New podcast out now! @elifriedman.bsky.social and Kevin Lin talk about their book, China in Global Capitalism. Class struggle, feminist activism, China's relations with Israel, the US, and much more.

Listen to a preview here or wherever you get your podcasts: workingclasshistory.com/podcas…

E106: Radical Reads – China in Global Capitalism

As part of our Radical Reads series, we speak to Eli Friedman and Kevin Lin about their new book, China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry.

^{Working Class History}

New podcast episode! We talk to the authors of China in Global Capitalism about working-class life and struggle in China and its relations abroad, inc with Israel, in Africa, and its rivalry with the US.

Listen to a preview here or wherever you get your podcasts: workingclasshistory.com/podcas…

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Bare booty

Show HN: CSS generator for a high-def glass effect

Link: glass3d.dev/
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

Wikipedia's fine; it usually sucks but it is convenient. But it was written during the Perpetual Now, and it's more interesting to look at contemporary sources. Before the establishment of the Perpetual Now by paywalled newspapers and shitty goddamn blogs that want to ruun 6MB of JavaScript for engagement farming, there was Usenet and public mailing lists and bulletin boards for discussion and because of bandwidth constraints, "publications" that weren't on physical media were on really lightweight text files. This sort of thing is easy to pass around, it's all viewable regardless of operating system, you have your choice of software. Searching through text and processing text, these are really well-understood pieces of computer science, there are standard tools for doing it on any operating system, and they are so well understood that when you build search, the first thing you do is reduce everything to text; this is the point of software like Tesseract. Even HTML is more or less serviceable (provided you follow Fielding's advice on document structure). But someone babbling in a TikTok video or some four-hour Youtube ramble, a paywalled news site, that's all huge, heavy on bandwidth, and most people don't have a way to view RealMedia videos, soon enough they won't have a way to view .flv files. Nobody worries about this.

I'm not saying this because of nostalgia or anything like that: it is interesting that for that period of history, we have very good records, but it's just that window. Whatever is going on now is all broken links and paywalls and a morass of content-marketing, right, you are at the mercy of major commercial search engines, which are opaque and censored and then further censored in a way that varies by region and then gamed by people trying to make some cash, blogs have to have these massive header images. So one era of history has this really machine-friendly way of recording itself and that was rare before and after: you can read code and text from really old systems but say the bulk of it, the heyday of text files, maybe the mid-80s to the mid-00s.

So I have been reading up a little on Operation Sundevil (I'll probably have some more things to say about it), having gotten interested in it after reading about it in old issues of 2600. If you are not familiar, in 1990 the Secret Service coordinated with local law enforcement to carry out about thirty simultaneous raids across 15 cities and seized BBSs, floppies, etc., but ended up with very few actual arrests, and there was a lot of rhetoric in press releases from law enforcement and it was pretty apparent that they didn't understand the tech. The EFF was founded as a result of a raid that (coincidentally) happened at the same time as the Operation Sundevil raids: Steve Jackson Games was publishing cyberpunk-themed tabletop games and the feds seized the company's BBS because they believed the tabletop game ruleset "GURPS Cyberpunk" was a "hacking manual", they seized half the company's material for their upcoming game (due to be published a month later). All of these independent public communications systems were scooting along, people were dialing in and sending each other messages and then out of nowhere, the cops showed up. The reason someone running a fedi instance should be interested in how that event unfolded is obvious; the German government just arrested that old lady for posting thumbs-up emojis at a joke about a news story. Do you know what it will look like in real-time when they start to *really* notice fedi?

Of course there's a Wikipedia page ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operatio… ) but the contemporary accounts of it are very interesting. Wikipedia is written in retrospect: what did the people that were There say about it while it was happening? Fedi actually matches the culture around the BBSs really closely, so when (or "if" for optimists) this sort of thing happens to fedi, what will it look like? Contemporary accounts of it give you a better feel for how it unfolds. People over- and under-reacting, how you perceive these things with the fog of war (so to speak) in effect.

So, here is a tarball of text files. Phrack is a phreak/hacker publication (was distributed on BBSs and still available as text files) and was one of the targets; FidoNet was the biggest network of BBSs and had a model that caused some really similar inter-board dynamics (read some of the old FidoNews, see if it doesn't resemble fedi instance drama) and they had FidoNews published periodically. Note that spelling varies: "Operation Sundevil", "Operation Sun-Devil", "Operation Sun Devil". I was generous with the grep and it is probably going to be a footnote rather than the main topic. But because they're text files, I could just grab them and use grep. (And, of course, this stuff is what got me to write that uudecode thing in awk: I've been reading these on Plan 9. git.freespeechextremist.com/gi… )

I am below going to break one of my own rules; not an ethical thing but a "I really shouldn't". I try not to say "someone really should": I think you either do it or support someone else that is doing it but "someone really should" is terrible. I am going to be terrible.

