Posts by fabio@manganiello.social
(DIR) Post #AxEbtJmZVQ3EM7gvFQ by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-15T00:09:49.337495Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
In the age of unregulated surveillance capitalism, children are just another product segment to be spied and sold.A new study (https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998) finds out that, out of 14 companies actively marketing online surveillance on school devices:86% monitors students 24/7, not just during school hours.71% scans content posted by minors through AI.Only 43% of them employs human reviewers.36% admitted of spying kids not only on school-owned devices, but also on their own personal devices, although they didn’t clarify how they do that nor what kind of data (photos, texts…) they scrape.50% scrapes content posted on those kids’ own social media profiles too.29% admitted to use the scraped data to process “risk scores” on the level of schools, classes and individual children.The companies involved in such large-scale surveillance campaigns usually prefer to remain as anonymous as they can. I believe instead that it’s a civic duty that as many people as possible know their names, publicly shame them, call them accountable, and threaten or intimidate their employees. It’s those morally bankrupt individuals who should feel afraid and ashamed for spying and selling the most sensitive data about our kids without our consent and without accountability. It’s by destroying the morale of their own employees that we can weaken this rotten system:Ativion: https://www.ativion.com/Bark: https://www.bark.us/schoolsBlocksi: https://blocksi.net/Deledao: https://www.deledao.com/activepulse-student-wellnessGaggle: https://www.gaggle.net/safety-managementGoGuardian: https://www.goguardian.com/beaconLightspeed Systems: https://www.lightspeedsystems.com/Linewize by Qoria: https://www.linewize.com/ManagedMethods: https://managedmethods.com/use-cases/student-self-harm-detection/Navigate360: https://navigate360.com/solutions/digital-threat-detection/Netsweeper: https://www.netsweeper.com/solutionsSafer Schools Together: https://saferschoolstogether.com/Securly: https://www.securly.com/Sergeant Laboratories: https://www.sgtlabs.com/Note that some of those websites push marketing campaigns that justify their deeply immoral practices by advertising how many potential tragedies they prevented through their massive surveillance schemes - e.g. “18,000 cases of physical harm prevented thanks to our surveillance!”.They don’t answer however:What accounts for “evidence of physical harm” - does a teenager who writes “I hate my math teacher” on social media account as a credible threat? Does potential intent reflect actual crime - i.e. are we already in a Minority Report scenario?If the benefit of preventing 18,000 cases of violence is worth the cost of spying on at least tens of millions of children and teenagers worldwide - would you accept the police to monitor each single picture, video or message you send so they can catch a potential criminal in your city?In the meantime:If you trust your own kids and you wouldn’t spy on each single piece of information they share (a principle of basic trust that IMHO every single good parent who wants to raise a healthy adult should agree on), then you shouldn’t let an opaque unaccountable American company spy on them more than you would do yourself. The best way to know your children is to sit next to them while they use digital devices, answer their questions and provide them with guidance. If you can’t do that, then any other less transparent methods of surveillance (which includes both parental control software and 3rd-party surveillance services provided by these companies) is a parental failure.Avoid at all costs, unless really required, any phone, tablet or computer given by your kid’s school. Provide them yourself with a device if needed.Teach your children to use surveillance-proof instruments - decentralized social networks like Mastodon rather than Facebook/TikTok/Instagram, your own Searxng instance instead of Google, a private Nextcloud instance instead of Google Drive, a self-hosted LLM model instead of ChatGPT, Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger everywhere, and no browser extensions provided by the school, a VPN that uses your PiHole or other privacy-aware DNS servers to filter malicious traffic, etc. I wish I could provide a silver bullet that doesn’t require parents to be expert sysadmins who know how to run their own services, but the truth is that I can’t. Kids’ digital footprint is so sensitive that the best way to handle it is to run your own hardened private services, and in today’s surveillance-based economy not trusting any 3rd-party is usually the best option.If teachers object that it’s their right to surveil the activities of your child, please remind them the existence of the following laws:(For American parents): COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act): websites and online services are required to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13, and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act): parents have all rights regarding their children’s educational records, including the right to inspect records and consent to disclosure.(For European parents): GDPR: requires parental consent for processing children’s data (typically under 16, though member states can lower to 13).If your kids’ school uses American cloud services in the class (usually either Google’s or Microsoft’s services for email, calendar, files, messaging, video conference etc., for example most of the schools in the Netherlands use the Google suite) express your concerns over the privacy of your children and lobby them to move away from them. Some of the companies I mentioned earlier purchase data from Google or Microsoft, either directly or through intermediate data brokers. Raise awareness with other parents and push your school to use open-source transparent privacy-respecting alternatives like Nextcloud, Jitsi or Mattermost instead.https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998
(DIR) Post #AxLxrzC87hIFJR8Sa8 by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-19T19:05:11.607637Z
0 likes, 3 repeats
In order to please the requests a large publisher (Axel Springer), #Germany may be on the verge of making ad-blockers illegal - and, worse, anything that modifies a Web page before or after rendering.Axel Springer has an open lawsuit against Eyeo (the maker of Adblock Plus).Publishers or Big Tech companies waging war against browsers and extensions culprit of blocking their juicy ads+tracking revenues aren't anything new. But this time the argument is a very dangerous one.The argument is that the source code of a website (its HTML, JS and CSS) is copyrighted content intended to be rendered as-is on a client's device.Therefore ad-blockers, by intercepting or blocking requests made through this copyrighted content, or modifying the DOM it renders, are breaking copyright laws.In 2022, the Hamburg appeal court ruled that Adblock Plus did not infringe the copyright of websites, but rather it was merely facilitating a choice by users about how they wished their browser to render the page.Unfortunately, on July 31, the German Federal Supreme Court partially overturned the decision of the Hamburg court and remanded the case for further proceedings. The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.The statement that a website as a whole, including its 3rd-party integrations (such as ads/trackers