“Don’t say “Europe should invest in secure communications”, write out that the European Commission should procure a secure email solution that does not fall under US spying legislation” https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/europe-must-invest-in-xyz/
Tomorrow, I'll be taking time off from my regular work fighting cybercrime to help my fellow citizens with another important task: exercising their electoral franchise by casting ballots.
In 2020, I decided to sign up to work for my county here in Colorado and help out at the largest polling location, the University Memorial Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I'll be working there again this year.
One takeaway I've learned from working at the polls is that my election officials, led by the Colorado Secretary of State and Boulder County's clerk and recorder, have put an enormous amount of thought and work into preparing the election process to be incredibly transparent, fair, and accessible to any eligible voter.
This year, I trained with dozens of other people in my community to learn how to assist voters with this process. The training was rigorous, and included about 12 hours of online training and a day and a half of training in person. People hired for more senior positions attended additional training, but I wasn't interested in being a Lead. I wanted to help voters with registration and using the electronic Ballot Marking Devices (or BMDs) so I have been working as an "ePollbook and Tech Judge" this year.
The cybersecurity aspects of what we're doing are no joke. We are required to memorize multiple long, complex passwords for different systems we need to log in to. We will also have at least two different multifactor authentication systems in use to protect the access to our accounts.
Our training also included some topics I wish we didn't have to learn about: Conflict de-escalation, information about election misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and how to respond if someone engages in violence in a polling place. I guess this is the world we live in, now. I don't like it, but I'm glad the people running our elections are clear-eyed and focused on what we need to know to stay safe while helping others.
Today was an incredibly long day. While many people used the touchscreens - I checked in 22 voters myself - many more of these first-time voters told me they wanted to do it "old school," marking the paper ballot with a pen.
Tomorrow, it's going to be an even longer day, since polls open earlier and close later. We're expecting long lines all day. It will be an all hands on deck situation in the Voter Service Center. And I, for one, cannot wait. It is thrilling and very, very encouraging to see so many young, first-time voters decide to take this leap into a new form of public engagement.
So tomorrow, I hope (if you haven't already) that you can get out to the polls where you live. I'll be there, and so will thousands of my compatriots, bipartisan election workers who will help you register, or get you a ballot, or maybe just hand you an "I Voted" sticker. Give them a thumbs up or a nod - they're doing important work, and they'll appreciate it.
Tomorrow, I'll be taking time off from my regular work fighting cybercrime to help my fellow citizens with another important task: exercising their electoral franchise by casting ballots.
In 2020, I decided to sign up to work for my county here in Colorado and help out at the largest polling location, the University Memorial Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I'll be working there again this year.
I didn't know Lennart Poettering was on fedi. Started reading a thread about D-BUS and as soon as I read the word I said to myself: I bet the systemd people are going to replace it. And what do you know, a dozen posts later, there it is.
I mean, I just read this stuff out of mild interest because I use Debian and Debian uses systemd and a few years back I started writing service unit files for the things I do and it wasn't too bad. I'm still in the process of migrating them over, though. Not all of the services I run have switched.
I didn't know Lennart Poettering was on fedi. Started reading a thread about D-BUS and as soon as I read the word I said to myself: I bet the systemd people are going to replace it. And what do you know, a dozen posts later, there it is.
I mean, I just read this stuff out of mild interest because I use Debian and Debian uses systemd and a few years back I started writing service unit files for the things I do and it wasn't too bad. I'm still in the process of migrating them over, though. Not all...
recently I've had more young people asking me for advice on this and I'm like why do you want advice from me, I failed completely at it. I have a tech salary so I host a few queer people in need when I can, that's it, that's the bare minimum a socialist should do and it does not a commune make.
I guess I can talk about my experience with the times we worked towards that problem I could never solve, namely: how to get queers to do mutual aid when we don't know how to stay together.
1. You can't put a bunch of queer ppl in a space and say "it is forbidden to date, that's dangerous". That would be like telling cats not to jump. Bonding intimately to one another is kinda what we *do*.
2. When people are intimate they are liable to emotionally hurt one another.
Then you pair a subculture built from reified trauma, where any conflict is considered to be abuse, any hurt is violence, any disagreement is DARVO etc.; where the figure of the abuser is seen as a sort of duplicitous infiltrator to be rooted and cast out with prejudice; where the group is the first time the queer person ever felt accepted so they're liable to pedestalise others and thefore, when things go hurtful, to splitting and disposal; you pair this subculture of callouts, where the more you denounce the safer you are from your time on the wheel, against a material condition of wars and economic crises, against a world that deny us food and shelter and visas and medicine.
