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!
Kringel-Kultur ist einfach nur Diskriminierung von Leuten die etwas "anders" sind (oder einfach nur "nicht männlich"), im etwas weniger deutlich reaktionärem Gewand.
Hättest du das gleiche geschrieben, wenn es ein Junge mit einer Fußballverein-Party gewesen wäre?
The Gemma 3n model has been fully released, building on the success of previous Gemma models and bringing advanced on-device multimodal capabilities to edge devices with unprecedented performance.
Cannabis use prevalence is actually kind of low in the Netherlands, many european countries where it's illegal have higher prevalences. Turns out, legalizing cannabis doesn't turn everyone into a stoner.
In a poignant speech, John Mahama strongly criticized the colonial abuses perpetrated by Europe and called for restorative justice for Africa. Following
Islamic doctrine does not merely limit women's rights—it annihilates their sense of self-worth from the very beginning. The Quranic Sura 2:282: "A woman's testimony is worth half a man's," and Sura 4:34: "Men are in charge of women... and if they disobey, beat them," are not just verses; they are the foundation of a system built on the dehumanization of women. Girls are taught from their earliest years that they are inherently worth less than men. In court, their testimony is diminished; in marriage, their obedience is mandatory; in society, their rebellion is met with sanctioned violence. Even in Islamic communities in the West, forced and arranged marriages—often between first cousins—result in severe health issues like congenital disabilities while also sustaining a culture of honor killings, child marriage, and the systematic imprisonment of women within their own homes.
The most insidious aspect of this oppression is that it breeds its callous enforcers. Women do not simply endure this system—they uphold it, enforce it, and ensure that it perpetuates. Mothers force their daughters under the hijab before they can even understand their choice. They pressure their sons to dominate their wives, training them from childhood to be emotionally detached tyrants. Older women, robbed of autonomy their entire lives, redirect their frustration by policing younger women's sexuality. Mothers-in-law establish their dominance in the household by abusing their daughters-in-law, a cycle of cruelty passed down like a curse.
And yet, many of these women who have been conditioned to defend their oppression flee to the West, not for freedom but for security, economic stability, and the benefits of a civilization built by the values they despise. They arrive, settle in isolated parallel societies, and refuse to integrate, carrying their submission like a family heirloom. They raise their sons with the same entitlement and their daughters with the same chains, forcing their little girls into hijabs in countries where child veiling should be considered abuse. They demand the West accommodate their imported gender apartheid and cry "Islamophobia" when faced with even the slightest pushback.
we have an indoor water park in Pennsylvania and it’s not far from NYC, the young girls wear a one piece swimsuit that integrates a head covering. It’s bizarre.
The abhorrent prime minister of #Canada #MarkCarney (or Mark Carnage) had the audacity to say that he was supportive of working on "a path towards establishing a 'Zionist' Palestinian state"!!! 🤯
A "Zionist" Palestinian state?!!! He wants a state for Palestinians who put the interests of those who inflicted unimaginable suffering onto them on top of their own interests!
Mark Carney is without a doubt a Netanyahu slave, a foreign agent, "if you will".
Canada’s most prominent Muslim advocacy organization is demanding Prime Minister Mark Carney apologize after comments he made during an interview with Christ...
It's as nonsensical and as offensive as saying "let's establish a white-supremacist state for the indigenous people of America alongside the US" or "a Nazi state for the Jews alongside Nazi Germany".
Recently Mark Carney said Canada would only accept a “Zionist Palestinian state”.
As Craig Mokhiber noted in response to your comment, “calling for a ‘Zionist Palestinian state’ is like calling for a ‘Nicotine-based cure for cancer’ or a ‘Ku klux…
"The mental contortions these Western leaders put themselves through on behalf of the Israeli regime is remarkable. Calling for a “Zionist Palestinian state” is like calling for a “Nicotine-based cure for cancer” or a “Ku klux klan civil rights bill.” No to cancer, no to Klan, no to #Zionism, and no to #Carney."
Neofeud is a Dystopic Cyberpunk adventure game in the vein of Blade Runner, but with an overlay of Game of Thrones-like political intrigue, and 1366x768, hand-painted, stylized visuals.
