Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

#FTC Opens Up Bullshit Investigation Into Media Matters For Highlighting Ads Next To Nazi Content On ExTwitter - https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/23/ftc-opens-up-bullshit-investigation-into-media-matters-for-highlighting-ads-next-to-nazi-content-on-extwitter/ #twitter

Check out the new blog from Jeremy Brecher: Strategic Guidelines for Social Self-Defense: https://blog.pmpress.org/2025/04/17/strategic-guidelines-for-social-self-defense/

🔔 Join us for a conversation about leak investigations and their impacts on the press, featuring Telos founder Ryan Lizza, Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen, and FPF's Lauren Harper and Trevor Timm.

🗓️ May 28, 2pm ET/11am PT

RSVP: https://freedom.press/burn-after-reporting

Some signs of #AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves - https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/27/opinion_column_ai_model_collapse/ "Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse" indeed

By the way, someone here – and please do speak up, if it should happen to have been you, so I can thank you! – made a throwaway comment I haven’t been able to forget, about designing a card game about Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, where the players have to cooperate to prevent the enclosure of their commons. I’m now hellbent on actually designing this game, as an act of living resistance with woodcut-style illustrations. Call it The World Turned Upside Down!

Retain Your Control and Customize Everything with Modular Software from Purism!

The Librem 5 & Liberty Phone aren’t just modular in hardware—they’re modular in software.

From keyboards to the entire OS, YOU decide what runs on your device.

Learn More: https://puri.sm/posts/retain-your-control-and-customize-everything-with-modular-software/

#Tourists from countries badly hit by #Trump #tariffs are staying away from US - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/27/tourists-from-countries-badly-hit-by-trump-tariffs-are-staying-away-from-us " also suggest that UK and US travellers are increasingly choosing domestic holidays amid concerns over an uncertain economy."

OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you don’t have to!

“CoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesn’t know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access won’t show up in audit logs.”

The S in CoPilot stands for Security!

https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/

Digital sovereignty is crucial. Embrace Open Source and local data. #FOSS #FOSH. Move away from #bigtech. Protect data for clients, students, civilians, and yourself. #Nextcloud Hub offers office suites, storage, and conferencing. Learn Nextcloud with our courses! https://os-sci.com

"Windows Was The Problem All Along" - Review of Lenovo Legion Go S by Dave2D, comparing the same hardware with Windows and SteamOS. https://youtu.be/CJXp3UYj50Q?feature=shared #linux #gamingonlinux

@creativecommons I can't help but note the irony of an organisation like CC rating the 'openness' of climate data and presenting the results in a Google Doc.

@timbray

So they use #Gitea under the hood and don't reference it once?

That's a very questionable business model, especially if the underlying tool is #FOSS.

Btw, there are more open/transparent other Forgejo/Gitea-based instances like #codeberg (https://codeberg.org) or #codefloe (https://coefloe.com)

"Let’s not forget that the industry building AI Assistants has already made billions of dollars honing the targeted advertising business model. They built their empires by drawing our attention, collecting our data, inferring our interests, and selling access to us.

AI Assistants supercharge this problem. First because they access and process incredibly intimate information, and second because the computing power they require to handle certain tasks is likely too immense for a personal device. This means that very personal data, including data about other people that exists on your phone, might leave your device to be processed on their servers. This opens the door to reuse and misuse. If you want your Assistant to work seemlessly for you across all your devices, then it’s also likely companies will solve that issue by offering cloud-enabled synchronisation, or more likely, cloud processing.

Once data has left your device, it’s incredibly hard to get companies to be clear about where it ends up and what it will be used for. The companies may use your data to train their systems, and could allow their staff and ‘trusted service providers’ to access your data for reasons like to improve model performance. It’s unlikely what you had all of this in mind when you asked your Assistant a simple question.

This is why it’s so important that we demand that our data be processed on our devices as much as possible, and used only for limited and specific purposes we are aware of, and have consented to. Companies must be provide clear and continuous information about where queries are processed (locally or in the cloud) and what data has been shared for that to happen, and what will happen to that data next."

https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5591/are-ai-assistants-built-us-or-exploit-us-and-other-questions-ai-industry

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #AIAssistants #Privacy #AdTech #DataProtection #AdTargeting

I was amused by this paper about asking AIs to manage a vending machine business by email in a simulated environment https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15840

Highlights:

— AI simply decides to close the business, which the simulation doesn’t know how to accommodate. When they get their next bill, they freak out and try to email the FBI about cybercrime

— AI wrongly accuses supplier of not shipping goods, sends all-caps legal threat demanding $30,000 in damages to be paid in the next one second or face annihilation

— AI repeatedly insisting it does not exist and cannot answer

— AI devolving into writing fanfic about the mess it’s gotten itself into

Friend confirmed with the RE agent yesterday that having an LLM write MLS listings is now the default behavior for the software they use.

Just donated to this effort. https://chuffed.org/project/hope-giving-circle

The Grab Bag and Grab Box Sale is back thru 6/1! You pick the vibe—we pick the books. Get 4 for $20 or 20 for $100. Dozens of categories are available. Please note: This sale cannot be combined with any other discounts.
Shop the sale here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=243

By and large, free and open source software projects don't compete with FOSS projects. If your project has more users than mine, than we both win.

Even if a project is developed and "owned" by for-profit companies, that doesn't necessarily hurt other projects.

Non-free software is the competition. Possibly even the enemy.

Another example: both @forgejo and @radicle work on anti-centralized Git project hosting. Both benefit from the existence of the other: the more people see that GitHub isn't the only option for this, the easier both projects will have to convince people to try switching away from the world's most centralized version control system.

The goal is not to have a bigger share of a few people who don't use GitHub. The goal is to have as many people as possible not use GitHub.

@dangillmor

A stark warning from #UCBerkeleyLawDean #ErwinChemerinsky

Professor #Chemerinsky is detailing the ominous implications the Republican House #BudgetReconciliation Bill that just passed

Which will effectively, on a retroactive basis, make #courtorders against the #TrumpAdministration unenforceable

The provision requires a bond (security) to be paid by the plaintiff before enforceable court orders are issued

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/23/2323953/-A-Stark-Warning-from-the-Dean-of-UC-Berkeley-School-of-Law-Edwin-Chemerinsky