Benjamin Mako Hill

It's also amazingly stupid because a lot of Benjamin Mako Hill's work is in maintaining communities. He used to post about them: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/

Open Source needs open source infrastructure, so in retrospect GitHub was never really the best place for hosting open source projects. https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

Good reading for people with this worldview (which at one time included myself): “Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports”[1] “https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-professional-s…

Best of luck staying off of Google properties. It gets more challenging by the day. http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-ha… Don't like YouTube's copyright claim issues on video game playthroughs? Use Twitch. Oh wait, what's that? Google is trying to buy Twitch. http://kotaku.com/report-youtube-is-buying-twitch-for-1-billion-157824… Oooops.

Gratis isn't enough. Free software requires free tools: http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html A great example of truly free code hosting, in the only sense of "free" that actually matters, is Rhodecode. Have them host it for you: https://rhodecode.com/ Or host it yourself, no possibility of vendor lock-in: https://rhodecode.com/docs/ And it does both git and hg. We need more of this.

> Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully. http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html is worth a read.

This reminds me of the Overprice Tags project by Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Media Lab/Sloan. See http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ Students at MIT, Brown, and other schools labelled the journals in their libraries with pricetags showing the cost the university was paying for each journal. Nuclear Physics A&B <//elsevier.com/locate/nuclphysa> cost $25,888 in 2005. Similarly, Students for Free Culture have been working on both the Open University Project and the Open Access Project, pressing universities to reform their use of journals. See http://freeculture.org/ Lastly, public universities have been known to disclose the cost of journals they subscribe to -regardless of NDA status- at the issuing of FOIA or CPRA type requests. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act

you can decide not to buy corporate products That's a fallacy by both choice and externality. There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement. Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She can literally chose between non-free software (which includes surveillance), or death. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/mar/26/sandler-fsf-free-software-a… Emergency medical services, government contracts, third-party contracts by various firms and organisations, third-party use of Gmail either directly or as a hosted email service (see Benjamin Mako Hill's "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours": https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h… and the issues of spillover externalities (Amazon Ring doorbell surveillance, third-party tracking of mobile phone SIMs, MACs, and Bluetooth signatures, facial surveillance) mean that, no, actually, you cannot decide not to participate in corporate surveillance. And, as a final point, both government and corporate surveillance and oppression very often speak to the same underlying dynamic: that of power to defend both itself and its wealth and/or golden geese. Examples are numerous, though the Johnson County War would be a good case history: …

Hi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share: == During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics. I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other? As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.” That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good. -- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_remarks.html

Thanks, for downvoting pointing to definitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://mako.cc/talks/20031106-nten/foil06.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h… Sure. Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

> Free > Privacy-focused > GitHub (Microsoft) > Cloudflare Which is it? These US megacorporations are respecting neither users’ privacy nor their freedom. https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html https://httptoolkit.com/blog/public-cdn-risks/ Also not to be confused with PRISM Break <https://prism-break.org/>

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/trust-your-technolust Just need to get the right color for your paper stock!

You don't have to use Google for Google to have ~half of your emails. https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h… Google have been so far good stewards of your data so nothing to worry about.

It seems quaint now since we all got so used to it, but this is called an anti-feature. Someone spent engineering time (and every customer is paying for that) to make this thing less useful. I used to be up in arms about this after watching Benjamin Mako Hill's talk in 2010: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-talk In Hindsight, this was one of the first times during my university days that I thought "maybe tech isn't going the right way."

Wikipedia was originally intended to be a smaller sandbox area for Nupedia, the expert-authored encyclopedia from Bomis (Jimmy Wales's company). Of course, Wikipedia turned out to be much more successful. But there were other collaborative Internet encyclopedia projects that didn't do so well. Benjamin Mako Hill has a paper exploring what made Wikipedia succeed while the rest failed: https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf

Further down in the comments you'll find a research paper [1] that analyzed why Wikipedia succeeded where others failed. I am not sure I bought into the conclusion (which prompted my initial comment), but at least it has a comprehensive listing of all the main players at the time: Interpedia, TDEP, Everything2, h2g2, TheInfo, Nupedia, GNE [1] https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf

I didn't see https://kolabnow.com/ mentioned anywhere. It's more than email, it's a groupware based on FOSS with a pretty good track record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab_Now#Kolab). Hosted in Switzerland with 2FA and strict privacy guidelines https://kolabnow.com/privacy - No end-to-end encryption, though, but as everybody knows https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h…

Another interesting bit of history was the Seiko Message Watch, which had time-sync and one-watch messaging over an FM radio sideband: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/tribute-to-the-seiko-messagewatch Back before cell phones were ubiquitous that was pretty novel. I remember being struck by how cool it was to step off the plane in Taipei and see it update to local time while I watched. Getting pages about server downtime using the email gateway was also a nice way not to lug a pager around. The system didn't outlive Y2K, however, and since it was clear where the market was going they simply shut it down rather than fix the Y2K bugs.

Remember this article, https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h…

An obscure joke on this topic that's always tickled me though perhaps not objectively funny: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/property-2

No, don’t use JIRA for developing OSS: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/free-software-needs-free-tools

This is exactly like this case: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h… I used to freelance and FB started showing me one of my client as suggestion even though I use a work email for that, how? My client must have installed the FB app on the phone and his email client must have synced my email on the phone and now even FB had my email.

> Journals are expensive, but they're not _that_ expensive. https://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ Would $25,888/yr for a single journal not count as '_that_ expensive'? But I agree they're not likely a tuition driver. After all, institutions can simply drop subscriptions: they don't do much for attracting students compared to facilities.

> I can stop using Google products tomorrow without the need for a gun or explanation. True, but that would not stop Google from tracking you everywhere, via more than a dozen tracking systems. Also, even if you don't use Gmail, Google may still have about half of your emails, maybe more.... https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h…

Yes, these secondary network effects are maddening. See also: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-h… I've updated the post to reflect this problem.