Success for #softwarefreedom in @fsfe's intervention against #Apple in front of the European Court of Justice!! Big thank you to @llas who is coordinating the activity, our lawyer Martin Husovec, plus Jithendra, Dario, our interns Ben and Anna Rita, and the rest of the @fsfe team working on this!

https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260708-01.en.html

NEW: 20 civil society organisations have called for an investigation into the UK Information Commissioner's Office for failing to uphold data protection law in relation to eVisas.

This scheme has been plagued with breaches and accessibility issues.

And the ICO has done nothing to hold the UK Home Office to account.

Find out more ⬇️

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/civil-society-organisations-call-for-ico-to-be-investigated-over-evisas/

#dataprotection #evisa #ico #gdpr #migrants #homeoffice #ukpolitics #ukpol

A drug is a chemical substance and object.

A social media platform is a complicated system of speech and communication.

Using anaology that conflate the two is at best lazy thinking, at worst prohibitionist propaganda from people with authoritarian personality types.

How ChatControl passed in the EU parliament.

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Simulated Windows dialog box. Text reads "Do you want to enable warrantless surveillance on all EU citizens?" Options: Yes (highlighted) or Remind me later

Lord help me I'm writing my own plaintext accounting tooling in Guile

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

Okay bonny, I am gonna give you a scarf so that my friends in the office in Utrecht know where you are…. So like this!

Now you go find a place in 1st class until I get a phone call okay 💕🐰

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OV looking at a plushie bunny with ticket scanner

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OV Printing out a lost&found label

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Ov putting on sticker like a scarf

Geocoding fun: There's a bunch of trees in Budapest named after major European cities (and of course correctly mapped as such in #OSM), what could possibly go wrong...

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Transitous showing a 1min/68m walk from Belgrade to Rome, in Budapest.

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Photo of the tree named "Belgrád" in Budapest (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6032676306), taken by a Transitous contributor who debugged the problem on-site.

• Date: Saturday 16th May 2026


• Time: midday - 4pm (London time)


• Location: Canada Water Library Meeting Room 1 (OpenStreetMap)


• RSVP: Reply to this message, email me, or message me here on the fediverse, so we know rough numbers.

• LibreLocal wiki entry


• GLLUG post

#GLLUG #FreeSoftware #Meetup #London

[Fairbuds XL]> .quit
Invalid command in menu main: quit

beanquery> ,q
beanquery> 

scheme@(guile-user)> exit
$1 = #<procedure quit args>

matthew@matthew@fennell.dev-laptop:~$ quit
-bash: quit: command not found

I like that:

if [condition]:
	breakpoint()

In other languages, I slightly dread starting a debug session because I have to remember the flag to pass extra args, add all the breakpoints on startup etc. This leads to long sessions because I don't want to lose the investment I've put into my breakpoints.

But in Python, I have much shorter debug sessions and I can get right to a point of invocation really quickly, verify something, and close the debugger straight away.

I use the repl much more because I can end up in a repl right with the context and variables that I need.

Defining more breakpoints within the repl is really nice to unpack nested datastructures in the same way it would be done in the code:

>>> for key, some_list in some_dict.items():
... 	for value in some_list:
... 		breakpoint()

It's really thoughtfully designed - thank you to the people who made it so!

RE: https://chaos.social/@sleepyowl/116126002122086149

A must read thread from @sleepyowl, particularly for anyone laughing off the "oh they're trying to enforce age verification at an OS level, well I'll just change my open source operating system settings"

Y'all, this is the game where we get LOCKED OUT of having ANY real FOSS operating system we control AT ALL

The steps have been being put in place for this for over a decade now. And who controls the supply chain?

We have to fight this stuff tooth and nail.

@matthew and if you really must know:

1. Cache invalidation.

"Want transactions for the whole of Jan, without any transactions from 1 Feb?"

Bank 1: Export 1 Jan to 1 Feb 😎
Bank 2: Export 1 Jan to 31 Jan 🙂
Bank 3: Export 1 Jan to 30 Jan!! 🤦

How does that happen?! It must be inclusive on both ends, plus the 1 Feb transaction happens at midnight? All I know is, if you go to 31 Jan, it will pull 1 Feb into Jan's export!

Thank goodness for -maxdepth 1!

Baroness Kiddon has tabled an amendment that would require client-side scanning on every device. That would include all film cameras. https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/65150/documents/7938 #MassSurveilance #scanning

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Screen shot of amendment 239A to Crime and Policing bill

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Screen shot of amendment 239A to Crime and Policing bill

So you probably don't want to reject AI generated content not because "AI generated content Is incompatible with your license if it has no copyright" but because "whether or not AI generated content is subject to copyright is not a settled matter and ESPECIALLY NOT INTERNATIONALLY" (and not everywhere has a public domain). If you accept something, its status may not be the same internationally, and *legal decisions about AI output could change soon*, leading to an integration of something very hard to undo later.

And the OTHER reason to not integrate it is that most of AI generated output has subtle bugs and tends to result in an erosion of your community. So yeah, that too.

Can you run Signal with basically no iOS or Android devices right now and still do the (mandatory) prove-your-phone-id steps?

It feels like very near future I, and everyone else who cares about computing autotonomy, we're all gonna have to start runnin' the Linux phones, no matter how non-ideal that user experience is right now

@BBCNews This is about basic order and decency in government: which was the #Starmer prospectus. Boring but safe. Rather than corrosion of basic democratic norms.

@NoRestfortheWicked

As a person who is running Matrix from 2018 until now, it seems I made my choice to switch to xmpp.
Currently in a process of migrating people to the new platform.

As someone here stated about Matrix:
"wait another 2 years and see if it's gotten any better. Well, this hasn't expired yet".

I'm tired of waiting too.

Also, xmpp is far from being perfect, but

- it works stable
- lite weight (both clients and server),
- works pretty well on poor network conditions.
- better for 1:1 chats
- AV calls are flawless.

I am stressed over online safety act shit extending to VPNs, and keep running through the rant in my head and not making the video because I'll sound insane.

The world is going mad in so many ways.

ICYMI: Finally blogged about an old paper (led by @groceryheist) that explains why people often engage in multiple groups with overlapping topic and membership, and which helps explain why competition between online groups seems to be rare. https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/why-do-people-participate-in-similar-online-communities

Thank you, #OnlineSafetyAct for failing to regulate #AgeVerification in any way at all. Now Discord users must hand their data to a Peter-Thiel-of-Palantir-linked system.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,”

Wow!

We welcome today's UK High Court ruling on Palestine Action.

The proscription not only criminalised political #protest but had far-reaching consequences for free speech online and counter terrorism programmes like #Prevent.

The government must change the Terrorism Act so future ones don't make similar proscriptions with worse consequences.

With the ban still in place, we need to hear how Ofcom expects platforms to remove #PalestineAction content.

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/human-rights-defenders-raise-concerns-that-online-safety-act-will-lead-to-censorship-of-palestine-protest/

#ukpolitics #ukpol

@bert_hubert And out the door before CI has finished!

@bureaucrhaj my friend the professor solved that problem a while ago! Even @rosahaj in her younger days liked bikes!

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Shak in back basket in backpack on bike

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Blahaj lying on bike

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Rosahaj in bag on bike sneaking our

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sovtechfund/116056808593765766

If you're a FOSS maintainer working on standards or following them, we would love to hear from you! Please share and boost in your circles.

Yeah! Feeling cuddly great!
Can you see I've new stuffing???
But now finally NOMPF!

#Blahaj #surgery #stuffingReplenishment

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A Blåhaj cuddly shark sitting on a table with a plate with two Dutch cheese sandwiches in front of them. A Smolhaj cuddly shark and a small black crotched octopus with colourful bead tentacles are watching. Glad everything went well! And the scar is neat. And it seems you are already recovered! Amazing!

@EUCommission @bendirgo I for one look forward to some of that EU harmonization towards ISO 8601

Wanted to see me speak at #FOSDEM but couldn't make it? Here's the two talks I gave!

How to Level Up the Fediverse
(co-presented with ActivityPub co-author @tsyesika !) https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HVJRNV-how_to_level_up_the_fediverse/

Lisp is Clay: the Power of Composable DSLs https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HDE7JZ-lisp-is-clay/

Can't get enough? Need more #spritely talks? We gave a bunch... 🧵

Another FOSDEM and hackathon are in the rear-view mirror, and it is hard to find words to describe how amazingly productive and fun the experience was! We met so many people at the postmarketOS stand, in the FOSS on Mobile devroom and at dinners in the evening. As always it is fun to put faces to nicknames and to talk about the Linux Mobile ecosystem, and figure out how to improve it in person.

Find photos and what we got done in the blog post:

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/02/10/fosdem-and-hackathon/

Thanks to all who came by or contributed towards making this possible!

#fosdem #linuxmobile #postmarketos