Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Disney scanned every background actor in WandaVision without giving them any explanation of how it may be used, asking them to make various facial expressions like “surprised” and “scared”.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1190605685/movie-extras-worry-theyll-be-replaced-by-ai-hollywood-is-already-doing-body-scan

"First, the Big 5 do not SELL ebooks to libraries. Not one.

Libraries do not own title one from the Big 5. We license them. And that makes all the difference in the world for cost, depth and breadth of collection, and preservation. Nobody should ever use the word 'sell' in a sentence combining 'Big 5' and 'library ebooks.' This is not nit-picking. It is the essence of the problem."

And they are suing to stop Controlled Digital Lending of the books we did buy.

https://www.readersfirst.org/news/2023/8/2/big-5-license-terms-as-of-july-2023

@KorimakoEcology “No other pets are allowed free access to other people’s property.”

That’s a good article on what must be an unpopular topic in NZ. Pet cats have long had free rein to go wherever they want. It would certainly be good for birds and lizards in NZ cities if there was a gradual shift away from that. Plenty of other countries do it to some degree so we know it’s possible. There just needs to be national leadership and a fair transition.

The sale of Maine’s Portland Press Herald and its family of smaller publications to the National Trust for Nonprofit News has been finalized. CEO Lisa DeSisto has been named to run the new Maine Trust for #LocalNews. #journalism https://www.pressherald.com/2023/08/01/sale-of-maine-newspapers-to-national-nonprofit-is-finalized/

Useful article clarifying what is going on with the ocean currents: https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/07/27/amoc-time-entering-a-new-era-in-ocean-currents/

Just a reminder that two prominent Federalist Society members wanted to overthrow the government by fraud and then have the government murder you if you objected.

Eat that with your fuckin’ Chick-fil-A sack lunch.

BlacSpace Cooperative is hiring! 
Seeking two stellar new, Bay Area-based staff members to grow their cooperative into launch phase:
Storytelling Lead
Mutual Aid Lead

BlacSpace is a new cooperative enterprise that leverages the Black Arts Movement tradition to cultivate a supportive ecosystem where Black arts, business, ownership, and culture can thrive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSbK-rSMB150GHbPogTvAYcnpJajWuQimaF6svaYsApjQvYNZUKGQ8642RWMG5qY0TACcvfFE-E9ZXu/pub
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRoCPlMVlE1L3SMfWSwhpWXKZiTZFnQ5P8_atVy3mz3AjHHOkKxER9g4eRDuAtxRtJoCKRNatyu5Q-o/pub
#oakland #cooperatives

They did this to sex workers first and no one listened or cared. Maybe they’ll listen now if it means they can’t buy their weed seltzer with a card https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/business/mastercard-debit-cannabis-transactions.html

Are you planning to celeberate #SoftwareFreedomDay? DFF has released its announcement fot this year events by proposing three key topics:
- AI - Challenges to Face and Actions to Take
- Communication Decentralization - Why and How
Lessons Learned from the Past, Actions to Take for the Future

https://digitalfreedomfoundation.org/index.php/170-software-freedom-day-2023

Are you a scientist who's active on Mastodon and does research in #ornithology, #ecology, #naturalhistory, or a related field? I want to follow you - please reply and introduce yourself! (And please share so this reaches more people!)

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)

For those of you (most of you, I suspect) who're required to use Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, or Facebook technologies every day to do your job, but (as you should) resent it... I encourage you to alert 'the powers that be' that you'd rather not. If they ask you what you'd prefer, tell them: something that doesn't make us a pawn of a $trillion US corporation. Some known-good options I use daily are listed here: https://tech.oeru.org/updating-oer-foundation-web-services-february-2023 The local options are many & entirely unmarketed.

"Klein says he belongs to the Painted Feather Woodland Métis. The entity is not recognized by the Manitoba Métis Federation or the Métis Nation of Ontario. It's a for-profit company based out of a single-family residence near Bancroft, Ont..."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/kevin-klein-indigenous-manitoba-government-1.6876688?__vfz=medium%3Dsharebar

As now everyone seems to be mad with that "degoogling" thing, I'll reiterate my point: I won't stop using services that are accessible and usable for me as a blind screen reader user. Period, full stop. You can be a thousand times open-source, have good intentions and be saint angels in flesh, but if your service is not accessible *and* usable by a blind user, I cannot perform my daily tasks, be it for work, hobby or leisure, hence I won't use your service. Make your services accessible and usable for everyone and then preach about degoogling, de-appling, de-microsofting and de-whatevering. #Angry #Blind #Accessibility

We are starting a tech worker-cooperative on Southern Funen, Denmark. And looking for inspiration, knowledge and comrades - so please share!

Our praxis will be something like offering local and democratically organized tech-infrastructure to people and organisations with compatible values (not-for-profits, local-orgs, coops, informal groups, activists, etc.). Our ambition is to operate with planetary and intersectional feminist principles: http://futurologi.org/7-principles-for-planetary-coops/

#cooperative #WorkerCoop #NotForProfit #SmallTech #PlanetaryCoop

"The Tragedy of the Commons" was written by a eugenicist and was effectively debunked as ahistorical fantasy decades ago. More propaganda in the service of privatizing public space and resources. Pass it on. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

If you are looking for a bad example of how to communicate after a cyber breach, Microsoft is providing a teachable moment. They either haven't figured out how China-based hackers access its services or don't want to share what caused the "error."
At the very least, it can serve as a good reminder that while open-source has security "concerns," we can't hide them.
@dangoodin of @arstechnica has more on the "open question."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/us-senator-blasts-microsoft-for-negligent-cybersecurity-practices/

#cybersecurity #governance #incidentresponse

Instead of going to work today, let's build a world that doesn't deprive people of life's necessities, a world where nobody is forced to choose between exploitation and death.