Please just read the whole article. It’s an easy read for the first half, and well researched. Proper journalism. And relevant not only for Canada.

Thousands of councillors in more than 500 municipalities have received these emails, according to KICLEI, the group behind them, whose name mimics the international environmental network ICLEI. Screenshots of KICLEI’s internal database show the email addresses of local officials nationwide.

Sounds like they’re proudly doing it out in the open.

And on:

(…) the digital infrastructure behind KICLEI’s campaign: a custom AI chatbot designed to express fears about United Nations control using moderate, civic language — messaging that is now shaping real decisions in town halls across Canada.

chatbot instuctions

At least 14 municipal halls have received KICLEI presentations, with Thorold, Ont., already voting to withdraw from Canada’s flagship municipal net-zero scheme, Partners for Climate Protection. This month, Lethbridge, Alberta, voted to cut its governmental emissions reduction target in half. These decisions followed receipt by the town councillors of letters, presentations and reports from KICLEI members.

And on:

KICLEI (‘Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives’) was founded in 2023 by Freedom Convoy activist Maggie Hope Braun

Why am I not surprised. And please don’t call these people activists. That’s just the skin they’re putting on. They’re grifters.

Would you prefer “suppress”?

Also, wouldn’t your eyes bounce right back since they’re attached with a sort of rubber band?

They’ve been doing shit like that* without AI for decades. But yeas, it’s getting worse all the time.

* censor | suppress - tomatos | tomatoes

If anybody still believed in Telegram’s trustworthiness, it should now be dispelled.

(Only kidding, there’s plenty of people who still “believe” in both Durov and Musk)

“Unauthorized Bread”

Fuck Peter Thiel with a rusty spade. Him and his technonazi ilk.

And I’m not “just” angry. They actively pursue this bullshit, Skynet, Citicorp, like a Bond movie villain. They try to build their neoliberal cities in the desert only to find out that there’s already people living there and now they have to deal with these pesky authorities, and courts, and whatnot.

Those pesky “We have updated our privacy policy” emails. And “by ignoring this message you have signaled consent” (paraphrasing).

Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.

Enshittification is guaranteed even for the paid tier.

Maybe there’ll be silver, gold and platinum memberships next. How long til you realize you’ve been had?

Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all

I explicitely did not claim that.

And as the other guy said, you don’t need a G account to watch youtube.

The article makes a point about a certain type of workplace vampirism - which also finds its way into the finished product - but also points out that there are different types of complexity and they aren’t all “bad”. It’s a little confusing to read imho.

But I get the point. I am by no means an IT person but I just took over a blog theme and I’m apalled by the minified CSS framework the whole thing relies on. Looking at the margins for some divs, they are defined and overridden 4 times before their final value, and only the 5th time could have been avoided had the original developer known a little more about the framework they were apparently eager to use.

Yeah fuck Google. Delete all Google accounts before it’s too late. Plenty of alternatives exist and you can still benefit from their rankings and whatnot, if your business depends on that.

Ugh, no. I’ve known Brian Eno and his music and the influence he had on other musicians* for decades before I learnt about this little factoid, just a few years ago.

* (U2, Devo, Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Grace Jones, Sinéad O’Connor, Robert Wyatt, Ultravox, Coldplay…)

the more people continue to ditch windows, the more scammers are going to focus their energy on linux

Sorry, I missed this in my first reply.

It is true.

A few simple rules:

• keep your system up-to-date within the constraints of their repositories
• install only from trusted repositories, i.e. the official ones for your distro. This excludes any package of any app straight from their website.
• same precautions for web browsers as for any other OS. Don’t click any old link, don’t execute mail attachments, that sort of stuff.
• don’t execute arbitrary code esp. from the internet
• don’t just sudo if you want to make something work. Despite the famous xkcd, that’s not how this works. Least privilege at all times.
• Antivirus software still isn’t required

Unless you have some extraordinary usage scenarios, that’s it really.

Windows 95 chime composer Brian Eno

I cringe hard at this characterisation. Brian Eno is known for many, many things. Amongst other inventing the term Ambient Music and, of course, making such music. But not only. Playing in so many bands and producing so many more. That chime really is the tiniest of all his contributions to musical history.

But yes. Call out all companies and politicians that are complicit. It needs to end yesterday.

First of all there isn’t One Linux.

In simple terms for an end user, yes, you are definitely better off with any of the major distros.

Non-commerciality is probably the most important aspect. Or as someone put it a long time ago: “Suddenly I realized that the software is on my side.”

What surprised me the most with this announcement is how it was met with surprise and harsh reactions. People felt betrayed.

I would just call that naivety. Of the (average) consumer.

Not sure why they chose “geek” here, maybe we just have different definitions of that.

Thank you for your service.

I use keepassxc and although I’m unlikely to ever install it any other way than through my distro’s package manager without 3rd party repos, this is good to know and hits a personal note.

Fuck all nefarious hackes and scammers. I just re-installed my server and installed crowdsec on it not 24h hours ago, and already got 20 000 bans. Twenty thousand! It’s getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

tl;dr: “Reject All” will not break the site.

Also, technically there’s still a cookie after that:

The choice is recorded in a consent cookie

The article seems to ride on people’s anxiety about walls of text & choices presented by various cookie popups (not all of which even have a “Reject all” option) and IMHO isn’t quite clear enough that “Reject all” is the best option for 99% of use cases.

Agreed on all points.

Even the blurb tells us that this has been a thing since basically forever, and the arguments why it should become worse with AI are weak.

But the old fakes were time-consuming to create and required specialized expertise.

Bullshit. Every photographer knew how to take a lead pencil and make the lady’s face smoother on the negative.

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