The US DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency - has closed the U.S. Agency for International Development today. Their DNS records were deleted last week ( usaid.gov/ )
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms.
Elon announced the US Agency for International Development was shutting down on an X stream, where he called the staff "evil" and a "criminal organisation".
If you are in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.
I purchased meanwhile, an interactive fiction comic book, hmm 10 years ago on IOS. It was pretty accessible with VoiceOver but I got to a point where it got frustrating so gave up. I just redownloaded it and am loving every second of it since it is now accessible with VoiceOver! Every Interactive Comic by Zarfhome Software Consulting now has VoiceOver support, definitely give one a try! I will be buying the others! Thank you so much from blind interactive fiction players everywhere! Zarfhome apps on the app store! apps.apple.com/us/developer/za…
It's a community all about revisiting the magic of retro gaming, or discovering it for the first time. Come hang out and help us test things before we start our monthly game playthroughs in March.
(You're more than welcome to join even if you don't plan on doing monthly playthroughs)
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Please especially take note if you are a national of Spain, Slovenia, Belgium, or the Netherlands; the petition needs about 5x as many votes as it has now, but it also needs to hit a threshold in three additional countries, and those are the four closest.
EU citizens, if you want in while you can, there's a EU citizen's petition for the EU to ban "conversion therapy" (this is as ominous as it sounds) of LGBTQs, with 7 days left to sign.
It will not make the threshold, but might be able to rack up a few more country thresholds— I'm happy to note Spain just hit it. Belgium and The Netherlands are the next best bets as they're over 65%; If you know queer-friendly folks in those countries, maybe a good time to forward this:
The petition is up overall 26,000 votes in the last ten days. I don't know whether it can hit a million by May, but turning more countries green definitely sounds viable.
* The petition asks the EU to ban pseudo-psychological practices purporting to "convert" gay and trans people to straights. Yes, that's a thing, and it's cruel.
By the way, since I know there's a lot of Germans on Mastodon:
The need right now on the EU citizen petition against anti-LGBTQ "conversion therapy" ( mastodon.social/@mcc/114512352… ) is raw votes from anywhere. BUT as it happens Germany's currently the closest %-wise to being the 8th country to endorse the petition!
15.5k DE votes would turn Germany green on this map, and send a pro-LGBTQ message to German lawmakers¹:
¹ DE already has a local law banning gay/trans conversion therapy against minors.
Okay big news on the EU citizen petition to ban the use of "conversion therapy" (IE "curing" or perhaps "torturing into submission") on LGBTQs—
BE, NL and SI came through and last night the initiative *met* the 7 countries goal! It needs 330,000 mor…
Okay big news on the EU citizen petition to ban the use of "conversion therapy" (IE "curing" or perhaps "torturing into submission") on LGBTQs—
BE, NL and SI came through and last night the initiative *met* the 7 countries goal! It needs 330,000 more signatures before the 17th to pass, which sounds rough, but it's got *420,887* in just 5 days, so things are actually on a good pace. This will at least be really close, and this could happen!
Britain proclaimed the legal non-existence of trans people in the last month with a court decision; in the US, Texas did so last night, with a bill passed in its House of Representatives. There is a global effort to unexist trans people. If nothing else, if the EU wants to show that it's different— that it's not a part of this— it seems like a pretty direct way to say so would be this citizen's initiative against attempting to unexist individual trans people via torture.
EU citizens, if you want in while you can, there's a EU citizen's petition for the EU to ban "conversion therapy" (this is as ominous as it sounds) of LGBTQs, with 7 days left to sign.
It will not make the threshold, but might be able to rack up a few more country thresholds— I'm happy to note Spain just hit it. Belgium and The Netherlands are the next best bets as they're over 65%; If you know queer-friendly folks in those countries, maybe a good time to forward this:
It is 7 AM CEST. The EU citizen initiative calling for a ban on "conversion therapy" (here meaning, pseudoscientific attempts to "cure" LGBTQs) is less than 250,000 votes from success. This is astounding, the votes have like, *tripled* in a week.
