Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 02/07/2023: Independence Day and Consequences of Running Leftist Communities



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

    • Politics and World Events

      • Independence Day

        It's around 11pm, the dog is trying to stand on the table and we're anxiously watching the baby on the monitor as the sounds of *pops* and *booms* are all around us.

        We grilled up some burgers on the patio and watched our town's firework display for Independence Day here in the US. Great show, and we could see it clearly from our house. We flew the drone up to capture most of the show. I noticed a few other blinking lights in the sky marking my neighbors doing the same. Unfortunately I wasn't as prepared as them, as I ran out of battery before the finale.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • The Consequences of Running Leftist Communities

        Today, the administrators of kolektiva.social, a Mastodon instance that bills itself as a "free, non-corporate platform for anarchists and anti-colonial content producers looking to circumvent Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists," announced that an unencrypted copy of their database circa May 2023 was seized by the FBI as part of an unrelated raid€². The main content affected as part of this is all user account information and all posts, regardless of the post's privacy level. It should be noted that direct messages on Mastodon require a copy to be stored on both your instance's server and the target server, so the availability of these types of data is not unique. However, the failure to adequately handle potentially sensitive user data and to quickly communicate this breach shows me that kolektiva is falling prey to the lack of meaningful concern for its users that plagues most leftist spaces.

        [...]

        To be clear, this is no worse than corporate social media, which is often more than willing to hand over your unencrypted DMs to any government agency that asks for them. However, spaces that advertise themselves as places for activists to gather and work are essentially creating large databases of leftists that can be easily scooped up by the feds if that data isn't secured.

      • Old Computer Challenge: Preparation

        The Old Computer Challenge 2023[1][2] is coming up in little over a week and I've planned this weekend to get things set up for it. The idea of the challenge is simple: to use a computer with maximum 512m ram, 1 core and the lowest cpu frequency, for one week, and see what happens. The challenge runs from July 10th to 16th and this will be my first OCC, as I (regrettably) had never heard of it before. But let's get started!

        [...]

        So far, the first steps into setting up OpenBSD made me both really excited but also very aware of the limitations of the device. I already had to reinstall the OS once after the /usr partition was full due to me setting up ports. Speaking of... extracting the ports.tar.gz file took a whopping 30 minutes (for reference, this takes about 15 seconds on my M1 mac).

      • Internet/Gemini

        • striping things down

          I stopped hosting fedi. Deleted my alt account as well. i'm going through my phase of not socializing a lot anymore, or at least, trying something different.

          right now i'm only hosting gemini and xmpp over a dynamic dns. so please, if you wanna reach out, xmpp is my preference (i can email too, though!)

        • AmiGemini and GCC

          Had a horribly distracted morning again, but just couldn't let this one go.

          The final thing on my todo list for my AmiGemini setup was getting a comfortable line length, without excessive window decorations.

          Being the odd little duckling that I am. I'm not really a fan of anything more than 10-12 words per screen width of text.

          Without excessively large fonts. AmiGemini when in full screen mode therefore is quite uncomfortable for me to read in.

        • domains

          There are many projects, most of them only designed, which domains have been bought for. Being sensitive, these were reserved where original personal member domains were reserved. Unfortunately, this was very convenient, because we used Google Domains.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
Expect many more cuts
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026
Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
Links for the day
Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
Verbal advocacy goes a long way
Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
Corruption in Europe is a real thing
The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
marketing spun as "science"
He Did Not Have Enough Souls
A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
When It Comes tom Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
It's not about security or politics
"Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
Links for the day
Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
Links for the day
IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026
Microsoft's Bing Down to 0.5% in Armenia
Microsoft does not want shareholders to see this
Libel by Bots: Unexplored Legal Area?
Liability can be traced back to the operator
Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI"
xAI and X (Twitter) Live on Borrowed Time, It'll Get a Lot Worse Fast
Being associated with a child porn site formerly known as "Twitter" is odorous to say the least
Microsoft is Lobbying Brussels via Opensource.org and OSI
The new (GAFAM) management at OSI is not serving the OSI's original mission
Will Lockett's Newsletter: Microsoft became Microslop and Windows users are "flocking" to GNU/Linux "to escape the mess"
"Users are fed up and jumping ship from Windows to Mac or Linux. In fact, it appears that Windows has lost 400 million users since 2022!"
Photographic Collections
There are going to be over 100,000 JPEG, PNG, and GIF files by the time we turn 20
Norway Curbs Social Control Media as It Harms Norway's Society
A decrease from 11% to just 1.87% is possible to reason about
Accomplishments of Our Community
Why I enjoy writing in Techrights
Microsoft Invented a Slop CEO ("AI CEO") Because Real Interest in Slop is Waning, So It's Just Faking Its Prominence
It's noise
Google Promoting Slop, Not Journalism
The truth of the matter is, Google is part of this problem and it doesn't seem to care
Another IBM Company (Spawned by IBM) is Hiding the Scale of Layoffs, Just Like Red Hat and Kyndryl
Why is the scale of the layoffs there shrouded in secrecy?
Links 14/02/2026: Financial Woes in Hong Kong and "Hong Kong Journalists Face ‘Precarious’ Future After Jimmy Lai Jailed"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: Fish Shell and Meta Slash-commands
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Bias and Toxicity in" Slop, Microsoft's Vista 11 System Update Breaks Systems Again
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Suppression of Free Speech" and "Climate Change Puts Winter Games on Thin Ice"
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part I - Getting the Word Out About What the 'Alicante Mafia' Did to Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Can't everyone in the European media agree that letting cokeheads run Europe's second-largest institution is a terrible idea?
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part I - Huge Audience (Offline and Online), 'Cancel Culture' Attempted and Failed
the comeback of Richard Stallman (RMS) in the United States
GitHub Cannot Survive for Much Longer
Microsoft is trying to just hide the debt
Ed Zitron: Microsoft Is A Decaying Empire That Bet The Future On Making In Excess Of $500 Billion In New Revenue Within The Next 4 To 6 Years From AI — And It Hasn’t Made A Dime In Profit Yet
Microsoft bets its future on a bunch of nothing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day