The result of this combination is that the first time there's a relationship conflict, both sides are incentivised to call the other an abuser as soon as they can, because whoever loses the narrative war in the abuser:victim binary also loses the support they need for shelter and medicine and collective self-defense etc. Moreover anyone not directly involved in the conflict is incentivised to get the fuck away, shut up and not get involved, lest they pick the losing side in the final narrative and be deemed an enabler. I.e. people are pushed to do the exact opposite of what we need, which is collective solutions to structural problems. Everything gets individualised, ascribed to failures of moral character of specific bad people, whose number somehow seems to multiply the more purges there are. So every relationship breakup splits the entire group into subgroups that never talk to one another again, even in the face of actual literal nazis stockpiling fucking guns, to literally fucking shoot at us. But no we can't have a gun range or an estrogen distro or a food forest, because Rebecca from Stuttgart punched a wall once when she was distressed and then she was deemed violent and problematic, and her bff Sarah who would have money to share now will never talk again to Marina who knows farming or her wife Dersima who could hook you up with immigrants.
> A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let's not kid ourselves: we don't have communities.
(The Broken Teapot)
recently I've had more young people asking me for advice on this and I'm like why do you want advice from me, I failed completely at it. I have a tech salary so I host a few queer people in need when I can, that's it, that's the bare minimum a socialist should do and it does not a commune make.
I guess I can talk about my experience with the times we worked towards that problem I could never solve, namely: how to get queers to do mutual aid when we don't know how to stay together.
@elilla oh god I feel every fucking word of that in my bones. Dead fucking on, every single word.
Nearly ten years of being in queer online spaces has completely disillusioned me from the idea of community. Nobody's willing to just take a step back and say "hey, okay, take a deep breath everyone, let's talk about [feud of the day] like adults, mkay?"
@elilla
This experience is what made me become a social worker for homeless kids instead.
When my illusions about our community eventually fell apart, I decided to put my skills to use in a setting that isn’t built on illusion.
It’s being a front line medic in the fight against capitalism. And there are casualties, there is triage, but there are no illusions. All of this is real.
We (including my colleagues here) just stoicly keep on doing what we do, knowing that it won’t change anything in the here and now of the bigger picture.
Sometimes we see kids making it, often enough we see them not making it.
It’s about staying focused on what you can provide rather than what you can’t.
But also, not doing this alone, knowing I can take myself out of it at any time and have someone covering for me, not having to take it home with me.
@elilla
This experience is what made me become a social worker for homeless kids instead.
When my illusions about our community eventually fell apart, I decided to put my skills to use in a setting that isn’t built on illusion.
It’s being a front line medic in the fight against capitalism. And there are casualties, there is triage, but there are no illusions. All of this is real.
We (including my colleagues here) just stoicly keep on doing what we do, knowing that it won’t change anything in the...
25% of the people in Switzerland would vote for Trump, which is just shameful. On the other hand, that is less than the percentage of peple who vote for the Swiss extreme-right party SVP. Which gives me some hope for that segment…
Wrote my little fedi-forgetter using Python. This allows me to expire toots without having to archive them. I needed this functionality for my GoToSocial instance since it doesn't have toot expiration, I don't think. https://src.alexschroeder.ch/gompotherium.git/ #GoToSocial
My Gomphotherium script is running and operation Memory Loss is on target. I'm now down to about 4000 posts from the 5250 or so I started out with.
Gomphotherium is a script that you run from a cron job. It deletes 10 posts or boosts that are at least 8 weeks old and not pinned. That's 240 toots per day, 1680 toots per week. The deletion rate limits on fedi are pretty tough, so this slow drip of digital laudanum is the only solution that will work unless you use Mastodon (which has automatic post deletion built-in) or or Mastodon Archive (a program that archives your messages and optionally deletes them afterwards).
Gomphotherium supports all servers supporting the Mastodon Client API. If you're using an instance that supports apps, it will work.
Perhaps this is the moment where I should consider packaging it for Pypi. I'd be happy to accept merge requests that do this. Publish your fork on a public git repo and I'll pull it from there!
My Gomphotherium script is running and operation Memory Loss is on target. I'm now down to about 4000 posts from the 5250 or so I started out with.
Gomphotherium is a script that you run from a cron job. It deletes 10 posts or boosts that are at least 8 weeks old and not pinned. That's 240 toots per day, 1680 toots per week. The deletion rate limits on fedi are pretty tough, so this slow drip of digital laudanum is the only solution that will work unless you use Mastodon (which has automatic post...
A few years back I had a habit of every six months or so doing a thread on Fedi about options for getting books other than Amazon. Eventually it finally occurred to me that I could write it once, put it up on website, and update as needed, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
@JessMahler Thank you! Lots of people prefer to buy elsewhere, but so many 'independent' shops are owned by Amazon. It's hard to find those untouched by Bezos.
@JessMahler hive.co.uk for Britishes- does EBooks (DRMed, but otherwise normal EPub) and with every purchase you can pick a local independent bookshop to get a cut.
