Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

You absolutely must read today's (forgive the expression) incendiary blog post by @pluralistic -- "They Were Warned"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

One quote: "It's depressing to see so many comrades in the fight against Big Tech getting suckered into carrying water for Zuck, demanding the eradication of CDA 230."

So far "A History of Equality" has been excellent.

One interesting idea floated by Pikkety is having a "universal inheritance" on top of a universal income.

Everyone, at a certain age (he suggests 25) gets a lump sum of money equal to say 60% of the average inheritance. This would be a sizeable amount for most people, and would facilitate people buying homes and being able to negotiate better wages.

He suggests funding this by taxing the wealthiest inheritances in particular.

I"m continually disappointed by their annoyance at having someone point out that it's very hard to fight something if you totally depend on them for your weapons.

It's like picking guns for your revolution that only fire bullets made by gov't run ammunition factories. You're not going to get very far.

Luckily, we've got other digital weapons that don't belong to our class enemies. We just need to have the commitment to our principles to actually go to the effort of using them.
4/4

Back in the old days, when the US government pursued an anti-trust case against the Microsoft Corporation, every single court document written by the prosecution.. was authored in MS Word. The figures were displayed in MS Excel spreadsheets. Interestingly, despite the fact that MS was found to be abusing its monopolies in many ways on a massive scale, MS was never penalised in any useful way, and nothing was ever done to break their monopolies. 1/n

Great news everyone! I open the grifter playbook and talk about all the people that now try to sell me time with your boss' boss' boss and why they keep buying trash software.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/

Supreme Court lets Hawaii sue oil companies over climate change effects - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/supreme-court-lets-hawaii-sue-oil-companies-over-climate-change-effects/ " SCOTUS won't answer "recurring question of extraordinary importance" to Big Oil."

Housing is a human right. The Housing Monster is a scathing illustrated essay that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing—a house—and looks at the social relations that surround it.

This new edition includes analysis situating and exploring the text's impact around the world by Lazo Ediciones in Argentina, Ben Kritikos in Scotland, and Sean KB in the US.

Get 20% off this title with code JANUARY.

The world's wealth is wasted on these pathetic worms. https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2025/01/13

It appears that melting Antarctic sheets may result in larger volcanic eruptions This is due to the unloading of ice mass shifting pressure across vast chambers of magma.

"The researchers note that even if anthropogenic warming ceased immediately, the effects of ice mass unloading that the West Antarctic Rift System has already experienced will still affect volcanic behavior here for thousands of years to come."

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-antarctic-ice-sheets-larger-volcanic.html

#climatechange #geophysics #fossilfuels

Tomorrow evening (14 Jan), we'll be having our monthly #libre / #FOSS / #opensource catch up for Aotearoa NZ. It'll be here at https://meeting.iridescent.nz (which will redirect you to our BigBlueButton) at 20:00 NZDT - all welcome! Hope to see you there.

For English speakers who do not speak French:

I wanted to let you know about this awesome movement started in France to encourage people to quit X (Twitter) on January 20.

You can follow it here with the hashtag #HelloQuitX and use Mastodon's translation feature to read the posts (if your server has it). You can read more about this movement on this website (in English): https://www.helloquitx.com/

You can support this movement by following it on Mastodon, and sharing widely: @helloQuitX

#QuitX #DeleteTwitter #Mastodon

60 German universities leave X.

So why are politicians still on X?

https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-germany-2025-1-more-than-60-german-universities-and-research-institutions-leave-x/

I think I've figured out how to get #nginx to 1) terminate #TLS for some domains, but also 2) forward any *other* TLS connections, intact, to another machine.

It's kind of stupid though: You listen on 443 in a `stream` context with `ssl_preread on` and send some of the traffic to another upstream on localhost -- the same nginx, listening on a different port in an `http` context, configured to actually terminate TLS. (The rest passes to the other machine.)

...is there a better way to do this?

Good piece about Northeastern University's upcoming and dubious CS curriculum change:

https://huntnewsnu.com/82511/editorial/op-eds/op-ed-northeasterns-redesign-of-the-khoury-curriculum-abandons-the-fundamentals-of-computer-science/

Sounds like #NEU is trying to move towards the "coding boot camp" model, which is completely the wrong thing in an industry experiencing downturn *and* a glut of junior devs.

This will hurt new students' ability to distinguish themselves from the rest of the market—and will cheapen the value of existing alumni's degrees.

We need a whole lot more of this from 'higher ed', please, globally: https://www.computable.nl/2025/01/10/universiteiten-starten-nextcloud-pilot-als-alternatief-voor-big-tech/ (translate from Dutch if required 😁 )

#uspol

After many years and experiments, another conclusion I'd like to share:

- Make sure you "own" (well, better: rent) at least one domain name with a recognisable but not "funny" name (my main domain is wildeboer.net)
- Only "buy" one of .com, .net, .org, .eu (when you live there) or your countries top level domain (TLD). Ignore all the fancy hype TLDs.

Your domain can become your digital identity authority that YOU control. This will become more important mid-to longterm, IMHO. 1/n

Has there ever been a situation where the small community network allows the bigger commercial network to bridge, interface, etc. and it has resulted in the smaller community network growing and becoming a viable alternative the commercial one? I feel like I get in this argument every few weeks on fedi, and, to my knowledge, there are literally no examples of this happening ever. But I do want to be fair if I'm just wrong and they exist.

#AskFedi

New Report Finds The US Only Doing Politics At a Sixth-Grade Level