Mastodon Feed: Posts

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

Today in History: Herman Hollerith patents first data processing computer, 1889

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

Today in History: American Telephone and Telegraph loses antitrust case, 1982

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

[BEGIN TODAY IN HISTORY RUN]

Boosted by jwz:
netblocks ("NetBlocks") wrote:

⚠️ Confirmed: Telemetry indicate a major disruption to networks in Belgorod, western #Russia, after Ukraine targets the region's energy installations with missiles; initial analysis suggests one of the most effective infrastructure strikes by Ukraine since the start of the war

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
kenwhite.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("We’re Going To Keep The Popehat") wrote:

It is the position of the Trump Administration that its agents can come into any state and city in America (let alone other countries) and kill people and that state and city have no jurisdiction to inquire about it. Treat any Trump official accordingly.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mbwhpvwctp2q

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
aboutsignal ("Signal News & Tips") wrote:

Signal massively downloaded amid rising tensions, number one in Denmark 🇩🇰 🇬🇱

People are looking for a safer alternative to WhatsApp

👉 https://aboutsignal.com/news/signal-massively-downloaded-amid-rising-tensions-number-one-in-denmark/

#signal #signalmessenger #signalapp #tech #privacy #whatsapp #denmark #greenland #news

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@PCMag/115856696065155915

Not content with littering up the Earth, the billionaires are now coming for our night sky too. I wish we could shoot all of it down.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Wired (who are not on Mastodon!?) is dissembling.

https://www.wired.com/story/x-grok-app-store-nudify-csam-apple-google-content-moderation/

The answer to "why is X still in app stores?" is obvious: the fascists like it.

App stores are centralised rentiers, ergo easy to coerce when proprietors are avaricious bootlickers. Wired's *so close* to connecting the dots, but fail here yet again. From last Oct:

https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/

/cc @pluralistic

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
nullagent@partyon.xyz wrote:

There's some more details about what happened at the high school ICE attempted to storm after murdering Renee Good.

It seems ICE rolled up with several vehicles and in short order ended up pepper spraying students and fighting with passers by.

📸 mrs.frazzled via Facebook

#ReneeGood #minneapolis #PublicSchool #FuckICE

Attachments:

• video: e00b6d19abf0b63d.mp4

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ("Adrianna Tan") wrote:

The Chinese word for ‘owl’ is ‘cat headed bird’.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon #Torties

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
KimPerales@toad.social ("Kim Perales") wrote:

"Remember🚨everyone who's out there defending cold-blooded #murder.🚨They’ve shown you exactly who they are."
-M Touch

"Men🚨who murder innocent women & then destroy their pub #memorials aren't LE. They’re a fucking rogue admin at war with the American ppl."
-A Standal

"If you let🚨#ICE murder #immigrants, they'll eventually murder anyone who disagrees with them➡️if you let them murder anyone who disagrees with them➡️they'll murder anyone they want.🚨may be YOU."
-C S&G
#USPol
https://metro.co.uk/video/ice-officer-stamps-candle-left-memory-shooting-victim-renee-good-3583053/?ito=vjs-link

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
stefano@bsd.cafe ("Stefano Marinelli") wrote:

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

Answering myself, the author at the second link has actually started her interactive writing seminar with this post. So I subscribed. (Note to self: don't share links before you finished reading them :-) )

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
people@flipboard.com ("People") wrote:

ICE Academy Shortened Its Training to Just 47 Days Under Trump in Nod to the 47th President, Report Claims
https://people.com/ice-academy-training-shortened-47-days-under-trump-report-11881592?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Celebrity Parents & Families @celebrity-parents-families-people

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
kathimmel@mstdn.social ("it's kat! 🇵🇸✊") wrote:

back to the future with a 1954 masterpiece made by three communist artists, all of whom had been blacklisted in hollywood. it's one of the first films made fully independent of the hollywood studio system.
advancing workers' rights & embracing social & political thought from a feminist perspective, this is well worth a watch.
#cinema #film #communism #feminism #workersRights #saltOfTheEarth
https://archive.org/details/clacinonl%5FSaltOfTheEarth

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Putting on my marketing cap again for a second. (I have no power, so if you hate what I'm saying take comfort in knowing Mastodon would never hire me lol)

The feeling this illustration gives you should be the feeling people get when they hear Mastodon. Community, public, commons, subversive, a dab of punk. It's what I felt coming here for the first (third) time. There's an appetite for this on the corporate web, I just know it.

Artist: Gareth McMurchy
Curator: Molly White

#CnM

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
gbjorn.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Gunnar Björnsson") wrote:

Martin Peterson doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
mhoye wrote:

Daughter just came home to tell me the teachers at school tried to confiscate her vape but they couldn't because it's actually a kazoo.

