Mastodawn

What’s at stake in the fight against age verification is not just a single bill in a single state. It’s about whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control online that reinforces specific moral and religious worldviews. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-age-gating-isnt-about-kids-its-about-control

Rep. Finke Was Right: Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control

What’s at stake is whether “protecting children” becomes a legal pretext for embedding government control over the internet to enforce specific moral and religious judgments—judgments that deny marginalized people access to speech, community, history, and truth—into law.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Mar 9

Jackie Singh Mar 7

Infosec pros fight ransomware, APTs, and foreign disinfo for a living. But when Trump weaponizes clearances, hollows out @CISAgov, and unleashes @DOGE as a systemic insider threat, our industry mostly chooses self‑preservation.

Join me as I unpack that trap: https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/p/the-industry-that-fights-governments #infosec

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

Most security reports could be a couple sentences and a small code snippet, and would be better for it. I hate that every report is written as if it were a blog post about their finding and how it's the greatest disaster of all time. Write as if you're having a dialog with a knowledgeable maintainer, wait for questions to elaborate if needed. LLMs have not made this better either.

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Jan 24

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf, ELS Jan 18

The folks at #Retraction #Watch are my #science #heroes, detecting #falsified scientific studies. Follow the link to read about all that they do: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/science-journals-retract-500-papers-a-month-this-is-why-it-matters-8ckm8lfw9

Science journals retract 500 papers a month. This is why it matters

A small team of volunteers is tracking thousands of falsified studies, including cases of bribery, fraud and plagiarism

The Sunday Times

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Jan 23

PyCon US Jan 21

🚀 Calling all Startups! 🚀

Good news! The #PyConUS 2026 Startup Row application deadline has been extended to January 30, 2026.

Don’t miss your chance to showcase your startup to the Python community! 🐍

Details and how to apply
👉https://us.pycon.org/2026/attend/startup-row/

Startup Row

PyCon US 2026

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

Look I know it's not a competition to have the _most_ maladaptive coping mechanism but you go to war with the psyche you have

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Jan 14

Kattni Jan 3

Happy Solar New Year! My goal for this quarter is to figure out what kind of work I want to start looking for, and to put together a solid resume. To that end, I have a favor to ask. If you have any recent experience with looking for work, or any experience hiring folks, I'd like to pick your brain. If you've been looking for work or found a job, I want to know what worked for you and what didn't. If you're a hiring manager, I want to know what you look for, what kinds of questions you ask, and any other advice or ideas you may have. My initial list of questions is short, but I'm sure it will evolve as I talk to more folks. If you're up for having a chat with me, let me know and I will send you a meeting schedule link.

Boosts greatly appreciated.

#GetFediHired #HiringAdvice

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Dec 23

Dave Winer Dec 22

The web as your plan B

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your add-in.

Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it — who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things.

It was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there.

My advice — think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff.

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Nov 30

Rebecca Watson Nov 26

Automatic license plate readers may seem like a good idea until you hear about the ways they enable cops to abuse women, all while not actually making you any safer https://skepchick.org/2025/11/the-police-state-gets-flocked/

The Police State Gets Flocked

Transcript: Earlier this year, I talked about the data and research that suggest that using tools like ChatGPT is bad for learning, because it offloads critical thinking to an algorithm, leaving ki…

Skepchick

Gregory P. Smith (he/him)

🚲🦝

Nov 27

Mike Fiedler, Code Gardener Nov 26

There's a nasty #OpenSource #SupplyChain worm going around named Shai-Hulud. It's also capable of exposing some projects' long-lived PyPI API Tokens. Read more on what's happening, and what you can do to protect your projects.

TL,DR: Adopt Trusted Publishing 🔐🚀📦

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-11-26-pypi-and-shai-hulud/

PyPI and Shai-Hulud: Staying Secure Amid Emerging Threats - The Python Package Index Blog

Shai-Hulud is a great worm, not yet a snake. Attack on npm ecosystem may have implications for PyPI.