Software Engineer at Stripe.
Building free software, public services, and digital commons recreationally.
| Website | https://boramalper.org/ |
| Location | Cork, Ireland 🇮🇪 |
[doing things I’m bad at]
“ugh, I suck at everything”
[doing things I’m good at]
“this doesn’t count because it’s easy for me”
I think #rsync has been a true litmus test of fanatical animus towards #AI.
If you think it's right to pile on a veteran programmer who spent his life on giving away some of the most widely used #FOSS today, only because he desperately tries to continue maintaining them (often also alone) in the face of newly-armed attackers by using the same AI tools to level the playing field, you urgently need to question your life choices.
"rsync and outrage" by Andrew Tridgell
New, by me: A number of high-profile and/or valuable Instagram accounts, including those of the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant for the U.S. Space Force, got hacked and defaced with pro-Iran messaging in the past 24h after people figured out that Meta's AI support assistant could be tricked into resetting account passwords.
From the story:
"A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target's usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta's AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset."
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/06/hackers-used-metas-ai-support-bot-to-seize-instagram-accounts/
EFF welcomes our new Executive Director Nicole Ozer!
Nicole has long been a partner of EFF’s in the fight to defend civil liberties in the digital world. She’s basically as close to EFF “family” as someone can be without actually having worked here — until today! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/welcome-new-eff-executive-director-nicole-ozer
EFF welcomes our new Executive Director Nicole Ozer today! Nicole is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital speech who previously served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco. From 2004-2025, she was founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
I wish we had more builders sharing their work on Mastodon than we have doomers spewing out agitated toots.
So please, show us your projects! Share your blogposts, your artwork, your creation. Even if they're "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu". Tell us more about your homelab, how you're de-Googling, and the new service you're self-hosting now.
It is a lot more fruitful to learn from and help each other towards solutions than to focus all our attention on problems alone.
Don't be a "doomer".
* Complaining about a problem isn't same as solving it.
* Blaming people for a problem doesn't make you a part of the solution.
Putting in time and effort to build sustainable solutions and strong communities is the way, but those require significantly more investment than inaction through criticism.
Le Guin only considered two groups of people: the ones who walk away from Omelas, and the ones who stay.
But the real world tells us that there's a third group, who think if they have it so good by torturing just the one child, imagine how awesome the economy would be if they could use five, ten, perhaps even hundreds of children. Perhaps they'd sell courses on how to childmaxx your own, private Omelas.
> After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would "continue to function." The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Microsoft_Office_2019_and_2021_for_Mac_view-only_conversion_(2026)
ADHD Jesse
BrianKrebs
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Schrödinger's Prat
Brooke Vibber 
Milo Trujillo