"No exaggeration, the best Point & Click game I've played. ...a cyberpunk dystopia ruled by corporate feudalism... I loved it from the very beginning to the final credits." --Neofeud Reviewer #indiegame #indiedev #retrogamestore.steampowered.com/app/673…
Neofeud is a Dystopic Cyberpunk adventure game in the vein of Blade Runner, but with an overlay of Game of Thrones-like political intrigue, and 1366x768, hand-painted, stylized visuals.
Yesterday afternoon we wired in Wrack’s new electronic self-steering gear.
In keeping with a late 20th century tradition among seafarers we’ve given it a name: ‘womack’, after the sci-fi writer (and longtime social media friend) Jack Womack.
People who don't admit they have hearing loss are annoying. No, I'm not talking quietly - everyone else can hear me. Get your ears checked, pick up your hearing aid, and stop saying "what? what?"
And certainly don't suggest we go someplace noisy to continue the conversation.
Should probably get your eyes checked while you are at it. Those are probably not at their peak either.
#Amazon management ignores summons to #EuropeanParliament. “If an Amazon worker would have behaved this way towards Amazon management, they would have already been fired three times over.”
Originally published by Unity News Network ‘Events, dear boy, events’. So said British prime minister Harold Macmillan on the fallibility of leaders due to unanticipated, uncontrollable factors. ‘S…
Irish government more committed than ever to advancing the interests of the global monopoly corporations and international financial institutions. communistparty.ie/en/2025/06/i…
The British government is planning to ban the activist group Palestine Action and designate it as a terrorist organization, following their actions at a Royal Air Force base where they sprayed two jets with red paint.
This move has been criticized by various human rights organizations and political figures, who argue it's an attempt to suppress civil liberties and hide the UK's accountability in the Gaza conflict.
Se avecina un grave revés para la ley brasileña sobre responsabilidad de intermediarios y su impacto en el contenido de usuarios. Lee más sobre lo que ha decidido la Corte hasta ahora y las salvaguardas mínimas que debería considerar: eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/majo…
One customer was charged $440 for a scuff on his rental's wheel. But talking to a human employee about it wasn't easy, and he was encouraged to pay ASAP.
We've seen 20 months of genocide in #Gaza, and along those 20 months we have seen the international institutions do shit. The highest court in the world, the #ICJ, hasn't done anything to stop it. The #ICC ruled a detention order against Netanyahu and he's walking free as if nothing. The UN security Council has seen, literally, more vetoes than resolutions on Gaza.
The only exceptions being #Yemen and other, non-State actors (Hezbollah, etc.) ( #Iran has a very strong pro Palestine policy, but it didn't enter the war with Israel over it, but over being directly attacked by the entity).
We should draw conclusions from this. We should reflect on what it means that the international institutions and the world's States can't or won't 'do anything.
What does that mean. If institutions won't act, who needs to do it, and how.
For me the answer is very clearly that we need direct action, no representative or professional activist or what have you can do what we need to do DIRECTLY, by our own (collective) hands. And secondly, that if these governments and institutions don't act in our behalf, if they are the tools that carry out the genocide and the damage control over the genocide, then we need to get rid of them. Those institutions should not exist.
End the deficit in five minutes.” It’s simple, here’s the deal: you pass a law that says whenever the deficit goes over 3% of GDP, bam, every sitting member of Congress can’t run for re-election. No detours, no BS. You spend too much, you’re out.
In a watershed moment in the fight to hold corporations accountable for complicity in Israel’s war crimes, A.P. Møller Maersk has become the first global shipping company to halt the transport of goods to and from Israeli settlements.
Hospitals in the Gaza Strip received 79 martyrs (including 5 rescued dead) and 391 injuries in the past 24 hours, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.The ministry added in its daily statistical report on the number of m
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
A USA TODAY BESTSELLERWinner of the 2024 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity"An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s …
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Cory Doctorow back to San Francisco for the release of Enshittification at Public Works. More to come, but grab a ticket and join us!About the bookEnshittification: its not just youthe internet sucks now.
