Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Via @waldoj

Virginia's governor vetoed bills that would support the right to contraceptives.

https://mastodon.social/@waldoj/112465190628995562

"...the Ministry for the Environment said it was 'cloud infrastructure agnostic' but expressed a preference in two tenders as the solution had to 'integrate' with what it already had from Microsoft or AWS."

#PhilPennington, 2024

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/495883/growing-government-reliance-on-offshore-cloud-services-has-security-experts-worried

This kind of lock-in is precisely why we don't want public agencies leasing hosting from foreign DataFarmers.

One of my talks for #GPN22 got accepted!

I'll talk about how "My files are a mess!", and how it will stay this way unless we achieve a collective enlightenment.

https://cfp.gulas.ch/gpn22/talk/ZRKD3G/

Now I finally have an excuse to do the research on the topic XD

#gpn #ccc #filesystem #semantic #database #presentation #UX

Latest comic: The Great Regression

#cartoon #comic #fascism #race #abortion #lgbtq #democracy #uspol

I do have to hand it to the #AI developers out there: you all have managed to figure out how to simultaneously solve our plausible-sounding-bullshit-and-soulless-art shortage, while also addressing our oversupply of unpolluted air and water. Truly, you have killed two birds with one stone. Sure, your work may be directly contributing to our already massive economic inequalities, but at least it's also speeding up the end of life as we know it. Personally, I find that admirable.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/ssh-backdoor-has-infected-400000-linux-servers-over-15-years-and-keeps-on-spreading/

Kernel.org folks never provided the postmortem they promised in 2011 after finding their infrastructure had been rooted. They also didn't bother to respond to my email earlier this week seeking comment on new information that, in fact, their servers had been rooted 2 years earlier by a 2nd, even more sophisticated piece of malware.

While no one responded to me, here's Linux Foundation member Konstantin Ryabitsev responding elsewhere to my post that the breach was the subject of an FBI investigation, and later of a lawsuit. This says lots about the obligation kernel.org, an organization entrusted with huge responsibility, feels toward transparency. If Microsoft did this, people would be apoplectic.

If you use Slack for work, your messages and DMs to friends and colleagues are now being used to train the company’s machine learning features — and everyone is opted in by default.

A quiet update to the company’s policy suggests messages, data and files sent by users are helping Slack to improve its in-app features like channel recommendations, search results and emoji suggestions, reports @PCMag. Individual users can’t opt out either, something critics have called a “privacy mess.”

https://flip.it/Tb1gRM

#Slack #AI #MachineLearning #Tech

Here comes a thread on light pollution from satellites, with a concrete action that you all can take to help push for regulation of satellites in orbit!

Astronomers have been worried about light pollution from satellites (if you've been following me for more than 24 hours, you've perhaps heard a bit about this). Astronomers spent SO much time and effort begging and pleading with Starlink to make their satellites fainter, with mixed results.

Google Cloud accidentally nukes customer account, causes two weeks of downtime

UniSuper, a $135 billion pension account, details its cloud compute nightmare.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

We told Project Censored that lawmakers who say they’re concerned about authoritarianism in a second Trump term need to stop handing future administrations a "dictator’s dream toolkit." https://freedom.press/news/bipartisan-bill-could-let-trump-shut-down-nonprofit-news-outlets/

#NetBSD #openai #chatgpt

"Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core."

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

I've been posting a series on LinkedIn about my water heater upgrade, from gas-fired water heaters to heat pump water heaters. (For those that missed it, I co-founded Onsemble to make this upgrade easier for homeowners.)

Figured a few folks here might appreciate seeing links to those posts:

- Post 1: Upgrading my water heaters avoided 20 metric tons of carbon emissions from being emitted over the life of the prior water heaters. (This stat still boggles my mind. One house. TWENTY METRIC TONS OF EMISSIONS AVOIDED.)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rickklau_decarbonization-sfclimateweek-activity-7188574858480443394-Sw-m?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3BoRBTTSpCRZm0OalHfwPghw%3D%3D

Such moral cowards running New York University -- ordering student protestors to write phony apologies.

This is right out of the authoritarian playbook -- and it craps on every notion of freedom of expression.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/nyregion/nyu-protests-apology-letters.html

You don't have to agree with the protestors' politics. But you should damn well understand that America is in wave of McCarthyism right now.

@purism Nice you like the release but wouldn't it be better to boost https://fosstodon.org/@phosh/112445825369450917 rather than copy the message verbatim?

🚀 📱 phosh 0.39.0 is out. Some highlights:

- #phosh: folder support, night light quick setting
- #phoc: wakeup-key handling (to prevent accidental unblank)
- #squeekboard: New layouts, lots of layout improvements
- mobile-settings: Allow to manage custom quick settings, allow to toggle whether to ignore hw keyboards, many new translations

Check out the full release notes at https://phosh.mobi/releases/rel-0.39.0/

#librem5 #pinephone #gtk #wlroots #gnome #linux #mobile #LinuxMobile

The reason I'm opposed to having the Federal gov't regulate crypto is that you will simply normalize criminal behavior, which needs to be stopped, not regulated. Which is to say I'm against the Feds regulating crypto for the same reason I'm against them regulating Ponzi schemes.

And guess what? It's already happening. Front-running trades is now a protected activity I guess, rather than a financial crime? Cool, cool...

https://archive.ph/vwIbt

Save us from those who believe that programmers exist to serve format and capitalization conventions instead of the other way around.

@scott

Thank you for sharing this. This article seems really important. I'm not Jewish, and I'd be interested in hearing more reactions from people who are...

Quote from article:
"The new antisemitism law would in effect silence vast swaths of Jews within educational institutions. It would in some ways be the most punitive law against Jews to be enacted in the U.S. since the Immigration Act of 1924."

"There is no other definition of bigotry in the world that equates criticism of a state, even harsh and unfair criticism, with discrimination or bigotry against the state’s people. If one claimed that denunciations of the violent foundations of the Russian empire are 'anti-Slavic'[...] we would immediately see through that as just an instrumentalist defense of Russian state interests."

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4666860-the-antisemitism-awareness-act-bars-the-teaching-of-modern-jewish-history/

Fascinating... just saw an ad on Facebook that Thrifty (car rentals) have gone 100% EV... I wonder what they know that the rest of the population don't...