Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I posted about switching to Firefox as my "daily driver" browser as a little tiny step away from Chromium browser hegemony, and I had a ton of people in the replies suggesting I should just use Brave or Edge or Opera or Vivaldi instead.

I'm a little concerned that people don't realize just how pervasive this problem is. Every single one of those sits on top of the Chromium codebase.

TIL there was no single burning of the historic Great Library of Alexandria. The “single burning” story is just myth.

Instead, the Library of Alexandria was slowly defunded and its librarians, intellectuals purged from Alexandria. Over generations its prominence and scholarship slowly faded away, and the collection was likely slowly lost to corruption, war, plunder, dilapidation, or dispersed across other private and public collections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Can anyone find Leila, this seems important

While the extremists in the US work to return the nation to an era of racism and denial of basic human rights, it's important to remember that in much of the world contempt for basic freedoms has never stopped. Malaysia is an example, and this musician's protest is admirable: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/malaysia-festival-halted-matty-healy-1975-criticises-anti-lgbtq-laws

It's officially 100 degrees in the shade. Not even August yet. 😕

Latest comic on the writers' and actors' strikes being called "disruptive"

#labor #unions #wga #sagaftra #strike #work #jobs #economy #inequality #writers #actors #hollywood

Video of women attacked in Manipur breaks silence on systematic gang rapes in #India - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/video-of-women-attacked-in-manipur-breaks-silence-on-systematic-gang-rapes-in-india the details here suggest that things are getting even worse...

This week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made clear that linking does not constitute infringement, and kept in place an important test to determine under what circumstances entities can be held liable for displaying copyrighted content online. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/victory-embedded-links-photos-instagram-dont-infringe-photographers-copyrights

Turkmenistan continues to block Tor and anti-censorship tools at a large scale. Tor bridges prove to be one of the few free alternatives to access the open internet. If you have the resources to help, please consider running bridges. How? Take a look: https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-help-turkmens-to-bypass-internet-censorship-run-an-obfs4-bridge/7002/7

Kenneth Jupp once wrote about feudalism that

“Feudalism is now a term that carries connotations of privilege and oppression. It was indeed a system of unequal hereditary status. Yet it stood for a kind of justice, because no one was so high that his privileges were not conditional upon the discharge of obligations, and no one was so low that he was without certain rights. Although in practice it often fell short of this ideal, it was only when feudalism began to disintegrate, that privilege became wholly divorced from obligation, which simply disappeared.”

Feudalism was oppressive and exploitive AND it imposed obligations on the privileged that don’t exist anymore. Lords extorted rents from their tenants, but tenants could not be evicted, for example. Rents were set by ancient custom rather than “the market” and sometimes inflated into nominal fees. Peasants had permanent rights to waste and other common lands and properties that overlapped with those of the lord, who could not legally exclude or alienate via sale the peasant’s property.

When I think of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I do not envision the rupture that classical Marxism does. Capitalism feels much more like a continuation of feudalism, in which our obligations to the rich have been preserved while the obligations of the rich to us have been severed under the pretense of “individual liberty.”

Just a reminder that registrations for Elsica.Social are now open: Elsica is your cosy home in the fediverse with a mild thematic focus on #botany, #nature, #wildlife, #horticulture, #bio and #earth #sciences, nature #photography, #exploring and #travel. If you know Latin names of random #plants, get up at 3 a.m. to walk into remote valleys to take #landscape #photos, spend all day in your #garden, like reading #science books or watching the latest #documentary about the #birds of Patagonia, you will feel at home here.

Come and join our friendly community: elsica.social/register

Please kindly share, boost and spread the word.

FroSCon takes place 2023-08-05 and 2023-08-06 in St. Augustin near Bonn in Germany: https://froscon.org/info/

DRM for web BROWSING, in part to thwart ad/spyware, is one of the more rotten ideas ever from any company, and from Google it's the opposite of (long-abandoned) "don't be evil." https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md

Reading this, https://techblog.nz/3186-Griffin-on-Tech-Microsofts-leg-up-from-the-Govt-and-the-tech-bro-cage-fight I feel outrage at the deep naivete of our gov't tech decision makers. And I also feel frustration at the fact that the author (and the tech media in general) sees this "lock in problem" & improper (i.e. corrupt) procurement process (e.g. instructing gov't department heads to 'come up with ways to work with Microsoft' without a contestable tender) is a problem... & then shrugs. Rather than accepting this, how about we just stop doing business with Microsoft?

This is wider distribution:
"Meta’s LLaMa 2 license is not Open Source"

Co-opting the term "open source" to then place restrictions on it is not helpful.

Yes, we are in new territories. Perhaps the open source definition needs to be relooked, but while that could be something OSI could do (along with the community), for now, LLaMa is NOT open source compliant.

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

Google keeps raising prices for YouTube. Not remotely worth it at this point.

Intriguing:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-07-17/two-arrogant-men/
"As a matter of fact, most traditional farming systems, with or without grazing (without livestock isn’t an option as all traditional food systems have had some livestock), have been sustainable. The grasslands of Europe, managed for millennia without holistic planned grazing, are hotspots of biodiversity."

The last clause being a hotlink to this article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718307456

@dangillmor
and a positive AI story:

New Project Uses AI To Turn Project Gutenberg Texts Into Free Audiobooks With Lifelike Voices — In 30 Seconds | Techdirt

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/20/new-project-uses-ai-to-turn-project-gutenberg-texts-into-free-audiobooks-with-lifelike-voices-in-30-seconds/

Florida's official racism is ramping up and up and up: "Students at Florida public schools will now learn that Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them skills. This change is part of the African American history standards the State Board of Education approved at a Wednesday meeting." https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/07/19/do-not-for-the-love-of-god-tell-kids-that-slavery-was-beneficial/

Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/

#Pluralistic

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