And, kind of related, maybe there should be something like FidoNews for fedi: a kind of neutral publication that is independent of any given instance or project, information and announcements for people running instances or using fedi, open submissions, editorial from the staff, maybe interviews, maybe transcripts of the interviews in the Fedi Files podcast, something that people can download and have. It is, at present, easier to understand FidoNet's history than fedi's, because of FidoNews. Fedi has itself (good luck searching) and scattered blogs, and if I decide to shit some awful fedi drama onto the FSE blog, there's not an editor that will reject it: I'm the editor of my blog. That's fine for a blog, but a fedi-wide publication with a couple of editors, you know? I'm sure on the non-ideologue region of fedi there are some people that'd do a reasonable job, I'd be happy to help or send some material, but I am really not fit to be the editor, among other things I am too stubborn and I will spend my time arguing with people about their submissions instead of just publishing them (and aside from that, being the FSE admin carries some baggage that this publication shouldn't have to deal with). Tom Jennings (creator of FidoNet and main editor of FidoNews for most of its history) is on fedi and I would be surprised if he wants to be the editorial staff for that but you can probably ask him for advice (and probably should because I have *never* dialed into a FidoNet BBS but FidoNews is still an interesting read). So, sorry to "someone should" but someone should.

Thank you for reading my blog post. Here is a tarball.
operation_sun_devil.tar.gz

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🙃🙃🙃🔥

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Dear ICE raid protestors,

Mexican is not a race, it's a nationality. The Mexican flag doesn't represent a race, it represents a country. Hispanic is not a race, it's really just people who share a language. Which really isn't a shared culture at all.

Mexicans claim their Hispanic ancestry from... Spain. And last time I checked, Spanish people are... WHITE and... EUROPEAN. And most Mexican Americans are... WHITE.

Americans aren't prejudice against your race, they are opposed to illegal immigration. Coming from Mexico. Which is a corrupt, shithole country that produces ignorant people. It's also slightly socialist.

Being born in American, you have the luxury of abandoning that identity and becoming the proud people you see yourself as. But instead, you choose to identify with the dregs of humanity.

I am libertarian, and I am probably a little bit more socially liberal than other users here. But all commies can go to hell. If you insist on subjugating yourself to Marxist identity politics, then you have no hope, and you have no sympathy from me

A recent Israeli military order threatens to displace 1,200 Palestinians from our homes in Masafer Yatta, but we refuse to be erased.

mondoweiss.net/2025/07/israel-…

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza
@palestine @israel

Israel is trying to expel us from Masafer Yatta. We refuse to leave our homes.

^{Mohammad Hesham Huraini (Mondoweiss)}

#People in #Manchester took the streets in solidarity with #Palestine and to denounce the ongoing #Israeli #genocide in #Gaza.

#video #rafah #freepalestine #antinazi #antizionist #classwar #ausgov #politas

We just released Mastodon 4.3.9 and 4.2.22. They contain a number of important bug fixes, and one security-adjacent fix.

If you are running nightly versions, an updated container image is available under the `nightly.2025-07-02` tag

Full release notes and update instructions are available on our GitHub release page:

github.com/mastodon/mastodon/r…

#mastoadmin

Releases · mastodon/mastodon

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

^GitHub

last day of school (university) tomorrow, finally! but i'm kinda sad that i won't see some people anymore, this was my last school year 😿

but i'm glad i met all of them and i had loads of fun these last few years 😸

#catgirl #neko #schoolgirl #girl

nypost.com/2025/07/02/us-news/…

A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama admin’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and DNI James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”

theblaze.com/news/lawfare-stri…

😏

Lawfare strikes again: Rogue judge ignores SCOTUS, shields 500,000 from Trump's immigration crackdown

The Supreme Court limited nationwide injunctions, yet a judge persists in blocking Trump's deportation push.

^{Candace Hathaway (Blaze Media)}

You MUST listen to RFC 2119.

Eric Bailey: It turns out you can just pay people to do things. I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of "Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive,...
jwz.org/b/ykqi

most people use calendars to track time, i use "cisco hardcoded credentials" incidents

bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu…

Once a man lost his way in the desert. The little food and water he had was finished, and for the last two days he was desperate for even a drop of water.

He knew that if he didn’t find water soon, he would die in a few hours. Still, a small hope was alive inside him, so he kept searching for water. He didn’t give up.

He kept hoping he might find water somewhere. That’s when he saw a hut. At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Earlier too, he had been tricked by mirages in the desert. But he had no other choice but to believe it this time. After all, this was his last hope.

He gathered his remaining strength and walked towards the hut. As he got closer, his hope grew. This time, luck was on his side. The hut was real.

But when he reached, he saw that the hut was deserted. It looked like no one had been there for years. Still, the man went inside, hoping to find water.

Inside, he was shocked. There was a hand pump. Filled with new energy, he quickly went to the pump and tried to draw water.
But the pump was dry. It seemed it hadn’t worked for a long time. Disappointed, he fell to the ground. He thought he would surely die now.

Just then, he noticed a bottle tied to the roof. Somehow he managed to reach it. He was about to open the bottle and drink the water when he saw a note stuck to it. The note said: