Live facial recognition. A waste of time. Waste of money. And, crucially, lays waste to our rights.
For the supposed golden goose of UK digital policing to spit out one (false positive) match is an indictment of this invasive tech.
Tech and surveillance aren't the solution to complex social problems.
#SafetyNotSurveillance #facialrecognition #policing #precrime #surveillance #privacy #ukpolitics #ukpol
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
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@annasdtc people often make it a binary choice between big tech or complete self hosting. But it does not have to be a binary choice. You can use and support communities and cooperatives. For messaging, we are happy to provide services to anyone who wants at https://prav.app and https://durare.org
It is part of #xmpp federation, so you have a choice of many other providers too. https://providers.xmpp.net has a list of such providers.
I'm still not saying everyone should self-host their own Mastodon instances. Self-hosting Mastodon is probably best left to a community. But then again, very minimal ActivityPub implementations such as https://holos.social/ that are about as easy to set up as installing an app on your phone exist. Perhaps the free software community should aspire to write more of such human-scale software where applicable.
Address:
Lecture Theatre G12,
1-19 Torrington Place (University College London),
London,
WC1E 7HN
Time: 6 pm - 7:30 pm on Tuesday 10 November
Please arrive on time (6pm), so we can let you in easily.
Thank you to Lars, @arunisaac@snac.systemreboot.net, UCL LUG and UCL itself for calling, organising and hosting this event!
If you have anything particular you'd like to discuss, the Call for Participation/Ideas is open until 1 October 2026.
Some ideas include:
- Ideas for discussions, related to being an XMPP #operator
- #Hackrooms, discussing or helping out with operator-related projects
- Operator-related (or even wider XMPP-related) topics
- Anything else you can think of which could be interesting to XMPP operators!
For more information, check out the:
From the wiki:
Sprints are a great opportunity to get to know the people you are usually working together with online. For people who are not working on XMPP full time they can also be a good opportunity to finally sit down and start working on that one project they always wanted to work on.If this sounds like the right event for you, come and join us!Beyond that Sprints are a good opportunity for inter op testing and bug fixing or in general a good opportunity to learn from each other. If you want to implement feature X in your client, another client developer, who already implemented that feature, might be there and can tell you what to look out for when implementing this feature.
Sprints can also be a rare instance where client and server devs are in the same room and a good opportunity to rapid prototype a new feature that has the client and server interacting with each other.
Coming up this week 🔔
It's the first of a series of townhall events delivered by the #SafetyNotSurveillance coalition.
Join us in London to explore how AI and ‘crime-predicting’ technologies are currently being used by the Met.
🗓️ Thurs 17 September
🕕 6-9pm
📍The Liberation Centre, SW9 7QR
Register now ⬇️
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/safety-not-surveillance-london-townhall/
#surveillance #policing #metpolice #ai #precrime #ukpolitics #ukpol
Not easy these humanist devices… but I think I am ready for some train spotting!
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OV trying to use a minolta SLR
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OV in back side of camera smiling
For our next London OpenStreetMap social pub meet-up, come join us in the Blue Posts, Newman St on Wed 23rd from 7pm:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London#Wed_23rd_Sept_-_The_Blue_Posts,_Newman_St
Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge station) on Saturday 5th September from 5pm until late. Be there and be square.
The Debian project started in 1993 and celebrates its birthday on August 16th of each year: Debian Day. This year we'll have at least 19 gatherings in 3 continents; c u there! #Debian #Debian33years #DebianDay #DebianDay2026
I had a really nice day out in London yesterday. Picked up the DVD of the second season of Silicon Valley, before heading to a Linux user group meeting which was really good fun.
There were contrasting views, but also understanding and appreciation. Aside from some useful feedback for the team at @mozilla , I met some good people (including @matthew ).
Leaving the pub, I had a swift Nandos at Waterloo, before listening to my Bandcamp Friday purchase on the train home. A good day out.
I hope to be there once I finish with work, probably a couple of hours after it starts.
- Date: Saturday 8th August 2026
- Time: 1pm onwards
- Location: The Metropolitan Bar (OpenStreetMap)
- RSVP: not required.
It's not a reserved venue, so look for a table with lots of stickers, and Polarian wearing the EuroBSDCon 2024 (Dublin) tshirt (with artwork like this).
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FOSS Meetup in #London on Saturday was a success, we ultimately had 9 people attend that day.That you so much to those who attended, and also those who helped with outreach. I am aiming to run another one sometime in October, but this time with more infrastructure.
Also again, thanks to the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) for managing to get the sticker package to us on short notice.
If anyone lives in/near #London and is passionate about #FOSS and #Freedom and would like to help build a community, please do reach out, the more the merrier.
Picture of the meetup attached, lots of stickers!
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Photo looking downwards onto a round wooden table in a pub environment, on which some pint glass es are visible (some empty, some half-full) as well as some FSFE informative leaflets and stickers. The table is surrounded by ~8 people, who are not visible in frame apart f rom some arms and legs, as the camera is looking down. One person's hand is reaching into the sticker pile. There are so many stickers sprawled over the table that they have taken over ~80% of the table. The stickers are loosely grouped into a few sections: the overwhelming majority are FSFE stickers, while nearer the camera there are also some w ith the logos of XMPP, Snikket and OMEMO.
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It was great to see some familiar and new faces and even some people from the fedi too 🙂
#GLLUG #FreeSoftware #Meetup #FSFE #London #ShotOnLibrem5
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Photo showing the lid of a laptop, which is filled with stickers. There are so many overlapping over each other that barely 10% of the laptop lid itself is visible. The newest / highest are an "I Love Free Software" and "This Computer is not old" stickers from the FSFE, as well as a sticker of the orange OMEMO fish logo. Other stickers include a couple of rows of NLnet hex stickers, Open Rights Group stickers on the laptop hinge, a variety of XMPP stickers including Monal, Conversations, XMPP network graph, big OpenStreetMap and FSF stickers, as well as sourceware and Software Freedom Conservancy stickers in the bottom left corner. Below these free software related stickers, some Formula 1 related stickers, with some helmets, race cars and team logos, can be barely seen peeking through.
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A close-up photo of the same laptop, focused on the FSFE's "This Computer is not old" sticker. It shows a retro-looking grey pop-up box on a blue background, which looks like it comes from a boot screen or non-graphical linux install. The title of the popup box is "fsfe.org". Inside, the box says: "This computer is not old, it is sustainable." There are two buttons at the bottom of the box, the left (selected) one says "OK" and the right one says "Cancel". Also visible in frame, surrounding/underneath the sticker, are the edges of an OpenStreetMap sticker, a McLaren F1 car sticker, a Phosh sticker, a GNU sticker and an IndyCar sticker.
New on the blog. Codeberg's members voted to stop hosting mostly AI-generated projects. The freedom worth defending is not the freedom to be taken from, it is the freedom to refuse.
I dusted off an old idea to show duration for walking segments of public transit itineraries that I played with a year or so back.
Now that the list is using flowboxes, which can wrap contents to multiple lines when needed I think it will probably look better:
#gnomemaps #PublicTransport #PublicTransit #transitous #routing #Gnome
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GNOME Maps showing a list of public transit itineraries with indicated time estimations for walking legs
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 ⬇️
#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.
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
Utopia & Dystopia by Dylan Glynn
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A side-by-side crayon or oil pastel drawing split into two panels labeled "UTOPIA" and "DYSTOPIA." The left panel, titled "UTOPIA" in green text, shows a lush, green tree with a thick canopy standing on a patch of grass against a light, rain-streaked background. The right panel, titled "DYSTOPIA" in red text, shows a fiery red, orange, and yellow mushroom cloud erupting against a dark, black background, resembling a nuclear explosion.
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.
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We'll be here for a few hours and possibly heading to a pub afterwards.
Come join us if you're in London and fancy a casual chat about #FreeSoftware!
[Fairbuds XL]> .quit
Invalid command in menu main: quit
beanquery> ,q
beanquery>
scheme@(guile-user)> exit
$1 = #<procedure quit args>
matthew@matthew@fennell.dev-laptop:~$ quitIf only using
-bash: quit: command not found
C-d for everything didn't feel so wrong.pdb while writing some stuff in #Python, and it's really nice to interact with!I like that:
breakpoint() function, making conditional breakpoints very natural: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():I end up writing things in the repl first, but within the context that the code would be written in reality.
... for value in some_list:
... breakpoint()
It's really thoughtfully designed - thank you to the people who made it so!
"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!
silly free software joke [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as digital sovereignty, is in fact, software right to repair/digital sovereignty, or as I've been taken to calling it, software right to repair plus digital sovereignty. And what you're referring to as software right to repair/digital sovereignty, is in fact, free software/software right to repair/digital sovereignty, or as I've been taken to calling it, free software plus software right to repair plus digital sovereignty.reverse-i-searches: I wanted find Maildir -type f -mmin -10 | mthread | mseq -S, and I got find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete!!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