[uspol] So the mainstream media predicts that the Democrats are likely to take back the US House of Representatives in 2026. But the Big Tech companies are still 100% all in on fascism -- not hedging their bets the way they tried to make nice as much as possible with Republicans back when the […]

New, by me: The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network Today's story is a long overdue series of scoops nestled inside a far more urgent Internet-wide security advisory. The vulnerability at issue has been exploited for months already, and it’s time […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

"You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby […]

For those interested in the #California #drop system, CalPrivacy has an #rss feed https://privacy.ca.gov/feed/ and mailing lists (including job postings) https://cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/apps/subscribe/ So far I'm still working on DROP (stuck at the "We couldn't verify you're a California […]

myth: in the future, personal AI will save you money by browsing shopping APIs, to get you the best deals reality: in the future, personal AI will save you money by flying untraceable autonomous drone strikes against data centers, to lower your electric bills

point of order: if you use the new #California #drop system to remove your info from the legacy data brokers, make sure you are also blocking or opted out on the Big Tech platforms (if you're opted out from old-fashioned sales/sharing but still targetable on Google/Meta/Apple, it tends to drive […]

You don't need to wait for the European Parliament and the European Commission if you want to build a Eurorack synthesizer. You can order modules and hook them up. And the #eurostack doesn't need top-down action either. Fundamentally the Eurostack is bottom-up decisions made at ordinary IT […]

Good morning, California DROP system (sign up now to have data removed by data brokers in August) So far I'm stuck at "We couldn't verify you're a California resident." but will try again when I get a verification code in the postal mail. https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/

myth: #advertising supports democracy, without it news sites would need paywalls to support quality journalism reality: 10% of the people in the USA buy a majority of the stuff, so over time an ad-supported site will skew to the interests of that wealthy 10% In the real world, quality […]

#europe businesses seem to have finally reckoned the risks of having critical supply chain dependencies on emotionally unstable US BigTech bosses and rather weird US laws.. > Any private contract between a European customer and a US cloud provider is ultimately subordinate to US federal law. A […]

[uspol] the USA can't build Navy ships on time or within budget, and the solution is...a large software project, to be done by a government contractor? With "AI"? https://news.usni.org/2025/12/09/navy-palantir-announce-448m-ship-os-ai-tool-for-shipbuilding-and-repair

[uspol] damn there are a lot of people seeding that "60 Minutes" item on BitTorrent—my ratio is still 0.00 and I have a pretty decent connection https://archive.org/details/60minutes-cecotsegment

#youtube has a bunch of tricks to get you to watch AI slop and/or extreme right-wing videos. For now, if you have #Firefox, you can still work around this stuff. It's not as easy point-and-click as it could be, but IMHO a 10-minute session dinking with settings is worth it. Three extensions and […]

Just added the `browser.ml.enable` #ai preference to my #Firefox `policies.json` file https://codeberg.org/dmarti/browser-adfraud-protection/commit/9a5dc25f43ba15fecd924e64caed85242aac640f This is something you can drop into place once and have it take effect for all users and browser profiles […]

RE: https://fediscience.org/@gwagner/115744160237430663 #readthewholething (on the best screen you can get) Amazing photography 1/4

"Are #apple gift cards safe to redeem?" If a card was tampered with at the store, the recipient, who had no idea that the tampering happened, could get locked out of their whole account (!) https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/17/are-apple-gift-cards-safe-to-redeem In California if a […]

personal stylebook note: choose NPOV verbs for LLM output, such as "emit" or "generate" and avoid anthropomorphizing language like "write" or "say" except in a direct quotation

"Research Groups Oppose Capping #nih Funding of Publisher Fees." https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2025/12/16/research-groups-oppose-capping-nih-funding PS: These universities seem to be saying: "We accept the growth of the APC model. We just need help […]

Every time someone from a bigger food city says ‘what’s the big deal about food in SF’ and people get so defensive. I think it’s worth articulating that the severe gentrification has led to changing tastes, yet the cost of living and lack of housing also impacts everything. If service people […]

for those of us who recollect the mercifully brief flirtations gnome, enlightenment, KDE, and BeOS each had with transparent backgrounds and transparent terminals, which looked so cool until they had to be used, the responses to apple's "liquid ass" user interface seem unsurprising.

