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Unsolicited advice [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
This may or may not help, but there's a public bridge at aria-net.org which lets you join Matrix rooms and 1:1 chats, without a Matrix account or server, from XMPP.Like all bridges, I'm never 100% confident it's working properly on the other end! But, it's worked quite well for me so far.
Parliament is going to debate the petition you signed – “Repeal the Online Safety Act”.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
The debate is scheduled for 15 December 2025.
Can a toddler be a terrorist?
A shocking new report has found that babies and toddlers have been referred to the UK's controversial counter-terrorism scheme Prevent hundreds of times since 2016.
ORG has shown that data collected under the Prevent programme is widely shared and retained for years even when referrals are marked ‘no further action’. Lives are being impacted from an absurdly young age.
Read more from Hyphen:
https://hyphenonline.com/2025/11/12/babies-referred-to-prevent-counter-terror-islamist/
Other changes:
"Completely open source" → "based on open standards"
Specific deadlines → open consultation period
Technical specs (OpenAPI) → general principles
Fixed roadmap → iterative development
“What if everybody did it?” is the cornerstone of Kantian ethical morality: “Take every action, as if, by acting it's willed into universal law”.
… which is a fancy way of saying “Do onto others as you would have do unto you”.
So, I'm totally ok with a “what if everyone did it?” analysis.
& I'm not sure there is even a utilitarian comeback here.
Cc: @AnnieBuddy @evan
Every now and then it hits me how invisible the advantages of being part of the EU can be. For instance despite bringing billions of phones to Brussels for FOSDEM for multiple years at this point, I only realised today that this only is possible thanks to freedom of movement for goods and people within the EU. I think too many don't appreciate the small things like this enough, like not having to choose between leaving some of your belongings with the border control or missing out on an event.
Websites often pressure users to change browsers needlessly.
I run Firefox ESR 128.14.0.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/128.14.0/releasenotes/ says it's nary 3 months old. Yet my bank says:
> “Your browser is no longer supported. For…improved security, update to…latest version.”
Reading bank's FAQ it's b/c they only support last 2 #Firefox releases (ignoring ESRs).
Web designers once aspired to “graceful degradation” — but that principle slowly declined in fashion since ≈ 2011.
Today, those who aspired to it now shun it.
⏰ NEXT WEEK ⏰
We're going beyond the screen and hosting a meet up IRL. Whether you're a supporter or just curious, everyone is welcome to pop down.
Hear from our team, mingle and join the movement!
🗓️ Monday 10 November
🕡 6:30-9pm GMT
📍 Newspeak House, London, UK
Sign up ➡️ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-london-meet-up/
I almost want to try deleting random parts of a throwaway install, but then doing that on a real system is something else entirely. I'd definitely be worried that I missed something subtle/important.
python3.Not many experiences since have replicated that sinking feeling, seeing the system get removed in front of my eyes, kicking myself for having not spent 2 seconds looking at the list of packages to be removed.
Like you @KatS@chaosfem.tw I ended up reinstalling the whole thing, maybe it was salvagable but I for one had no idea how to do that 😀
Thought: I should dress my bicycle up as a human crawling on all fours for Halloween, then I will dress myself up as a bicycle and ride it around.
…
No, I am not drunk or high right now, why do you ask?
This! Buy from local (independent) stores instead of online giants; attend live shows, and buy merch directly from the bands; eat locally-grown (organic) food; use privacy-focused, community-built online services; buy used gear & equipment instead of brand new ones; and of course, do it all based on what you can afford and as a best-effort thing, without being hard on yourself if/when it just isn't possible.
For sure, it won't change the world, but it will feel good 😎
https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make/
Please support your local decentralised messenger and stop this parasocial relationship with the blue messenger. You will never be able to fix him. Your decentralised alternative may not work as well, but that's because it's not effectively subsidized by big tech hyperscalers.
But hey, maybe we're not meant to have seamless calls everywhere and everytime and not pay anything! *loses 90% of the crowd*
Awww. We're fucked.
A little more than 2 months after Debian, we’re finally releasing Mobian Trixie as our new stable release! We’re also taking this opportunity to start rotating the PGP/GPG keys we’re using for signing both our images and package archive.