Novelist, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow joins Rachel and David in the cafe to talk about the enshittification of the internet and how we ended up in our current enshittogenic environment.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🚱". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
Want to dive back into those good old memories without the risk of a time machine malfunction? Join our Nostalgia group! Share your stories, smile-worthy photos, and chat with fellow lovers of the past. And if you’re looking to find or sell antique treasures (yes, that dusty old knickknack might actually be worth a fortune), this is the place to be!
Dr. Josephine Varghese, Varkey ParakkalIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US Vice President JD Vance. Photo: Narendra Modi / X India’s change of stance on a ceasefire in Gaza shows moral depr…
Raise awareness. I was checking fundraisers just in GoFundMe (not other similar platforms) and I found more or less a thousand (1000) opened cases of #Gazans who seek for some funding. More of them asking to evacuate their families from #Gaza. This must be stopped right now. Zionists must thrown out of #Gaza right now. Gazans deserve respect of themselves in their respected land. gofundme.com/s?q=gaza
True dignity is not granted through material items but achieved through the end of violence and the recognition of Palestinians’ rights to self-determination and justice. In #Gaza, dignity is a collective value representing the right of the #Palestinian people to live in freedom and security. Any attempt to restore dignity through material goods is an arrogant oversimplification of a much deeper struggle. #IsraelTerroristState #IsraelWarCrimes #warcrimes #genocide #palestine #gazagenocide #nakba mondoweiss.net/2024/09/the-ind…
Every voyage is a journey of "Sailing & Beyond" in Sailing Era! Navigate your fleet and sail for fun; run a business; have a romantic encounter in the tavern; capture pirates amid intense battle; explore inland for treasure...
Introducing a new, unifying DNA sequence model that advances regulatory variant-effect prediction and promises to shed new light on genome function — now available via API.
Με background πολιτικού μηχανικού και ταλέντο στην αυτοσκηνοθεσία, ο Ποσειδώνας εμφανίζεται καθημερινά στις οθόνες εκατοντάδων χιλιάδων χρηστών των social media ως «λαϊκός εκφραστής της αλήθειας», καταδεικνύντας την κρατική ανεπάρκεια στη συντήρηση δημόσιων κτηρίων και έργων υποδομής. Ο αγαπημένος TikToker του ΣΚΑΪ, του Πρώτου Θέματος και του Άδωνι Γεωργιάδη καλεί τώρα σε πογκρόμ εναντίων των προσφύγων στο Ρέθυμνο και αμφισβητεί τον «ανδρισμό» των Κρητικών που δεν παίρνουν τα όπλα.
Ο Ποσειδώνας δεν είναι ακριβώς καινούργιος στο παιχνίδι. Σύμφωνα με δικές του δηλώσεις, υπήρξε ενεργό μέλος της Ομάδας Αλήθειας, του επικοινωνιακού μηχανισμού της Νέας Δημοκρατίας που δραστηριοποιείται κυρίως στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, προκειμένου να ενισχύει το κυβερνητικό αφήγημα και να υποβαθμίζει τους πολιτικούς της αντιπάλους. Επίσης, φέρεται να έχει διατελέσει social media manager για το κόμμα του Τζήμερου «Δημιουργία Ξανά» και διοργανωτής πολιτικών δράσεων, όπως τα συλλαλητήρια «Μένουμε Ευρώπη»
Ποιος είναι ο Ποσειδώνας; Με παρελθόν στην Ομάδα Αλήθειας και την ευγενική υποστήριξη φιλοκυβερνητικών ΜΜΕ, ο δημοφιλής TikToker καλεί σε πογκρόμ στο Ρέθυμνο - της Ιωάννας Αρχοντάκη
NEW MERCH! https://modernity.news/shop/DONATE: https://www.subscribestar.com/paul-joseph-watsonLOCALS (Exclusive content! Ad free): https://pauljosephwatson....
