Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Trump ally Larry Ellison, one of Silicon Valley's historically nastier characters, could soon control CNN and TikTok. (Other people are involved including the reprehensible Andreessen Horowitz VC firm and Ellison's son.)

The Hungary-izing of "news" gets worse and worse.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon-control-tiktok-and-cnn/sharetoken/4353d6b1-523c-409e-9613-2592d0977daf

I know I know people are doing their best within means but I sigh hard each time I see a conference or lecture on the violence and capture of big tech recorded on Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. Tales of injustice, penned from jail.

FWIW we've had people oceans away conferencing in to CriticalSignals (https://criticalsignals.nz) using a self-hosted BigBlueButton instance, calls recorded and uploaded to self-hosted Nextcloud, able to be shared publicly with a click. The last was from Ireland - a formidable network distance to here in Aotearoa, and with a couple of dozen participants remoting in, panelists included. Not only can it be done, but in this year of 2025 it works great.

@CommonMugwort And it can be done. I've moved many people and groups off Zoom to BigBlueButton, and also from Slack to Mattermost (whose UX many say improves on Slack). These are thousands of people, and just two examples.

It just takes a few in a community to share the load. Some may adopt a non-profit micro-economy built around admin and support.

The platform morale than comes from community owned and operated,, privacy-respecting tooling - when done right - is not to be underestimated!

Very pleased to present another round of Tunnel and Fortress, live classes in the design, deployment & administration of self-hosted, tightly secured & sovereign server infrastructure.

The classes draw from 2 decades deploying dozens of servers & services for orgs & groups, big & small, & often with powerful adversaries.

I want to teach you to be able to do the same, to get the communities you care about off Big Tech.

https://video.nikau.io/w/9RVN23fgj7AeMVmVrr8so9

https://learn.nikau.io/courses/course-v1:Nikau+TF2+2025_T4/about

#exitbigtech #sysadmin

R3Dmx calls it an uncontrolled system of surveillance and social control that violates privacy, free expression rights and presumption of innocence. We support their efforts to push back through the courts and raise international awareness. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/mexican-allies-raise-alarms-about-new-mass-surveillance-laws-call-international

Our Mexican allies are raising alarms about the dystopian surveillance system Mexican lawmakers passed through a set of laws that erode privacy safeguards and underpin disproportionate powers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/mexican-allies-raise-alarms-about-new-mass-surveillance-laws-call-international

The Ninth Circuit just delivered good news for digital privacy: abandoning a phone doesn't abandon your Fourth Amendment rights in the phone's contents. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/appeals-court-abandoned-phones-dont-equal-abandoned-privacy-rights

Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/magical-systems-thinking/

📣 New episode!

Interview with northern BC anarchists about the growing struggle against the #PRGT pipeline.

Discussions includes history and overview of the project, the changing context of the Canada-US trade war, anarchist-indigenous solidarity, and taking some lessons from Shut Down Canada.

https://fromembers.libsyn.com/fighting-the-prgt-pipeline

As some of you were asking for donation methods apart from bank transfer: we now also support credit cards and paypal at https://ev.phosh.mobi/donate 🎉. From within the 🇪🇺 bank transfer should still be the most cost effective way leaking the least data.

🔴 BRAND NEW COMIC now up on Boing Boing
-
📰 News of the Times: School Shooter Kills Conservative Child Pundit!
-
https://boingboing.net/2025/09/17/tom-the-dancing-bug-school-shooter-kills-conservative-child-pundit.html

"Only the right wing gets to lie about their enemies." OK, man. You can be the hall monitor in the barracks. I'm going to continue saying JD Vance put a GI Joe up his urethra.

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

🔗 https://www.404media.co/doj-deletes-study-showing-domestic-terrorists-are-most-often-right-wing/

Here’s a brief story, with receipts about Trump administration corruption and crypto industry collusion that WILL be investigated once the majority of the House is filled with people who take ethics and the Constitution seriously:

There are now two tactical aerostat systems in New Mexico. These uncrewed, tethered airships can capture video up to 15 miles away. (4/9)

Southern New Mexico now has more than a dozen Autonomous Surveillance Towers made by Anduril Industries. These towers are controlled by an AI, which attempts to categorize and track objects of interest. (2/9)

One email to the German credit agency, and two weeks late, I have my own product ID to connect my janky payment script to banks.

That was surprisingly painless.

The library I use no longer provides a default one, and they recommend getting one, so I thought, why not.

https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints/

#fints #hbci #banking #opensource #germany #government #invoices #finance #programming

Has anyone on here ever obtained an ASCAP license for a low-power community radio station (in the US)? Trying to figure out how much $ we're looking at and ASCAP themselves are refusing to answer my phone calls 😮‍💨 #AskFedi

i love the alt text culture on fedi, because once in a while i'll browse other platforms and i see an image that i can't quite parse, in which case normally i would just look for alt text to get what i'm looking at, and instead i get the disappointment of no alt text