By examining the limits of reasonable user behavior and embracing imperfection for users who go beyond it, we can continue to provide service that meets the expectations of users without sacrificing scalability of the system.
We wanted to let you know that thanks to actions taken by the government, a break in service for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) Program and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Program has been avoided.
...
The CVE Services infrastructure will continue to operate as normal, as will updates to the CVE List and the cve.org website."
Yes, and no. Seems they were already working on creating a fundation before this mess up. The CISA "takeover" of the contract with MITRE may cover what was currently running, that means after they were already forced to layoff 400+ people because of budget reduction. So the fundation may prevent future breakage because of governmental messup, it needs to prove the robustness of its contributors and funding setup.
Very recently, CIRCL launched GCVE-eu (gcve.eu) — a Global CVE allocation system. We added support for GCVE in Vulnerability-Lookup, since it was designed from the beginning to work independently of specific vulnerability identifiers.
GCVE: Global CVE Allocation SystemThe Global CVE (GCVE) allocation system is a new, decentralized approach to vulnerability identification and numbering, designed to improve flexibility, scalability, and autonomy for participating entities.
"We believe the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by attempting to shut down our operations simply because they disagreed with our independent journalism. They saw our reporting as not aligned with their political agenda." - VOA's Patsy Widakuswara, lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits filed against USAGM's Kari Lake. foreignpress.org/foreign-corre…
Health Canada has issued alerts for one lot of Laboratoire Riva Inc.’s acetaminophen caplet and six lots of Life Brand’s Timed Release Melatonin pills.
The W3C “Accessibility of machine learning and generative AI” draft doc continues to get updates, which is good. w3c.github.io/ai-accessibility…
So far the 3 issues I filed (disambiguate ‘AI’, replace overlays section, discuss sustainability) have no action — but it is early and those were recent. github.com/w3c/ai-accessibilit…
First-Ever National Elder Fraud Coordination Center Brings Together Private and Public Sectors to Seek Justice for Victims WASHINGTON, April 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, AARP, Amazon, Google,...
Sources: the Trump administration plans to eliminate the IRS' free Direct File tax program, after IRS staff were told in mid-March to stop working on it (Fatima Hussein/Associated Press)
The Trump administration plans to eliminate the IRS’ Direct File program. That's the electronic system for filing tax returns directly to the agency for free.
Is there #jabber #xmpp Android client that lets you specify server and port manually? All I tried assume domain from the ID. I am experimenting with ephemeral fully local servers that claim no domain. I know I might be breaking some standards here..
It quickly became common that in every streaming service series episode nothing happens except for a cliff hanger for the next episode. I don't like this trend. #LastOfUs
It's a giant bloated industry that depends on a captive audience
What are you going to do, sign up for cable? Nah, you'll end up like me... scrolling Megahertz, Prime, and Netflix for something that sounds cool even if every episode is #dramachurn that ends with a cliffhanger.
So… In 12 days the FourSquare City Guide will go offline, and the years of editing I did as a ‘superuser’ will only benefit companies paying for use of the 4SQ database… That's the risk of doing something nice for a company instead of open-source, I guess? I’ve been using @openstreetmap more, recreating my lists on @organicmaps, but I've already noticed many venues are still missing or already outdated… What’s a good place to start educating myself if I want to edit and add venues? @osm_be
If understand correctly your demand, to update businesses, shops etc... in OSM, then Everydoor is also a good choice to do so. it gets all nearby premices and then you can edit all kind of info, opening hour, accessibility, contact information etc...
you can also just open openstreetmap.org and hit the edit button, consult wiki.osm.org of things aren't clear. @streetcomplete for gamified editing while walking around. Or you could use the @MapComplete shops theme
Ah, @MapComplete seems to be a good fit! Especially since it's web based, and very much focussed on different categories of venues. But I'll look into the @organicmaps “Add business” function as well…
@Singolzd @streetcomplete @MapComplete well, I don't think ID is a good starting tool actually. I've fixed way to many accidental changes done by potlach / potlach 2 and ID users over the years. Something which doesn't really happen with JOSM users, even in the beginning.
