Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I'm a member of the Boulder Valley School District's "District Accountability Committee" or DAC. Each school in the district has a representative that meets once a month at district headquarters to hash out policy, budget, and other recommendations to the school board.

At last night's DAC meeting, during the Q&A period following our Superintendent's briefing (in which he brought up the ongoing problem of kids vaping in school bathrooms), I mentioned an amazing talk I saw at this past @defcon #DEFCON33 called "Unmasking the Snitch Puck: The creepy IoT surveillance in the school bathroom" - video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I

You see, New Vista High School, which just opened a brand new building, has installed these devices, called a Halo 3C Smart Sensor, in all the bathrooms and elsewhere inside the school building, and has made a measurable impact reducing the number of vaping-in-school incidents. But, as I told superintendent Anderson, the sensor itself brings along with it some seriously problematic security vulnerabilities, in addition to the undocumented capabilities that the researchers in the talk exploited.

The superintendent's response to that made the whole room bust out laughing: "Andrew, you never fail to bring to my attention things that scare the hell out of me" - to which I responded, literally my job, Rob. It's why they call it "Threat Research" my guy.

This is why every community board, council, committee, etc. needs a thoughtful hacker present, to relay important information like this to policy implementers and policy makers who just don't keep up with this space.

#BVSD #schoolboard #edtech #edpolicy #techpolicy #Boulder #COpolitics

What could go wrong? https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-artificial-intelligence/

We had a similar philosophy when setting up the “Librem AweSIM” service at Purism, but this service goes to the next level by the minimalist approach to retaining personal data (just a zip code). With AweSIM, Purism would still have mailing address and credit card on file, and you essentially still had to extend trust to Purism. Not so with this new service.

Merrill’s history with Calyx also gives extra weight to his claims to defend privacy.

https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/

Co-op Cloud Assembly @ #39C3 is set!

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/de/assembly/detail/coopcloud

Shout out to the friends @ @klasse_methode for organising it.

See you there!

Good reminder that lawmakers can read classified info into the congressional record with no legal liability.

If the government is breaking the law in secret, members of Congress should have the moral obligation to expose it!

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-hegseths-alleged-war-crime-will

Why do business with Trump-collaborating retail conglomerates or Trump-complicit online behemoths?
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You can get great deals on wonderful gifts for your loved ones from a Trump-resisting, independent, semi-obscure cartoonist!
https://tomdbug.wpcomstaging.com/2025/11/25/14-days-of-black-fridays/
Packages being sent out quickly!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tomhead/115659063277687683

Yep this exactly. Like, this is the whole problem with ~rural reporting.~

People like to get up in arms about stories about this because we get to show everyone how much!! we really care!! about rural areas!!

But the only way most people actually pay attention to "rural problems" when it's their own pet peeve dressed up in a cowboy hat.

So to sell a story on rural corruption, you have to make it about Amazon.

And then nobody notices the rural corruption part.

🔵 This week's Tom the Dancing Bug
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The Republican Circus:
When they came for you, did I speak out? "Not me."👻
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Brought to you by the proud and mighty Inner Hive, including long-time member Silver Smurfer and new member Jan Strnad
(join us at bit.ly/theInnerHive)
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READ IT RIGHT HERE👇

P-type semiconductor? N-type? NPN? #CMOS ? #silicon is dope!

And you can build and simulate #transistors yourself: https://app.siliwiz.com/?preset=nmos

I bought Last Call BBS from Zachtronics to learn, but it's a game, simplified to the point where capacitors discharge instantly.

Meanwhile, siliwiz is used as a tutorial for designers of actual circuits in Tiny Tapeout:

https://tinytapeout.com/siliwiz/resistors/

Brb, redoing game challenges in simulator.

#electronics #circuits #chip #cad

The threat from such vague classifications is broad, especially as terrorism designations include financial connections.

Read the full story at https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/the-war-on-terror-turns-left/

Hey everyone, you can now follow @codebergstatus to get more granular notifications about our current system. We decided to keep the main account clear from the noise of smaller issues and allow you to explicitly opt-in to such notifications.

Important and positive news will continue to be shared on this account 😉

Sources: #Meta plans deep budget cuts to its #metaverse efforts in 2026, potentially as high as 30% - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-04/meta-s-zuckerberg-plans-deep-cuts-for-metaverse-efforts oh look: a waste of time and money, as we predicted... #ai will be next

UK Government’s plan to “ramp up #facialrecognition” - https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/press-releases/uk-governments-plan-to-ramp-up-facial-recognition/ "government need to focus their resources on real criminals rather than spending public money turning the country into an open prison with surveillance of the general population."

Ashamed to say that I never knew who Fred Hampton was or understood his impact until I was an adult.

History that isn’t taught is history that didn’t happen. The FBI, in collusion with the Chicago Police Department, assassinated Fred Hampton on this day in 1969. We can only imagine what kind of world we would be experiencing had he lived:

https://digitalchicagohistory.org/exhibits/show/fred-hampton-50th/the-assassination

#BlackMastodon #history #WhiteSupremacy

In the past few days I’ve seen talk about RAM prices shooting up due to demand from big datacenters.

Today I read that a historic brand like Crucial - I own plenty of their hardware, including SSDs - is dropping consumer products to focus on gear for those same datacenters.
The result (or maybe the intention?) is to push people away from self hosting, undermine the OwnYourData idea and make everyone depend on huge datacenters for life.

So much for owning your data.
So much for decentralisation.

Because taking down one giant datacenter is far easier than taking down thousands or millions of individual nodes.

Friends and colleagues, don’t trade your freedom for a bit of convenience. Once you give it away, getting it back is very hard.

Always Own Your Data.

#OwnYourData #SelfHosting

In case you didn't already know, plastic recycling has always been a lie.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12/report-shows-how-recycling-is-largely-a-toxic-lie-pushed-by-plastics-industry.html

This course looks interesting and is a good example of the kind of ambitious solidarity economy organizing being done in Latin America that goes unseen and unrecognized in the English-speaking context.
https://solidarius.net/info/apresentacao_curso_redes.pdf

Half of Europeans see #Trump as enemy of Europe, survey finds - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/04/europeans-trump-enemy-of-europe-russia-war-poll "Nine-country poll finds half of people believe risk of war with Russia is high and three-quarters want to stay in EU" only half?

Once again, we are fighting with an ongoing DoS attack. We are very sorry for the disruption of the service and hope to bring the service back online soon.

When the Feds Come to Your City: Standing Up to ICE

A Guide from Chicago Organizers

https://crimethinc.com/StandUptoICE

Are masked agents stalking your town, looking to kidnap your neighbors? Want to do your part to protect each other, but don’t know where to start?

This guide is based on the knowledge that an array of people have accumulated in Chicago over the past several months during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

As federal agents expand their assaults on communities across the country, it is crucial to share and build on these practices.