SDKs), is copyrighted content intended to be rendered without modifications only on the clients supported by the author is an extremely dangerous one.It goes against everything that HTTP and HTML have always been.Not only it would make ad-blockers illegal, but it'd make anything that alters the flow of an HTTP session illegal.Think of things like Greasemonkey scripts to change the style of some webpages. Or accessibility extensions that modify the contrast and font size of a page. Or things like Firefox's Reader Mode, often used by blind people to distill webpages before feeding their content to a screen reader. Or even just inspecting and manually modifying the DOM of a Web page through the browser's dev tools.And what if I do the blocking on DNS level, through something like Pihole? Would a DNS block towards a domain I don't want to be rendered on my devices be illegal too?If I acquired some content in a legal way (e.g. through an HTTP request to an openly accessible website), then I'm free to do whatever I can with that content, for personal usage, once it reaches my device.Imagine a law that makes it illegal to install another OS on a computer or phone that you regularly purchased.Or use alternative clients to render your chats.Or use a text-based browser with a minimal JS engine to access a Website.A law that wouldn't just imply a void warranty in these cases - just make them straight out illegal, as in "copyright infringment" illegal.It would be the biggest blow to the way the Internet is built - around open protocols open to all kind of implementations and messages open to all kind and manipulations on each step of the route.It would set a very dangerous precedent towards an over-reaching definition of copyright that could also mandate on what devices and under what condition some HTTP content should be rendered (and it's not such a far-fetched dystopia: look no further than the DRM implementations).And it would violate other EU laws (like the DMA) which are exactly meant to foster accessibility, inter-compatibility, freedom of implementation and modification of online content acquired through legal means.And what's most ironic is that blocking ads or modifying the CSS of a webpage may amount to copyright infringment, but massive scraping done by AI models may not.https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2025/08/14/is-germany-on-the-brink-of-banning-ad-blockers-user-freedom-privacy-and-security-is-at-risk/
(DIR) Post #AxXaotTkx2N3fTSJNI by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-25T21:33:42.637324Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
I missed this news a couple of days ago: #Redis is officially FOSS again, as it has backtracked from #SSPL and moved to AGPL (which IMHO is what they should have adopted all along).This closes the cycle of my prediction:That Redis had made a terrible mistake by switching to SSPLThat the switch to SSPL would have just resulted in a fork fever that would have critically eroded their user base and reputationThat those forks would have been eventually included in standard Linux distros instead of Redis itself because of their OSI-compatible licenses, and adopted as alternatives to Redis by the cloud providers (hence invalidating the whole point of SSPL)That Redis would have eventually backtracked and switched back to AGPLThere’s a 5th point in my prediction that hasn’t materialized yet though: that the damage is already done and it will be hard to revert.Fedora, Arch and Alpine have all replaced Redis with Valkey in their repos already, and Debian has opted to temporarily provide both.Many Docker configurations, cloud and on-prem deployments, Terraform templates, home servers etc. have already all migrated to Valkey.Not only, but the seismic fork allowed Valkey to implement features that have been requested in Redis for a while but not implemented because of the most complex governance of the project (like RDMA). Plus, while Valkey guarantees parity of features as of Redis 7.2.4, the mismatch of features is only supposed to increase as the hard fork diverges. This makes it even more unlikely that an enterprise software that has already migrated to Valkey takes the risk of migrating back to Redis later.Redis’ decision leaves MongoDB as the only major SSPL-licensed project out there. And that is also coming with its costs. For example, the Linux Foundation has just opened its arms to Microsoft’s DocumentDB rather than MongoDB because the former is released under an OSI-compatible MIT license rather than Mongo’s SSPL.The other project that still partly uses SSPL is Elastic. And even in that case the decision has backfired. It opened the way to AWS to release OpenSearch under an Apache license and grab a lot of developers.
(DIR) Post #AxbDhgzPT3XIalhLN2 by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-27T15:33:34.106288Z
3 likes, 3 repeats
Universal Basic Income, as proposed by many in Silicon Valley, doesn’t challenge the structure that creates inequality. It simply pays you to accept it.They like UBI because it solves just enough to stop people from asking harder questions.Instead of confronting the consequences of concentrated ownership, monopolistic platforms, and the erosion of public infrastructure, UBI wraps a complex crisis in a monthly direct deposit. A system that extracts value from every click, swipe, and gig-task offers you cash in return. But nothing structural. You get €1,200. They keep everything else.Altman’s trial showed some improvements in mental health and financial stress, but it didn’t move the needle on housing, employment, or security. The payouts helped people survive, but not thrive. Even Altman’s own phrasing reveals the limits of the vision: “basic compute” and “basic income” as rations, doled out from above, never debated, never collectively shaped.UBI offers “a post-political shortcut. It is a way to appear radical without any of the messiness of actual redistribution. It removes the need to organize, to bargain, to legislate structural change. It turns social justice into software.Many UBI proposals come hand in hand with plans to reduce or even eliminate public services. In this vision, healthcare, childcare, and education are no longer rights. They become products. If you want them, use your basic income to buy them. If you can’t afford them, well, that’s not the system’s problem. UBI without robust public services becomes a neoliberal paradise.A meaningful UBI — say, $2,000 per month — is prohibitively expensive in most current budget models unless paired with heavy taxation on wealth, capital gains, or corporate profits. Notably, this is something many UBI proponents do not propose. What remains is the worst of both worlds: a watered-down stipend that fails to lift people out of poverty, while justifying the rollback of existing services. A monthly check that can’t even cover rent in Berlin or San Francisco.What would a better future look like? One that doesn’t rely on handouts from our self-appointed digital landlords?It starts by refusing the premise that automation must lead to mass unemployment. Technology doesn’t destroy jobs. It transforms them. The real question is: who owns the tools, who sets the rules, and who benefits? If AI is going to increase productivity, why not shorten the workweek? If tech profits are surging, why not tax them meaningfully and reinvest in public infrastructure?A progressive future won’t be built on passive income. It will be built on collective ownership, universal services, labor rights, and democratic control over digital infrastructure. UBI isn’t a bad idea because it gives people money. It becomes a bad idea when it replaces everything else. When it turns into a substitute for justice, not a tool in service of it.The desire for a more humane system is real. People are exhausted. Wages stagnate, rents soar, burnout is everywhere. UBI feels like relief. But we shouldn’t confuse relief with repair. We don’t need monthly hush money. We need systems that work. For everyone.And we shouldn’t outsource the future of justice to the people who built the problem in the first place.https://steady.page/de/tech-actually/posts/02a5a878-504b-42f5-b7ca-d9ad9049f646
