Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

So, Twitter is no longer designated as a "core platform service" (gatekeeper) under the DMA. Twitter's reasoning for this is.... interesting:

"First, X Holdings Corp. argues that X does not constitute an important gateway
for business users to reach end users within the meaning of Article 3(2)(b) of
Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 for the following reasons: (i) X is not part of a
digital/platform ecosystem, (ii) X operates on a small, decreasing scale, and (iii)
X’s relative user engagement is low and declining"

ref. https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/202441/DMA_100041_631.pdf and https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/113316593914664643

There's a 2023 compliance suite for XMPP still in experimental state and no 2024 compliance suite at all? 🤔

(Referring to this part of Midori specifically: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/)

Bonus frustration: Microsoft almost, *almost* resolved this problem, most likely, with Midori (being one of the very few organizations that could put their foot down and *make* people care about this) - and then axed the project and only took parts of it.

I find "supply chain security" discussions so exhausting, even in their genuine form of "how do we contain malware on the average person's system"... because they are all identical carbon copies of each other in the end, and no new conclusions are ever reached.

It goes something like this:
- All these plugins and packages are a security disaster! Anyone can publish them! We should limit publishing to a curated set that's been reviewed.
- Oh, turns out nobody has the review capacity to do so, and/or it would break the world by creating a centralized gatekeeper for everything, so I guess we need to make it possible to run untrusted code safely instead. Sandboxing!
- Oh, turns out sandboxing is imperfect, so we actually need to fix the problem at the root, and adopt secure programming practices and tools like capability security and explicit authorization grants.
- Oh, turns out it's impossible to convince the majority of developers to collectively work on that (which is needed to make it succeed) because most of them don't recognize the problem and keep waffling on about curation and sandboxing. Guess we're just fucked then and it will be broken forever!

Rinse repeat for three decades.

Hey fedi, let's play a new(?) game! It's called "Stories That Could Have Happened".

The game: Someone picks a phenomenon, a saying, an event, or something else, where we don't actually know for sure how it happened or came to exist, and then we collectively write a Story That Could Have Happened about its origins! It doesn't need to be true or based on history!

There are only a few base rules, to keep it fun and non-confrontational for everybody:
1. You can either post a top-level reply to start a new story about the topic, or reply to someone else to continue on their story chain so far.
2. If you reply to someone else, you must either add to it or refine it with more nuance - you cannot outright contradict their post!
3. Posting with public visibility is encouraged, but make sure to add the #StoriesThatCouldHaveHappened hashtag, so that people can mute it if they want.
4. Keep your post short, and leave enough room for the next person to build on it.

So, anyone up for playing? 🙂 Let's start with this topic:

"Turning lead into gold"

Where did the idea come from?

(If your local waste collection program has different instructions for "when in doubt", then follow those; but almost no collection agency seems to specify this, for whatever reason)

Just realized that probably not everybody knows this: when sorting plastic waste, and you're not sure whether something can go in the plastic waste... if in doubt, put it in mixed waste!

The potential consequences of mixed waste in plastic collection are much worse (can make an entire truckload of plastic useless, depending on local collection process) than the potential consequences of plastic in mixed waste (one piece of plastic wasted).