I’ve been on fedi for 3 years, so I’m taking the opportunity of #PortfolioDay to make a proper #introduction !
My name is Nighten and I love to draw very detailed illustration about city and nature. Most of my artworks are set in the same continuity and universe, see if you can spot the link between them!
Most importantly, I publish a weekly art newsletter where I dive deep into my art, project and inspiration. I think it’s very good so feel free to join and read the archive! :)
(You even get free coloring pages by subscribing!)
And thank you if you decide to follow me! I hope my art will bring you joy 🌸
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Illustration: Inside a wood building with massive glass panel, a mother and her son are enjoying the incoming sunlight amongst plants. Wind turbines are visible close by. On the mountain far away, an observatory is visible.
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Illustration: A woman stands on top of a grassy hill, open arms, blow by the gentle breeze. A cat is standing next to her.
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A vibrant, colorful illustration of the same scene, showcasing lush greenery, houses nestled in hills, and utility poles with wires.
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Line art of a woman with short hair enjoying the breeze by a city canal. The background is a very busy city with an overwhelming amount of details.
If you've not joined us before, you can expect a casual chat about linux/FOSS/FOSS-adjacent stuff over some drinks and food. Hope to see you there!
Time: Saturday 24th October, 1pm onwards.
Address:
250 Haverstock Hill
Belsize Park
Greater London
NW3 2AE
RSVP: not required.
For more info, check the blog post.
Address:
Lecture Theatre G12,
1-19 Torrington Place (University College London),
London,
WC1E 7HN
Time: 6 pm - 7:30 pm on Tuesday 10 November. Admission opens at 5:30 pm.
Registration: required - sign up here.
Thank you to Lars, @arunisaac@snac.systemreboot.net, UCL LUG and UCL itself for calling, organising and hosting this event!
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@matthew @liw @arunisaac
Will it be streamed? (no judgement/rage if not, lol, just curious)
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@jbowen @matthew @arunisaac I'm afraid it will probably not be streamed or recorded. But it's based on my 2023 article in @lwn and I'm also happy to be invited to give the talk again to other audiences later.
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ERRORS, INACCURACIES AND HOME OFFICE INCOMPETENCE
Check the findings from our latest report @openrightsgroup
All the resources are now publicly accessible.
Review them and verify the findings.
We conducted a six-month investigation to understand the actual use of AI tools in the asylum decision-making process.
Each statement from the Home Office was found to be contradicted by alternative accounts obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It took eleven Written Parliamentary Questions (WPQs), two pieces of ministerial correspondence, and ten FOIA requests to establish that these tools are deployed without adequate internal oversight, accountability, or transparency.
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/the-use-of-chatgpt-in-asylum-decisions/
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Out of 70,000 summary texts generated by the summarisation tool, only 0.3% were examined for accuracy. The error rates observed in these summaries exceeded the 9% figure reported in the Home Office's published pilot evaluation.
Of the 203 summaries reviewed, 139 were deemed acceptable, 19 required further review, and 45 failed (constituting 22%). In the second stage of review, 30 of 56 summaries failed. Overall, between 15% and 23% of sampled summaries were assessed as unsuitable for use.
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In two accounts the Home Office stated that asylum applicounts “are not specifically told AI has been used in the consideration of their claim” and cannot see or correct AI summaries of their interviews.
The DPIA clearly states that applicants are informed of data processing via the Borders, Immigration and Citizenship privacy information notice on GOV.UK. However, this notice, updated on August 6, 2026, does not mention AI tools.
The DPIA for the APS tool that supplied to ORG through FOIA as the APS DPIA describes ACS. Its
internal title is ‘Interview Summarisation Tool – Pilot’ and every substantive
section concerns the summarising of interview transcripts. It is not apparent from the disclosed material that a data protection assessment specific to APS has been carried out.
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Neither the ACS nor the APS tools are referenced in the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard Hub.
There is no quality assurance process in place for the AI-generated summaries from ACS.
Similarly, the APS tool's generated text is not subject to quality checks.
Only 0.3% of all summaries produced between April and July were reviewed by Home Office Subject Matter Experts, with error rates between 15% and 23%!
There are no plans to conduct an independent audit of the system.
And there has been no effort to align the use of these tools with the UK Government AI Playbook.
Catzilla
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A black and white tuxedo cat sits on a windowsill with its mouth wide open in a yawn, perfectly aligned to look as though it is breathing fire into the sunset clouds
A recording of the talk “Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence” that I gave at Linux Days in Prague the other day is now available online.
Learn why open source is necessary but not sufficient for digital sovereignty and why we need open standards like XMPP.
Today's OpenStreetMap #31DayOSMChallenge is FIXME tags.
I've tended to ignore these. There's a lot of FIXME tags in London. It's a bit of a mess! See them with OSMInspector here:
https://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=tagging&lon=-0.07747&lat=51.52122&zoom=11&overlays=fixmes_on_nodes%2Cfixmes_on_ways Today's a good day to try to fix some.
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screenshot of OSMInspector zoomed to central London and with the "Tagging" "FIXME" overlay showing. It's busy with lots of little icons for every OpenStreetMap element tagged with a FIXME. Lots of them. In fact the map is a rash of light blue (the icon colour)
Look Rosa i added more pins to my lanyard… i have night trains, fancy night trains, NS cuties and Trans for London! I was a shark on all of these….
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Rosahaj looking at OV’s lanyard full of pins
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
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.
Successfully prosecuting the LLM companies under The Computer Misuse Act for their hacking activities is going to do a lot more to regulate their behaviour than any proposed regulation is.
I have a feeling any upcoming regulation will just build a moat around the existing big players and entrench their position.
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.
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.
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
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.