(DIR) Post #AxemowRWUS6gPuv5WK by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-28T11:01:52.786730Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Accountability for the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters incidents in #Amsterdam last November finally start to build up.For context, in the eve of the Ajax - Maccabi match, those barbarians came to the center of my city and:- Chanted "there are no more schools in Gaza because there are no more kids"- Chanted obscene words that encouraged raping Palestinian girls, drinking their blood and burning them- Climbed on houses and ripped off Palestinian flags- Harmed at least 3 taxi drivers because "they looked Arabic" and set fire to at least two taxis- Targeted anyone who looked Arabic on the street with spits and insultsNot only they were not punished for their crimes, but the very next day the Nazi government that rules over their shithole sent a State-sponsored rescue flight to bring them back safely, without giving the Dutch authorities even the time to investigate what happened or question those criminals.Not only, but the very next day Dutch politicians received precise instructions from the Nazi Israeli government to frame the incident as antisemitic attacks against peaceful football supporters, rather than a bunch of hooligans showing off the worst of humanity in a civilized place like Amsterdam - and most of the politicians, including our mayor, diligently complied to the orders of the Jewish mafia (but at least Halsema later apologized because "she didn't have the full picture yet" - but remember that a politician who doesn't yet have the full picture shouldn't be authorized to open their mouth).Not only, but Halsema banned ANY PROTESTS in and around Amsterdam for 6 days after the riots - probably afraid that my fellow citizens were too angry at how the Jewish mafia State smashed our city with basically no accountability.Now the Dutch government has finally defined Israel as a threat to national security for how it escaped accountability for the actions of their own citizens, and then tried to bully Dutch politicians to flatly repeat their version of the facts without giving our authorities time to investigate.And Amnesty International is finally suing the municipality or Amsterdam for its blanket 6-day ban on all demonstrations as an unjustified restriction to a democratic right.The tide is finally moving against Israel and everything it represents.https://nltimes.nl/2025/08/28/amnesty-int-sues-amsterdam-demonstration-ban-maccabi-tel-aviv-riots
(DIR) Post #AxgsFodeVEYi7N9AZM by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-08-27T10:22:14.314693Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I don’t think that #Google’s recent crackdown on apps that aren’t provided over the Play Store should come as a surprise to anyone.One version of Android after another, Google has consistently pursued a strategy aimed to introduce increasing levels of friction to anyone who doesn’t run their own version of Android, on devices that they certified, with their own version of the Play Services, installing apps from their own store.Their arguments in this case, like in all the others, are also extremely weak.Verifying the identity of an app developer to prevent the spread of malware isn’t any more effective in preventing malware than asking the ID of a robber before they rob your shop.And it’s not like fake Google accounts created in batches of thousands by professional scam factories are anything new, you know. Nothing will prevent those accounts from becoming “trusted developers”.And I also fail to see the security risks of apps not installed through the Play Store. There is much more malware spread over the Play Store than over F-Droid.And I definitely struggle to see a scam scenario where the scammer asks the user to install a separate store from a random website and provides the instructions to override the system checks over external APKs.Or maybe provides them with instructions on how to install adb on their computer, pair it to their phone over USB or direct Wi-Fi access, and run a command line to sideload an APK.I mean, this isn’t the kind of stuff that the average target of those scams can do - and those who can confidently do these things are usually tech-savvy users who usually also understand the risks of these actions.Just like I failed to see any technical cause for security concerns in the use of MV2 extensions in Chrome.The truth is quite obvious and under everyone’s eyes: Google just wants absolute control and absolute revenue maximization on everything inside of their ecosystem, and they will keep gaslighting us with “user security” excuses to get their way through.There’s just not a single reason in this world to prevent someone from installing any APK they want on their devices if they have enough knowledge to enable the Developer Settings, enable adb, and use the adb CLI to sideload an APK they built themselves to a device they purchased themselves.While I try to process these changes and think of how they will impact my usage of Android after September 2026, since 90% of the apps I use aren’t installed through the Play Store (and 100% of the apps I built aren’t provided through the Play Store), here are some reflections on the long-term consequences of this hostile act.We need to ditch Android. PeriodMy best hopes are that before September 2026 I’ll have replaced all of the Android installations on my devices with some flavour of Linux, while keeping feature parity.We (as FLOSS community) have been complacent for way too long despite seeing the writing on the wall for so long.When I asked one of the /e/OS managers a few years ago why they opted for Android as a base of their OS rather than a Linux distro for mobile (PostmarketOS, UBports, Sailfish, Manjaro, Plasma…) the answer was “because Android has already a big ecosystem of apps that users are familiar with, and if we use AOSS as a base rather than Google’s version we’re still safe”.And I get it. It’s hard to recreate that ecosystem, especially if you’re a startup with a couple of dozens of engineers at most. I also heard similar arguments from the folks who worked on LineageOS (and formerly Cyanogenmod) and GrapheneOS.But this widespread attitude, on the long run, has turned into complacency.Nobody bothered to create a native Linux layer that supported APKs and other quirks of the Android ecosystem.We all assumed that AOSS was technically open-source, so there were no risks in using it as a base - and we ignored that 99% of the commits pushed to its codebase are from Google employees, subject to whatever business strategy their employer wants to follow, and that, even if the core is technically FOSS, it doesn’t really matter if Google pulls more and more features outside of it and moves them into its opaque Play Services, and the result is that people can’t even use their banking apps, government ID apps or anything that requires