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The DEA issued me a glomar answer in response to my FOIA request on whether they acquired phone hacking tech Graphite from Paragon.

Even though the NYTimes reported the DEA acquired the phone hacking tech.

muckrock.com/foi/united-states?

Spent half a day on 6 lines of code. :thisisfine: Why is web-development always a major pita? :bread_angry: Anyway when this gets deployed it might finally become possible to share links to apps on #FDroid here, without #mastodon getting all confused and rendering wrong previews.

gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-websi

#FDroid in an #EU "Pilot project — De-monopolized access to EU applications"... "The focus of the pilot project includes EU institutions releasing their apps on existing alternative app stores, including f-droid that aims at promoting apps released under open source licenses"

data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/d

2726. Methodology Trial 

Those who follow me on The Bad Place have heard me repeat this a thousand times, But once more won't hurt.

Election security is incredibly complex, full of seemingly impossible tradeoffs. But disinformation about supposed "rigged" elections is perhaps the most serious threat to election integrity today,

The best defense is to learn how elections actualy work! Becoming a poll worker is a great way to do that

Also, this National Academies study is a terrific resource:

nap.nationalacademies.org/cata

@fdroidorg To be a little more specific. Non-free (aka proprietary, aka the opposite of free and open source) software is not allowed on the official f-droid.org reposiory. Most trackers are non-free. That's why they violate our policies and have to be removed, or they would prevent and app from being published. FOSS trackers are allowed, but will be tagged with the tracking anti-feature warning. However, those seem to be rather rare.

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Recommendation engines based on tracking individual users' behavior will always be dangerous. They are fatally flawed and not beneficial to humanity, even if they are free software and publicly audited. They inevitably result in someone invisibly controlling many others as they are in the process of thinking. That said, they will always be with us, so we must push for regulation of how they are used. The standard experience does not use such algorithms, but they are coming soon.

This level of vigilance is hard, so we have added another layer of defense in the upcoming client v1.16 release, currently in beta. We've moved the database to be based on and its built-in measures, then had that new code audited f-droid.org/2022/12/22/third-a 2/2

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The Twitter API lockout of third-party apps is only the latest reminder of centralization's most important rule: The platform owner has the right to capriciously wreck the businesses of people who accepted the platform's invitation to run a business on the platform.

I just remembered a wonderful feature in that has been broken by features: it used to be possible to do a parallel install of GNU/Linux on Android devices. features are of course important, but they do come at a cost. Android's does have some nice properties that make the devices pretty resilient. It is equally important to recognize that security is not the goal, but part of the process. A brick will always be more secure than any computing device.

#DRM isn't just an annoyance -- it's a violation of your right to use the items you own as you see fit. Learn more about our Defective by Design campaign at defectivebydesign.org, and follow our campaign account at @endDRM

The release of subfolders for iOS is experiencing a short delay. Apparently, Apple doesn't take kindly to referencing other "mobile devices" in the What's New section of an update.

To be clear, we included no mention of Android in this submission.

This type of overly restrictive behavior is unacceptable and is a clear example of why open source software is important. A single company should not have this kind of market control.

biggest legacy will perhaps be that he built a that delivered crappy for so long, that a bunch of idealists, volunteers,and kids were able to create the movement which the vast majority of companies have now signed on to. Using is the default now in software development, there is almost no major software that is purely proprietary. Converting open source to free software is the next struggle, freedom is an essential aspect for the future

and require signature verification, and is built on top of 's APK signing. This improves things a lot but does not mean they are immune. Debian and F-Droid repos can still override packages lower priority repos. It could make sense to have a "no overrides allowed" setting, but that would restrict useful features. Maybe F-Droid could implement "no new signing keys when overriding" rule by default, I wonder how much that would break what people are doing now? 2/2

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repository systems like etc have key issues that make them hard to decentralize properly: solid verification is optional, one repo can override packages from another, and the tooling makes it hard to see which repo was actually used. has additional measures which make it more trustworthy, but if devs add repos, those can still override it. verification helps a lot when using Maven repos but does not solve everything 1/2

Since I was an adult, I've had big swings in income, my lowest year was about 1/8 of my highest. This is by choice mostly, so I'm very lucky. It gives me perspective, and actually I was usually happier when I had less money and more time, though the insecurity of the lean years was tough. A small, steady income and housing would be the ideal. I also consumed much less in the lean years, and this article about going off grid reminded me of the benefits of a simpler life arstechnica.com/science/2023/0

@guygrossman if your course covers movements and/or the role of protest in democratic transition, there are six 30-min segments in the series A Force More Powerful. They cover how movements confronted authoritarianism / colonialism / occupation in India, US, South Africa, Poland, Chile, and Denmark (under Nazi occupation). Free to stream on YouTube.

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