Wayne Mackintosh 🇳🇿🐧 @mackiwg@mastodon.oeru.org

I'm going to share this New Republic article about Gates' influence on access to medicine one more time, because it's so important to critically examine the role of philanthropy.

The Gates Foundation and Gates' philanthropy are, in many ways, the best case scenario for billionaire interventions in public health. Even here, "philanthropy" becomes an extension of the founder's destructive ideology.

Imagine what could be done if we just taxed this wealth properly.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

Let's keep the #GNOME40 celebration going with a brand new release video!
https://youtu.be/vK-SwsWnEmo

Wordpress is now used by 40% of the web.

https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/40_percent_of_the_web_uses_wordpress

Folks I work with in Apia, Samoa, have just put out descriptions for two education technolgists/learning designers... have a look if you're interested in a change of scene!

https://www.unv.org/calls/WSMR000030-9017

https://www.unv.org/calls/WSMR000029-9021

So, this should be terrifying us... and motivating us to research mitigations and then act: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/24/22297686/browser-extension-blocks-sites-using-google-facebook-microsoft-amazon

Pretty much 4 years ago today, I said the following on my blog:

“I personally moved over to Bitwarden around 6 months ago, following the price rises by LastPass, as well as the fact that they had been purchased by LogMeIn – who have a proven track record of not treating their users very well.”

Kev in 2017 was a very, very wise man.

https://kevq.uk/bitwarden-an-open-source-alternative-to-lastpass/

Will a majority of respondents to this poll correctly guess the majority response to this poll?

OER benefit everyone (not just students)

https://edtechfactotum.com/oer-benefit-everyone-not-just-students/

🎉 Welcome to newcomers! 🎉

A few personal tips:

👌 the Fediverse is NOT twitt*r! enjoy a more relaxed, courteous, benevolent way of interacting! you are part of it!

🤚 introduce yourself! also fill bio and post a couple "toots" before following people to have more chance they'll follow back..

👍 favourite and follow generously! This is how to create link around. No algorithm-god is spying on you, telling you who to follow, what to read! \o/

⚠️ many people care about CW... learn about that

💗

So I don’t use Chrome but I have Ungoogled Chromium (https://codeberg.org/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium) as certain things only work under Chrom(ium) and I only just realised Google requires a Google account to install extensions.

Wow.

Hint: You can bypass this restriction using this the Ungoogled Extension Installer: https://github.com/UnnoTed/Ungoogled-Chromium-Extension-Installer

The lengths we have to go to in order to protect our privacy from basic everyday things is ridiculous. We need fundamental change. Surveillance capitalism needs to die.

I know others have commented on it (as have I*) but the irony of Twitter forcing people to 'quote retweet' to fix disinformation and trolling in the run up to the US election, while Mastodon explicitly disallows the functionality because that's exactly what it leads to.

* https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2020/10/10/twitter-anti-disinformation/

For the benefit of the mainstream and, especially, the media: the real definition of "hacker" http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html