Free software people I am begging you to stop naming your software

This was a brilliant game. Go #Belgium!

I’ll give this an amen.

Link: https://xcancel.com/thetnholler/status/2073789118920699971

Let me get this straight. Donald actually managed to make FIFA *more* corrupt?

After cancelling events, #Platner accused of 2021 rape https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/06/graham-platner-sexual-assault-allegation-00987737

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eff/116874821062112814

I have sworn by RSS for ages, and will continue to forevermore.

the new gnu parallel release name does not just have a rape joke in it, it's literally the name of a racist report by one far-right UK MP calling non-whites rapists. it's a straight up Nazi dog whistle. well done GNU

My timeline (which contains a lot of project leaders/sysadmins from big projects) is filling with posts about a new, ongoing wave of what most likely are scrapers collecting training data for „AI“ companies. They seem to be using botnets (or what some call „residential IP proxies“ to make it sound a bit more legitimate) with millions of IP addresses, making it really hard to defend against. Some have decided to take their sites down until this is over. This is now the world we live in :(

"The President and Vice President must be impeached, convicted, and removed."

On July 1, active duty air force Major Jason Watson held a powerful speech in Washington D.C. calling for the removal of Trump and JD Vance.

He then walked up the stairs and held a protest sign before being arrested by capitol police.

Full speech:
https://youtu.be/k2-AyA3SLEs?si=4UsTpY1J9IFFgBDM

@cwebber excellent post ... totally agree about the stakes and importance -- and about how so much of this crackdown is driven by fear of (and hate for) the net's possibilities for helping trans, queer, and questioning youth. And also totally agree about the importance of decentralized technologies! I've been working on a somewhat-similar post, including looking back at the 2008-ish golden age of organizing on the social networks and focusing on the grassroots organizing and activism that's needed ... on the way there, a few quick thoughts.

Because there's a difference between now and 2012. The internet feels a lot less like an "our thing" than it used to.

That's certainly true, and along with that there's also been a change in the politics and strategy of big tech companies. In the battles over net neutrality and SOPA/PIP, the big consumer-facing tech companies were largely on our side, and social networks were good turf for organizing. Today, they're actively aligning with fascist and authoritarian governments -- and hostile to organizing and activism that tries to resist fascism, authoritariamism and the surveillance-industrial complex. Algorithm changes and moderation practices are two aspects of that; their acceptance of age verification requirements is another.

Decentralized social networks offer a potential alternative. There are currently some big barriers but oh well, if changing the world were easy everybody would do it. And there are some real opportunities here, even with today's technologies and limited adoption. Can the Fediverse Help Stop Bad Internet Bills, explored this a couple of years ago, and we've come a long way since then. My Fediforum presentation on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism from last fall and this spring's unworkshop presentation on Legislative Activism in the ATmosphere and the Fediverse have more on the possibilities.

It feels like people are tired.

Yep. Living under fascism is exhausting, the economy sucks for many people, and long covid is a factor too. And, this is only one of many battles that need fighting -- as important as it is, threats like ICE and CBP, and losing access to gender-affirming health care, are a lot more immediate.

And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance publicly than before.

Also true. First of all big tech companies really are abusive and there's a justifiable feeling that something needs to be done. With big tech's lobbying power, the short-term prospects of passing strong privacy or anti-trust legislation are bleak, and it's not obious to most people how they'd help with kids safety.

Shoddy rsearchers like Jonathan Haidt overstate the harms of social media on kids and ignore the benefits (especially to margainalized kids and teens), and the Age Vendors Providers Association and anti-LGBTQIA23+ hate groups overstate the value (and understate the harms) of age verification. Plus it's been very hard to counter talking points like the false analogy to showing your ID to buy alcohol -- and at least so far age verification backers have done a good job of dismissing the evidence that it doesn't work.

On top of that, big tech and their allies in anti-LGBTQIA2S+ hate groups has been very good at spreding the myth that these bills will "hold big tech accountable." As I just discussed in KOSA, the KIDS Act, AI, Bad Internet Bills, and a potential giveaway to big tech , Meta, Microsoft, Apple, X, Snap, Pinterest, and OpenAI all support KOSA. They wouldn't be doing that if it were really holding them accountable!

Which brings us back to a potential role of decentralized social networks: getting accurate information out there to equip people to refute these talking points, both with the public and with legislators. Mainstream media is owned by big corporations (and doesn't care about youth or LGBTQIA2S+ people), so we need to work around that. There are enough of us here that if folks have the tools to use our real-world social networks and 1-1 online communications tecnologies to persuade people, it can really make a difference.

Anyhow ... a long response but as you can tell this has been something I've been thinking about a lot!

To be fair, #Lenin became a lot less anti-imperialist soon after gaining control of the empire he was opposing before 1917, but as long as you take what 20th century Marxists said at face value, this post presents an ironclad argument why it's time for serious leftists in the U.S. to start seriously supporting #Ukraine.

https://www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/american-leftist-162081866

#Zuck: Admits for the first time ever that #Facebook's single business model of converting compute capacity into ads has hit a ceiling, and pivots to cloud business.

#EpsteinClass: #META +8.81% at close.¹

Me: Still waiting for Zuck to realize that the biggest stone weighing the ad spend ceiling down is #GlobalInequality.²

¹ Apparently they believe the market for #ProbabilisticAutomation is bigger than the market for selling goods and services.

² Cancer doesn't know it's killing the host.

(Sharing the credit for this one with @quixoticgeek ):

Tom Bombadil is the Jar-Jar Binks of Middle Earth.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/114857246642135368

If you don't like Haitians, I don't like you. I meant that.

Today is one of those days when many of the people that say that they love fighting for "immigrants rights🤡" are really quiet.

They're going to deport 350,000 Haitian people for no reason other than racism.

It's more fun to look at a person with type 2 diabetes, and blame them for their own poor life choices. "They don't do enough push-ups, or drink enough raw milk!🤡"

It's less fun to look at poor leadership causing the flu to rip through their military base, destroying vital cells in their pancreas.

The spike in new onset diabetes diagnoses during Covid pandemic caused people to take another look at if the new cases were:

1) just previously undiagnosed diabetes

Or

2) triggering of previous genetic susceptibility

Or

3) Newly created cases

And it caused researchers to relook at the flu

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9894635/

@datarama

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-oil-industry-donations

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html

Let's begin by naming the billionaires funding the Trump regime:

They knew what Trump meant to do & donated anyway.

1. Elon Musk $291,482,587
2. Timothy Mellon $197,047,200
3. Miriam Adelson $148,304,900
4. Richard Uihlein $143,498,936
5. Ken Griffin $108,402,284
6. Jeff Yass $101,128,680
7. Paul E. Singer $66,800,800
8. Marc Andreessen $42,365,113
9. Stephen Schwarzman $40,202,039
10. Timothy Dunn $35,780,200

1/

RE: https://ohai.social/@shansterable/116817614634845377

So, so many things to note here, but don't miss this one:

The issue here is in no way related to immigration or customs enforcement. But the agents who confronted her were ICE agents.

ICE’s purpose doesn’t really have to do with immigration anymore. Its purpose is to be a dictator’s personal army, sans the discipline and constraints of the actual military, that can be deployed domestically against the country’s own population.

That’s why the Trump admin has bullied through a military-sized budget for the agency.

Signal chats appeared in an indictment of 15 people affiliated with Minneapolis anti-ICE protest groups. Does that mean Signal is compromised? No. But devices involved may be.

Read our newsletter to learn how to maximize your group chat safety (and subscribe):

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/signal-chats-cited-in-minneapolis-protest-indictment/