If your #blind, #signal does nothing to protect your #privacy. They use #hcaptcha, so if you can’t see the images, you have to enable cross site cookies and give them a valid email. And if you want to contact signal about it, sending your device info via unencrypted email is the only way. This is not how privacy or #security work. You’re better off with iMessage. Or even watsapp! At least they don’t hand your data over to a third party captcha provider. Or send your device info via unencrypted email. #infosec #a11y #accessibility

@BeAware @lowrah That’d be why. ChatGPT is too slow and pricy for screen readers to use regularly. In fact, both Apple and Firefox use on device AI to generate missing alt text in the browser for screen readers.

@BeAware @lowrah What model are you using? Alt text generation in edge and chrome use an extremely small one because they generate alt text for every image on a page in realtime as it loads.

@chris Personally I’m okay with threads banning it. They’re too big to effectively moderate contextually. This points to why the small instance mastodon model is a good one. Instances each get to decide how they feel about any given account.

@chris Well, the bot owner obviously made the bot for some purpose. Otherwise they’d just go look it up on a flight tracker app if it was just personal curiosity.

@chris Does it matter? Anyone could look up the info, but the entity creating a bot to post it to social media is communicating a message just by that act of creation. I’m okay with “Bill Gates is a hypocrite!” But less okay with “hey, here’s where Taylor Swift is, just in case you want to go abuse her.”

@chris It kind of depends on who’s doing the tracking and who’s being tracked. A dude tracking Taylor swifts jet is a creep. An organization tracking bill gates to make a point about climate change is not. As with all types of communication, context matters.

So now that #bluesky allows for self-hosting, I spent the last five hours setting it up. Yikes! That was TERRIBLE! Subdomains make it cranky. DNS makes it cranky. Reverse proxies make it cranky. Sharing a domain with the #fediverse makes it cranky. It requires the ability to send email, even for admin users. Their default docker-compose is really annoying and then you have to do a bunch of silly things to make the admin shell scripts (that just call curl) actually work. And then you don't even get a cool handle out of it, so nobody is going to bother.

I'm in the process of moving to #ServaRICA. They're in #Montreal, but still have excellent connectivity to #Ottawa. If you're wondering why I moved from one provider you've never heard of to another provider you've never heard of: I insist on hosting in #Canada, and I refuse to host with big teck like #Google or #Amazon. I don't know the guys at ServaRICA, but...they seem...fine I guess. Then again, I was thrilled with #accuris for years. So I dunno.

If you're curious, the data center in question is Accuris Hosting (accuris.ca). They've been down for a week now, and have been radio silent to all customers. I've heard from there upstream that they're in a payment dispute and were disconnected, screwing everyone leasing IP's or bandwidth from them.

I'm hosting on the new C# version of #iceshrimp because I believe we need far, far more fediverse servers implemented from scratch than we currently have. Also, I like DotNet as a concept, enjoy C#, and it's just me on this instance, so running things that aren't yet battle tested is okay. I also like the #API first way they seem to work.

If you're reading this, please #boost so I can get back to being federated with the #fediverse. Unfortunately, the data center I've been hosting with for years and years encountered some serious issues. I had to move suddenly, losing almost everything. I took the chance to change the software I use. But I've still lost all of my followers, all of my federation, etc! It's also taken down rblind.com, my passion project to get more #blind folks off #reddit. I'll be bringing that back over the coming days. In the meantime, hi! I'm a blind guy who uses the #NVDA #screenreader, loves #accessibility and works in the field, and reads tons of #fanfic, #litrpg, and #sciencefiction and #fantasy in my spare time. Nice to meet you!