holy shit "The Business Court in Brussels, Belgium, has issued an unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries including Anna's Archive, Libgen, OceanofPDF, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive's Open Library. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action. " #lawfedi

Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order (Update) * TorrentFreak

A Belgian court ordered intermediaries to block access to major shadow libraries, including the Internet Archive's Open Library.

abusive tech companies ("🤠") are drooling ("🤤") for generative AI and agentic AI ("👻") because: 1. 🤠 have decades of data about you already, 👻 is continued ROI 2. your attention and engagement via conversation with 👻 extracts new data types, even more data about you, and even more data about the people you talk about 3. engagement on behalf of 🤠 via 👻 is with impunity 4. your dependence on 👻 will mean unlimited, persistent access into your life and mind no different than the dependency you have on your cell phone being in your pocket and within arm's reach 24/7 5. 👻 will replace your friends in different ways. you will trust 👻 more and more as the tech improves 6. 👻 will learn how you work in way more nuanced detail than most people ever will. It will know how to most effectively talk to you, inform you, and control you 7. when 👻 becomes "on-device" in order to sway more users into trusting it, updates from the cloud will continue to allow 🤠 to collect data about your life and interact with you in ways that you trust and will most effectively sway your judgement 8. 👻 is trained to be extremely confident which makes them exceptional social engineers. 🤠 don't have to hire people to do this anymore

I want to thank @npub14vu6...9wlz and some other recent @npub13slx...t3va donors who donated a total of $780, enough to cover the cost of a new SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V dev board that we will use exclusively as a unfiltered Tor exit relay for hardware and OS diversity Arrow.com, the only seller of the SiFive HiFive, is charging a $196 tariff + sales tax even though the boards they have in stock have already been in stock for months, raising the cost of the board substantially I also want to thank @npub13xmr...232t who's not only donated a chassis for the SiFive HiFive, but is racking and stacking our gear we've moved from Seattle to San Francisco ^_^

" Hi all, As you might have just seen on the livestream or witnessed in person, I disrupted the speech of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman during the highly-anticipated 50th anniversary celebration. Here’s why. My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft’s AI Platform org. I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I’ve witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard. We are witnessing a genocide For the past 1.5 years, I’ve witnessed the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel. I’ve seen unspeakable suffering amidst Israel’s mass human rights violations - indiscriminate carpet bombings, the targeting of hospitals and schools, and the continuation of an apartheid state - all of which have been condemned globally by the UN, ICC, and ICJ, and numerous human rights organizations. The images of innocent children covered in ash and blood, the wails of mourning parents, and the destruction of entire families and communities have forever fractured me. At the time of writing, Israel has resumed its full-scale genocide in Gaza, which has so far killed by some estimates over 300,000 Gazans in the past 1.5 year alone. Just days ago, it was revealed that Israel killed fifteen paramedics and rescue workers in Gaza, executing them “one by one,” before burying them in the sand -- yet another horrific war crime. All the while, our “responsible” AI work powers this surveillance and murder. The United Nations and the International Court of Justice have concluded that this is a genocide, with the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders." 🧵 1/3 Source:

The Verge

Microsoft employee disrupts 50th anniversary and calls AI boss ‘war profiteer’

“Shame on you.”

this is a fantastic interview "Palestine Talks: In Conversation with Josie Guilbeau" (ex-US Army ex-NSA)

i think that everyone needs to read this "As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime."

The Atlantic

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

For most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.