@RubenKelevra JOSM-beginners don't make this type of mistakes, because the barrier to get started with is just so high - so the type of users where JOSM is the first editor will probavly be GIS-professionals or trained IT-people
@MapComplete I was neither and used JOSM as many other early OSM users did.
Yes, downloading a Java program might be a higher barrier than tapping on a button in the browser, but nothing substantial. And the GUI and UX is much more straight forward in JOSM than in potlach/ID.
I tried to use ID a couple of times and even small changes, like aligning a road is so atrocious compared to JSOM.
Yesterday, the P’urhépecha municipality of Cherán, Michoacán, celebrated 14 years of autonomy. It began on April 15, 2011, when a group of women blocked cartel-linked illegal loggers from removing trees from the community. This act sparked a mass uprising that saw the community reclaim its territory, establishing barricades, 179 permanent bonfires, a form of autonomous government rooted in P’urhépecha forms of communal organization, and expelling the cartels, police, and political parties.
If you want to know more about Cherán, might I suggest "The Bonfires of Autonomy," a piece I wrote for the anthology edited by @cbmilstein, "Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy:" akpress.org/deciding-for-ourse…
This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air,” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian…
The Rust team at Mainmatter has grown, but we need to grow it further!
We're looking for freelancers to help us migrate a database from C to Rust. It's an incremental rewrite: a module at a time, interfacing with the existing C code.
Me and a friend both have old #HumanWare #BrailleNoteApex #NoteTaker's lying around, and would like to see if we can do anything useful with them. They've been discontinued for some years now, and unfortunately HumanWare never made an SDK for them, but they run Windows CE 6.0 with a custom shell called #KeySoft, so I am fairly confident that we could develop something for them once we reverse-engineer KeySoft's API.
So, if you have ANY files relating to KeySoft, such as system upgrade files, KeySoft extensions, really anything except what we can already get from the devices themselves (like from the Windows folder), then I'd love to here from you! The PipeDream is to port a more modern OS to these devices but I am all too aware of how big, and / or impossible, of a challenge that might be, so even just being able to write some applications for them would really help!
I'm not a hacker, but I’m a competant C / C++ developer, I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty here, I may even break out the decompilation tools on some stuff if I have to. These products have been obsilete for over a decade now (the BrailleNote Touch came in 2015, manufacturing stopped in 2018, and support was discontinued in 2021), so I feel happy to do this. Ultimately it's just a bit of fun, anything we can get out of it will be positive, even if it's just what we learned along the way.
@mcourcel To be fair to HumanWare, the Apex came out in 2009, support lasted until 2021, and it's ancient hardware by today's standards: the thing has like 128 MB of RAM and a CPU from 2005 running at 532mhz, and runs an OS that Microsoft ended support for in 2018. I wish it could've lasted longer too but I bet they were starting to find it impossible to source replacement components from the manufacturers of things like their batteries and the motherboards themselves.
@mcourcel Well to be fair, the Touch, and probably the Touch Plus, were flops right out of the gate. That's what happens when you charge $7000+ for a device and only put in the bare minimum amount of effort.
They weren't flops. They were very flawed though, especially the touch. God that thing was so slow! And they really should've gone with much more up to date hardware so they could run a contemporary version of Android. Mind you almost all Android devices have that problem
@dangero Yeh it's all Windows CE 6.0, the only difference is in the version of KeySoft. That may mean sliglthslightly different APIs but I'm sure 90% of the core functionality of KeySoft is the same between KeySoft 8.1 and KeySoft 9.4.6 or whatever the latest one for the Apex is.
CC @matt. I'm not sure why, but I seem to recall that you did stuff with the Braille Note, or am I thinking of some other assistive technology project?
