Ryan Boswell 🏳️‍🌈

@ryanboswell@sfba.social
139 Followers
140 Following
2.8K Posts
💻 Software engineer turned manager.
❤️‍🔥 Passionate about privacy, security, content systems, emojis, and the outdoors.
🌐 Webhttps://ryanboswell.com/
👱🏼‍♂️ Pronounshe/him/his
Linux communities beware of #PewDiePie fans

Regardless of PewDiePie’s personal #politics (which clearly, at the very least are problematic), it is fairly well known by anyone who has been following him for any number of years that the vast majority of his fan base are enthusiastic fascists.

Now #PewDiePie , who’s content centers around PC gaming and Windows, has decided to switch to #Linux and published a video encouraging his followers to do the same. This means a very large number of his #fascist fan base is going to be switching to Linux.

Now many Linux communities are going to be forced to more explicitly choose their politics. Like the parable of the Nazi bar, if the community remains politically neutral, it will become fascist in short order.

A few things to be wary of:

  • People asking you not to be “too political” or to “focus on the technology, not the politics” is a classic and highly effective fascist ruse to get moderators to lighten up on fascist elements posting in their community.
  • People complaining about free speech rights. The #Internet and the #Fediverse is already a domain where people can speak freely about their politics by running their own server and building their own community with few to no government constraints. You don’t need to compromise on whether fascists have the right to free speech in your community.
  • Arguments over your code of conduct (CC) and “safe spaces.” Keep them up-to-date. Research other people’s CCs, learn about the history of why these CCs came to be, learn about what the function of each clause of the code is included and phrased the way it is. These were usually designed to make explicit the fact that a community wants to be a safe space where underprivileged people can feel comfortable expressing themselves, and it is very easy to make people afraid to express themselves. Fascists understand these CCs and the concept of “safe spaces” were explicitly designed to exclude them, and often attack these ideas.
'Subscribe to PewDiePie': What did Christchurch mosque gunman mean in final words before shooting? | The Independent

The gunman's mention of the meme was a nod to those in-the-know about internet culture – a fringe part of which helped foster his extreme anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideology

The Independent
turns out the woke in government was load bearing
The "move fast and break things" era is over. "Move thoughtfully and fix things" is up.
Honestly I can get behind this. #nbpy

So when they say "Ohhhh sorry the prisons are a labyrinth! We just can't find this person," that cannot be the whole truth in a prison system where people are truly working off sentences.

So. Either they CAN track people & are lying to the US about having lost our people in there. Or they can't track people, and they're lying to the prisoners about how every day they work in there takes 2 days off their sentence. I'm just saying.

Ok. So. Um. As somebody who's had some experiences with prison labor, I want to talk about what we're seeing here with CECOT's "work off your sentence" program.

(I had multiple manual labor farm jobs where I got to work & found out most of my coworkers were inmates. Long stories for a different day.)

This is the kind of thing that should be banned. It is time to realize that indiscriminate data collection and profiling is harming our society.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

#Vivaldi #Browser #Spyware #surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #AI #Windows #Macos #Linux

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

TechCrunch
@rmondello A decade of using Chrome's monopoly power to suck all the air out of the room and fend of anyone else's attempts to improve privacy on the web platform, while making life incredibly difficult for the other browser makers. Then, right on the verge of moving to the industry standard of blocking cross-site cookies and suddenly there's cold feet. Whomstsoever amongst us could have anticipated this turn of events?

"Clearview’s business model is based on “weaponizing our own images against us without a license, without consent, without permission”

this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose powerful surveillance technology is now in the hands of the Trump administration"
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/

The shocking far-right agenda behind the surveillance tech used by ICE and the FBI

Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump administration.

Mother Jones
The city should give citizens that report citation worthy things a commission each time they successfully issue one. We’re literally doing the city’s job for them, and making our streets safer, we deserve some recognition.
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@thegreatgonzo That illustrates the point rather well.
@thegreatgonzo you know you can just consume the art without giving them any money right? 😉
@6R1MR34P3R and that is a reasonable position to argue. But there are people who are still shoveling dollars into the pockets of terrible people. Not just JKR, but many others, Polanski for example.
@thegreatgonzo The only way to separate the art from the artist is to steal the art.

@thegreatgonzo I will say that any time I was going to "separate art from the artist" I would definitely not do so by directly supporting them in any form whatsoever.

But yeah, this is why I've had serious troubles even liking things where they aren't going to get anything from it anyway. Just imagining they might even get one penny from me watching some old show from the 90s on a free streaming service or something really ruins stuff I loved back before I knew what some people were.

@nazokiyoubinbou @thegreatgonzo
Separating the art from the artist works better with the dead ones, I guess.

@NicholasLaney @thegreatgonzo Even then it's hard...

Plus someone is still profiting from the IP usually. That someone didn't separate, one way or the other.

@nazokiyoubinbou @NicholasLaney yeah. It usually isn't as obvious why you might not want to funnel money to people as it has been with JKR.
It is all too easy to imagine that the royalties from something created by someone who was considered okay may have be left or sold to someone who isn't.

@thegreatgonzo @NicholasLaney Yeah, normally they're not quite so obviously and openly publicly horrible. I now have a constant fear "I liked this thing. Is the main actor or the writer a horrible person?" always at the back of my head. Sometimes I'm really afraid to even *look* for details. To be frank, I would 100% understand anyone wanting to put their head in the sand about such people wherever possible.

But no one can ignore her. I didn't even like Harry Potter and I know all this.

@thegreatgonzo I certainly can’t separate Robert Galbraith or how this person « wants to be called now » from the art…
@thegreatgonzo I am sorry. She ruined her magic kingdom for millions of people.

@thegreatgonzo Ditto with voting for right wing parties if someone has a queer friend (or 'friend' in this case), child or whatever. I'm sure the target of the right wing hate will understand that they only voted for the party because some of their policies make sense and since you're okay in their books, the party wouldn't probably try to set any laws that would hurt you, right?

This is my parents and them voting for the local right wing loonies, who fortunately took a beating this year.

@thegreatgonzo You should leave Harry Potter behind because Rowling is a bigot and also you're in your 30s
@thistle I left harry potter behind a long time ago. And I'm not in my 30s.