Built-in features on Meta’s smart glasses are being put behind a paywall.

You’ll now have to pay a $20/month subscription for features like conversation focus that were so far available out of the box.

Who would ever think that #Meta would provide features for free initially to gain market share, and put them behind a paywall once users were locked in?

And what kind of diabolical mind would think of beaming a paywall straight to your retina through a pair of smart glasses?

If there’s a way to enshittify it, rest assured that they’ll enshittify it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3wy317d71jo

Serj Tankian, lead singer of System of a Down, is furious at #Israel for using genocide recognition as a political weapon.

Israel has recently decided to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide.

The very genocide that a few years later gave Hitler the idea that he could do the same against the Jews.

All of Serj’s grandparents were genocide survivors. He was born in Beirut from refugee parents.

Yet, the criminal organization known as AIPAC has spent years lobbying US Congress not to recognize the Armenian genocide.

Because the methods used by the former Ottoman empire (ruthless violence against civilians, reckless destruction of property and land, arbitrary displacements that turned people into nomads, and obsessive focus on curbing the population and expelling it from its native lands) are awfully similar to those used by Israel itself in Palestine and Lebanon.

Earlier, Israel feared that a recognition of the Armenian genocide would have also led to the recognition of the Palestinian genocide.

Hence the lobbying against its recognition - even if that benefited the arguments of a political rival like Turkey.

However, the Zionist entity has now plans to expand its permanent state of war and destruction in the Middle East also to Turkey - the next logical political rival in the area to be wiped out by their imperialist plans.

Which means that all the means, including the recognition of a genocide perpetrated by Turkey more than 100 years ago, are valid, if their purpose is to apply ideological pressure on a rival that they want to soon start a war with.

It doesn’t matter in Israel’s eyes that what they are doing in Gaza is even worse than what was done against the Armenians.

The Zionist entity gave up on coherence and intellectual honesty long ago already.

They know that they can neutralize logic and common sense by simply aggressively ignoring it.

They feel like they’re entitled to condemn the Armenian genocide.

But if you condemn their own genocides, which follow pretty much the same blueprint as the Armenian genocide, they feel entitled to call you an antisemitic.

https://www.loudersound.com/news/system-of-a-down-serj-tankian-criticises-israel-armenian-genocide-palestine-2026

#DevConf is just a week away.

I will be speaking about #Madblog, #ActivityPub and #Indieweb on July 8th, from 11:30 AM to 12:15 PM.

Location: Biblioteca Cravino, Via Agostino Bassi 2, Pavia, Italy.

@nprofile1q...

The 250th anniversary of the #US Declaration of Independence has been celebrated in many American embassies too.

Except that these were not Congress-approved events.

As it often happens in the #Trump administration, they were organized by a private company called Freedom 250.

A few days before the event, the American ambassador to Belgium threatened a Belgian citizen after they urged the American band Zac Brown Band not to perform at the event.

Two journalists from the European Correspondent invited to the event in Brussels tried to question the US ambassador about his threat towards a EU citizen and about the funding of the event.

20 minutes later, they were escorted out by 8 police officers who confiscated their IDs and questioned them about the political leaning of their news outlet.

https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/the-us-ambassador-had-belgian-police-stop-our-reporting

For context, Bill White, the US ambassador to Belgium, has already sparked controversy for insulting Belgian politicians and threatening a socialist MP with a travel ban to the US.

The reason for the threat was an investigation into three Orthodox Jewish men practicing circumcision without a valid medical license, and White accused those behind the investigation of being antisemitic.

During the Nazi era, these were some of the countries that shut down their German embassies:

UK (September 1939)
France (September 1939)
USSR (June 1941)
US (December 1941)
Brazil (1942)
Mexico (1942)
Most of Latin America

When fascism takes over, it is a duty to contain it, isolate it and prevent it from seeping as an exported good into the fabric of a democracy - even through embassies.

Bill White is an ambassador of a fascist regime and he abides to the same principles (threats, insults, intimidation, plutocracy) espoused by all fascist regimes.

Therefore, he is not welcome in Europe, and it’s time for European countries to start considering shutting down their American embassies.

#USPol #EUPol

As expected, #EU #ChatControl is back on the table.

Despite being rejected a few times by the Parliament already, despite the unanimous legitimate concerns of many groups of experts called to express an opinion on the matter, Chat Control 1.0 is going to be resurrected by the EU Parliament president Metsola, despite the opposition of her own political group.

I guess that whoever is lobbying to enforce mass surveillance on EU citizens must be paying very well.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/double-threat-to-private-communications-undemocratic-chat-control-backroom-deals-and-imminent-concessions-spark-relaunch-of-fightchatcontrol-eu/

Differential privacy is a cornerstone of modern-day #statistics.

