Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Molly Crabapple on the tech industry's appropriation of art, and profiting by regurgitating it. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/12/is-ai-the-greatest-art-heist-in-history

When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

#AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism

post-American, enshittification-resistant internet https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/buyeuropean/p/290711/post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

Reminder: check out our Design of the Month T-shirt collection, supporting grassroots unions in South Asia. Individually printed just for you in the USA, on 100% organic cotton shirts. Browse the collection at https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/design-of-the-month

The two cows of fintech

by Teodor Kreczmar-Schuldorf

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2026/04/18/the-two-cows-of-fintech/

They simply do not care about our data being leaked. They intend to hand it to the USS Big Tech on a silver platter anyway.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-brussels-launched-age-checking-app-hackers-say-took-them-2-minutes-break-it/

#privacy #surveillance #surveillanceState #ageVerification #ageGate #censorship #technofascism #identityVerification #EUropeanUnion #EU

Embattled Congresspeople standing up for privacy need our help. Write to their colleagues and tell them we need real reforms in Section 702. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702

To settle this once and for all: Computer programming, being applied mathematics, is an applied art by definition.

#programming #coding #LLM #LLMs #AI #noAI #math #maths #mathematics #vibeCoding

What slop will the press pigs be eating in DC next weekend? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/17/800021943/cartoon/white-house-correspondents-dinner-menu/

Comic: "Dems should move to the right"

#uspol #cartoon #comic #science #disinformation

@bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana So let me summarize:

- Without knowing the legal status of accepting LLM contributions, we're potentially polluting our codebases with stuff that we are going to have a HELL of a time cleaning up later
- The idea of a copyleft-only LLM is a joke and we should not rely on it
- We really only have two realistic scenarios: either FOSS projects cannot accept LLM based contributions legally from an international perspective, or everything is effectively in the public domain as outputted from these machines, but at least in the latter scenario we get to weaken copyright for everyone.

That's leaving out a lot of other considerations about LLMs and the ethics of using them, which I think most of the other replies were focused on, I largely focused on the copyright implications aspects in this subthread. Because yes, I agree, it can be important to focus a conversation.

But we can't ignore this right now.

We're putting FOSS codebases at risk.

On this day in 1912, the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike began. It resulted in a 13-month labor conflict that would become one of the most violent chapters in American labor history. Explore related titles at pmpress.org.

Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/17/trump-is-literally-negotiating-with-himself-over-how-much-taxpayer-money-he-gets-because-his-taxes-were-leaked/

All I'm actually saying here is that (waves broadly) a lot more people who have never opened a PR or maintained a project being in a position to either open a PR or maintaining a project is going to result in them not behaving within the social norms we've developed as a group that is, to be fair, far less insular than in the 90s but is still somewhat insular compared to society as a whole and yes we are going to have to get used to the equivalent of HTML mail and top posting

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA

Hundreds of people have escaped arrest after taking to the streets of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, to show support for Palestinians by singing a classic Australian rock song containing a banned phrase in the state.

#Brisbane #Protest #Solidarity #Palestine #AntiGenocide #AntiApartheid #FromTheRiverToTheSea #Banned

@floatybirb @xgranade Well, some people already can't use US credit cards precisely because of US politics. Notably some members of the International Criminal Court.

So their list of everyday annoyances expands to not being able to use most of the Internet in the UK I guess.

A local coffee shop that is set to open soon only has a TikTok and Instagram account... I was a bit surprised, then, to see a bunch of reviews of various menu items and descriptions of what customers love and don't love.

It was TikTok and Instagram using AI to generate "summaries." None of those products exist yet because the coffee shop isn't open yet.

Fashtech is not empowering. I don't care how good you think your one good use case is. The ethical arguments will always matter.

I am so angry and disappointed at all the left- and center-wing commentators who bought into the right-wing framing of "parent's rights" as being more important than children's rights.

Like, I'm sorry, but parents have *responsibilities to* kids, not *rights over* kids. Kids aren't property, they're living, breathing *people* who deserve care and love and privacy and dignity.

@zzt “software can’t just ignore laws it doesn’t like”
The entire industry is now betting everything on software that only (and barely) works if you act as if licenses and copyright laws don't really matter if your investors are big enough.