Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites - https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/20/blue_origin_project_sunrise_orbital_datacenter/ "‘Project Sunrise’ needs a network that doesn’t exist, a rocket that’s hardly flown, and FCC approval" wave good bye to the night sky

This is an interesting development: https://linuxiac.com/germany-mandates-odf-for-public-administration/ - the UK did this, too, quite a long time ago - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs - like 2014 - but then reversed its decision due to being corrup-... er, I mean due to lobbying.

New rule: if your for-profit company is "too big to fail", you get nationalised, not bailed out.

The goal is to make corporate data less profitable.

Even stuff as simple as setting your birthdate to 1970-01-01 everywhere, adding [TEST] or [DELETED] as your name or account notes anywhere you don't need them to know your name.

Using plugins like AdNauseam to poison ad trackers (and cost them marketing dollars).

Using VPNs set to different locations.

Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info). Bonus points if you correct it to someone else's info on their site that's similar to yours.

Only fill in required fields when you sign up for anything, but only provide correct info if it matters for you to use the service, otherwise provide plausible, but incorrect, data.

If you use LLMs anywhere, use the free tier and always vote thumbs up for bad answers and down for good ones. It wastes their resources and drives up their costs while making their training data worse.

Now: What does that mean for struggles against Big Tech, digital capitalism and data exploitation?

I'd argue: It is a wake-up call to not put too much trust in a legal system that usually gives corporations an advantage. It is a wake-up call to not put too much hope in regulation.

The law can be an ally but in times of crisis it is little more than a formal safeguard. Judges get replaced, laws get rewritten. We felt too safe for too long. If we want change we have to make it ourselves.
(3/ )

The European Court Of Justice was dishing out rulings that were very in line with the data protection community. It scared Google by creating the right to be forgotten, it scared the EU commission by nullifying the EU-US data transfer agreements, it scared Facebook by making it a joint controller with side operators or websites that use their plugins, it scared the German federal ministries by treating the IP address as personal data. This however seems to be a thing of the past.
#Thread

BlueSky wants you to trust them, but they raised $100 million from a crypto fund almost a YEAR AGO and didn't tell anyone.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/bluesky-announces-100m-series-b-after-ceo-transition/

I am so excited for WNBA players: https://www.cbssports.com/wnba/news/new-wnba-cba-massive-step-forward-womens-sports/

Labor organizing makes life better for working people.

"What do you mean you don't want to produce cannon fodder for your dear leader?"

https://www.thejournal.ie/russia-to-refer-women-who-dont-want-children-to-psychologists-6989040-Mar2026/

Oh, they have banned "childfree propaganda"? I better not set foot in Russia, I'd end up in gulag!

#childfree #abortion #Russia

🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 Local Organizing

On the topic of starting a tech coop, here are some insights we shared with each other:

- You might not need a coop! Associations, Foundations, even informal gatherings might be more applicable, depending on your local law and organizational needs. Sometimes you'll establish multiple orgs to cover all your needs! Let your first interactions with collaborators dictate your administrative form.
- Finding partners is a difficult step! But it's important to have redundancy - you don't want a project to die when you fall ill. Consider starting with international coop work.
- If you have the means, doing pro bono community work for a few years is a good way to get started before you start looking for contracts.
- Consider establishing small trusted groups ("pods") of just a couple of people each. These often survive when people change orgs. E.g. income sharing, mentoring.

(🧵 2/5)

They can try to erase us, but we are everywhere.
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https://manchicken.com/2026/03/19/a-rant-about-enshittification/

Last call to back the Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/housingjustice

RE: https://floss.social/@gnome/116251314283038831

Your donations help GTK development:

- infrastructure maintenance, like CI/CD pipelines and GitLab
- community events, like hackfests for planning
- grants for targeted projects, like accessibility

If you can, consider setting up a recurring donation to the GNOME project

See normally when an algorithm requires The Entire Global Supply Of Ram, a coputer engineer would consider that not a good algorithm, and would try and make a better one instead of optimising the entire planet for paperclip manufacturing

You could make a horror movie about being the last person trapped in the Metaverse on the cheap because it looks so shitty.

“It feels like Squid Game”: #China’s workers scramble to keep up in the #AI race - https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-anxiety-openclaw-jobs-redundancy/ this will not end well

Afroman’s Defamation Trial Is Going About As Well For The Deputies As Their Original Raid Did - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/18/afromans-defamation-trial-is-going-about-as-well-for-the-deputies-as-their-original-raid-did/ this is epically hilarious

Your AI chatbot may be stealing your conversations.

Many #BigTech platforms:
• use chat inputs for training
• store conversations indefinitely
• process data in centralized clouds

What does that mean for #dataprivacy?

We break it down 👇
https://nextcloud.com/de/blog/the-problems-with-big-tech-ai-data-collection-privacy-concerns-and-how-to-protect-your-data/