Did you know that in almost half of all states in the U.S. you can register to vote and cast your ballot for President on election day‽
If for any reason you find yourself wanting to vote but haven’t taken the steps to make it happen, check to see if your state is on the list. There’s also a link there with information about requirements, times, etc.
Did you know that in almost half of all states in the U.S. you can register to vote and cast your ballot for President on election day‽
If for any reason you find yourself wanting to vote but haven’t taken the steps to make it happen, check to see if your state is on the list. There’s also a link there with information about requirements, times, etc.
If you want to learn more about the ‘Red Vienna’ of the 1920s/30s, I recommend a guided tour of the Karl Marx Courtyard and the Washhouse Museum. I learned a lot about historical socialist housing policy & puppet theatre about trade union labour struggles. The Karl Marx Courtyard, which is over a kilometre long, could be seen as a historical forerunner of the #superblock concept with over 1,300 flats, businesses, and social infrastructure.
If you want to learn more about the ‘Red Vienna’ of the 1920s/30s, I recommend a guided tour of the Karl Marx Courtyard and the Washhouse Museum. I learned a lot about historical socialist housing policy & puppet theatre about trade union labour struggles. The Karl Marx Courtyard, which is over a kilometre long, could be seen as a historical forerunner of the #superblock concept with over 1,300 flats, businesses, and social infrastructure.
I updated my ban-cidr script and added a bunch of Alibaba, Aliyun, Ace and Aceville… And load is back below 2. My feeling is that they'll try again in a few hours, with their bots distributed to new virtual machines in new networks. Until I have them all banned, I guess?
Look at the beginning of the script for instructions.
I updated my ban-cidr script and added a bunch of Alibaba, Aliyun, Ace and Aceville… And load is back below 2. My feeling is that they'll try again in a few hours, with their bots distributed to new virtual machines in new networks. Until I have them all banned, I guess?
Having feelings of existential dread about US elections every 4 years, is a choice, and not a good one. We don't need to do this every 4 years.
We could just listen to some of the Black people that we so depend on to protect us all from doom.
I told you 4 years ago, that if Biden screws up this gift of an election win, that Black men would not show up for him again in 2024. People who read about Black folk, but don't know Black folk, tried to write little tweets about why I was wrong.
@cstross Yeah, there's a very good reason we had "never again" drilled into us in Hebrew school. Sadly way too many people forgot and joined the cult. :(
Clicking on that Microsoft Azure link: "New! AI-generated suggestions…" Downloading an image and opening it: I can use AI to improve the pictures.
This is what we're burning the world for?
Current typical smart phone lifetime is 3 years.
To compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from production, distribution and disposal, they should last from 25 to 232 (!) years.
More realistic headlines than the ones coming from #Fukushima right now:
-The reason a remote robot removed the fuel is that humans can still not enter several of the reactors, radiation levels will kill them.
-Removing several grams of melted nuclear fuel is a proof of concept. The 800 tons of melted fuel remaining will not be removed this way, this is to assess the contents of the melted fuel. It is a minuscule sample and not the beginning of corium (melted fuel) removal.
-The corium at Chernobyl is still sitting under the reactor. It will take the better part of a century (best scenario) to remove the corium at #Chernobyl or Fukushima.
More realistic headlines than the ones coming from #Fukushima right now:
-The reason a remote robot removed the fuel is that humans can still not enter several of the reactors, radiation levels will kill them.
-Removing several grams of melted nuclear fuel is a proof of concept. The 800 tons of melted fuel remaining will not be removed this way, this is to assess the contents of the melted fuel. It is a minuscule sample and not the beginning of corium (melted fuel) removal.
I wanted to write a little program that I would call from a cron job that would delete 20 old toots of mine, oldest first, if older than a certain number of weeks. I wanted to use Perl 5 and then I spent a few hours getting the OAuth workflow right and now I can't even retrieve the statuses. Getting status code 404 followed by a lot of 599, no further explanation.
I am unhappy.
In half an hour we're going to see the in-laws and help cut some reed; we'll need it for the bees come spring. And then sauna and dinner. Maybe the rest of the day without computers will be better.
See you on the other side.
I wanted to write a little program that I would call from a cron job that would delete 20 old toots of mine, oldest first, if older than a certain number of weeks. I wanted to use Perl 5 and then I spent a few hours getting the OAuth workflow right and now I can't even retrieve the statuses. Getting status code 404 followed by a lot of 599, no further explanation.
I am unhappy.
In half an hour we're going to see the in-laws and help cut some reed; we'll need it for the bees come spring. And then...
One of the best features of fish is that it suggest to complete previous instances of what I typed so I can go “ls” and it will show me that last ls command I used, and then I can go up up up up to pick other instances of ls commands I used.
Gregory's Server