"I made a kazoo noise at them and I could see them dying on the inside so I made a sad kazoo noise instead. I don't think it helped."

The grin on her face.

Boosted by jwz:
johnrogers.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("John Rogers") wrote:

The animating principle of representational democracy is to protect the rest of us from the whims of deranged rich people, be they kings or oligarchs. Everything else is wainscoting.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nabpxh57dor5jlxw6cyxfpog/post/3mbwpe35qns2l

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈") wrote:

Thinking of starting a list of popular open source software developed using LLMs and by LLM boosters, along with alternatives that can be tried instead. LLM in FOSS should be socially shunned.

Anyone interested?

Update: https://codeberg.org/gen-ai-transparency/open-slopware alright, it's up. Patches welcome! Please send me your PRs at your leisure.

#foss #opensource #genai

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

I sometimes scroll YouTube shorts, which I'm working on, not the point. lol

But I noticed something interesting. Google's revenue might be hurting. Normally, they serve an ad every 4 videos (idk why I know this I just do).

Now it's every two videos. YouTube servers an ad every two videos on Shorts. That's wild. And because I know it's the third video, I just scroll right passed and I'm guessing they still count it as a view.

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
masspirates@social.globalpirates.net ("Massachusetts Pirate Party") wrote:

If you are going to tonight's 6pm protest in Boston at Park Street, bring friends and mask. Use airplane mode, turn off your phone or don't bring it to disable tracking. Bring a camera if you want to record it. MBTA stations and buses have cameras. Here is an incomplete map of surveillance cameras around Park Street. Get your own map at cctv.masspirates.org

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

Courtesy of The Great Fediverse, it's the second day in a row that I'm reading about writing [1][2]. So I got interested. If one wants to (more formally) learn how to write, where one would start? An online class? A series of articles? A mentor?

[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/#hold-the-gravel
[2]: https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/how-to-write-like-a-person

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca ("Broadwaybabyto") wrote:

What happened to Renee Nicole Good is not an anomaly or a rare phenomenon.

The only unusual factor is that she was white.

A Black man named Keith Porter was shot & killed by ICE on New Year’s Eve.

Marimar Martinez was shot five times by an ICE officer in Chicago who went on to brag about leaving seven holes in her body. She survived but has a hole in her arm forever.

Silverio Villegas González was shot dead in Franklin Park Illinois when he panicked and tried to run.

Then there’s the more than 30 people who’ve died in the camps.

No accountability. No punishment.

Keep speaking out. Let’s make sure this officer is held responsible.

#abolishice #ice #uspol #minneapolis #fascism #immigration #reneenicolegood

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
ophiocephalic@kolektiva.social ("ophiocephalic 🐍") wrote:

@fromjason
What you're describing is "justified" by the state's monopoly on "legitimate" violence, which is really the defining characteristic of what a state is at all. In this context, summary street executions by inept clowns with badges is legitimate, but harmlessly running away is terrorism

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
DrJackBrown@mstdn.social ("Dr. Jack Brown :verified:") wrote:

"People in positions of power have already passed judgement – from the President, to the Vice President, to Kristi Noem have stood and told you things that are verifiably false... they have determined the character of a 37 year-old mother that they didn't even know."

Governor Tim Walz

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
lorenzofb@infosec.exchange ("Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai") wrote:

NEW: The internet in Iran is nearly completely shut down, according to monitoring firms.

The blackout comes in the midst of countrywide protests that have lasted for days after spikes in prices and shortages of basic goods. The govenrment has responded with a violent crackdown.

“I think we’re at a near-total disconnection from the outside world now,” said Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity researcher.

http://techcrunch.com/2026/01/08/internet-collapses-in-iran-amid-protests-over-economic-crisis/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
quaithe ("Eva Infeld") wrote:

A propos of nothing in particular, I was reminded of this song about having a queer teenage crush on the pink power ranger. #39C3

https://youtu.be/G0QSubCuexk

Couldn't find any non-youtube links unfortunately.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
autonomysolidarity@todon.eu ("Autonomie und Solidarität") wrote:

Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live onstage during hacker conference

‚A hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites live onstage during their talk at a hacker conference last week, with the sites yet to return online.
The pseudonymous hacker, who goes by Martha Root — dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers — deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal in real time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany….‘

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/05/hacktivist-deletes-white-supremacist-websites-live-on-stage-during-hacker-conference/

Great 👏 @back2theRoot

#Ccc #39C3 #FightNazis #Hacking #Tech #Technology #Activism #HH #Hamburg #Germany

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

“The Minnesota agency tasked with investigating the killing of a U.S. citizen by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has withdrawn from the case, alleging federal authorities have restricted its access to evidence.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/bca-withdraws-renee-good-ice-shooting-investigation/