Facebook

January 28, 2025

Hey Meta, what are you running your servers on again?

Wait what now? Linux is malware? The same Linux that Meta runs a load of servers on?

Facebook is banning posts that mention various Linux-related topics, sites, or groups. Some users may also see their accounts locked or limited when posting Linux topics. Major open-source operating system news, reviews, and discussion site DistroWatch is at the center of the controversy, as it seems to be the first to have noticed that Facebook’s Community Standards had blackballed it.A post on the site claims, “Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being ‘cybersecurity threats.’ We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards.

December 10, 2023

Weeknote, Sunday 10th December 2023

On Tuesday, I attended (virtually, of course) an International Association of News Media (INMA) talk given by Benedict Evans on the future of news. I like Ben’s approach, which is basically to keep reminding news people that putting all their eggs in the basked of Google and Facebook was a bad idea, and no amount of begging them for money is going to make it better.

As Cory often points out, the problem isn’t Google “stealing content” – it’s that Google and Facebook have an effective duopoly over online ads. They are stealing money rather than content. Focusing on MOAR COPYRIGHT isn’t going to fix that.

I spent far too much time this week futzing around with technology rather than doing anything productive with it. Tech is my absolute best (worst) prevarication method. Instead of just getting on and doing stuff with the tech, I spend time farting around with it, installing this, playing around with that. It gives me the illusion of doing something constructive when I’m actually doing nothing of the sort.

One thing I did was to change my contract with Ionos, which I use to host and hold the various domains I have. Back in the old days, I used to self-host WordPress, which I stopped doing when I managed to corrupt an entire database and lose about a decade’s worth of posts. I was still paying for services which I no longer needed, including legacy support for outdated versions of MySQL, so managed to cut down my costs quite considerably. I should have done that sooner.

One project which I might embark on is to trim back my online presences and consolidate into one site. I currently have my tech blog, this site, and also a Substack. Oh, and a small site on Writing.as for short fiction. I’m tempted to merge them all into one, on WordPress, which would be cheaper to run and potentially make more sense.

But I am definitely not embarking on this for a while. Too much other stuff to do.

One project which I really do have to get to grips with is consolidating all my files into a single, coherent place. Every time someone has launched a new online file storage system, I have tried it out. That used to be excusable – it was my job to know about stuff like this – but now it’s not, and it’s in desperate need of consolidation.

I have files on Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and two different OneDrives. There’s a lot of duplication, but the structure of all of them is quite different. It’s going to be a semi-manual mess to work out how to get it all in one place.

And that’s not even thinking about which place it should be. My main rule is that everything must be stored locally on at least one machine, which then gets locally backed up, and as the ThinkPad is the device with the most storage that rules out iCloud. OneDrive seems reluctant to store everything locally, even when I tell it to. That leaves Dropbox.

But that means paying for another storage service, which seems silly when I have a lot of OneDrive storage space. I have a personal Microsoft 365 account, for access to Word/Excel/PowerPoint, and that gives me 1Tb of OneDrive storage, effectively thrown in for nothing.

I have the free version of Dropbox, but because I have had it for a long time and they have done a lot of “get free storage” promos over the years, it gives me nearly 9Gb of free space. That’s enough for a decent-sized “working documents” folder, storage everything that’s in use. Everything else can be be archived easily.

So perhaps that’s a good first step: get everything on to the ThinkPad, which is easily done, sort all the files, and use Dropbox for “working documents”. Sounds like a plan.

But not for today.

Three things which caught my attention this week

Timothy Burke is a journalist who had his devices seized by the FBI in an investigation into “leaked” Fox News footage. Having paid Google a lot of money over a long period for storage, he’s now been told Google is basically going to close his account and he has seven days to move hundreds of terabytes off their servers, or they will delete it. This is the danger of cloud storage: if you don’t have local copies, your files are not your own.
Related, Cory wrote about how DRM allows companies to simply force you to accept downgrades to service. Which a bunch of PlayStation users found out the hard way when Sony simply removed content they had bought and paid for.
Steven Levy wrote about Google’s NotebookLM, which is a service that lets you upload content and use a large language model to query it. This is a smart application of AI, but I want this to be local: I don’t want to have to upload my content into someone else’s servers.

This week I have been reading

Michael Jecks, thriller writer and pen expert (no really) has a new book out – the first that he’s self-published. It’s called One Last Dance Before I Die and as with all Mike’s books, it’s a well-constructed pacey read, which I would highly recommend if you want something fun and light.

I’ve also been reading Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel, which is pretty good even if he is a bit snotty about genre fiction.

