Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X.

This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x

Secret Panel HERE 💀 https://tinyview.com/mrlovenstein/2026/04/08/ruinternet

RE: https://mastodon.social/@johnleonard/116375005957747083

#microsoft being evil - what's new?

#funny #comic #trump #dementia #DementiaDonald #uspol

Unpacking Trump’s Use of Emergency Powers to Prop Up Coal - https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09042026/inside-clean-energy-trump-coal-plants/ "A World War II-era policy is stopping old coal plants from closing, despite high costs and the wishes of their owners." has there ever been a more perversely wrong policy?

In the past, many FOSS proponents would mistakenly apply the "many eyes make bugs shallow" quote to all classes of bugs, in particular security ones. That historically hasn't been true because you need security expertise to find security bugs, it's not democratized in the same way as general classes of bugs.

LLMs have now changed that. This blog post by Thomas Ptacek does a good job of explaining what is going on:

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03/30/vulnerability-research-is-cooked/

#security #AI #LLM

The company that - last week - accidentally published the source code of their flagship product, which was in turn discovered to be a contraption riddled with security holes and included instructions to deliberately mislead people, is telling us this week that they've got a new product that is _too good_ at finding security issues so they need to make a special secret cabal and only share it with them because it would be too dangerous to show anyone else.

This is definitely all very believable.

@cr00ky I know. It just don't pass the open definition. (Nor is it listed as an approved open source license by the OSI.) So, a "hardware printer you can actually understand, repair, and upgrade" yes, but it is not open in the sense open is normally used when talking about open hardware or open source. I think the name either implies that they don't really understand the context they are in (which is bad) or that it is a case of open washing (which is worse).

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116371937587992264

I think the way I would put it is:

1) The point of the AI project is ideological; the goal is to reshape industries such that we are dependent on AI companies' products, and to destroy free and open knowledge such that we are dependent on these products for thought and reasoning. We see an injection of AI into cybersecurity, while simultaneously drawing money and resources away from (boring) efforts that would actually broadly improve cybersecurity.¹ We see an injection of AI into knowledge acquisition, while simultaneously polluting the landscape of the internet as a useful source of knowledge. Both are in service of the same ideological project, and working towards the same goal.

2) The touted usefulness of AI for programming and cybersecurity is directly funding the project to expand it everywhere else, where it is causing massive harms to civil society, individuals' mental health, and the information landscape. You or your company paying for these products is keeping investment money flowing and extending the runway, for AI companies to reach that point of "indispensability". There is no divorcing your cool shiny toy from the creation of AI deepfakes that destroy democracy, or the AI psychosis that destroys lives. This is because the AI companies are pursuing an ideological project that ultimately has nothing to do with improving people's work or their lives; the leaders of these companies have loudly and publicly said that very clearly. You are laundering the reputation of these companies and keeping them alive, when the only moral option is to destroy them.

I've said this elsewhere, but: Maybe you, who are reading this, is offended by this framing, because you use and enjoy the AI tools. But it's also likely that you, and many other technologists, take moral abdication almost as a point of pride, where the only thing that matters is "capability". In that case, I don't understand the defensive response. Why are you uncomfortable being described as the thing you're bragging to be?

#fuckAI

¹ The stark contrast: The breathless and brainless promotional posts about Glasswing came into my feed at the same time as the posts about the final gutting of CISA. https://www.securityweek.com/white-house-seeks-to-slash-cisa-funding-by-707-million/

So, since the "the fediverse needs to be open to new ideas" canard is going around again, let's just be clear. AI is not a new idea, it's the oldest idea in the tech industry.

It's the idea that capital can embrace, extend, and extinguish computing, the idea that industry is more important than labor, that the climate crisis is an externality not worth worrying about. AI is the idea that stocks matter more than people.

No big trucks for little roads: American OEMs say #EU is blocking imports - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/04/no-f-150-in-france-us-automakers-complain-the-eu-blocks-big-trucks/ "the big truck is evidently now emblematic of America and must be accepted by our trading partners, regardless of whether there’s customer demand." #nope

New blog post!

A discussion of how modern visual-first algorithmic platforms are polar opposites of the predominantly text-based social networks of yore - and not only due to technological advancements, like "powerful computers with fantastic cameras in every pocket."

Sparked by a fantastic podcast episode (Details & links in the article - thank you @afelia )

https://technically-good.ca/blog/2026-04-08-a-blast-from-the-past-looks/

#socialMedia #platforms #algorithms #platformAlternatives

Important XScreenSaver policy update.

25: No contributions built with, or assisted by, LLMs or any kind of "generative AI" tools will be considered. If you didn't bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it. XScreenSaver is art by humans for...
https://jwz.org/b/yk56

When Claude Mythos is leaked and turns out to just be deterministic pattern matching 🙃 #AI #noAI #LLM #LLMs #vibeInfosec

Eurail B.V., a European travel operator that provides digital passes covering 33 national railways, says attackers stole the personal information of over 300,000 individuals in a December 2025 data breach.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/eurail-says-december-data-breach-impacts-300-000-individuals/

I’m delighted to announce that the OpenPGP implementation in #Conversations_im will see some love over the next ~6 months. Simultaneously, we will be laying the groundwork for OMEMO2 by implementing Stanza Content Encryption.

Thanks to funding from @nlnet and the European Commission.

https://nlnet.nl/project/Conversations-OpenPGP-refresh/

#XMPP #Jabber #OMEMO #OpenPGP

Not enough is made of the fact that ‘ChatGPT passes the Turing test’ isn’t news because ELIZA already passed it, and *really* not enough is made of the fact that it should be bloody obvious that human intelligence is flawed in ways that we clearly do not want to recreate in a machine to the extent of being indistinguishable from a human

LLMs are poisoning the knowledge base that has been painstakingly accumulated over the course of human history. We will, if this is allowed to continue, find that we have "destroyed the Library of Alexandria" once again. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=4b50fd2341-nature-briefing-daily-20260408&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-33f35e09ea-49717696

Consumers urged to ‘completely avoid’ UK-caught cod as population plunges - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/09/consumers-urged-to-completely-avoid-uk-caught-cod-as-population-plunges greed and stupidity, will we never learn?

What happens to Britain's radical right if Orbán loses?
https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits
Inside the money, power and patronage connecting Hungary and the British right