Okay #nerds. 🤓 The @techlore #Techlorian Signal chat is a [mutable, yet] steady stream of nerdery that is a value-add and welcome alternative to the S.A.D. (Standard American Doomscroll).
Even my young teen is asking to listen to the podcast, so yeah. They're doing something right. ✅
Happy to support it with my wallet as well as my keyboard.
🎉 The critical amendment 34 (rejecting automated assessment of unknown photos and texts) PASSED by ONE vote, paving the way for the extension of Chat Control 1.0 to be overwhelmingly REJECTED!
Initial analysis by @echo_pbreyer : https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parliament-stops-mass-surveillance-in-voting-thriller-paving-the-way-for-genuine-child-protection/
@techlore bringing it on home on #californialaw and #coloradolaw on #ageverification on the Operating System level. The problem, a breakdown, and action steps. 👍
This would quite possibly make my next phone a Motorola vs iPhone. I use Moto 5G for backup phone & like it "OK," but top-of-the-line it's not. BUT, I could be swayed. Apple Pay is kind of a must-have "for reasons" applicable to me/my household, so I'd still have to figure out a second device. (That was my issue w keeping #GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel 8 I owned for a super-short time. That and locked out of 2/5 critical apps due to G Play.)
Here's the @itsfoss article. https://itsfoss.com/news/motorola-grapheneos-team-up/
“In the case of Colorado’s and California’s bills, effectiveness is lost. In the case of New York’s bill, liberty is lost.”
Carl Richell, System76 Founder and CEO, urges New York to reject S8102A OS-level age verification.
Read his full statement: https://s76.co/m-S8102A
#Gorillaz "The Mountain, the Moon Cave, and the Sad God" #musicvideo
Original, #2danimation and backgrounds on a new Gorillaz track. It's so pretty TBH. "Let's be friends in every lifetime" kinda vibe.
Mannnn, everyone basically agrees #MaynardJamesKeenan and #Tool got the SAUCE like permanently. His voice and lyrics are seriously something special going on three bands and several decades.
The best a.m. 🎁 I give myself after coffee and a good breakfast is deleting 3-5 LinkedIn contacts I don't know. I've even deleted some I *do* know. I see them in the "You might know..." section & wonder how they're no longer in my network & then remember it's SUPER JOYFUL to be rid of most of them. 😂 Man, F #LinkedIn, seriously. What a toxic positivity (or negging 4 likes) trash-hole.
Once again, the thing I used to pay big 💰 for (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, etc.) are now PURE JOY to abandon.
Am I the only one who keeps #Google in its own browser ensconced in a #sandbox with nothing else in the browser EXCEPT Google-owned pages? Because to the folks around me, I'm takin' crazy pills, apparently.
I can't fully divest a couple accounts "for reasons", but that's about how much I trust The Googz. (And yeah, I own some Android devices as well, but the fruit company and Linux flavors won my daily drivers.)
The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:
#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.
A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.
What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.
Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.
And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.
Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.
Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”
These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.
In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.
But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.
After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.
We rejected this demand in its entirety.
In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.
And now we see each other in court.
But why all this?
Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).
And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.
All of this is making Palantir nervous.
We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.
We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.
In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:
World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.
The truth.
All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.
We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.
Fight Chat Control
System76 
Adfichter