This week I have been writing

Remarkably little because I have been futzing around too much with technology. I did, though, write something last Sunday about resurrecting my MacBook Pro. The only downside I have found to that machine is that, compared to everything else I use, its keyboard really does suck. I’m so glad that Apple went back to proper switches.

June 7, 2020

Weeknotes, Sunday 7th June

Some notes on anger

I’ve found myself getting astonishingly angry over the course of the week. There’s a lot to be angry about, but anger never sits well on me for long. The anger is, of course, well placed. Whether you’re angry about the government’s utter incompetence over COVID-19, the structural and personal racism which oppresses black people the world over, or a famous author’s transphobia (and yes, please, let’s not call it anything else), there is much to be angry about.

I’ve come to see social media in general and Twitter in particular as forces for ill in society, not good. That puts in me a small minority: there’s still plenty of people in tech who see the effects of social media as, on balance, a social good. When you see the impact that the awful death of George Floyd had, amplified to billions of people via social media, then you can see their point. Perhaps, now, we will get real change.

But anyone who has worked in social media management will tell you that the way to maximise your reach isn’t to make well-honed arguments but to to provoke emotion, and there is no better emotion to provoke in politics than anger. Twitter is a hate machine. We mock Trump’s Twitter use, but he’s a master at it, because he understands the fundamental rule: when you have people angry, if you want to reach more people, get them more angry still. Pile anger on to anger, until the world is burning.

Social media spread the news of George Floyd’s death further and with more impact than any other medium in history could have, and that is undoubtedly a good thing. But social media doesn’t give us any way out of the anger. It doesn’t give us any “and now what”. All it can do is keep making us more angry, because it rewards making you feel, not making you think.

But anger alone isn’t enough to solve social problems and, worse still, it’s addictive. It feels good, and it overrides the moral brakes in your brain. Anger drives hate-filled cops as well as justified protests. It’s a way to feel powerful in the moment, to feel in control of things that they have no control over.

That makes it doubly dangerous. Not only does it mean you lose control and do things beyond your own moral framework, but it’s gives you the delusion that you’ve already achieved something. Protestors throwing rocks today will have no more power tomorrow than they had yesterday, but get a sense of accomplishment. They feel like they’ve already made a difference.

Getting off social media

Related to all this: Inspired by a conversation with Phil Gyford I’ve set myself the task of writing something on how to remove yourself from Facebook while preserving the benefits of Facebook.

Technically, of course, it’s easy. There’s plenty of platforms which deliver the functionality of Facebook in a more open and ethical way. The challenge is actually discoverability.

The one unalloyed good that Facebook has brought to my life is that it’s genuinely brought me closer to my family. When your parents are alive, they’re often the glue that binds together you and your relatives. They tell you what’s going on, they keep track of who is where, and who has done what to whom. Then they die, and that bond with the extend family vanishes.

Facebook lets you preserve those bonds, but also makes it easier to rediscover them. Without Facebook, I wouldn’t be in touch with my Aunt Shiela, my dad’s last remaining sibling, who lives in Cypress. I wouldn’t be in touch with so many of my cousins, who prior to everyone being on Facebook I wouldn’t have known how to contact. And none of them would have been able to find me, either.

So the real issue with replacing Facebook isn’t “how do you remake the experience” but “how do you make yourself as easily discoverable”? That’s a much harder one to crack.

Things I’ve been reading

These examples of early computing design are almost heart breaking for me. Machines like the PET had the promise of science fiction about them.

The early days of home computing – in pictures | Technology | The Guardian

Nearly Half Of The Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots - there isn’t much doubt in my mind that social media is, on balance, bad for democracy.

Link

I'm fascinated by Ian Schrager - from Studio 54 to basically inventing boutique hotels, via a spell in prison.

Ian Schrager Is Still Creating Buzz - The New York Times

I've noticed these meeting notes generated by AI creeping into Outlook at work. One of Microsoft and Google’s key words when talking about AI is “useful” - think of Google calling the Pixel 4 “the most useful phone”.

Meeting Insights: Contextual assistance for everyone - Microsoft Research

Unsurprisingly, this had the MAGA crowd foaming at the gills, and even drew a tweet from El Presidents himself.

Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President - The Atlantic

“What I was hired to do was to create a 21st-century media company,” Lynch told me in his glass-enclosed office on Condé’s new executive floor, once the company’s dedicated gallery space. “Part of that is defining what that means, because they don’t really exist yet.”

Condé Nast’s Future Under Anna Wintour and Roger Lynch

Oh Vice.

Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff