Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Looks like Corporate #infosec has made it's choice.

#RSAC is filled with talks embracing AI and making it "secure".

And they invited and encouraged the Trump regime to spread its disinformation - fully sanctioned and encouraged by the conference leadership(and by conference attendees who laughed at the regime's jokes and lies and issued no challenges or stands during the talk).

With the ostracization of #ChrisKrebs by industry and the full embrace of Kristi Noem as a speaker, this was the moment that infosec made its bed.

Y'all lie in it now.

seems a good day to express gratitude for @mayfirst - for their tech services, having actual humans doing support, living their values as a co-op, design and usability improvements, and protecting members’ freedom of speech

This is the way: “Mastodon has taken the strategic decision not to accept venture capital investments for growth, but rather restructure to a European non-profit organisation. This means that we’re reliant on your support to build a team to work full-time on new product features, maintain mastodon.social and mastodon.online, and represent Mastodon and the broader Fediverse to policy makers and to media organisations. The elements of our mission related to an open internet, privacy, and data ownership are more important than ever.”

#shutUpAndTakeMyMoney

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/evolving-the-team/

As of *right now* developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple *cannot* block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power.

13/

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry - and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order - they *lied about it* to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is *furious*.

10/

Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters - that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar.

3/

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players - many of them children - with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers.

2/

🚩 Erster Mai - Straße frei! 🏴
Dieser Spruch hallt heute von vielen Lautis durch die Städte. Deshalb feiern wir auch den Release 1.0 von LAUTI am 1.Mai.

📣 LAUTI - Open Source Community Kalender

LAUTI ist eine unabhängige Kalender-Software für Städte oder Regionen. Kommt mit auf die Straße und verbindet eure Gruppen und Orte mit unserer unkommerziellen Open Source Organizing-Plattform.

✊ Auf einen kämpferischen 1. Mai.

Klasse & Methode - IT Kollektiv Stuttgart

👉 https://lauti.org

Huh - what do you know? https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ - turns out that when a software category is dominated by a libre option (e.g. mobile operating systems, blog engines, and now value stores/caching systems), nothing else can compete. As it should be.

Check out the new documentary series from @subMedia that just dropped its first episode on the massive uprising in #Chile in 2019.

Watch it here and set up a film showing in your area!

https://itsgoingdown.org/submedia-presents-interrebellium-the-estallido-social/

It's not TV, it's fascism. https://brianmcfadden.org/2025/04/25/white-house-approved-programming/

White House launches news-style site to promote favorable coverage of Trump
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/01/white-house-trump-news-website presumably it will be called "Pravda"...

#RFKJr and #health agency falsely claim #MMR #vaccine includes ‘aborted fetus debris’ | Robert F Kennedy Jr | The Guardian

This man may once have been a harmless crank but he is now a serious danger to #PublicHealth. With no formal medical training, he is the head of the US health department. I shouldn’t really be surprised; it seems to me that a qualification to be in #Trump's cabinet is that you have to be incompetent and unqualified.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/01/rfk-mmr-vaccines-fetus-claim

#Medicine #Health #Vaccinations

Did a video on what farm history can tell us about trade wars, and taking agriculture's customers & labor for granted.

Recorded at an old Confederate bullet factory personally torn down by Sherman himself.

https://youtu.be/pESl8iPTBf8

Happy May Day to workers, strikers, organizers, and agitators everywhere. To celebrate, we made a May Day Playlist for you all! And don't forget, for the entire month of May, we're offering a free e-Book copy of The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. Spotify and YouTube versions of the playlist and a link to the e-Book are available at the link in our bio. Use code MAYDAY at checkout. Also, let us know what songs we missed in the comments below!

The #Forgejo monthly update was published ✨ It is a high level overview of the project activities.

Forgejo is now featured on the official Git website. Forgejo v11.0 was released on 16 April following quick fixes for identified regressions. The Helm chart was updated to version 12 for compatibility. Federation work continues on HTTP signatures and following user activity. The infrastructure faced SSH connection failures and excessive crawling.

https://forgejo.org/2025-04-monthly-update/

Today's Help Desk: "Petitio Principii"

https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/hd/2025/05/petitio-principii/

Seattle Worldcon science fiction convention vets panelists with ChatGPT

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/01/seattle-worldcon-science-fiction-convention-vets-panelists-with-chatgpt/ - text
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJUFBIcOekw&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

I do believe this may be the *first* youtube video on the issue too

A lot of people in the co-op world (myself included) were very skeptical of the Drivers Co-op. Uber never had a positive-margin business model, and worker co-ops don't have the backing from dumb-money to keep a negative margin business going indefinitely. Turns out, we were right to be skeptical and everyone who told us we were being too "pessimistic" should probably take note.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-rise-and-fall-of-nyc-s-driver-owned-ride-share/ar-AA1rP00T