Mastodawn

Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward - TDF Community Blog

Germany has made ODF mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure. The decision is incorporated into the Deutschland-Stack, the framework governing the development, procurement and management of digital systems for public administration at all levels. This is neither a pilot project nor a recommendation from a working group, but a mandate backed by the federal government and the coalition agreement. The official document has been published by the IT-Planungsrat, the central political steering body comprising the federal government and state governments, which promotes and develops common, user-oriented IT solutions for efficient and secure digital administration in Germany: https://www.it-planungsrat.de/beschluss/b-2026-03-it. At this point, the question for all other European governments is clear: what are you waiting for? With this decision, the distinction between those who care about digital sovereignty and those who do not becomes stark. There are no more excuses Over the years, public administrations in Europe have accumulated a series of tired excuses, long since overtaken by the facts, for not making standard and open document formats mandatory. Let’s examine them one by one. ODF isn’t mature enough. ODF has been an ISO standard since 2006. It is now at version 1.4, with active development,

TDF Community Blog

Dennis 2h ago

javi 6h ago

ok folks, just to be clear:

No one. No one, sells your personal identifiable data on the internet. I mean, yeah, probably the dark web and super shady companies are selling your social security number somewhere. But not major corporation is selling your name or address to advertisers. That's illegal in the EU and multiple other places. They just don't do it and haven't done it for a long, long time.

What they sell is a profile of you. They don't sell "Javiera Mena, whatever whatever street, buenos aires". They sell "Woman, 35 y.o., single, 1 kid, Argentinian, languages spoken: English, Portuguese, Spanish, interests: [ music, hiking, horror movies ], countries visited in the last 12 months: [ Chile, Argentina, Spain ], most used websites: []... ". You get the drill.

Then, advertisers can go and say "we have this ad campaign, and we want to show it to Women between 30 and 40 years old, interested in hiking that have been to the Andes in the last 6 months. And bam! you get the ad. They didn't sold your name, but they very much sold and profited from your data.

This is how Meta operates. This is how google operates. This is how tiktok operates. This is how internet advertising operates, at large.

It looks like this is how Firefox operates now, too.

Dennis 2h ago

Bret Mogilefsky 4h ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/116281343752661759

I saw this in the wild. The Google discover feed showed me a headline for a 4h-old Guardian article where the Google link/headline said the Iranian leader Khamenei had been killed by a US bomb strike and I thought "Wow! Already? He's only just taken over for his dead dad!"

And that really would have been news except that wasn't what the article was about at all. It was about the US not knowing who to negotiate with now that they've overturned the anthill. It only referenced the killing of the _elder_ Khamenei at the start of the war a few weeks ago, and that reference was more than 3/4 of the way through the article, in background information. I was gob-smacked that Google would do such a thing. It's awful, a full betrayal.

Dennis 4d ago

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August B 4d ago

@yeswap
I was just talking yesterday about how the lack of engineering resources for maintenance and pressure to add new features makes formerly good products worse: less secure, slower, broken and harder to use.

Yet squeezing every bit of money out of a successful product until it's ruined is the only way to satisfy VC. The drive for infinite wealth and scale are destroying technology (and long ago destroyed the NYT).

Dennis 5d ago

Great post about what's wrong with today's commercial web. It reminds me of Aesop's goose that laid golden eggs and will end the same way - dead, killed by greed.

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones."

https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

Dennis 5d ago

Stable Genius Liberal 5d ago

If there is going to be a talking filibuster over the save act, the Dems need to read Epstein files that mention Trump into the record for the entire time.

#USPolitics #EpsteinFiles #filibuster

Dennis 6d ago

NomiChirps 6d ago

Does anyone know a museum or other institution that would be willing to take this large vintage railway wheel(?) press? It's marked "Chambersburg Engineering Co., No. 863", and a long time ago it was used to help maintain rail cars at the Port of San Francisco. Unfortunately it's going to the scrap yard this week because no museums we've tried are willing to come haul it away. boosts appreciated.

edit: Sorry folks, there was less time than I thought. It's already out the door this morning 😔

Dennis 6d ago

Steve Herman 6d ago

Venezuela defeats the United States — in baseball. Final score in the WBC championship: 3-2.

Dennis 6d ago

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the_blackwell_ninja [EST]6d ago

RE: https://mastodon.green/@gcluley/116246342593504567

The worst part of Equifax is you have no say in the matter. No signing up for the "service", no opt-in. Just "We're gonna track all of your finances, sell your data to anybody willing to pay for it, and leave it on this un-secure computer in the corner over here for somebody to steal." Absolute dogshit corp. Sure you can "freeze" your credit report, but it doesn't stop the data collection.

Dennis 6d ago

Erik Jonker 6d ago

Good but depressing analysis of the war with Iran. Must-read.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-americas-war-iran-backfired
#iran #usa #israel #geopolitics #trump #foreignaffairs @geopolitics

How America's War on Iran Backfired

Seventeen years ago, while serving as an Iran desk officer in the U.S. State Department, I asked a more veteran colleague about the latest inflammatory statement by Mahmood Ahmadinejad, then the Iranian president. My colleague responded: “Stop paying attention to Ahmadinejad. Only focus on Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He makes the important decisions.” He added: “But don’t worry. Change is coming. Khamenei”—who was then 69 and widely believed to have cancer—“could die at any moment.”

Foreign Affairs

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