A digital infrastructure plan - The latest from Bianca Wylie for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

"The path we’re on instead is techno-solutionism: the cheapest, straightest line governments can choose towards efficiency and savings, and the most impoverished innovation strategy possible for a young country with every opportunity to do differently."

policyalternatives.ca/news-res…

Bianca is so cool.

#cdnpoli

A digital infrastructure plan | CCPA

Asserting digital sovereignty means mapping out the real world of digital infrastructure and understanding which parts are for public intervention

^{Bianca Wylie (CCPA)}

If the allyship isn’t on this level… I dont want it, and you are not doing enough.

techcrunch.com/2026/01/05/hack…

Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live onstage during hacker conference | TechCrunch

A hacker known as Martha Root broke in and deleted three white supremacist websites at the end of a talk during the annual hacker conference Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

^{Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (TechCrunch)}

Reminder: Whistler, Blackcomb ski operations is owned by a US company. If you go there you are financially supporting the country that wants to invade Canada.

#cdnpoli #uspol

A spontaneous reboot means that once again I have to use the Web Inspector to remove that undismissable dialog from @element

Quality UX engineering as this has been since before they also fucked up the UI for the channels/chats.

Over the weekend, did you see the much-shared story on Reddit by a supposed whistleblower?

It started like this: "I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore."

Well, it was a fake.
platformer.news/fake-uber-eats…

#journalism #AI

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

^{Casey Newton (Platformer)}

RE: fed.interfree.ca/notes/ah4xrew…

Interesting commentary on the differences in voice preferences by screen reader users and typical sighted users. My step dad has his Apple Maps voice set to an Australian man because it's "nicer" to listen to and he enjoys the dialect differences (car park vs parking lot). Such a different approach from the efficiency screen reader users typically want.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

2026-01-05 16:25:11

The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users: The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers? stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html#ai#tts#llm#accessibility#a11y#screenreaders

Sam's Stuff - The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users

^{stuff.interfree.ca}

BREAKING: After 58 years, Trump dissolves the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB served as the primary funder for PBS, NPR and local TV and radio stations. Now it is no more.

Meanwhile, billionaires continue to buy up major legacy media to prevent criticism of Trump.

My human rights newsletter remains unapologetic in fact-checked research and justice-centered writing. No required paid sub. Never a paywall. Join us: lets-address-this-with-qasim-r…

Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid

A deep dive into the human rights issues affecting humanity. Pulling from my experience as a human rights lawyer—I bring the receipts to disentangle fact from fiction and advance the fight for univers

^{Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid}

Looking through a README in a repo on GitHub, it said it was inspired by an earlier project. The earlier project sounded like it would meet my requirements better, so I clicked on it and...

... it was my own project. An incomplete one from eight years ago.

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

platformer.news/fake-uber-eats…

Turns out a Reddit anonymous post was a hoax. And fortunately there are still reporters that fact check.

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

^{Casey Newton (Platformer)}

Completely different topic, so ripping this quote out of the context from the article I just boosted:

"I wonder how much Venezuelan sensitive information was in fact stored on Google/Microsoft services and accessed by the US military to prepare their recent strike."

This is indeed a pretty interesting question to ponder. And if you're, say, Greenland, maybe consider your use of US cloud services...

"Formerly Office", now balls-deep in AI.

#Microslop

Things would be very different if Harris was president. Democratic voters would be defending her attacks on other countries instead of opposing attacks by Trump.

Just like how they were out to brunch when Biden was increasing the military budget, financing genocide, attacking civil liberties, and killing hundreds of thousands of people when he switched to Trump's Covid strategy to please short term business interests.

Other's People Music returned from its very brief EOY hiatus with some groovy new tunes! Leftfield hip hop, singer-songwriter art pop, demented soundscapes, lo-fi electronic nostalgia & a post-rock concept album about ants. Enjoy!

etherdiver.com/2026/01/02/opm-…

#musodon #MusicDiscovery

So I'm going to NAM in a few weeks. I got a hotel room with a spa tub in it for the occasion, because I am a boujee bitch. There was an option during the booking to request braille signage, which I thought was pretty spiffy, so I selected it.

I just got a call from them to inform me that the braille signage is only available for the accessible rooms. Naturally the accessible rooms are just the regular rooms and don't have the upgraded tub. So So I decided to just keep things as is and do without the signage (as I have done my entire life)

How annoyed should I be about this?

Today’s lesson: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. A viral Reddit post about an unnamed food delivery company that delays customer orders takes all of the “driver benefit fee” was probably AI-generated. “Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it’s easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing,” Elissa Welle writes in her vetting of the post for @theverge. Read the rest of her report here:

flip.it/ZtSm6-

#Tech #AI #FoodDelivery #Apps #TechNews #Transportation

That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

DoorDash and Uber Eats both deny the allegations in the viral Reddit “confession” post about a “major food delivery app,” and the post is likely AI slop.

^{Elissa Welle (The Verge)}

#XMPP #Extensions and #Specifications ( #XEP )

Read about the new XMPP Extensions and Specifications changes and updates in December 2025:
xmpp.org/2026/01/the-xmpp-news…

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc #xeps #standards #opensource #decentralization #federation #messaging

Хегсет высмеял Путина и его "аналоговнетное оружие"

"Три ночи назад почти 200 наших лучших американцев вошли в центр Каракаса. И похоже, российская ПВО сработала не очень хорошо, не так ли?", - заявил глава Пентагона.

The XMPP Newsletter for December 2025 is out!

Read about the latest updates in the #XMPP universe and our #standards!
xmpp.org/2026/01/the-xmpp-news…

Enjoy reading! ☕

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc #opensource #decentralization #federation #messaging #newsletter

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

wetdry.world/@micr0/1157704131…

Micr0byte (@micr0@wetdry.world)

Attached: 1 video they are idiots... you can copy and paste the text from some of the epstein files to unredact it... absolute idiots...

^{Micr0byte (Wet-Dry World)}

@pluralistic

Microsoft's CEO doesn't want us to talk about AI slop any more, does he?

He's quite right: we need to start calling unwanted LLM-generated garbage "Nadella", in honour of Microsoft renaming "Office" to "CoPilot".

Or I guess we could call it Nadella Bukkake.

What do you think?

A 39C3 debrief, getting ready for FOSDEM, and new developments in the Rust servers area. That and more happened over the year end holidays!

matrix.org/blog/2026/01/05/thi…

This Week in Matrix 2026-01-05

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

^{Thib (matrix.org)}

Folks now getting mad at me that I paywall the channel Discord/Matrix.

I get it, everyone wants everything for free.

Counterpoint. I:

1. Have to eat, and
2. Don't want to spend 10 hours a day moderating.

It's a buck a month. I'm OK with it.

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^Ko-fi

The packaging of the Fairphone and it's accessories has braille! I have never seen any packaging other than medicine have braille. I'm so impressed. Even the location of the qr code is highlighted with embossing. It seems to say "scan qr code for help".

#fairphone #braille #phone #smartphone #packaging #accessibility #a11y #blind