The PHP Foundation wants to publicly share our support for the petition that aims to classify open source contributions as officially recognized volunteer work in Germany. This is a very important distinction for all our open source friends and community members living in Germany, but anyone can sign the petition. It would also be appreciated if you want to spread the word and help us help the organizers reach the 30,000 signatures required to bring it to quorum. 🙏 🐘 🚀

https://www.ehrenamt-opensource.de/en/

My hot take on the vulnpocalypse:

We don't have more vulnerabilities than we had before. The vulnerabilities were always there, we just didn't know they existed. But importantly, for moderately sophisticated attackers, who only have to find a relatively low number of vulns to begin with, not much has changed. Yeah it's a little bit cheaper, but finding vulns wasn't all that difficult, depending on the target. For defenders otoh, making the finding of vulns cheaper is theoretically a good thing, but we already had not enough capacity to fix the vulns found by fuzz testing and similar methods before, so this is just adding on the pile of stuff we know is broken, but can't keep up with fixing it. The net effect seems to be that we made triage more expensive. Yay.

If you or someone you know has an account on mastodon.cloud, I would highly recommend migrating to a new server. Lots of instances are in the process of completely blocking mastodon.cloud which will sever all connections for people on mastodon.cloud. Mastodon.cloud is effectively abandoned, running very old and out of date software with minimal moderation resulting in a good deal of moderation work for those of us running other instances.

I am posting this in hopes that some people on mastodon.cloud see it and decide to take action.

Recently I read a post by some jackhole techbro who wants a default automatic feed algorithm here just like Big Social™.

Opening the door for AI bullshit is not even the worst part of this idea.

Folks, all of us here ARE the algorithm. Personal curation is a feature, not a bug.

We make Mastodon awesome by following people and boosting what we find meaningful, significant or just cool. That's how it works.

Let's keep making friends. Let's keep sharing. Let's keep Mastodon alive. Together. 💖