Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

For the #selfHost #FediCurious: you could run a decent #Mastodon instance (or any of many other #Fediverse apps) on a fairly entry-level Virtual Private Server, e.g. 4GB RAM, 2 Virtual CPUs, & some extra disk space. The cost (if you use a hosting provider like https://hetzner.com, which I'm using for a bunch of Fedi instances) would be ~ €10/month (including extra disk space), or something like NZD 17.50 right now. So, you & friends could be self-sufficient #Fedizens for < NZD250/yr.

The first draft of my new book (tentatively titled How To Write A Tech Book) is done! But the work is far from over. Next I'm going to review and polish the draft and format it, so it's ready for a professional copy edit and a review by a few tech writers.

#writing

NYC job opportunity:

Do you want to use your technical skills to advance press freedom?

We are looking for an IT Engineer based in NYC! You'll support our Brooklyn office and our remote staff.

$90-$110K salary commensurate with experience, application deadline June 7.

https://grnh.se/bb6e14ff5us

Here's a brief selection from one of the opening plenary session talks at the #BeyondGrowth conference taking place now in Europe...

"We need to reduce production of private jets, SUVs, commercial airlines, mansions, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, arms, cruise ships — there are huge chunks of our economy that are mostly organized around capital accumulation, and are wasteful and destructive and totally irrelevant to human well-being. We can also ban the practice of planned obsolescence and introduce policies to expand product lifespans. When products last twice as long, we will need half as many. Finally, we urgently need to cut the purchasing power of the rich, using basic sensible policy tools such as wealth taxes and maximum income ratios."

That's Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel), Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.

#Economics #Politics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Inequality #Capitalism #Degrowth

A vulnerability (CVE-2023-32784) in the open-source password manager KeePass can be exploited to retrieve the master password from the software’s memory.

The bad news is that the vulnerability is still unfixed and that a PoC exploitation tool – aptly named KeePass 2.X Master Password Dumper – is publicly available, but the good news is that the password can't be extracted remotely just by exploiting this flaw.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/05/17/cve-2023-32784/

#Cybersecurity #CVE #KeePass

Primary election results in #Pittsburgh and Allegheny County are looking so good right now I am in tears.

Since 1998 we have been saddled with a district attorney who charged Black children as adults more often than any district attorney in the country, and now he is done, primaried from the left by a public defender, and defeated. A 24 year reign of life and community destroying terror is over.

Returning from holiday to #Codeberg ...

Take good care of your mental health! If a project requires you to read through all your backlog, it is usually hostile to newcomers, too.

PS: We appreciate someone to pick up https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/626 in order to improve the overwhelming notification UX.

"Abraham ...says if he had his career all over again, he would put more trust in the students." https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018889878/a-different-way-of-learning I think this is a key detail missing in mainstream education. I've describe an even more 'different' way of learning (esp. digital ed) that builds on the idea in this post: https://davelane.nz/openschool

Please yell shit at neo-Nazis when they are in your town and have someone film it. It is on its face a good thing to do and it galvanizes your neighbors yell shit at neo-Nazis wherever they may occur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtmDlUDUfM

1. A Florida teacher is under STATE INVESTIGATION for showing a Disney movie in class.

The parent who complained, who is also a member of @Moms4Liberty@twitter.com and the school board, SIGNED A PERMISSION SLIP ALLOWING HER CHILD TO WATCH PG MOVIES AT SCHOOL

We have the receipts

🧵

Over the weekend, white supremacists were out in force in D.C. and internet hero Joe Flood heckled their hate rally with the most on-point taunts.

The video is absolutely priceless. Way to go, Joe! 👏

https://www.comicsands.com/joe-flood-heckles-patriot-front-2660276960.html?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=toot&utm_campaign=SAND

Tech companies have gotten increasingly secretive about the data, scraped from the internet without compensation or consent, used to train their AI models. So we looked closer. Here's our analysis of the 15 million websites in just one highly-filtered CommonCrawl web scrape-used to train models like Google's T5 & Facebook's LLaMA.
We found
-the copyright symbol appears >200M times
-pirated sites, 1 for e-books
-half of the top 10 were news sites https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning

A new report commissioned by the governor of Bayelsa state in Nigeria said that over the course of 50 years, oil companies spilled 10-15 times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez disaster in the small riverine state.

Read the story from Ashoka Mukpo

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/05/as-shell-eni-quit-niger-delta-state-backed-report-describes-legacy-of-carnage/

#NigerDelta #Oil #Shell #News #Africa #ClimateChange #Nature #CorporateSocialResponsibility

OpenAI proposed regulation cont’d:

2. Create a set of standards for AI models. Note the emphasis on self-replication and exfiltration into the wild. These are existential doom scenarios. OpenAI would rather be regulated on impossibilities rather that than harms like misinformation, defamation, discrimination, or privacy.

@dynamic @jos for areas of knowledge that are constantly updating and contingent on other things (coding, standards, laws) who said what when and where is an essential part of making the information information and not misleading noise

As @joshtpm points out, there was plenty to investigate about Trump's Russia connections. And there still is: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/newsletter/vol-2-no-2-lets-get-back-to-reality-on-trump-and-russia/sharetoken/mvmqmLB5AmXG

As DeSantis converts a progressive Florida college into a right-wing indoctrination factory, students are hosting their own alternative graduation ceremony -- and you can be sure DeSantis and his extremist buddies are looking for ways to punish this dangerous independence of thought. https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/local/sarasota/2023/05/16/new-colleges-alternative-graduation-to-host-maya-wiley/70223148007/

Last week we announced a new tool that helps you narrow down your search area when geolocating an image.
You can read more on how to use it here: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2023/05/08/finding-geolocation-leads-with-bellingcats-openstreetmap-search-tool/?utm_source=mastodon

Companies use crises to raise prices and boost profits. Regulators then punish consumers for the resulting inflation. These are the findings from two new American studies. https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Fstory%2F2023-05-10%2Fcolumn-these-are-the-companies-whose-thirst-for-profits-drove-inflation-higher

"Open"AI CEO tells Congress that his industry needs to be regulated. It does, no question.

But you can absolutely sure that what he and the other big players want is a system of regulatory capture (by them) in which they become a cartel that can't be challenged by upstarts.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-chief-goes-before-us-congress-propose-licenses-building-ai-2023-05-16/