Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Open-source communities, small businesses, law professors, patient advocates, and thousands of individuals all told the USPTO the same thing: we need a real way to challenge bad patents. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/thousands-tell-patent-office-dont-hide-bad-patents-review

Cory Doctorow on why countries should fight fire with water.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

'Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would work too well. It would inflict too much pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians too much money, and make too much money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry.'

Reminder - if your software is 'a little bit proprietary', it's entirely proprietary. It's like claiming to be a little bit pregnant.

One of the myths that comes up again and again in FOSS is "It's run by a non-profit, it's safe, the corporate world cannot take it over".

Mozilla shows how incorrect this assumption is: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/115730052589989499

Non-profits can be captured by corporations very easily:

1. Evil corporation donates massive amount of money to a non-profit, far more than it got from individuals, grants etc.
2. Non-profit uses the massive donation to greatly extend its features and pay itself much bigger salaries
3. Non-profit can no longer function without corporate donations
4. Non-profit captured, does whatever corporation wants

#FOSS

All PM Press books are 50% off with coupon code GIFT through 1-1-2026. Stock up while you can.

https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=3&sortby=num_sold:desc

New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 2: installation & setup"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-2-installation-setup/

with a special shout-out to @shollyethan and @ilja who, a year ago, encouraged me to try self-hosting. And of course immense gratitude to the @yunohost team for making all this possible ❤️

I hope this guide may inspire others to try it, too. The path to digital independence and empowerment is easier than you thought...

#selfhosting #FOSS #empowerment

Strengthening #Wikimedia Collaborations with and for #OpenScience - https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/12/16/strengthening-wikimedia-collaborations-with-and-for-open-science/ #openaccess

Last week in the United States of America, Congress began fast-tracking nearly 20 bills in a massive effort to enact massive censorship on the internet, decimate your ability to use computers privately, and severely restrict free speech online.

We sat down with @taylorlorenz to dissect these 'Bad Internet Bills' and what you need to know to stop them: https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/

https://neat.tube/w/tS3ho29H2YTJJjEh8sXuNy
https://youtu.be/q0hE4EM7RRo

#KOSA #BadInternetBills #SCREENAct #AppStoreAccountabilityAct #USpol #USgov #Trump #Censorship #Privacy #AgeVerification #TaylorLorenz #USA #US #PrivacyGuides #Video

Ran into a problem in prod?
Just generate a fake cloudflare error page and blame it on them - gives you time to fix.

#foss #devops #cloudflare #infosec

By the way, if anyone's interested in the construction of the greenhouse, there's an album for that: https://photos.lane.net.nz/index.php?/category/126

@futurebird There aren't any such problems.

AI costs more and does worse than any available alternative including not doing the thing at all.

(The tiny number of really hard practical stats problems where this isn't true, they get violent if you try to call what they're doing AI.)

Hey, we thought it might be worth announcing that our time to respond to your inquiries (sent by email or otherwise) will be much more limited until next year.



We will try our best to remain responsive for urgent inquiries. Thank you and happy holidays! ❄️

@pluralistic

Grooming a cohort of effective leaders happened in the 1930's.

Public education absorbed a generation of university graduates when higher education was defunded in the 1930's. Those teachers taught civil rights leaders, women's rights advocates and union members. Public libraries for the self educated

This time Koch Network got there first. Dismantling effective public education forestalled that path to growing good leaders.

They're also attacking libraries...

1/

@ophiocephalic ahahaha incredible

these capitalist fuckers can’t help themselves. everything has to be a grift. they’ll sell Karl Marx NFTs and a Kropotkin metaverse moderated by slave labor if they think anyone’s buying

so many of the people who for years wrote about how the actual duty of a senior software developer is to remove code from the codebases and molding the junior coworkers into fully-fledged professionals is now enthusiastically writing about inducing confabulation machines to extrude enormous amounts of code-like product, and how glorious it is that the infinite lies machine made junior developers obsolete.

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/115579264442185020

Yesterday, my colleagues were flabbergasted when I said that I don't use any chatbots. Well, here's one of the major reasons why

A little belatedly sharing this piece that I published in The Chronicle of Higher Educations's Opinion Forum (sorry full text is paywalled)

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-ai-is-changing-higher-education

Ugh, listening to RNZ right now - Kathryn Ryan talking to a US correspondent, who's just stated, with what sounds like a straight face, that US Republicans are saying that the reduced tax on wealthy people will 'trickle down' to poor people. And Kathryn didn't even question the legitimacy of that concept. Come on Kathryn, you need to call this stuff out.

But I think it's enough to want something to still be there. For everyone.

A classic 1962 Christmas comic/humor piece from the great Al Jaffee.
-
https://boingboing.net/2025/12/13/al-jaffees-legendary-mad-christmas-toy-feature.html