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!
A growing movement is calling on Illinois to divest $100 million in Israel Bonds, and has filed an ethics complaint against Treasurer Michael Frerichs, alleging abuse of authority, corruption, improper use of state time, and misuse of public assets.
On June 14, Trump spent an estimated $40 million on an extravagant military parade in Washington, DC. What was supposed to be a show of strength for US imperialism amounted to measly crowds and squeaky tanks, dwarfed by the millions protesting ICE ra…
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says Israelis are committing “daily atrocities” in the occupied West Bank, with full knowledge of the government, p...
Pyongyang, July 13 (KCNA) — The chief of the Policy Office of the Ministry of National Defence of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Sunday issued the following press statement titled “The U.S.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.
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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:
Once you’ve mined the earth and milked the service industries, what is there left to frack? Us, that’s what – with everything from admin charges and estate agent fees to blockbuster premiums and ‘cakeage’
One of the NSA's most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse.
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
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."
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.
Co-op Congress brings together those working to build a fairer economy to share ideas, get inspiration and take action. See the full programme of Day One at ...
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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Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
I ran a poll on that a couple of months go. Don't know if I worded it well enough, and it's not a huge sample size, but it's there for what it's worth.
Which term do you prefer to use?
#poll #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FLOSS #FOSS
[ ] Free Software
[ ] Open Source Software
[ ] Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
[ ] Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS)
I like the post. I just wanted to point out the similarity between your last paragraph where you write "we still lack a word to express what we're for." with this paper from Orwell orwellfoundation.com/george-or… . We know what's wrong with the current state, eg anti-this and anti-that, but defining (and Naming) the future state is hard.
There has been dozens of times in development of this program that if I didn't know how to program already, I would have been dead in the water. But the AI did the wrong thing and I would say "why don't you take the session data and convert it to json and base64 it and pass it as a query parameter to the other page" and it works
I don't think I am that smart, I am just saying that no, if you are a know-nothing "founder", AI isn't going to make you a programmer. Just a criminally irresponsible charlatan
#Baltic Nazis are testing #HIMARS for the first time a few kilometers from #StPetersburg Let's hope it's the last, unless they also seek the "Ukrainian fate"
Pentagon reports "#US soldiers are observing and advising the Estonians during the first real HIMARS fires. The independent, operational HIMARS unit is capable of providing lethal, long-range, and accurate fire in support of Estonian and #NATO forces on the battlefield." 🤣 😂 How did the HIMARS do in #Ukraine,? remind me plz
Damn, #TIL that configure my GUI to work with 2K display is very simple [1] — just specify the dimensions of display's active area in the X server configuration and restart X server!
That all, the letters on the screen become visible without tricky GTK/Qt specific environment variables
[1] Not applied to the Firefox / Librewolf — it is completely ignores X settings
Check out Sidebery too: addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firef… It's three in one: hierarchically structured tabs, bookmarks and favourites — all in one sidebar! Very customisable too — you can configure every tiny thing about it, down to key bindings. I like it a lot!
I believe it only scales the content this way, if you want its UI to be scaled too, look into ui.textScaleFactor in about:config This var had a different name before, but in versions greater than 100 this one should work. I set it to something like 115 on my MacBook — makes the tab names readable 😄
Pyongyang, July 14 (KCNA) — Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, […]
Superman is pro-Palestine, or so the internet would like to believe after watching the new James Gunn-directed Superman film that hit theatres this weekend. The film has several elements that have people on both sides comparing it to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Who would have thought the immigrant who embodies the qualities of justice and empathy would side with a people being annihilated by a powerful country backed by the US? Shocking.
A lot of people on the internet are celebrating and cheering on some pretty brutal videos of ICE grabbing Mexicans out of parking lots, out of Walmarts, wherever. It’s understandable. I understand, and my instinct is to celebrate it as well.
Ex-MEP Belinda de Lucy tells the horrifying story of her being attacked on the school run for not wearing Islamic dress. What has happened to London!? Sadiq Khan thinks 'diversity is our strength'...
Ex-MEP Belinda de Lucy tells the horrifying story of her being attacked on the school run for not wearing Islamic dress. What has happened to London!? Sadiq ...
A youth centre in Barcelona already suffered an attack last May and researchers believe that both events can be related. The mayor appeals to cohabitation Read
@HebrideanHecateI was reading some comments from Muslims. Some said it was God's will, but others say that it's the fault of Islamists and that they should respect the country they move to or go home.
@Haleakalacrater @HebrideanHecateI'm not sure which is worse. Either way, it'll be seen as Islamophobia. There have been stories coming out of Spain about certain tensions.
@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain They don’t assimilate, they abuse women, they’re violent, they gang rape girls, they want Sharia law, they want Christians dead - how can people not fear being taken over by islamists?
#BBC bosses pulled our film on Israel attacking Gaza’s medics. Here’s the producers' story of how the corporation repeatedly delayed and ultimately shelved their damning documentary observer.co.uk/news/national/a…
So BBC management never disputed the documentary’s facts—only the reporter’s public acknowledgment of them. Wouldn’t this be like canceling a #Holocaust documentary not because the facts were wrong, but because the reporter’s social media posts showed sympathy for victims? Or does BBC management believe that there are no uninvolved in Gaza deserving sympathy? Was Navai supposed to show more empathy toward the IDF or Israeli suffering after Israel killed more than 50,000 people? The BBC’s adoption of a line the Israeli regime would very much approve of is embarrassing. Or maybe that’s really why the documentary was canceled?
This idea has been in my mind since the very beginning of this adventure, almost two years ago. Over time, several people have suggested it. But until recently, I felt the timing just wasn’t right - for many reasons. Today, I believe it finally is.
So I’m happy to announce a new service: The BSD Cafe Journal - journal.bsd.cafe
At first, I thought I’d use BSSG for it (I even added multi-author support with this in mind), but in the end, it didn’t feel like the right tool for the job.
The idea is to create a multi-author space, with content published on a fairly regular basis. A reference point for news, updates, tutorials, technical articles - a place to inform and connect. Just like people in Italy used to stop by cafes to read the newspaper and chat about the day’s news, the BSD Cafe Journal aims to be a space for reading, sharing, and staying informed - all in the spirit of the BSD Cafe.
What it’s not: It’s not here to replace personal blogs, or excellent newsletters like @vermaden 's. And it’s not an aggregator.
