It blow my mind that people are still using Ubuntu on the desktop. I actually thought for a moment that Ubuntu had disabled the ability of users to shut down their system. Yes- I only saw 'suspend' as an option when I went to the shutdown button. The reason is I was behind the lock mode. Seems like a bad design, but that might just be GNOME.

I have a ton of criticism for Canonical, but the most recent is they utterly dropped the ball for the 2nd time in a decade when it comes to USB wifi adapters. They failed to include the firmwares in 26.04 and so hundreds of thousands of users are unable to connect to the internet.

The only other operators that have gotten it this wrong were "Purism" and humorously that was worse because they didn't include the only free firmware in a distribution that only works with free software (theoretically, it appears they actually include non-free software, or they've been caught doing it repeatedly anyhow.. and stuff they should have caught... every other distro did).

Slashdot poster asks an intriguing question:

"A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left 'terrorist' organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and "she also faces trial for alleged involvement in three attacks in 1990 and 1994: a failed bombing in front of a bank, a shooting at the US embassy in Bonn and a 1993 bombing at a prison.".] She had remained hidden for decades, and the German police hadn't deployed facial recognition software to catch her. But according to the article a journalist did, to good effect.

Is the ban on the police using it a good thing? Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?"

While this was Germany I think it's inevitable that the people have a right to revolution and it's never going to be a clean or clear thing. This isn't something a government is going to reconize. It's more an inalienable right, including that of prisoners, immigrants, minors, and others who may be getting shafted by the law of the land as that they had or have no influence in. The same applies to the voting population that had no influence in the laws that were passed prior to their existence or voting rights.

As someone in the US it's worth pointing out that our own government was formed through the right of the people to revolution WITHOUT asking permission of the government at the time.

The "right to bear arms" is enshrined in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution explicitly because of this inalienable right.

What is a tyrannical government to someone else may not be a tyrannical government to us. That doesn't nix their rights.

Someone made a really good point in relation to this:

"The core of Microsoft's complaints is that the researcher did not attempt to report the bugs so that the company could fix them. That would have been 'responsible,' as Microsoft's blog put it. "

That point was:

"The exact scenario we warned about when the discussions about this 'responsible disclosure' nonsense started. Someone needs a reminder that letting you know your software sucks is a courtesy, not something you can demand."

Well said.

https://tech.yahoo.com/cybersecurity/articles/microsoft-under-fire-threatening-security-170339694.html

"A security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products," reports TechCrunch, 'along with code to exploit them.'"
..
"The core of Microsoft's complaints is that the researcher did not attempt to report the bugs so that the company could fix them. That would have been 'responsible,' as Microsoft's blog put it. "

I don't know ... the responsible thing to do if you ask me is release unannounced whenever it's a security vulnerability that involved proprietary software and when companies do the responsible thing and disclose source code then the proper thing would be to submit a patch to the bug tracker to fix the issue.

I'll give a thumbs up to the researcher for this one.

"Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms 'that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids.'"

THEY DIDN'T DO BUSINESS IN YOUR F'ING STATE! That was the entire f'ing argument you moron.

If you can't handle that there are people interacting with "your" citizens ... well stuff it. But the point is you DO NOT HAVE WORLD WIDE JURISDICTION!

All that is going to happen is your going to push companies like this OUT of the US where a non-US government won't cooperate with your illegal claim of jurisdiction. When courts issue rulings and there is no jurisdiction (no bank accounts, employees, offices, etc) those who get the ruling have no ability to enforce it.

For example if I have a ruling that says joe smo owes me a million dollars in the United States and joe smo lives in Russia and operates a site out of Russia with a .ru domain and has no hosting, domain registration, bank accounts, etc in the United States there is nothing upon which to enforce that judgement. I can't take that order to a US bank and get them to hand over proceeds from a bank account that doesn't exist within the United States. I also can't take that court ruling to a Russian bank and get that order enforced because the Russian bank isn't going to recognize a US court order.

