Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Friends -- please check out this event. Hastily publicized but there are great people participating and it should be a serious conversation about some challenging issues in co-op organization. Especially the role of workers in consumer and multi-stakeholder cooperatives.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/owning-together-worker-consumer-co-ops-in-conversation-registration-615930553867?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

After five years of helping to build hardware and software that protects people's privacy, security and freedom, at the end of the month I will no longer be at Purism (I'll still be helping out as an advisor).

For the near term, I plan to spend my time promoting my new book (coming very soon), writing yet another book, and thinking about what's next for my career.

If you have any suggestions for what I should do next, email me at next@kylerank.in (DMs are disabled on this instance).

For years I've been supporting nonprofits to transition from power-over to power-sharing. A tiny slice of that is practicing #workplacedemocracy, and I've finally put together a corner of the Internet to gather resources on the topic and advertise the services that I and my co-organizers offer. Want to take a look and tell what's confusing, what's missing from the Library, or how to improve? This is the beta version! https://www.tosstheboss.org/library

If you installed a Linux system with disk encryption more than a couple of years ago, there's a decent chance it's using a weak key derivation function and someone who cares enough would be in a position to brute-force it. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html has more details and instructions on how to update to a better KDF.

Missouri's transgender snitch form would have been right at home in the most evil days of the old East German regime:

Hey, if you use WordPress and you also use Redis, is there a trick for getting the site to update properly when you create a new post? I have to wind up flushing Redis cache and THEN flush site cache these days, and it's really annoying.

Ivan, an imprisoned anarchist in France, released a public letter last week in which he says that the police managed to break the LUKS encryption on his Linux laptop. The password was longer than 20 characters:

https://nantes.indymedia.org/posts/87395/une-lettre-divan-enferme-a-la-prison-de-villepinte-perquisitions-et-disques-durs-dechiffres/

They had the computer since last summer, so there was enough time to brute force the PW using cloud computing, though it would certainly have been expensive.

This enemy site talks about using up to 10,000 computers with GPU acceleration to attack a LUKS password:

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/08/breaking-luks-encryption/

All of which is to say that what constitutes a good password has changed. One guideline is to use seven random words -- easy to remember,hard to force.

#technology

Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich.

Just read the draft Generative AI guidelines that China dropped last week. If anything like this ends up becoming law, the US argument that we should tiptoe around regulation 'cos China will beat us will officially become hogwash.
Here are some things that stood out. 🧵

Given the government’s long history of using and abusing incredibly invasive techniques, people in the United States should push for more robust human rights safeguards.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/us-deserves-stronger-spyware-protections-bidens-executive-order

Scientists discover that fungi can effectively break down plastic - https://boingboing.net/2023/04/16/scientists-discover-that-fungi-can-effectively-break-down-plastic.html more like this, please...

lol jk 😂

https://dcist.com/story/23/04/12/world-bank-cafeteria-workers-contract-picket-wages/

Tech-obsessed utopian fad-chasers are going to doom us all. First they gave us crypto, which wastes vasts amounts of electricity to facilitate gambling and fraud. Now they've delivered ChatGPT, which wastes vast amounts of water to facilitate the removal of human interaction on the internet. Their stupidity truly knows no bounds, and yet they are convinced they're the smartest cats on the planet. 🤦‍♂️

https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-generative-ai-water-use-environmental-impact-study-2023-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01100-0

Excuse me, but how are people calling this a win?

What this 5th Circuit ruling means:

* FDA approval of Mifepristone remains

* Mifepristone cannot be mailed

* Mifepristone can only be dispensed after over 3 doctor visits

1. to administer mifepristone,
2. to administer misoprostol
3. assess any complications

Hope you’re rich and living where you can get three doctor visits in 49 days, ladies!

This feels like the soft crescendo before they remove more of our waning rights.

Was thinking i could maybe also just wire that up to sense the voltage in one of the batteries and to run a relay off that.

Running stuff at lower voltage from a battery in a larger voltage battery bank is something i try to avoid. In this case it feels like it shouldnt be so bad. Its a low draw, the system is only running up in summer months and should regularly be getting a good charge.

Anyone got any thoughts?

#electronics #offgrid #solar

Helping out with some offgrid power stuff on a community farm.

They have a 1kw 72v solar irrigation pump and controller which is designed to run without batteries. It runs when theres enough sun to start the motor.

They attempted to upgrade the system with six nice new 12v lead acid batteries and a 72v charge controller which worked OK for a bit until the low voltage cutout malfunctioned and the batteries got hammered so hard they died.

continued...
#electronics #offgrid #solar

The thing about Twitter is that it really lacks a lot of the features you'd expect from a true Mastodon replacement.

For example, there's no way to edit your toots (which they, confusingly call "tweets"—let's face it, it's a bit of a silly name that's difficult to take seriously).

"Tweets" can't be covered by a content warning. There's no way to let the poster know you like their tweet without also sharing it, and no bookmark feature.

There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content.

It also doesn't Integrate with other fediverse platforms, and I couldn't find the option to turn the ads off.

Really, Twitter has made a good start, but it will need to add a lot of additional features before it gets to the point where it becomes a true Mastodon replacement for most users.

#twitter #mastodon #twittermigration

I don't begrudge any writer who wants to keep writing for Substack. Make money however you can do it! But I am tired of people saying that there is nothing scammy or problematic about a publication that hides its financials, hides who it is paying, and then says that we should just trust that it is a neutral platform with no agenda. And on top of that, they now refuse to have any kind of coherent moderation policy.