What it is: A place where authors can write original content, share links to posts on their own blogs or elsewhere, publish guides, offer insights, or dive into technical explanations.
The guiding principles are the same as always: positivity, constructive discussion, promoting BSDs and open source in general. No hype (sharing a cool new service is fine, posting non-stop about the latest trend is not), no drama, no politics. The goal is to bring people together, not divide them. To inform, not inflame. Respect, tolerance, and inclusivity are key. Everyone should feel welcome reading the BSD Cafe Journal - never judged, offended, or excluded.
The platform I’ve chosen is WordPress, for several reasons: it’s portable (runs well on all BSDs), has great built-in role management (contributors, authors, etc.), and - last but not least - supports ActivityPub. This means every author will have their own identity in the Fediverse (like: @stefano@journal.bsd.cafe ) and can be followed directly, and it’ll also be possible to follow the whole Journal.
Original and educational content is encouraged, but it’s also perfectly fine to link to existing articles elsewhere. Personally, I’ll link my technical posts from ITNotes whenever I publish them there.
The goal is simple: a news-oriented site, rich in content, ad-free, respectful of privacy - all under the BSD Cafe umbrella.
Content coordination will happen in a dedicated Matrix room for authors. There’ll also be a public room for discussing ideas, giving feedback, and sharing suggestions.
Of course, I can’t do this alone. A journal with no content is just an empty shell. So here’s my call for action: Who’s ready to lend a hand? If you enjoy writing, explaining, sharing your knowledge - the Journal is waiting for you.
County Hall. Credit: Blog Preston
Plans that could see Reform UK cut funding to nurseries in central Lancashire will see job losses, closures and fewer fund
Strings Attached: Mossad, Media Influence, and the Shadow of Epstein – Unmasking Israeli Intelligence Penetration of U.S. Institutions - Scott #Rickard
This paper investigates the intersections between Israeli intelligence apparatuses and high-ranking figures within the United States, specifically scrutinizing the relationship between #FBI Director Kash #Patel and Alexis "Wilkins, an employee of #PragerU — an organization headed by a former Israeli military intelligence officer. The broader implications of these relationships suggest that Israeli operatives, particularly veterans of Unit #8200, may be exerting influence over American political and investigative institutions, particularly in shaping the #narrative surrounding high-profile intelligence scandals like Jeffrey #Epstein.
Introduction: Intelligence, Influence, and the Weaponization of Relationships
In July 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel publicly declared his certainty that Jeffrey Epstein had committed suicide, contradicting mounting forensic, journalistic, and intelligence assessments that suggest otherwise.[1] This proclamation rekindled longstanding suspicions about the depth of foreign influence in U.S. law enforcement, particularly from Israeli intelligence. Critics and observers now question whether Patel may be compromised — not through overt espionage, but by way of a potentially sophisticated “honey trap” operation.
At the center of this concern lies Patel’s romantic relationship with Alexis Wilkins, a media personality affiliated with PragerU, a right-wing ideological media nonprofit. While the age difference — Wilkins being 26 and Patel 45 — is hardly novel in Washington social circles, her professional affiliation and PragerU’s leadership connections raise serious national security concerns.
PragerU, Marissa #Streit, and Unit 8200’s Soft Infiltration of U.S. Influence Infrastructure
Marissa Streit’s leadership of PragerU is emblematic of the growing presence of Israeli intelligence alumni within American political and cultural institutions. Streit, according to PragerU’s own website, served in Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Forces ( #IDF), which is #Israel’s equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency ( #NSA) and plays a central role in cyber espionage, signals intelligence ( #SIGINT), psychological operations ( #PSYOP), and #surveillance.
[6]In more specific terms, Streit’s profile on PragerU’s official "Leadership" page states:
“Marissa moved to Israel at a young age where she completed her primary education and later served in the Intelligence Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces.”[6]
Unit 8200 is not a generic military outfit. It is a covert arm of Israeli intelligence operations, known for extensive electronic surveillance programs — including domestic spying on Palestinians, mass collection of metadata, blackmail via personal data, and international cyber-operations.[7] A 2014 exposé by The Guardian reported that whistleblowers from Unit 8200 revealed their orders to "target Palestinian civilians’ sexual preferences, money problems, or infidelities for extortion purposes."[8] This unit is trained in the manipulation of human behavior via technical and psychological means — training which veterans often carry into civilian life in media, cyber firms, and geopolitically aligned think tanks.
Streit’s career trajectory—from Israeli military intelligence to leading a major U.S.-based ideological content provider—exemplifies the soft power mechanisms through which Israel exports its strategic narratives into U.S. public discourse. Under her leadership, PragerU has expanded its influence over #US school curricula, partnering with state education boards to promote “patriotic” content that often whitewashes U.S. and Israeli history alike.[9] In 2023, Florida's Department of Education approved PragerU Kids content for use in public schools, effectively embedding foreign-influenced messaging into state-sponsored curricula.
[10]It is in this context that Alexis #Wilkins' employment under Streit must be interpreted as more than incidental. Given Streit’s Unit 8200 background and the organization’s penetration into U.S. information ecosystems, Wilkins’ proximity to #FBI Director Kash #Patel — whether romantic or operational — demands serious national security scrutiny.
Unit 8200 and Strategic Psychological Influence Operations
Unit 8200’s influence is not limited to conventional intelligence gathering. It is a critical hub of Israel’s cyber operations and psychological warfare doctrine. The unit produces many of Israel’s top tech entrepreneurs and cyber-surveillance experts, many of whom go on to work in global cybersecurity firms or partner with intelligence services abroad.
In the United States, veterans of Unit 8200 have founded numerous tech startups that provide tools to law enforcement, counterterrorism agencies, and commercial surveillance. According to investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, Israel’s military-intelligence complex has a strategy of funneling Unit 8200 talent into private sector front organizations to amplify their influence globally, often beyond regulatory scrutiny.
[7]Thus, Unit 8200 alumni in the private sector serve dual purposes: they commercialize surveillance technology and propagate pro-Israel messaging under the radar of formal diplomatic or military channels. This makes organizations like PragerU, under Streit’s leadership, potent vehicles of influence disguised as domestic conservative activism.
The Epstein Connection: Censorship, Cover-Up, and the Question of Allegiance
The suspicion surrounding Kash Patel intensified after his public dismissal of foul play in Jeffrey Epstein’s death. This comes despite years of mounting evidence that Epstein was an operative involved in sexual blackmail schemes that ensnared politicians, royalty, and corporate elites. Multiple intelligence insiders, including former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe, have claimed that Epstein worked for Mossad and that his child trafficking operations served intelligence purposes.
[8]By publicly declaring Epstein’s death a suicide without forensic reconsideration, Patel appears not only to contradict common sense, but also to act in the interest of suppressing inquiries that may implicate Israeli operatives. Given his personal ties to a media operative under the direct employ of a Unit 8200 veteran, the integrity of Patel’s judgment on matters of international blackmail and espionage must be seriously questioned.
Conclusion: National Security at a Crossroads
While direct evidence of Patel acting on behalf of a foreign power remains circumstantial, the aggregate implications of his personal and political associations merit urgent review. The normalization of foreign-trained intelligence officers, such as Streit, in U.S. media and policy spaces represents a subtle yet potentially devastating erosion of sovereign control.
The infiltration of American information infrastructure by foreign intelligence — especially one as aggressive and embedded as Israel’s — is no longer the realm of fringe speculation. The question is not whether such influence exists, but how deeply it reaches into our institutions, and whether public officials like Kash Patel are willing, witting, or unwitting participants.
References:
“Kash Patel: Epstein ‘Killed Himself’ – FBI Director Denies Foul Play.” Politico, July 2025.
Peters, Jeremy W. “The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine Behind PragerU.” The New York Times, July 2019.
Marcotte, Amanda. “PragerU's Far-Right History Rewrite: Palestinians Never Existed?” Salon, August 2022.
Schectman, Joel. “Israel’s Unit 8200: Cyber Intelligence That Dominates Silicon Valley.” Reuters, October 2019.
MacAskill, Ewen. “Israeli whistleblowers: ‘IDF intelligence unit used against Palestinians’.” The Guardian, Sept. 12, 2014. theguardian.com/.../israel-int…
Levin, Bess. “Florida Approves Curriculum Created by Right-Wing Group That Says Slavery Was Actually Beneficial.” Vanity Fair, August 2, 2023. vanityfair.com/.../florida-pra…
Mazzei, Patricia. “Florida Approves Videos from Conservative Group PragerU for Use in Classrooms.” The New York Times, August 3, 2023. nytimes.com/.../florida-prager…
Θα σας έστελνα καμιά φωτο από παραλία εχτές αλλά δεν είχα χρόνο το βράδυ να τις περάσω στον υπολογιστή από την κάμερα (έκανε και ζέστη).
Επί της ευκαιρίας να πω κι ένα ΓΑΜΙΕΤΑΙ Η CANON γιατί άλλαξαν την εφαρμογή που είχαν για να περνάς τις φωτό απευθείας στο κινητό από την κάμερα. Πλέον έχει απαίτηση η εφαρμογή για να δουλέψει να έχεις online λογαριασμό. WTF 🤬
Εννοείται δεν έχω κάνει γιατί προφανώς θα στέλνει τις φωτό ή τα μεταδεδομένα τους σε αυτούς για αναλύση. ΓΜΤΧΚΤΠΤ
@dougroudouvari για γρήγορο share on the go όχι. Γιατί πριν μπορούσα επιτόπου όπως τις τραβούσα να τις στέλνω στο κινητό (πχ ενώ είμαι στην θάλασσα) και μετά όπου θέλω. Ο υπολογιστής είναι όταν θέλω να κάνω πιο «σοβαρή» δουλειά. 🙃
Goodship is an anomaly. After his career was over they were doing the health checks on him and most horses are ruined by the time they retire because of the physical toll, they said his condition was like he never raced at all. It's widely believed he was one of the most successful racehorses ever while half-assing it the entire time.
05:49 Medical sources: 85 martyrs as a result of enemy airstrikes and shelling on the Gaza Strip since dawn today, including 46 in Gaza City. english.masirahtv.net/news/368…
it's sickening to see these countries supporting the genocide in Gaza while pretending that they stand for integrity, nation's right to defense and human rights when it comes to Ukraine
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer during the 1950s and 1960s. He died in 1966 during routine surgery. They gave up.
“The funding we’re announcing today will accelerate the development of affordable multifamily rental housing so that those rebuilding their lives after this tragedy have access to a safe, affordable place to come home to.”
Some even make these repos public — so cringe TBH. I'd probably die of embarrassment if all my quick'n'dirty code landed somewhere public, I'd probably not be able to write a line of code this way 😅
"[A]t least $1.6 billion from state and local treasuries across the country are sunk into Israeli bonds. Governments have been buying up Israeli bonds for decades, but recently some have increased their investments for symbolic reasons: to show political support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. But credit agencies have downgraded Israel’s credit rating twice in the past nineteen months because of the increasing instability of its economy.
Verdura que ens aporta molts beneficis, però només si ha pogut madurar com toca, és a dir rebent el Sol, mentre encara penja de la planta. A veure, no és que si no és així no en tingui gens, però un tomàquet madurat d'una altra manera, resulta molt més mediocre en beneficis, i conserva moltes més de les substàncies perjudicials que conté quan no és madur, com la tomatina i la solanina.
El licopè és el principal antioxidant del tomàquet. I és el que li dóna el seu color vermell. Com més profund sigui el color, més en contindrà. El licopè que, per cert, és soluble en oli i no només suporta la temperatura, sinó que li agrada fent-se més biodisponible, protegeix els teixits, sobretot la pell, però també els ulls, el sistema cardiovascular, i redueix el risc de càncers, com per exemple el de pròstata. A més a més, un tomàquet ben madurat contindrà moltíssima vitamina C i carotens. Dos nutrients que resulten protectors per moltes malalties. La tomatina i la solanina, són tòxiques pel sistema nerviós. Quan el tomàquet madura, la tomatina es va transformant en esculeòsid A, una substància anticancerígena, reguladora de la inflamació i dels lípids en sang, redueix el risc d'osteoporosi i disminueix la disregulació endocrina durant la perimenopausa. Però, com deia, perquè aquesta transformació es dugui a terme, cal una maduració natural amb el Sol, mentre el tomàquet encara és a la planta. Excepte la vitamina C, totes aquestes substàncies beneficioses, són resistents a la temperatura, i es troben en grans quantitats a la pell. Per això, convé fer la salsa amb la pell inclosa, i si cal, ja se li treu un cop acabada la cocció. Com si féssim un extracte.
Children among more than 700 people killed while waiting to get #water
The Israeli army has targeted 112 freshwater filling points and destroyed 720 water wells, putting them out of service. This has deprived more than 1.25 million people of access to clean water.
On March 9, Israel cut off the last power line feeding the last water desalination plant in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, halting the production of large quantities of drinking water and further deepening the enclave’s water crisis.
Locus Mag, a non-profit org, has been an integral part of the California Bay Area SFF scene since 1973. We rely on readers, writers, and fellow science fiction fans to keep us going. And we have a Patreon for monthly support - check it out!
“The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”
~ James Madison (1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President in an April 2, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it.
Looks like Toronto housing bubble is starting to burst with developers are quietly cancelling condos. Meanwhile, total condo sales fell by 75% from 2022 to the first quarter of 2025, according to data from market research firm Urbanation, and the average resale condo price dipped by 13%.
Pakistan's Interior Minister Syed Mohsin Raza Naqvi arrived in Tehran to discuss border and security issues, being welcomed by his Iranian counterpart Eskandar Momeni.
The Israeli regime’s acts of aggression, from targeted assassinations to bombing campaigns, are made possible by unwavering American support, says an American journalist and activist.
Miller🚨urges red states to build their own versions of #AlligatorAuschwitz.
The BBB funds that. $3.5B: avail to “eligible states. FL AG Uthmeier is the sadist behind the #detention fac. Miller urged pols in GOP-run states to build their own state-run IMM det facilities.
A migrant💔escapee might get devoured alive by an animal: #dehumanization.
Sunshine State Attorney General James Uthmeier is the real brains behind this notorious migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The more barbarities that emerge, the brighter his star will no doubt shine.
humanity is really lucky that we have people like Dr. Yipeng Ge, Christian Smalls, and many others (the two names I know!) trying to break Israel's blockade of all humanitarian goods to #Gaza
Today, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition aid boat Handala set sail from Siracusa, Italy and continued its journey to Gaza. This marks a bold step in our ongoing effort to challenge Israel’s illegal, deadly blockade of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
"False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised.
The #misinformation ranges from industry promoting fossil gas as a “low-carbon fuel” to bizarre conspiracy theories such as that wildfires in southern California this year were planned by officials in order to destroy child-trafficking tunnels."
Who’s afraid of the electric car? The Narrative War Delaying Climate Action in Europe
"Report reveals that climate disinformation on transport is not the result of isolated falsehoods or outright denial of climate change, but rather a complex and adaptive phenomenon deeply rooted in local political, economic, and cultural realities. It thrives not on the outright rejection of science, but on strategic doubt, distortion, and emotional appeal."
A joint report by Science Feedback and Newtral reveals that climate disinformation on transport is not the result of isolated falsehoods or outright denial of climate change, but rather a complex and adaptive phenomenon deeply rooted in local politic…
"Our study found that the human response to the climate crisis is being obstructed and delayed by the production and circulation of misleading information.
We found that this is being done by powerful economic and political interests, such as fossil fuel companies, populist political parties, and some nation states."
Powerful corporations, governments and political parties intentionally spread false information about climate change to avoid ending greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm at least heartened to read here the term "narrative war" for the second time in two days. After journa.host/@anneapplebaum/114… yesterday.
It's in that war that I reckon most posts we read on the "inevitable" direction of our politics accidentally represent, like, friendly fire. Promoting the inevitability of very direction they don't want.
"Sanctions are disappearing, weapons are diminishing, counterpropaganda is harder to hear. All of that will encourage Putin to go further—not just to try to defeat Ukraine but to divide Europe, mortally damage NATO, and reduce the power and influence…
China has unveiled the world’s first laser topping robot, overcoming a major hurdle in cotton’s laborious cultivation cycle to achieve the quest for fully mechanised cotton production, according to its developer.
Francisco Lucas considera que las palabras del representante de la extrema derecha “atacan la seguridad de miles de personas”. Por su parte, María Marín, de Podemos, asegura que a los cargos de Vox "no les va a salir gratis"
@normanefe Bueno, tengo una teoria y es que todos los que gritan "somos patriotas de pura raza" normalmente sus padres son hermanos. Pero son cosas mías.
libertytree.ca/quotes/Joseph.H… “In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers, gathered in Philadelphia to draft the new U.S. Constitution, gave the sole authority to declare war to the U.S. Congress. ... our Founders understood that it was essential, to secure a representative form of republican self-government, that the power to declare war must be in the hands of Congress, and not in the Executive Branch. ... Nothing has transpired in the intervening centuries to justify any alteration in their…
"In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers, gathered in Philadelphia to draft the new U.S. Constitution, gave the sole authority to declare war to the U.S. Congress. ...
A new peer-reviewed paper proves that paradox-free time travel is possible as long as just two pieces of an entire scenario within a closed time-like curve are still in “causal order” when you leave, the rest is subject to local free will.
In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity.
On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared “safe zone” in the town of Srebrenica.
That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War.
The #Knesset will vote today on dismissing Joint List MK Ayman Odeh. Three prominent US senators including Bernie Sanders condemned the dismissal effort as an attack on democracy. German parliamentarians and Arab local authority heads also oppose the move. The dismissal requires 90 Knesset members’ support.
The senators noted that Odeh has advocated for peace, justice, and Jewish-Arab partnership for over a decade, and that the expulsion effort directly responds to his calls for Gaza ceasefire, ending occupation, and a political solution. They warned the move sends a “chilling message” to Palestinian citizens of Israel that their representation is conditional.
Well, the next time someone parrots the tired about #Israel being the “only democracy in the Middle East” line, remind them that democracies don’t expel elected representatives for calling for peace. This is textbook #authoritarianism - using parliamentary procedures to silence dissent and purge opposition voices.
What’s particularly offensive is the deafening silence from U.S. Democratic leadership, the very ones who are complicit in the genocide in Gaza through financing Israel’s war machine. While senators like Sanders, Welch, and Van Hollen find their voices, where are Schumer, Pelosi, and the party establishment? Their absence speaks volumes about how thoroughly they’ve abandoned any pretense of defending democratic principles when it conflicts with their political calculations.