I know there are some pretty unorthodox things you can do with them. Sadly, I don’t have one on me to remember what all of them are though. I know you can change the sound scheme and replace all of those key soft sounds.
+ AstraCrypt: hide and encrypt your files with modern security standards 🛡️ + Mint: a lightweight Misskey Android client (in early development state) 🛡️
3 apps have been removed as they were reported broken:
- Kuroba - Tappic - moVirt
1 app moved to a new packageId 1 month ago, so the old one was removed today:
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
Whistleblower reveals evidence on how Elon Musk's DOGE team extracted 10 GB of sensitive data about American citizens from a government agency, and then deleted accounts and logs to cover their tracks.
Then, when the whistleblower tried to report the data breach, he received a threatening letter containing pictures taken from a drone watching him walking his dog.
Die Bahn-App „#DBNavigator” ist voll mit #Trackern, die uns überwachen. #Digitalcourage klagt dagegen. Denn wir wollen Bahn fahren – nicht Daten liefern.
Gemeinsam haben wir Ende April die Bahn dazu aufgefordert, die Mängel zu entfernen. Dafür hatten wir der #DB eine Frist von zwei Monaten eingeräumt. Doch die Bahn hat in ihrer Antwort klargemacht, dass sie nicht vorhat, etwas Wesentliches zu ändern. Am 20. Oktober 2022 haben wir deshalb unsere Klage eingereicht. Die Bahn hat mittlerweile ihre Klageerwiderung eingereicht, auf die wir geantwortet haben. Der nächste Schritt bei unserer Klage wird die Verhandlung sein, ein Termin wurde noch nicht bekannt gegeben.
I am under a DDoS attack. Not my server, not my service. Me.
And like everything these days, it has to do with #AI.
This is going to be a thread because I'm annoyed and have much to say. It should be called something like "How I wasted a good part of the last 7 years having to react to a dubious technology instead of doing my job". Or perhaps "How a science disappeared". You can decide. /0
The DDoS attack started in 2018, though at the time, I didn't see it coming. I remember standing with colleagues in a hallway, at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento. The conversation went like this:
- Have you seen that new overblown model that performs so well on the X and Y benchmarks? - Well, given the size, they might as well use random projections, would probably work great. - Haha! Yeah. Wanna grab a coffee?
Fast-forward seven years. Billions of dollars have been spent on the Transformer and co. The EU has just announced a 200 billion € initiative to promote #AI, following other governments across the globe. Millions of people, crushed by the demands of 'efficiency', now think that a machine writes email better and faster than they do. And wow, the new tech can even fire people (in all senses of the term.) Still wanna grab a coffee? /2
In the last seven years, I have had to teach Transformers, reply to questions from over-enthusiastic students and concerned family members, write countless lines (publicly and privately) about the many issues associated with 'AI'. Hell, I even had to build the thing from scratch to illustrate its problems. I am on stage every month with a tiny Transformer which you can unpack, showing to an interested audience why the thing is all hot air.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the outreach. I even think that looking inside a machine helps people understand better why they are people and not machines. Language is one of these things that are never taught in school (kids know more about the Big Bang than they do about the faculty that helps them think, believe and communicate). So perhaps showing how #AI fails to do language is the best way to describe what language actually is. But it is only a small part of my job description. /4
I am computational linguist. Wanna know what I was working on before 2018? I was doing computer simulations of (parts of) the human semantic faculty. I was showing how knowledge, beliefs, real and hypothetical worlds live inside the human mind, in multidimensional spaces. I was showing their geometry and manipulating conceptual shapes the way you move concrete objects in space. And it was beautiful and it had so much potential to explain aspects of our humanity. /5
How much real science have I done in the last 7 years? A fraction of what I wanted to do. My field was engulfed by #AI hype. Literally. You can read the reports highlighting how industrial involvement in our scientific community drastically increased after 2018. I got out of academia because of it. But then I couldn't get away from the fact that the general discourse had also been hijacked and that some reaction was needed. /6
I am an introvert. I don't enjoy talking, fighting, arguing. I don't actually like social media (sorry Mastodon, you're great nevertheless). I like being alone with my eyes closed, wondering what would happen to this or that conceptual structure when you rotate it through space. This is what I'm actually good at, or at least what I feel comfortable doing. But you all know the sign: "It is so bad that even introverts are here." /8
I am a computational linguist, so I feel a duty to talk about so-called #AI and fight the hype. But this is Denial of Service. The service I was meant to provide was science, not debunking a trillion-dollar distraction.
