Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
THE LEO ZAGAMI SHOW/MAGA COUNTER COGNITIVE WARFARE EPISODE 39 Saturday, May 31, 2025 with Leo & Christy Zagami LIVE at 3 pm PST (4 pm MT/ 5 pm CST/ 6 pm EST) with news, geopolitical, and occult analys
Pope Leo XIV signals a digital-era shift for the Church by endorsing HolyDeeds, a Vatican-backed immersive tech project that unites sacred storytelling, art and AI.
"It's essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda, and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon."
Astonishing *NEW* details have been uncovered involving the Lost Ancient City of Atlantis, and the Eye of The Sahara. These details are so significant that t...
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Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction 01:07 Sponsor: Proton Mail 02:14 Weird, but good GNOME implementation 06:00 The "Spatial desktop" 08:17 Enhanced Tiling & layouts 10:03 Under the hood 12:26 Windows app support & other things 14:34 Does it regain the crown? 17:15 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers 18:24 Support the channel
Zorin OS 17 doesn't use the very latest, it's based on GNOME 43, not 45. The Software store is the one from GNOME 45, but other apps are the version from GNOME 42, like the image viewer or the file manager.
You still get access to desktop layouts, which let you change how your desktop looks and feels in one click. You also get a Zorin appearance app with accent colors, dark mode, support for other themes, and a few other options to change how the interface looks and feels, but that's all stuff Zorin OS 16 already had.
As per Zorin specific changes, the default Zorin menu now gives you a search box, to find anything you want, it uses the GNOME shell search backend, so you can enable or disable providers in the settings. You also gain an "all apps" category to see everything sorted alphabetically.
Also, Zorin OS seems to default to Wayland now,
It brings back the desktop cube. It can be enabled in the Zorin appearance settings, and it's triggered as a replacement for the activities view: instead of the strip of desktops, you get the desktop cube. You can make it turn with touchpad gestures, and windows are laid out with a nice parallax effect, floating over the desktop.
The alt tab window switcher can also be replaced with a more visual, 3D version of the default, and again, it looks good, but it's not more usable: you don't see all windows as well as a basic alt tab strip of thumbnails and icons, and it makes it harder to actually get to what you're looking for, because you don't have the full list of app icons visible all at once.
Zorin OS added advanced tiling. Again, it needs to be enabled in the Zorin Appearance settings, and it gives you not only quarter tiling, but also a lot of other options. When you tile a window to a screen edge, you get a little pop-up to fill the rest of the space with another open window, and it creates tile groups, meaning that bringing one of the window to the fore will also bring the other one alongside it.
You can also turn on tiling layouts. They're not the most legible or easy to create, as you can't just place your windows how you want them, and save that as a layout, you have to enter relatively cryptic series of numbers to define the percentage of the display each zone occupies.
Under the hood, Zorin OS 17 is Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, so you're getting packages that are close to being 2 years old. It adds snap and flatpak, with flathub enabled.
Zorin uses the Linux kernel 6.2, which, ehhh well it's end of life, and has been since May 2023,
You're also stuck at the nvidia drivers 535, so not 545, the latest ones that fix a LOT of Wayland related issues, and the mesa drivers are 23.0, where 23.3 was released recently, with a lot of improvements for recent hardware.
Zorin OS also still keeps the cool things they add on the side: first you get Zorin connect, which is KDE connect and the GS Connect extension for GNOME shell. You also get an easy one click install of Wine, called Windows app support. It installs Wine, and PlayOnLinux, so you can try and run various windows executables, but both of these are super outdated.
Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton (Mail, Drive, VPN, Pass...) answered a lot of the questions you, the community, asked, in an interview that covers basically everything!
He discusses security, privacy, the origins of Proton, how they operate, Linux support, future projects, products and features, quantum computing, passkeys, and more!
🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! podcast.thelinuxexp.com
00:00 Intro 01:16 How did Proton start? 03:24 Why start with email? 06:03 What is Proton's business model? 08:34 Why set up in Switzerland? 11:33 What data do you have on customers? 14:39 How is encryption important? 18:20 Do you always need to use a VPN? 20:47 Why focus on building an ecosystem? 24:55 Is an Office Suite planned? 26:29 What differentiates Proton from competitors? 30:26 Is Proton a viable alternative to big tech services? 33:31 Why expand to more products instead of finishing existing ones? 37:19 Does the general public care about privacy? 38:45 What's next for Proton services? 40:08 What are the plans for native Linux clients? 46:03 Will ProtonVPN offer dedicated IPs to everyone? 47:46 What's the environmental impact of Proton? 49:27 Proton on F-Droid, without Google Play notifications? 52:03 Why are code repos all separated and hard to find? 53:12 Why are addresses ending in ".me" ? 54:57 When will all apps reach feature parity? 56:24 Will SMTP relay be supported? 57:47 Will Proton focus more on businesses in the future? 59:50 Why put all your eggs in one basket with just Proton services? 01:01:00 Will Proton support passkeys? 01:03:21 Does E2E matter is the recipient isn't using it? 01:04:49 Will Proton disable port forwarding in VPN? 01:06:41 Is encryption enough to make email private? 01:09:06 What protects users from a change in Proton's code licensing? 01:11:14 How does Proton protect its infrastructure? 01:13:14 Impacts of Quantum Computing on privacy and security? 01:14:24 What's the future of Proton Bridge? 01:16:25 When will Proton photos be a thing? 01:17:17 Plans for Proton Notes? 01:18:20 Will VPN support the Apple TV? 01:21:12 Support the channel
Executive Order 14287: Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens requires that the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security publish a list of states and local jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration la…
The image displays a list of counties and cities in New Mexico. The background is dark gray, and the text is white, providing a high contrast for readability. At the top, the title "New Mexico" is prominently displayed in white text on a black background. Below the title, the word "Counties" is listed, followed by a bullet-pointed list of county names, including Bernalillo County, Chaves County, Colfax County, and others, up to Taos County. The list is organized in a clear, easy-to-read format. At the bottom of the image, the word "Cities" is listed, followed by a bullet-pointed list of city names, including Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The overall layout is simple and straightforward, with a focus on providing a clear and concise list of counties and cities in New Mexico.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B
Tomorrow is the first day of pride month and to celebrate, I think it’s time to remove celebration of corporate allyship (did they ever ACTUALLY care anyway or only want our money?) and go back to the roots.