#mozilla is packing their browser with "AI" slop and adtech. But that's not just an issue for normal users. #ibm needs to put a default browser on Red Hat Enterprise Linux—and IBM and its big customers have their own slop and adtech strategies. So somehow the browser as packaged for IBM will […]

[uspol ai] Whatever the legal effects of the executive order against state "AI" laws, the big obvious effect is that Trump just put a big TRUMP sticker on "AI". For anybody who is trying to sell something to Trump supporters in the USA, that means a scramble to come up with "AI" features to […]

Just read "Fascintern Media" by @robin ( https://berjon.com/fascintern-media/ ) and it reminds me of a line in a recent YouTube video about how moderation policies work there "But the thing I believe, one of the reasons such leaders get support in modern world because we are not allowed to […]

Something that seems like is should be a common use case for "AI" (computer vision, machine learning varieties) Input: a photo or scan of a document Output: marked-up text for the same document (word processor format or HTML) What are the best tools for that?

marketing news: [big surveillance advertising company] spent [redacted] billion to acquire [data broker] claiming records on a billion+ people right to know: [data broker] has one file on me. says I was using an Android device at the following times Timestamp: 2025-08-31 10:40:12.87 Timestamp […]

Third installment in my series for Reynolds Journalism Institute, on the #SurveillanceAdvertising oligopoly But, to look on the bright side for a minute, this is just an internet dystopia narrative. And the internet turns out to be remarkably good at beating those. We don’t eliminate them […]

RE: https://akademienl.social/@Frederik_Borgesius/115685261948938353 "Less personalized ads" -- will they still target by fraud risk factors like age and neighborhood?

Exactly. The new U.S. National Security Strategy is much worse for Europe than most people had imagined. Europe is described as a bigger threat than both China and Russia, and they outline the need for regime change in Western European countries as part of a civilizational struggle.

this fall I worked with the core Git folks on writing an official data model for Git and it just got merged! I learned a few new things from writing it. https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/gitdatamodel.adoc

Happy family tech support day to all who celebrate. So far all of my requests have been for how to turn off some of the new "AI" or "smart" features that have arrived during the year

RE: https://freeradical.zone/@funnymonkey/115610945941284484 This info is how sites get sponsors. Marketing decision-makers need to be able to justify supporting a legit site instead of throwing money at the surveillance advertising dupooly

[uspol] "The American right, especially the emerging MAGA ecosystem, was simply a dream customer: highly engaged, highly inflamed, and extremely willing to click through to garbage sites that paid out ad revenue." […]

What do #prosocialdesign features and metrics look like in a social app? #myfeed is a new one taking a backwards approach to the problem Starting with a goal of five minutes/day of engagement _maximum_ (too much use is a UX issue to be fixed) Adding lightweight to-do and calendar features to […]

"Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway." We knew that. In the big picture, though, marketing decision-makers _knew_ that this stuff was going on at Meta, but chose to pass info on their own teen […]

For me, as someone who made web sites during the web boom, this is really sad. I remember telling family and friends to come on, check out this web thing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/22/ai-workers-tell-family-stay-away

Valve Software just lucked into a bunch of free content marketing courtesy of MSFT Before Steam Machine: Steam Machine will be a solid gaming console with lots of titles At launch of Steam Machine: Look at the specs, seems like a decent game development system too After "agentic Windows" […]

Remember that time Mozilla said it was going to stop working with the personal data removal service Onerep after I published a story showing Onerep's CEO was actually running several people search sites at the same time? […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/115572214446178708 Perhaps city-dwelling raccoons will fix my Makefile

Just did a #recap download for the amended complaint (Nov. 6) in Walsh v. Dollar Tree Stores, Inc. #cipa #privacy #privaterightofaction https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69643824/walsh-v-dollar-tree-stores-inc/

time-saving reading tip I ignore "I am good at skill A and used it to invent a thing to make it easier to do tasks requiring skill B" and pay extra attention to "I am good at skill B and this thing built using skill A helps me"

I’m in!! Zohran Mamdani wants you to boycott Starbucks https://www.businessinsider.com/zohran-mamdani-boycott-starbucks-strike-2025-11 #boycottstarbucks #findafourthplace #unionstrong #labormakesoligarchstake

Hahaha which one of you submitted this one Like it made me laugh with its wide-eyed eager absurdity but also this is genuinely a textbook example of a Great Ad If you click on this ad then it goes to a small Neocities webpage at […] [Original post on retro.social]

Imagine that Walmart founder Sam Walton, on one of his unannounced visits to a company store, had found some executive running a criminal scheme out of the back room. Asses would have been kicked. For a conventional business, even a large one, the appearance of honesty and a clear offer of a […]

All of these "Europe must" articles are a lot more optimistic if for "Europe" you read "European IT decision makers" and not just "European politicians & bureaucrats" Everyone who is in a position to select IT products and services is going to have choices * vendor who bought Trump a gilded […]

[Epstein, Trump, and "Bubba"] Okay, so this is all childish and reminds me a lot of the David Cameron pig photo in the 2010s. But Bill Clinton has an opportunity to do the funniest thing imaginable, now. Just hold a press conference, and forcefully say "I did not. have. sexual relations with […]

[uspol nsfw] rejected technothriller plot Newly elected President of the USA, in 2017, discovers that good pictures of him engaged in a sex act with a former President of the USA exist. Upon taking office, he summons the tech CEOs and leading VCs, offers not to make them face the consequences […]

the epic orchestra arrangement of "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" would be "The Hour Of Peanut Butter And Of Jelly Is At Hand"

We had our three year anniversary on November 9th. I completely forgot to mark it. Happy three years to everyone on https://thecanadian.social