So if you're *not* a linguist or an engineer, please do not let anybody divert you from your purpose. Do what you're good at. Bake bread, sell groceries, rescue injured owls, invent better solar panels, help keep our cities clean.
I feel for you! This hype has only just started to invade my field for real during the last two years. I have tried to move myself into places where I can voice criticism but the hype train moves on. Everyone is afraid to lose some vaguely imagined advantage if they don’t keep up. I maintain that the way to keep up is to remain critical. Honestly, I wish this technology had not been invented. We don’t need tech that can halfway simulate what we are already good at. Sigh!
I send you my heartfelt sympathy too! As if science wasn't anyway under attack in so many other ways... I guess we have to stick together and keep the spirit alive, hoping for better days!
I have had customers say to my face "I don't need you any more because I am using AI"
The end result they got were awful, but they don't care, they think it's great, not seeing what it is doing to them and their reputation long term, but then, *their( customers don't care either. No one cares. Only the tiny minority who can see this for what it is actually care, and we are not enough!
This is so sad! People who think that AI can make music are people who never knew what music was in the first place (same goes for the visual arts, for science, and anything that involves true creativity).
I think this has been in the making for quite a while. The societies we live in mostly fail to teach people to really *see* what is special about human output, to ask questions and seek the unexpected.
I'm sorry for you. Please keep making music. Music needs you!
Same as the above musician. I have just closed my translation business after a 40-year career. The technical/patent-related work I did has gone. It's good that autonation can help more people communicate but companies have gone overboard on the hype. Some translation will always need humans, but as with coders, how are they to get trained & experienced?
A close friend of mine is a translator, so we often have long conversations about 'how you would translate X or Y'. When I see how much thought, argumentation, linguistic and world knowledge goes into those conversations, it is very clear to me that a mere statistical model of language will never do what a translator does. It is so important that people do not forget this. One thing I am most worried about is that we are experiencing a devaluation of language itself.
The trajectory of E2E-encryption is about de-platforming: There shall be no central machines that can control the edges/peers, and the social groups and virtual centers they freely form.
Our #deltachat R&D around #chatmail relays and #webxdc apps all aim to realize such a "zero-platforms" fully E2E-encrypted interaction model. However, this is *not* just about cryptographic cleverness. Rather it is about usable anti-authoritarian designs, as explicitly stated in January delta.chat/en/2025-01-23-webxd…
How can we evolve and deploy web apps without allowing developers or operators to become a “billionaire in the middle”? There are many ways to try to address this challenge and some involve the tec...
I really wish Delta Chat had built in voice all feature atleast.
Signal stopped working in the middle east even with a VPN and while texting works on Delta Chat even without it for the most part, the voice calling feature is equally as important if you ask me.
Please let me know if there's a way to do this or please consider developing this in the app.
agreed. We are aware of the importance of voice calls and there are various background efforts around designing and realizing them. If there are developer experienced folks out there who want to help, DM us. Or someone with a bunch of money. We have experts in our community which we can't contract because of a lack of money, and so they rather work in corporate environments for the time being.
As I announced earlier today @RezzaBuh and I are going on an #evtrip. Goal: pick up an Audi Q4 e-tron 35 I've purchased in Bavaria. We're staying in an B&B near the border over night. We use an EV on the way there, too. The only charging stop is in 311km. Once we get there, the car should have 19% of battery left.
