It's also a really good example of how captions (this is a caption really, not exactly alt text) are context-dependent.
The caption you mention continues:
> The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in the S-C arm, 65,000 light years away.
...which makes no sense (there's no maser visible in the image or mentioned in the article) until you realise that this image was uploaded for another article and is being reused here.
Evidently the website's content management system asks for caption text when uploading the image, rather than when selecting it for use in the article. The latter is the right way to do it.
If anyone in or near Iraq can read this, you can spread messages using person-to-person tools that don't need the internet at all.
For example, using the Scuttlebutt network (SSB), you can deliver messages from your contacts, using Bluetooth or just by being on the same wifi. They can be public messages, or encrypted private messages so only certain recipients can decode them. Manyverse (https://manyver.se) is a decent Android app for SSB.
There are other tools like Briar, which I don't know much about, but other people here may be able to help...
Sadly yes, because big businesses with insufficient concern for maintaining openness on the internet keep choosing siloed proprietary communication services, just because they're "more polished".
There's no distinction between the "desktop" and "mobile" versions of GNOME Web. It's literally the same code (compiled for the appropriate processor architecture), just at a different window size.
I seem to recall (correct me if I'm wrong) that European courts ruled that “agreeing” to a very-long EULA for desktop software didn't constitute informed consent, because it's trivial to demonstrate that the users didn't actually read the entire agreement — even if they scrolled to the end, it's unreasonable to believe that most people read 10,000 words in 15 seconds.
So I assume that eventually these performances of consent-gathering will be legally judged meaningless.
More generally, if enough people (including the author) think the content has merit, they will choose to support it (by which I mean “collectively supply all the resources it needs to continue”).
The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.
On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.
As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.
1. Is it possible to use the open source Pocket client built into Firefox with any other server, e.g. by specifying another domain name in about:config?
2. Is there an open source implementation of compatible server software, that you could use to run your own server?
The answers to these questions will tell you whether Pocket is open source.
> Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this.
I'm less forgiving. The Pocket service is proprietary - this technology couldn't fall into the right hands - and it directly competes against open web standards like RSS/Atom. I honestly don't know how they justify it against the Mozilla Manifesto.
I've never used Facebook, so I don't know how well Diaspora can compete, but it seems like a possibility. For Twitter, there's Mastodon (and way-back-when there was identi.ca, its forerunner).
> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.
That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.
They'll have a passably-functioning tool, which is a pretty low bar that I think we still set so low because we remember IE6.
But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.
Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.
This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!”
And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.
There's a rule of thumb that says any film advertised on the side of a bus is probably not a very good film.
This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.
By providing a coherent set of easy-to-use, privacy-respecting alternatives.
It makes it easier for those who _want_ to switch, but don't have the confidence/skill/energy to figure everything out on their own.
Similarly, Disroot made it easy to switch away from Google, by providing a complete (for my purposes) drop-in replacement; Ubuntu made it easy to switch from Windows.
I use Brief, a Firefox extension. It downloads items in the background while Firefox is open, which seems to be often enough that I don't miss anything.
The caption you mention continues:
> The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in the S-C arm, 65,000 light years away.
...which makes no sense (there's no maser visible in the image or mentioned in the article) until you realise that this image was uploaded for another article and is being reused here.
Evidently the website's content management system asks for caption text when uploading the image, rather than when selecting it for use in the article. The latter is the right way to do it.