This isn’t just about one MK - it’s about establishing precedent for political purging. Today it’s Odeh for advocating ceasefire; tomorrow it’s any voice that challenges the narrative.
reminder that #israel kills - 100~150 people in #Gaza every day for the past few months, including those seeking food and water (re: israel has dismantled almost all reliable food and water sources) - an average of 27 children a day (about 3 classrooms' worth of kids at my toddler's daycare)
More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.
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They were right. The switch from calling it "free software" to calling it "open source" sparked a massive, unbroken wave of adoption, to the point where today it's hard to find anyone who professes animus to "open source," not even Microsoft (who once called it "a cancer").
Two motives animated "open source" partisans: first, they didn't like the ambiguity of "free software." Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined "free software") viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug.
He liked that "free" had a double meaning: "free as in speech" (an ethical proposition) and "free as in beer" (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of "free software" as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing "free software," would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn't be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom.
For "open source" partisans, this was a bug, not a feature. They wanted to enlist other hackers to develop freely licensed codes, and convince their bosses to adopt this code for internal and public-facing use. For the "open source" advocates, a term designed to confuse was a liability, a way to turn off potential collaborators ("if you're explaining, you're losing").
But the "open source" side wasn't solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren't excited about building a "commons" or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents.
For these "open source" advocates, the advantage of free software methodologies - publishing code for peer review and third-party improvement - was purely instrumental: it produced better code. Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method.
Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it's only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.
This is true! Publishing code makes it better, and prohibitions on code publication make code worse. That's the lesson of the ransomware epidemics of the past decade: these started with a series of leaks from the NSA and CIA.
Both agencies have an official policy of researching widely used software in hopes of finding exploitable bugs and then keeping those bugs secret, so that they will be preserved in the wild and can be exploited when the agencies wish to attack their enemies.
The name for this practice is NOBUS, which stands for "No One But US": we alone are smart enough to find these bugs, so if we discover them and keep them secret, no one else will find them and use them to attack our own people. This is a provably false proposition, and a very dangerous one.
The Vault 7, Vault 8, and NSA cyberweapon leaks blew a hole in NOBUS.
Failures in the agencies' own security protocols resulted in the release of a long list of defects (mostly in versions of Windows, but other OSes and programs were affected). Malicious software authors used these as can openers to pry open millions of computers, enlisting them into botnets and/or shutting them down with ransomware.
These leaks also provided some "ground truth" for researchers who study malicious software.
Once these researchers had a list of which defects the spy agencies had discovered and when, they were able to compare that list of defects that malicious software authors had discovered and exploited in the wild, and estimate the likelihood that a spy agency defect would be independently discovered and abused by the agency's enemies, who they were supposed to be protecting us from. It turns out that the rediscovery rate for spy agency bugs is about 20% per year.
In other words, there's a one in five chance that a bug that the CIA or NSA is hoarding will be used to attack America and Americans within the year.
NOBUS is a form of software alchemy. Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis.
But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemist kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were *very* wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison.
Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review. Both open source and free software partisans claim transparency as a key virtue of their system, because transparency leads to improvement ("with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
At the outset, "open source" and "free software" were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa. But over the ensuing decades, that changed, as Benjamin "Mako" Hill explained in his 2018 Libreplanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon":
Several months ago, I gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet 2018. The talk was about the thing that scares me most about the future of free culture, free software, and peer production. A …
As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between "open" better code) and "free" code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: "Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?"
If you were an "open source" person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, "Does this new thing increase code-quality?" If you were a "free software" person, the question you had to answer was, "Does this make people more free?"
These value judgments carried enormous weight. They influenced whether hackers would work to improve a given package or pursue a use-case; they determined who would speak or exhibit at conferences, they created (or deflated) "buzz," and they influenced the direction that new license versionss would take, and whether those licenses would be permissible on influential software distribution channels.
For a movement that runs on goodwill as much as on dollars, the social acceptability of a practice, a license, a technology or a person, mattered.
Hill describes how chasing openness without regard to its consequences for freedom created a strange situation, one in which giant tech monopolists have software freedom, while the rest of us have to make do with open source.
All the software that powers the cloud systems of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, is freely licensed. You can download it from Github. You can inspect it to your heart's content. You can even do volunteer work to improve it.
But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it.
And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high.
In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it.
Which is not to say that free software doesn't benefit from open source's popularity.
The vast cohort of people who have been won over by open source's instrumental claims to superior code are the top of a funnel that free software partisans can operate to convince these people to consider the ways that their lives have been made more free through open code, and to prioritize freedom, even ahead of code quality.
The free/open source movement is actually a coalition of people who share *some* goals even if they differ on others.
But coalitions are also brittle, because after they get what they want (transparency for code), then they have to resolve their differences, which means that some members of the coalition are going to be bitterly disappointed.
After all, there's code that we don't want to improve - at least, not if we care about freedom. For example: code that helps ICE kidnap our neighbors. Code that powers drones. Code that spies on us, both for governments and for private-sector snoops, like the data-broker industry. Code that helps genocidiers target Gazans. Code that helps defeat adblockers. Code that helps locate new sites for fossil fuel extraction, and code that helps run fossil fuel extraction operations.
Human freedom has an inverse relationship to this code: the better this code is, the worse off we all are.
Periodically, some free software advocate will follow this to its logical conclusion and propose a new free software license that prohibits use for some purpose: "you may not use my code in the military," or "you may not use my code for ad-tech," or "you may not use my code in ways that despoil the environment."
It's not surprising that this is a recurring event. After all, if you care about software as a tool for enhancing human freedom, and you notice that your code is being used to make people less free, it's natural to want to do something about it.
And yet, every one of these efforts have foundered - and I think every one will. This isn't because ethics clauses in license are a foolish idea, but because they are logistically transcendentally hard to get right.
First, there is the problem of writing good "legal code." Free software licenses are extraordinarily hard to get right. Not only do the terms have to spell out the rights and obligations of participants in the software project, but the whole system needs to be designed so that these clauses can be enforced. The right to sue for breaching a license is determined by "standing" - only people who have been injured by a license violation have the right to seek justice in court.
Even if you figure out all that stuff, it's possible for even extremely talented lawyers working in collaboration with the most ethical of technologists to make subtle errors that take years or decades to surface.
