FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Right wing white USian Christians: Anti-racists are just trying to make me feel guilty so they can control me.

Me: .... I want you to hold on to that realisation you've just had about the church you belong to....

a person with a 3d scanner did a full color scan of the 11foot8(+8) bridge and took measurements of the true height of the crash bar and made an animation explaining the overheight warning system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTeKwB_TEEM

public transit systems never will - and aren't supposed to - make money or break even

fares are a holdover of a culture of "properness" and disproportionately affect disadvantaged people

fareless systems see significant increases in use, which directly translates to less use of cars and healthier cities

In the seventies, before desktop computers, both SF media and contemporary commentary portrayed data centralization as a huge threat. Both the surveillance issue and the labor capital issue. Then in the micro era, that earlier view of the computer as a scary spider was recontextualized as a joke, as an unfounded boomer fear. Who needs to be afraid when there is Windows 95 on every desk?

And now here we are.

Today in "civil asset forfeiture is a hell of a drug" and "cops rob more than robbers":
Institute For Justice Survey Shows How Philadelphia's Forfeiture Program Preyed On Poor Minorities
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211031/17423147856/institute-justice-survey-shows-how-philadelphias-forfeiture-program-preyed-poor-minorities.shtml

DRM has yet again punished paying customers instead of pirates.
"Denuvo-Protected Games Rendered Unplayable After Domain Expires": https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-protected-games-rendered-unplayable-after-domain-expires-211108/

For 26 years, from August 1995 through October 2021, the #Windows taskbar could be on any screen edge you wanted. No more. With #Win11, the taskbar is on the bottom and that's that.

The lazy Firefox logo I posted last evening was rushed since it was getting late, so here's a more polished version. Attachment 2 is the transparent version so you can use it as icon

it's aaron swartz remembrance day today and i feel like i should use this to talk about something i think about a lot and that i think should be more widely talked about.

aaron's death was murder. it's as simple as that. the way the us justice system deals with hackers and other "national security threats" (and just the US justice system in general) is explicitly to break people. it's psychological torture intended to either make you bend to their will, off yourself or just become a psychological wreck that is no longer a risk to the system. i don't think it's really possible to understand this until you're subjected to it yourself, and unfortunately i'm subject to a small degree of the same pressure.

the main weapon the US justice system uses to break people is uncertainty, you don't know what's going to happen to you, you don't know when it's going to happen to you and you might just not hear anything for a year. but during that entire time you're aware of the fact that the US may be watching you at all times, they can use all tools at their disposal and anything you say or do can and probably will be used against you in your case. i'm still not entirely sure how good it is for me to talk about this stuff, i'd talk about it a lot more often if i knew (or not at all). they also break you with the conscious misunderstanding of facts, of what you've done, the fact that they do not care about the publics opinion, they make it very clear that they can do with you whatever they want. this all on top of the usual pressure such as like the prospect of the actual sentence itself, the money this kind of case requires, the constant fear of losing even more, not knowing when and if ever you can freely speak and travel again, not knowing when your last free day for the next two decades will be and the painful realization that there is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't just another sealed indictment waiting for you around the corner.

it's hard not to break under this pressure. i fully understand the decision of everyone who broke under this, rest in peace aaron, rest in peace kevin, rest in peace everyone i forgot about. i will try my best not to break, purely out of spite, out of anger in the name of everyone who broke before and because i have the small advantage of not actually being in the US. but let me tell you, if i do break, please don't hold it against me, understand that this is not something any human should ever have to go through, no matter what they may or may not have done.

this is not a call for sympathy, this is a call for anger.

#retrocomputing animemes.