Today I'm reading Romeo Foxtrot Charlie 1540
The request for comments RFC are important documents to learn from*
(even when they are obsoleted you always learn from the Basics*)
#RFC #protocols #standards #network
#tsh #sh #zsh #ksh #Unix
@ayo did you come across #radicle yet? Looks really intriguing. They did a lot of R&D, seem to have nailed the #protocols now. I'm going to try it for my next #opensource project
My wife and I have two cards for an account with a major credit card. Traveling recently, she'd made a purchase on that card that triggered texts and emails to me worrying about fraud. This really bugs me.
Don't ask me why they're asking ME, not her. They CAN tell the cards apart. They should have asked her directly. It'd have been even faster. Delay was due to asking the wrong person.
"Charge OK? Yep. OK, done." That's all it should have been.
I verified things with my wife and texted back to the card's SMS query that it was OK.
But even after I inefficiently confirmed all was well, upon going to the web site, I was again confronted with the Fraud Department wanting to confirm purchases that I had already, through their clumsy interface, dismissed as non-issues.
Also at the site, I saw that they were playing a back-and-forth thing where the vendor was repeatedly retrying apparent new transactions to get an affirmative response. Every vendor in the universe likely knows there's no other way to get past this than to keep trying.
Given how bad their internal bookkeeping is, that they don't know I've dismissed this alert, I kept wondering what the chances are that sometimes people just get double-billed. You'd like to think there was a consistent state, a database, a single source of authority with data integrity and a unique view, but then again, they're not showing evidence they're good at that.
And now today I got mail from their fraud department asking me about my experience and whether, based on that, I'd recommend the card to a friend.
It WASN'T an incident of fraud. It was confirmed normalcy. It should have been finished now. Having already wasted my time once, they want to waste it more?
And let's leave aside my annoyance at the fact that every business in the universe has converged on this practice which (a) assumes I make recommendations based on a single experience, and/or (b) seems to be trying to single out an agent for blame, rather than considering process.
I seriously doubt that feedback from these surveys ever reaches the people designing the offending processes because modern customer service seems to have as its bedrock principle that no one inside the company should ever learn what the customer experience is. It feels like the purpose of customer service is as armor to make sure that the business can really see, much less absorb, the vast amount of useful information that customers would willingly provide about just how bad their product is. I think this because the worst parts never change, no matter how many of these surveys I fill out.
Here's what I wrote today:
«Declining a valid charge is not the answer to fraud. You may feel hampered by existing protocols, but the credit card companies all have this problem and all profess helplessness. They/you own this problem.
The problem is that every time you decline a purchase, the person we're buying from can't tell the difference between a stolen card, someone who doesn't manage money right, and you just being nervous. Create a way to send an error code that distinguishes these. A temporary error that says "I'm querying the customer, please retry this transaction." or even a way to just ask a question before responding. It's completely preposterous that the correct solution to this problem is to leave egg on my face because you can't have rational network protocols that fairly represent the actual information that needs to be represented.
You're using outdated ways of doing things because you're too lazy to make a new standard, and you figure it's just fine if you sully the reputation of every customer every time they make a nervous-making transaction, that they'll be fine about it, that they won't mind the uncomfortable conversations, that they love to have email, text, etc. in a zillion different places for a single transaction, information that confusingly lingers after-the-fact an that is just clutter.
So you're asking me now whether I think that was a kind of fun experience that would make me recommend your card to someone else? Do you hear yourself? Did this question really need to be asked?
What you did does not instill confidence. It just makes a mess of a routine situation that should have a routine interaction, and there is nothing about this interaction that has the look of routine, other than that customers are used to getting dumped on big Big Credit and having to take whatever you dish out.»
After more multiple choice questions, they asked if I had any other comments to add. I did add some reminders about alert fatigue and how real problems are likely to slip through the cracks when they're doing these other things.
Is it any wonder that not all of us are reassured by billionaires taking over the US and saying "don't worry, we're good at this", "deregulate us", "run the US like a business"?
I don't think ActivityPub needs to be reinvented, although it could certainly be better maintained. Maintaining the spec might be an unenviable job given the multitude of competing interests, so it should be rotated or voted on.
Something like Gemini but with an equivalent to webforms would be good, and enable more of an alt-web to become established against the corporate browsers.
