Oh, this? Itโs just the federated Bluesky PBC, funded by federated venture capital, federatedly censoring people on behalf of the federated dictator of federated Turkey, Federated Erdoฤan. mas.to/@osma/11434616689055247โฆ
Bluesky didn't reach a federated stage where you could choose a service provider in a free country before they started to censor people based on authoritarian demands.
Looking at making Linux desktops (laptops) a blessed alternative.
What do you wish you knew about desktop Linux in a business environment before deploying it?
More general details: - Global remote-first team. - FinTech (so we have compliance requirements - 99.9% sure we can meet them all with existing tools) - Will be optional, only for those who want Linux.
so I used to support a team of developers who ran (mostly) Linux desktops and I reckon 90% of the problem was that everyone who wanted this setup had extremely strong Opinions about everything and also the tendency to want to get into the guts of it and tweak everything to get it *just right*, and no two people ever wanted the same thing. I tended to just give up, because the choices were that or locking everything down and making everyone hate me.
I would maybe look at locking down a defined home/data partition with extreme prejudice and letting them roam free a bit on the system level.
@mike We're pretty lax in terms of "locking down" - we do the bare minimum required to meet compliance (eg, full disk encryption, screensaver password required, etc) and other than that you're free to do whatever you like as long as you can get shit done still.
We have mandatory DLP software, and monitoring to ensure these minimum requirements are maintained.
Biggest compliance issue ironically is likely to be AV. Clamav here we come ๐
yeah this is the best possible situation, with people who primarily want a Linux environment doing too much is kind of a mistake. Better to start with the minimal basic requirements and leave them to it.
Heh, I'm still mad at one guy who after I spent a day getting his new workstation up and running, immediately wiped it and reinstalled the exact same distro on it. I still don't know why. ๐
๐ฌ 446ย ย ๐ 186992ย ย โค๏ธ 206594ย ยทย being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that youโre supposed to do warm uโฆ
Canada has fewer "constitutional impediments" to slow down Poilievre's implementation of Elon Musk's DOGE policies on Canada, meaning that same destructive rampage (which remains the Conservative priority) will fall on us with lightning speed should Poilievre win the election and take office in Canada.
---
If Pierre Poilievreโs Conservatives win the federal election, they could move at lightning speed to shrink the size of the public service.
Thatโs according to Ian Brodie, a former chief of staff of prime minister Stephen Harper, who believes the most surefire way to usher in deregulation in Canada (a main priority for Poilievre) is to reduce the head count of the public service and fast.
โOnce you deprive the public service of the people to create policies, guidelines and regulations and letters and contract documents and so on and so forth, the burden on society is reduced,โ Brodie told an audience at the Canada Strong and Free Networkโs annual conference in downtown Ottawa on April 11.
For Brodie, time is of the essence to reduce the federal budget. If elected, he said the Conservatives should move quickly to downsize the Privy Council Office and give ministers mandates to cut down departmentsโ workforces.
โThe good thing, compared to the United States, is that, for all sorts of constitutional legal reasons, the impediments to DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) moving quickly, we donโt really have to worry about in Canada,โ Brodie said at the conservative conference. โCanada can move as quickly as it wants in fixing the fiscal problems.โ
Itโs been the approach for American and Argentinian right-wing governments that have sought to reduce public spending and regulation by trying to eradicate whole government agencies and departments. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has laid off hundreds of thousands of government employees in recent months.
Poilievreโs Conservatives have said they will reduce the size of the public service through attrition, which would shed 17,000 jobs a year.
Yes, the same hosting service that's taken a banhammer to paying LGBTQIA+ users based on false reporting of *non-pornographic LGBTQIA+ content as pornography* has now spun up their very own instance.
The past tense of slay is slew. The past participle of slay is slain. I don't make the rules, I just enjoy bizarre verb tense spelling changes. Can you imagine if we conjugated "play" the same way?
That said, I applaud the simplification of English for learners, so from here on out it's slay slayed slayed. Also we're spelling laid "layed" from here on out. Sorry.
