Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

You can tell we've been through the looking glass for some time now, because I keep seeing these completely credulous "news reports" about how "rich billionaire invested in rocketry and AI says datacenters in space are necessary to make AI better", with nary a "p.s., for readers unaware, this is an incredibly stupid idea along every single axis" to be seen.

Important Man Says Thing!!!!!!!!

Fuck off with this "journalism". That goes for you too, Eric Berger. So what if you wrote a book about this category of asshole. Doesn't mean you have to lap up their piss.

#SickAndGrouchy

Germany kicks sand in Microsoft's face by mandating the Open Document Format for all public documents.

https://linuxiac.com/germany-mandates-odf-for-public-administration/

'Germany’s move aligns with broader European efforts to promote digital sovereignty and interoperability, including the European Interoperability Framework and the Cyber Resilience Act. These policies emphasize the importance of open standards in ensuring secure, transparent, and future-proof digital services.'

Equinox makes it look like it's plural. Today's the vernal equinock.

Through the end of March, CREDO Mobile customers can vote for EFF and two other organizations to receive a generous donation from the CREDO community. Vote for EFF today to support our work defending civil liberties in the digital world! https://www.credodonations.com/

Chuck Norris facing death and once again proving he was all talk.

New comics section up at In These Times!
https://inthesetimes.com/article/homage-to-the-orphanage-chicago-political-comics-trump

Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year? No I can't either.

And from their actual press release: "The Atmosphere currently contains about 20 billion public records—the posts, likes, comments and other interactions that bring the ecosystem to life. It's an astonishing collection of what open social infrastructure makes possible."

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b

How I read it: data harvesting at its finest 💁‍♀️

#Bluesky

😂

"To underscore the consequences of not having that kind of data, Smiley pointed to a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI."

"It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right," he said. It's 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It's a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/

#AIBubble

Good to know/remember at Springtime.

May the society change for a better future ...

#Spring #springtime #nature

#AI probably does lead to more computer security disasters - https://algorithmwatch.org/en/ai-probably-does-lead-to-more-computer-security-disasters/ this is a fab encapsulation: "#Chatbots, in fact, are not built to help, but to please."

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.