It looks like the public sector in Germany is to drop its patchwork of incoming communications solutions in favour of a decentralised/federated new approach based on the Matrix protocol with MLS for message e2e encryption.
Well done. I'd wish more public/government orgs would have that foresight.
Oh... cool cool cool 
"The director of a new organization founded to advance the priorities of #US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. #Kennedy Jr. has extensively promoted the “#Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a famous #antisemitic forgery.
Leland Lehrman, who last month was named executive director of the #MAHAInstitute, also believes #Israel may have been behind the 9/11 terror attacks, and has inveighed against “high-level #Jewish Illuminists, or Lucifer worshipers.”
HTTP QUERY and Go: We need another HTTP verb. I'll explain why.
https://kmcd.dev/posts/http-query/
#http #protocols #api #webdev #go
The battle to AI-enable the web: NLweb and what enterprises need to know https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-battle-to-ai-enable-the-web-nlweb-and-what-enterprises-need-to-know/ #AI #standards #protocols
#Capitalism didn't give us the #internet.
Large-scale #cooperation, open #protocols, and free #software gave us the internet. Capitalism gave us mobile sites that don't work because fifteen ads cover the screen.
The inspiration for above mentioned re-reading of #RFC9413 for fun.
I've always respected Jon Postel's work and, from what I know, took them as inspiration and "guiding principles" in my work as a network engineer and architect. It's good to see, in my opinion, them getting re-evaluated rather than thrown out with the bathwater. YMMV of course.
https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/25/postels-law-and-the-three-ring-circus/
As good a time as any to re-read an #RFC and re-visit Postel's "law" - "be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept".
I appreciate the consideration put into this as well as the pertinent examples.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413
#protocols #standards #networking
A great video about why #Bluesky is NOT recommended as a truly open and independent alternative to mainstream #socialmedia.
@niccolove @niccolo_ve
#activitypub #fediverse #atproto #protocols #thefutureisfederated
Which #Messenger To Replace the #DataKraken #WhatsApp with? 
(5/n)
... I still have one, but federated #XMPP just somehow can't seem to take hold outside of its own niche" .
If you wanted to dig down even further, you'd get to the point where you'd have to deal with #Protocols:
https://eattherich.club/@jmhorner/110991346559623491
A French 
librarian association made an...
@ayo did you come across #radicle yet? Looks really intriguing. They did a lot of R&D, seem to have nailed the #protocols now. I'm going to try it for my next #opensource project
My wife and I have two cards for an account with a major credit card. Traveling recently, she'd made a purchase on that card that triggered texts and emails to me worrying about fraud. This really bugs me.
Don't ask me why they're asking ME, not her. They CAN tell the cards apart. They should have asked her directly. It'd have been even faster. Delay was due to asking the wrong person.
"Charge OK? Yep. OK, done." That's all it should have been.
I verified things with my wife and texted back to the card's SMS query that it was OK.
But even after I inefficiently confirmed all was well, upon going to the web site, I was again confronted with the Fraud Department wanting to confirm purchases that I had already, through their clumsy interface, dismissed as non-issues.
Also at the site, I saw that they were playing a back-and-forth thing where the vendor was repeatedly retrying apparent new transactions to get an affirmative response. Every vendor in the universe likely knows there's no other way to get past this than to keep trying.
Given how bad their internal bookkeeping is, that they don't know I've dismissed this alert, I kept wondering what the chances are that sometimes people just get double-billed. You'd like to think there was a consistent state, a database, a single source of authority with data integrity and a unique view, but then again, they're not showing evidence they're good at that.
And now today I got mail from their fraud department asking me about my experience and whether, based on that, I'd recommend the card to a friend.
It WASN'T an incident of fraud. It was confirmed normalcy. It should have been finished now. Having already wasted my time once, they want to waste it more?
And let's leave aside my annoyance at the fact that every business in the universe has converged on this practice which (a) assumes I make recommendations based on a single experience, and/or (b) seems to be trying to single out an agent for blame, rather than considering process.
I seriously doubt that feedback from these surveys ever reaches the people designing the offending processes because modern customer service seems to have as its bedrock principle that no one inside the company should ever learn what the customer experience is. It feels like the purpose of customer service is as armor to make sure that the business can really see, much less absorb, the vast amount of useful information that customers would willingly provide about just how bad their product is. I think this because the worst parts never change, no matter how many of these surveys I fill out.
Here's what I wrote today:
«Declining a valid charge is not the answer to fraud. You may feel hampered by existing protocols, but the credit card companies all have this problem and all profess helplessness. They/you own this problem.
The problem is that every time you decline a purchase, the person we're buying from can't tell the difference between a stolen card, someone who doesn't manage money right, and you just being nervous. Create a way to send an error code that distinguishes these. A temporary error that says "I'm querying the customer, please retry this transaction." or even a way to just ask a question before responding. It's completely preposterous that the correct solution to this problem is to leave egg on my face because you can't have rational network protocols that fairly represent the actual information that needs to be represented.
You're using outdated ways of doing things because you're too lazy to make a new standard, and you figure it's just fine if you sully the reputation of every customer every time they make a nervous-making transaction, that they'll be fine about it, that they won't mind the uncomfortable conversations, that they love to have email, text, etc. in a zillion different places for a single transaction, information that confusingly lingers after-the-fact an that is just clutter.
So you're asking me now whether I think that was a kind of fun experience that would make me recommend your card to someone else? Do you hear yourself? Did this question really need to be asked?