the Play Services (which is more than half of the apps on the market), or even get notifications properly delivered, if they just use the FOSS base.We all assumed that since Android uses a Linux kernel it was technically Linux, and we ignored that their base kernel is by now so patched and outside of the main kernel line, and many OS features have simply been moved to the Play Services, that I struggle to even still recognize it as a Linux system.This complacency has to end now. We need a true Android compatibility layer on Linux mobile distros now. We need to work on a Linux distro that people can use as a daily driver on their phones now.Is this bullshit even compatible with EU regulations?Remember all the times that Apple tried to bypass the EU’s rulings over their abuse of dominant position with the App Store?Remember that one of the workarounds they tried to still reap off the revenue of non-App Store apps involved heavy controls over the external links provided by app developers, or still forcing developers to register to the App Store?Well, how’s Google’s new requirement different?Basically also developers who don’t upload their apps to the Play Store are requested to register themselves through a portal owned by Google, in order to get a Google-generated certificate that they can use to sign their apps.If Apple abused its dominant position by forcing people to go through its gates, even if they don’t intend to distribute software through them, then how’s Google’s case different?Reach out to your MEP and report this as a potential violation of EU antitrust laws.Containerize everything?An option that is running through my mind is to wrap all of my non-standard software on Android into Termux scripts or separate containers. But I’m just not sure how harder Google will push also against these DIY solutions, given how much they’ve already tried to break Termux in the past. Really, the only medium/long term solution I see is just move out of Android. The longer we stay there, the longer we’ll be vulnerable to Google’s ransoms.
(DIR) Post #AxzW8gT3ycqdlGcutU by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-08T08:44:42.448119Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@joynewacc @palestine @aral this is very shameful on them…did they at least bother to provide a reason for the suspension? At least on Mastodon you can submit an appeal in these cases, not sure if that’s the case on Bluesky though…The Mastodon->Bluesky bridged option is still there, but if they have already targeted 7 of your accounts they’re likely to target that mirror account too.Otherwise Blacksky is another option, as someone in this thread already suggested. And there may be other Bluesky PDS instances out there that you could sign up to without being subject to the whims of the moderators on the main node (I’m no Bluesky expert and I haven’t tried to run my own PDS, but if there is someone here who has a running PDS I’m sure that they could take you onboard)
(DIR) Post #AyE2bK0BFal97AtFCK by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-14T13:07:16.372638Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
You cannot vote with your wallet.Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.Margaret Thatcher tried to get us to believe that "there is no such thing as society." She wanted everyday people to abandon the idea of having a shared destiny, to throw away any notion of solidarity as an answer to social problems. Despite the fact that Thatcher's own backers happily formed cartels and cabals, from the Mount Pellerin Society to the Heritage Foundation, Thatcher insisted that everyday people should fight their battles alone.If you want higher wages, don't join a union – just go demand a higher wage from your boss. If you want lower rents, don't demand rent controls, just petition your landlord for a discount. If none of this stuff works (this stuff rarely works), then you are out of luck. "The market" exists to do "price discovery" and you've just discovered the price of your labor (less than you need to survive) and the cost of your home (more than you can afford). You voted with your wallet, and you lost. As Thatcher was fond of saying, "there is no alternative."Change happens when solidaristic groups of everyday people – unions, political movements – directly confront politicians and power-brokers and demand change. Your boss won't equitably share the fruits of your labor unless they fear that all the workers on the jobsite will shut down the shop. Your politicians won't do the bidding of everyday people – who can't shower them in cash – unless they fear that they will have their offices blockaded, their homes picketed, and their seats primaried.Individual actions do not provoke systemic change. For that, we need collective action.Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better. Your individual hand-wringing about whether to buy organic produce or get a Frappuccino just makes you less effective. It's not a boycott. A boycott is planned, social and solidaristic. It's something lots of people do together. Boycotts work (which is why génocidaires hate the BDS movement). Scabbing isn't buying something from someone unethical. Scabbing is crossing a picket line or breaking a boycott.We won't cure enshittification by zealously pursuing an approved list of correct merchants and products – we'll do so by changing the policy landscape so that enshittifiers sink and disenshittifiers rise@pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/
(DIR) Post #AyKLrTiHMuA8I4udsG by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-17T07:50:43.089384Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
#FediBlock @8124@staff @Gargron I can't believe that this heinous genocide apologist is still allowed on Mastodon.I can't believe that he's still allowed to lurk over my profile even after blocking me.I created two accounts on mastodon.social just to defend myself from his slanderous defamations, from his threats of writing a formal complaint about me to my employer framing me as an antisemitic Nazi, and for publicly defamating my own employer in order to force them to take actions against me.Both of my accounts were suspended for evading blocks.But this filthy motherfucker is STILL allowed to take screenshots of whatever piece I or @aral write where we criticize a _FUCKING GENOCIDE_ done by the country he supports, he can keep sharing them on his timeline and in his lectures without our permission, and harass us with #FediBlock bullshit.We are trying to fix the mess that HIS COUNTRY has created by supporting Palestinians escaping death and famine, and we also need to get these levels of harassment in the process?The government that he supports so vehemently is displacing one million of people in Gaza RIGHT NOW. And this account has first denied and then justified this genocide AT EVERY SINGLE CHANCE HE GOT. But hey, if I dare to ask his people a couple of questions and put them in front of their contradictions then *I* am the problem because I don't follow the proper academic distinctions between Jews and Israelis stated in his own book?How can you let this happen?How can you guys sit on the wrong side of history for so long?How can you not react even after so many people expressed their absolute disgust towards such a living insult to everything that humanity is supposed to be?I demand that:1. You suspend this serial harasser and genocide apologist who so vocally supports a terrorist State, just like you would suspend anyone who spreads Al Qaeda propaganda2. You forward to me any details you have about this account that would allow me to send him a physical letter because *I SERIOUSLY WANT TO SUE THE ASS OUT OF THIS SCUMBAG*. I have an idea of who he is, but I need you to collaborate to make sure that I'm sending my lawyer's letter to the right person. If you keep preventing me from defending myself from his verbal assaults, and you deny me the right of suing someone who for *MONTHS* has now tried to intimidate me, then I may be forced to sue the mastodon.social staff instead.I will interpret anything other than immediate collaboration in suspending this fascist piece of shit and allowing me to legally defend myself from his continuous slander as YOU guys on mastodon.social implicitly supporting genocide - and the verbal iron dome of intimidation built to silence criticism against it.https://mastodon.social/@8124/115217616723161507