You can read more on our blog: https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/new-stable-rotating-keys/
If you design an on-hold audio loop, you shouldn't put it into production until you spend a day trying to do your regular job while on hold. If so, you'll learn:
1st: offer a callback queue if possible.
2nd: offer user the *choice* of pure silence or audio loop while holding.
3rd: the audio loop should:
* have completely consistent volume level.
* never break in w/ human voices in the loop (eg: “Remeber our website…”) once loop starts. It *will* sound like live agent every time to most users.
apk upgrade when I am on the tube and know I'm about to lose connection?I started migrating from #NextCloud to #Radicale, but iOS threw a spanner in the works (turns out accountsd only checks for A and not AAAA DNS records!) I decided to go into a "half-migrated" state: pointing myself to the new instance to continue testing while leaving my partner pointing to the old one.
That caused a problem: any events we created in the meantime wouldn't be synced to the other's devices.
vdirsyncer came in super handy and enabled a three-way sync between NextCloud, Radicale and my laptop! So, despite being on two completely different #CalDAV servers, we both see exactly the same state and all updates flow through seamlessly. And, when they switch instance, it will be like nothing ever happened, despite being on different servers for a few weeks.
Thank you #openStandards and #freeSoftware!
UK Politics, civil liberties [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I can highly recommend listening to this Prospect Magazine podcast featuring the late Conor Gearty.It's a scary but very worthwhile listen. It covers public support of civil liberties, the right to protest, the proscription of Palestine Action as well as what Labour should be doing to fortify against an authoritarian takeover.
I have thought a good bit about what government could do, and I believe there are a number of simple things they could do that they're not doing. And those are to fortify democracy against the forthcoming fight.So you could - obviously, obviously - change the voting system. Don't have any stupid internal independent commission, don't have any stupid royal commission, don't consult, just have "Single Transferable Vote - PR Act". You'll get Liberal support, Labour support - push it through. Unfortunately it's not in the manifesto, the Lords would try and delay it.
You would ban foreign influence on elections - it would be straightforward. You would make it impossible to have something like GB News. You would not allow Mr Marshall (lovely man though he is) to run a whole lot of outlets in pursuit of an obvious and transparent political agenda.
It's called parliamentary sovereignty, it's called legislation, it's called having will. There used to a requirement that all media was balanced - return to it. A lot of this is return to the past! A lot of this is recover what Mrs. Thatcher began shredding. The community that benefited from the end of the cold war, through the lack of fear of communism, they destroyed many of the social entitlements originally, and they've turned now to the civil and political, and they're seeking, in my opinion, to perpetually empower themselves. But we can fight back.
Let's have some fights with the right enemies. And if you go down, you go down. That strikes me as a more attractive set of scenarios than simply surrendering on the basis that you didn't achieve some growth that you set out to achieve in 2029.
@neil there are degrees of self hosting, too. I "self host" many services, but it's on rented VPSes on other people's servers.
It outsources the tedious "keeping servers and networks alive", while giving me control over the actual services. Does that count as self hosting?
(to my mind, yes, but not in the purist path of having it running on a computer you can see and touch...)
Over next 1-2 weeks,I'd appreciate an extended thread re: #FrameworkLaptop, #mntreform, & #FOSS.
TL;DR on my idiosyncratic needs:
* minimize binary firmware blobs¹
* Having 2 disks in RAID-1²
* Runs stock Official #Debian stable³
* Understanding best current replacement keyboard options⁴
* Form factor that works for my travel needs.
Is @frameworkcomputer or @mntmn better for me?
I'd be glad if ∃ active engagement on this!
@dianea free open source software on my hardware is something more akin to #droidian and getting away from an android project that is dependent on Google’s aosp -with an uncertain future, also powered by google hardware.
Graphene has a lot of dependencies on google being generous and those gifts are drying up quickly.
We need to be supporting more TRUE open source solutions. More #linuxmobile options and focus is what we need.
“We are not saying we are going to boil the ocean in one go as the public would be really sceptical of that. We startering with right to work checks first but there are loads of other applications for digital ID.” Josh MacAlister. They are literally saying there will be future function creep of digital ID and this is about merging records across Government.