By that time, there might be millions or even *billions* of works that have been released under the defective version of the license, and no practical way to contact the creators of all those works to get them to relicense under a patched version of the license.
This isn't a hypothetical risk: for more than a decade, every version of every flavor of Creative Commons license had a tiny (but hugely consequential) defect.
These licenses specified that they "terminated immediately upon any breach." That meant that if you made even the tiniest of errors in following the license terms, you were instantly stripped of the protections of the CC license and could be sued for copyright infringement. Many *billions* of works were released under these older CC licenses.
Today, a new kind of predator called a "copyleft troll" exploits this bug in order to blackmail innocent Creative Commons users.
Multimillion dollar robolawyer firms like Pixsy represent copyleft trolls who release timely images under ancient CC licenses in the hopes that bloggers, social media users, small businesses and nonprofits will use them and make a tiny error in the way they attribute the image. Then Pixsy helps the troll extort hundreds or thousands of dollars from each victim, under threat of a statutory damages claim of $150,000 per infringement:
Creative Commons spent millions over years, working with a who's-who of international copyright and licensing experts, and it took them more than a decade to fix this bug, and the billions of works released under the old licenses are ticking time-bombs. After all, the copyright in those works will last for 70 years after their authors die, which means that anyone who acquires the copyright to those older images could turn troll and go hunting.
There's a reason that old FLOSS hands react with instant derision whenever someone proposes making up a new software license. It's the same reason cryptographers are so hostile to the idea of people rolling their own cipehers: no matter how smart and well-intentioned you are, there's a high likelihood that you will screw up and irrevocably place innocent people at risk.
Yes, irrevocably: getting all those creators to relicense their works under a modern CC license is effectively impossible. Even projects with a relatively small number of contributors - like Mozilla - had to resort to throwing away chunks of code whose authors couldn't be located and paying someone to rewrite them under a new license.
Those are reasons not to come up with new free and/or open licenses, period.
But on top of that, there's a special set of confounders that arise when ethics clauses are added to free/open licenses.
The first of these is the definitional problem. Even seemingly simple categories can elude consensus on definition. Again, the Creative Commons licenses are instructive here: from the outset, CC licenses let creators toggle an ethics clause, called the "NonCommercial" (NC) flag. Works licensed under "NC" couldn't be used commercially. Seems simple, right?
Wrong. For years - to this day - CC users have been unable to consistently agree on what constitutes a "commercial use." If you post something in your personal capacity to a commercial service, is that "commercial?" Well, it had better not be, because *anything* you find online is going to have some kind of commercial enterprise involved in getting that file to you: a long-haul fiber provider, a data-center, a hosting company, a cloud company, a social media service, etc, etc.
If "noncommercial" means "no one can make any money as a result of the distribution of this work," then an NC license would mean that works couldn't be distributed at all (even if you're just printing off copies of a cool image at home and stapling them to telephone poles, the printer ink company and the staple company are making money off of every copy you post).
Now, the CC NC ethics clause is the *best case* for an ethics clause in a license. CC is a centralized organization that has total authority over the text of CC licenses and exercises near-total control over their interpretation.
Now imagine how a hypothetical ethics clause in a software license would perform, given the CC NC experience. Compared with, say, "military/nonmilitary," the "commercial/noncommercial" distinction is trivial to draw.
Is Ford - whose cars are in DoD motor-pools - a "military" user? What if Ford decides to boycott the Pentagon, but the Navy still buys a bunch of used Ford Focuses from a wrecking yard and fixes them up with Ford parts they buy at an Autozone: does Ford now become a "military" user of free/open software?
This is why the right wing troll mantra "What is a woman?" is so effective: women aren't *what*s; they are *who*s, and if you try to come up with a definition that encompasses all the people who are women, it will stretch to dozen of pages and still miss people out. This isn't unique to women - almost every category defies exhaustive definition. Famously, there is no such thing as a fish:
But imagine now that we are going to create billions of works whose copyright will endure for more than a century, and if any of them fails to refer to someone by their name correctly, then any of millions of people, some of them not even born yet, could ruin some software contributor's life and maybe the lives of thousand or millions of users of their software.
And "name" - like "noncommercial" - is an easy case. The hard cases are things like "military/nonmilitary," "fossil fuel-sector/non-fossil fuel sector" etc etc. Big, distributed projects with informal institutions and leaders are poorly suited to adjudicating *any* of these definitional questions, but toothy ethics clauses require these loose ad-hocracies to create and enforce definitions of the most pernicious and slippery concepts of all.
I want to be clear that I'm not opposed to the idea of an ethics clause in free/open licenses. I make extensive use of both the NC and commercial CC licenses, after all. My objections are practical, not philosophical.
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Rochdale in Greater Manchester to give the opening keynote at the 2025 Coop Congress.
After my talk, I was on a panel with Chris Croome, who has been campaigning for a co-op software license:
> either enforce co-operation and sharing and do not allow code to be privatised (made proprietary) or code that is released under terms that dictate that if the code is used to run a business the nature of the business must be a co-operative.
I’m personally not in favour of dual licensing. Projects that use a AGPL license without a CLA or dual licensing and which pay their developers includes Nextcloud — it is possible.
I've been thinking about this ever since and I think all my concerns about other ethics clauses apply here. Admittedly, there is a widely accepted and mature definition of "co-op," the seven "Rochdale Principles":
But there are plenty of entities that are recognizable as "co-ops" that exist outside of the UK, the Anglosphere and the global north that don't embrace all of these principles, or embrace them in ways that fit into the consensus as to their meaning that has emerged among Rochdale-derived co-ops. It's not merely that a "co-op" license might exclude these co-ops.
It's also that the enforcement mechanism for software licenses is that individual software authors retain the copyright to their lines of code, and use copyright law to threaten and punish people who violate the license terms.
This means that you could have a pool of potentially thousands of software authors, *and* their literary estates, who would have the right - for more than a century - to attack co-ops that use "co-operatively licensed" software on the grounds that the differ in their interpretation of what is - and is not - a co-op.
