Notices by Hugo (hugo@assemblag.es)

really feeling that land border to Russia these days.

https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/security/angle-grinder-used-to-cut-telecommunications-cable-to-natos-northernmost-qra-base/424730

a student on my cultural history of nature course wants to write their term paper about Lenin being a mushroom and yeah that's me, down a completely new rabbithole, misty-eyed with appreciation that I get to do what I do for a living. I fucking love the humanities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom

"This is, without hyperbole, a five-alarm fire for digital privacy and security."

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/uk-orders-apple-to-break-encryption-worldwide-while-world-is-distracted/

routing all communications of a federal agency exclusively through the privately owned website of one of your key allies is a perfectly normal thing to do during a coup, I guess.

https://thedesk.net/2025/02/ntsb-moves-plane-crash-press-updates-x-twitter/

in a detached way, the degree to which they are just steamrollering through to capture vital systems and infrastructure is sort of impressive.

then again, they have been planning this for years, in public, published a giant tome detailing what they were going to do, and somehow there are just... no defenses.

tech question and I figure this might be the right forum: I have a late 2017 macbook pro that I wiped to install linux. I'm running LMDE on it and it works—but it crashes weirdly, can't handle waking up and I keep having to manually reinstall the audio driver.

any suggestions out there for a linux distro that works smoothly on this particular model?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111951

looking for some tech advice for running linux on a macbook so reposting this on public, with some hashtags.

#linux #macbook #retrofit

https://assemblag.es/@hugo/113890848795176471

haha wow. on the one hand jesus christ they're all cheering but on the other, somehow musk manages to make even the sieg heil look like some sort of b-grade brainrot "dork maga" loser shit.

american media: "it's only a nazi salute if performed in germany by a registered member of the german nazi party between 1933 and 1945. otherwise it's just what we call 'a strange gesture.'"

walking back from the metro, some kids had constructed a ski slope down the public stairs around the corner from my flat and were practicing skating tricks along the railing. winter in oslo.

"Rules forbidding insults about a person's appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease have also been scrapped.

Expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class are also no longer banned on the platform, and neither is referring to transgender or nonbinary people as 'it."

https://news.sky.com/story/metas-new-guidelines-allow-users-to-say-lgbt-people-are-mentally-ill-13285449

@iraantlers yeah. in scandinavia, public infrastructure and basic citizenship functions are increasingly mediated through smartphones that run on operating systems controlled by one of two competing US tech giants. it's stupid af.

was planning to keep using my recycled iphone until it physically fell apart but I checked the settings, "enhanced visual search" had been enabled and it might be time to fire the whole thing into the sun.

@iraantlers fairphone with one of the degoogled OS is probably my preferred option. although to be fair I only got a smartphone in 2021 to play pokémon go: I'm always weighing a possible future in which I don't have one.

@dymaxion

nice. yeah, that combo is one of the options on my list. the fairphone scores well for repairability though, which as far as I know pixel isn't that great for?

@iraantlers

being tied into US digital infrastructure increasingly feels like a liability.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/03/apple_enhanced_visual_search/

the images of mangione are astonishing, like some sort of staged, mythopoietic photoshoot.

caravaggio, the taking of christ (c. 1602).

there's a quote that lives rent free in my head these days—nazi Reichsminister Martin Bormann, on suppressing education in the conquered eastern territories: "Jeder Gebildete ist ein künftiger Feind."

"every educated person is a future enemy."

just, astonishing.

https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-cuts-basic-research-new-zealand-scraps-all-support-social-sciences