to Yale University to monitor and track student protestors.

Some of you may find this topic uncomfortable as it may not align with your political views.

But the reality remains that the genocide in Palestine is a testing ground for never before seen surveillance tech that will soon be used on you. And the world’s most renowned hackers are silent.

IMO, Primal offers the best custom zap feature I’ve seen. You can setup your custom zaps easily and it goes a step further by letting you customize zaps for individual notes.

If 90% of users are on phones why are 90% of developers making web apps?

The mobile market has a clear preference for apps over webapps.

I love webapps and they have a lot of positives but few devs stop and reflect on what the market is conveying.

I noted a few weeks ago:

PWAs are an effective way of distributing applications permissionlessly, especially on iOS, but there's a few drawbacks:

- Hard to install: the fact that you have multiple steps that need explanation (go to the hamburger menu, tap on install, but on iOS use Share...). As insignificant as this sounds, it's a major UX hurdle for users and why I think PWAs are not more widespread. Apple and Google know this very well.

- Harder to discover: though not needing an app store is an upside, it hurts discoverability, especially on app stores with a social layer like Zapstore

- Reliance on domain names: Not a huge problem but definitely not as sovereign as private keys

- Hard to verify releases: since you pull data and UI from a website, it's unclear when you have upgraded, impractical to sign and next to impossible to audit a particular release. Websites typically perform lots of deployments every day

We are all reckless maniacs now...

"BlackRock says up to 2% Bitcoin allocation is a reasonable range"

What’s prism?

The #Sony #Xperia 10 IV with #SailfishOS is the first time I actually liked using a phone, ever since the #Nokia #N9

That includes all the current bugs and issues that *didn't* exist on my Xperia 10 or my original #Jolla.

#linuxonmobile

Things are getting interesting..

The DoJ asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome. The request follows the ruling in August that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search.

Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government asked Judge Mehta to give Google a choice: either sell Android or bar Google from making its services mandatory on phones that use Android to operate. If Google broke those terms, or the remedies failed to improve competition, the government could force the company to sell Android at a later date.

The government also asked the judge to stop Google from entering into paid agreements with Apple and others to be the automatically selected search engine on smartphones and in browsers.