It allows the generation of datasets that are statistically relevant for a researcher, but that leak as little as possible about the individuals in the dataset.

It works on several principles:

Suppression, usually by removing outliers from the dataset that could lead to easily identifiable targets.
Coarsening, e.g. replacing a city with a region or a country, or a date of birth with an age range.
Sampling, usually through the removal of random records.
Swapping, where some attributes from different records may be randomly swapped.
Noise addition, by adding or subtracting random numbers in a given noise range to the actual values.

From 1990 to 2010, the US Census Bureau primarily relied on swapping for the decennial census. Then, they realized that this technique was actually very unsafe, and that it was pretty easy to reconstruct individual records using the published statistics.

They eventually adopted the full differential privacy framework in 2020.

But some people apparently got annoyed with that. And the main culprit was noise addition.

Adding a normal random distribution to the data made the numbers noisy, and some people who rely on the US Census expecting its numbers to be fully accurate were very annoyed.

Who are these people?

Well, one category is that of demographers and social scientists. Still, their mathematical models can be adapted to take into account that they’re dealing with noisy data - especially if the noise gain of distribution is published upfront.

But the most annoyed ones are thos who used the Census data to reconstruct actual records of individuals.

Yes, you read it well. There are people who use public datasets that are supposed to be coarse, and leverage probabilistic models to reconstruct information about individuals.

One big use case in America is, of course, #gerrymandering.

Those nonsense spiky borders can be much more accurate when the Census data allows you exactly to identify who lives where and what’s their ethnicity, so you can dilute the voting powers of some ethnic groups much more efficiently.

Apparently those groups have lobbied the Federal government so much that they got it to release an order that states the following:

Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department’s policies

This is a serious attempt of a political body to interfere through legislation into technical decisions that should be uniquely delegated to technical specialists - and the academic consensus is currently that of a full differential privacy framework.

Noise infusion is the most effective pillar in the differential privacy framework to prevent identification of individuals in public datasets.

Weakening it is likely to make everyone’s #privacy worse, and benefit only very few and their interests.

#USPol

https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html

πfs is the most efficient (when it comes to data storage) filesystem that you’ll ever find.

In fact, it compresses information so much that any file, no matter its size, will occupy the same amount of disk space. Even if it’s many GBs in size.

It achieves such a feat by using the digits of π (yes, the mathematical constant) to store your files.

If your reaction is “huh? how can I store my files inside of an irrational number?”, you’re not the only one.

One of the most interesting conjectures about π (first proposed in 2001) is that its binary representation is normal.

Or, in other words, its binary representation will contain any possible subset of finite bit strings.

Your illegal MP4 rip of Titanic? Yup, it’s just a finite string of binary digits hidden somewhere in π.

As long as you know the index inside of π of the substring that represents the content of your file and its length, you can use the BPP formula to extract the actual file content from the trascendental digits of π.

The only requirement to run the filesystem is to have a simple metadata directory which, for each file, contains its name, its length and its index inside of π.

> DATA="$HOME/pifs/data"
> META="$HOME/pifs/meta"
> mkdir -p "$DATA" "$META"
> πfs -o mdd="$META" "$DATA"
> echo "This is a test" > "$DATA/test.txt"
> cat "$DATA/test.txt"
This is a test
> ls -lh "$META"
total 4.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1 fabio fabio 30 Jun 11 16:41 test.txt

NOTE: DON’T USE IN PRODUCTION

I intentionally said that πfs is the most efficient filesystem when it comes to data storage.

This is an interesting application of a mathematical conjecture when it comes to extreme data compression, but it’s still mostly a mathematical gimmick and proof-of-concept.

The price you don’t pay on the data storage side is paid on the CPU and memory side.

The bigger the file, the more expensive it is for the algorithm to find a sequence of digits in π that matches its content. And the more memory it takes to store intermediate results.

It can work fine for small text files, but it can become embarrassingly slow as the file size increases (it took an hour to copy a 23 KB PNG image).

Using the Spigot algorithm could probably enhance things though, as it allows to extract a generic set of digits from a trascendental number by minimizing the knowledge required about the previous digits.

I’m curious to know to which authorities Yoti, an “age verification” company, is supposed to report #GrapheneOS users, and on which grounds.

There’s something so disturbingly wrong with the implied syllogism here.

“Criminals use GrapheneOS, and you use GrapheneOS, therefore you must be a criminal“.

How about this?