Christians beware. If he's coming after academia's tax exempt status for pushing back against his agenda, then he has no choice but to also come after churches who don't support him. You're next! #USPol
(Note that thanks to the Fediverse I now distinguish between "Christians" and "followers of Christ" because the two aren't the same anymore.)
The Trump administration has just claimed an astounding new power: the ability to deport lawful permanent residents based on their โexpected beliefsโ (including perfectly โlawfulโ expecโฆ
๐ฌ 101ย ย ๐ 5376ย ย โค๏ธ 10705ย ยทย Nazi propaganda and Trump propaganda are the same thing. Republicans are too busy licking boots to say anything.
"I literally drove my car to Canada for the weekend, & on the way back, I was treated like a criminal,"said Atallah, who has been a #US #citizen for 10 yrs.โฆ
"So I had to, under duress, give him permission to look through my email, through my priveleged informationโฆ,"Atallah said.
After several requests, Atallah says CBP called his sister, an #immigration atty.
"It's not about the immigrants,"Celine Atallah, Bachir's sister, told NBC10 Boston. "It's โฆall of us."
it's Maine Governor Janet Mills. I wanted you to be the first to know: Iโm officially suing Donald Trump.
When I recently visited the White House, President Trump chose to single me out in a room full of governors from both parties and threatened to unilaterally withhold federal funding from Maine unless we fall in line with his personal demands.
When I stood my ground, he claimed he was "the law," never mind Congress or the states.
I told him Iโd see him in court.
His administration has ordered investigations into Maine schools, tried to cancel millions of dollars worth of federal grants awarded to Maine's education system, and worked to terminate federal contracts based in Maine โ a decision his own administration says would increase Social Security fraud.
They've even called me a "petulant child."
But I refuse to back down.
โญ๏ธWe've officially filed our lawsuit against Donald Trump for overreaching his authority and illegally freezing funds that go to feeding children in Maine.
I โ along with my fellow Democratic governors across the country โ will not be intimidated by the President's threats. We refuse to be bullied. Instead, we're taking action.
We're doing everything we can to fight for democracy and push back against attacks on our freedoms.
But we can't do it without your support. So Iโm asking supporters like you for the 4th time: can you add your name to stand with me and other Democratic governors as we work to push back against Trump and his Republican trifecta?
With Donald Trump already taking extreme actions โ including threatening to hold federal funding from my state โ will you take a moment to answer the following questions? Your feedback is critical to setting our 2025-26 cycle strategy.
I'd suggest reading up on Guantanamo Bay to appreciate that running detention camps out of the reach of the judiciary isn't exactly a new idea in (modern) US history.
These (implicit) comparisons are not fair. Concentration camps were built to murder people. Guantanamo and the camps ICE are using are "just" camps with torture and "only" a few "occasional" deaths caused by mistreatment, but as a German I need to point out that the concentration camps were one of the most horrible places ever created by mankind. It is hard to imagine how cruel people can be but usually the answer is "much more cruel" and you should not use "the German superlative".
As a Latin American, I can tell you about the SAME in LATAM may decades ago. You know, Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Balaguer (same country, puppet after the US invasion), the Somozas (in Nicaragua) who FDR called "our SOBs", Castillo Armas (Guatemala, after the coup against democratically elected Arbenz).
So now US people are experiencing that very same thing.
I'm not sure I would necessarily agree in full. There probably should be some kind of reference to the basic idea of adherence to the rule of law too rather than rule by law.
You could have a judicial decision but if it is not independent of the executive, for example, then I'm not sure that the involvement of a judicial decision somehow makes it less of a "concentration camp".
Self-promo time! Drop links to your creations, including writing, art and other media! What do you want to share with the #Writephant crowd? #writing
Mars Need Women is a hopeful yet deeply dystopian feminist SF web-novel (free-to-read on Mastodon) that leans heavily into Women's rights issues. It is a woman-centric adventure story of overcoming adversity while being female, with all the warts and frustrations, not as a man in disguise.