What's more, there are plenty of groups that could organize as a co-op and satisfy the software license's definition, who might nevertheless not be "ethical" by the lights of the co-op movement. Think of a firm of mercenaries that set up as a worker co-op (if this strikes you as implausible, I remind you that the most vicious, human-rights-abusing cops in the world are mostly members of "unions").
i. Excluding co-operators because of small differences in which co-op principles they adopt;
ii. Including co-operators who are structured as compliant co-ops, but do terrible things; and
iii. Putting license users at the risk of copyleft trolls who exploit ambiguity in the definition of "co-op" to extort massive "settlement fees" from software users.
That all said, a co-op license has positive aspects as well. Remember what happened when we stopped stressing "freedom" in our software licenses: we got the code quality of "open," applied to all kinds of code, including code that destroys freedom. I've been involved with co-ops since I was a pre-teen, and I've experienced firsthand what happens when a co-op forgets its ethical basis in favor of instrumental goals.
Take the Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Canada's most beloved and successful consumer co-op. MEC was inspired by the US outdoor gear co-op REI, and it served Canadians proudly for decades. But like most consumer co-ops, MEC had very low member involvement, so a cabal of MBA-poisoned looters to were able to take over MEC's board, change the bylaws, and then flip the co-op to a ruthless American private equity fund:
MEC isn't a co-op anymore. The board's argument was that keeping MEC a co-op wasn't as important as infusing it with capital so it could source the goods its members wanted and offer them at reasonable prices. Joke's on them: after five years of PE looting, MEC's quality sucks and its prices are sky-high.
Institutional structure (like whether you are a co-op or not) can *influence* the kind of activity an organization engages in, but it can't *control* it. Keeping enshittification at bay requires multiple, overlapping constraints that prevent the institution from caving into the worst instincts of its worst members.
That's why I'm rooting for Bluesky to get more federated. It's nice that they're a B-corp, but that alone won't stop a dedicated investor class from replacing the current management with enshittifiers who destroy the lives of tens of millions of Bluesky users. However, if a large plurality of Bluesky users weren't actually *on* Bluesky, but on federated servers, they could credibly threaten Bluesky's business by defederating with it if it enshittified:
So maybe the prospect of losing access to all of its business-critical software could have acted as a check on MEC's board and prevented them from sleazing up to private equity vampires. This is certainly a possible benefit to a co-op ethics clause in a software license. I'm not convinced that it outweighs the risks, though.
I'm a free software person. There are bitter free software partisans who think that the open source people stole our revolution. I understand their outrage. But I also think we left an open goal. In retrospect, choosing a deliberately confusing name in the hopes of sparking conversations was a tactical error. The cohort of potential movement supporters who also enjoy word-games is smaller than the cohort who are put off by being deliberately confused.
I also don't think it's a problem that the software freedom coalition includes people who value software freedom for purely instrumental reasons - because open code is better code. I *do* think it's a problem that they are the senior partners in the coalition and have steered it for a quarter-century. After all, they steered it into this ditch where tech monopolists have free software and we all make do with open source.
Coalitions, though, are hugely important. Take the as-yet-nameless coalition lined up against corporate power, which has defied political science's laws of gravity, pushing antitrust enforcement across the world, against the world's largest and most powerful corporations:
This coalition needs a name. I often cite James Boyle's explanation of the role the word "ecology" played in bringing together thousands of disparate issues (spotted owls, ozone depletion) under a single banner and turning them into a *movement*. The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner.
Almost all of our definitional terms are "anti-something," from "antitrust" to "antifascist." We have no end of words to describe what we stand against (even "enshittification"'s opposite is "disenshittification"), but we still lack a word to express what we're *for*.
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Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
@pluralistic > The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner
Back in the 90s we organised under the banner of a loose international coalition called People's Global Action. Which corporate media reframed as "anti-globalisation movement". Many people called it the "alter-globalisation movement", or later, the global justice movement.
All of the "freedom" labels have been co-opted by the (ptui) Libertarians.
The words I think of that aren't "anti-X" are "civil defense" or "integrity" kinds of ideas.
"Civil Integrity Movement" maybe: it combines the definitions of integrity, in the sense of having a good moral sense, and of keeping things whole and unbroken.
oh but they have come up with a name: “woke”. Coined by the ghouls that stand to benefit from labeling anyone who stands against their humanity destroying tendencies, as a dismissive insult.
I'm also a Free Software person, but I parted ways with the FSF a long time ago because they fundamentally misunderstand how social movements work. Successful laws and contracts are not there to enforce behaviour, they are there to codify the consensus on acceptable behaviour.
I have never murdered anyone. This isn't because laws provide consequences if I do, it's because I think living in a society where everyone lives in fear of being randomly killed is bad and so I subscribe to the consensus that we all agree not to murder each other. Laws against murder exist because there are always a few outliers and you need a rule to deal with them. Similarly, contracts work best when there is broad agreement between both parties about what they are both going to do. The contract assumes both are acting in good faith and then does two things:
Provide some clear text describing what both parties intend to reduce confusion, and
Provide some fallback in case one is not acting in good faith.
The problem with FSF licenses and their derivatives is that they don't start by building that consensus, they start by assuming bad faith. At that point, you're immediately shifting to an adversarial stance.
When you present people with laws that they consider unjust or contracts that they don't feel reflect social agreements, you end up with people trying to find loopholes. Sometimes they just ignore the laws / contracts entirely and you end up with widespread civil disobedience or mass contract violation. Now you have selective enforcement problems.
The people who are most able to find valid loopholes are the ones who are able to employ the most lawyers. The simple act of writing a complex license shifts power from individuals to corporations.
The biggest failure of the Free Software movement has been to fail to show any benefits for most users of the Four Freedoms, except the zeroth. The linguistic problem of Free Software and freeware being conflated is strengthened by the fact that, for 99% of users, the sole benefits that they directly perceive from Free Software are the same as those in freeware.
There needs to be a variation of Conway's Law that talks about the relationship between the structure of a piece of code and the underlying business and economic systems behind it. Proprietary software systems naturally become closed all-encompassing ecosystems because the goal for such a system is to make sure that users spend more time in it. Interoperability that lets people take their data and leave is a down side. Third-party plugins are useful because they let other people build things that require end users to pay you, but plugins that could grow enough functionality to eventually remove you as a dependency are a danger. The most desirable end state for proprietary software looks like iOS and the Apple App Store: the vendor controls a critical component that everything depends on and also the distribution channel for everything that extends this base layer.
