Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The #FreePalestine reversible bandana in English and Arabic is a benefit for Palestine Legal, which provides legal advice to activists and affected communities who stand for justice in Palestine.

Learn more, get one, or donate directly at https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1326

The national election protection hotline (I do legal volunteer work for them) asked me to share information about them on social media.

Here is their website: https://866ourvote.org

If you are a lawyer and want to volunteer, there is a place to contact them.

(I like doing back office research, so I spent a few dozen hours last year researching changes in state election laws and writing up summaries so the hotline workers have the information handy.)

Hello Fediverse!

We're making this account to promote the Heart of the Valley Anticapitalist Bookfair which will be happening in Corvallis, Oregon in ONE MONTH!!!

We have three days jam-packed with more than 15 book talks, parties, and workshops. That you won't want to miss!

There will also be dozens of awesome vendors like @anarchotranshuman, @nobonzo, @crimethinc, @DetritusBooks, @certaindays @RRFM_corvallis, @pmpress, @naceugene, and like... a whole bunch of other ones I can't find on here.

All the info you need can be found at hotvbookfair.noblogs.org

@dangillmor @paul it's premature... To block facebook from federating with mastodon? Did I miss something? There were millions of people on mastodon with no interest reconnecting with those networks, and now suddenly there are "2 sides"? Lol this is absurd.

Elon Musk scared millions of additional people away from Twitter, and they came here along with this argument. Nobody was asking to reconnect to those networks.

Cupid by @GumpyFunction is a delight. Fiendish sliding block puzzle with cute funny cartoon graphics and dogs. It's a Game Boy Color ROM so you can play it on anything, use an emulator, flash it to a cart and play it on a real console, emulate it on your phone, load it onto your #gameDad (best option IMHO) or even play it in the browser at https://gumpyfunction.itch.io/cupid, pay what you want, minimum $0.00

(if this gives you the oh-no-what-if-it's-actually-good anxiety you can pay $0.00 now (no login needed!) and then go back and buy it again for $something)

I don't know Gumpy Function and have never spoken to him before so I hope he doesn't mind me posting his game here

Thanks to pro-competition regulators -- in Europe, not the U.S. -- Adobe's blatantly monopolistic buyout of Figma has been blocked.

This is good news for everyone but monopolists and the people they enrich by screwing everyone else.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24005996/adobe-figma-acquisition-abandoned-termination-fee

Intuit-owned MailChimp goes virulently anti-union. I remember when Intuit was an honorable company, but that was decades ago. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/24002001/mailchimp-pineapple-street-union-podcast-canceled

Retail theft went down and the national retailers federation had to admit 5% not 50% of theft was from criminal gangs. This whole panic was concocted to close underperforming and unionized stores and the media bought it. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek0.cMux.iabRLNkE-vqu&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Poor editing: You have to read a long, long way down in this otherwise interesting article about Goodreads to learn that it is owned by Amazon.

That fact should have been right at the top, given Amazon's overwhelming clout in the book-sales business.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/18/goodreads-review-bombing

I recently received some spam mentions on this account, and couldn't figure out how to report it to the Friendica admin. I know that on Mastodon there's a menu item for each message to report it. Is there an equivalent tool on Friendica?

#Friendica #moderation #spam

The New York Times once published a news story about Hitler in which the reporter wrote -- and editors approved -- the following: "But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers..." (see screenshot).

That should have been an indelible lesson. It wasn't.

The Times repeats its worst failures. It's institutional.

More Titan photos and discussion here: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/titans/

For over 60 years now, the world has been rigged with an elaborate infrastructure that can effectively end civilization on a moment's notice, whether by deliberate command or mistake. It's never been used.

You might find that to be reassuring proof of the fundamental rationality of world leaders and the robustness of nuclear command and control systems. Or you might wonder at what point our unreasonably good luck will run out.

“The government pimped out #Texas to seek out foreign toll operators from France and #Spain. They put out on the front lawn of the Texas capitol a sign that read ‘Texas is for sale. Name your price.’”

From our magazine: A private equity firm continues to extract profits from the State Highway 288 tollway, while drivers and workers pay a high price for the toll road. https://www.texasobserver.org/txdot-construction-toll-workers-deaths?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=audience

#news #politics #transit #safety #USpol #France #WorkersRights

Hey everyone! I'm guessing a lot of you will be buying last minute gifts for people, and those tend to involve gift cards. Be very careful when you're buying these off-the-rack at retail stores that sell gift cards for various popular restaurants and brands. Especially those that are not in particularly tamper-proof packaging.

A friend just shared some photos he took after buying a bunch of Dardens restaurant gift cards for some gifts to clients. They didn't discover until leaving the store that several of the cards had been tampered with, their PIN scratch-offs re-covered with look-alike scratch off stickers. Also, the phony ones seem to have goofy looking barcodes, like they were scanned and printed by a laser printer without enough ink.

The trick here is the thieves pull the card out, scratch off the PIN part, record that, cover up the pin with fake tape, and then shove the thing back in the packaging and put it back on the shelf. Then, when someone buys it, the thieves can access the value on the card the minute it is activated (purchased).

The image shows two of these cards that are non-tampered (left) and two on the right that were. These cards can slide right out of their packaging with a little wiggling, and slide back in the same way.

Some stores keep their gift cards behind the counter for this reason. Might be best going for those instead of the ones in aisle 19.

Tired of Producing Valuable Personal Information for AT&T, Verizon, & T-Mobile to Sell for Profits while You Pay the Bills?

If so, switch your cellular service to AweSIM private cellular service by Purism.

Stop your wireless carrier from tracking you by way of ad tracking technology based on your personal information by switching to AweSIM private cellular service.

At Purism, you are our customer, not our product to be exploited for profits.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

Just saw exploit attempts against #OwnCloud CVE-2023-49103 detected by an IDS in the wild. So if you’re running OwnCloud, that’s like the final warning…

NextCloud is not vulnerable to this one.

I talk a lot about the incompetence of digital voting vendors a lot, but HOLY CATS

https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2023/12/14/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-forced-to-rerun-contract-vote-after-crew-discovered-ballot-system-was-vulnerable-to-fraud/

#infosec

It is nice to see people starting to question the fact that they host and develop free software on a proprietary infrastructure owned by Microsoft and used to scrape training data for their IA.

https://notgull.net/finding-a-forge/ by @notgull

The best time to leave Github was before it was acquired by Microsoft. The second-best time is now. Sooner or later, you will be forced out of Github like we, oldies, were forced out of Sourceforge.

https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html

3M knew its chemicals were toxic three decades ago, but kept schtum. https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/12/15/toxic-3m-knew-its-chemicals-were-harmful-decades-ago-but-didnt-tell-the-public-government/

#Meta is doing EEE.

You will, eventually, be able to follow any Threads user. You will definitely be able to boost their posts onto your server's feed.

But you will probably never be able to like or comment. And your posts will remain largely invisible to Threads users.

Meta will embrace and extend into fedi, until enough relationships get made that they're reasonably certain they are the center of gravity.