Transcript of CounterSpin's interview with Chip Gibbons on Mahmoud Khalil:
"The goal is to take away your right to criticize a foreign apartheid state’s genocide, with the eventual goal of taking away your right to criticize US foreign policy. And this is the vehicle for doing it. It starts today, with the visa holders and the Green Card holders, but they will come for the natural-born citizens eventually, too, if they get away with this."
Viele Beobachter verunsichern Berichte, wonach die EU-Kommission auf die Durchsetzung des Digital Markets Acts (DMA) für US-Konzerne zeitweise verzichten will.
Earlier this evening I spent 45 minutes with Michael Farris talking about Trump's use of political theater - in his recent bombing raid in Iran for the purpose of giving Netanyahu an exit ramp from his war on Iran and in today's NATO summit, where ad…
Explore psychedelic worlds of sound with this album of intricate, ever-transforming tracks of wild-eyed wizard synth and haunting ghostwave. Explore the tools and technologies of mystic experience, as explained and illuminated in sonic form:
Avant, on balançait des chèques comme des peanuts. Maintenant, on tronçonne les écoles et les hôpitaux publics à la scie mécanique… Mais chut ! Faut pas réveiller les citoyens qui roupillent devant la télé : un p’tit chèque piqué dans la poche de ceux qui bossent au privé, c’est toujours plus « pratique » que de financer leur avenir… ou leur mort.
Die #DeutscheBahn und die #SBahn #Berlin haben endlich eine Strategie zum Umgang mit dem Klimawandel gefunden: Immer, wenn ihnen das Wetter nicht passt, stellen sie männiglich den Betrieb ein. Da kann das Klima mal sehen! Das hat es jetzt davon!
Mein Weg von S Hermannstraße nach Südkreuz führt mich deshalb heute mit der U8 zum beschaulichen Alexanderplatz und von da mit dem 248er Bus. Man kommt ja sonst nicht raus.
There are two general views of history. The first is the one they teach in school that we're all supposed to accept as legitimate, and it's called the accidental theory of history, which posits that our history is merely an aggregation of accidents. The other is the conspiracy theory of history which posits that history is the end result of elites conspiring together toward a certain result. If you believe the former, then you must accept that all of the efforts and money the elites put into controlling the course of events result in nothing but a series of accidents.
Learn the facts of the conspiracy. The Colchester Collection's "Secret Societies" catalog contains more than 50 books on the subject, explaining who the real power behind the throne is, what their intentions are, and how they go about achieving them.
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.
A reminder that it was never about following the law and being documented—it was always about banning non-white immigration, period.
Elon Musk, an white undocumented immigrant, can destroy the Govt & he's praised. A brown immigrant and US citizen can get elected to NYC Mayor & he's a danger. smh
it’s cus we were sitting there and there was a negro cleaning the table 4 feet away and he had earrings with the “Star of David” so I told her about how nowhere in the Bible is it mentioned and it’s actually the star of remphan
Actor Patton Oswalt went on a social media rampage expressing his glee over the death threats President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan is facing due to his work putting President Trump’s deportation plan into effect.
Bars und Feiern für Schwule gibt es in München viele, doch die für Lesben sind fast alle verschwunden. Woran das liegt – und wie drei Frauen das ändern wollen.
Wer in der queeren Szene eine Party sucht, wird in München schnell fündig – wenn er schwul ist. Aber Bars und Feiern nur für Lesben sind rar. Woran liegt das? Eine Spurensuche.
Microsoft: Windows 10 vs 11 performance bullshit benchmark
"Microsoft did not test Windows 10 on the machines that ran Windows 11, or vice versa. they actually used a 10-year-old chip in a modern benchmark. Can you guess how old the CPUs on all these Windows 11 PCs are? They are all from 2022 or later, the only exception to this is the i7-1065G7 which was released in 2019. It also happens to be the only CPU which was also tested on Windows 10. Notice how the CPU frequencies of the Windows 11 machines have been casually omitted?"
This video I'll talk about how Microsoft tried to steal a developers project by promising to help him, but then forking his work and changing his projects li...
This came out a while ago. The developer used a license that said, "Steal this software, I don't care." Then he was shocked Pikachu when it was stolen.