(DIR) Post #AyKLrVdOE3RKFUdlWy by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-17T08:47:23.900183Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@8124 @aral @Gargron even worse, look at this: https://mastodon.social/@8124/115215365985382080@joynewacc is a writer based in Gaza going through hell right now.She has ALL THE RIGHT in this world to be outraged at those who stole her dignity, her dreams, her family members, her home and her safety.She posted the picture of a baby buried under rubble by the IDF bombings.She commented with “the Nazi genocide is still ongoing”.Now YOU tell me @staff: what person in this world with anything that resembles a functioning brain and a heart not filled with the filthiest poison would condemn this post as an example of antisemitism, and publicly (and anonimously) shame a victim of a genocide perpetrated by his own country on his timeline, all while ignoring that the post is about a fucking baby dead under rubble?How much dehumanization are you willing to allow on your platform?What kind of a sad and rotten human being, terminally perverse mind and evolutionary failure must one be to always look at the world through the lenses of aggressive victimism, and continuous ideological conflicts based on pseudo-academic arguments only stated in a book he wrote himself, even while the government he supports is murdering people right now?How can you not see that every single day you allow this scumbag to stay online and act with impunity behind a shield of anonimity is a shameful stain that will tarnish forever your reputation of a safe place with no room for bullies, Nazis and sociopaths?We brought Palestinian voices to the Fediverse telling them that, unlike mainstream social media, this was a safe place where they could be heard without being ostracized.As the main instance on the Fediverse, and the one where most of these accounts have been registered, I demand that you help us keep this place safe for those going through a genocide RIGHT NOW. And that means that profiles like @8124 MUST GO without further ado.They have already done enough damage.They can attack me, no problem. I’m used to deal with ultra-Zionist bullies, I’ve got strong shoulders and means to defend myself. But they shouldn’t fucking dare to throw traumatized people whose lives they have already broken into their filthy machinery of slander, intimidation and dehumanization. They’ve crossed a line that civil society shouldn’t allow them to cross.Genocide apologists funded by a foreign terrorist government to harass and silence those who either endure or condemn their genocide have no place on any instances that run in EU territory, nor in any civilized society, especially in this historical moment.If they want a safe place where they can freely spread terrorist propaganda, they are free to run their own hardcore Zionist instance hosted in their own pariah shithole. I’m pretty sure that most of the admins will be very happy to defederate it then, just like we did with other instances run by lunatics. Then they’re free to throw their #FediBlock calls in the middle of their cathedral in the desert, without harming anyone in the process.And I invite all of my followers that he hasn’t blocked yet to also report this account. We must ensure that the pressure on @staff gets too hard to ignore.
(DIR) Post #AyKLs44WBhLH3TauXI by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-17T13:25:24.584417Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@8124 @aral @joynewacc ok, given some of the comments posted on this thread I think that I need to set the constraints of the issue at hand, before embarking that slippery slope that somehow always leads to pictures of swasticas somewhere in the comments…Antisemitism is real. Prejudice against Jews for being Jews is real. People who deny the Holocaust actually exist. Just not at the scale that the most hardcore Zionist propaganda wants us to believe, and not embracing the huge scope that lunatics like @8124 want us to believe, but the problem exists, and those who embark in that kind of narrative must be condemned.Israel also has the right to exist. Sure, I question the reasons why it came to exist. I consider Mandatory Palestine the biggest mess that post-colonial Britain could do (and they’ve made a lot of mess, from Gaza to Kashmir to Kurdistan we’re still picking the pieces of their mess).I believe that granting carte blanche for the return of people who had been displaced for centuries, ignoring how the ethnic mix had changed over all that time, while not granting other displaced people (like Armenians, Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks) the same right, has been a great injustice, and on top of it’s also been poorly executed.And I consider the Law of Return a legalization of ethno-squatting that gives a free piece of land to anyone with a given bloodline, regardless of who owns the land.But I don’t want to go that slippery slope now because opinions are strong on either side. And complaining of how things could have gone better 100 years ago doesn’t change history nor it changes the present.What matters is that there are people now who have been living on those lands for at least 3-4 generations, and if you remember the smell of your grandma’s orchard in your neighbourhood then that’s your home too. On both the sides of the wall.I just ask them not to be jerks. Is it too much?I just ask their citizens to condemn what their terrorist president is doing, go to elections and vote for someone who is not a Nazi madman inspired by a terrorist like Meir Kahane (who btw was considered a terrorist even in Israel while he was alive) throwing wars just to stay out of jail. Just like Palestinians should be given the right to go to elections peacefully and vote for someone who is not Hamas. Is it too much to ask?I just ask them not to throw bombs at their neighbours whenever they have some problems at home, and respect internationally recognized borders. Is it too much to ask?Please let’s not take this thread down the slippery slope of the roots of antisemitism and final solutions, or we’ll inevitably alienate someone, provide undeserved ammunition to the antisemitism police and dilute my point.My simple point is that there’s a genocide going on right now, and that those who not only deny it, but also spread pro-genocide propaganda, and harass both critics and victims under the shield of aggressive victimism, anonimity and impunity, should be condemned, isolated and suspended.Can we focus on the issue at hand before wearing our tinfoil hats? The problem of people dying right now while other people try to deny it and dehumanize them is more important than amateur contemporary history conversations.
