mcneely @mcneely@librem.one

I’m seeing some posts decrying Apple’s decision to implement end to end encryption, and to move away from client-side scanning. Yes, CSAM is harmful, and massively problematic. That’s not in dispute. Neither is seeking to protect fundamental rights and to avoid mass surveillance, any indication of tolerance or acceptance of heinous activities. *Please*, turn your energies to seeking solutions which don’t entail mass surveillance, or infringements of fundamental rights.

When I participated in approving the Cryptographic Autonomy License, the only FOSS license that provides users guarantees of data portability, I thought that this conversation might start to shift. That we'd recognize that running distributed systems at the scale of what users have come to expect cannot be performed by individuals, and that we needed to shift the conversation towards how we can protect users' digital autonomy and inherent rights without them needing to become systems administrators.

Yet there has been no forward progress. I just can't associate myself with "software freedom" while it cares more about software, a tool, than the rights of people, the only reason the tool exists.

Humans have lived and thrived in communities since time immemorial. We specialize because it allows us to scale; no one person can master everything that allows us to have a happy, healthy life.

You may be able to self host a few pieces of software meaningful to you, but hosting your entire digital life by yourself? Well, we already recognize that we can't write all the code, or build all the hardware ourselves---that's why open source is important. So then why the fixation on trying to run everything ourselves?

When software was far simpler in decades past, that might have been a feasible goal! But it hasn't been for years.

The USA is not really a democracy, because there has never been a nationwide election where it was as easy to vote for white voters' as Black voters.

Most US school children are not really taught about the Reconstruction and post-reconstruction period of US history. This was after Black folk got the right to vote but before racists did the above math. Black Southerners won elections!

Then they got Jan 6th'ed and ran out by violence. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Y'all can start warming up your "epic takedowns" and "scathing dissents" of the impending decision.

I don't believe in "States rights," because most all of the time, that just means "States' rights to be racist to Black folk."

About 50% of all white US voters reliably vote for the more right wing candidate.🥲 50% vote against. About 90% of Black voters vote against right wing candidates.

Who wins an election depends on how many Black folk vote.

Don't make me tap the sign

I’ve become increasingly convinced that “rel=me” is a better way to verify journalists than publication-specific instances. The time, costs, security issues, employer/employee relationship intricacies, and more make publication-run instances for staffers problematic on various levels. That could change, and I’m sure someone will find a way to do it well. But I currently don’t think that publication-run instances make sense for most newsrooms.

Just a shocking number of people don’t even know the bivalent boosters •exist•.

Folks, there is a newly forumated booster as of October.

If you got your last before October, you should get a new booster.

It’s available for kids 5 and up.

It’s free.

It will protect you ••much•• better against the newest variants, which are hospitalizing people en masse.

Tell your less-online-than-you family, friends, neighbors. Publicity has been terrible.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-new-covid-wave

I understand naming is one of the most complicated things in IT, but please: if you're creating a new open source a project, check if there's some other, long established free and open source project with the same name first, before writing the announcement.