Free Software systems that aim to reproduce this structure of self-contained siloed apps are doomed to failure. They are playing the proprietary software game, with none of the advantages that proprietary software vendors enjoy in such a world.
If you really want to build a Free Software system, you need to build simple, understandable, composable systems that individual end users can easily extend and tailor to their needs. The distinction between a document, a plugin, and an app are meaningless in such a system: users have full access to all of the functionality of the underlying system and can trivially extend it and share their extensions with others. Licenses like the GPL are a liability in such a system because they impose complex legal requirements on things that should be normal uses of the system. Treating extending and modifying a program as unusual things that most end users won't need to do and therefore where it's okay to introduce legal friction is implicitly starting from the assumption that you will fail to build a system where most users benefit at all from freedoms one to three.
"We are not from the century of making words up. Words were already invented. We are from the century of reinventing the words that were already invented." (Almada Negreiros, 1921; translation from the original Portuguese by me)
We had exactly this dilemma in a company I worked for which had a ‘no defence work’ rule. We were asked to provide equipment for on-base schools. We decided that was OK, but not everyone was comfortable with the decision.
the SCP Wiki for the last number of years has wanted to update our license from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-SA 4.0 to give the writers & artists more freedom over their work
presently, in order for the site to move to 4, under 3 we have to reach out to every author & the site turned 17 years yesterday
like what you wrote about firefox, we'd have to do the same (it's a possibility when the site jumps from wikidot to it's own wiki-platform, & from 3.0 to 4.0)
I understand there to have been efforts to try to do this sort of thing both in indie TTRPG licenses and the rules of said indie games themselves ("Nazis are not allowed to play this game") with even less success, especially since the OGL debacle resulted in the shattering of the license consensus. (CC-BY didn't catch on in any broader way among TTRPG studios, and just replaced the OGL for newer projects with original 5e D&D as the only prior reference.)
@martinvermeer @jorgecandeias Language has always been a battleground of essentially contested concepts. I don't think that's a reason to avoid labels, even in a world eager to mislabel you.
Anyway, I think this movement is a huge tent of other existing ones. People working to expand democracy/dignity across economic, social, and political dimensions. Not sure one term is desirable for this, but maybe we should recognize we're addressing the same problem from different angles.
This coalition seems based on human rights. The very phrase is racist (to Klingons, per Star Trek VI).
If something is Pro-Human, it's necessarily unified against non-human AI and corporate entities, enforcing a simple hierarchy when they're in conflict.
It could start by solidifying the sanctity of human lives: their right to privacy, their right to identity and expression, and their right to humane labor.
I don’t understand. Can you please explain. I like FireWire and use it, but it is going away and I don’t like it. I have to get a new laptop, and am sad I can’t find one with FireWire.
![Firewire in 2005 [photo of a normal firewire 400 connector]
Firewire in 2025 [photo of an 8pin gpu power cable saying 600W]](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/8024141 "Firewire in 2005 [photo of a normal firewire 400 connector]
Firewire in 2025 [photo of an 8pin gpu power cable saying 600W]")
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
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Clarion Write-a-Thon | Cory Doctorow
clarionwriteathon.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Semantic drift versus ethical drift: Locking things open vs locking in freedom.
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11485173…
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Cory Doctorow
2025-07-14 13:06:12
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Hey look at this
* Who Goes MAGA? techdirt.com/2025/07/08/who-go…
* Using Signal groups for activism micahflee.com/using-signal-gro… (h/t Bruce Schneier)
* What To Do When You See ICE in Your Neighborhood theintercept.com/2025/07/12/ic…
* Fintech Dystopia fintechdystopia.com/
* Wet Leg: Moisturizer wetleg.bandcamp.com/album/mois…
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moisturizer, by Wet Leg
Wet LegCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#15yrsago New York Times and other papers use deceptive death-notice company idlewords.com/2010/07/the_grea…
#15yrsago Riepl’s Law: how future media compost the past en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riepl's_…
#15yrsago Online video patents: an impassable thicket? web.archive.org/web/2010070601…
#15yrsago Canadian copyright astroturfers own up: front for US labels web.archive.org/web/2010070513…
#10yrsago Fracketeering: Life in a capitalist sci-fi horror story theguardian.com/money/2015/jun…
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Fracketeering: how capitalism is power-hosing the last drops of value out of us all
Ian Martin (The Guardian)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#10yrsago How the NSA searches the world’s intercepted private communications theintercept.com/2015/07/01/ns…
#10yrsago Judge hires lawyer to threaten court over jury summons loweringthebar.net/2015/07/som…
#10yrsago The next Librarian of Congress: a Librarian of Progress? librarianofprogress.com/
#10yrsago 1930s ice-cream parlour hidden in Cincinnati’s art deco railway station thoughtandsight.com/the-1930s-…
#5yrsago 1000+ accidental trigger-phrases for smart speakers pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
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NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications
Morgan Marquis-Boire (The Intercept)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#5yrsago Hong Kong law threatens people all over the world pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
#5yrsago A grifter's border wall is about to fall into the Rio Grande pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
#5yrsago Roller derby's brilliant re-opening plan pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
#5yrsago Don't Believe Proven Liars pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
#5yrsago Unauthorized seat pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
July 3's threads: Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor; and more!
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11478865…
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Cory Doctorow
2025-07-03 09:45:17
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…
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My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
us.macmillan.com/books/9780374…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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."
craphound.com/shop/
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upcoming appearances:
* Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
openrightsgroup.org/events/org…
* #DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
politics-prose.com/cory-doctor…
* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…
* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
contraflowscifi.org/
* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…
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Booksmith presents: Cory Doctorow Enshittification
Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Recent appearances:
* Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?s…
* If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmE…
* Forward Kentucky
youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZ…
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Co-op Congress 2025 – Friday 4 July
YouTubeCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pol…
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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:
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
clarionwriteathon.com/members/…
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Clarion Write-a-Thon | Cory Doctorow
clarionwriteathon.comWulfy
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
How to be an effective AI critic.
Step one, stop learning about #AI !
Freeze you knowledge around February 2024.
Ygor
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I ran a poll on that a couple of months go. Don't know if I worded it well enough, and it's not a huge sample size, but it's there for what it's worth.
floss.social/@ygor/11448362592…
Ygor (@ygor@floss.social)
FLOSS.socialCory Doctorow reshared this.
Debby
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Sunshine and Wind
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •