Notices by Fabio Manganiello (fabio@manganiello.social)

@gilly007 @alaamoh @aral @joynewacc still with this bullshit?

How much more evidence are we supposed to bring?

You know what?

I want to silence this bullshit for good. I want a permalink to forward all the “Gaza Verified is a scam” folks to from now on. And this post can be that permalink.

If you don’t believe the content posted by these accounts, their pictures that can’t be found anywhere else on the Web, often still containing the immaculate EXIF headers from their phone cameras, the raw material posted on archive.gaza.onl, the redacted copies of IDs and diplomas that some of them uploaded, their scholarship applications currently processed by academics in the real world, or their videos where you can often hear loud sounds of drones, including some users who uploaded their own verification calls, then you must at least trust the way the Internet works.

As someone who runs a couple of satellite websites for this initiative, I get visits from some of these accounts too. I firmly respect everybody’s privacy - no trackers and no cookies, just plain nginx logs tossed away every 2 days. But if someone keeps making such slanderous claims around a humanitarian initative I also have the duty to provide solid evidence to prevent one the last lifelines to Gaza from being cut.

You want some whois subnet info about the network operators they connect through? Here we go:

And I have other examples too.

I’m only providing info about larger network subnets and operators info here in order to protect their privacy, even if these are dynamic addresses - xxx parts are still obfuscated out of caution. But they are still significative enough to verify which operators run those networks.

Palnet and NewStarMax are the two main providers of network connectivity in Gaza.

Which means that those connections, without a doubt, came from Gaza.

Now, the only way to falsify this statement is by finding at least one commercial VPN provider that provides thousands of IP addresses from data centers in Gaza, from a dozen or so of different class B subnets that are actually allocated for residential or mobile usage.

Or maybe propose that all these connections are being routed by a bunch of Raspberry Pis running Wireguard that are still somehow operating under the rubble.

Until someone can prove any of these statements, my position is clear: we’ve provided in these weeks all the (privacy-respecting) evidence we could against lots of folks who shout “it’s faaaaake” and run away.

Now the burden of proof lies squarely in the hands of these detractors.

If you folks don’t apologize and give a word of comfort to people fighting for their survival who you called scammers, then the whole world ought to know that you are acting in bad faith in the middle of an ongoing genocide with the purpose of cutting the few remaining humanitarian lifelines - and you should be called accountable for that.

It looks like, besides being the worst patent trolls in the IT industry (do you know that Oracle still holds the trademark for JavaScript, and they’ve been refusing to give up on it for two decades by now, even though they do nothing with it?), besides pushing competition and innovation in the whole industry behind with their hostile takeovers and endless legal trials (remember when they tried to patent the names of Java classes?), besides what they did to Sun (the way they dismembered one of the most innovative IT companies to ever exist is one of the biggest blunders in this industry), besides being given the American division of TikTok undeservely and on a silver plate solely because of lobbying merits, we now have one more reason to hate #Oracle.

Oracle employees who criticize #Israel may now be referred to mental health support services.

There’s a clear name for those who treat non-violent political views they disagree with as mental diseases that should be cured: Nazis. And if Oracle proceeds with these plans then we should all call it out as the most Nazi company on earth, and boycotting everything it touches (which I guess includes their official JVM and their fat enterprise db, not that anybody gives a shit of either of them anyway nowadays) should be a nobrainer.

The time has come for us IT professionals to be more morally conscious in the choice of our employer.

Companies can’t become isolated exclaves within democratic countries where the rules of free speech don’t apply and where employees can be harassed for their opinions. Companies shouldn’t impose restrictions on free speech that the laws of their own countries don’t impose. And, most importantly, they have no power to refer someone for psychological support on the basis of their ideas when the laws of their countries have no such constraints.

If they do, then it’s up to those who work for them to walk out - and to those contacted by those recruiters to politely reply with a “no, thanks”, with the motivation clearly attached.

