When we're as surrounded by streaming platforms as we are now, it's easy to forget that the DRM-free life still exists. Even now, there are dozens of record labels, publishers, and online retailers that refuse to abuse their customers. Learn about them in the Guide: u.fsf.org/1lr #EndDRM #DRM
The new memoir about Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg is billed as an exposé – but it feels like a morality tale for our times, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
'In the 78-page document that Wynn-Williams filed to the SEC (and which the Washington Post claims to have seen), it was alleged that Meta had for years been making numerous efforts to get into the biggest market in the world. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… These efforts included: developing a censorship system for China in 2015 that would allow a “chief editor” to decide what content to remove, and the ability to shut down the entire site during “social unrest”; assembling a “China team” in 2014 for a project to develop China-compliant versions of Meta’s services; considering the weakening of privacy protections for Hong Kong users; building a specialised censorship system for China with automatic detection of restricted terms; and restricting the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese government critic, after a Chinese internet regulator suggested it would improve cooperation. T... show more
'In the 78-page document that Wynn-Williams filed to the SEC (and which the Washington Post claims to have seen), it was alleged that Meta had for years been making numerous efforts to get into the biggest market in the world. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… These efforts included: developing a censorship system for China in 2015 that would allow a “chief editor” to decide what content to remove, and the ability to shut down the entire site during “social unrest”; assembling a “China team” in 2014 for a project to develop China-compliant versions of Meta’s services; considering the weakening of privacy protections for Hong Kong users; building a specialised censorship system for China with automatic detection of restricted terms; and restricting the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese government critic, after a Chinese internet regulator suggested it would improve cooperation. These corporate efforts only stopped after it became clear that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden viewed China as a strategic threat to the US.'
This account of working life at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech giant organisation describes a ‘diabolical cult’ able to swing elections and profit at the expense of the world’s vulnerable
I was at a #bellringing conference at the weekend and got the chance to ring at York Minster! This bell weighs 3 tons, and is twice the weight of a bell I ring regularly, and my heaviest bell to ring so far.
David Erich's *Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful* is a brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and viole...
The Federal Court has issued its ruling on the costs in the Voltage - TekSavvy case, a case involving the demand for the names and address of thousands of TekSavvy subscribers by Voltage on copyright infringement grounds.
My last nationally bestselling novel was "The Bezzle," an ice-cold revenge story of high-tech finance crime starring the forensic accountant Martin Hench.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s pris...
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
Conversation, community, and culture. Pittsburgh's family-owned, general interest independent bookstore. Check out our online store, literary events, and writing workshops.
I get to chat with one of my favorite writers about his new book, "Picks and Shovels", as well as what it's like to invent a word that absolutely nails the current zeitgeist with "enshittification".
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "☎️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
Last year, we came together to support the servers that make the Fediverse amazing. This year, we’re doing it again but better!
✨ How can you join in? ✨
❤️ Share the word with your followers ❤️ Comment if you'll boost or use #PledgeDrive ❤️ Tag your favorite profiles & hashtags ❤️ Encourage donations to keep servers running
If you're a server admin and would like your server highlighted, send me a Private Message! 💌
Woman who planned to sell human toes regurgitated by dogs pleads guilty in Melbourne court - theguardian.com/australia-news… that's a very #2025 headline...
David Erich's *Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful* is a brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and viole...
Enrich is a veteran business reporter at the *New York Times*; he's reported extensively on high finance and sleaze, and has a knack for piercing the Shield of Boredom that protects finance crimes from scrutiny. His 2017 book *The Spider's Web* manages the nearly impossible trick of making the LIBOR-rigging conspiracy - which involved trillions, but in ways that were so baroque that hardly anyone noticed - comprehensible:
In taking on the libel-industrial complex - a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today - Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.
As such, Enrich's writing is *extremely* cautious, sometimes comically so, but always intentionally, in a way that highlights the absurd chilling effect his subjects are attempting to induce in all of us.
The book primarily concerns itself with the effort to overturn *Sullivan*, a 1964 Supreme Court case that established protections for media outlets that report on public figures and commit minor factual errors, provided that the errors were neither negligent nor malicious.
Since *Sullivan*, media outlets have held the upper hand when reporting on public figures. While *Sullivan* isn't a license to simply make stuff up about celebrities, politicians and business leaders, it does mean that if a reporter makes a minor misstatement, it's on the subject of the reporting to prove that the error was negligent and/or malicious.
Before *Sullivan*, most defamation litigation happened in state courts, and southern courts allowed lawmakers and cops to sue newspapers that reported on racial terror campaigns during the civil rights fight. The judgments involved were so large that many media outlets simply gave up on reporting on the intimidation, violence and murder taking place in the Jim Crow south.
True to form, Clarence Thomas has led the charge to dismantle a law that was key to the struggle for rights for Black people and other disfavored minorities. In Enrich's telling, Thomas's animus for *Sullivan* started during his confirmation hearings, when Anita Hill described his relentless sexual harassment of the lawyers who worked for him, including Hill.
Being the subject of a media firestorm that painted him as a disgusting, cruel sex-pest seems to have inspired Thomas in a decades-long campaign to find a case that would let him tear down *Sullivan*, so that wealthy people could once again intimidate reporters into silence.
Of course, Thomas's hatred for *Sullivan* only grew when *Propublica* revealed that he had taken numerous "gifts" from wealthy "friends" who had business before the courts, revelations that will forever make Thomas's name a synonym for corruption.