(DIR) Post #AyKLsVvyb399T5oU6q by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-17T17:32:34.043414Z
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@8124 @aral @joynewacc and you know what's the worst part? That I had seen this coming. I knew that a short circuit between Palestinians and Hasbara propagandists on the Fediverse was inevitable.But I thought that, after seeing what their army has inflicted upon innocent civilians through their own pictures and videos, those Israeli propagandists would have had the decency to apologize for the crimes they encouraged - or at least have the decency to shut the fuck up.But no. When your irredimably rotten soul belongs to the deepest circle of hell there's no space for apologies, humanity, empathy, or anything that isn't squarely focused on yourself and your perceived sense of self-entitlement.Shielded by the comfort of anonymity in a European pseudo-academic ivory tower, scumbags like @8124 are there to tell us that there's no genocide in Gaza - even contradicting those who are living it on their own skin right now and publishing videos about it.You show them the picture of a dead baby under rubble, call it a genocide, and they'll shame you on their timeline and throw back at you a chapter of their own book explaining why comparing Jews to Nazis is antisemitic, so YOU are in the wrong - not the guy who murdered a baby.I'm not sure what perverse psychological processes can turn a human being into such a abhorrent sadistic asshole unable to even feel an inch of empathy towards other humans. But, whatever it is, we don't need these evolutionary failures on our platforms. Let them rot on X.
(DIR) Post #AyPYkgrOMOQMEU4I52 by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-16T19:21:58.540619Z
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An open question to the Israeli folks on the Fediverse: do you think that you are doing enough?Do you think that focusing so much on condemning antisemitism while a genocide is being committed right now next to your door in your name, and people are angered at your silence, is the right battle to fight?Do you think that raising awareness about how others may bite your arm, while your government right now is chewing someone else’s arm to the bone in their jaws, is a sensible thing to do?The whole world is taking to the streets to condemn the actions of your government. We are organizing fundraising campaigns and parting with our own money to make sure that those trapped in Gaza can get enough food to eat and a place to sleep. A fleet of voluntarees is sailing across the Mediterranean to bring aid. All to fix the failures of YOUR government that YOU elected, and of YOUR army. All because your government, as an occupying power, has failed to provide civilians in its de facto administered territories the basic level of protection that they are obliged to provide under international law.And you? You, personally, as a human being, are you doing enough?Sure, there have been some protests, but it seems to me that most of them were squarely focused on getting the hostages back home. So suppose that they’re all back tomorrow: will you still take to the streets until the last IDF soldier leaves Gaza and Palestinians finally get their chance to rebuild what you’ve destroyed?Would you march to uphold the validity of the UN resolutions that your government has been ignoring for decades?Would you march to defend the right of the Palestinian people to have their own land?Would you march to manifest your discontent against how your government is alienating even its closest allies, and how that will impact your economy and your relationships with the world for decades to come?Netanyahu has just given an abhorrent speech where he laid his vision for Israel as “the Great Sparta” of the Middle East, stating a national identity rooted in war, a more militarized society, and increased autarky and self-sufficiency as a response to the increased isolation that Israel will get as a response against its crimes - and, most likely, he’ll push back against fresh elections as long as he can, and leverage a situation of permanent emergency as a reason to indefinitely suspend democracy.He basically stated that he doesn’t care of the world hating him, he doesn’t care of the sanctions, he doesn’t care of the ties that Israeli people and businesses have made with the rest of the world, he doesn’t care if his own people abroad will be subject to discrimination for years to come because of his actions, he believes that many enemies means much honor, and he’s ready to sacrifice the national economy and the reputation of his country on the altar of the worst genocidal fevers, in exchange of new land for a few Jewish squatters, and he’s ready to wage war to all of his neighbours too.He literally gave a speech that could have come out of Hitler’s mouth. Nothing less than that.He has decided to just drop the mask and all the rhetorical contradictions and claim in front of the world that he is a Nazi at war with everyone.Are you willing to follow him down this path of self-destruction? If not, where are the pitchforks outside of his house and the people demanding for his head?If it was the Dutch doing to Belgians even 10% of what you’re doing to Gaza, most of us would probably protest on a daily basis until we paralize the economy and force the government to hear us. “Not in my name” banners would fly everywhere. My fellow Dutch brothers have blocked highways and organized mass strikes for much less. Why don’t I see that happen in Israel?When the most extremist Rabbis preach the destruction of Gaza mentioning Deuteronomy, do you vehemently dissociate from them, and call them out for the religious fundamentalists beefing up State-sponsored terrorism that they are?When your ministers spit on Christians or harass Muslims in mosques do you condemn them vehemently enough and call them out for the evolutionary aberrations born in the wrong century that they are?When the worst lunatics among you run their bulldozers over Palestinian homes do you condemn them, isolate them and show them all the contempt that they would deserve?Do you agree that Israel has an existential unsolved trilemma, and that that problem should be solved either by building a multiethnic State or