Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

To what degree is the Republican Party a cult?

A reporter went looking for Republican lawmakers willing to push back on the epic "eating pets" lie. You won't be a bit surprised that she couldn't find a single one.

https://www.notus.org/congress/raining-cats-and-dogs-gop-lawmakers-embrace-trumps-baseless-claims-about-immigrants-eating-pets

If you think LLMs and GenAI are cool, or even just inevitable, please read this 👇

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09/why-must-humans-compete-for-electric-power-with-bullshit-generators-programmed-by-ritual-incantations.html

The myth of a secretly rational Republican Party is probably the most dangerous belief on the center-left.

While there are Republican voters who aren't aware of the party's extreme agenda, the people who control the party want what Trump wants. There's no "rescuing" them.

This was one of our centerpiece topics in the latest "Theory of Change" featuring OG blogger Driftglass: https://plus.flux.community/p/despite-the-rights-complaints-there

“In 11 months, Connecting Humanity has managed to send four-hundred thousand donated eSIMs from all around the world to Gaza, which is equivalent to 10 million US dollars. And we are still connecting people, and we are still asking for eSim donations every day.”

Mark your calendars for #SDGdigital 2024. Universal and affordable internet access, especially in developing countries, is crucial to fast-tracking the Sustainable Development Goals and ensuring a more sustainable future for all.

On 20-21 September UNDP and ITU are hosting SDG Digital 2024 to demonstrate how digital technologies can shape a more sustainable, inclusive and responsible future.

More: https://go.undp.org/4ak

#DigitalFutureForAll #OurCommonFuture #GlobalGoals #SDGs

PureOS Crimson update: New subscriptions are coming in! Your support enables continued advancement. Thanks to all subscribers, new and old!
https://puri.sm/posts/pureos-crimson-development-report-august-2024/
#PureOS #Privacy

“When the ordinance came to Amarillo, we felt like we didn’t have a choice other than to fight it.”

Our top story: Local advocates are organizing to protect the path to New Mexico from those who would shut down out of state travel. https://www.texasobserver.org/far-right-abortion-vote-amarillo/

#abortion #Texas #NewMexico #travel #HumanRights #health #politics #USpol #RoeVWade

Finally, somebody talking sense about political organizing. It's seems wild to have to say, but calling someone a fascist is no way to get them to adopt your political outlook, you know? And if you can't tell the difference between someone who voted Republican and a fascist, well my friend...you just may be the real problem here.

https://www.labornotes.org/2024/09/worker-solidarity-best-strategy-defeat-rising-fascism

Are you working on a project to make our internet more resilient/secure/human-centered/inclusive/better/.../?

You could consider applying for funding.
We currently have 5 calls open:

NGI0 Core: Internet architecture
NGI0 Commons Fund: Reclaim the public nature of the internet
NGI TALER: Privacy-preserving digital payments
NGI MobiFree: More ethical and human mobile software
NGI Fediversity: Creating the hosting stack of the future

Deadline Oct 1

https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240601-call.html

#FOSS #NGI #NGI0

Signroom is a platform allowing users to sign documents and objects. In this interview Andrea D'Intino, CEO and Co-Founder of Forkbomb B.V., talks about the project. Part 4 in the interview series with project teams working on the building blocks of the Next Generation Internet.

https://nlnet.nl/project/Signroom/interview.html

#NGI #FOSS

"today's workplace surveillance tools may be ... peeking into your clipboard, analyzing transcripts of your Zoom meetings and phone calls, and even monitoring your physical movements. This vast portfolio of data is then used to develop individual AI-generated 'risk scores' that make inferences about your psychological condition and personal life outside of work"

@jonkeegan on my new report on employee surveillance technology from Microsoft and Forcepoint/Everfox:
https://sherwood.news/tech/corporate-surveillance-technology-is-out-of-control/

Are you a journalist with a digital security question? Share it with us for our new digital security advice column! https://freedom.press/training/blog/advice-column-announcement/

The German Foreign Office simultaneously fact checks and trolls Trump over at the hellsite. Hilarious.

New op-ed from Public Knowledge in MIT Technology Review:

"This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse."

Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/11/1103838/why-a-ruling-against-the-internet-archive-threatens-the-future-of-americas-libraries/

Today is the release of JUSTICE WARRIORS: VOTE HARDER, an election thriller for our deranged times.

I'm very proud of it, but do not listen to the blurbs below—Please do your own research by purchasing wherever books are sold!

Democrats have embraced the neocons and Republicans are denouncing the military-industrial complex. This is not good territory for a left that binds itself to party politics.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-real-realignment-2/

Quick reminder that Immigrants Are Good, Actually.
By pretty much every metric.

Call out the xenophobic bullshit.

Harris won, no doubt. T is an incompetent narcissist.

But the 'Democrat' platform is anything but progressive, except for abortion, it could have been pulled out of a (pre Trump) Republican campaign. (No wonder Cheney likes it)

Nothing on universal healthcare or education, denial on covid and public health, plenty of jingoistic imperial militarism, bragging about fracking and More Oil Than Ever, and of course, the Genocide thing.

America continues the rightward drift. ➡️

This morning, I took my wife to the hospital for routine blood tests that had been scheduled for some time. Everything was going smoothly: check-in, number, waiting room. Suddenly, everything came to a halt and shut down. I was connected to the hospital’s public Wi-Fi and noticed that my connection also went down.

Having managed a couple of similar facilities, I immediately understood what had happened. I saw the staff panicking and calling the technicians, but they quickly reorganized within 10 minutes. They managed to process everyone who already had a number and then proceeded with the others in the order of their arrival. Despite the ten-minute delay (even though people started complaining right away), they were extremely efficient.

I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud.” The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.

For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.

Everything essential must always be accessible locally and, in special cases, it should be possible to physically access the servers and connect directly to them, bypassing any network/switch failures.

There has been only one interruption in the past, due to human error. Today, we have redundant servers (not HA on virtualizers, but two machines running the same software with replicated databases - on separate power lines) so such an issue shouldn’t happen anymore.

Not everything can be anticipated, but history is a great teacher. The Internet connection will eventually be interrupted :-)

When it comes to the health and survival of people, there are no compromises.

#IT #Internet #Networking #Outage #Health #HA #Cloud #CloudComputing #OwnYourData