Ehrich's cast of characters includes a clutch of whiny, ultra-rich axe-grinders, who finance (often in secret) lawsuits that are designed to chip away at *Sullivan*.
As you might imagine, the kind of lawyer who sits up at night figuring out how to help wealthy, powerful people destroy their critics is often a crank themselves, with "colorful" personal relations that Enrich reports on with meticulous prose, including the many denials and non-denials his subjects sent when he sought comment.
As with his LIBOR book, Enrich does yeoman duty here unpacking complex matters that would be dull in a lesser writer's hands.
The litigation strategies devised by *Sullivan*'s enemies are always convoluted and are sometimes clever, much like the litigation strategies used to kill campaign finance limits (*Citizens United*) and abortion rights (*Dobbs*). Indeed, many of the financiers, think-tanks and lawyers behind those plots are also would-be *Sullivan* slayers.
The best of these legal gambits are actually rather clever - locating innocent people who've been genuinely wronged by *Sullivan* (as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law") and then using them to undermine *Sullivan*, without actually helping them in any way. It's positively fiendish.
We're in a moment when a lot of powerful people are getting far more powerful, and abusing that power to commit wildly corrupt acts. The only way we'll know about this is if the press can freely report on their misdeeds. *Murder the Truth* is a vital guide to the next *Citizens United*, the next *Dobbs* - a campaign to take away your right to know about the *next* assault on your rights that plutocrats will launch.
OpenStreetMap in Ireland has been thriving for years, even hosting our 2nd State of the Map in 2008! Since 2019, OSM Ireland has been a proud Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Beyond everyday mapping, the Irish OSM community has been actively preserving genealogy, history, and heritage through mapping.
cc @governorkeagan Do you know who at OSM Ireland could fix the https problem with the ireland site? (You get a security warning when you try and visit it)
Wir suchen für meine Abteilung einen Vertriebsbeauftragten (idealerweise für #Oldenburg )! Wir entwickeln Leittechnik für Stadtwerke - die zentrale Steuersoftware für Strom-, Gas-, Wasser- und Fernwärme-Netzwerke.
Wir verkaufen üblicherweise sehr kundenspezifische Projekte, keine Produkte von der Stange. Kenntnisse über die Strombranche wären hilfreich.
Bei Fragen zu der Stelle könnt Ihr euch bei mir melden!
The latest Fountain Pen video is now available for your viewing pleasure.In this video I am looking at the fountain pens I have inked up in March 2025.Join m...
Canadian woman applies for a work Visa in the US, but ends up in the immigration system and is put in various jail cells for almost two weeks sleeping on concrete.
Meta AI presents VGGT, a feed - forward neural network. It can directly infer key 3D scene attributes from one or more images in under a second. These attributes include camera parameters, point maps, depth maps, and 3D point tracks. 🧵1/3
We propose Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), a feed-forward neural network that directly predicts all key 3D scene attributes from single or multiple (up to hundreds) image views within seconds.
In full solidarity with @SalemSolomon & other VOA staffers put on leave. Salem is a multi-award winning editor/reporter working in Tigrigna, Amharic AND English, serving audiences across Africa & the world. I'm proud to have been mentored by her for years, she's an inspiration, a sister from another mother.
On that wasteland known as X, her post was swarmed with pro-regime trolling & misogynistic hate.
Best indicator of who is happiest with the clampdown on free press: fascist men.
"National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said"
Squashing a promising new area of research. For what purpose?
Two senior scientists say National Institutes of Health officials advised them to remove references to mRNA vaccines in grant applications, and they fear the Trump administration will abandon a promising field of medical research.
🇷🇺 / 🇪🇹 Today, Russian state media outlet Sputnik expanded its broadcast presence in Ethiopia, opening an "Africa Hub" in Addis Ababa.
Some of this footage is from the launch ceremony, where Ethiopian parliamentary speaker Agegnehu Teshager, and Valentina Matvienko, Russia's Federation Council speaker were both present.
Sputnik, which already had a presence in Ethiopia, expands at a time when Ethiopian media outlets and civil society orgs face shutdowns, and the arrests of their members.
Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Ukraine hält offenbar weiter Gebiete bei Kursk ++
Das ukrainische Militär hält nach eigenen Angaben auch nach dem Rückzug aus Sudscha weiter Positionen im westrussischen Gebiet Kursk. Russland und die Ukraine melden gegenseitige Drohnenabschüsse. Die Entwicklungen im Liveblog.
US-Präsident Trump hat angekündigt, am Dienstag mit Russlands Präsident Putin zu sprechen. Die EU-Außenminister beraten heute über weitere Militärhilfen für die Ukraine.
Found the time to play with the test water-jet-cut stained glass globe pieces. (Done with scrap glass so the colors are random.) I definitely need to massage the outlines more, sacrificing some geographic accuracy to keep the resulting pieces thick enough to not get completely covered in the copper tape. The goal is to have all the solder joints be *only* coastline or lines of latitude/longitude. But overall, I think this is going to work, using this offset of 0.4mm to account for the tape thickness.
Tinker ☀️
in reply to Defective by Design • • •- Not sure if these would count as DRM free or where they fit in the conversation:
I use Hoopla App with my library card to download (temporarily as I'm borrowing them) music albums.
I also listen to @somafm internet radio a lot.