Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The "Resistance Toolkit" -- https://resistance-toolkit.com/

Over my career I've been involved in hundreds of contract negotiations, many of them including stuff like software licensing. I've done this work for governments, and corporations, for myself, and for non-profits.

Which is to say, I know what words mean. I know what the legal norms are in multiple jurisdictions, and I know when someone is trying to bullshit me.

I have no doubt that Mozilla think they need this license and privacy policy. I'm concerened enough by the "why" to ditch firefox.

Mozilla have published an update to this:
> "UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice."

I want to break this down.

https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114072293410465140

The sound you're about to hear is the economy seizing up, grinding people and companies into the ground as Trump-mandated uncertainty about...well, everything becomes the central reality.

We'll be lucky if it's only a bad recession.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/atlanta-fed-shock-sounds-trumpcession-warning-mcgeever-2025-03-03/

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Ideas Lying Around; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/

#Pluralistic

1/

We live in what Karl Polanyi called a "market society," in which commercial market exchanges have almost completely supplanted non-market exchange. Gone are the great pillars of pre-capitalist economies: domestic household production, reciprocity, and redistribution. In their place are buying and selling. To access virtually any resource, including basic sustenance, we must first sell (usually ourselves).

1/15

"Donald Trump’s plan to impose #tariffs on #Canada, #Mexico and #China could force American consumers to pay an average of $1,200 more per year, a prominent economic thinktank warns." - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/mar/03/us-politics-live-news-donald-trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-announced-commerce-secretary?page=with%3Ablock-67c5ab998f08962cd47bea34#block-67c5ab998f08962cd47bea34 pity trump voters didn't understand that...

#Mozilla rewrites #Firefox’s Terms of Use after user backlash - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/mozilla-rewrites-firefoxs-terms-of-use-after-user-backlash/ good, but maybe this should have been caught before it was published... #privacy

Some good news:

https://montanafreepress.org/2025/03/01/montana-right-to-work-legislation-fails-twice-in-one-day/

The #REI #union is asking members to vote in the board election that opened up today. They are asking members to vote to withhold.

Please boost! I have this guess that REI members are a fair slice of who is here on Mastodon.

https://vote.escvote.com/REI/

(Edited to fix link)
#unions

You love to see it.

"President Trump's online base is splintering over the administration's handling of two major news stories related to sex trafficking, which converged this week in dramatic fashion."

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/01/trump-maga-epstein-files-andrew-tate

@dynamic The first rule of UI design should be "if it ain't broke, don't go fiddling with it." This is the problem with having techies making all our tech - they love fiddling with things just for the sake of it! Nasty catch-22 there...

🏆 Congratulations to the @Blender project for its role in the "Flow", which just won the Best Animated Feature award at #Oscars2025.

Open Source has won, indeed!

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/

#Oscars #Flow #Blender #FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

@leighelse
It's a tough one. What Mozilla probably needs is a community-led takeover / reset of the corporate side to try to realign its priorities and fix all the bad decision making going down.

Maybe a good starting point is moving HQ away from SV (and out of USA for that matter) to gain some distance from the grifter bubble that now exists there, to have a hope of getting the right people in place. 😜

Every year, millions of books are destroyed by the publishing industry—pulped, recycled, or trashed.

Last month, we intercepted another pallet of “damaged” books before they could be destroyed.

Some books look brand new. Others show signs of survival—a bent corner, a scuff, a trace of a label. But every book is intact, and every idea is still powerful.

Use code REJECT at checkout. Sale valid until 4/1/2025. See the link in our bio.

@lightweight @virkon42 @arinbasu1 @futuresprog For a chunk of my IT career I wrote native apps for Windows. It was a living, and I'll always be grateful for that.

But the environment was not a stable one. Security changes with each iteration of Windows was prone to break installers, third party dependency updates broke other functionality ... moving to web apps saved me a lot of pain.

Looking at today's Windows environment, I'm grateful not to be dependent on it.

Ever since adding the `Haptic` API to #feedbackd for games I wanted to make the `VibraPattern` available to feedback themes as well as this allows for more nuanced feedback.

This allows us to e.g. use more subtle feedback for OSK button presses than for 📢 of incoming SMS.

Opened MRs to make that possible and
while at that I made the maximum strength for all events confiurable too. It's a bit hard to 👂 in the 📽️ but it's there. Hopefully this makes it into #phosh 0.46:

#LinuxMobile

If you want clear-eyed political analysis of the US foreign policy scene (and by extension the domestic political moment), this is about as good as your likely to find, imho.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/the-empire-rebrands.html