Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

This is why I have been trying to warn about BlueSky.

BlueSky has just been partially bought by a cryptocurrency company "Blockchain Capital" and appointed a blockchain / cryptocurrency expert to their board:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

Their new board member is a bitcoin researcher who promotes NFTs.

BlueSky describe the tie-up with Blockchain Capital as a "natural partnership" and says that the blockchain company has "a uniquely deep understanding of our decentralized foundation".

(via @jwz)

Update on our Code of Conduct policy:

Following extensive internal and external discussions, we have decided to update the Kolektiva.social code of conduct. While there will be additional changes coming in the near future, there are two that we will be adopting effective immediately. In this post, we will discuss our rationale for these changes, and how they will affect our moderation practices. The obvious context and impetus for the changes is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the increasingly brutal Israeli military campaigns being waged in the West Bank and Lebanon.

The TLDR; version:

1) We are removing the section of our Code of Conduct that specifically prohibits Analogizing Israel and Nazi Germany.

&

2) We will be taking a more active role in removing posts that uncritically celebrate the Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 7 2023, and/or glorify militarized, authoritarian actors in the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Syrian and Iranian states.

We’ll go over both of these points individually, but first we want to acknowledge that there are users who will take issue with these decisions for different and mutually-conflicting reasons. While we regret this, we also see it as inevitable. We welcome feedback, discussion and constructive criticism.

The Kolektiva mod team is made up of individuals with our own opinions and strongly held views. While we don’t always agree on everything 100%, we try to come to consensus whenever possible, and to be guided by our shared anarchist principles and values. Sometimes this process moves slowly, and requires numerous conversations, which has been the case here.

The past year has been utterly horrific. The scale and constant bombardment of ethno-nationalist and religious-sectarian violence, massacres and atrocities has ignited rage, hatred, and a thirst for vengeance in many people’s hearts. It has shattered many people’s illusions about shared human values, and added a new sense of urgency to discussions on the role and ethics of violence as it relates to revolutionary and anti-colonial struggle, tactics and strategy. While often difficult, we hope these discussions and debates continue, and that they produce new affinities and ultimately, more effective resistance against the forces that divide and subjugate us.

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@GuerillaOntologist reading the full piece, it doesn’t sound like they are all that much reformed.

brought to you by...
https://archive.is/fM4pM

“We take it back,” Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, two of America’s most prominent health economists, declare in a new book, We’ve Got You Covered, their blueprint for reforming our health care system. After years of preaching “the gospel” that “patients must pay something for their care,” they’ve now abandoned the message.

Economists love to take the side of power when they actually have some influence (see Robert Reich's run as Labor Sec.) but then, when no longer in a position to actually effect anything, they repudiate their former positions and start making the arguments of people they had previously dismissed as naive or ignorant. They should not be allowed to so easily rehabilitate their academic reputations. These people are a scourge, and letting them off the hook so easy does us no favors.

“I appreciate you may be a sportsman, but I am unclear at this point what a grenade launcher has to do with that,” Judge William Cathon said.

Judge was speaking to right-winger allegedly behind all kinds of terrible stuff in Phoenix, Arizona.

https://www.azfamily.com/2024/10/23/man-behind-phoenix-area-political-threats-had-huge-stash-guns-ammo-police-say/

@agx https://flathub.org/apps/com.toolstack.Folio is also pretty neat for taking notes and managing them in separate topics.

I'll be tabling at the Georgian Bay FanCon this Saturday in Meaford, Ontario, so if you're in the area, come say what's up and get some comics.

I will add that I don't believe that there is anything inherent to liberalism here - this is simply how the liberal mindset has developed in the US, by and large. ALs could be a force for good, but to do that they would have to ally with Leftists, which they find impossible to do while also insisting on a blind obseisance to their party's leadership, which Leftists cannot abide. The problem is unaccountable political leadership, which ALs have proven unable (or unwilling) to remedy.