Pride is a party!
Pride is a riot!
Pride is a rejection of shame and an embracing of wholeness. 🥰
So happy early pride to everyone who isn’t performing it as a show, but is actively living and loving their full being along with that of others! 🥳
🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! podcast.thelinuxexp.com
00:00 Intro 00:37 Sponsor: 10% off your first website with Squarespace 01:35 Who are they? 03:45 Customization Options 05:10 Comparison with Framework 07:07 Design & Build Quality 08:53 Specifications 10:35 Performance & Battery life 11:51 Display, inputs, speakers, mic & webcam 13:41 Should you buy one? 14:58 Support the channel
NovaCustom is from the Netherlands, and they're specialized in laptops, you won't find desktop PCs in here. They put the focus on customization of your laptop to your exact specifications, they ship Linux out of the box, and they use coreboot.
They offer 3 years of warranty, and they guarantee spare parts availability for your device up to 7 years after your purchase.
They have 14 inches, 15 inches and 17 inches, the cheapest they have is 749€, and the most expensive goes up to 3900 euros but that's with all the options ticked
Of course, you can change the specs, but you can also add you own logo, you can change the boot logo, you can engrave the palm rest, you can pick between Windows and Linux, or you can ask them to create a dual boot.
You can choose yo use your own keyboard layout, in ANSI or ISO, change the look of the super key, change keyboard illumination, ask to completely remove the mic and webcam...
Framework goes further, since you can even replace the entire motherboard and keep the whole chassis, keyboard, panel, webcam and ports. They don't have as many models and sizes though, and until the 16 inch model releases, you're not getting any dedicated GPU options, and you're limited to 13 inches.
Novacustom is more about customization, repairability, and allowing users access to their own hardware, where Framework is more about keeping the exact same device, and making it modular, and allowing complete upgrades.
In terms of price range, Framework will be a little bit more expensive than NovaCustom for the same configurations, but they do have better panels, and newer CPU options, plus Ryzen options that Novacustom don't currently offer.
My review unit is the NS51 series, their mid range laptop. In terms of build quality, it feels very rigid, the hinge is super solid. The whole thing is pretty heavy, 1.7 kilos, and it's quite sturdy.
The only real issue I can see is the position of the power button, next to a USB port
All the spare parts are accessible for up to 7 years after your purchase, and they give you a complete service manual.
My review unit came with a core i7 1260P. In terms of I/O, on the right, you get gigabit ethernet, the ill placed power button, one USB 2 port, a micro SD card reader, and on the right, you have your barrel charger, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port, and 1 thunderbolt 4 and 1 type C 3.1 Gen 2 port. You can charge the laptop using USB C.
This laptop came with coreboot, with Dasharo firmware.
In terms of performance, the CPU gets a more than honorable 2498 in single core, and 7450 in multi core. As per battery life, this chip is relatively power efficient, it lasts for about 7 hours at mid brightness, wifi on, watching youtube videos in a loop.
Now let's look at the various things this laptop comes with. The display is 15.6 inches, 1080p, 16:9, 300 nits of brightness. It covers 98% of SRGB.
As per input, the keyboard feels pretty good to type on. They keys have good travel, they bounce back well, it doesn't feel mushy for a membrane keyboard, and it sounds pretty good. It's a good keyboard.
The touchpad is decent, it doesn't feel like glass, but it's smooth enough, large enough, and it feels precise. It did wobble a little bit and you can feel that when just using tap to click.
Now, the webcam is the usual potato quality fare, it's 720p.
The microphone is the same, it will be suitable for short video conferences, but it makes you sound distant.
And finally, the speakers, they're your average fare.
In the backstory bible for the world in which most of my stories take place, I have a thing called "The Blight". It is an agent of Oblivion and serves to bring all of reality back to absolute zero, no heat, no light, no movement, no time. It undoes creation. But I'm left unable to name its opposite. What do you call everywhere, everywhen, every thought, every color, infinitely bright and hot, teeming with immortal life? What's the opposite of a naked singularity? Ubiquity? Omnilarity? What do you call the thing that starts The Big Bang? What is the first tick of forward in time called?
I don't even know what hashtags to put on this but it's appreciate any suggestions for terms to use. I know you must pass through The Gleam to find it but The Gleam is not of it. The Gleam is the shining world while what lies beyond is blazing.
please boost, moderation meta/drama, on minors being "owned" by others (kink relationships)
Sensitive content
Okay, fedi, enough is enough with this: minors saying that they are "owned by", "property of", or "own(s)" someone, regardless of if that someone is a minor or an adult is not okay. Even if they say that in a platonic way, others can still misinterpret that as inappropriate and take action against a minor or an adult who does that.