What is dangerous here is that a state while supposedly sovereign is not entirely sovereign. It's much more likely that Vermont will be able to enforce a judgement from a Vermont court against a foreign corporation that operates in another US state due to reciprocity or something akin to it.

Reciprocity is the principle of the exchange of rights between states. California may recognize Vermont's order.

"Meta had argued that it can't be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites' large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction. "

Talk about seriously disturbing. They just threw out a legal concept called jurisdiction or more specifically nexus in one blow that protects everyone from having to obey the laws of every other state on the mere basis someone might use a product or site in another state.

There is no way anyone including a large entity could even begin to comply with the 10s of millions of laws that exist in just the 10,000 + legal jurisdictions within the United States.

What this means is everyone is effectively guilty of millions of laws simply because they posted something that can be accessed on the internet.

This is not the first time that US courts have accepted this kind of nonsensical argument.

It's getting more and more dangerous to live within the United States when foreigners can demand and get your extradition despite that you've NEVER even stepped into their jurisdiction.

If Texas wants to extradite a a liberal for saying means things on the internet what's to stop them OTHER THAN a lack of nexus and jurisdiction?

The answer is pretty much nothing if you completely throw the concept of jurisdiction and nexus right out the window.

Previously accepted weak arguments have been "you have a site where the domain name was registered using a company in the United States and therefore we have jurisdiction".... or "you sent your physical property into another state (DVD rentals) therefore we can tax you" (pre-US Supreme court ruling that threw out nexus for sales taxes, which is probably the biggest can of worms).

At the Enemies of the State Renegades @ the Rapids event, Bonnie Freeman delivered a compellng about her personal experience with the raid on her and Ian's home. She, Lauren Rodriguez, Aaron Day, Tor Eckland, James Babb, and Ammon Bundy brought the stories of Ian, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan-Hill, Roman Storm, Roman Sterlingov, Dexter Taylor, and the Bulletin Man Jeff Weinhaus home to a very human level.

This event resulted in an influx in petition signatures for Ian and the other "enemies of the state"

If you couldn't be at the convention, the re-stream is happening tonight at 8PM to an audience that will be well in the thousands or more thanks to some of our influencer partners.

Watch at: https://www.enemiesofthestate.net

Or stream directly on Aaron Day's channels:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/JVlxbmfgX0c

Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7agcyi-s3e17-enemies-of-the-state-rebroadcast.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_l

PLEASE SHARE THESE LINKS AND HELP US GET THE NUMBERS UP

While my company primarily supports GNU/Linux (ie the penguin in ThinkPenguin.com) I have to wonder where else you can purchase a product and get a response from support pertaining to OpenBSD? So we actually do GNU/Linux and “free software” which pretty much translates into OpenBSD and FreeBSD, not just free software on top of GNU/Linux. Anyhow so here is what happened for the curious:

So a customer bought one of our USB 4G modems and was using it with one of our routers running libreCMC. After upgrading the router to a newer firmware it “stopped working”. The router didn’t see the modem. They also mentioned something about the modem working fine in OpenBSD. What-do-you-know- that was the problem. Or part of it. After a few messages back and forth I realized they had almost certainly switched the modem into MBIM mode for use with OpenBSD according to our documentation for OpenBSD. The router expects QMI mode. OpenBSD expects MBIM mode. The OpenBSD documentation explains how to switch between the modes. Ie: the customer had run AT+QCFG="usbnet",2 for MBIM mode in-between updating the firmware and trying to use it with the router again. Fix, switch it back: AT+QCFG="usbnet",0 for QMI mode.

Glad they mentioned OpenBSD or I’d have been banging my head against a wall wondering what possibly could have happened.

"Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. "

I always knew hard drives were bad omens.

Back to the live boot DVD I suppose.

[if you can't hear the joking in my writing ... IDK what to tell you... but this attack is only feasible in a lab setting and not something anyone should actually be worrying about]

It's time for Mastodon users to get out of the the US. It sounds like Trump is now going to go after those who don't use facebook, X, and Truth Social enough in his new war on "anti-tech extremism":

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism-as-ai-hatred-grows/