I set up my own Mastodon instance with open sign ups, https://cyberplace.social, if any of your friends need a home.

It's funded upfront for a year, to about 2k active users.

The instance is designed to compliment the excellent work of infosec.exchange, ioc.exchange, defcon.social etc by adding more diversity to the fediverse for #cyber.

Male sparrowhawk on my garden fence.
I was so lucky this sparrowhawk landed on the fence when my back door was open & it let me go in the garden to photograph it.

#photography #wildlife #wildlifephotography #birds #birdphotography #nature #naturephotography #birdofprey #raptor #sparrowhawk

Interesting article on the challenges of voice assistants. I think of the three big tech companies with an offering — Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — only Apple and Google is positioned to have a somewhat successful solution.

As successful as Amazon’s Alexa was with users, there was never a cogent monetization strategy. Unlike the other three, Amazon is not a personal information ecosystem.

Microsoft suffers from a lack of native mobile device in their ecosystem, which is the primary entry point to voice assistance for most users.

Google suffers from being primarily an ad supported business. In a visual display of information you can decorate it with ads, but the user can ignore them and focus on the content. The liner nature of audio does not allow for the same, so ads are more intrusive and no on wants an address supported voice assistant.

Only Apple has the requisite personal information for ecosystem, mobile device, app ecosystem, and business model where a voice assistant could work. Alas, they’ve squandered years without much progress. So maybe they are all doomed after all.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

"Why eBooks Wear Out Faster Than Everyday Paper Books"

You’ll be reading that paperback decades from now

article. Why we need libraries to *buy* books not rent them.

https://www.lifewire.com/why-ebooks-wear-out-faster-than-everyday-paper-books-6831842

SUCH a cool experiment out of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab: https://archive.social

Allows you to capture a thread from Twitter and archive it in sealed PDFs to attest to legitimacy.

Could be enormously useful to journalists, archivists, etc, particularly with Twitter facing a perilous future.