Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

An ambitious experiment to give young people money and trust them to spend it well shows promising early signs, participants say.

https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/01/20/cash-for-care-covenant-house-city-council-homeless-youth-income-experiment/

Hi everyone! We’re excited to share some updates:

Bonfire 1.0.1 is out! 🎉
This release is all about making your social web experience livelier, more connected, and truly yours. It brings features like following hashtags, scheduled posts, dashboard widgets, and more. This is the very first delivery from the maintenance work funded by your incredible support. Thank you for helping us reach this milestone and keep Bonfire thriving!

For details about the release see our latest blog post: Bonfire 1.0.1: Building Momentum

What’s next for crowdfunding?

If you're an existing backer, the pledge manager is now open. Please keep an eye out for updates there so we can start preparing rewards for you.

The campaign is open again for the next month. With core maintenance funded, every new pledge (or increased pledge from existing backers) now goes directly toward our first stretch goal: federated groups. Support or share our extended campaign to help fund community-owned, cross-instance spaces for real collaboration and self-governance.

Bonus good news: Thanks to a new grant, end-to-end encrypted messaging in Bonfire is now funded and in development!

Thank you once again for being part of the Bonfire movement! Your feedback, support, and community spirit make all of this possible. If you have questions or want to get involved, reach out or come say hello at FOSDEM if you’re in Brussels at the end of January!

With gratitude,
The Bonfire Team

A port on #localhost open only to one process. Can #linux #network namespaces help me?

Let's find out.

The idea is to MitM between my IMAP server and Claws Mail. The proxy would ignore the password and instead use #TLS with a client #certificate to authenticate me (mTLS style).

This way, there's one less #password to store in RAM and accidentally exfiltrate.

As much as I like the Claws UI, it's crashy and I don't trust its #security a lot. #RiiR anyone :P?

#email #networking #dovecot

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

How I managed to give an exam while giving the students the choice to use a chatbot or not.

And what I learned in the process.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

Israeli crews begin bulldozing headquarters of UN agency for Palestinian refugees in east Jerusalem - https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-east-jerusalem-unrwa-cc9c5b2cac2332f0207d485f381be53d more outrageous bullying and wilful destruction - it is all #israel's gov has got #unrwa #gazagenocide

Why the heck do I have blocked people on my account? I'm pretty sure I never blocked anyone.

#Mastodon can be really paternalistic sometimes. I don't want to be protected according to someone else's preferences.

/me unblocks and unmutes 145 people

Honestly, how the hell am I supposed to know which ones are the 20 I muted for good reason?

#socialmedia

We have published a new zine (De-monopoly DiscoTech 101) with a Japanese version (requested by comrades in Japan who were interested in running their own DiscoTech events)

Shout out to RTM members who made reading a zine on our website easy and fun!

https://resisttechmonopolies.online/projects/zines/

~ ammar

Oh look: #discord outsourced their age verification to some vendor. You know, the #ageverification that countries like the UK want to make mandatory for basically every online service. And the vendor had a data breach exposing photos of government IDs for 70,000 people.

Do you feel safer? How many children did we protect by exposing the IDs of these 70,000 (presumably) adults? Thanks for taking one for the team, you 70,000 canaries in the #privacy coal mine.

https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service

But my main question is still mostly this: Am I primarily going to cause headaches for devs and users, or is this really a thing with pretty widespread and stable support?

(I'd like to do some experiments of my own, but I can only test so many servers and so many libraries in various languages!)

6/6

"#ICE🚨deported a 5-yr-old US citizen from Texas to Honduras. Reports say no alternative placement was offered, CPS was not notified, & relatives were not contacted.

Not to be confused with a sep case last year where a fam was given the option to let a US citizen child stay with relatives, this deportation occurred on Jan 11, 2026.

Nat media hasn’t picked it up.🚨Many cases like this stay confined to local reporting."
-WarMonitor
#Deportations #Sadism #Protest #DHS #USPol
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/austin/article/ice-deports-austin-girl-honduras-21298653.php

@tante glad you brought that up. The increasing complexity is an issue for self hosting or community hosting.
One mitigation approach is @coopcloud. we create configuration commons together for easy deployment and are currently ramping up dedicated maintainers for popular software. everyone interested check it out and join us in creating configuration commons for open source software with democratic decision making.

Bill Gates charity trust’s holdings in fossil fuel firms rise despite divestment claims - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/19/bill-gates-charity-trusts-holdings-in-fossil-fuel-firms-rise-despite-divestment-claims gates was never one of the good ones, no matter what he wanted us to believe... #windows #microsoft

January is FEDIVERSE PUNK MONTH! We took steps to get off the meta platforms, created our new account here and are currenty working on a newsletter. Exciting things are in the works!

We also took some time to do an interview with COUNTERFORCE about all of it. You can read it here: https://the-counterforce.org/k-town-hardcore-fest/

... please sign up for the newsletter - we promise it's one that you'll be looking forward to opening every time! https://ktownhardcorefest.org/newsletter/

@pluralistic "Corporate Social Media" is just "Corporate Media" nothing else. As you said the social component is not wanted as it doesn't generate dollars.

With the rise of AI even the last human element - the content creators - have been replaced.

I strongly believe that social media/web/connections can only truly exist when people - not corporations - with the interest in it own and host it. Like the discussion boards of the past or the fediverse of now. .

We have recorded from about 10 minutes of downtime, we apologize for the disruption.

In recent days, we have repeatedly encountered high memory usage from Git processes.

Today, the system was restarted in an unfortunate moment and left a corrupted (probably incomplete) service file that required manual intervention and delayed recovery.

We are continuing investigation for the root cause and improved detection and automatic correction for unexpected memory usage.

Remember when FB got busted trying to manipulate people's emotional states through their feed? I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't something similar. Definitely wouldn't put it past them.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-ai-glasses-desert-aliens

Armin Ronacher, who even very recently has previously has been very pro ai agent vibecoding to the point of criticizing critics, seems to have stepped back and asked the question: are AI coding agent users all experiencing mass delusion... including himself? https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

Conversation on lobste.rs is also interesting https://lobste.rs/s/0pxvyd/agent_psychosis_are_we_going_insane

How do you train the dumbest guys in the country? You don't! https://www.gocomics.com/brian-mcfadden/2026/01/19

"Code is now disposable, you can regenerate systems in minutes", he says as I watch him going round and round in circles trying to get Claude to fix a bug.

@trumpwatch.bsky.social

They should consider rescinding Machado's #NobelPeacePrize for treating it disrespectfully & degrading its value, meaning & prestige, derived from the respect & prestige w/which the global community holds the Nobel Prize Committee & its processes.

Without them, it's worthless.