"Keep Writing" #JaneGoodall said to me.
Happy #ShamelessSelfPromo #WritingCommunity #writerslift #writers #authors #books #Bluesky
#Mastodon #Instagram #Linkedin #Facebook #Youtube #Pinterest #Threads #Belo

http://belobrescia.com
http://amzn.to/2mhpOIN
http://kdp.amazon.com

belooleb.blogspot.com/2024/10/chil...

Это в РФ блокируют дурной #Roblox, а та же #Австралия повырубала почти весь интернет тем, кто младше 16 лет.
А именно уже:
#YouTube, #TikTok, #Twitch, #Instagram, #Facebook and #Threads, #Reddit, #X (#Twitter), #Kick
И глава государства ходит распираемый от гордости:

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was a “proud day” for Australia.
“This is the day when Australian families are taking back power from these big tech companies. They are asserting the right of kids to be kids and for parents to have greater peace of mind,” Albanese told the public broadcaster ABC Wednesday. But he conceded “it won’t be simple.”

Destroying Autocracy – December 04, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

The Programmer’s Fulcrum is the future (and smaller) home for a fusion of Symfony Station and Battalion. Its tagline is Devs Defending Democracy, Developing the OMN.

You can sign up now and for 2025 get an email with links to each week’s Symfony Station Communiqué and Battalion “Destroying Autocracy” post along with their featured articles. And you’ll be set with TPF after the fusing in January.

We are posting on the Fediverse now at @thefulcrum @thefulcrum.dev and original website content will start next month.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

ActivityPub is a shared vocabulary, a public language for moving meaning and connection across the open web. It gives you nouns and verbs, and the community defines the grammar through lived use.

This is why the OMN works with ActivityPub, a metadata and meaning layer, not a platform, flows, not silos. ActivityPub is the widely deployed 4 Opens protocol that treats publishing as a flow, a conversation.

Unlike the more vertical stacks (ATProto is a good example), ActivityPub doesn’t force a worldview. It doesn’t tell you, “this is how your network must be structured.” It doesn’t enforce hierarchy or lock you into one interpretation of identity, authority, or workflow. It’s a KISS path – here’s a shared language, verbs for publishing and receiving, express objects, updates, relationships. The rest is up to the commons.

This flexibility is exactly why the OMN can become a part of this flow.

Why the OMN works with ActivityPub – And why we need a bridge to p2p

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery

DDEV has:

Power Through Blackouts: How DDEV Community Helped Me in Ukraine

TechPolicy Press shares:

How to Test New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Law

The EU’s Digital Omnibus Must Be Rejected by Lawmakers. Here is Why.

Singapore announced an:

Issuance of Implementation Directives to Apple and Google Under the Online Criminal Harms Act

The MIT Press Reader has:

The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

The Guardian reports:

Irish authorities asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by IDF

Neutral

TechPolicy Press reports:

What the European Commission and Civil Society Both Get Wrong on the Digital Omnibus

Why Platforms Don’t Catch Climate Misinformation — and How to Change That

EuroNews asks:

Which European countries are building their own sovereign AI to compete in the tech race?

Numerama reports:

Mistral AI dévoile Mistral 3 et Ministral : des modèles qui replacent la France sur la scène open source

TechCrunch reports:

Mistral closes in on Big AI rivals with new open-weight frontier and small models

Wired reports:

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the states. Activists Are Fighting Back.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing

EDRi has:

Promises unkept: The EU-US Data Privacy Framework under fire

404 Media reports:

Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI

Pariah States

DarkReading reports:

Tomiris Unleashes ‘Havoc’ With New Tools, Tactics

DPRK’s ‘Contagious Interview’ Spawns Malicious Npm Package Factory

Student Sells Gov’t, University Sites to Chinese Actors

TechPolicy Press reports:

The Gulf’s AI Rise and the Risk of Entrenching Authoritarianism

The Register reports:

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

Big Media

Axios reports:

Fox News hires Palantir to build AI newsroom tools

Big surprise.

Big Tech

The Guardian reports:

How big tech is creating its own friendly media bubble to ‘win the narrative battle online’

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Anti-immigrant material among AI-generated content getting billions of views on TikTok

BleepingComputer reports:

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

Big surprise here. But, if you’re amoral enough to use it, you deserve all the privacy invading ads you get.

Google deletes X post after getting caught using a ‘stolen’ AI recipe infographic

Nature reports:

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

Wow.

The Guardian reports:

The question isn’t whether the AI bubble will burst – but what the fallout will be

National Review reports:

Meta Researchers Privately Compared Instagram to Addictive Drug, Bombshell Court Filing Shows

Wanna-be Big Tech

OMG Unbuntu has:

Mozilla’s ‘Rewiring’ to AI – Saving the Web or Saving Itself?

Cybersecurity/Privacy

TechCrunch reports:

European cops shut down crypto mixing website that helped launder 1.3B euros

DarkReading reports:

New Raptor Framework Uses Agentic Workflows to Create Patches

Bleeping Computer reports:

Fake Calendly invites spoof top brands to hijack ad manager accounts

The Register reports:

Microsoft quietly shuts down Windows shortcut flaw after years of espionage abuse

Fediverse

Coywolf has:

Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse

Ben Werdmuller shares:

Introducing Roundabout

Sean Coates explores:

The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization

Great and important stuff.

Ploum asks:

Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?

Wouldn’t the fix to this would be to show a larger version of a user’s profile image with text posts?

RSS

Planet Codigo has:

Mi solución RSS con software libre y autogestionado

Slightly Decentralized Social Media

TBD

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

• That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
• Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS. Or even our future home in 2026, if you want a head start.

Keep fighting!

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Roundabout #RSS #StopChina #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #Threads

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=4147

Alt...

Spaceship at the site of a battle

On the Threads numbers, your theory that they're counting people on Instagram and get shown a Threads post is certainly plausible.

Details aside though the most likely explanation seems to me that Meta is lying (as they have about numnbers in the past -- remember the "pivot to video" lolsob).

@fediversereport

#meta #FediPact #threads

Last Week in the #ATmosphere:

- 20 million accounts on #Bluesky
- #Threads is taking the competition with Bluesky serious; Bluesky might be closer in size to Threads than thought
- experiments with visualising the firehose
- and a ton of links

Read at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2411-c/