Minors: if you have something like the examples above on your profile, you are asked to remove it.
To everyone: if you see something suggestive of a kink relationship in a minor's profile, please report it to your admins.
To admins and moderators specifically: if you learn of such behavior, follow your moderation policies to handle it as appropriate on your instance.
Laut einem UNICEF-Vertreter konnten 2024 1,7 Millionen argentinische Kinder aus der Armut befreit werden. Dabei lobt er die Milei-Regierung: Bestimmte Maßnahmen hätten die Kinderarmut zurückgedrängt.
people living in the UK. If you have the time you might want to give your feedback to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on their planned changes in light of the supreme courts idiotic ruling on gender.
The Vaccinated | Jim BreuerGood morning.Let’s start with some Jim Breuer mocking vaccinated woke vegetables. Hillarious stand-up moment with Jim Breuer!Origi...
There is an air raid alert right now. Russian drones are flying over many regions of Ukraine. It's a quiet night. All the houses are asleep. Complete silence — and in that silence, you hear a drone passing by. You instantly recognize the sound and hold your breath. I didn’t get much sleep last night...
Started streaming on May 26, 2025 #economictimes #latestnews #ET On May 21, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a crucial hearing titled "The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines." Top medical experts and legal ...
On May 21, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a crucial hearing titled "The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: H...
voices testified, including Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Jordan Vaughn, Dr. James Thorp, Dr. Joel Wallskog, Attorney Aaron Siri and Hawaii Governor Josh Green. Dr. McCullough presented findings from a large autopsy series, stating that in 73.9% of examined post-vaccine deaths, mRNA COVID vaccines were considered the likely cause—a claim that has sparked intense debate in the medical community.
I need a big favor. My friend @Aseelsehwel lives in Gaza, & she & her brother are currently trying to raise money to feed their family, care for their father who is suffering from kidney complications, & eventually leave Gaza for Egypt. They are a family of 6 & it looks like their estimated costs to cover everything would be $50,000.00. So far they are at $30,360.00, can we try to get them over the finish line? Here is a link to their GoFundMe:
Hello everybody, We are Munther Sahweel, we are here to ask you urgent as… Mariam Shwel needs your support for Help Sehwel Family with their Medical treatment
Democrats are spending some $20 million dollars to figure out how to connect with young men. So, they commissioned a study called “Speaking With American Men: A Strategic Plan.”
@UptownGirl Perhaps because your whole platform is based upon fear, fear, and more fear. Covid is going to get you, the Earth is going to overheat, etc.
🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! podcast.thelinuxexp.com
00:00 Intro 00:38 Sponsor: Check out TuxCare's newsletter for news about Linux security 01:24 Debian 12 Stable 02:17 Not completely FOSS anymore 04:24 Desktops: not that outdated 09:16 Apps and packages 11:14 Who it's NOT for 13:02 Debian 12 is a great desktop 14:33 Sponsor: Get a PC that runs Linux perfectly 15:25 Support the channel
KDE Plasma 5.27 video: GNOME 43 video: GNOME 44 video:
So, to begin with, Debian 12 moves away from its pure "FOSS" roots. Debian 12 now enables the non-free firmware repo by default IF Debian detects you'll need it on your computer. Just know it's possible to disable this during the boot process.
Debian 12 actually splits non free software into 2 different repos: non-free, which is for packages and apps that don't conform to Debian's guidelines on free and open source software, and non free firmware, which is the same thing, but specifically for drivers and firmware.
Debian isn't generally known for shipping the very latest and greatest desktop environments, but Debian 12 isn't far off. For Plasma users, you get the very latest, KDE 5.27, with all its bug fixes and updates, which means you're not missing out on anything.
If you were using Debian 11, you were using KDE 5.20, so you're jumping a full 7 versions ahead, which means your experience will be drastically better, whatever your use case.
If you're a GNOME user, you'll get GNOME 43, which isn't the latest, but GNOME 44 wasn't a huge update by any means. If you were using Debian 11, you were on GNOME 3.38, which means you'll get a whole 4 new versions worth of features, support, performance improvements.
Of course, Debian 12 also updates virtually every single package and app they ship. You get the LTS kernel version 6.1, and you get the Mesa drivers 22.3, and the nvidia drivers 525.
All in all, 67% of packages were updated from Debian 11, and the repos now include 11000 new packages as well, for a total of more than 64 000.
Of course, Debian 12 isn't a desktop for everyone. If your use case is "I like using the very latest thing", then obviously, it's not for you. If you want the most beginner friendly distro, while Debian isn't a bad choice; it's also not the easiest. If you want to game on Linux, Debian will also not be your first choice.
In the past, I would never have recommended Debian Stable as a desktop for most users. It was too old, too outdated, the older applications in its repos were just not a great experience, and Flatpak wasn't super well supported. Older desktop environments were also lackluster, as each new release brought some crucial improvements that you really couldn't do without.
With the maturity of formats like Flatpak, snaps or AppImages, you don't have to care about what versions of apps are in your repos. If you need something newer, you can get it, without adding a third party repo that might mess up your system's dependencies and shared libraries.
And desktop environments on Linux are now very mature, which means using a 6 month to 2 year old desktop isn't a dealbreaker anymore.
And of course, Debian stable won't be for everyone. Tinkerers, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and people who like to game won't find what they want in Debian 12. But for anyone who just wants a computer that works reliably, day after day, without failed updates or stuff that randomly breaks, Debian 12 is an obvious choice. In terms of combining stability, software availability, and now, hardware support, nothing comes close.
James Clavell (born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell; 10 Oct 1921[1][2] – 7 September 1994) was an Australian-born, British-raised and educated, naturalized-American writer, screenwriter, director, and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known for his Asian Saga novels, a ...
The Children's Story by James ClavellThis is the best available copy now known to be available.It was professionally scanned from the film.It can be viewed a...
number of which have had television adaptations. Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly (1958), based on the short story by George Langelaan, and The Great Escape (1963), based on the personal account of Paul Brickhill. He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love, for which he also wrote the script.
Mr. Clavell called me personally to thank me for highlighting his short story "The Children's Story" in a national parents' rights newsletter that I helped write & edit that was mailed to politicians & parents nationwide.
Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's internet—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He began by noting that he is known for coining the term "enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by talking about nursing. A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that ""bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'"". The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to ""play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced"".
In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. ""Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying."" That is horrific on many levels, he said, but ""it is emblematic of 'enshittification'"", which is one of the reasons he highlighted it. Platform decay
Enshittification is a three-stage process; he used Google to illustrate the idea. At first, Google minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering to produce a great search engine; while it was doing that, however, it was buying its way to dominance. ""They bribed every service, every product that had a search box to make sure that that was a Google search box."" No matter which browser, phone carrier, or operating system you were using, Google ensured that you were using its search by default; by the early 2020s, it was spending the equivalent of buying a Twitter every 18 months to do so, he said. That is the first stage of the process: when the provider is being good to its users, but is finding ways to lock them in.
[Cory Doctorow]
The second phase occurs once the company recognizes that it has users locked in, so it will be difficult for them to switch away, and it shifts to making things worse for its users in order to enrich its business customers. For Google, those are the publishers and advertisers. A growing portion of the search results page is shifted over to ads ""marked off with ever-subtler, ever-smaller, ever-grayer labels distinguishing them from the organic search results"". While the platform is getting better for business customers—at the expense of the users—those customers are also getting locked in.
Phase three of enshittification is when the value of the platform is clawed back until all that is left is kind of a ""homeopathic residue—the least value needed to keep both business customers and end users locked to the platform"". We have gained a view into this process from the three monopoly cases that Google has lost over the last 18 months. In 2019, the company had 90% of the world's search traffic and its users were loyal; ""everyone who searched on Google, searched everything on Google"".
But that meant that Google's search growth had plateaued, so how was the company going to be able to grow? It could ""raise a billion humans to adulthood and make them Google customers, which is Google Classroom, but that's a slow process"". From the internal memos that came to light from the court cases, we can see what the company chose to do, he said: ""they made search worse"".
The accuracy of the search results was reduced, which meant that users needed to do two or three queries to the get the results they would have seen on the first page. That increased the number of ads that could be shown, which is obviously bad for searchers, but the company was also attacking its business customers at the same time. For example, ""Google entered into an illegal, collusive arrangement with Meta, called Jedi Blue"" that ""gamed the advertising market"" so that publishers got paid less and advertisers had to pay more, he said.
So that's how we have ended up at the Google of today, where the top of the search results page is ""a mountain of AI slop"", followed by five paid results ""marked with the word 'Ad' in eight point, 90% gray-on-white type"", ending with ""ten spammy SEO [search-engine optimization] links from someone else who's figured out how to game Google"". The amazing thing is ""that we are still using Google because we're locked into it"". It is a perfect example of the result of the ""tragedy in three acts"" that is enshittification. Twiddling
The underlying technical means that allows this enshittification is something he calls "twiddling". Because the companies run their apps on computers, they can change a nearly infinite number of knobs to potentially alter ""the prices, the cost, the search rankings, the recommendations"" each time the platform is visited. Going back to the nursing example, ""that's just twiddling, it's something you can only do with computers"".
Legal scholar Veena Dubal coined the term "algorithmic wage discrimination" to describe this kind of twiddling for the "gig economy", which is ""a major locus for enshittification""; the nursing apps, Uber, and others are examples of that economy. ""Gig work is that place where your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not allowed to call yourself an employee.""
Uber invented a particular form of algorithmic wage discrimination; if its drivers are picky about which rides they accept, Uber will slowly raise the rates to entice those drivers—until they start accepting rides. Once a driver does accept a ride, ""the wage starts to push down and down at random intervals in increments that are too small for human beings to readily notice"". It is not really ""boiling the frog"", Doctorow said, so much as it is ""slowly poaching it"".
As anyone with a technical background knows, ""any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation"". This kind of ""wage theft"" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers. This kind of thing is not just bad for nurses, he said, its bad for those who are using their services.
Do you really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase their desperation so that they'll accept ever-lower wages, is going to result in us getting the best care when we see a nurse? Do you really want your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps who drove an Uber until midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so that they could pay the rent?
Paying and products
It is misguided to say ""if you're not paying for the product, you're the product"", because it makes it seem like we are complicit in sustaining surveillance capitalism—and we are not. The thinking goes that if we were only willing to start paying for things, ""we could restore capitalism to its functional non-surveillance state and companies would treat us better because we'd be customers and not products"". That thinking elevates companies like Apple as ""virtuous alternatives"" because the company charges money and not attention, so it can focus on improving the experience for its customers.
There is a small sliver of truth there, he said; Apple rolled out a feature on its phones that allowed users to opt-out of third-party surveillance—notably Facebook tracking. 96% of users opted out, he said; the other 4% ""were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees"".
So that makes it seem like Apple will not treat its customers as products, but at the same time it added the opt-out, the company secretly started gathering exactly the same information for its ""own surveillance advertising network"". There was no notice given to users and no way to opt out of that surveillance; when journalists discovered it and published their findings, Apple ""lied about it"". The ""$1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for"", but that does not stop Apple from ""treating you like the product"".
It is not just end users that Apple treats like products; the app vendors are also treated that way with 30% fees for payment processing in the App Store. That's what is happening with gig-app nurses: ""the nurses are the product, the patients are the product, the hospitals are the product—in enshittification, the product is anyone you can productize"".
While it is tempting to blame tech, Doctorow said, these companies did not start out enshittified. He recounted the ""magic"" when Google debuted; ""you could ask Jeeves questions for a thousand years and still not get an answer as crisp, as useful, as helpful as the answer you would get by typing a few vague keywords"" into Google. Those companies spent decades producing great products, which is why people switched to Google, bought iPhones, and joined their friends on Facebook. They were all born digital, thus could have enshittified at any time, ""but they didn't, until they did, and then they did it all at once"".
He believes that changes to the policy environment is what has led to enshittification, not changes in technology. These changes to the rules of the game were ""undertaken in living memory by named parties who were warned at the time of the likely outcomes""—and did it anyway. Those people are now extremely rich and respected; they have ""faced no consequences, no accountability for their role in ushering in the Enshittocene"". We have created a perfect breeding ground for the worst practices in our society, which allowed them to thrive and dominate decision-making for companies and governments ""leading to a vast enshittening of everything"".
That is a dismal outlook, he said, but there is a bit of good news hidden in there. This change did not come about because of a new kind of evil person or the weight of history, but rather because of specific policy choices that were made—and can be unmade. We can consign the enshitternet to the scrap heap as simply ""a transitional state from the old good internet that we used to have and the new good internet that we could have"".
All companies want to maximize profits and the equation to do so is simple: charge as much as you can, pay suppliers and workers as little as you can, and spend the smallest amount possible on quality and safety. The theoretically "perfect" company that charges infinity and spends nothing fails because no one wants to work for it—or buy anything from it. That shows that there are external constraints that tend to tamp down the ""impulse to charge infinity and deliver nothing"". Four constraints
In technology, there are four constraints that help make companies better; they help push back against the impulse to enshittify. The first is markets; businesses that charge more and deliver less lose customers, all else being equal. This is the bedrock idea behind capitalism and it is also the basis of antitrust law, but the rules on antitrust have changed since the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890. More than forty years ago, during the Reagan administration in the US, the interpretation of what it means to be a monopoly was changed, not just in US, but also with its major trading partners in the UK, EU, and Asia.
Under this interpretation, monopolies are assumed to be efficient; if Google has 90% of the market, it means that it deserves to be there because no one can possibly do search any better. No competitor has arisen because there is no room to improve on what Google is doing. This pro-monopoly stance did exactly what might be expected, he said, it gave us more monopolies: ""in pharma, in beer, in glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling"", he said to laughter.
Markets do not constrain technology firms because those firms do not compete with their rivals—they simply buy their rivals instead. That is confirmed by a memo from Mark Zuckerberg—""a man who puts all of his dumbest ideas in writing""—who wrote: ""It is better to buy than to compete"". Even though that anti-competitive behavior came to light before Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram in order to ensure that users switching would still be part of Facebook the platform, the Obama administration permitted the sale. Every government over the past 40 years, of all political stripes, has treated monopolies as efficient, Doctorow said.
Regulation is also a constraint, unless the regulators have already been captured by the industry they are supposed to oversee. There are several examples of regulatory capture in the nursing saga, but the most egregious is that anyone in the US can obtain financial information on anyone else in the country, simply by contacting a data broker. ""This is because the US congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988."" The Video Privacy Protection Act was aimed at stopping video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS video titles were purchased or rented, but no protections have been added since then.
The reason congress has not addressed privacy legislation ""since Die Hard was in its first run in theaters"" is neither a coincidence nor an oversight, he said. It is ""expensively purchased inaction"" by an industry that has ""monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale"". The coalition in favor of freezing privacy law keeps growing because there are so many ways to ""transmute the systematic invasion of our privacy into cash"".
Tech companies are not being constrained by either markets or governments, but there are two other factors that could serve to tamp down ""the reproduction of sociopathic, enshittifying monsters"" within these companies. The first is interoperability; in the non-digital world, it is a lot of work to, say, ensure that any light bulb can be used with any light socket. In the digital world, all of our programs run on the same ""Turing-complete, universal Von Neumann machine"", so a program that breaks interoperability can be undone with a program that restores it. Every ten-foot fence can be surmounted with an 11-foot ladder; if HP writes a program to ensure that third-party ink cannot be used with its printers, someone can write a program to undo that restriction.
DoorDash workers generally make their money on tips, but the app hides the amount of the tip until the driver commits to taking the delivery. A company called Para wrote a program that looked inside the JSON that was exchanged to find the tip, which it then displayed before the driver had to commit. DoorDash shut down the Para app, ""because in America, apps like Para are illegal"". The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) signed by Bill Clinton ""makes it a felony to 'bypass an access control for a copyrighted work'"". So even just reverse-engineering the DoorDash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperate to move their users to apps instead of web sites. ""An app is just a web site that we have wrapped in a correct DRM [digital rights management] to make it a felony to protect your privacy while you use it"", he said to widespread applause.
At the behest of the US trade representative, Europe and Canada have also enacted DMCA-like laws. This happened despite experts warning the leaders of those countries that ""laws that banned tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets in their countries"". The laws were a gift to monopolists and allowed companies like HP to continually raise the price of ink until it ""has become the most expensive substance you, as a civilian, can buy without a permit""; printing a shopping list uses ""colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky-Derby-winning stallion"".
The final constraint, which did hold back platform decay for quite some time, is labor. Tech workers have historically been respected and well-paid, without unions. The power of tech workers did not come from solidarity, but from scarcity, Doctorow said. The minute bosses ordered tech workers to enshittify the product they were loyally working on, perhaps missing various important social and family events to ship it on time, those workers could say no—perhaps in a much more coarse way. Tech workers could simply walk across the street ""and have a new job by the end of the day"" if the boss persisted.
So labor held off enshittification after competition, regulation, and interoperability were all systematically undermined and did so for quite some time—until the mass tech layoffs. There have been half a million tech workers laid off since 2023, more are announced regularly, sometimes in conjunction with raises for executive salaries and bonuses. Now, workers cannot turn their bosses down because there are ten others out there just waiting to take their job. Reversing course
Until we fix the environment we find ourselves in, the contagion will spread to other companies, he said. The good news is that after 40 years of antitrust decline, there has been a lot of worldwide antitrust activity and it is coming from all over the political spectrum. The EU, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, ""and China, yes, China"" have passed new antitrust laws and launched enforcement actions. The countries often collaborate, so a UK study on Apple's 30% payment-processing fee was used by the EU to fine the company for billions of euros and ban Apple's payment monopoly; those cases then found their way to Japan and South Korea where Apple was further punished.
""There are no billionaires funding the project to make billionaires obsolete"", Doctorow said, so the antitrust work has come from and been funded by grassroots efforts.
Europe and Canada have passed strong right-to-repair legislation, but those efforts ""have been hamstrung by the anti-circumvention laws"" (like the DMCA). Those laws can only be used if there are no locks to get around, but the manufacturers ensure that every car, tractor, appliance, medical implant, and hospital medical device has locks to prevent repair. That raises the question of why these countries don't repeal their versions of the DMCA.
The answer is tariffs, it seems. The US trade representative has long threatened countries with tariffs if they did not have such a law on their books. ""Happy 'Liberation Day' everyone"", he said with a smile, which resulted in laughter, cheering, and applause. The response of most countries when faced with the US tariffs (or threats thereof) has been to impose retaliatory tariffs, making US products more expensive for their citizens, which is a weird way to punish Americans. ""It's like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping someone else says 'ouch'.""
What would be better is for the countries to break the monopolies of the US tech giants by making it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak, and modify American products and services. Let companies jailbreak Teslas and deliver all of the features that ship in the cars, but are disabled by software, for one price; that is a much better way to hurt Elon Musk, rather than by expressing outrage at his Nazi salutes, since he loves the attention. ""Kick him in the dongle.""
Or, let a Canadian company set up an App Store that only charges 3% for payment processing, which will give any content producer an immediate 25% raise, so publishers will flock to it. The same could be done for car and tractor diagnostic devices and more. ""Any country in the world has it right now in their power to become a tech-export powerhouse."" Doing so would directly attack the tech giants in their most profitable lines of business: ""it takes the revenues from those rip-off scams globally from hundreds of billions of dollars to zero overnight"". And ""that is how you win a trade war"", he said to more applause.
He finished with a veritable laundry list of all of the ills facing the world today (the ""omni-shambolic poly-crisis""), both on and off the internet, and noted that the tech giants would willingly ""trade a habitable planet and human rights for a 3% tax cut"". But it did not have to be this way, ""the enshitternet was not inevitable"" and was, in fact, the product of policy choices made by known people in the last few decades. ""They chose enshittification; we warned them what would come of it and we don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of clueless lawmakers of old.""
There once was an ""old good internet"", Doctorow said, but it was too difficult for non-technical people to connect up to; web 2.0 changed that, making it easy for everyone to get online, but that led directly into hard-to-escape walled gardens. A new good internet is possible and needed; ""we can build it with all of the technological self-determination of the old good internet and the ease of web 2.0"". It can be a place to come together and organize in order to ""resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide, and authoritarianism"". He concluded: ""we can build it and we must"".
His speech was well-received and was met with a standing ovation. Some of his harshest rhetoric (much of which was toned down here) may not have been popular with everyone, perhaps especially the PyCon sponsors who were named and shamed in the keynote, but it did seem to resonate within the crowd of attendees. Doctorow's perspective is always interesting—and he certainly pulls no punches.
La maire de Strasbourg, Jeanne Barseghian, a réagi aux critiques émises après l'annonce d'un jumelage avec le camp de réfugiés palestiniens d'Aïda. Elle assume porter "un message politique nécessaire alors qu'on est face...
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Si a las muy excelentes personas de Mastodon les apetece pasar a saludar a esta escritora durante la Feria del libro de Madrid, aquí les dejo cartelito con horarios, fechas y casetas. Sigan con su día.
ICE and police in San Diego deployed flash bang grenades against community members who surrounded them and blocked ICE vans, when they attempted to arrest several workers at an Italian restaurant.
From Pedro Rios on BlueSky:
"ICE discharged 3 flash-bang grenades. The people, even more determined, then pushed ICE agents out of their neighborhood with anti-fascist slogans forcing them to retreat. This is the way it should be everywhere."