two States for two people, and that anything else that doesn’t converge towards either of these scenarios would make you an ethno-theocratic post-colonial pastiche unworthy of sitting at the same table as other liberal democracies? Would you take to the streets to call for the government you elected to provide a sensible solution for that issue?One of the cornerstones of the fight against #antisemitism is that Jews should not be collectively held accountable for the actions of the Israeli government. Are you applying the same principle towards your Palestinians brothers and sisters? Or are you holding a whole territory of 2 million people accountable for the actions of a few dozens?One of the cornerstones of the fight against antisemitism is that you can’t punish a whole ethnic group until they’ve learned their lesson. Are you applying the same principle to Gaza?One of the cornerstones of the fight against antisemitism is that never again means never again for everyone. Do you think that you’re consistently upholding that principle?Do you agree that most of today’s grudge against you and your people is motivated by your incoherence in upholding the principles that were supposed to be the bedrock of your own national identity?Do you agree that true antisemitism targets you for what you are as a person (and that should always be condemned), but what most of us are doing now is calling your government accountable for the actions it is doing right now?Do you agree that these things are very different, and that throwing antisemitism as a scareword at both of them only dilutes the meaning of such a strong word, it blurs the lines between Netanyahu’s actions and your own national identity, and therefore it invalidates the whole can’t call us all accountable for what our government is doing cornerstone - besides building the perception of a verbal iron dome built on contradictions whose sole purpose is to shield you from any forms of accountability? We won’t call you accountable for everything that your government is doing. But we’ll call you accountable for not standing against your government while it commits a genocide in your name.Do you think that what your government has been doing against Gaza for the past two years is a proportionate reaction to the hostages crisis?Your government is bent in a genocidal madness with no plans other than murder and destruction, and it won’t listen to anyone.But YOU have leverage.It can’t throw the antisemitic scareword against its own voters while they wave Israeli flags on the streets.It can’t alienate its own people.If you are not protesting hard enough, if you are not boycotting the local enterprises that don’t take a strong stance against this genocide, if you are not organizing campaigns to break the blockade around Gaza, if you don’t demand for new elections and for Netanyahu and his gang of criminals to rot in jail, if you don’t raise your voice against your government calling a terrorist anyone who wants to help the people that they’re killing, then the blood of each single Palestinian will be on your hands too.If you would like to manifest your outrage, but you don’t feel comfortable because of external pressures, then we must really question if Israel is really the balward of democracy and free speech in the Middle East that it was supposed to be (and the whole reason why Western countries were supposed to support it). Or just an atrocious appendix of 19th century European colonialism that voluntarily disregards all the progress we’ve made in the past two centuries to move away from our imperialist past.If instead you agree with what your government is doing then you can’t ask for our support. Nor the support of any human being with a heart.We’re trying to fix your mess, and we’ll be fixing it for years to come. Europe will soon be asked to fix another humanitarian crisis that YOU have caused and welcome millions of people that YOU have displaced. Both you and us will have to manage for years to come radical movements born out of this evil genocide. Every time you drop a bomb over a kid’s house or tent, or murder their parents in front of their eyes, or you strip away from them their right to eat or go to school, you’re creating the pre-conditions for (well deserved) long-term hate against your people. You are the main cause of the rise in antisemitism today. And those sparks can easily ignite, and make any process of peace and security (both for Europe and Israel) harder to achieve on the long term.You can’t ask us to support you in this. Nor in anything else.You and your State deserve to be treated like an internationally isolated pariah. Your 5-star Gaza resorts built on the bodies of Gazans deserve to remain empty. Gaza will forever be the biggest open-air museum of genocide, and that blood will forever stain your hands too.@palestine #palestine #israel
(DIR) Post #AySYzjA6fQ9ZBos7Iu by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-22T08:50:29.470064Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
64 bit pointers can address up to 18 billion GB of memory.Since we are very unlikely to see that amount of RAM any time soon in our machines, that means that most of that address space is unused.Most modern architectures only use 48 bits for virtual addresses.And of course when you leave unused resources C developers get creative.You can virtually stuff anything into the remaining bits, as long as you remember to reset them to the original value before dereferencing the pointer.Chrome’s engine uses pointer stuffing to tag the type of a variable, for example.And the red-black tree implementation in the Linux kernel also adopts this approach.In fact, pointer stuffing is so common that support for it as ISA level is being discussed - under that proposal the commonly unused bits will just be ignored by the CPU when it needs to access that memory location, which removes the need for the developer to write extra wrappers around the pointer to reset any user payloads before accessing it.https://archive.is/ve8Wl
(DIR) Post #Aye1EkmOg3lDQ3vDn6 by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-27T19:49:58.845443Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@usama971 have you already reached out to @aral or @joynewacc for verification on gaza-verified.org?