#Protocols #Internet
Title: #Protocols, Not #Platforms: A Technological Approach to #FreeSpeech
Subtitle: Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free #speech
Link: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
One Health Surveillance
The implementation of comprehensive monitoring is imperative:
• Integrated tracking of human, animal, and environmental health.
• The establishment of real-time #datasharing #protocols across relevant sectors.
• UtiliSation of #advanced #molecular techniques for the detection of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is crucial.
• Mapping of climate-related and AMR #hotspots must be undertaken.
#OneHealthSurveillance #GlobalMonitoring
https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2021.584593
8/n
THIS is where I disagree...
You may think it's elitist, but if people are too lazy to learn even fundamentals like how to use #Tails then maybe they should just not do #tech at all?
I'll gladly teach #TechIlliterates but I won't waste my time on people that spread disinfo...
It's 2024: @tails_live / @tails has been out for over a decade and there are a shitload of guides ranging from written documentation to Zoomer-friendly TikTok-Style shorts on how to get started.
I don't expect people to do #airgapped pffline-PGP but with @thunderbird including #Enigmail and not requiring any external dependencies like the god-awful #GPG4Win stuff's easier than ever.
Same with #mobile: #Appls like @monocles / #monoclesChat are so easy, I've been able to onboard literal tech-illiterates remotely with few steps and simple instructions.
FOR THE LAST TIME:
*STOP MAKING EXCUSES TO JUSTIFY ESCALATING COMMITMENT TO EVIDENTLY BAD SOLUTIONS!"
Whereas with #SelfCustody of all the keys as well as #ReproduceableBuilds and real #decentralization, this would be evidently impossible even if all the devs wanted to comply honestly and not just because they could be held at gunpoint.
Compare that to #monocles where you do pay like €2 p.m. but in return get #standard #protocols like #IMAP, #SMTP & #XMPP and can pay anonymously and not have to provide any PII whatsoever!
Make of that what you will, but just like allowing flatearthers to roam freely without caretaker supervision doesn't make the world less round, so won't the facts change about #ITsec, #InfoSec, #OpSec & #ComSec.
Because all #centralized, #SingleVendor & #SingleProvider solutions are bad, and if they don't even allow for #SelfCustody then they are just a #grift to #scam tech-illiterates that don't know and/or don't care!
Dot Social: This Publishing Platform Sees the Future, with Ghost’s John O’Nolan
Love this summary!
"John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, calls himself “the inverse Peter Thiel.” That’s because he wants to build a tech company that bucks the usual narratives, with as few monopolies as possible. His open-source publishing platform is structured as a nonprofit and is integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, giving creators digital sovereignty. No longer do writers have to perform for an algorithm to succeed or get stuck inside closed systems that monetize off their backs."
Getting really excited about what activity pub can do and where this all can go. Another great interview @mike
"How should the web work going forward"
Episode webpage: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/john-onolan-g6azzKz0
Nice work @evan you repped the #fediverse and #activitypub so well on the big stage talking to @davidimel on the @mkbhd @waveformpodcast.
Very clear and compelling. Kudos
If you'd like any of these, er, "classic" #tech #books for just the price of posting, let me know. I think they'd be about £3 to send inside the UK, each. Please only bother if you'd personally like to own it/them - if you'd just plan to flip them then it really wouldn't be worth your while!! #FreeBooks #Free #GiveAway #Techbooks #SecondHandBooks #bookstodon #Devops #development #Developers #sre #sysadmin #golang #cucumber #rspec #cloudfoundry #internet #protocols #programming #PleaseBoost
Digital colonization is at it again!
AI companies are reportedly still scraping websites despite protocols meant to block them
Nostr is another effort to build an open social network on the Web, and it’s very different than ActivityPub. Here’s how it works.
@DrPen Human autentication #protocols are going to be very necessary very soon.
But the problem is, people won’t start to want them until it’s already too late. And when that happens they’ll be ready to sacrifice their privacy for convenience.
When privacy is gone, we’ll be at a risk of losing democracy as well.
That’s why we need to start NOW and develop #humanauthentication that ALLOWS for #anonymity!
https://gimulnaut.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/humans-have-freedom-of-expression-bots-dont/
"IEEE Life Fellow Robert E. Kahn, widely known as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized for “pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet.”"