“Epstein used an iPhone, and you use an iPhone, therefore you must be a pedophile“.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos

Migration to the UK is down 48% from last year and 82% from 2021.

Small boat arrivals and the asylum backlog are also down, while 70,000 people were returned or deported.

Yet, anti-immigration rhetoric has only intensified.

Liberals cannot win the immigration battle. By courting the xenophobic votes they harm their own nation, alienate their own voters, and play a pointless game to win the worst slice of the population - the despicable “I’m not racist but…” uncle who would anyway always be unhappy with anyone who doesn’t look and think like him/her, and for sure would never vote for a progressive party anyway.

Labour delivered what the public wanted: a huge fall in net migration to 171,000 in 2025 from 331,000 in 2024 – the lowest in over a decade. Yet online reactions show that parts of the public and the political class are so radicalised that no reduction will ever suffice.

Pipers like Farage, Salvini, Wilders or Trump will always run political agendas rooted in fear and prejudice, even if there was only a single migrant left in the country.

And, even if there was no migrant left, they’d just leverage new fracture lines (North vs South, urban vs rural, cis vs LGBTQ…).

Because, without creating a permanent sense of emergency that constantly turns natural differences in a society into collective irrational fears, their whole political careers would be irrelevant.

#UKPol

https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/home-affairs/immigration-numbers-are-down-so-why-is-the-rage-still-rising/?fsp_sid=5224

The psychological pressure over Russian citizens matters just as much as the war on the frontlines.

Russians must know that their country is at war, that their president is the only one responsible for that war, and that when you attack someone without reason the other party has all the right to strike back.

Russians should be annoyed with the man who caused that war, to the point of feeling the urge of replacing him.

They shouldn’t go through a business-as-usual scenario while their president drops bombs on civilians.

The black clouds over St. Petersburg while the city prepares to host the International Economic Forum, and 20,000 international representatives are there, are a well deserved humiliation against a declining and decadent regime.

A couple of years ago the supporters of the Czar were very loud in repeating how Ukraine couldn’t win this war, how it was supposed to accept whatever deal imposed by the Russian invader, and how powerful Russia’s military apparatus was.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Russia has lost a whole generation of men to this stupid war (either through casualties or emigration), its logistical supply lines are permanently disrupted by the Ukrainian drones, and it’s forced to use Soviet-era weapons, trucks and tanks after the Ukrainian drones have destroyed everything they built in this century.

Russia was stuck in a 20th century idea of conflict, with frontlines to push, heavy artillery and traditional aviation to do most of the job, and vulnerable supply lines that stretch over hundreds of km of railway and roads.

#Ukraine has drones. And they didn’t need much else.

While Ukraine destroys military planes, oil depots and railways without killing anyone. Russia can only react by dropping bombs on civilians in Kyiv.

Because that’s what bullies do when they feel trapped and outsmarted - they resort to gratuitous violence.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-petersburg-oil-terminal-putin-drone-887969921c595f3a81c3b6c0b120b5f3

“You’re fucking crazy“.

It’s hard to believe that someone like #Trump calls someone else “crazy”. And yet these are the words he used for #Netanyahu, terrorist and convicted war criminal.

“Everybody hates you. Everyone hates #Israel because of you“.

Again, these words came from the president of the US. An ironclad Zionist who is craving to profit from his future resorts on the beach in #Gaza.

But when we repeated for so long that everyone hates Israel because of its crimes against humanity and its impunity, we were bashed as the antisemitic ones.

“I’m the one keeping your ass out of jail“.

Indeed, Netanyahu belongs to a jail.

Either at home, because of the endless trials for corruption that he’s been trying to escape for years, or in The Hague, for his ICC arrest warrant for crimes against humanity.

Trump, another thug who should be in jail, openly admitted that he’s the one keeping him out of jail.

Just like two thugs with their hands bathed in blood reminding each other to be grateful to the other.

The existence of Israel in its current genocidal and hyper-colonialist form is a disgrace for humanity as a whole.

The fact that Netanyahu is not in jail yet is a disgrace for everything that justice is supposed to be.

The fact that Netanyahu has so much leverage over the West that it can drag the most powerful country in the world in all of its colonialist wars is outrageous, and historians will spend years to understand how this happened.

There’s only a problem with the latest call between Trump and Netanyahu.

That those words should have come from us, as Europeans.

We should have told both Trump and Netanyahu that they are two fucking crazy fascist thugs, that the world hates them, that the world hates the US and Israel because of them, and that they both belong to a jail.

The fact that no head of State in Europe so far had enough courage to make such obvious statements speaks a lot of how ideologically, politically and morally irrelevant we have become.

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/trump-netanyahu-israel-lebanon-call