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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Here’s a handy guide on how to get involved in that sort of stuff, for anyone else reading.

    Part 1: The big picture 🖼️

    The protests are good ways of meeting like-minded people in your community to form connections, as well as spreading awareness of local mutual aid groups so more can join or form ICE resistance groups who can join an encrypted chat to coordinate, alert neighbors, and talk strategy. It also is a good place for unions or union members to encourage others to unionize their workplaces, which can also ultimately work toward a national general strike, which is our most tangible and powerful collective action.

    The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (such as ending the war in Iran, ceasing support for the genocide of Palestine, and Abolishing ICE).

    The General Strike was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

    There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).

    Part 2: Learn First Aid ⛑️

    Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt.

    Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

    But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

    Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

    Part 3: Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

    If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

    These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

    This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

    There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!), for more info, go here, and scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community) section”

    Part 4: Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike 💪

    If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to make a general strike possible.

    Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn’t the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so.

    Most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner.

    You can contact the IWW with the link below:

    And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.

    • 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
    • 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
    • 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
    • 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
    • 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
    • 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
    • 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
    • 🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland
    • 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
    • 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
    • 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
    • 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW
    Part 5: Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️

    Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.

    Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.

    Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.

    Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.

    We’ll start it off with some General Advice:

    • Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
    • Be careful about who you meet online
    • Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
    • Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
    • agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.

    For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment).

    I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).


  • The kernel update issue on Android is going to be exactly the same for PostmarketOS and for the exact same reason: proprietary firmwares and/or drivers.

    That is not the case, as PostmarketOS uses community made open-source drivers, even for the GPU, and all devices that it supports uses the mainline kernel, as all of the drivers they develop are upstreamed to mainline, instead of it being a proprietary driver that is locked to a specific kernel.

    The open-source drivers aren’t currently as polished as the proprietary ones, but as we’ve seen the open-source AMD driver for desktop, it can become the best option with community effort and funding.

    and now you need to maintain both a GNU/systemd/Linux AND a compatibility layer with Android

    The point of adopting Postmarket is that they could then rely on the open-source community to help with maintaining most of of the components, much like how Linux desktop or Linux Server works currently. Waydroid is developed by its own team, so they wouldn’t need to fork that and maintain it to have access to Android apps (though they could help contribute to it if they wanted to).

    From a security and privacy standpoint, Linux was never designed to handle hostile apps designed to aquire as much data as possible. Android has a sandboxing system

    Android is Linux at the core, yet it was able to be hardened, which shows that PostmarketOS could be similarly hardened if such features were adequately funded and developed by the EU. Linux already has Wayland, which is a huge step forward for security, and Flatpak packages already have Android-like permissions built in (though they would need to modify how those work by default to increase security).



  • I’m not entirely sure if that would be better than just adopting PostmarketOS, since forking AOSP would mean maintaining a fork of that entire ecosystem, and I’m unsure how they would deal with all the phone manufacturers dropping support for phones rather quickly, or using outdated kernels to access GPU and hardware drivers for said phones after the manufacturer drops support.

    Investing in PostmarketOS instead would bring with it much less stuff to fork, along with access to the mainline linux kernel (instead of outdated Android ones) that use open-source GPU drivers that can be effectively maintained, and it can support Android compatibility with a compatibility layer, Waydroid.

    A polished PostmarketOS ecosystem only seems to offer advantages compared to a forked AOSP, so if they’re choosing which to invest in, Postmarket seems like the clear winner.










  • 90% of youtube thumbnails have a face in them, usually of an exaggerated emotion, and that goes for both male and female youtubers. Many youtubers have confirmed time and time again that the algorithm favors faces by a pretty wide margin, and thus most play that game.

    I’m not a fan of it, I wish they didn’t or the algorithm was changed to not favor it, but I understand why they do it. Though I don’t think it’s particularly gendered as your image claims.



  • 20 years ago Linux couldn’t play 95% of Windows games seamlessly without tinkering, couldn’t easily produce music without a lot of tinkering and few DAWs, couldn’t effectively video edit (Kdenlive is good now, and Davimci Resolve now supports Linux), and it had spotty WiFi card support.

    All of those are now no longer a problem, and make transitioning to it far easier for a much wider swath of people.




  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoPrivacy@lemmy.mlAny one used Kloak yet ?
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    13 days ago

    The GPL would only let them close source their own code, but to close source any code that was contributed by others, they would need to explicitly ask permission from each and every user that added to the codebase, which generally isn’t feasible.

    That prevents the original creators from being able to benefit from free and rapid community development and then close sourcing it all later. To effectively close source the app, they would need to re-implement every contribution themselves.

    They would only be able to do what you describe with the GPL if they also required every contributor to sign a CLA which explicitly gives up ownership of the contribution to the project owners.

    The MIT license allows anyone (including the original creators) to close source the app without needing permission from anyone.



  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.nettoPrivacy@lemmy.mlAny one used Kloak yet ?
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    13 days ago

    Not personally a fan of it since it’s not federated (and has no plans to implement federation) meaning its one centralized point of failure and one centralized point for governments to subpoena. It has no plans to implement any form of encryption (Movim has solid encryption, and Fluxer plans to implement encrypted DMs in the future).

    Also very concerning to me is that it uses the MIT license, which allows for the company to do a rug-pull and close-source the code in the future so they can enshittify it. Only the GPL license ensures that it remains open-source and in the community’s hands forever.