> The Taliban in Afghanistan have imposed a nationwide shut down of telecommunications, weeks after they began severing fibre-optic internet connections to prevent what they call immorality.
Interested readers may note that "disruption measures", including access restriction orders, form the backstop of the UK's Online Safety Act.
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.
I’m not a fan of doing this but it is for a good cause.
Hi, as you might know blahaj.social 
is a small vulunteer ran incomeless part of the fediverse 
We built it several years ago with recycled servers and network equipment.
Our @sysadmin haj has been working hard but our core switch and one of our HDDs refused to come online after a power cut.
Donations to purchase a replacement are very welcome at https://blahaj.social/about (shark pictures are also very welcome 💕)
Alt...
Smal blahaj coming our of rack holding ethernet cables
UK politics, digital ID [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Dear Estonian government: could you please schedule an embarassing leak of all digital ID records for sometime in the next few weeks? That would really help us out.
OV is saying goodbye to his beloved ICR! Bye bye single deck international VIRM 😢💕
Alt...
OV on table with goodbye pin
So, after blockchains, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, metaverse, VR, AI-for-everything... what is the next bubble?
Any chance that it will be small, sustainable, local computing?
@jonquark @openrightsgroup It is definitely a significant risk, I think the HO eVisa app works like this. And of course, eVisas don’t work except on an app; in both cases the systems will make some people very dependent on relatives or partners who are abusive.
We're in a cost of living crisis and Labour wants to bring in digital ID cards for everyone 🤡 They're risking turning the UK into a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are to go about our daily lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/keir-starmer-expected-to-announce-plans-for-digital-id-cards #precrime #digitalid #idcards
# Digital ID cards to be compulsory for all UK adults under government plans
*sigh*
Tiny details, like what to do about people who don't have a compatible smartphone, still need to be worked out..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g6vgpdo
(Fixed link)
@neil I wonder if that's a reasonable bit of digital legislation that could be implemented 🤔
"Services cannot be provided purely through a downloaded app and there must be feature parity between a mobile-optimised web application (to be accessible through a browser of the user's choice) and any developed mobile application."
I've just had my credit card forceably moved from Sainsburys Bank to Nat West. Nat West asked me to select a four digit code and a twenty characters password.
All routine stuff so stored the password in my password manager (using a password it offered me so a random string of characters) and then tried to log in.
(1/2)
Can someone explain the context I'm lacking for all of this? Non-UK person here 😅 Thanks!
...
UK Politics, flags [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I'll do my best from my perspective (based in London, I don't want to speak for everyone or other nations in the UK).Generally speaking, many in England find nationalistic flag-waving distasteful (with the exception of England playing in a major sporting event, or, for some, when there's a royal event).
In the last few weeks, far-right groups have tried to push the narrative within their circles that "we are 'not allowed' to fly the flag and 'be proud of our country'" (dog whistle for ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration + anti-asylum viewpoints). This led to people putting up flags on lampposts, spray-painting it on pedestrian crossings and bus stops etc. Councils initially started taking them down off lampposts, but then the far-right people were able to say: "look, it's proof that we're not allowed to fly our flag" (aka "the 'true Brits' are being suppressed by the 'others'") so councils have largely backed off.
I think it is essentially used as a dog whistle to make "others" feel unsafe. Certainly that is how I feel when surrounded by these flags.
That is not to say that everyone is putting them up for these reasons, but if you are putting them up now, I think it is a way of showing a particular point of view.
People are rightly upset with another Musk intervention in British politics. Yet so many Polticans, organisations and journalists still use X. Polticans and organisations should ditch the platform. Move to federated services and alternatives. Be the change they want to see. #Musk #X #Fediverse #ukpol
Installing #munin on a new server, wondering why it is not generating graphs.
Hmmm, everything is working fine if I callmunin-crondirectly, graphs are generated, and the cron entry is there in/etc/cron.d, so what's going on? Why is it not getting run from cron?
$ sudo service cron restart
Unit cron.service could not be found.
$
Huh? What is up with systemd? Why can't it find cron? Oh, hang on a second...
$ apt search cron | grep -i installed
$
D'oh!
There's something so wrong about it ultimately not respecting your choice.
Mozilla seems to have compromised its values. I don't think it's wrong to struggle with that. It reminds me of one of Karen Sandler's excellent talks on when to say no to funding:
We are fighting to make improvements in the areas that we think are so important, and if people think that that's important, they will get on board and help you find money, and help donate to you - and if they don't, well, you know, maybe it wasn't that important, and you'll have to find something else to do.I feel the same about the forks. I really hope, with all the new browsers with real community involvement, that better days are ahead of us.But, if you don't stay focused on that mission, and you're willing to compromise around the corner, you will never build trust for your organisation, you'll never be able to get the volunteers you need to keep going, and your funding will then constantly be on a downward spiral towards things that take you further afield from the reason you got started to begin with.
feed2exec!I love how flexible it is. I wanted to download each article to a file so I could copy those back and forth between devices. The man pages gave me everything I needed to write a simple plugin to do this, and it was well worth taking the time to learn.
Now I have the ability to do completely crazy and arbitrary things to my feeds before reading them! Well, I'm probably not going to do anything with that, but it's nice to know I can 😀
vidir, available from the moreutils package in #Debian.I can't believe I didn't know about it already! I frequently have to rename many files, and vidir lets me apply my keybinding and hacky macro knowledge to yet another task :D
Censorship creeps onwards 🤐
Ignoring issues with the UK Online Safety Act, the government is using Henry VIII powers to engulf more content.
Aimed at blocking 'self-harm' content, algorithms will misidentify support resources and content will vanish behind age gates.
https://www.digit.fyi/uk-gov-to-toughen-online-safety-act-against-self-harm-content/
#onlinesafetyact #onlinesafety #osa #censorship #freespeech #freedomofexpression #ukpolitics #ukpol
@BBCNews So much of this relates to the tabloidification of social media. Which is about disempowered users, who cannot choose their moderators and prioritisation engines,
@ret 100% especially when you add that the far right are inevitably quite happy to forget FX once they have the power to restrict speech they do not like. We are watching that happen in real time.
The Open Rights Group is working on an amendment to the OSA which would propose a small site exemption, for sites that are maintained without a view to profit, with a small number of active users, and which the owner reasonably believes to pose no risk to users.
If you want to give thoughts on various parts of the potential amendments, there's a form here:
https://cloud.openrightsgroup.org/nextcloud/apps/forms/s/dQB6GSRQ4jHzGjxiYG5tAnDB
Any sufficiently large node on a decentralised service should be treated with the same caution as a centralised service.
@generalx@freeradical.zone @id@fedi.4x31.dev @prosodyim@fosstodon.org I use a PostgreSQL backend and it works fine for me. Granted, my server has ~5 users :)
One thing I'm very happy to have landed in GNOME Calendar 49 (after a year in the merge review queue) is the more noticeable month names in the infinitely scrolling month view's 1st day cells: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/issues/962
Now they show up bold-typed and as full-length words, except when there is a space constraint from a weather forecast on the 1st day of the month (in that case the month name will automatically shrink to its previous abbreviated form).
General purpose computer --> limited purpose computer --> appliance --> haha it is really our computer so pay up for your subscription like a good little cash cow and pray we don't alter the deal further no wait we are of course going to do that
MCC codes used to restrict what Aslyum Seekers can purchase https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/30/home-office-bans-asylum-seekers-from-buying-luxury-goods-and-services digital borders within a state where access to goods or services is denied by data
@philpem I’m getting a premonition… 🔮 “Labour vows to crack-down on unmonitored ‘self-hosted’ sites” - BBC, June 2027