Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I'd love to hear she had a road to Damascus moment and deeply regretted taking the job... But short of evidence of that, I do think less of people who work for them, especially those who do so knowingly. I feel bad for those who do so unwittingly, because they're dangerously oblivious (some willfully so).

The Republican party is one big crime syndicate

Clarence Thomas Is Committing Tax Fraud

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/clarence-thomas-is-committing-tax-fraud

Car makers are relentlessly spying on you, and if you use their apps you are helping them -- and stalkers and abusive partners -- do even worse.

Car makers are completely indifferent to the harm they assist.

Lawmakers are completely indifferent to the harm.

Don't install the app, period. The car maker will still spy on you, but at least an abusive partner will have more difficulty doing it.

https://archive.md/7lhOw

If this is true, I am so disappointed in Wordpress (where I used to work). They were the leader in customer support, keeping it all in-house and requiring all employees to spend time doing support. If they really just hooked a LLM bot up to their email support, they're ruining their own reputation, and I've lost my last example of a company doing support right.
https://social.panic.com/@cabel/111692900717018267

A principled decision by @karawynn -- she's taking her well-worth-following newsletter away from the "Nazi Bar".

(Substack's competitors need to up their games, pronto.)

https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/nine-lives-exits-the-nazi-bar/

Here's the piece she wrote about "The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries" that led me to subscribe in the first place:

https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

23andMe's security failure is -- you guessed it -- the users' fault, the slimy company insists.

It's the latest tech industry effort to escape responsibility for its own routine indifference to people's privacy.

Sure, the users could have been more diligent, but they are victims in significant part because of crap practices by the companies they (absurdly) thought they could trust.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/03/23andme-tells-victims-its-their-fault-that-their-data-was-breached/

The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing me and thousands of other journalists, continues to undermine its own advocacy of worker equity and social justice by regularly and actively supporting Twitter, a platform that spreads dangerous hate speech and propaganda that's intended to weaken if not destroy a free press. Not only that, but Twitter's narcissistic robber baron owner is outwardly hostile to workers at SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.

I've voiced my opposition to the management of the NewsGuild of New York, and they said they continue keeping a "presence on many social media platforms because that is where many of our members are, despite some of the platforms having a troubling track record with blocking hate speech." The NewsGuild of New York has yet to even test the waters of Mastodon.

The NewsGuild of New York has a history of encouraging boycotts against antilabor organizations, but doesn't walk the walk when it comes to its own actions.

History won't judge the NewsGuild of New York, and the rest of the journalism establishment continuing to support Twitter, kindly.

Publishing software as open source: It's of enormous benefit to government to declare, right up front in RFPs, that it's going to publish the resulting software under an open license, or release it into the public domain. I recently wrote a long blog entry on this topic, so I won't belabor this. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2023/12/publish-open-source/

Owning copyright: Hire vendors who will develop software that the agency will own, not the vendors. This completely shifts vendors’ incentives. Vendors who want to use government as R&D funding will go bid on SBIRs (the right way to get that funding), and vendors who just want to be compensated for their time will show up.

Three years on, little justice for press assaulted on Jan. 6: Nearly 20 journalists were assaulted and thousands of dollars in news equipment was destroyed in the riot. https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/little-justice-for-press-assaulted-on-jan-6/

If you like #punk history, the new @pmpress NoMeansNo oral history by Jason Lamb with Paul Prescott is GREAT.

Well-told story of one of the most unique bands in punk.

My first 80% Wednesday off is going alright!

I came across this EU study on the 'value of open source' (which I call #libre), and I think all of us user our influence to make sure that the power-brokers in our lives are aware of it and understand its implications: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/study-about-impact-open-source-software-and-hardware-technological-independence-competitiveness-and

Any #Boston area #FiberArts people have words of wisdom on locally sourced wool?

@Nathanpboston and I are researching non-petrochemical clothing for cold and/or wet outdoor activities.

https://fediscience.org/@Nathanpboston/111686852482026448

Thinking to myself this morning “Threads can’t be as bad as I recall…”

First post in my feed: Instagram influencer with a cup of coffee watching the sunrise from her balcony in a $1000/night hotel built with slave labor in a country where women can’t drive, telling me about how she has discovered that the secret to life is learning to savor the little things.

No, apparently the secret to life is to be born rich, white, and beautiful.

Anyway, that’s enough Threads for 2024.

@RichPuchalsky I first learned a few simple yoga moves from a physics prof from Kashmir in about 1990-1. Simple materials, no high tech yoga mat or petrochemical ultra-stretchy clothing. It’s been instructive for me to attend a commercial yoga studio and learn about its manufactured petrochemical dependency. And, I think simplicity has a real chance to assert itself in the yoga industry, and ultimately be more economical. I’m going to start by modeling it myself in the studio.

Google's Chrome browser is more locked down than ever, introducing new tricks to inhibit extensions, collect even more user data for ads, and restrict access to content for people who use ad-blockers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/year-review-googles-corporate-paternalism-browser

Weather tracker: Saudi Arabia hit by floods as temperature records broken in Canada - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/01/weather-tracker-saudi-arabia-hit-by-floods-as-temperature-records-broken-in-canada "Heavy rain and hailstorms affect large parts of Gulf state while temperatures in some parts of Canada could be 20C above normal" and so it begins in 2024

One of the things I am learning from this Frederick Douglass biography is that there wasn’t just one “abolitionist movement” before the Civil War, there were multiple abolitionist movements, and there were a lot of ideological and personal squabbles within and between them.

Which is totally unsurprising when you consider the state of contemporary progressive and leftist movements.

/1

Distributed Denial of Secrets or #DDoSecrets is a vital publisher archiving leaks, for the public. We have been active for five years, but donations have never kept up with the pace of our submissions. We have shared hundreds of terabytes of leaks with journalists and researchers. We are now launching an urgent appeal: https://donorbox.org/ddosecrets-five-years-later Without your donations, we may be forced to pause operations and suspend access to our search engines and direct download tools. Can you pitch it to help us meet our goal?