Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The U.S. federal government is once again debating whether to extent warrantless surveillance under FISA.

Restore the Fourth has a petition to representatives, asking them to cosponsor reforms that would restore warrant requirements here: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/no-to-mass-government-surveillance-cosponsor-plewsagsra

Sharing and signing the petition would be greatly appreciated!

#USPol #privacy #surveillance

Boxes of goodies are ready for the new volunteers trying out the node setup instructions over at https://lores.tech . This will bring us up to 7 people trying out nodes in their own homes, which gives us some great practice on how to coordinate a digital commons for a region like Merri-bek.

#NeighbourhoodFirst #LoRes #merribek

A couple of new reviews posted:

https://the-counterforce.org/gul-demo/
https://the-counterforce.org/the-smarthearts-not-forgotten/
https://the-counterforce.org/stresssysteem-de-vorige-oorlog/
https://the-counterforce.org/the-dissidents-d-o-v-e-a-better-world-split/
https://the-counterforce.org/red-wine-glue-vol-2-comp/
https://the-counterforce.org/komatiite-famine-pact-ep-demo/
https://the-counterforce.org/vending-machine-live-at-abc/

Reminder there are also RSS feeds for everything on the site! There's an RSS feed for reviews only, if that's all you care about: https://the-counterforce.org/tag/reviews/feed.xml

This is the best technical explanation of DLSS 5 I've ever read.

It's contribution time! A couple of days ago we added an new recipe to @coopcloud
Until now, there was only a generic recipe for PHP applications, but now the catalogue contains a dedicated @moodle recipe which we already use in production.

https://git.coopcloud.tech/coop-cloud/moodle
Feedback welcome.

Gas prices may be high, but at least housing, healthcare, and food are affordable, I assume. https://patreon.com/BrianMcFadden

Law enforcement typically issues a warrant to telecom providers for access to customer location “tower dump” data. Now we have learned Customs and Border Protection purchased location data based on ad IDs.

Read more in our weekly digital security newsletter, and subscribe.

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/cbp-bought-ad-location-data-for-surveillance/

Revealed: a crypto billionaire’s political base hosting ‘anti-woke’ and rightwing activists in Westminster - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/18/crypto-billionaire-ben-delo-westminster-political-base-the-sanctuary-hosting-anti-woke-rightwing-activists "Pardoned by Trump after violating US banking law, Ben Delo provides funding, networking, and podcasting space for a range of groups, including those with hardline views on migration and abortion"

🔴 Brand new Tom the Dancing Bug now up on Boing Boing
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🔥 EXCURSIONS ARE HELL
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https://boingboing.net/2026/03/18/tom-the-dancing-bug-excursions-are-hell.html

And then the national tour for “Privacy’s Defender” continues in #Denver on Friday, and in #Boston and #AnnArbor next week! Click below to buy the book and follow the tour. https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender

Coders using Claude report forgetting how to code themselves. Now MIT releases this study. LLMs are rotting your brain. Stop using them now, before the damage becomes any worse.

"MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

In case you needed more reasons to avoid using AI, perhaps the very means to think are enough to consider; unless it's too late to consider...

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

Are there any search engines that penalize LLM-generated content?

The NSA kept illegally spying on Americans for years after Snowden blew the whistle, according to a FOIA release.

This is exactly why Section 702, an easily abused warrantless surveillance authority, needs reform.

Time for Congress to stand up to the intel community and protect our privacy.

https://www.pogo.org/investigates/declassified-report-reveals-nsa-broke-surveillance-rules

and because only like one in ten people will ever open a settings menu we end up with this, like, tech caste system where 90% of people put up with the shitty antifeatures that make the company money while the techiest 10% (which includes everybody reading this, I will never stop banging the drum about fedi people not being representative of broader society) get a deshittified app for free

not exactly the kinda liberation-via-silicon we'd imagined in the zx spectrum days

Mutiny in the Mountains chronicles the fifty-year struggle of West Virginia’s public sector workers to assert power without significant collective bargaining rights or political leverage. Get 20% off this new release with code MARCH here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1875

Kind and cherished FOSS and computing freedom advocate @sleepyowl (Joyce Ng) has gone missing and there is reason to fear she may have been apprehended by authorities, possibly likely even for being framed. Nobody has been able to reach her and many of us are worried for her safety.

Joyce does work on verifiable open source hardware. She also has been an activist pushing against the rise of far-right Christian nationalism globally but especially in Singapore. Because of this and her identity, she has people who would like to see bad things happen to her.

Probably for this reason, she may have been misidentified by Five Eyes as being a threat actor. Joyce wrote about this concern in November, posting a threatening screenshot where she was tipped off. https://bitowl.online/about

Please spread this wide. Hopefully this is a false alarm but Joyce is a kind-hearted person who fights for human rights and computing freedom; many of us are worried for her safety.

"learn ai or become part of the underclass"

how fried is your brain if you think you have to learn how to use ai. OH NO HOW WILL I EVER LEARN HOW TO TYPE IN A SENTENCE AND THEN BE DISAPPOINTED AT THE RESULT

Americas nerds and jocks (the dudes only of course) are irredeemable. The future lies with our freaks and burnouts.