Our wannabe engineer heroine May Ri escapes a disheartening life, faced with becoming little more than a housewife because she lacks "blessings," to help colonize Marsโif you can call being shanghaied escaping and being contracted to have children a benefit. (She does choose the gorgeous supportive guy to "work with," though, so that's a positive.) As she learns to make uniquely useful martian machines, she keeps putting herself at the center of a global martian dust storm as martian power shifts from being male-dominated to a predominately female 1st generation of martians. May Ri together with her five daughters, shape a world (Mars) the way unfettered women might imagine it.
When the men of Earth take affrontโof course they doโthey learn that women don't fight like men, especially when their children's lives are threatened, and their wellbeing is at stake. #RSMarsNeededWomen
May Ri bought into the hype and the spiel, not realizing it was the last gasp of a long dead oligarch's dream. When the money dried up, nobody would finance the supply missions. Who cared about the ten thousand up there when you could outrage the millions down here with something less expensive? Earthers returned to their petty games of slaveryโthat wasn't called as suchโand empire that ate nations.
On Mars, colonists were pushed to their limits: The terraforming mission, the domes, the spinlauncher and Deimosbase, the raising the first and second generation martians. Men died disproportionately. In the end, a few strongmen attempted to corner the growing "female resource" to their benefit and to the benefit their sons, working to crush the whisper of the half-forgotten promise of democracy that had followed May Ri to the planet of war.
She and her daughters led the way, fighting. Together with "sisters" and with "aunts," they redefined which gender would be considered a "resource."
They found that the blood of the ever-absent fathers spilled on the rusty regolith of Mars blended in nicely.
Good news! Unlike Columbia University, Harvard is not caving in to the Trump gang's attempt to snatch away their federal funds.
Even better, a bunch of universities are suing the Trump-run National Institute of Health. They are - pardon the all caps, I'm copying this from the legal action:
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION, ASSOCIATION OF PUBLIC AND LAND-GRANT UNIVERSITIES, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, BROWN UNIVERSITY, THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER, and TRUSTEES OF TUFTS COLLEGE.
Harvard's lawyers wrote a letter to the Trump gang that ends like this:
It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvardโs efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court. The governmentโs terms also circumvent Harvardโs statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our countryโs scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world. These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the governmentโs terms as an agreement in principle.
Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.
Good on them for trying but wonโt make much difference seeing as Trump has everyone in his pocket up to and including the Supreme Court. Very sad to see the USA collapse in this way.
@alex_p_roe - it does make a difference to fight. If you just fold, Trump wins faster and goes further. Even if you lose, your battles slow him down, and rally the opposition.
Dictatorships do end, and not because people give up.
I agree that fighting is right and it's good to see some are slowing down the Trump infestation. Dictators over come to very sticky ends. I wish Harvard all the best and the same to everyone else who stands up to this insanity but it won't be easy - this time round Trump's malicious petty tentacles are everywhere. That he has so much support is also very worrying.
@alex_p_roe - it definitely won't be easy. I think only the collapse of the economy due to his tariffs will significantly weaken his support, since apparently being a dictator is fine with 40% of the population. (He has a 40% support level now, but with gerrymandering that's enough for Republicans.)
A tanking economy may make a difference but what might really hit home is the number of businesses who are highly likely to detach themselves from services provided by US companies. Microsoft and Google plus others, are in for a shock.
12 Democratic Senators and 48 Democratic House members voted for the Laken Riley Act and helped it become law.
The Laken Riley Act allows the US Govt to deport immigrants on the mere accusation of a crime.
If you see any of those 60 Democrats complain about Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, or K ilmar Abrego Garcia, among hundreds of others, please know they enabled this fascism. With Democrats like these, who needs MAGAs.
The US soul appears to have been sickened even deeper and lost it's human sensitivity and sensibility even more than already seen and feared! It's up to those that still live up to that standards to stand up and resist!