From a report:
"A large crowd began to gather and witnessed one individual being placed into a federal vehicle. Cody said agents then started taking people out through the back of the restaurant to avoid the crowd.
The crowd surrounded the agents, yelling profanities and calling them fascists. Many people recorded the agents and the license plates of their vehicles.
At one point, a group blocked an unmarked vehicle carrying agents from leaving the intersection at 30th and Beech Streets. After activating the sirens multiple times without success, agents used what appeared to be a smoke device to disperse the crowd."
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made arrests Friday afternoon at Buona Forchetta, an Italian restaurant in the South Park neighborhood of San Diego.
Every time I read a mozilla product blogpost I get more convinced that whoever is writing them has left earth long ago and is writing them from an increasingly distant part of the universe that bends all communication into the register of a maniacal product manager, and the only way they have of signaling something has gone wrong with their shuttle is by heightening the self-evident contradictions between the self praise and the content of the blog posts they are indentured to write blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/bu…
Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which their data will be permanently deleted. [...]
Meanwhile, new features like Tab Groups and enhanced bookmarks now provide built-in ways to manage reading lists easily. [...]
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way. We’ll continue to build a browser that works harder for you: more personal, more powerful and still proudly independent.
"We are stopping the thing that lets you make and share curated collections of offline pages with a little algorithmic affinity recommendation overlay because people don't want to manage reading lists and want to only have algorithmic recommendations.
Don't worry we basically fully replaced them with bookmarks (??) and a different tab orientation (??) because people still want to manage reading lists (??). But you can't actually import your pocket export to those things, and since they don't actually replace them we won't just move your data to them and will just delete it in a few months.
In conclusion, this is why pivoting to focus on the same gimmicks everyone else is focusing on and transitioning your personalized collections to generic AI slop reflects our being the most independent organization ever (???) Which lets us prioritize personalization (????)"
excuse me can you repeat that? blink twice if you need someone to come get you
Having seen a bunch of writing on social media from ppl there and read a bunch of these blog posts, the corporate culture must be absolutely wild to allow this kind of completely 180 degree opposition between the choices they are making and internal heroism myths vs. the entire reason why the tiny tiny fraction of browser-using people use Firefox do so and literally everything that mozilla itself is saying about its values.
And like if it was just a normal for-profit corporation I wouldn't blink twice, I am aware of the need for diversification since their major source of revenue could potentially get cut down to $0 pretty soon, but a lot of this is just a total self own and a totally mystifying one. There was an obvious route and they decided to throw it into reverse and drive through the garage door instead.
I'm actually not sure of a bigger example in tech of burning all your goodwill for almost no reason like this. Usually it's because companies get bought or something, but mozilla just decided instead of "we have a ton of dedicated people who understand the importance of the thing, so let's do a wikipedia and really obnoxiously remind people we need them to pay for browser development while keeping their trust by not doing the bullshit that causes people to want to use our thing" that it would be better to just completely lose the plot and lean into the thing people were running from because they got high on their own patronizing supply of "we know better, ads are good, ai is good, our entire userbase that is yelling what the fuck at us is just a vocal minority... of itself..."
I wouldn't say I know a ton of people, but I know enough, and none of them use Firefox unless they are a privacy wingnut or otherwise have some specific reason to hate Google and Apple. It just isn't a better piece of software than Chrome, it can't be and never will be, Google has infinity dollars, it competed on a different axis and that was fine for the people the use it because privacy is more important than perf or ux. The 2% of browser share that use Firefox are those privacy Wingnuts.
The one moz employee that frequently wanders into these threads once promised to show us the user research that is informing them and making them think "people who use Firefox are fine with ads, love them, don't mind having surprise advertising tech running in the browser that explicitly tells them it won't do that, and are apparently now clambering for more AI in their browser" and I suspect we probably won't. There just is no way that someone who thinks that the series of bad calls Firefox has made recently are actually fine would use Firefox.
And it was always impossible to compete technically on browser development bc of the amount of labor involved and the very adversarial nature of web standards.... but man you're pivoting to trying to compete on "AI"? The extremely capital intensive, every tech giant is betting the whole farm, running at a loss, spent a decade recruiting top talent, pay 10x what you can.... That "AI?" Just comically bad calls. Maybe I would be more sympathetic if they explained the strategy instead of just saying "we're doing what's best for the web now shut up and eat your poison"
I'm not defending their AI strategy but I don't think it's *that “AI”*. Examples of the AI they invest in is local in-browser translation and fake review detection. It’s more of a "traditional" ML rather than fancy LLM.
There also was text-to-speech model done in collab with Mozilla (with fully available and open voice samples data set) but I don't know if it was ever even intended to be used in the browser.
I actually use their translation extension (which uses their translation model). I also use Google Translate extension. Google Translate outright refuses to translate some bits of text (5-10%) while Mozilla's extension translates everything. GT is a tiny bit better when it works but it's extremely frustrating when it doesn’t. Consistency of Mozilla's translation is much more preferable to me. I'd even go as far as saying it's good AI.
well, LIbrewolf seems a better choice. Even then, you will be owned by 52/8 54/8 34/8 and 35/8 netblocks from Amazon and Google unless you get rid of push, ping, shopping the control addresses and a few other things. You see, they put a lot of work into this, mainly out of self interest. It's not for you.
If you're online, they will try to stop you from changing or even scrolling down to certain things in about.config
They infiltrate everything. keep on eye on that pile of underwear.