(if you don't want to follow this thread, just mute #evtrip)
We arrived at the supercharger in Pilsen with 24% of battery left. We were speeding 130km/h where we could and the average consumption was still 17.4 kWh/100km. Now we need to charge it for 10 minutes to reach Rozvadov, but we'll probably stay a bit longer to have extra energy for tomorrow.
The downside is that the supercharger in Pilsen is on a hotel parking lot 7km off the highway with no services around, just the hotel. #evtrip
And we've arrived to Svata Katerina, the last settlement before the border. Here the day ends for us. There will definitely be more fun tomorrow. We will have to deal with the German authorities and none of us speaks German. And E-tron 35 has a considerably shorter range than today's car and I won't use the built-in navigation, so the trip back home will be a bit of an adventure. #evtrip
We're on the way again. 150km to Roth. We've got more than enough energy to reach the destination, but we'll make a quick charging stop to have breakfast. #evtrip
We charged the car to 82% while having breakfast in McDonald's. There is a visible difference in charging station availability between 🇨🇿 and 🇩🇪. At the location where we stopped were like 3 different vendors with a plenty of chargers. The next stop is the Audi dealer in Roth. #evtrip
The paper work with the Audi dealership is done, it was quick. I've got the keys, but the car doesn't have original plates, so we have to go to the authorities without it and return for it with transport plates. #evtrip
Now the drill is: 1) go to the insurance company to get temporary insurance (€89, done), 2) go to the transport authority to re-register the car and get transport plates, 3) go back to the insurance place to get the plates physically done. 4) go back to the authority to stamp the plates.
Fortunately the insurance company is just next door. #evtrip
@bycx yep, you return them when you register the car in CZ and pick up Czech plates. They are valid for one month max, I picked an insurance for 2 weeks, so only for 2 weeks for me. Before expiration I have to register it home.
We're on our way back. The initial range was 267 km at 98% of the battery. We stopped after 100km for lunch. 170km/62% left. I am positively surprised by the consumption. With speeding 110-115km/h it was around 17 kWh/h. #evtrip
The infotainment was a bit of a letdown. We couldn't quite get Android Auto working. Not sure if it isn't included in the package or what. Setting up MyAudi was also quite confusing. I'll have to look into it once I have time home. For this trip I'm using Sygic for EV navigation. Charging power at the supercharger was only 35 kW. Not sure if it was because the battery was at 60% or there is some compatibility issue. Next stop: Ionity Beroun, 170km #evtrip
I am surprised an open source guy like you would be not more annoyed by such a cloud/proprietary software stack... Wish there was a more ecological software option for cars.
Arrived to Ionity Beroun, another 170 km, the battery down from 80 to 20%, let's get back to 80% and continue. The biggest problem at the moment are several traffic jams along the way.
Ioinity started charging 105 kW which is close to the car maximum. Also the biggest price: 21 CZK (€0.8)/kWh if you don't have a plan. This ride will be more expensive than with gasoline. #evtrip
The last charging stop. The most powerful charger so far: 400 kW. The price is a bit lower: 17.80 CZK/kWh. So far the biggest problem has not been charging, but traffic which is just terrible before the Easter. #evtrip
@Cooba13 the original plan was that I would use @RezzaBuh's accounts, but after the first stop we split. I will register at least EON, but we will rarely use public chargers.
And now it's being charged from our roof top solar system (through house batteries now). We've been selling power surpluses for 1.25 CZK/kWh. If we charge the car with it instead, we'll drive for 20 CZK (€0.8)/100km. #evtrip
This explains why we couldn't get Android Auto to work. It's extra and not particularly cheap. Well, it's the VW concern after all, everything is extra in their cars. 😅 #evtrip
That is fascinating. I have Octavia (4th gen) in base trim and Android Auto is included. But I had to pay extra for spare tire and back wiper 😁 VW policies are mysterious 😉
not only Android Auto but also no satellite navigation! They probably think there's no need as EVs can't be used for longer distances 😉. Or what. A proper navigation with a range estimation is an essential feature of an EV...
