Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

You have to be rich to get old comfortably in America. Otherwise, get ready for becoming a pauper and wrecking your loved ones' lives. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/dying-broke-facing-financial-ruin-as-costs-soar-for-elder-care/

Kaiser Health News and the NY Times collaborated on this story that will enrage you -- but should also make you question our budget and policy priorities, which are unsustainable in every way.

I'm seeing reports of pro-Israel marches featuring far-right, anti-semitic celebrities and I...

I feel like this is a good time to remind everyone of what some of those fashy folks said was their plan:

1) Drive a wedge between Black voters and Jewish voters to enable a far-right US takeover
2) Drive Jewish people out of the US through violent anti-semitism (and presumably to Israel)
3) End US military support for Israel (knowing what this will lead to)

"The incarcerated voice is paramount in the world of journalism. Without it, the world in general is left with a significant information void — what transpires behind the double-razor wire fence that surrounds each prison."

Really grateful to our advocacy team at @freedomofpress for featuring this guest opinion from Jeremy Busby, about what it's like to be a journalist working within America's system of mass incarceration.

https://freedom.press/news/guest-opinion-incarcerated-journalist-calls-out-relentless-retaliation-by-prison-officials/

They can reuse this headline the next time a billionaire goes to space. https://www.popsci.com/technology/iss-toolbag-lost-spacejunk/

Technical News Regarding Upgrades to Secure and Private PCs Supported by PureOS Manufactured by Purism!

New orders of Librem 14 and Librem Mini v2 are now shipping with Intel AX200 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, replacing the Qualcomm Atheros AR9xxx series.

Like the Librem 11‘s integrated AX201, the device firmware is provided by the PureBoot Firmware Blob Jail.

We made this decision with care and to promote customer control over their own devices.

https://puri.sm/posts/intel-ax200-wi-fi-bluetooth-shipping-for-new-orders/

Recently came across the very interesting assertion that use of hashtags goes against the culture on Fedi. I've been here since 2019, and I think that's the first time I've heard such a thing, but maybe that's just me?

Do hashtags go against the culture on Fedi?

EU Parliament committee rejects mass scanning of private and encrypted communications

https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-mass-scanning-of-private-and-encrypted-communications/

On 14th November, Members of the European Parliament’s ‘Civil Liberties’ committee voted against attempts from EU Home Affairs officials to roll out mass scanning of private and encrypted messages across Europe. It was a clear-cut vote, with a significant majority of MEPs supporting the proposed position.

Scoop: a16z is the money behind CivitAI, an AI platform that we've repeatedly shown is the engine for nonconsensual AI porn. We also revealed the site is offering "bounties" for AI models of specific people, including ordinary citizens https://www.404media.co/andreessen-horowitz-invests-in-civitai-key-platform-for-deepfake-porn/

Government in Marion County, Kansas, was deployed at almost every level in one of the most blatant-ever attempts to kill freedom of the press.

Thankfully, the local newspaper -- with vital help from people who still believe in the First Amendment -- is prevailing against this cabal.

The county's taxpayers should get ready to pay higher taxes to cover what, if there's any justice, will be a massive lawsuit settlement.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/13/well-it-looks-like-pretty-much-every-government-agency-was-complicit-in-the-raid-of-a-small-town-newspaper/

"The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as fuck, and people seem to be okay with it because select components meet the OSI definition whilst missing the bigger picture that the compositional graph of components does not."

@ghuntley

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

In other words, people looking at isolated components and saying "but they're open, what's the problem", and ignoring their effects on our freedoms when combined.

@yojimbo @lightweight

#SoftwareFreedom

@matthewskelton

Maybe 10 years ago I was on a project where they hired an external consultancy to count Function Points (remember them?)

Unfortunately, counting Function Points turned out to be a bit hard.

Fortunately, they had a table of average LoC/Function Point for a bunch of different programming languages, so all they needed was a count of the changed lines in the release.

We had a few minutes warning of this exercise so we used the time to append a space to every line in the repo.

I cracked a #transformer and the shards of the core did not stick to metal. What!? I thought it was ferrite, useful for its magnetic properties. Can anyone confirm that the cores inside inductors are not actually #magnets ?

#inductor #askfedi #electronics

This is fine...
#US #Healthcare

[US Health Care Strip-Mined for Profit: Primary Care Physicians Becoming Scarce, Poorly Trained Nurse Practitioners Run Wild]
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/us-health-care-strip-mined-for-profit-primary-care-physicians-becoming-scarce-poorly-trained-nurse-practitioners-run-wild.html

Among the rapacious tech megacorps often demonised (quite rightly) in the media, Microsoft often gets a 'free pass'. Lots of people (painfully naïvely) think "they've changed". They talk about the 'new' and 'open source-friendly' Microsoft. Bollocks. I think we should be promoting things like this: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=m6mtSupCoGs or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6mtSupCoGs to counter MS' spin. Because they're a corporation of horrible people (with a few kind-but-credulous-to-fault ones mixed in amongst them).

Hey guys, how is capitalism going? It's going great! Thanks to profit motive based innovation and hard work, the ransomware industry has grown to a $250 Billion(!) industry, with "Ransomware As A Service" (RaaS) now being a very real business service offered by actual companies and resulting in probably multiple times more in costs in down time, and other costs.

Where do we get this incredible boost to productivity and efficiency from?

It's as if by an invisible hand!

https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/ransomware/ransomware-as-a-service-raas/

Until there is a definitive adjudication of the copyright status of LLM training data, it is *deeply irresponsible* to use Github Copilot for open source. I will refuse contributions created with it on any project I'm involved with, as well as permanently ban any user caught sneaking in Copilot-generated code in defiance of this rule. I would strongly encourage all maintainers to take this stand as well. License headaches are already bad enough without secret poison pills being injected.

The situation is resolved, everything is back online.

In short: Our firewall rules were conflicting with the container (LXC) setup after the Debian upgrade.
We are still investigating the root cause for the conflict.

Thank you for your patience.

Experian is a criminally negligient "credit bureau" that hoovers up personal information, sells it, and lets identity thieves easily steal "your" account.

There is absolutely no accountability because Congress doesn't give a damn -- and Experian blatantly doesn't give a damn.

Read this infuriating blog post by @briankrebs

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/its-still-easy-for-anyone-to-become-you-at-experian/