Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

From @KarlBode at TechDirt, re abandonment of subsidies to help poorer Americans get Internet access:

"The GOP killed this popular program. Yet in two different stories this week, both CNET and the Associated Press fail to clearly communicate that to readers. At CNET, the program simply “ran out of money”

It feels hopeless sometimes to believe journalism will ever even recognize, much less fix, its longstanding flaws.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/28/press-struggles-to-explain-how-the-gop-killed-a-popular-broadband-discount-program-driving-millions-of-poor-americans-off-the-internet/

Is money real?

Somebody give me a "Fact Check" column to launder my opinions as irrefutable facts. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/08/23/newspaper-nit-picker-fact-checks-this-comic/

By enacting comprehensive data privacy laws, “we take a bite out of a whole host of problems.” EFF’s Cindy Cohn discusses privacy, competition, decentralization, AI and more with Mark Oppenheim on The Nonprofit Report. https://moppenheim.org/digital-privacy-with-electronic-frontier-foundation-nonprofit-report/

This is a much better take on Gus Walz and his family than what's been running around the Internet. I appreciate the heads-up from someone here who shared it privately. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-26/gus-walz-shows-what-the-left-gets-wrong-on-disability-rights

Peer review is broken. Unfortunately, the rule for reading journal articles is now caveat lector.

"...two days after publication a firestorm erupted & the publication was withdrawn by the publisher soon after. It turned out the paper was...written using ChatGPT or equivalent Algorithmic Intelligence (AI). It was nothing but twelve pages of nonsense, with reasonable-sounding text at first glance but figures undoubtedly drawn by AI that were nothing but pure gibberish."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/peer-review-what-does-it-really-mean-today.html

"We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.

"Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America."

"In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/08/on-the-distortions-and-distractions-of-the-democratic-national-circus.html

Texas' anti-voting (if you are suspected of favoring Democrats) law is working as designed, with massive deletions from voting rolls and intimidation of, among others, Latino pro-voting organizations.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/texas-removes-over-1-million-voters-from-rolls-since-passage-of-anti-voting-law/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/house-raids-texas-democrats-ken-paxton-voting-rights-lulac-rcna168216

We've got "first amendment auditors" noodling around in Vermont. These are people who come into public spaces such as the public library and film with (often) a pretense of being citizen journalists but often just being provocative and playing "gotcha" games with people who don't know/understand rules for filming in public places.

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (I helped!) created this helpful guide. Get your library policies in place before they show up!

https://www.oif.ala.org/auditing-the-first-amendment-at-your-public-library/

No one should have to worry about warrantless police drones spying on their backyard sunbathing.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/backyard-privacy-age-drones
#drones #privacy

https://donorbox.org/support-land-defenders

If you've got some extra cash laying around maybe you could help cover travel costs and life expenses for Indigenous Land Defenders facing repression by the Canadian state.

#Wayland #inputmethod team GO!

I assembled a team to continue work I started for #mobilelinux with #phosh , #squeekboard and #librem5 .

We're going to finish the mobile side of screen-based input, and also try to properly bring traditional input methods (like for Chinese) to Wayland.

Thanks @nlnet for providing the motivation.

Watch this account!

#cjk #touchscreen #osk

#ServiceToot: Codeberg's uptime is about 99.92% (two weeks average). Not perfect, but surely good enough for a donation-driven non-profit.

What do you think? ~f

#computers applied to a social #process fossilize it.
A computer-free social process can be modified by every participant.

Without computers, the lady at the gov't office could fill out the form for you, or ignore the requirement, or demand a bribe.

With a computer, any deviance needs a special process, and only a handful people have the skill or permission from above to implement one.

Computers centralize #power in #bureaucracy and expand it (because they can buraucrat faster).

Signal founder, Moxie Marlinspike, on why describing Telegram as an "encrypted" messaging app is misleading:

"The reality is the opposite-TG is by default a cloud database w/ a plaintext copy of every msg everyone has ever sent/recvd."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90725423/signals-founder-warns-ukrainians-about-using-telegram-heres-why

highly recommend this overview of #degrowth by @jasonhickel in conversation with the great @parismarx! https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshape_technology_w_jason_hickel

"right now, all our engineers are deployed by capital to do things like develop new algorithms for advertising... [this labor] could be remobilized for other purposes: to innovate more efficient public transit, or more ecological building materials"

Just got a couple 8GB DDR4 SIMs via Aliexpress for ~ $20 which have boosted my old home server from 8GB->24GB meaning I can host a bunch more cool stuff on it! It's worth spending a little on existing hardware to give it more utility rather than replacing them. It's also a great thing about Linux that you can run it on *anything* - there's no profit-motivated planned obsolescence as there is with proprietary computer systems.