You don’t want to work for a jerk. And you also want them to clearly know that they’re jerks, and that’s why you don’t want to work for them. Let them recruit only among the ultra-Zionists, and let’s see how far this rotten technological dinosaur and industrial cancer goes.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/oracle-tiktok-israel-2674151514/

I am happy to announce that the bulk of the work on the #Gaza Verified Archive at archive.gaza.onl has been completed.

No matter what admins do today or tomorrow with verified Palestinian accounts, their content is now permanently archived (in 3 different locations for now).

The UI is also ready, and I have added two “merged” timelines for posts and media containing all the content uploaded by all verified accounts - like a unique “Gaza” timeline.

New content is automatically indexed every 5 minutes.

I still feel a bit guilty for using a Vue SPA to build the frontend, but I’ve tried to redeem my sins as much as possible on the integrations side - the archive exposes a REST API, RSS feeds for all the endpoints, a static directory to browse uploaded media, and even the possibility to download the full db for static analysis.

The only major feature that is still missing is a periodic archive, which can be downloaded and used by other archivists to bootstrap their instance, but I’ll work on that today.

@aral @joynewacc open to your feedback 🙂

Also, the archive automatically collects and backups posts from the verified accounts that have been uploaded publicly. All licenses and rights belong to the respective authors. If you would like some of the content or your entire profile to be removed from the archive, feel free to reach out to me.

@palestine

If some of our friends in #Gaza could record some footage of this it’d be invaluable historical evidence.

I hope that nobody will dare to scold us if we compare Netanyahu to Hitler if he really goes through with this psychopatic plan.

Because blasting your own UN speech about “finishing your job” in Gaza through loudspeakers to the population you’re currently imposing a genocide upon is something that would horrify even the most perverse megalomaniac Nazi mind.

To our friends there: I know that this psychological warfare can be more than discomforting while you’re already fighting for your own lives, but that’s exactly the point of it.

When great leaders say great things they don’t need to force people to listen to them. Their words spread virally. They don’t get the whole UN assembly to walk out when they start speaking.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/26/israeli-loudspeakers-broadcast-netanyahu-speech-to-un-gaza

@usama971 have you already reached out to @aral or @joynewacc for verification on gaza-verified.org?

@orange_lux @MxHeadmaster @aral @Gargron @staff why are we supposed to walk on eggshells even when we call people accountable for their crimes perpetrated under everyone’s eyes, and while we’re actually the ones trying to help those victims?

Are Jewish in Israel protesting hard enough? No.

Are Jewish outside of Israel protesting hard enough? No.

With a few notable individual exceptions, not a single Jewish organization has so far issued a single statement that condemns this genocide.

The LA Holocaust Museum dared to post a single “Never again means never again for everyone“ on their social media accounts, and it received so much backlash from American Jews that it was forced to backtrack and apologize.

Are Jewish outside of Israel not protesting hard enough because many of them hope that the Law of Return will soon grant them a spot on the sea built on the charred corpses of the Palestinians? Maybe.

Can I call them accountable for this? Or do I always have to navigate the rhetorical maze of Orwellian doublethink designed to shield Israel from any form of criticism?

Judaism and Israel are not the same thing, but they are related; Zionism and Israel are not the same thing, but they are related; Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing, but they are related; but if you criticize any of them, then you’re an antisemite.

Seriously, I’m sick and tired of this fascist bullshit.

People are dying right now under the world’s eyes in the worst genocide of this century. This will be documented in history books once it’s over.

When my kids will ask me where I was when this happened, I can tell them that I was calling the ones responsible for it accountable and I was helping the besiged population as much as I could.

What will you say?

That you were too busy on social media criticizing those who were helping around pedantic definitions of Jews, Zionists and Israelis, and putting the Nazi on the same level of the partisan and asking a Fediblock for both?

