Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Wow, our crucial public services (and business/commerce systems) are so completely badly run. No one seems to have considered that the world's crucial computer systems are completely dependent on a low quality, poorly managed, insecure, woefully fragile software monoculture. And those managing it act like they're surprised. This has been obvious to many of us for a decade. How are those managers even still employed?

Internet history rhymes

The FCC has voted to more closely regulate prison telecom services, a move that will significantly cut the exorbitant fees that families pay to communicate with incarcerated people. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/07/18/fcc-vote/

When you see the word "privatize" just think "extract wealth by choking public good to death"

Z. Zane McNeill: “Armed with terms like ‘dirt femme,’ ‘granny witch,’ ‘fag hillbilly,’ ‘plant queer,’ and ‘gay redneck,’ a new generation of Appalachian queer artists, activists, and emerging scholars have decided to reclaim ‘Appalachia’ as an inherently queer space. ...

For many of us, self-definition of Appalachia is in and of itself activism: by reclaiming what it means to be ‘Appalachian,’ we imagine a place of resilience in which *y’all* really means *all.*”

Read more in Y'all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1240

#books #bookstodon #reading #Appalachia #LGBTQ #queer

@w7voa

#TranslatedFromTheRepublican

"Billionaires decide who the presidential candidates will be. Not voters.

Oligarchs decided long ago to evade taxation, give countries away to Putin, thwart climate action & fry the planet, let Chinese cryptocurrency hijack fiscal policy, end unions, and erase a century of progress on civil rights."

Latest comic: Lowering the temperature

#uspol #cartoon #2024election #authoritarianism #fascism #media #politics

Make your own JD Vance comic. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/7/19/2255560/-Cartoon-Make-your-own-J-D-Vance-comic

Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai
Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

Facebook jettisons a tool that many, many disinformation fighters (including me) found essential to our work. The replacement is, relatively speaking, junk. https://www.proofnews.org/meta-is-getting-rid-of-crowdtangle-and-its-replacement-isnt-as-transparent-or-accessible/

Two things are still true:

1) If enough Black people in swing states re-check their registration, and sign up for mail-in voting, early voting, or ballot drop off, then Biden can't lose.

2) The Dem party has spent significantly more time, money, effort, and attention, trying to get Kamala Harris out of the Whitehouse, than it has spent registering Black voters in swing states or telling them about mail-in voting or early voting. 🤡

The "despair" is unnecessary and self-inflicted.

Hey, #wizzair , are you serious?

If I ask you to delete my personal data, but you don't have any, then... now you have my data and keep it?

This is a joke.

https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/about-us/data-subject-rights

"In case you provide such personal data, which are not being processed by us, we will retain them for 6 years following the closure of the of processing your request."

Also, 5 years ago you deleted my data, and now I get a marketing email? You get 1 chance to explain before I complain.

#gdpr #privacy

@GossiTheDog If it wasn't for the fact that people are posting about it left and right, I'd have no idea this was even happening. None of the websites I go to are even down. I think "critical" might mean different things to different people.

And hey, if you got "critical" infrastructure running on Windows, maybe the lesson today is yours :p

I can only speak as an outsider, but this interview with Marjorie Feld useful about the *long* history of tensions between Zionist and Anti-Zionist American Jews seems useful and informative: https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-16-2024/

The saddest thing about this global Microsoft Windows calamity is that almost no one is going to learn the *right* lessons. That's because they're all so completely invested in doing things the wrong way. Key lesson: monocultures are very very bad.

Wow! 😲

CrowdStrike’s CSO sold $1.5M worth of stock right before the outage today!

I repeat, the Chief Security Officer sold $1.5M worth of stock!

https://www.barrons.com/articles/crowdstrike-insiders-sold-stock-cac5e509?siteid=yhoof2

@varx lol! We're locked out of our perfectly maintained and fully running 100% Linux cluster because Windows is probably somewhere in the chain for authenticating/authorizing SSH sessions.

On this day in Anarchist history, July 19th we remember the start of the Spanish Revolution, when thousands of Anarchists took control of Barcelona.

https://kolektiva.media/w/cBm5s2K8XTgcvjrcRnancD