(DIR) Post #AyjfiwFtXjCxegT1Mm by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-09-29T23:33:13.527614Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
If some of our friends in #Gaza could record some footage of this it’d be invaluable historical evidence.I hope that nobody will dare to scold us if we compare Netanyahu to Hitler if he really goes through with this psychopatic plan.Because blasting your own UN speech about “finishing your job” in Gaza through loudspeakers to the population you’re currently imposing a genocide upon is something that would horrify even the most perverse megalomaniac Nazi mind.To our friends there: I know that this psychological warfare can be more than discomforting while you’re already fighting for your own lives, but that’s exactly the point of it.When great leaders say great things they don’t need to force people to listen to them. Their words spread virally. They don’t get the whole UN assembly to walk out when they start speaking.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/26/israeli-loudspeakers-broadcast-netanyahu-speech-to-un-gaza
(DIR) Post #AylNLxou9LTszMepmK by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-10-01T10:18:57.095378Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I am happy to announce that the bulk of the work on the #Gaza Verified Archive at archive.gaza.onl has been completed.No matter what admins do today or tomorrow with verified Palestinian accounts, their content is now permanently archived (in 3 different locations for now).The UI is also ready, and I have added two “merged” timelines for posts and media containing all the content uploaded by all verified accounts - like a unique “Gaza” timeline.New content is automatically indexed every 5 minutes.I still feel a bit guilty for using a Vue SPA to build the frontend, but I’ve tried to redeem my sins as much as possible on the integrations side - the archive exposes a REST API, RSS feeds for all the endpoints, a static directory to browse uploaded media, and even the possibility to download the full db for static analysis.The only major feature that is still missing is a periodic archive, which can be downloaded and used by other archivists to bootstrap their instance, but I’ll work on that today.@aral @joynewacc open to your feedback 🙂Also, the archive automatically collects and backups posts from the verified accounts that have been uploaded publicly. All licenses and rights belong to the respective authors. If you would like some of the content or your entire profile to be removed from the archive, feel free to reach out to me.@palestine
(DIR) Post #Ayo0E6fxcq4sfMddiq by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-10-02T16:13:27.324798Z
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@Mohamed_Dawed did you reach out to @aral or @joynewacc ? They are in charge of the verification process. I'll be happy to donate something after verification 🫂
(DIR) Post #Aysd3mAdgLWD1FtOU4 by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-10-04T21:58:53.911805Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@gilly007 @alaamoh @aral @joynewacc still with this bullshit?How much more evidence are we supposed to bring?You know what?I want to silence this bullshit for good. I want a permalink to forward all the “Gaza Verified is a scam” folks to from now on. And this post can be that permalink.If you don’t believe the content posted by these accounts, their pictures that can’t be found anywhere else on the Web, often still containing the immaculate EXIF headers from their phone cameras, the raw material posted on archive.gaza.onl, the redacted copies of IDs and diplomas that some of them uploaded, their scholarship applications currently processed by academics in the real world, or their videos where you can often hear loud sounds of drones, including some users who uploaded their own verification calls, then you must at least trust the way the Internet works.As someone who runs a couple of satellite websites for this initiative, I get visits from some of these accounts too. I firmly respect everybody’s privacy - no trackers and no cookies, just plain nginx logs tossed away every 2 days. But if someone keeps making such slanderous claims around a humanitarian initative I also have the duty to provide solid evidence to prevent one the last lifelines to Gaza from being cut.You want some whois subnet info about the network operators they connect through? Here we go:inetnum: 193.35.2x.0 - 193.35.2x.255netname: NewStarMax-ZoneCcountry: PSadmin-c: NO1xxx-RIPEtech-c: NO1xxx-RIPEstatus: ASSIGNED PAmnt-by: newstarmax-mntcreated: 2018-07-11T13:29:39Zlast-modified: 2019-10-13T13:42:49Zsource: RIPErole: Network Operationaddress: Yaffa Street, Deir Albalah, Alwustanic-hdl: NO1xxx-RIPEcreated: 2019-10-13T13:26:36Zlast-modified: 2019-10-13T13:26:36Zinetnum: 94.26.12x.0 - 94.26.12x.255netname: RafahFTTHcountry: PSadmin-c: JT3xxx-RIPEtech-c: ST3xxx-RIPEstatus: ASSIGNED PAmnt-by: PALNET-MNTmnt-by: POL-MNTcreated: 2018-03-22T14:11:05Zlast-modified: 2018-03-22T14:11:05Zsource: RIPEAnd I have other examples too.I’m only providing info about larger network subnets and operators info here in order to protect their privacy, even if these are dynamic addresses - xxx parts are still obfuscated out of caution. But they are still significative enough to verify which operators run those networks.Palnet and NewStarMax are the two main providers of network connectivity in Gaza.Which means that those connections, without a doubt, came from Gaza.Now, the only way to falsify this statement is by finding at least one commercial VPN provider that provides thousands of IP addresses from data centers in Gaza, from a dozen or so of different class B subnets that are actually allocated for residential or mobile usage.Or maybe propose that all these connections are being routed by a bunch of Raspberry Pis running Wireguard that are still somehow operating under the rubble.Until someone can prove any of these statements, my position is clear: we’ve provided in these weeks all the (privacy-respecting) evidence we could against lots of folks who shout “it’s faaaaake” and run away.Now the burden of proof lies squarely in the hands of these detractors.If you folks don’t apologize and give a word of comfort to people fighting for their survival who you called scammers, then the whole world ought to know that you are acting in bad faith in the middle of an ongoing genocide with the purpose of cutting the few remaining humanitarian lifelines - and you should be called accountable for that.
(DIR) Post #AyvTprBLw6xAOXOUoS by fabio@manganiello.social
2025-10-06T06:16:36.933700Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I am planning to shut down this account and abandon social media for a while.I have canceled myself to try to help as many as possible lately, and supported everyone against slanderous accusations directed at them.That only ended up with my account being limited on mastodon.social with no notice, no explanation and no appeal, while genocide denialist trolls and nasty people who tried to halt fundraising for Gaza are still allowed to act under a blanket of absolute impunity.I can't even communicate effectively with new accounts in need from Gaza if my profile is hidden on the main instance.And what baffles me is the lack of support I've received myself when it was my account to be targeted. 2500 followers, yet never felt so alone when I was in need of support.I'll keep cheering for @aral and @joynewacc from the sidelines, they're doing an amazing job, and I'll keep supporting accounts from Gaza, because it's the right thing to do.Just not here, much more on the sidelines, and away from the spotlights.I may be back one day, I don't know if on Nostr or some other platform that has already taken into account the fact that the admin of the largest instance of a defederated network can also be an asshole who has the power to cut you from your own network and those you're trying to help even if you run your own instance.Adieu.https://manganiello.social/notice/AyucANnhcA0Crx1TlY