Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

FreeBSD Release Engineer Emeritus Glen Barber has had a rough few years.

He managed the last several major FreeBSD releases. If you've run FreeBSD any time in the last few years, it's because of him.

Now he's out of work and his car is busted. Can't get one without the other. Throw him a couple bucks towards getting some wheels?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/outofwork-and-need-transportation

Still opposed to ethnic cleansing, btw. Sorry no one in US government follows me.

#Breaking: #Trump's campaign directly orchestrated the filing of the #Michigan fake electors certificate, according to internal campaign emails

The docs =part of AG Nessel's ongoing investigation.

"The revelations provide further proof that the false elector certif’s advanced in 7 battleground states, incl Michigan, were not organic efforts by local GOP officials to ques election results in their states, but part of larger scheme by Trump's campaign to maintain power"

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/04/donald-trump-campaign-emails-guided-michigan-false-elector-bid-kenneth-chesebro-boris-epshteyn/72097051007/

My Citation Needed newsletter is no longer on Substack!

https://citationneeded.news/citation-needed-has-a-new-home/

#substack #SubstackMigration

Important departure from the Nazi bar as @molly0xfff moves her indispensable newsletter, previously on Substack, to a self-hosted (open-source) Ghost setup. If you already subscribe and pay, as I do, it should just work for you with no visible change.

Kudos, and I look forward to more current Substack users making the same ethical decision. https://mollywhite.substack.com/p/citation-needed-has-moved?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1109312&post_id=140394052&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=qs4z&utm_medium=email

Our University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies Indigenous Technoscience Microcredential series, a fully online course series in three parts and accessible to the public, launches April 2, 2024. Part 1 runs April 2-June 3, 2024.

Are you a professional working in science, policy, and ethics fields who wants to understand the role of science and technology in colonialism in order to help change those patterns? This course is also open to anyone with interest.

https://www.ualberta.ca/native-studies/programs/continuing-education/indigenous-technoscience-microcredential/indigenous-people-as-subjects-objects.html

Meet the cryptid candidates! https://brianmcfadden.org/2023/12/29/republican-primaries-cryptid-candidates/

In 2023, Cargill jacked up the price of Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt

Their goal: increase annual revenue more than 10-fold, from $3 million to $50 million.

How? REDESIGN THE BOX + Jack prices

Early 2020
~$3.49 for 3# box.

Today, Diamond Crystal store price on Amazon:
- $108.95, case of nine 3# boxes, delivered ($12.11 per box)
- $13.29, 3# box delivered
- $8.99, 1# box delivered

I am #CrowdSourcing price info:
https://forms.gle/ncvBB34tXwFBTmY1A
Form does not track!

TIA for help/boost!

Signal boosting this fundraising campaign from a technology co-op which has members in #Gaza. It was posted on the CoTech forum.

https://community.coops.tech/t/fundraising-appeal-for-gaza/3753

The video on the gofundme is worth a watch.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/9qf6nz-hope-beyond-borders-yallas-gaza-crisis-fund

More context: https://www.yallacooperative.com/story-and-team

Boosts welcome.

#Coops #Coop #TechCoop #Cooperatives

Consider the possibility that all the articles that assure you running your own #libre services (i.e. self-hosting or hosting on a rented VPS) is "too hard"... are writing for media organisations funded by advertising from proprietary SaaS providers or are, in many cases, SaaS providers themselves. Yes, it's unethical, but it's in their interest to do that. You can always try it and decide for yourself. Here're a bunch of our recipes: https://tech.oeru.org Trying them'll cost you approx $0.

Watching all the different levels of proprietary OS & software hand wringing going on about 'not owning my own computer', lost privacy, CoPilot, ads on the desktop, etc. evident even here in the very #libre-heavy Fediverse, I thank my lucky stars that I dumped proprietary for a fully #libre computing experience back in **checks notes... 1994. Yup. I missed Win95 and later. I've never owned an Apple product. Never used Adobe or Microsoft anything. Chuffed as.

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.