2016 was an excellent year for the progress of Evil. It’s time for those of us who believe there ‘is such a thing as society’ to start pushing back harder, for a happier 2017.
I plan to take on fascism, corrupt media, lying politicians, hierarchy in general, fixing democratic reform, climate chaos and replacing the failing socialism and capitalism systems, as the year warms up; but for now lets warm up with open communication protocols. This article recommends the Franz messaging application:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/12/21-must-have-apps-ubuntu. It says:
“The days of multi-protocol instant messengers are long gone, with (mostly) proprietary mobile-first services now ruling the roost.
Want to chat on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram or another well-known messaging service on Ubuntu, without using your browser? Try Franz.”
Or don’t. Ask why Google needed to assimilate XMPP into Google Talk, in order to destroy it, so it could launch Hangouts to compete with Skype and Apple and control yet another market. It got beaten and left us with the current fragmented mess. When will we all learn the lesson to choose open protocols not products and suppliers that do what is good for us rather than for themselves? We will only progress in software if we stop throwing everything away every few years and starting again with something worse. Customers and governments must start demanding this. We must NOT Brexit or Trump on international communication. Tribal thinking is Bad, kids!
Can anyone recommend a good XMPP service provider that serves the UK which REALLY believes in open standards and privacy, like Google, Facebook, Apple and (occasionally) Microsoft pretend to? Maybe with an old-fashioned SMTP/POP email service that isn’t Gmail. Liars must be punished, or they’ll keep doing it… and we’re back to politics.
This week I mentioned a product in a closed Slack group and received targeted marketing next time I logged into Facebook. What else is being snooped on?
On The Outside 