@JamesHeather To je. S touto cenou a průměrnou spotřebou na dálnici vychází 100 km na 310 Kč. U benzínu by mě to samé stálo cca 250 Kč. Je to ale cena extrémní, kdy člověk dojede k výkonné nabíječce bez předchozí registrace. S ní je ta cena někde na 12 Kč. Doma ze sítě člověk nabíjí za 5 Kč a u elektřiny ze solárů mě vychází kWh v nákladech ušlé příležitosti 1,25 Kč. Počítám, že z 95 % budeme nabíjet doma, takže průměrná cena pro nás bude hluboko pod 100 Kč na 100 km.
yep the fact when you charge on supercharged price per distance is very similar with petrol is well known. You get cheaper only when slow charging at home. Experimentally tested in Estonia (by me, borrowed car) and Estonia -> Slovakia trip by my colleague (his Škoda Enyaq)
meanwhile in Estonia, paid 100 eur to dealer => received car with license plates. On the minute of receiving car, go to insurance company web (or mobile app) login by ID -> new 3rd party liability insurance -> pay by card and done in 2 minutes. Next the same is done with Casco insurance. Get keys, drive home.
our goal was to spend as much battery as possible to have time for breakfast. German autobahns are great when you have such a goal 😉. On the other hand we had a lot of time to get to the destination on time. Hence from almost fastest car (overtaking police car driving 160 kmh would cause me a lot of troubles at home) to still not the slowest. Even thought there was no limit, almost everyone drove the same at around 115 kmh.
we would have reached Rozvadov without charging. I set charge at destination to 30 % at destination. So ten minutes wasn't to reach but to reach with 30 %. And the consumption is surprisingly nice. This is my first drive with the (semi)new Model Y (with less than around 700 km driven - registered only on Monday) and it's about 15 percent more efficient than my old Model Y. However, it's on beautiful but inefficient 20" Induction wheels.
@mkyral @mattb @mattdm Our public transport in countryside is still superb compared to public transport in rulal areas of the US. I lived in a town of 5k in Pennsylvania and the only public connection with the rest of the world was a long-distance bus to NYC 5 times a week.
Interesting thread. I also picked a car from Bavaria, 10 years ago. In Finland we have awful car prices due tax. Is it due such or just the amount of choice that made you get it from there?
@ikkeT not because of tax reasons, prices are better and selection is also better. Germany is definitely ahead of us in electromoblity and the used EV market is much larger.
Oh wow. Two bugs I can already see in the #NVDASR 2025.1 remote's implementation that I absolutely dislike: - When muting the remote computer, with the "mute remote" option, this was reworked so that any time the remote machine speaks, it gets unmuted again. This makes the feature useless now, because I do this often when I'm on another laptop, have headphones connected through my desktop through which my work laptop is connected. I know, I'm complicated, 3 computers. But this is when using "mute remote" on that secondary laptop, like the HP I just got back finally today, really helps. Thanks NVDA for breaking it. - If connected to a remote computer, and your remote computer disconnects but you left control inside the remote session on the target, you cannot switch back out of the remote session, because it will just keep saying, "no computers are connected." Now, again, I do the "host control server" thing, so I don't know if this applies to when connecting to a server directly, but it means that you are stuck in a non-functional target machine until your remote host reconnects. Also, very very bad. Both of them are horrible and make NVDA's remote implementation quite different from the add-ons.
I don't think the first one has been reported, but there's a PR to fix the second one. The point of unmuting is that if you're controlling a machine, you most likely want to hear its output. But if you're using remote as a keyboard, it's going to break that.
