without total control of media publishing, broadcasting, distribution & trading, there are no #techbro American billionaires; and without American #tech #billionaires, there is no American Fascism as we know it today.

if billionaires have no right to exist; neither their #media companies as we know them — the #FAANG & corporate media.

to kill American fascism you need to kill American corporate media as it is off and online.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

#AmericanFascism #copyright

The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal to lend out digitized books. A federal appeals court sided with the four publishers, which accused the nonprofit of copyright infringement.

^{Emma Roth (The Verge)}

I know everyone has probably seen this but, Beary Poppins is my whole vibe.

The small nudge is bearfection.

Record measles outbreak in Oregon blamed on vaccine exemptions

Vaccine exemptions at nearly 9% in the state, enabling sustained transmission.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/record-measles-outbreak-in-oregon-blamed-on-vaccine-exemptions/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.

The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal to lend out digitized books. A federal appeals court sided with the four publishers, which accused the nonprofit of copyright infringement.

^{Emma Roth (The Verge)}

The obvious choice for ActivityPub’s birthday would be the 23rd of January 2018 - the day it was annointed as a W3C recommendation. That doesn’t seem quite right though - its not as if the spec came into existence in any sense upon that date. In fact, Mastodon implemented it before thne.

There are several possible dates you might pick, but for me it will always be September 5th 2014 - when I committed the first sketch of a specification I called ActivityPump and pushed it to Github

It wouldn’t be until November that I actually submitted (a revised and enhanced version of) that draft to the working group, but even then I had the very nucleus of the specification written down.

Happy 10th birthday, ActivityPub. 🍰

Here be a first draft · w3c/activitypub@f510032

Contribute to w3c/activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Annoyed at the quiet, I ended up putting on a wildlife documentary in the background a couple nights ago. It's always fun to watch foxes, right?

And on the screen there were these creatures enduring in the most brutal elements in an unforgiving and competitive world. All teeth and claws, yells and screams, covered in dirt and blood -- and absolutely *thriving* to the point of having time to play despite *everything* going against them in their world.

Hey furries -- whether you chose your species or it chose you, let it be a reflective reminder that for all the cute softness inherent in them that they -- *you* -- can fight, survive, and thrive in even in the most difficult of times.

Hey, if you write role-playing games, even if it's just for you and your friends, I just wanted to let you know that I'm pretty damn proud of you.

Look at the billions of dollars and all the other finite resources they're shoveling into the AI furnace just to forge the most banal poop in all of human history.

And here you are, making art that actually, genuinely gets human to make art.

“The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.”

- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment."

Interesting. According to Brent Spiner (the actor who plays the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation)

1) it was Patrick Stewart's UK pronunciation of his character's name (day-tah instead of the US's dah-tah) that made this pronunciation canon, and

2) the character of Data and the popularity of Star Trek has led to "day-tah" now being the common pronunciation in the US, too.

https://youtu.be/xeqTMTOxid8 (π min)

#StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #data #pronunciation #English #EnglishLanguage

Brent Spiner on the "Data" name in "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

Brent Spiner tells a funny story about the Data name from "Star Trek: The Next Generation", and how Patrick Stewart is responsible for the way the word is no...

^YouTube

FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server Data is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users (2023)

In May [2023], Mastodon server Kolektiva.social was compromised when one of the server’s admins had their home raided by the FBI for unrelated charges. All of their electronics, including a backup of the instance database, were seized.

It’s a chillingly familiar story which should serve as a reminder for the hosts, users, and developers of decentralized platforms: if you care about privacy, you have to do the work to protect it. We have a chance to do better from the start in the fediverse, so let’s take it. ...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/fbi-seizure-mastodon-server-wakeup-call-fediverse-users-and-hosts-protect-their

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41434600

This is an issue that's troubled me since joining the Fediverse in 2016, and as one of the people heavily involved in the "Plexodus" diaspora from the late unlamented #GooglePlus. Whilst large commercial providers have their failure points concerning privacy and law enforcement, they've also often stood up to over-broad attempts to surveil peoples' online activity. Small instances on distributed systems often run as hobbies or very small-scale subscription / donation-based operations might avoid the roving eye of such efforts, but also lack resources, knowledge, and procedures for how to respond when such seizures occur. As the EFF notes, Kolektiva failed to alert its members (and remote contacts) until months after the FBI raid.

The EFF does have a promising guide to legal rights and considerations specifically tailored at the Fediverse:

"User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

#KolektivaSocial #Kolektiva #EFF #ElectronicFrontierFoundation #CyberRights #FBI #OnlineRights #JacksonGames

Edit: This is a 2023 story.

FBI Seizure of Mastodon Server Data is a Wakeup Call to Fediverse Users and Hosts to Protect their Users

We’re in an exciting time for users who want to take back control from major platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

> #Microsoft confirms that #Windows 11 Recall #AI is not optional — a glitch made it appear so in the Windows 11 24H2 KB5041865 update
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-confirms-that-windows-11-recall-ai-is-not-optional-a-glitch-made-it-appear-so-in-the-windows-11-24h2-kb5041865-update

But don't worry, the company that is unable to correctly implement a toggle switch assures us that they definitely implemented this new immensely complex piece of technology nobody asked for directly in the operating system in a way that is secure and under no circumstances puts anyone in danger in ways security researchers said it will.

Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 Recall AI is not optional — a glitch made it appear so in the Windows 11 24H2 KB5041865 update

Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc says, "This will be fixed in an upcoming update."

^{Christopher Harper (Tom's Hardware)}

I really miss going to Rust and Wasm events, hanging out with folks, geeking out. But like, the last time I got Covid it knocked me flat for about six months - and I don't know how I'll respond to a Next Time. So there really can't be one.

It's so draining to feel like I'm the only one advocating for clean air, accessible environments, spaces that don't risk having participants walking away with long-term disabilities.

Like, I don't even know how to begin to explain that this is important.

"i host my api serverlessly"

THEN HOW DO I CONNECT TO IT, BEN???
WHAT AM I CONNECTING TO???
A FUCKING LOCAL FILE????

I'll be fursuiting as these two huge larger-than-life floofs at Furry Migration from Thursday to Sunday!

Just see me around, talk, hug, or I could also be open for cuddles too!

I can't wait for Furry Migration!

"the bluesky network is federating"

JUST ONE SMALL PROBLEM
FEDERATING WITH WHO, JAY?
FUCKING ACTIVITYPUB?

If your open source project makes me jump through hoops to report a bug, I will just conclude you don't care about bugs.

That includes requiring me to create an account. Big projects like the Linux kernel manage just fine with a simple mailing list, there's no reason your small project needs a big corporate solution with accounts and data leaks. Leave that to big corporate projects like Mozilla, who really don't care about bugs.

I'm not an expert in labor history or activism, but from a lay perspective, it seems unavoidable that in its modern and present form, AI is an attack on labor. Not even just in the direct sense of replacing and supplanting labor, but also in the form of *devaluing* it (e.g.: the shift from translation jobs to "editing" jobs).

Opposing the proliferation of AI is thus, to my naive understanding, an act of labor and class solidarity.