Stolen? It was forked as is allowed by the MIT license. With GPL as well there is no „you cannot fork” rule, you can do exactly the same thing. The author misunderstood that „you have to push the changes to upstream”, which is not in any of those licenses.
While I'm usually all for Free software (as opposed to open-source software),
His problem is the exact reason GPL was created.
Nah, his problem is that Microsoft has much billions of dollars and so doesn't give a fuck about any licenses on projects by small developers. They simply ignored even the terms of the MIT license (which required MS to keep the original copyright notice, which they didn't). GPL would've done squat here since it also allows for forking (by design), but also because the US legal system is cooked, and people don't have many rights left when it comes to a dispute with a corpo.
I was going to mention DOS, but I looked it up in the hopes of not sounding like an idiot and it turns out the history is more complicated than I knew.
This is clickbait. tl;dr a guy released MIT-licensed software, Microsoft forked and renamed it as they're legally allowed to do. Hell they could even close the source and sell it if they wanted to.
Forked it, renamed it, and changed nothing but the license on it.
What's stopping it from becoming the defacto version putting the original into the point where it's no longer worth maintaining, then Microsoft pulls it and sells it as a subscription service?
Nothing, because the author explicitly chose to allow this kind of behavior. Paraphrasing one of the Youtube comments on the video: the author picked a cuck license and then got cucked, what a shock!
It's funny how apropos cuck really is here. We all recognize that a woman (Microsoft) cheating on her husband (the guy in question) is a bad thing, but we no longer view it that way when we learn that the man consented, video taped, and gets off to it. If you really want to stop this kind of thing, simply choose a better license like the GPL that forbids this behavior.
As with a lot of 90s software, it’s a bit more complicated than which source code did they download (or, rather, mail order on floppy… because it was the 90s). Not the least of which is due to the fact that many of the projects don’t exist anymore and there weren’t that many copies to begin with.
However, they both embrace and extend LDAP and Kerberos among other open and not open projects of the time. Both choices were related to the results of the Protocol Wars and Microsoft’s attempts, in the 90s, to do to the Internet what Google is doing today.
Present-day disk galaxies often contain a thick, star-filled outer disk and an embedded thin disk of stars. For instance, our own Milky Way galaxy’s thick disk is approximately 3,000 light-years in height, and its thin disk is roughly 1,000 light-years thick. How and why does this dual disk structure form? By analyzing archival data from […]
This is just my guess, but it could be that it's the wrong architecture for your device. And so you can't install it.
Mind you, that is only a guess.
Edit: The main fdroid client is letting me install it. So it's either an architecture thing on your device or you could try the standard fdroid app instead of droidify
Thanks, you're right! I enabled Izzy's repo through the official F-droid client and it's showing 'No versions compatible with this device'. Finally found the cause, thank you
The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Closely related to the dictator's dilemma is "authoritarian blindness," where an autocrat's censorship regime keeps them from finding out about important, socially destabilizing facts on the ground, like whether a corrupt local official is comporting themself so badly that the people are ready to take to the streets:
The modern Chinese state has done more to skillfully navigate the twin hazards of the dictator's dilemma and authoritarian blindness than any other regime in history. Take Xi Jinping's 2012-2015 anticorruption purge, which helped him secure another ten year term as Party Secretary.
Xi targeted legitimately corrupt officials in this this sweeping purge, but - crucially - he only targeted corrupt officials in the power-base of his rivals for Party leader, while leaving corrupt officials in his own power base unscathed:
Chinese online surveillance is often paired with censorship, both petty (banning Winnie the Pooh, whom Xi is often mocked for resembling) and substantial (getting Apple to modify Airdrop for every user in the world in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages before a key Party leadership contest).
But there are many of instances where China spies on people but *doesn't* censor them, even when they express dissatisfaction with the state. Chinese censors allow a surprising amount of complaint about official incompetence, overreach and corruption, but they completely suppress any calls for *mobilization* to address these complaints. You can be as angry as you want with the government online, but you can't call for protests to do something about it:
This makes perfect sense in the context of "authoritarian blindness": by allowing online complaint, an autocrat can locate the hot-spots where things are reaching a boiling-over point, and by blocking public manifestations, the autocrat can prevent the public from turning their failings into a flashpoint that endangers the autocracy.
In other words, autocrats can reserve to themselves the power to decide how to defuse public anger: they can suppress it, using surveillance data about the people who led the online debate about official failures to figure out who to intimidate, arrest, or disappear.
Or they can address it through measures like firing corrupt local officials or funding local social programs (toxic waste cleanups, smokestack regulation, building schools and hospitals, etc) that make people feel better about their government.
Autocracy is an inherently unstable social situation. No society can deliver everything that everyone in it desires: if you tear down existing low-density housing and build apartment blocks to decrease a housing shortage, you'll delight people who are un- or under-housed, and you'll infuriate people who are happily housed under the status quo. In every society, there's always someone getting their way at the expense of someone else.
Obviously, widespread unhappiness is inherently socially destabilizing. After all, no society can police every action of every person. From littering to parking in disabled parking spots, from paying your taxes to washing your hands before serving food, a society relies primarily on people following the rules without even though their face little to no risk of being punished for breaking them.
The easiest way to get people to follow the rules is to foster a sense of the rules' legitimacy: people may not agree with or understand the rationale for a rule, but if they view the process by which the rule was decided on as a legitimate one, then they may follow it anyway.
This legitimacy is a source of social stability. Sure, your candidate might lose the election, or the government might enact a policy you hate, but if you think the election was fair and you believe that you can change the policy through democratic means, then you will be on the side of preserving the system, rather than overturning it.
A democracy's claim to legitimacy lies in its popular mandate: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but it was fairly made." By contrast, a dictator's legitimacy comes their claims to *wisdom*: "Sure, I don't like this decision, but the Supreme Generalissimo is the smartest man in history, and he says it was the right call."
You can see how this is a brittle arrangement, even if the dictator is a skilled autocrat who makes generally great decisions: even a great decision is going to have winners and losers, and it might be hard to convince the losers that they keep losing because they deserve to lose. And that's the *best* outcome, where an autocrat is *right*. But what about when the autocrat is *wrong*?
What about when the autocrat makes a bunch of decisions that make nearly everyone consistently worse off, either because the autocrat is a fool, or because they are greedy and are stealing everything that isn't nailed down?
Every society needs stabilizers, but autocracies need more stabilizers than democracies, because the story about why you, personally, are getting screwed is a lot less convincing in an autocracy ("The autocrat is right and you are wrong, suck it up") than it is in a democracy ("This was the fairest compromise possible, and if it wasn't, we need to elect someone new so it changes").
The Snowden revelations taught us that there is no distinction between commercial surveillance and government surveillance. Governments spy, sure, but the most effective way for governments to spy on us is by raiding the data troves assembled by technology companies (for one thing, these troves are assembled at our own expense - we foot the bill for this spying whenever we send money to a phone or tech company).
The tech companies were willing participants in this process: the original Snowden leak, about the "PRISM" program, showed how tech companies made millions of dollars by siphoning off user data to the NSA on demand:
It was only later that we learned about another NSA program, "Upstream," through which the NSA wiretapped the tech companies' data-centers, acquiring *all* of their user data, and then requesting the data that interested them through PRISM, as a form of "parallel construction," which is when an agency learns a fact through a secret system, and then uses a less-secret system to acquire the same fact, in order to maintain the secrecy of the first system:
Upstream *really* pissed off the tech companies. After all, they'd been dutifully rolling over and handing out their users' data in violation of US law, risking their businesses to help the NSA do mass spying, and the NSA paid them back by secretly spying on the tech companies themselves! That's a hell of a way to say thank you to your co-conspirators.
After Upstream, the tech companies finally started encrypting the links between their data-centers, which made Upstream-style collection infinitely harder:
But that hardly ended the mass surveillance private-public partnership. Congress continued to do nothing about privacy (the last federal consumer privacy law Congress gave Americans is 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling newspapers about the VHS cassettes you take home) (we used to be a *country*).