@orange_lux @aral @Gargron @staff @MxHeadmaster

And, to be extra clear : it IS antisemitic to consider ALL THE JEWISH PEOPLE responsible for the ongoing genocide.

I repeated several times “I don’t call all Jewish accountable for it - just those that don’t protest against it“, just to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstood.

And here we are with yet another account who tells me “why do you call them all accountable?“

Is verbal comprehension a problem here?

Jewish all around the world hold the highest leverage against Netanyahu. The whole world could protest against him, and he’d still call the whole world antisemitic and move on. But he can’t do the same with his own people. He can’t call antisemitic protestors who wave Israeli flags. And, as long as there’s still a pretence of democracy in Israel, he’s technically accountable to his voters.

So I have all the right to call those who aren’t striking and protesting every day accountable. Just like I would have called accountable any Italian who didn’t protest against the rise to the power of Mussolini and didn’t embrace the rifle against the fascists.

Which doesn’t mean that I call all Italians accountable (and I’m Italian myself). But sure I call one of my grandfathers accountable for not doing enough to oppose it.

Is it that hard to understand, or are you simply acting in bad faith?

Man, we’re ALL responsible by our inaction.

Oh no, that’s the difference.

I participate to civic protests.

I boycott Israeli products.

I try to lobby my own employer to stop doing business in the occupied territories.

I support initiatives like @aral@mastodon.ar.al’s Gaza Verified, give a word of comfort to people who lost everything and give them donations so they can buy a tent or a piece of bread.

I am not responsible for any inaction.

Can the same be said about you and your pedantic distinctions while a genocide is being committed?

@8124 @aral @Gargron even worse, look at this: https://mastodon.social/@8124/115215365985382080

@joynewacc is a writer based in Gaza going through hell right now.

She has ALL THE RIGHT in this world to be outraged at those who stole her dignity, her dreams, her family members, her home and her safety.

She posted the picture of a baby buried under rubble by the IDF bombings.

She commented with “the Nazi genocide is still ongoing”.

Now YOU tell me @staff: what person in this world with anything that resembles a functioning brain and a heart not filled with the filthiest poison would condemn this post as an example of antisemitism, and publicly (and anonimously) shame a victim of a genocide perpetrated by his own country on his timeline, all while ignoring that the post is about a fucking baby dead under rubble?

How much dehumanization are you willing to allow on your platform?

What kind of a sad and rotten human being, terminally perverse mind and evolutionary failure must one be to always look at the world through the lenses of aggressive victimism, and continuous ideological conflicts based on pseudo-academic arguments only stated in a book he wrote himself, even while the government he supports is murdering people right now?

How can you not see that every single day you allow this scumbag to stay online and act with impunity behind a shield of anonimity is a shameful stain that will tarnish forever your reputation of a safe place with no room for bullies, Nazis and sociopaths?

We brought Palestinian voices to the Fediverse telling them that, unlike mainstream social media, this was a safe place where they could be heard without being ostracized.

As the main instance on the Fediverse, and the one where most of these accounts have been registered, I demand that you help us keep this place safe for those going through a genocide RIGHT NOW. And that means that profiles like @8124 MUST GO without further ado.

They have already done enough damage.

They can attack me, no problem. I’m used to deal with ultra-Zionist bullies, I’ve got strong shoulders and means to defend myself. But they shouldn’t fucking dare to throw traumatized people whose lives they have already broken into their filthy machinery of slander, intimidation and dehumanization. They’ve crossed a line that civil society shouldn’t allow them to cross.

Genocide apologists funded by a foreign terrorist government to harass and silence those who either endure or condemn their genocide have no place on any instances that run in EU territory, nor in any civilized society, especially in this historical moment.

If they want a safe place where they can freely spread terrorist propaganda, they are free to run their own hardcore Zionist instance hosted in their own pariah shithole. I’m pretty sure that most of the admins will be very happy to defederate it then, just like we did with other instances run by lunatics. Then they’re free to throw their #FediBlock calls in the middle of their cathedral in the desert, without harming anyone in the process.

