🚄 All aboard the #HackerTrain to #FOSDEM !! 🚃
Going to #FOSDEM2026? Thinking of going by #train?
Would you like to meet other hackers along the way?
Join us on the https://hackertrain.
"Whenever he (@pluralistic) talks to policymakers, the response is that if anyone does anything progressive on tech regulation, the US trade representative would kick in their teeth."
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, blogger and activist, who is the very best form of troublemaker. He’s got a new book out on Enshitification, and I suspect everyone was expecting a talk on the book. Nope.
Someone kindly reached out to ask if I would consider speaking about Gaza Verified (gaza-verified.org/) at the Social Web Devroom being organised by the Social Web Foundation at FOSDEM.
My answer is no.
And I feel it’s important for those of us who care about such things to understand why:
• Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org) partners with, and thereby whitewashes and legitimises Meta
• FOSDEM (fosdem.org/2026) allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes and legitimises, Google and IBM (Red Hat)
Meta and Google are both surveillance capitalists with strong ties to the Trump regime that is arming and financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. IBM, apart from having helped Nazi Germany carry out the Holocaust, is also singled out by name, alongside Google (Alphabet
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Someone kindly reached out to ask if I would consider speaking about Gaza Verified (gaza-verified.org/) at the Social Web Devroom being organised by the Social Web Foundation at FOSDEM.
My answer is no.
And I feel it’s important for those of us who care about such things to understand why:
• Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org) partners with, and thereby whitewashes and legitimises Meta
• FOSDEM (fosdem.org/2026) allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes and legitimises, Google and IBM (Red Hat)
Meta and Google are both surveillance capitalists with strong ties to the Trump regime that is arming and financing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. IBM, apart from having helped Nazi Germany carry out the Holocaust, is also singled out by name, alongside Google (Alphabet, Inc.), as complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people (aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un…).
It shouldn’t be hard for organisations that purport to be alternatives to toxic Big Tech to not be sponsored and affiliated with them. But apparently it is.
Personally, I have no trouble saying no to having my name and legitimacy being used to whitewash these corporations and I have been doing so since the beginning.
I will not stand – literally or metaphorically – in front of their banners and talk about an initiative that tries to help the very people victimised by these corporations in their sociopathic quest for profit at any cost.
I hope more people start doing the same if we are to have any chance of making these corporations with their toxic business models and their complicity in genocide socially unacceptable. If we cannot even meet that already-very-low bar – as long as those of us with legitimacy allow ourselves to be used to normalise them – nothing will change.
Wow, if you search for signal messenger on DuckDuckGo using Chrome, the actual @signalapp web site is the *third* entry following ads for “Signal Private Messenger – Free Download” that leads to the site appmaus.com and “Get Signal Messenger | Install Signal App” that leads to the site filelocations.com.
DuckDuckGo should be held criminally liable for anyone who ends up downloading malware because of this.
What life is like for Palestinians from Gaza on centralised, US-based, Big Tech networks like Bluesky (yes, it’s all those things… did something about them make you think otherwise?)
The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Something happened to me recently, and I don't mean to be dramatic, but it's truly a shameful thing. Two days ago, I joined the writing platform #substack & even though @aral & @fabio told me it wasn't a good platform for me, being Palestinian, I decided to interact on it and post my poems there. I was subjected to awful abuse in all verbal forms by Zionists there. But I preferred to remain silent instead of arguing with any fools. Today, the platform’s banned me!
Colorado's bold move to regulate high-risk #AI systems drew praise from policy analysts and interest from other states. But pressure from #BigTech and concerns about compliance costs have lawmakers reconsidering the law less than a year after it passed. theconversation.com/colorado-i…
one day you unwrap() what you shouldn't have, another day you again unwrap what you shouldn't have. What should I do with you bigtech? #cloudflare #whatsapp #bigtech
"#🦔Rothschild stufte #Amazon und #Microsoft auf „neutral“ herab und argumentierte, dass die #KI-Infrastruktur sechsmal so viel Kapital erfordert, um denselben wirtschaftlichen Wert wie die ursprüngliche Cloud-Umstellung zu...
Your daily reminder that @EUCommission are only cunts on days with names ending with day.
“The European Commission will launch its long-awaited bid to simplify digital rules in an effort to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses and to promote European start ups in the global artificial intelligence race.”
“TABS [by Mozilla] pulls exactly the data you need—from HTML to Markdown to JSON—using the fastest, most efficient method for each page. It adapts to the structure and complexity of the site, staying stealthy and reliable so your [AI] agents always get what they need without friction.”
Want a magic box that just works? #SteamMachine is for you. Want to build your own, choose your own components, architecture, even OS? You can do that too.
Both ways are completely compatible with each other. No corporate lockdowns or gatekeeping.
That's how technology should work.
#Valve is leading the way in how you can build a polished commercial ecosystem that still lets you do what you want, and plays nice with everyone else.
In my new article "The rebellion will be federated – 2025 edition" I discuss the key role of the Fediverse in this political and cultural climate... and argue that digital sovereignty and the ability to self-host are now more important than ever:
Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal i…
I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was a dollar-store Elon Musk at the time.
What can I say? He duped me with his “small tech” talk, making me think we were talking about the same thing. Which, clearly, we weren’t, because Small Tech is all about inclusivity and a non-colonial approach to designing and developing human-scale technology:
“Small Tech is political through and through. It stands with both middle fingers raised high against Big Tech and capitalism. It’s proudly progressive. Small Tech is the opposite of Big Tech, not Big Tech Light.”
I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was a dollar-store Elon Musk at the time.
What can I say? He duped me with his “small tech” talk, making me think we were talking about the same thing. Which, clearly, we weren’t, because Small Tech is all about inclusivity and a non-colonial approach to designing and developing human-scale technology:
“Small Tech is political through and through. It stands with both middle fingers raised high against Big Tech and capitalism. It’s proudly progressive. Small Tech is the opposite of Big Tech, not Big Tech Light.”
Couple weeks ago Cloudflare announced it would be sponsoring some Open Source projects. Throwing money at pet projects of random techbros would hardly be news, but there was a certain vibe behind...
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"Former Apple employee Ashley Gjøvik moved into one of the adjacent apartments in 2020 only to fall badly ill with indications of chemical poisoning, she told SFGATE.
