Notices by Erik Moeller (eloquence@social.coop)

* If you are in Berlin or willing & independently able to move there, and

* You have a program management (or reasonably comparable) background, and

* You have deep, technically grounded understanding of open source and free culture ...

I would really like to hear from you about this role on my team.

Both of these programs are really powerful ways to invest in the people behind the code -- and to grow the understanding of why public investment in critical open source infrastructure matters:

https://www.sovereign.tech/jobs/program-manager-fellowship-standards

I was worried they'd picked some proprietary option, but no, it looks like the French government is investing in an open source videoconferencing solution to replace their usage of Zoom.

Repo: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

(EDIT:) Sadly, the open stack they rely on still heavily ties into VC-funded US tech that's used, among other things, for border surveillance:

https://blog.livekit.io/livekit-series-c/

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-ban-officials-us-video-tools-zoom-teams-visio/

You wouldn't know it from how it was covered in major news outlets, but: "No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history."

Let's make October 18 the largest.

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/08/new-data-shows-no-kings-was-one-of-the-largest-days-of-protest-in-us-history/

People tend to think of ALT text as a "good thing to do for people with disabilities". That is true, but also reductive. It is useful for everyone, as is generally the case with accessibility.

I sometimes see posts with screenshots of text in a language I don't speak. If they had ALT text, I could use the "Translate" feature, and it would translate both the post and the transcription.

If you post in English, everyone who doesn't speak English fluently will benefit from ALT text.

At this rate it's honestly surprising that none of the major #AI players have issued an "AICoin" yet (aside from Altman's aspirational spycoin). Maybe that's the final step after institutional investment dries up.

(Graphic from Bloomberg: https://archive.is/Pagn7)

Apple: And you'll see why 2025 will finally be like 1984.

Think ... identically.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/apple-iceblock-app-store-trump.html

For many years, activists and the annoying free software people in your area have warned that the power of app stores enables turnkey censorship. And of course there have been many examples of this, especially with repressive non-US governments getting apps removed from app stores.

This is why alternative "stores" like https://f-droid.org/ are essential for free expression - and Google may soon make it impossible to meaningfully operate those, as well:

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

I don't really think it makes sense to talk about "protecting democracy" in a two-party system where one party has fully given up on the idea of democracy and is steadily building out authoritarian rule.

Nor does success at pushing that party out of power while it remains fundamentally anti-democratic magically "restore democracy".

At this point, the goal must be to _create_ democracy in the United States.

Keir Starmer is keeping Britain safe from encyclopedias.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62j2gr8866o

As someone mainly working in open source land, I can't tell you how under-appreciated it is to be able to _look at what some piece of code does_ to shortcut troubleshooting.

So much corporate "software as a service" stuff is poorly and incorrectly documented, and you have to take wild guesses at what any of it actually does.

(I'm mostly griping again about Mailchimp today, which is terrible no-good awful software, but it applies to so many things.)

Thank you to the journalists who are continuing to investigate the monstrous treatment of the hundreds of human beings who were sent by the US government to El Salvador's #CECOT concentration camp.

404 Media has examined flight manifests and identified dozens of previously unknown deportees:

https://www.404media.co/flight-manifests-reveal-dozens-of-previously-unknown-people-on-three-deportation-flights-to-el-salvador/

ProPublica documents how people who entered the country legally, with no criminal records, were torn away from their families:

https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-deportees-trump-immigration-asylum-el-salvador

All of Trump's "America First" nonsense, including galaxy brain shit like "tariffs on Taiwan", will accelerate China's rise. The dumb logic of nationalism -- the rejection of the very alliances that made America powerful, for good and for ill -- means "America Second", then "America Third", and so on.

But when failing authoritarian governments run out of scapegoats, they often go to war.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-taiwan-semiconductor-tariff-impact-china-tech-2022564

Pretty good breakdown of OpenAI o3's (quite good) performance at guessing locations based on photos, by way of the "GeoGuessr" game (metadata stripped). It scored better than a very highly ranked human.

A tendency of some AI critiques is to treat _all_ such evidence as "smoke and mirrors". That is unhelpful; it occludes awareness of capabilities that are actually improving (and can present real #opsec and surveillance risks in this case).

https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-04-28-can-o3-beat-a-geoguessr-master

Fox News is now calling Garcia, a dude who was harassed by gangs before fleeing to the US, only to be kidnapped and sent into a concentration camp _by_ the US, an "MS-13 leader".

This is the sort of unadulterated lying that gets pushed into #MAGA people's brains every day -- America's version of "Der Stürmer" or the "Völkischer Beobachter".

If you want to have any hope for people in the fascist MAGA cult, you gotta get them off those feeds first. (And that includes X, of course.)

Pay close attention to the SAVE Act, which attempts to reinstate large scale voter suppression measures across the United States.

Trump's allies will do everything they can to manufacture new claims about "voter fraud" prior to bringing this to a vote, and plenty of Senate Democrats are fickle and stupid enough to consider voting for it.

Don't take for granted that it will die in the Senate.

https://act.aclu.org/a/save-act

As a German, I've been careful to avoid the term "concentration camp" for El Salvador's #CECOT rent-a-gulag, because the term directly connotes genocide.

But when you threaten to put people in camps under horrific conditions forever, with no due process of recourse (often, as we've seen, on the basis of hearsay or tattoos), those camps become concentration camps. This is nazi talk; this is concentration camp talk. No other term does it justice.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/09/kristi-noem-migrants-trump-ice-prison

One weird thing that happens with authoritarian leaders is that they make stupid decisions that make no sense, and nobody can tell them no.

I understand why people want to read some big master plan into Trump's tariffs, but IMO it's as simple that it's a fixed set of dumb beliefs in protectionism that nobody can talk him out of. He's been saying the same nonsense since the 1980s.

All authoritarian leaders do stupid shit like this. That's why you don't want to end up with authoritarian leaders.

Feels like we're back in 2020 when it comes to travel to the US, but for entirely different self-inflicted reasons - and with no end in sight.

With the latest #AI image generators, it is now trivially possible not only to generate realistic photos, but to also have consistent _sequences_ of photos, e.g., of an alleged drug transaction.

Unlike past faking techniques, this requires only seconds of effort.

Trust in images is utterly misplaced at this point. And actually legitimate photographic evidence of wrongdoing will be challenged as fake.

Trust in sources matters more than ever.

Reporting that's based on public records shouldn't then be put behind a paywall.

This also makes sense from a revenue perspective for many paywalled publications. It's a great way to establish an area of freely available reporting that can draw people into buying subscriptions.

Really proud of my colleagues' advocacy here, and glad to see WIRED taking the lead on implementing this recommendation.

https://freedom.press/issues/wired-is-dropping-paywalls-for-foia-based-reporting-others-should-follow/