And I invite all of my followers that he hasn’t blocked yet to also report this account. We must ensure that the pressure on @staff gets too hard to ignore.

@joynewacc @palestine @aral this is very shameful on them…did they at least bother to provide a reason for the suspension? At least on Mastodon you can submit an appeal in these cases, not sure if that’s the case on Bluesky though…

The Mastodon->Bluesky bridged option is still there, but if they have already targeted 7 of your accounts they’re likely to target that mirror account too.

Otherwise Blacksky is another option, as someone in this thread already suggested. And there may be other Bluesky PDS instances out there that you could sign up to without being subject to the whims of the moderators on the main node (I’m no Bluesky expert and I haven’t tried to run my own PDS, but if there is someone here who has a running PDS I’m sure that they could take you onboard)

I prefer not to call Wilders racist. “Racist” is not a journalistic word, because you can ultimately not know what someone’s intentions are, just like genocide is not a journalistic word. The latter is primarily a legal concept and a political word. Journalism means staying as close as possible to the facts and avoiding far-reaching qualifications. It is our work to describe as precisely as possible what someone does and what happens. It is up to others to give qualifications to that

The editor-in-chief of the Volkskrant explains very clearly why most of Western modern-day journalism (including his own newspaper) is a big part of today’s political problems.

You see, something interesting happens when you, as a journalist working for a major newspaper, don’t express harsh judgements towards jerks.

Initially, those who already have high levels of political/social immunity will indeed connect the dots themselves. They’ll understand that proposing arbitrary deportations for migrants or calling them stupid is racist, and that destroying every home and starving the local population in Gaza is a genocide, even if you don’t tell them explicitly.

But not everyone has high levels of political/social immunity. Many can’t even tell the difference between two popular political ideologies, and they don’t even have a clue of what’s happening in the world any deeper than the headlines that they briefly scroll on their timelines.

You need to tell most of the population explicitly “hey, btw, this is not ok”, because you can’t make assumptions about their levels of civic education or political literacy - just like you wouldn’t throw a paper on non-linear fluidodynamics differential equations to an audience without being confident of their level of numerical literacy.

Also, he says “I can’t call a racist as such because I don’t know his real intentions”: does he apply the same rule as a journalist to everybody else (never a single judgement because you can never know someone’s intentions), or is it only racists that get this privilege? If I repeatedly ask my audience “don’t you want less Moroccans in your country?”, do you really need a crystal ball to understand what my ideologies and motivations are?

And, on the long run, when you simply report the worst thoughts of the political class without applying any filter or judgement, you normalize them.

The first time I hear Wilders making a racist remark about Moroccans I may get enraged. The second time too. But on the 3rd, 4th, 10th, 20th, 100th time, will I still get enraged the same way? Especially when the news is passed without the moral judgement that it should rightfully be applied to it? Or will it become just another opinion in a sea of equally valid opinions?

The problem is that fascists and racists are very well aware of the tendency of the “moderate” press to pass on their comments without judgement.

In fact, they use them as their loudspeakers.

They repeat the same outrageous thing again and again, without anyone between them and the listener calling it outrageous, and the listener will slowly start to consider it normal. The more you repeat something false or awful without anyone shutting you up, the more people will believe you - no matter how false or awful the original thing is.

Today journalists like Indro Montanelli don’t enjoy a good reputation in Italy because they failed to take a strong stance against the fascist regime, first amid fears of not being sufficiently impartial, then amid fears of alienating the supporters of Mussolini among their readers, and then amid fears of persecution. On the other hand, intellectuals like Benedetto Croce or Karl Popper are seen in a positive light for speaking up against those crimes, without thinking in terms of “is it my job as a public intellectual to take a public position or not? Will I offend or alienate my audience by taking a stance?”

