Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Read in our latest digital security newsletter: Android now warns users of unexpected AirTag Bluetooth trackers
https://mailchi.mp/freedom.press/digital-security-digest-8131809?e=fe28d28019

The elite political media is normalizing the return of overt racism into our political discourse. https://presswatchers.org/2023/08/political-journalists-are-destigmatizing-racism-and-no-anti-antiracism-is-not-a-thing/

"We need a federal shield law to make clear that reporters can’t be forced to burn their sources," FPF Deputy Director of Advocacy Caitlin Vogus tells CNN's Oliver Darcy. This is "essential to protect journalists, sources, and the public’s right to know."

#PRESSAct
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/02/media/catherine-herridge-deposition-reliable-sources/

Commemorate and celebrate #BlackAugust with these books on Black liberation , prison abolition, and freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, revolutionaries, and political prisoners of war, both living and deceased.

Volunteers for Software Freedom Day Needed https://lemmy.ml/post/1811066

Now do everyone who either signed off on it, covered it up, or tried to justify it after the fact.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/caci-abu-ghraib

HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Disney scanned every background actor in WandaVision without giving them any explanation of how it may be used, asking them to make various facial expressions like “surprised” and “scared”.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1190605685/movie-extras-worry-theyll-be-replaced-by-ai-hollywood-is-already-doing-body-scan

"First, the Big 5 do not SELL ebooks to libraries. Not one.

Libraries do not own title one from the Big 5. We license them. And that makes all the difference in the world for cost, depth and breadth of collection, and preservation. Nobody should ever use the word 'sell' in a sentence combining 'Big 5' and 'library ebooks.' This is not nit-picking. It is the essence of the problem."

And they are suing to stop Controlled Digital Lending of the books we did buy.

https://www.readersfirst.org/news/2023/8/2/big-5-license-terms-as-of-july-2023

@KorimakoEcology “No other pets are allowed free access to other people’s property.”

That’s a good article on what must be an unpopular topic in NZ. Pet cats have long had free rein to go wherever they want. It would certainly be good for birds and lizards in NZ cities if there was a gradual shift away from that. Plenty of other countries do it to some degree so we know it’s possible. There just needs to be national leadership and a fair transition.

The sale of Maine’s Portland Press Herald and its family of smaller publications to the National Trust for Nonprofit News has been finalized. CEO Lisa DeSisto has been named to run the new Maine Trust for #LocalNews. #journalism https://www.pressherald.com/2023/08/01/sale-of-maine-newspapers-to-national-nonprofit-is-finalized/

Useful article clarifying what is going on with the ocean currents: https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/07/27/amoc-time-entering-a-new-era-in-ocean-currents/

Just a reminder that two prominent Federalist Society members wanted to overthrow the government by fraud and then have the government murder you if you objected.

Eat that with your fuckin’ Chick-fil-A sack lunch.

BlacSpace Cooperative is hiring! 
Seeking two stellar new, Bay Area-based staff members to grow their cooperative into launch phase:
Storytelling Lead
Mutual Aid Lead

BlacSpace is a new cooperative enterprise that leverages the Black Arts Movement tradition to cultivate a supportive ecosystem where Black arts, business, ownership, and culture can thrive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSbK-rSMB150GHbPogTvAYcnpJajWuQimaF6svaYsApjQvYNZUKGQ8642RWMG5qY0TACcvfFE-E9ZXu/pub
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRoCPlMVlE1L3SMfWSwhpWXKZiTZFnQ5P8_atVy3mz3AjHHOkKxER9g4eRDuAtxRtJoCKRNatyu5Q-o/pub
#oakland #cooperatives

They did this to sex workers first and no one listened or cared. Maybe they’ll listen now if it means they can’t buy their weed seltzer with a card https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/business/mastercard-debit-cannabis-transactions.html

Are you planning to celeberate #SoftwareFreedomDay? DFF has released its announcement fot this year events by proposing three key topics:
- AI - Challenges to Face and Actions to Take
- Communication Decentralization - Why and How
Lessons Learned from the Past, Actions to Take for the Future

https://digitalfreedomfoundation.org/index.php/170-software-freedom-day-2023

Are you a scientist who's active on Mastodon and does research in #ornithology, #ecology, #naturalhistory, or a related field? I want to follow you - please reply and introduce yourself! (And please share so this reaches more people!)

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)