The truth about #copyright: even successful authors can’t live on the #royalties #publishers pay them - https://walledculture.org/the-truth-about-copyright-even-successful-authors-cant-live-on-the-royalties-publishers-pay-them/ it's tragic that most people still believe in this fairy tale put about by the copyright world

The American Liberal (AL) is someone who would sooner attack a Leftist for not supporting a Center-Right politician of their own party than make any attempt to pressure said politician into adopting more liberal policies. While AL voters insist everyone to their left must vote for their candidate, their candidates move continually rightward in order to grab more votes from the openly conservative party.The AL is, therefore, a force for reactionary and otherwise conservative politics.

I thought I understood the extent to which the broad availability of mobile location data has exacerbated countless privacy and security challenges. That is, until I was invited along with four other publications to be a virtual observer in a 2-weeek test run of Babel Street, a service that lets users draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the area.

The issue isn't that there's some dodgy company offering this as a poorly-vetted service: It's that *anyone* willing to spend a little money can now build this capability themselves.

I'll be updating this story with links to reporting from other publications also invited, including 404 Media, Haaretz, NOTUS, and The New York Times. All of these stories will make clear that mobile location data is set to massively complicate several hot-button issues, from the tracking of suspected illegal immigrants or women seeking abortions, to harassing public servants who are already in the crosshairs over baseless conspiracy theories and increasingly hostile political rhetoric against government employees.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/the-global-surveillance-free-for-all-in-mobile-ad-data/

It is amazing that any journalism organization, much less the NY Times, would quote Nate Silver on politics without disclosing that he is an "advisor" to political betting company with funding from Trump ally Peter Thiel.

Such shabby journalism, in every possible way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/opinion/election-polls-results-trump-harris.html?smid=tw-share

That civilians are being killed at an alarming rate in Gaza shouldn't be news to anyone. I suspect that for many this falls somewhere on the range from "civilians die in war, regrettably but inevitable" to "maybe Israel is being a bit careless, but who can blame them; Hamas is evil" extending at most to "Israel is being reckless, and I wish they would dial it back a bit". But none of that actually fully faces the depravity what is going on.

There is mounting evidence that Israel is engaged in a concerted strategy of mass starvation and destruction of civilian infrastructure in northern Gaza. I know that sounds too extreme to be real. It's tough to sound sane when the world is crazy. But this isn't my weird extremist anti-Zionist hyperbole. I have receipts.

[1/5]

(I'll put the rest of the thread behind CW)

Do you know what your cost savings are from using Open Source Software (#OSS) ❓

▶️ Harvard Business School has estimated in a recent paper that the value of OSS to the economy is 4.15 Billion USD. Firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. Apparently, OSS appears in 96% of codebases, and some commercial software consists of up to 99.9% OSS.

👉 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #Business #KDE #NLnet

Btw, they are super in violation of the GPL. They use u-boot and the linux kernel with custom patches and they are not accessible, even after asking. But they "want to honor open source licenses", but can't provide access. I guess

Holy fuck, after 2 weeks of reverse engineering this mips firmware dump I found the u-boot password!! Didn't have such an adrenaline rush in whole fucking while.
The fact, that I looked at that password several times in the hexdump and never tried it, we can ignore :D
#ReverseEngineering

We have traveled back in time, and webrings are a thing again. My blog is on https://akols.com/ which is an extremely selective collection of blogs that various people I've met over the blog write. It's maintained by Daniel Sidhion, who I met around a year ago, and who was recently like #2 on Hackernews for some absurd Nix hackery he was working on.

Check it out if you want to see some other neato writers in the tech space.

Surveillance tech like Fusus “gives police the ability to surreptitiously spy on and track people of no real or alleged criminal concern. It creates caches of sensitive, personal information that can be retained indefinitely,” EFF’s Beryl Lipton told Sacramento's ABC10.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/crime/sacramento-public-safety-camera-network/103-e94b0a6d-1696-48bd-893a-29f53515d384