Please understand how *profoundly* that stuff doesn’t matter in the real world. I’ve talked to self-described liberals who want socialized healthcare and self-described conservatives who agree with me on a lot of anti-policing and anti-carceral issues.

Political labels don’t really tell you anything useful. If anything they get in the way.

#USPol #USPolitics #USApolitics

2/2

@old_hippie @bmacDonald94 @The_Icarian I use a VPN so I would want an email provider that works okay with a VPN.

@The_Icarian @bmacDonald94 I had my Gmail account since the invite-only days, too! I am not sure what to switch to, let alone how to start moving off it.

@cjewel @bmacDonald94 Remember the Titan submersible and how the rich guy who built/piloted it wouldn’t listen to warnings about how it might collapse under pressure? How his rich passengers assumed it was fine?

The billionaires think that because they can buy themselves out of all the things that trouble the rest of us, they can buy their way out of physics and biology too.

I see a lot of hot takes on Mastodon over what #apple is doing in the #UK and why. Folks are acting like it’s a breach of trust for Apple to turn off #e2ee/Advanced Data Protection in the UK but they are really making the best of a bad situation.

The UK told Apple “you are legally required to give us backdoor access to the #iCloud storage of ALL your users EVERYWHERE and not tell them.” Apple is not doing that.

1/?

The fact that #Apple got such a demand/request from the #UK #homeoffice at all is something we only know from a leak. I kind of suspect that Apple leaked it themselves. We don’t know if #Google, #Meta, etc. got similar demands and are complying with them WITHOUT telling us.

Remember, this is not just for users in the UK, it is for ALL USERS EVERYWHERE.

2/?

Instead of having secret backdoored #e2ee or being in a position where they might end up providing that…Apple is making it very clear to users in the #UK that they can’t really provide E2EE, and it’s because of the UK’s government. Full disclosure. If people want to maintain their #privacy they need to use something else.

(And/or pester their government to change the snooping laws they have.)

3/?

This does NOT, as some people have claimed, provided a model for authoritarian governments everywhere. This is not what the #UK wanted! #apple blew the whole snooping thing wide open. The kind of people who turned on Advanced Data Protection will look for #e2ee messaging providers who don’t give a fuck about the UK’s laws.

4/?

This is not compliance, it’s

- Saying “fuck you” to a government that wants to snoop
- Alerting people that their government wants to snoop
- Turning an angry user base on their snooping government
- Refusing to lie to their users to enable snooping

5/?

It looks like the #50501protests mostly went well and were a positive experience for everyone, despite my misgivings. I’m glad to be wrong about this one!

Hopefully this engages new people in the work going on around them. And these folks start using Signal groups instead of Discord to organize LOL.

#50501movement

@20002ist @bmacDonald94 The people who carried water for fascists to own the libs, ostensibly because of Palestine, are not going to admit how badly they fucked up. It will always be someone else’s fault.

@GottaLaff Good thing we got rid of Joe Biden who lets Netanyahu do whatever he wants

Oh, wait

@JoscelynTransient Don’t snitch! Don’t snitch on yourself!

I think a lot of Democrats were hoping that people were dispirited and demoralized by the onset of Trump 2.0 and would not be holding rallies or yelling at them like they were from 2017-2021 so they could roll over in peace, but that’s not happening. Democrats are starting to show a spine because of pressure campaigns and it seems like the Senate switchboard melted down today.

#USpol #USpolitics

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@KimPerales I’ve been telling people! I’m a little more charitable and assume that the people organizing this don’t really know what they’re doing but even that is potentially disastrous.

Oh hey remember all the foolish motherfuckers on here who said things like “Trump and Biden are both fascists” or “things can’t be any worse under Trump”? LOL

#USPolitics #USpol

@AxiosNews @bmacDonald94 @business-AxiosNews “We heard you like grifts so here’s a grift stuffed into another grift.”

@timnitGebru It’s not just Musk. All these tech bros must be on drugs

@dalias @carnage4life Open AI, Microsoft, etc. have been insisting that huge amounts of powerful hardware (like Nvidia chips) are needed to train and run an AI. But DeepSeek needs only a fraction of that compute power - and thus chips, electricity, water, etc.

People are not going to pay for horrendously compute-intensive and expensive AIs if they can use one that does the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

@futurebird @bmacDonald94 I had a liberal arts education and took intro to computer science to fulfill my math requirement, LOL

But in all seriousness. Learning to code is really not enough. Having even a basic education in IT security and understanding system and network architectures is at least as important if not more so.