Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Attention Canadians, French people, and anyone outside the United States: Microsoft says your country's data protection laws are void and null if the US government says so. Microsoft will turn over any and all information about you to the US government at that government's request no matter what your country's laws say. Time to stop using Microsoft if you value your own privacy and your nation's sovereignty.

And hey, fellow Americans: time for you to stop using Microsoft, too, and start putting your data overseas in the servers of non-American countries. The only way any of us are going to protect our privacy is to have as little to do with our own country as is possible, and in the digital realm, there's actually a lot we can do. My Mastodon server is not the US. My personal server and email is not in the US. My company email is not in the US. I don't use Google or Meta at all, and the only thing I "use" Microsoft for is Visual Studio, which I'm even moving away from now that I'm getting out of programming for good.

Take back your privacy by boycotting the companies willing to spy on you, either for their own profit or for the corrupt, fascist American government.

#Microsoft #Canada #France #UnitedStates #USA #privacy #DataPrivacy

https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/microsoft-says-u-s-law-takes-precedence-over-canadian-data-sovereignty/article

Turns out studying philosophy is actually valuable. Philosophy majors don’t just argue well, they actually become better thinkers and do better on tests.

Data from 600k students shows they outscore every other major on reasoning, curiosity and open-mindedness.

https://theconversation.com/new-research-suggests-that-studying-philosophy-makes-people-better-thinkers-262681

@dangillmor if you pay Kagi you are also giving money to OpenAI to serve you their bullshit, though. No paid tier on Kagi currently excludes AI.

@dangillmor the database will be so full of ai slop it won't matter.

Coming soon on your Mastodon server… The long awaited quote posts, with user-control (you can chose if you want to be quoted on a per-post basis, change it later, and retract any quote of your post)

Amazing work by the team 🎉

Expect a blog post with all the details in a few weeks, support in the mobile apps, then we will enable the feature on mastodon.social, then release Mastodon 4.5

#mastodon #quotePosts

May this portion of the dissent by Ketanji Brown Jackson haunt John Roberts forever and be the final word on his tenure as Chief Justice.

Give #Faircamp a folder of audio. A few minutes later, get a complete static website with your music, podcasts, whatever. That includes playlists, RSS, and a Web player, downloads, third-party links, purchases, and unlocks. No coding. And it’s free.

https://cdm.link/faircamp-intro/

Long overdue - @freebliss and community have done amazing work, through the latest 1.5 release. And there's a lot more...

Silicon Valley people keep reinventing buses, taxis and.. eugenics

https://archive.is/2025.08.14-182952/https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-764234f8

Reimagining NGO Relationships with Cooperatives

"In the NGO’s evaluation matrix, Atipriya Cooperative ranks among the highest in overall scores, including maturity and governance. Yet, during my conversations with its members, one thing kept troubling me: they did not seem to frame the cooperative’s establishment as the result of their own initiative. Instead, they often spoke about it in a passive voice"

https://geo.coop/articles/reimagining-ngo-relationships-cooperatives

Or to put it another way, if it's not easily recycled then it shouldn't be disposable.

Well, it’s public: Mayor Lurie has announced that he’s letting Uber and Lyft onto car-free Market Street along with Waymo, something he has no authority to do. The Traffic Code clearly doesn’t allow it. These companies are treating our billionaire mayor as above the law. #sfPol
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/market-street-cars-waymo-uber-20826713.php

I wouldn't mind overengineered, disposable electronics so much if they were also engineered to be easily recycled.

Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation - https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/20/harvard-dropouts-to-launch-always-on-ai-smart-glasses-that-listen-and-record-every-conversation/ oh, goody... #privacy #surveillance

Africa Is Buying a Record Number of Chinese #SolarPanels - https://www.wired.com/story/african-imports-of-chinese-solar-panels-increase/ "Chad has imported enough solar panels to replace their country’s entire current power generation capacity." amazingly good news #renewables