Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

a cool thing about the current era of american politics is that it feels much more likely that the fascists will ruin their whole thing themselves through a series of own goals than that the democrats will do literally anything to stop them

In case you were wondering... My spouse is a school bus driver and these are the instructions drivers have received today.

We have published a new newsletter about our current activity: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-looking-into-2025.html

* Meet us at #FOSDEM in Brussel and get stickers for you and your friends!
* Learn about our infrastructure improvements, networking and #Ceph storage.
* Read about other news from the past months.

"You simply cannot cover Trump’s 2nd term accurately & responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into #authoritarianism, racism, & cruelty.

And the mainstream political #media – for a variety of reasons — is not willing to do anything of the kind.

...Rather than speaking truth to power, they have become stenographers with amnesia"
https://presswatchers.org/2025/01/why-is-trump-coverage-so-feeble/

CC: @dangillmor

#Press #News #Journalism #GOP #Trump #DonaldTrump #Politics #USPol #US #USA

If only there was a group of people working on software that didn't rely on Microsoft or Meta. Like, people who released the source code to their software in the open. A sort of "open source software".

But that's crazy. How could a modern nation-state support something like that? They only have software budgets in the billions of dollars. It's not like that level of funding would have an outsized influence on making software like libreoffice or nextcloud exactly what they want instead of just whining that it isn't good enough and buying Microsoft or Google.

I've heard though that Microsoft software never crashes which is why governments go with them, because Microsoft can guarantee their software is perfect and will never get hacked or crash. I mean, that makes perfect sense.

Nope, the only option is clearly to just keep paying Microsoft and Google. Can't be helped. But it sure would be neat if something like that existed.

This isn't going to get any better until we break our complete dependence on them: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/540236/as-the-digital-oligarchy-grows-in-power-nz-will-struggle-to-regulate-its-global-reach-and-influence

Debian is the most significant Linux distribution for many reasons, and its decision to leave Musk's site makes me respect its leaders even more.

https://news.itsfoss.com/debian-logs-off-twitter/

Wanna know what's new in #phosh? @devrtz will give a short overview in the FOSS on Mobile devroom at #FOSDEM this weekend: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6323-phosh-yet-another-year-around-the-sun-/

The devroom has a bunch of interesting talks on #LinuxMobile (and other #foss OSes): https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/mobile/

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a declassified World War II-era CIA guide to sabotaging fascism in the workplace has become one of the most popular free ebooks on the internet:

https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging-fascism-is-suddenly-viral/

Co-op Cloud kite-flying coming to you once again, in about ~7 hours at 12 noon UTC

Agenda: https://pad.autonomic.zone/VtyrLUl9RWaJGgEDrncQUw?edit

Call: https://vc.autistici.org/CoopCloudKiteFlying

Docs: https://docs.coopcloud.tech/federation/organisers/#kite-flying-hours

– 3wordchant

♲ @waynerad@diasp.org:

neveragain.tech: "We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration's proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs."

Signed by 2,842 people, from many companies, universities, organizations I've heard of, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Dell, Adobe, Yahoo, GitHub, GitLab, Intuit, Airbnb, Slack, IBM, Red Hat, MITRE, IEEE, MIT, GE, Oracle, Fastly, Docker, Uber, Lyft, Medium, Meetup, Stripe, Xilinx, Dropbox, VMWare, MongoDB, Akamai, Heroku, Autodesk, LinkedIn, Palantir, Synopsys, Accenture, Pivotal, Intel, Atlassian, Canonical, Instacart, Microsoft, Rackspace, Automattic, Change.org, Cloudflare, Foursquare, Home Depot, Salesforce, Squarespace, Khan Academy, Walmart Labs, Charles Schwab, Northrop Grumman, Tableau Software, the Lifeboat Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cornell University, Harvard University, the Wharton School, Brandeis University, Stanford University, the University of Delhi, the University of Maryland, Oregon State University, the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania, National Institutes of Health, Illinois Institute of Technology, SUNY, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and others.

"We are no longer publishing new signatures to the pledge on this website, but you can still support our movement."

neveragain.tech

#solidstatelife #domesticpolitics

Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded – and got – labor law:
All bets are off
https://buff.ly/4gjQ2nn

Newsletter writers who use Substack should ask themselves whether they're comfortable supporting a platform where management thinks what Musk and Zuckerberg are doing is just fine.

Example: "[Musk] deserves a lot of credit for advancing freedom of speech on X, before it was popular" --

Warn your friends about Substack.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

#science #CapitalismIsADeathCult

Someone just told me I'm "not the second coming of data engineering Jesus just because I wrote code once and got popular for swearing a lot in a blog".

How do I effectively rebrand as data engineering Jesus to irritate one specific person

Delighted to report that the historic batch of papers I had from my late friend, CBS “Murrow Boy” Richard C. Hottelet, is now posted and available to anyone interested.

#history
#radio

https://archive.org/details/richardchottelet1944to1948

Many thanks to @internetarchive for doing this.

(Special thanks to @textfiles for his help.)

Love the headline:

https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/

(I don't believe the "AI" companies are technically stealing from us, but their behavior is grossly unethical in many ways -- they're engaged in a giant digital land grab.)

im thinking about how much better off we would be now if the work of making gender marker changes possible and stuff had instead been used on restricting the ability of the state to collect and store gender information in the first place.

passports and drivers licenses simply shoudn't have gender on them, for example. they should not be allowed to collect that information. i'm a gender privacy extremist but it feels like that would have been better. imho.