Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Finally, some good news
"A white buffalo calf was born in the park’s vast and lush Lamar Valley. To the several tribes who revere American bison, the calf’s appearance was both the fulfillment of sacred prophecy and a message to take better care of the Earth."
https://montanafreepress.org/2024/06/26/tribes-honor-the-birth-of-a-rare-white-buffalo-calf-in-yellowstone/

This will never not be funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT-DuG0UjU

If journalists did even a tiny bit of self-reflection, this headline

"Trump trusted more than Biden on democracy among key swing-state voters"

would be understood as proof that Big Journalism has utterly failed to do its job.

But if you read the story, there's not a hint of that recognition.

https://wapo.st/3KYyorV (free link)

Journalists aren't the only reason for this public ignorance of reality. But they are a major factor, and they absolutely refuse to grasp that, much less do better.

Election denialism isn’t gone. Trump’s backers are probing for weaknesses.


The Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter, normally sends election observers to countries such as Sierra Leone, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

⭐️This fall, the group will deploy nonpartisan monitors in Michigan, Arizona and, yes, Georgia ⭐️
— not the country but the state where the group is based.

Such vigilance, in the world’s oldest democracy, reflects 💥the corrosive downstream effects of former president Donald Trump’s years of relentless election denialism.💥


Mostly under the radar, 🔥Trump backers in some key states are probing for weaknesses in the nation’s decentralized election administration system. 🔥

For example, Mr. Trump’s allies appear to be exploring whether county-level officials can block the certification of vote tallies, if the election doesn’t go their way.


The United States has more than 3,000 counties. Dragging out certification in one could create a cascading problem in which a state is unable to certify its results by the Dec. 17 deadline to cast its electoral votes so that they can be sent to the Capitol for counting on Jan. 6, 2025.

If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the House might be forced to pick the president
— with each state’s delegation getting one vote,
a system that favors Republicans.


The Electoral Count Reform Act that passed in 2022 addressed weaknesses exposed by Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

State legislatures will find it harder to block certification, and the threshold is higher for members of Congress to block the counting of electoral votes a state submits.

Yet, while significant and valuable, the bipartisan measure did not address every vulnerability.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/26/2024-election-certification-denial/

In 2017, I founded a small nonprofit that trains progressive law students and lawyers to run for office, especially at the state and local level. I have run workshops every year since then, using the first $5000 I raised. Now, I need to do another round of fundraising so the work can continue. I’m a little nervous about doing this on #Mastodon. But I won’t go back to the bird site, so I’m going to see how it goes. 1/ https://www.leadersfromlaw.com/home

Paramount wiped out MTV News archives, and is now taking down old TV clips from the Internet.

Big Media (and small sites, for that matter) won't preserve the archives, so the rest of us will have to do it.

We need to get organized, and create a system that preserves the past. The Copyright Cartel will go nuts, so we need a safe way around them.

I hope smart people are working on this, right now. Because media companies don't give a damn about history.

@kyle It's Droidian. It runs Debian(ish) userspace on top of Android HAL. Very different to actually running Debian.

Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone

The EMBAG law stipulates that all public bodies must disclose the source code of software developed by or for them, unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns. This mandate aims to ensure greater transparency, security, and efficien ...continues

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/switzerland-mandates-software-source-code-disclosure-for-public-sector-a-legal-milestone/

#opensource #switzerland #technology

Supreme Court just legalized bribery of public officials. A perfect and grotesque endorsement of the kind of corruption that Trump world stands for. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/26/supreme-court-bribes-gratuities-corruption-mayor/

Just a reminder: The best way to read the #CNN new site is at:
https://lite.cnn.com/

We must stop the Kids Online Safety Act. If KOSA is allowed to pass, it will likely lead to age verification, handing more power, and private data, to third-party identity verification companies—endangering the privacy of every social media user. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-kosa-will-censor-the-internet-but-won-t-help-kids

Great news, privacy enthusiasts! The Librem 11 tablet is back in stock. Secure your freedom with this powerful, privacy-focused device. Order now before they're gone again! #Librem11 #PrivacyMatters #PureOS #Purism
https://puri.sm/products/librem-11/

@dynamic
Yes! This is exactly why I don't like the "speak truth to power" sentiment. It's not power that needs to hear truth - they already know the truth, they just lie about it - it's us regular people who need to hear it. And getting out to do some good old fashioned grassroots organizing (petitioning, lit distro) is a great way to build political power and counteract misconceptions about your group/cause/movement that your political opponents are no doubt spreading.

Pretty sure that you can just make up a category of people (call it "X"), create a quiz to "see if you're an X," and within a week everyone on the internet will just assume that "being X" is a thing.

I don't like it. We end up thinking these categories are facts of nature when they're just made up. People are real. You are real. All the labels people create and tag each other with are not real - they are social fabrications. Be you, is what I say, and don't worry all the f'n labels.

It's beginning to dawn on folks that abortion rights were just the first human rights to go under right-wing control of our top political offices, especially the courts.

Gay rights are in the Republican extremists' crosshairs. So is birth control. So is freedom of expression, and so much more.

The right wing never bought into civil rights in the first place.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/gay-rights-trump-gop/678797/?utm_source=press.coop

Maybe Big Journalism will notice this with more than passing interest, but they'd have to wake up first.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-06-24/overcoming-despair-and-apathy-to-win-democracy/
"Instead of organizing a protest in the city center, in front of a government building where nobody’s around, we would organize those same protests at the outskirts of the city, in and around green markets or shopping centers. We spoke to people rather than shout at institutions where the doors were shut."

@Codeberg I think it would be a very good first step. There are good reasons for not internationalizing domains. That's all because the namespace owner does not vet the entries.

In case of projects belonging to a user, the user *does* control the entries, so I'm not seing any downsides.

I've published my first version of the debugging tool that causes large corporations to scream and run away:

https://crates.io/crates/breakmancer is a *secure* reverse shell, allowing you to drop a breakpoint into any build script.

Your build can pause, reach out to your laptop and let you poke around, and then resume where it left off. Incredibly useful.

It's written in Rust and uses some basic libsodium cryptography to secure the connection. I'd like to get a security audit (any volunteers? it's a pretty small program!) and expand to include plugins for languages that support REPLs, such as Python, Javascript, and Clojure.

Can’t find my thread to update it, but after a Chinese company acquired Polyfill.io last year (embedded in over 100k websites), it has started serving malware to users of said websites - prepare to be surprised.

https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack

#threatintel

Worth grepping your source code for "polyfill.io" and taking urgent measures to remove that code if you're linking it into your site - the domain name apparently now intermittently serves malicious JavaScript

My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/25/polyfill-supply-chain-attack/ - or read this article https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack