Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

GoGuardian monitors millions of students. We analyzed actual websites that the student monitoring tool marked as "explicit," and found that thousands of students are flagged every day for visiting sites that are benign, and often, educational. https://www.redflagmachine.org

Teenage daughter asking for a #privacy focused period tracker app for Android, please advise

#ReproductiveFreedom

I'm seeing a lot of reckons about #Mastodon vs. #BlueSky, bagging #libre developers for 'not getting what's important to users' of social media with Mastodon. In doing so, the reckoners are demonstrated the fact that they neither understand libre software communities or the motivations of devs, nor do they realise they're demanding something from people who owe them nothing. They're treating libre software as if it's focus is more users & profit. Seems a weirdly entitled position to me.

I think this is basically the idea behind promoting open protocols rather than open software.

Support Anarchy in Montreal!

The Constellation Anarchist Festival (including the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair) is back! The Festival will be from May 15-21, 2025, with the Anarchist Bookfair taking place over two days on May 17-18, at the usual spot. For more info, check out @anarchofest.constellation (IG) or kolektiva.social/@constellation (mastodon), or wait a few weeks as they start sending out more info.

Meanwhile, the oldest anarchist space in Montreal -- the three-story building at 2033/2035 St-Laurent -- is fundraising. That space has been around, via the non-profit Association des espèces d'espaces libres et imaginaires (AEELI), since 1982. An anarchist bookstore/infoshop has been at the location for over 40 years, and the building currently houses three projects: L'Insoumise (Anarchist Bookstore), DIRA (Library) and Les Révoltes (Feminist-Queer Social Center). Learn about the fundraising campaign here: www.diffusionlibertaire.org

I've also included here the poster from the first-ever Montreal Anarchist Bookfair back in 2000. I "designed" the poster, based on an Anti-Racist Action (ARA) image by Gord Hill. I'm nostalgic for it because it represents a throughline between the anarchist space and the Bookfair. I was a volunteer for a few years at the Anarchist Bookstore on St-Laurent in the late 90s, learning a few things, and meeting new comrades and friends, to be able to eventually have the confidence to help to co-found and launch the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair in 2000. It's good knowing these kinds of subversive core projects have evolved and continue decades later.

My rule for buying into #technology is:

get the #software separately.

Buy a laptop → install #Linux .
Get a router → flash #openwrt .
Sign up to a messenger → Use an open client.
Browse a #web app → Use an unrelated browser.

Why? The vendor can't resist the control. I don't know why. They make the experience suck. Bloat, ads, locked features, antifeatures, phoning home. Even #OpenSource .

Independent software would not survive if it did that. People would install something else.

From the IPCC CLIMATE CHANGE 2023
Synthesis Report.

#Dataviz

I've been listening to the From Under the Shadow podcast the past few days. I've long been aware of the broadstrokes of US policy in Central and South America. As I listen I think every US citizen should aquaint themselves with the details. This is the core truth of the US: It is an empire built on extreme violence in the name of democracy. https://nacla.org/under-shadow

@dangillmor
FWIW, some other (seemingly anti-fascist😉) folks using #substack:
Kim Wehle
Matt Binder
JoJoFromJerz
Shahid Buttar
Judd Legum - popular.info
Sarah Kendzior
Frank Schaeffer
Ryan Grim - Drop Site News
Seth Abramson
Thom Hartmann Report
Robert Reich

Ghost's #beehiv comparison:
https://ghost.org/vs/beehiiv/

beehiv's #Ghost comparison:
https://www.beehiiv.com/comparisons/ghost

Techie Molly White's article has useful insights (even if you're not going to self-host Ghost)
https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/

The comments on the latest thing to blow up has given me many fine additions to my collection:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/

What would it take, I wonder, to get brilliant, anti-fascist historians like Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder to stop supporting fascist-friendly Substack?

Might it be possible to do a Kickstarter or such thing? If enough people agreed to subscribe to their work on, say, Ghost -- maybe they'd switch over.

In other words, incentive to do the right thing without wiping out their income.

I'm spitballing here. Any ideas on how something like this could/would work?

Possible? Hopeless?

Software Freedom Conservancy is partnering with OpenWRT (and Banana Pi) to create a wireless router (OpenWRT One) that is focused on right to repair and software freedom.

I’m interested to see this how this new proactive approach to free-software-backed hardware by SFC pans out compared to FSF’s more passive RYF’s more program.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/nov/29/openwrt-one-wireless-router-now-ships-black-friday/

#FOSS #RightToRepair

This article I wrote hit the HN frontpage again:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/you-must-read-at-least-one-book-to-ride/

Just wanted to shout out the one guy that said I seem like such a nerd that he could never enjoy time with me 😢 I've never been more owned

Black parents have historically been divided from our children by #enslavement, the modern #carceral system, + #capitalist work demands. I'm committed to being present with my #baby while maintaining my #activism and #radical tech projects. That means #crowdfunding support!

venmo/cashapp
nullagent

paypal
nullagent@gmail.com

I also survived a #racist attack on 9/15/24, I'm recovering from a #concussion + #depression, + raising a #legalfund to fight back.

https://chuffed.org/project/114004-support-a-protester-assaulted-while-defending-housing-rights

Been thinking about what the key-trust part of decentralized "social PKI" should look like.

The individual part seems straightforward: A public key, and a history of key rotations (where each key signs a message revoking itself as latest, and endorsing the next public key as latest instead.)

But how do you trust someone else's key in the first place? (Including when they lose all data and have to recreate their identity, with a new key.)

I'm very tempted to say... we can leave that to implementations, with just some strong suggestions in the spec as to how to meet different users' different needs.

One implementation could just use TOFU and notify the user if something looks wrong. Another could participate in a key-gossip system, where useragents inform each other of identity/key relationships they've seen, allowing multipath resilience against MITM. And another could go full-on PGP key-party if it really wanted to, I guess.

Does this sound reasonable? Would love to hear feedback.

#cryptography #SocialMediaDesign #PKI

We're in the Discourse Phase™ in which Dems will try to halt discussion of what went wrong.

Terms like "circular firing squad" & "blame game" will be weaponized.

They want silence so they aren't held accountable & get to keep their gigs running the party into the ground.

Latest comic: Capitulation

#cartoon #comic #uspol #media #politics #democracy

“Gaza has awakened the world, and Palestine has become the quintessential defining struggle of our times. Palestine is the litmus test for progressive movements and organisations, and it is also a test for each and every one of us.” https://www.tni.org/en/article/vietnam-algeria-palestine

Grindr’s AI forays amount to “data surveillance,” EFF’s Paige Collings told Gazetteer SF. “There are real life consequences for very vulnerable communities,” and if LGBTQ+ protections are weakened, “the risk of this over the next few years is heightened.” https://sf.gazetteer.co/grindrs-ai-wingman-has-privacy-experts-concerned

So @Codeberg suffered from high traffic [1], bringing the site almost down. They managed to fix it by blocking access to one repo that attracted all this traffic for reasons (as of now) unknown to us.

What worries me are the comments under their post pointing at various proprietary, commercial services like Cloudflare, Amazon as the obvious way to mitigate. If we really are at the stage where the internet is so broken that you … (1/2)

[1] https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/113570009001800356