Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

#India cuts #PeriodicTable and #evolution from #school #textbooks — experts are baffled

#RightWingPoliticians everywhere are trying to turn the clock back to the dark ages.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01770-y

#Politics

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, because I had heard that Debian is better on privacy issues. In relative terms, Debian kind of seems like a huge headache in terms of support and package availability, though.

Question: How bad is Ubuntu, really?

(boosts welcome)

The Biden administration should be searching for how to drop the case against Julian Assange -- universally acknowledged to be a direct threat to press freedom -- not figuring out how to keep it going. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/fbi-restarts-julian-assange-probe-despite-hopes-of-release-20230531-p5dcoe.html

As the toxic legacy of opencast mining in Wales shows, operators get the profits, and the public get the costs - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/01/fossil-fuel-toxic-legacy-coal-wales-mining appalling - and appalling that politicians keep falling for these tricks... #dirtycoal

@aradionetwork is on Kolektiva! Follow them!

Here’s proof fishing bans leave plenty to eat, says study of Mexico marine park - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/01/heres-proof-fishing-bans-leave-plenty-to-eat-says-study-of-mexico-marine-park seems likely they will help to boost numbers...

BU President whines about dissent, calls it "cancel culture"

https://popehat.substack.com/p/speech-or-cancel-culture-at-boston

Visit https://www.pgdp.net to learn about how to help create some of Project Gutenberg's forthcoming eBooks. Proofreading a page a day is easy, fun, and a great way to help bring literature to the world. There are many different roles, for the different steps involved in digitizing a printed book to make a Project Gutenberg eBook. Beginners are welcome, and there is an online tutorial to get started. And @DProofreaders is already at Mastodon!

#ProjectGutenberg #ebooks #Public Domain

Just a reminder that Clarence Thomas let a GOP megadonor take him on lavish trips, buy his mom's house and let her live there rent free, pay for his grandnephew to attend a private boarding school — all in secret until now.

How is he still on the Supreme Court?

"Today, a heavily armed Atlanta Police Department SWAT team raided a house in Atlanta and arrested three of its residents. Their crime? Organizing legal support and bail funds for protesters and activists who have faced indiscriminate arrest and overreaching charges in the struggle to stop the construction of a vast police training facility — dubbed Cop City — atop a forest in Atlanta.

The arrests are an unprecedented attack on bail funds and legal support organizations, a long-standing facet of social justice movements, according to Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

“This is the first bail fund to be attacked in this way,” Regan, whose organization has worked to ensure legal support for people resisting Cop City, told me. “And there is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/31/cop-city-bail-fund-protest-raid-atlanta/

There's yet another "AI will kill us all! It poses a risk of extinction!" letter going around, and I just… Y'all i am just so fucking tired.

CAPITALISM poses risk of extinction (climate change, right the fuck now).

WHITE SUPREMACY poses risk of extinction (genocide, eugenics).

HEGEMONY poses risk of extinction (nuclear FUCKING WAR).

And whatever "risk of extinction" "AI" poses, it poses because it is BUILT FROM THOSE EXTREMELY HUMAN VALUES.

Even if you stopped every "AI" project running, RIGHT THIS SECOND, those values would still kill us. And no matter how long you "pause" your "AI" projects, if you don't address those values? Then when you start your "AI" back up? You'll KEEP BUILDING THOSE SAME VALUES IN.

This is not hard. At this point, as much as it pains me to say it, it's not even novel. And yet you're still not fucking getting it.

I'm so goddam tired.

git-buildpackage 0.9.31 is out:

http://lists.sigxcpu.org/pipermail/git-buildpackage/2023-May/000488.html

If you use --upstream-vcs-tag and have projects with repacked tarballs then this release should make this use case simpler (thanks to a patch by Richard Laager). There's some bugfixes as well.

#gbp #debian #git

Feeling pretty good after a one-hour weeding session on the Somerville Community Path.

@Matt_Noyes @emi and Chris indulged me in a little ranting about one of my least favorite terms/concepts on the last GEO livestream: low-skilled (and/or unskilled) labor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJqdDgbr-IU

The "Marco Temporal" would prevent Indigenous Brazilians from reclaiming their ancestral lands if they weren't occupying them in 1988. The right wing in Brazil's congress is trying to push this awful law through TODAY! Fuck that 😡 #MarcoTemporalNão https://exame.com/brasil/governo-tenta-adiar-votacao-do-pl-do-marco-temporal-prioridade-e-mp-dos-ministerios/

The Democrats are always promising to "fight for" something or another, but I have a real hard time remembering when their fighting has resulted in a victory. Every time they have the opportunity to makes some real social gains (say, like by codifying Roe v. Wade) they assiduously avoid doing so. You see, if they actually fixed anything, what would they fundraise on? Better to let the Republicans keep winning so the Dems can keep begging for money to "fight" them.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/05/no-bargain-big-money-and-the-debt-ceiling-deal.html

Police Are Using #AI for Mass #Surveillance in the US and in Europe - https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/police-ai-mass-surveillance/ and they are doing it in a very cunning way...

New, scoopy, different: A number of Discord communities focused on cryptocurrency have been hacked this past month after their administrators were tricked into running malicious Javascript code disguised as a Web browser bookmark.

"A CAPTCHA bot that allows Discord cookies to be accessed by the person hosting the CAPTCHA," was how one victim described the attack. "I've seen all kinds of crypto scams, but I've never seen one like this."

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/discord-admins-hacked-by-malicious-bookmarks/

Congress is bipartisan on one thing only: It will always spend more on military contractors than the Pentagon even asks for -- and the Pentagon always asks for vastly more than it needs.

@juddlegum reminds us of an ongoing outrage -- one of the reasons our nation is so broke(n).

https://popular.info/p/there-is-always-more-money-for-defense

McCarthy threatened default in part so he could partially deliver on the right-wing demand that the IRS not hire 87,000 enforcement agents, which it wasn’t going to do anyway. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/30/debt-ceiling-republicans-mccarthy-irs/?itid=ap_philipbump