When barbaric times come, there’s no doubt over who sits on the right side of history - and it’s never those who failed to speak up.

https://babelmagazine.nl/2025/01/05/pieter-klok-hoofdredacteur-van-de-volkskrant-over-emoties-in-het-publieke-debat-de-verkiezing-van-donald-trump-genocide-de-voorman-van-doe-maar-en-de-macht-van-de-pen/

@libreleah I use Arch (btw) on most of my machines, but I still have 5-6 RPis around stuck on Bullseye (and two of them even on Buster) exactly because it’s always been a pain to run a proper dist-upgrade.

I don’t mind the half a day downtime when I manage only one Debian system, but when it’s 5-6 systems that easily become half a week just to manage upgrades, backports, broken packages etc. (sometimes in the past I just gave up and did a fresh install, which really sucked).

But if you can confirm that the process has finally become painless then I may even try to do the jump - I guess that the biggest blocker for me would be to migrate all the custom X11 scripts on those machines to Wayland, which I currently hate more than Pipewire…

@delreveess @davidculley @gubi

1. Find someone you really trust who hosts a Forgejo instance and ask them to host your code there (or Gitlab if it’s not an enterprise installation)

2. Use Codeberg if that’s not an option

3. Use Sourcehut if you really want to learn the hard way

I missed this news a couple of days ago: #Redis is officially FOSS again, as it has backtracked from #SSPL and moved to AGPL (which IMHO is what they should have adopted all along).

This closes the cycle of my prediction:

1. That Redis had made a terrible mistake by switching to SSPL
2. That the switch to SSPL would have just resulted in a fork fever that would have critically eroded their user base and reputation
3. That those forks would have been eventually included in standard Linux distros instead of Redis itself because of their OSI-compatible licenses, and adopted as alternatives to Redis by the cloud providers (hence invalidating the whole point of SSPL)
4. That Redis would have eventually backtracked and switched back to AGPL

There’s a 5th point in my prediction that hasn’t materialized yet though: that the damage is already done and it will be hard to revert.

Fedora, Arch and Alpine have all replaced Redis with Valkey in their repos already, and Debian has opted to temporarily provide both.

Many Docker configurations, cloud and on-prem deployments, Terraform templates, home servers etc. have already all migrated to Valkey.

Not only, but the seismic fork allowed Valkey to implement features that have been requested in Redis for a while but not implemented because of the most complex governance of the project (like RDMA). Plus, while Valkey guarantees parity of features as of Redis 7.2.4, the mismatch of features is only supposed to increase as the hard fork diverges. This makes it even more unlikely that an enterprise software that has already migrated to Valkey takes the risk of migrating back to Redis later.

Redis’ decision leaves MongoDB as the only major SSPL-licensed project out there. And that is also coming with its costs. For example, the Linux Foundation has just opened its arms to Microsoft’s DocumentDB rather than MongoDB because the former is released under an OSI-compatible MIT license rather than Mongo’s SSPL.

The other project that still partly uses SSPL is Elastic. And even in that case the decision has backfired. It opened the way to AWS to release OpenSearch under an Apache license and grab a lot of developers.

In the age of unregulated surveillance capitalism, children are just another product segment to be spied and sold.

A new study (https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998) finds out that, out of 14 companies actively marketing online surveillance on school devices:

• 86% monitors students 24/7, not just during school hours.

• 71% scans content posted by minors through AI.

• Only 43% of them employs human reviewers.

• 36% admitted of spying kids not only on school-owned devices, but also on their own personal devices, although they didn’t clarify how they do that nor what kind of data (photos, texts…) they scrape.

• 50% scrapes content posted on those kids’ own social media profiles too.

• 29% admitted to use the scraped data to process “risk scores” on the level of schools, classes and individual children.

