"Engament strategies for the Fediverse”, tomorrow at #PubConf2025 with great speakers: @babetteknauer @wendyhk and @_elena hosted by @danlammerhirt

Cannot miss this one!

1/n

Who and what are part of the 'tech right'?

What kind of world building are they after?

https://electronicplanet.xyz/2025/05/02/network-patchwork-technate-geographical-imaginations-of-the-tech-right/

Wow, researchers at the Uni of Zürich have basically pulled the same shit as Facebook did with their emotion manipulation experiment: they let loose a group of LLM bots on r/changemyview to see if it would change people's minds. And the ethics board of the UZ didn't see any issues with that…

It's shameful how people who allegedly care for ethics could greenlight such work, and shows how research "ethics" mostly cares about following process and not what's right…

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/

In the last few months, many people have called on the EU to start supporting open alternatives to US-owned social media sites. The thing is: The EU has been doing that for some time already. It has financed, among others, ActivityPub, Mastodon and PeerTube. For @netzpolitik_feed, we spoke to Michiel Leenaars, who professionally gives out buckets of EU cash to open source projects.

#eu #europeanunion #opensource #activitypub #mastodon

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/open-source-funding-on-the-brink-delivering-whats-needed-to-make-europe-sovereign/

Great overview by @brianmerchant on Big Tech under the next US presidency.

Now might be a good time to look for tech-alternatives not based in the upcoming US dictatorship. 🫠

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/tech-under-trump-part-1

My latest #FOSSAcademic post is live. This one focuses on #alternativeSocialMedia research, with some new articles about #Mastodon. fossacademic.tech/2024/11/22/A... Also, I am actively building a listserv for academics who study alternative social media (broadly conceived). See the post for more

ASM Update: New Research Editi...

@breadandcircuses

What's very worrying about news articles about weather catastrophes, environmental disasters, massive property damage, and their death tolls; they very rarely blame the culprit...the fossil fuel industry

The globe didn't volunteer for destruction, the fossil fuel industry imposed it on us all

In response, the fossil fuel industry is funding fascist movements, instead of helping fix the mess they made.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/climate-on-the-ballot-2024-1235096557/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.html

Auf dem Bild zu sehen: Ein Gelände des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND) – und die Bewegungsdaten einer Person, die sich oft dort aufhält.

Vermutlich arbeitet die Person in Deutschland für den US-Geheimdienst NSA.

Wir können sogar sehen, wo genau auf dem Gelände sich die Person häufig aufhält: In einem Gebäude, das vor einigen Jahren weltweit für Schlagzeilen sorgte.: as Gebäude sollen BND-Mitarbeitende „die Blechdose“ genannt haben.

@NiemPseu @waag

Hi L.Yo, we are working on the project over three years and work with some of the key FOSS players, including @murena, F-Droid, MicroG and several app developers.

In the meetup above we want to understand how we can improve app distribution through F-Droid, based on developer experiences. If you are interested, do join!

Wieviel Steuern sollen die weltweiten Konzerne zahlen? Nur mal so zum Vergleich: In Deutschland muss der Betreiber einer Bäckerwei ingesamt 45 Prozent abdrücken, in Irland war #Apple weniger als 1 Prozent gewohnt. https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1182699.wennrs-ums-geld-geht-schaut-auf-eure-baecker.html

✏️ Donderdag zijn de #verkiezingen #EP2024!

🗳️ Weet jij al waar je gaat stemmen? We hebben alle stembureaus van Nederland op de kaart gezet. Vind een stembureau dat mooi is, of lekker dichtbij of goed toegankelijk: https://WaarIsMijnStemlokaal.nl

♿ We proberen steeds meer informatie over de toegankelijkheid van stembureaus te verzamelen. Bij deze verkiezingen kun je op 12 verschillende voorzieningen filteren, zoals of er een gebarentolk (NGT) of een stemmal met audio-ondersteuning aanwezig is!

I had been looking forward to May 15th ... the day Data Centres > 500Kw in Europe, to comply with the Energy Efficiency Directive, would have to publicly report their floor area, installed power, data volumes, *energy consumption*, PUE, temperature set points, *waste heat utilization*, *water usage*, and use of renewable energy.

But alas... it has been delayed to September 15. :unacceptable:

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-adopts-eu-wide-scheme-rating-sustainability-data-centres-2024-03-15_en

Many people think GenerativeAI is a public problem — but what kind of problem, for what kind of public, & how is the problem made?

In a new piece, I trace these questions across (1) charismatic figures, (2) failure indexes, (3) journalistic practices.

Free print here but email me if the link expires & I’ll send a copy: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YDEABN9IKUNPGQF6YWC5/full?target=10.1080/13183222.2024.2319000

#ai #generativeAI #commodon #communication #sts #mediaStudies

Why smartphones are the key to a better internet

https://waag.org/en/article/why-smartphones-are-key-better-internet/

@waag

@RandySimons @waag

I'm curious, what other hardware do you have in mind?

@RandySimons @waag Good question. E Foundation who maintains E/OS is a co-initiator of the project and we partner with Murena, which create the Murena phone based on e/OS. So it seemed natural that we would work with e/OS. Another important aspect was privacy. e/OS - compared to other Android distributions - does not communicate device identifiers and other information. A separate issue is the dependency from Google Play Services, which we try to resolve by partnering with MicroG.

@ethanz Would love to try it out as well, this sounds very interesting, ccing @chandrn

Digital sovereignty is a big thing in Brussels - also in #AI. But what are the politics behind the "EU AI sovereignty" ambition?

After all, it could mean boosting EU AI at the expense of foreign competitors. But also - a completely different angle - to rein in tech influence in society tout court, so that citizens regain some sovereignty themselves. Which is it?

For the Journal of European Public Policy, I've dissected 6 yrs of Commission strategy to find out.

Now OA: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2024.2318475

Mastodon is really lacking discovery tools beyond the local and the federated timeline.

As a way to address this issue, @tante has set-up the @hypebot which forwards trending posts from a hand-curated list of instances.

You can find the list here:

https://github.com/tante/hypebot-config/blob/main/config.yaml

We want to update that list occasionally, to keep it interesting.

Any suggestion of instances that should be added?

Most generative AI models were trained on Common Crawl, a massive archive of web crawl data. Yet most people never heard of it. My new research studies Common Crawl in-depth and highlights its influence on LLM research and development #commoncrawl #ai #generativeAI #llm #datagovernance #sts https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/generative-ai-training-data/common-crawl (1/10)