Do I have #regex experts among my followers: echo "123.4506000" | sed -E 's/(\.[0-9]*[1-9])?0+$//; s/\.$//' is intended to remove trailing 0s when its a number with a decimal point. But when there are no cifers behind the decimal point other than 0s, the whole number shall be stripped of the point and the 0s. What are I am doing wrong? Sharing appreciated.
Hmm. Das Problem ist gelöst. Aber warum mit regulären Ausdrücken? Die sind sehr mächtig und daher in der ausführung teuer. Das problem ließe sich mit wenig code in jeder prozeduralen sprache lösen, die einen string-datentyp hat. Das wäre billiger.
European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, will host an Implementation dialogue concerning high-speed rail in Europe on 15 April in Brussels.
I was practicing a song and didn’t quite succeed. But it seems I wasn’t the main artist here anyway—so hopefully you’ll forgive my totally un-warmed-up, raspy voice that couldn’t hit the notes. My parrot Tori did a much better job, don’t you think? P.S. It was supposed to be a serious song… but who cares?
Why wasn't #Mastodon invented in the London borough of Tooting? I mean really... Then you could have the default site being tooting.common, yes, let's just invent an entirely new TLD for it.
Also, my childish side just loves the place-name 'Tooting Bec' as heard in this train recording. Causes me a chuckle every time. Recording from The Northern Line.
I want to say a few things, after having read the Supreme Court judgement on the characteristic of sex in the Equality Act.
Firstly, that my heart and all support I have goes to all trans/enby/other people here and elsewhere. No doubt, a great many arseholes will misunderstand this decision, and I am very aware that pointing out that their behaviour remains wrong in law and potentially criminal will not alleviate that pain. Transphobes are always wrong; that they have a new way to be wrong helps nobody, and only causes more pain. I wish I could ease that pain, and know that I stand with all trans/enby/other people in any effort to ease that pain.
It has been the case since time immemorial that two problems dog our judicial system at all levels: that having the money to pay for better lawyers can distort decisions, and that the judiciary - especially at senior levels - is dreadfully lacking in diversity. I felt that latter point especially when reading the claim in the judgement that MPs and Parliamentary drafters could not possibly have been mistaken or ill-informed when considering the rights and needs of trans people; it's clearly the case in 2025 that many MPs and Parliamentary drafters do not much understand trans rights issues, and it would have been even more so a decade and a half ago, when the Equality Act was being drafted and debated in Parliament.
However, many people who might read this - in the UK and elsewhere - will have little or no familiarity with this country's judiciary, and I want to clarify a point the repeatedly comes up in regard to legal rights:
This is not the US, and regardless of the dominance of the US on social media, its constitutional quirks are not widely repeated. The UK Supreme Court is not an activist court. It does not have conservative judges and liberal judges. It does not have judges appointed on the whim of a temporary political leader. Its judges are appointed by representatives of panels which appoint to lower courts (plus two existing members of the Supreme Court), which themselves are a mix of various legal professionals and lay people. I feel it is essential to make clear that this is not, as it would be in the US, a matter of right-wing judges appointed by right-wing politicians to make right-wing decisions.
It is a matter of poorly written law, which Parliament will one day seek to revise and clarify. As I've said, I disagree with a fundamental part of the decision because I disagree with the assumption that Parliament was adequately informed and competent at the time of the Equality Act; without that assumption, I don't believe it would be possible to reach the Court's conclusion. Others may feel it would still be a possible conclusion, I claim no professional expertise.
But it is still a matter of how the law is worded, and how Parliament may seek to amend the law in future.
This is important because it must guide action. MPs are in the decisive position. Parliament could, if it wished, pass an Act tomorrow to guarantee trans rights (unlike other countries, the right of Parliament in the UK to pass and enforce an Act explicitly negating a Supreme Court decision is effectively unlimited, as seen in last year's absurd political actions regarding the safety or otherwise of Rwanda).
