Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Purism Announces First Public Offering on StartEngine.

Off to a fast start, we are excited to announce that we are north of $250K invested, and rising quickly, we thank those of you who have invested in tech freedom, privacy, & security!

Invest here: https://startengine.com/offering/purism

“If House members were really concerned about privacy, there wouldn’t be much of an obstacle to… having a (comprehensive data privacy) bill on the floor, being debated, being worked on," EFF’s @davidgreene told The National Desk. But that's not happening. https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/congress-is-focusing-on-the-wrong-problem-with-tiktok-bill-experts-warn-data-collection-bytedance-privacy-expert-data-bought-sold-corporations-freedon-of-expression-ccp-china-foreign-adversaries-third-party-brokers

📩 ‘National security’ claims don’t trump First Amendment https://freedom.press/newsletter/national-security-claims-dont-trump-first-amendment/

... because Wayland is a LOT better after a clean install. (well... semi-clean. Like I said, I keep my /home directory).

There is still some flickering, but it's a lot less. A lot. Which means I may need to flip over to x11 if I want to play a few games on my laptop but for the most part I think I do my work in Wayland with few issues.

OK, an important addendum to above, always remember until further notice that upgrading KDE Neon is never smooth and it's always better to just do clean installs when moving from one version to the next. That's why I have /home on a separate partition - it keeps my individual app configurations untouched, so when I reinstall applications I just pick up where I left off.

It looks like _most_ of my Wayland issues had to do with KDE Neon not upgrading smoothly from KDE 5.27 to 6.x...

Obvious Firefox is the answer, but if you need a different engine at times, at least use a Debian-based Chromium...

From the latest upload to sid:
"disable/screen-ai-blob.patch: add patch to not register the ScreenAI component. Previously, if you opened a PDF and clicked "open in reader mode", it would download a binary blob to ~/.config/chromium/screen_ai/, and do OCR stuff (and who knows what else) in that opaque blob without warning you. We, uh, don't want that."

https://tracker.debian.org/news/1514077/accepted-chromium-1230631258-1-source-into-unstable/

General Motors has stopped sharing details about how people drive its cars with data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry.

The decision followed a New York Times report this month that G.M. had, for years, been sharing data about drivers’ mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the insurance industry. The drivers were enrolled — some unknowingly, they said — in OnStar Smart Driver, a feature in G.M.’s internet-connected cars that collected data about how the car had been driven and promised feedback and digital badges for good driving.

Some drivers said their insurance rates had increased as a result of the captured data, which G.M. shared with two brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk. The firms then sold the data to insurance companies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html

@kashhill doing the lord's work.

Unsafe at any speed, even if you're on lots of speed yourself. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/03/15/the-tesla-death-trap/

“For 30 years, they’ve been complaining about problems at the border, and for 30 years, surveillance has been touted as the answer,” EFF’s Dave Maass told @themarkup “It’s been 30 years of nobody saying that it’s had any impact.” https://themarkup.org/news/2024/03/22/the-future-of-border-patrol-ai-is-always-watching

The Guillotine is fun to joke about, but we really don't want to bring that kind of thinking back.

"Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome."

https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too

Any #California public employees out there? You'll want to be paying attention to this, as #CalPERS is trying to hand your retirement savings over to Private Equity (even more than they have already).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/financial-times-tells-calpers-not-to-go-further-into-the-private-equity-haunted-house.html

Today people in El Paso at the border who were scheduled to be sent to a detention center tore through a razor wire fence and pushed past the National Guard.

For more background on how capitalist globalization, war, and US intervention is pushing many to flee their homes, go here: https://itsgoingdown.org/the-enemy-arrives-by-limo/

More info here: https://www.khou.com/article/news/special-reports/at-the-border/migrants-arrested-in-el-paso/285-3e80289e-2f41-4a8d-94a8-edb6e8427d63

Introducing our newest addition to the collective, The Child and Its Enemies. From the show:

Hello and welcome to The Child And Its Enemies, a podcast for and about. We are a neurodivergent, kids living out anarchy and youth liberation.

Here at the child. We believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives. And kids, teens, and everyone else affected by anti childism are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for trans liberation. Kids and teens that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create neuroqueer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. My pronouns are they, them I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at the anarchist review of books, author of the blog, debate me, bra and organizer of some all ages, queer spaces in my city and online

coming soon to https://channelzeronetwork.com/

available now on Spotify

This is an important insight from @interfluidity 👇

"At a personal level, I'm deeply attached to continual reinvention and nomadism. But into what kind of institutions, what kind of societies, do all we nomads compose? And how does that liberty affect those less well-placed to pick-up stakes and reinvent themselves when things go awry?"
https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/02/11/situated-versus-unsituated-virtues/index.html

R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024 - https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/20/r-i-p-the-scottish-enlightenment-1697-2024/ "on April 1st the Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021 comes into force, an Act which will criminalise speech and opinion deemed ‘#hateful’ even if spoken in the privacy of your own home."

If you want to know more about the impact of antitrust on IBM behaviour, I’d recommend reading this paper by Tim Wu. In his conclusions, he looks at what antitrust regulators should learn from the case, and I found this paragraph quite relevant to what’s currently happening. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3292&context=faculty_scholarship

The first stable release of the new 1.18 series is now available containing the collective fixes and improvements put into all the previous 1.17 releases by the many people who have contributed to Wesnoth over the last two and a half years! For more details see https://r.wesnoth.org/t57843 as usual, or take a look through https://www.wesnoth.org/start/1.18/

@rstevens it seems the important part of doing crime without facing any consequences is you have to already be rich.