What you did does not instill confidence. It just makes a mess of a routine situation that should have a routine interaction, and there is nothing about this interaction that has the look of routine, other than that customers are used to getting dumped on big Big Credit and having to take whatever you dish out.»
After more multiple choice questions, they asked if I had any other comments to add. I did add some reminders about alert fatigue and how real problems are likely to slip through the cracks when they're doing these other things.
Is it any wonder that not all of us are reassured by billionaires taking over the US and saying "don't worry, we're good at this", "deregulate us", "run the US like a business"?
"…there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of #Bluesky or the #ATprotocol, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to control things like identity, illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough for most users (many of whom likely don't know or care about #decentralization or #protocols, etc) but it's likely to be a centralized system that relies on trusting a central authority.
Decentralized in theory, but centralized in practice."
https://torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/is-bluesky-decentralized-its-complicated/
I don't think ActivityPub needs to be reinvented, although it could certainly be better maintained. Maintaining the spec might be an unenviable job given the multitude of competing interests, so it should be rotated or voted on.
Something like Gemini but with an equivalent to webforms would be good, and enable more of an alt-web to become established against the corporate browsers.
#Protocols #Internet
@billseitz Happy to make a connection about connections!
Here's an upcoming paper about how the IETF makes protocols about protocols: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tgZ86ugijXPUOo_lD3kLfQBPbneecUNzZim1GOgkC1M/edit #Internet #protocols #meta #selfreference #strangeloop
posting yet another little thing, this time about a prevalent problem in the AP world: "view more replies on {origin instance}", AKA the "source of truth" problem (as I've dubbed it).
THIS is where I disagree...
You may think it's elitist, but if people are too lazy to learn even fundamentals like how to use #Tails then maybe they should just not do #tech at all?
I'll gladly teach #TechIlliterates but I won't waste my time on people that spread disinfo...
It's 2024: @tails_live / @tails has been out for over a decade and there are a shitload of guides ranging from written documentation to Zoomer-friendly TikTok-Style shorts on how to get started.
I don't expect people to do #airgapped pffline-PGP but with @thunderbird including #Enigmail and not requiring any external dependencies like the god-awful #GPG4Win stuff's easier than ever.
Same with #mobile: #Appls like @monocles / #monoclesChat are so easy, I've been able to onboard literal tech-illiterates remotely with few steps and simple instructions.
FOR THE LAST TIME:
*STOP MAKING EXCUSES TO JUSTIFY ESCALATING COMMITMENT TO EVIDENTLY BAD SOLUTIONS!"
Whereas with #SelfCustody of all the keys as well as #ReproduceableBuilds and real #decentralization, this would be evidently impossible even if all the devs wanted to comply honestly and not just because they could be held at gunpoint.
Compare that to #monocles where you do pay like €2 p.m. but in return get #standard #protocols like #IMAP, #SMTP & #XMPP and can pay anonymously and not have to provide any PII whatsoever!
Make of that what you will, but just like allowing flatearthers to roam freely without caretaker supervision doesn't make the world less round, so won't the facts change about #ITsec, #InfoSec, #OpSec & #ComSec.
Because all #centralized, #SingleVendor & #SingleProvider solutions are bad, and if they don't even allow for #SelfCustody then they are just a #grift to #scam tech-illiterates that don't know and/or don't care!
Dot Social: This Publishing Platform Sees the Future, with Ghost’s John O’Nolan
Love this summary!
"John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, calls himself “the inverse Peter Thiel.” That’s because he wants to build a tech company that bucks the usual narratives, with as few monopolies as possible. His open-source publishing platform is structured as a nonprofit and is integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, giving creators digital sovereignty. No longer do writers have to perform for an algorithm to succeed or get stuck inside closed systems that monetize off their backs."
Getting really excited about what activity pub can do and where this all can go. Another great interview @mike
"How should the web work going forward"
Episode webpage: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/john-onolan-g6azzKz0
Nice work @evan you repped the #fediverse and #activitypub so well on the big stage talking to @davidimel on the @mkbhd @waveformpodcast.
Very clear and compelling. Kudos
Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, #Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education
(Phillips Andover, Stanford)
as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton).
Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, #Dick #Uihlein didn’t waver:
He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967,
joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics.
He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.
In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father,
who often went by Ed.
At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled,
“My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.”
Dick said that same year that
“my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”
Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005.
Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions.
Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the #Federalist #Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the #Conservative #Partnership #Institute
and the
#Foundation #for #Government #Accountability,
as the Daily Beast reported.
Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer,
sent out to millions of homes and businesses,
was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.
“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law,
recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”
She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness:
“Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time.
There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media.
We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass.
The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”
The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era.
Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the #American #Principles #Project,
which runs ads attacking what it calls “#transgender #ideology,” #abortion and the teaching of “#critical #race #theory.”
Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 #safety #protocols and “#equity” training for teachers.
More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate #Darren #Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the #Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting #perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.
The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. #Ron #Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.
For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control.
Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.
For new staffers, it begins with the #dress #code in the employee handbook:
Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays;
hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months;
dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.
The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time.
Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks,
with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches.
One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child.
“Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.
#Uline #Dick #Liz #Uihlein #Doug #Mastriano #Jim #Marchant #election #falsehoods #antisemitic #speech #Edgar #John #Birch #Society #fluoridation #segregation #Edwin #Walker #George #Wallace
Ben West - 
