Mozilla Festival’s call for proposals ends 5th November

Mozilla Festival - Dzifa Kusenuh - MF Studio Host

This weekend is usually Mozfest weekend when it was in London. It was always a special time full of wonder, joy and great people.

Its now moved to a March date since moving to Amsterdam. However its still well worth not only attending but also participating in.

Every year there is a call for proposals to join the many great sessions in some fantastic spaces at Mozfest 2022.

Submit A Session Idea for MozFest

MozFest is a unique hybrid: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world.

There are 9 Spaces created by the Wranglers that address urgent issues such as: digital privacy; neurodiversity and wellbeing; intersectionality in tech; and climate and sustainability. MozFest is looking for collaborative, participatory and inclusive sessions, workshops, skillshares, immersive art projects, and more that interrogate these issues and drive forward the conversations around Trustworthy AI. 

Connect with Mozfest

Excited about leading a session? You can learn more here about the process here.

I lost all trust for Zoom yesterday…

British PM on Zoom
Wonder how many people have tried to dial into that zoom id?

Yesterday I was on a zoom call which was hijacked or zoombombed with something not just horrible but totally illegal. Because of this I have pretty much lost all trust in zoom.

This is of course very difficult as its what we use at work and of course being in the middle of the covid19 lockdown, makes things tricky. Because of this, I’m going to still use it but with much more caution and I’m going to be a lot more forceful about the hosting side of it.

Its clear war-dialers for public Zoom meetings is so easy and well used by inscrutable groups of people. Zoom could make sharable links much more difficult to war dial, similar to the way Google docs uses combinations of characters and numbers to make a much longer url, a lot harder to war-dial.

The defaults of Zoom, is setup for a semi trusted corporate environment. I understand the covid-19 pandemic changed everything but there has been many updates and only now is the defaults only just safe. Their share prices have rocketed but they are only now focused on security ahead of more features?

Their idea of end to end encryption is a total dump on top of the security findings saying some calls are being routed via China.. Today they announce you can choose your routing but you need to pay for it. More governments and companies are blocking zoom because they just don’t trust it.

Likewise neither do I… but I will use it… with caution.

I have been thinking about an equivalent, and thought about two.

  1. I lost trust in Facebook a long while ago but still use it for volleyball events and the occasional post about something I feel could be important for friends, family and the public who don’t read my blog (as its posted on the internet already, I post publicly adopting the indieweb Posse approach, much to the surprise of some friends). For example I posted what happened on zoom yesterday there today.
    Facebook was hardly trustworthy to start with and over and over again they took the living daylights with our data.
  2. There was a point when Windows Vista pushed as the step/edition of Windows XP and I didn’t like what Microsoft had done to it. To be fair I didn’t trust them and saw shadows of where things were heading. So I switched to Ubuntu.I know the new Microsoft is quite different of course but the damage was done.

If you are hosting a Zoom call, please do lock it down theres a number of guides to help including this one.

XTech 2006: Call For Participation

There is a Call For Participation if you want to join XTECH 2006, You have until January 9th 2006.

The theme for 2006, “Building Web 2.0”, recognises the key place of standards-based and open technology in enabling the next generation of web applications. Practitioners and leaders from all disciplines are invited to participate in presenting and discussing the technology and design issues behind the changing web.

It looks like I will not be talking this time due to the lack of development in a RSS extension to better support Languages. But who knows what might happen over the next few weeks. Anyhow, I will be back as it was a great conference to be a part of last time. I expect this year will be full of practitioners and we may see even more developers from google, yahoo, microsoft, etc this time around.

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