In 1841, Adams successfully argued before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case that captured African slaves should not be sent out of the country for trial.
It is official! We are hosting our own Nextcloud server for the students and staff of Amsterdam University College (AUC).
Rather than dwell in our frustration and disappointment about the university's ever increasing dependence on Big Tech, we decided to simply create the world that we want to live in.
That is why, over the last few weeks, we have set up and tested our own, free and open source alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox.
Link to Nextcloud server: https://nextcloud.opentech-auc.org/.
On 22 December 2019, the presidents of the boards of directors of Dutch universities raised the alarm:
โThe universities have little or no influence on the way data is collected and persoโฆ
When Donald Trump finally loses his stranglehold on America itโs heartening to know that he, Musk and everyone else involved in the destruction of American institutions can be deported to foreign prisons without due process by using Trumpโs own executive orders.
2 sadistic despots: Bukele has assc himself w the key figures in Trumpโs orbit to solidify his credibility w him. On X, he interacts with & reposts Musk, R-leaning journalists... He's used SM to revel in helping Trump circumvent orders from US courts.
Bukele publicly floated the idea of taking in US-citizen prisoners: SLV "prepared to help the US โoutsource part of its prison system โฆ in exchange for a fee.โ
It is appearing very likely that #RationalWiki will be dissolved this year due to lack of legal representation (no pro bono lawyers came forward and we do not have funds to hire a lawyer). Meritless #defamation lawsuits were filed against us by "human biodiversity"/"scientific racism"/pro-eugenics plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are consequently likely to win their cases by default.
Racialism (also known as scientific racism) is a set of far-right pseudoscientific ideas which hold that humanity can at all be meaningfully divided into biological categories ("races") that are both broad (each category should include many humans, sโฆ
๐ฌ 2ย ย ๐ 179ย ย โค๏ธ 552ย ยทย Factories of the 1950s are not coming back.
We need green energy jobs, technology, education, research, and infrastructure investment.
We need the opposite of MAGA.
So, just picked me up a new used LG Ultra wide monitor, got it set up and...
1920X1080 maximum available resolution. Yeah, that's a problem, the native resolution is 2560X1080 and that's why I bought it. Sure, size is wrong in the preferences, 34in, but the 29in LG ultra wide has always done that.
So, we go searching for an answer and on one thread, the question of cable quality comes up along with some ways to determine port, mode and things like that. Notably, despite it having an HDMI input, it shows my computer is using Display port. Hmm, that means I'm using one of my old Amazon Basics DP to HDMI cables, I wonder...
The computer has both HDMI and DP output, at one time I'd had two monitors connected, and I guess I just kept using the DP for no particular reason, switch to HDMI, and Bob's your uncle.
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]
in reply to fukawi2 • • •so I used to support a team of developers who ran (mostly) Linux desktops and I reckon 90% of the problem was that everyone who wanted this setup had extremely strong Opinions about everything and also the tendency to want to get into the guts of it and tweak everything to get it *just right*, and no two people ever wanted the same thing. I tended to just give up, because the choices were that or locking everything down and making everyone hate me.
I would maybe look at locking down a defined home/data partition with extreme prejudice and letting them roam free a bit on the system level.
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]
in reply to Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL] • • •fukawi2
in reply to Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL] • • •@mike We're pretty lax in terms of "locking down" - we do the bare minimum required to meet compliance (eg, full disk encryption, screensaver password required, etc) and other than that you're free to do whatever you like as long as you can get shit done still.
We have mandatory DLP software, and monitoring to ensure these minimum requirements are maintained.
Biggest compliance issue ironically is likely to be AV. Clamav here we come ๐
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]
in reply to fukawi2 • • •yeah this is the best possible situation, with people who primarily want a Linux environment doing too much is kind of a mistake. Better to start with the minimal basic requirements and leave them to it.
Heh, I'm still mad at one guy who after I spent a day getting his new workstation up and running, immediately wiped it and reinstalled the exact same distro on it. I still don't know why. ๐