Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

We keep hearing that only 'AI', whose profound ability to grasp complex systems, could solve a problem as wicked, entangled and multi-dimensional as global warming.*

This report details not only why that has no basis in reality, but that this fairytale is part of an industry campaign to make BigAI look like it's part of a habitable future, covering the tracks for genAI's massive footprint.

https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/big-tech-greenwashing-report/

* Turns out the trick is not spewing CO2 & CH4 into the air

#ai #climate #genai

@orrickle Meanwhile, writers who take on rural labor usually focus on strikes done by miners & textile mills.

Writers who talk about sharecropping & tenant farming tend to put it as a racial justice problem rather than an economic problem. (It absolutely WAS a racial justice problem. Folks just seem to have trouble understanding that racial justice problems do in fact impact the wider economy & aren't "just a Black folks' problem." Aaaaaaaaa)

Good News! 🚨👀

I am delighted to finally announce today what I've been working on in the past few weeks:

Privacy Guides' new Activism section!
https://privacyguides.org/activism/

The Activism section offers a new way to empower the digital rights community. It will progressively grow with more tools to support the community in its privacy activism effort, both for individuals and organizations 💛

As Privacy Guides' new Activism & Outreach Lead, I will be working hard on developing this section even further in the coming weeks, adding many more tools to support our community.

I hope this can be a helpful resource for anyone who is ready to fight for privacy rights ✊🔒

#PrivacyGuides #Activism #Privacy #DigitalRights #HumanRights

Kash had to get all those party flights in before jet fuel prices went up. https://www.patreon.com/posts/kash-patel-man-151754841

Love a life so virtuous that Trump, Bezos, and Musk demand it be outlawed.

NEW! 🚨✨

Privacy Guides is thrilled to announce today the addition of a new Activism section on our website!

This section will be a new way to support the community in its privacy advocacy and activism effort, both for individuals and organizations 💛

In this age of digital mass surveillance, we must work together to fight for privacy rights collectively ✊🔒

https://privacyguides.org/activism

#PrivacyGuides #Activism #Privacy #DigitalRights

RE: https://mastodon.coffee/@gwync/116126767039113591

people don't like slop

I'm moving out!
My WG is looking for a new tenant.

🌈 thoroughly queer WG of 4 + you
💸 ~460€ rent (660€ deposit)
📅 from April/May on
⌛ potentially up until 12/2026 when there may be renovations
🏙️ central Karlsruhe (Innenstadt-West)
🚋 close to a well-connected station
📐 very bright 19-20m² room according to Roomba map 🤖
⛅ flat with beautiful balcony view
🛗 elevator included
🛀 2 bathrooms, one with shower & bathtub

If interested, write me a DM!

The distinction between "firmware" and "software" these days is pretty thin. With that in mind, how should you treat non-free firmware blobs on a modern system? @mjg59 has a great post that talks through a lot of the considerations that should go into making the decision for yourself:

https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/to-update-blobs-or-not-to-update-blobs/

It's hard to build hardware w/o blobs. If you want details, check out my talk on Purism's attempt to build RYF-compliant hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbvMtFLOmE

#blobs #ryf #firmware #foss

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004. - Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

🎉 Applications for the Sovereign Tech Fellowship are officially open!

What’s new? For the first time, community managers, and technical writers can apply alongside open source maintainers until April 6, 2026, to become Fellows.

The #SovereignTechFellowship invests directly in the people behind the code, supporting key experts whose work underpins the health and stability of critical components in the #opensource ecosystem.

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Kansas invalidates license of a trans person who didn't even change their gender marker https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/kansas-revokes-license-no-gender-change

So who, and when, flagged her as transgender? And in what way is this in violation of the law?

They just want to harass trans people.

A cartoon on the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the US sold arms to Iran, despite an embargo, to use the proceeds to fund the right-wing Contras' attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

From Ireland, the international magazine of the Workers' Party, 1987.

Turns out DHS is buying ad data, and you've got whole new reasons to run ad blockers and pi-holes.

Run Privacy Badger. Run Pi-Hole. Block ads, save bandwidth, #FuckICE, and #FuckTrump.

“Squirter:” The Catastrophic Stupidity that May [Have] Set Off a Larger Religious Conflict - https://emptywheel.net/the-catastrophic-stupidity-that-may-have-set-off-a-larger-religious-conflict/ "there are almost no people in Trump’s inner circle who have been paying attention. Instead, he’s got sycophants, Crusaders, and venal developers advising him, deliberately trying to purge anyone who has been paying attention."

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that
⚠️ the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was
💥“anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night,
👉more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department.

https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for

Medical journal The Lancet blasts RFK Jr.’s health work as a failure
Kennedy's destruction "might take generations to repair," The Lancet said.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/medical-journal-the-lancet-blasts-rfk-jr-s-health-work-as-a-failure/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Who wants to share (a) decent zine(s) on putting on a music show for one's first time?
Bonus if it has details on fundraiser shows and touches on potential hostile venues/door-attendees.

(@'ing is welcome)

🙏

My experience of the #fediverse :

Year 1 (2023):
It feels a little lonely as 99% of my friends stayed on Big Tech platforms.

Year 2 (2024):
I start a blog - #TheFutureIsFederated - to explain the fediverse to "normies"... and I make a lot of new (techie) friends.

Year 3 (2025):
My techie friends encourage me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost... and I do! (GoToSocial, PeerTube, NextCloud...) I LOVE it.

Year 4 (2026):
I plan to buy a Heltec to try out off-grid mesh radio communication 💁‍♀️