The companies involved in such large-scale surveillance campaigns usually prefer to remain as anonymous as they can. I believe instead that it’s a civic duty that as many people as possible know their names, publicly shame them, call them accountable, and threaten or intimidate their employees. It’s those morally bankrupt individuals who should feel afraid and ashamed for spying and selling the most sensitive data about our kids without our consent and without accountability. It’s by destroying the morale of their own employees that we can weaken this rotten system:

• Ativion: https://www.ativion.com/
• Bark: https://www.bark.us/schools
• Blocksi: https://blocksi.net/
• Deledao: https://www.deledao.com/activepulse-student-wellness
• Gaggle: https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management
• GoGuardian: https://www.goguardian.com/beacon
• Lightspeed Systems: https://www.lightspeedsystems.com/
• Linewize by Qoria: https://www.linewize.com/
• ManagedMethods: https://managedmethods.com/use-cases/student-self-harm-detection/
• Navigate360: https://navigate360.com/solutions/digital-threat-detection/
• Netsweeper: https://www.netsweeper.com/solutions
• Safer Schools Together: https://saferschoolstogether.com/
• Securly: https://www.securly.com/
• Sergeant Laboratories: https://www.sgtlabs.com/

Note that some of those websites push marketing campaigns that justify their deeply immoral practices by advertising how many potential tragedies they prevented through their massive surveillance schemes - e.g. “18,000 cases of physical harm prevented thanks to our surveillance!”.

They don’t answer however:

• What accounts for “evidence of physical harm” - does a teenager who writes “I hate my math teacher” on social media account as a credible threat? Does potential intent reflect actual crime - i.e. are we already in a Minority Report scenario?

• If the benefit of preventing 18,000 cases of violence is worth the cost of spying on at least tens of millions of children and teenagers worldwide - would you accept the police to monitor each single picture, video or message you send so they can catch a potential criminal in your city?

In the meantime:

• If you trust your own kids and you wouldn’t spy on each single piece of information they share (a principle of basic trust that IMHO every single good parent who wants to raise a healthy adult should agree on), then you shouldn’t let an opaque unaccountable American company spy on them more than you would do yourself. The best way to know your children is to sit next to them while they use digital devices, answer their questions and provide them with guidance. If you can’t do that, then any other less transparent methods of surveillance (which includes both parental control software and 3rd-party surveillance services provided by these companies) is a parental failure.

• Avoid at all costs, unless really required, any phone, tablet or computer given by your kid’s school. Provide them yourself with a device if needed.

• Teach your children to use surveillance-proof instruments - decentralized social networks like Mastodon rather than Facebook/TikTok/Instagram, your own Searxng instance instead of Google, a private Nextcloud instance instead of Google Drive, a self-hosted LLM model instead of ChatGPT, Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger everywhere, and no browser extensions provided by the school, a VPN that uses your PiHole or other privacy-aware DNS servers to filter malicious traffic, etc. I wish I could provide a silver bullet that doesn’t require parents to be expert sysadmins who know how to run their own services, but the truth is that I can’t. Kids’ digital footprint is so sensitive that the best way to handle it is to run your own hardened private services, and in today’s surveillance-based economy not trusting any 3rd-party is usually the best option.

• If teachers object that it’s their right to surveil the activities of your child, please remind them the existence of the following laws:

• (For American parents): COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act): websites and online services are required to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13, and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act): parents have all rights regarding their children’s educational records, including the right to inspect records and consent to disclosure.

• (For European parents): GDPR: requires parental consent for processing children’s data (typically under 16, though member states can lower to 13).

• If your kids’ school uses American cloud services in the class (usually either Google’s or Microsoft’s services for email, calendar, files, messaging, video conference etc., for example most of the schools in the Netherlands use the Google suite) express your concerns over the privacy of your children and lobby them to move away from them. Some of the companies I mentioned earlier purchase data from Google or Microsoft, either directly or through intermediate data brokers. Raise awareness with other parents and push your school to use open-source transparent privacy-respecting alternatives like Nextcloud, Jitsi or Mattermost instead.

https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998