But we all know it will not do so, we all know there is not a majority in Parliament in favour of greater and more explicit legal protections for trans people. Activism must focus on changing that balance through persuasion and education. Write to your MP. Protest. Support and/or join groups campaigning for legal recognition of trans rights. If it's relevant and viable where you are (which of course it isn't in many places, but I shan't go on a rant about electoral reform just now), consider how your vote could change the Parliamentary balance. Don't bother with effing online petitions, they do more harm than good.
There will be a time (either at the back end of this Parliament, or - I'd suggest more likely - not long after the next election) when Parliament does seek to amend the Equality Act. Its own commission recommends doing so, and I believe that we can certainly read the later paragraphs of this judgement as further encouragement in that direction. This battle will come. Be ready.
But also remember this, as many will in the coming days weeks and months try to persuade you otherwise:
The decision today affects a very narrow range of circumstances, beyond those covered by existing legal provisions. It is not a wide-ranging judgement, even if transphobic media try to pretend that it is.
The right of all trans people, whatever their circumstances, to be free of discrimination and harassment remains unchanged. Being trans remains a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. Trans people cannot be excluded on a whim (and the status of toilets and changing facilities is not altered by this decision, as - contrary to what transphobes believe - the sign on a toilet has never been a matter of law in the UK, except as regards adequate provision of disabled toilets).
It is also true, and clearly iterated in the judgement, that discrimination on the grounds of sex as a protected characteristic continues to be based on the discriminator's *perception*; if a trans person is discriminated against or harassed based on the discriminator perceiving them as being male or female (regardless of the trans person's identity), that remains an offence.
I say this not to diminish the harm and pain caused by this judgement, both in its specific application, and more significantly, in the cultural impact and effective encouragement of transphobia. I say this as a reminder that those legal protections still exist, and there are far more circumstances in which a trans woman's right to be treated as a woman is guaranteed, than there are circumstances affected by the decision. Transphobes will seek to argue otherwise. They are wrong. Do not believe, as they want you to believe, that trans people are now unprotected from discrimination and harassment.
And believe me when I say that I remain in awe of your strength and humanity, and that I continue to believe that your strength and humanity will win out in the end.
The dog has been struggling with her back paws over the last few days. vet unsure if it's a temporary thing but charged me seventy quid for the opinion and a few antiinflammatories.
I've very much enjoyed revisiting those fanfictions from 2003 this week, all done with that now.
Work's been ticking over nicely enough, winding down to the long bank holiday weekend which we are spending near Blackpool in the company of some old friends. We'll be a house of 8 (3 us, 5 them), although technically that should be 3 and a bit, I suppose. Baby was 8cm long 2 weeks ago. I have such banalities on my "going away from the house" list as "put out both garden waste and rubbish bin", and "finalise grocery for evening of return". Holidays used to be "Ooh! wake up early and have fun!" and now it's all "did I turn off the TV and shut the windows?" #GettingOld. Not looking forward to returning home via manchester on a bank holiday, either, and kinda wishing I'd extended my holidays off work for a day of downtime after my time up there.
Have started watching Severance on Apple TV in my lunch break. We're up to 507 in our DS9 runthrough, very much enjoyed Quark and odo having a physical bash at each other. I don't remember terribly much about the upcoming episodes; Rapture is An Emissary thing of course, The Darkness and The Light is about Kira's old resistance pals being killed off? and the shiners (from memory) of the upcoming ones are the Bashyr hologram and the Les Mis thing with eddington. Lots to look forward to!
daniel:// stenberg://
in reply to daniel:// stenberg:// • • •daniel:// stenberg://
in reply to daniel:// stenberg:// • • •daniel:// stenberg://
in reply to daniel:// stenberg:// • • •Kurt Roeckx
in reply to daniel:// stenberg:// • • •daniel:// stenberg://
in reply to Kurt Roeckx • • •