I've moved to privacy-focused Firefox forks (Librewolf on desktop and IronFox on mobile), precisely because I was still a Firefox user (ie someone who'll favor privacy and absence of ads over performance and UX) when I made the switch.
this is the one part I disagree with. A shitton of stuff goes into a browser, but I'm pretty sure for >90% of users it would not make a difference whatsoever if they're using Chrome or Firefox. The differences between modern browsers are honestly so minimal, no average person is going to notice. Privacy? A few odd extensions? RAM usage? I'd argue that the only people who notice *any difference at all* are people on a similar level of technological expertise as us "privacy wingnuts"
Sad but true. The best thing in Firefox is that it's not owned by Google, so Google's advertisement business interest can't interfere with the direction of browser development (other than default search engine settings), unlike Chrome's removing MV2, adding privacy sandboxes and such. Other than that, Chrome is marginally better in case of security and performance. If (can I still use "if" here?) Mozilla abandon all its principles and went down the Google way... what's the point in using Firefox?
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
It probably won't take too much skill to scrap the cruft off with a fork, install ublock origin and use the basic features of the browser. No I do not want to save anything to the Amazon cloud, though Mozilla will push you there and what they hell is it with the 34.0.0.0/8 DDOS when I try to turn off your SPY TOOLS??? @mozilla
@mozilla #Google employees "volunteer" their time to work on #Firefox, and make it there own. Even when you are using it on your desktop. Do you wonder why people say #FuckGoogle? Look at these Google addresses, when I launch my browser on my computer at home. Fuck #Google Anyone who offers an excuse for this will be blocked. There is none, and this a mild example.
"Hey PR person, here is the list of all the unrelated things the engineering teams delivered this month. Please write a blog post that makes it look like they are related somehow"
funny that they say "more ai" features as the previous two aren't using AI? And if they had a specific idea for a feature in mind they probably wouldn't be so vague. They have no idea for a good AI feature. Thats so desperate
Indeed. That kind of speech, at the limit of the nonsense, which frequently comes out of some chief-of-whatever-executive, and only contains two elements: something practical, real (like "were closing this"), with present consequences that everyone clearly understand ("you're fired now"); and a large amount of fuzzy rationale, vaguely related to abstract, remote "values", "better future", "building" and "deep" and "commitment" that no-one can honestly attach to what is being done/said.
Mozilla is trapped between a rock and a hard place, they are convinced in the future the browser it's only going to act as a gateway between AI chatbots and their users, so they have to position themselves as an "ethical AI" company, while still being a browser company, the one piece of software they are convinced is not going to survive the ai slop era. You can smell the neurotic desperation out of posts like this
"Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build." Says the company financed by Google as a fucking figleaf
@alxd Oh, yeah, Mozilla has been the realm of the ego-driven narcissists and the unhinged product designers for like a decade now. It's why they've shown no significant progress toward making the things they known for (browsers, and web dev tools for those browsers) better, and have lost the massive community that used to work for free toward making those things better.
Children Of The Sun by Billy Thorpe. Sandman368-Made-This-Video! *BEST CHILDREN OF THE SUN VIDEO ON YouTube! Children Of The Sun Music Video. Exclusive Vi...
@cs The failed assumption here is just because there aren't laws against doing evil things for no particularly good reason, poisoning ones customers would not be profitable to the bar tender, that people will do them, and conversely that laws will stop them, both of these assumptions are demonstrably wrong.
Genuine question here for Linux users and musicians, composers, guitar players etc. I am being told by several mouthy people online that "nobody uses linux" & "nobody would use linux for music making"
How many of you use or have used Linux as a vehicle for recording music?
I'm the original/lead dev of Ardour, an open-source/libre cross-platform DAW that runs on Linux, Windows and macOS. People can get our software prebuilt from us for all 3 platforms; for Linux, they can get it from their distro; or they can self-build.
We get pingbacks from the builds we supply, which is likely around 50% of all the Linux users of Ardour.
We have as many Linux users by this metric as we do Windows users.
Shocking new clinical trial data has revealed that the new Bill Gates-funded self-amplifying "replicon" Covid mRNA "vaccines" cause severe blood abnormalities in almost all recipients.
An internal memo from the Diocese of Charlotte in North Carolina was recently leaked, revealing a calculated strategy to silence Catholics who raise concerns over the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
If you want to grow in and around society. Stop fighting the small piece of shit things.... GO FOR THE HEAD, OR GO FOR THE MAIN THINKING PART OF THE SOCIETY OR THE BODY... tHEN FIGHT THE HEAD AND NOT THE BODY PARTS....
@salelouis I have to cats and the behavior I've observed is they are not selective about their prey, if they can kill it they will, they may or may not eat it depending upon how hungry they are. My second observation about cats is that a cat is a cat is a cat, regardless of size.
![Still image. Social media post.
Me as a teen rebel:
This system sucks and is pointlessly cruel
Me now:
This system sucks and is pointlessly cruel [footnotes 1, 4, 11]](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/7388777 "Still image. Social media post.
Me as a teen rebel:
This system sucks and is pointlessly cruel
Me now:
This system sucks and is pointlessly cruel [footnotes 1, 4, 11]")
RoseThistle
in reply to RoseThistle • • •Forbes Magazine: 05/13/2025
"Faith Meets AI And Tech In Vatican’s Bold Move Under Pope Leo XIV"
forbes.com/sites/torconstantin…
Faith Meets AI And Tech In Vatican’s Bold Move Under Pope Leo XIV
ForbesRose
in reply to RoseThistle • • •