That meant that tech companies could collect our data will-ye or nil-ye, and that data brokers could buy and sell that data without any oversight or limitation:
There's many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry - but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.
Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were *also* denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement.
Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations - America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.
Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkerton's pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.
This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" - anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.
Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.
American politics have been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power.
In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:
It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it *only* does things that rich people want, and *never* does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza.
But more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.
I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown.
Mass surveillance makes guard labor *much* cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.
Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing.
For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps.
That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:
What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.
Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.
America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:
Retail Credit continued to do this until *1975*, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name...
...to *Equifax*.
Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:
But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor - even surveillance-supercharged guard labor - is no substitute for policies that make the country better off.
Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.
This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy mark for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:
They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, in Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we *like it* (or at least, never dare complain about it).
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
Sorry, you use the wrong Software for the fediverse... You definitely need something with more characters per posting... or no limit... and embedded pictures.
No. Sorry... i'm not interested anymore. You love threads. I hate them. I followed your advice for people who don't like thresds from your own spreaded link.
Because... I don't like threads. I don't like them. You like them. So i unfollowed you.
>People who use CC licenses suddenly get angry when the CC is okay with AI training.
I get the whole lack of attribution thing, but unless you are licensing your work under a non-commercial license (which I don't seem many people do as it's not a libre license), you are already letting billionaires profit off of your work.
Developers used C++ and GameCube-specific libraries. Nintendo provided a GameCube SDK, which allowed developers to take advantage of the console's capabilities, including 3D graphics management.
Ist halt bei den meisten Parteien wirklich nur LARP, d.h. sie machen größtenteils nur Lippenbekenntnisse. Gerade SPD und FDP (also die Teile, die nicht ständig wie AfD-Politiker reden) sind da oft ziemlich unglaubwürdig.
How Canadian media covered up the destruction of Gaza
Edited by Martin Lukacs, Dania Majid and Jason Toney
As Canadians bear witness to live-streamed horrors in #Gaza, the country’s most powerful media have distorted the unfolding #genocide—whitewashing Israeli violence, dehumanizing Palestinians, and smearing a growing protest movement."
Ashoka, also known as Ashoka the Great, was an emperor of the Maurya dynasty in India, ruling from 268 to 232 BCE. He is famous for his spiritual transformation and for the way he promoted Buddhism after experiencing a period of violence and military conquests.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a prominent Philadelphia citizen asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, do we have a monarchy or a republic?” Wise Franklin’s reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."
Depuis l’automne 2024, un collectif revendique des dégradations, des menaces, et des agressions contre des soutiens à la #Palestine, souvent pour un simple affichage de drapeaux. Ils s’inscrivent dans les combats de l’extrême droite identitaire. #france streetpress.com/sujet/17508584…
Depuis l’automne 2024, un collectif revendique des dégradations, des menaces, et des agressions contre des soutiens à la Palestine, souvent pour un simple affichage de drapeaux. Ils s’inscrivent dans les combats de l’extrême droite identitaire.
![Willy-nilly is an English-language idiom and a slang which describes an activity, an action or event that is done in a disorganized, unplanned, or vacillating manner.[1][2][3] The term is derived from Shakespearian expression "will ye, nill ye", which is a contraction that means “whether one wants to or not.”[4]](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/7815790 "Willy-nilly is an English-language idiom and a slang which describes an activity, an action or event that is done in a disorganized, unplanned, or vacillating manner.[1][2][3] The term is derived from Shakespearian expression \"will ye, nill ye\", which is a contraction that means “whether one wants to or not.”[4]")
rumschlumpel
in reply to Hofmaimaier • • •XM34
in reply to rumschlumpel • • •rumschlumpel
in reply to XM34 • • •TanteRegenbogen
in reply to Hofmaimaier • • •rumschlumpel
in reply to TanteRegenbogen • • •Kringel-Kultur ist einfach nur Diskriminierung von Leuten die etwas "anders" sind (oder einfach nur "nicht männlich"), im etwas weniger deutlich reaktionärem Gewand.
Hättest du das gleiche geschrieben, wenn es ein Junge mit einer Fußballverein-Party gewesen wäre?