The page says voting ends "May 17", and I wish I knew if that meant "at midnight tonight" or "midnight tomorrow" or what. Uh. Do you know
Germany is ~6,000 local votes from endorsing it. Are there 6,000 Germans on this website
Google ending AI arms ban incredibly concerning, campaigners say | BBC "...Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a section which previously ruled out applications that were "likely to cause harm"..." bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx…
Experimented yesterday with Fedora’s KDE spin… I was shocked by the level of accessibility, although it wasn’t perfect. My primary issues with it were that I had to use a lot of Orca’s navigation commands to read panels in the systems settings app, and I had major issues with Konsole, the default terminal app. I wasn’t able to read any of the information in that particular apps interface using Orca. I also tried the Fedora workstation edition, which uses Gnome as it’s a desktop environment. Let’s just say that was not worth my time. Had accessibility issues there as well, and surprisingly it was worse than the experience I had with KDE. I know KDE defaults to Wayland, as does Gnome, but KDE’s accessibility implementation seems to be a lot better than what Gnome has under Wayland, with the exceptions I’ve previously mentioned. Incidentally, the X 11 experience with Gnome is actually worse now than it was previously. For example, the terminal app does not even open for me. I should also note that all this is under Fedora 41, so people aren’t confused. #A11Y #Accessibility #Blind #Experiments #Linux #Fedora41 #KDePlasma #Gnome #Wayland #X11
@tyrylu @JRepin the best example that I can think of off the top of my head is when using the terminal app while Orca is running, you cannot stop speech by hitting the control key. As a matter of fact, all the typical Orca keyboard commands seem to have issues. Another example that comes to mind is specific to Tuba, but also seems to affect other GTK4 apps like Dino… when attempting to read text while Orca is running, it doesn’t always read everything out fully. For example, when attempting to read posts in Tuba, I can see who sent the post, the time of the post, but not the actual text of the post. Also, I can’t always just arrow down to move onto the next post as Orca won’t read through a list like that reliably.
Arrowing should definitely work. The Tuba and other GTK 4 app issues regarding Orca not reading everything or in weird ways, yes, that is the aftermatch of Libadwaita using list items as almost a generic container, and of the fact that we did not solve the situation where you have an a11y label for the item, and its content as well, in some cases, you need both, so Orca does it, which is chatty sometimes, e. g. in Tuba. And, the keyboard handling thing will be fixed in Gnome 48.
@Lukáš Tyrychtr @Jure Repinc @Gregarious I would be interested to know how do you guys use the @Dino #XMPP messaging app with a #screenReader? When I launch it it opens one of my recent conversations. Input box has the focus. I can't figure out how to use the keyboard to navigate to the incoming chat, to the toolbar, to the menu and similar. I can use ctrl+tab to cycle through open conversations. I am using version 0.4.4.
This will be most likely an app specific issue, but I have no experience with this particular app, so I can't say more, but a bug report, at least to track the fact, would be advised.
Ralfeek (1808?) is playing Anon. in a casual Correspondence game of chess. Game is still ongoing after 0 moves. Click to replay, analyse, and discuss the game!
počuj, ja som o tú hru asi prišiel, mazal som históriu a to okno sa zavrelo, teraz som iba ako hosť, dá sa stým niečo robiť? Pred tým som nemal registráciu ale teraz už mám.
@furrocioyskitty I think this page will give you all the information you need, also about tech stack etc. We do not use other vendors; if we use third-party code, it must be open source. tuta.com/security
Tuta combines security with ease of use so that you can keep your mailbox safe from attacks easily. Find out how Tuta secures all your emails and contacts on the Tuta security site.
“The Trump administration has not released a list of DOGE employees. Nor has it said how they are being paid, how many have entered each agency, and whether they are government workers. That raises questions about who they are answerable to - Musk or Trump as head of the executive branch.” reuters.com/world/us/musk-crea…
📣 We are thrilled to announce that @NGICommons is officially relaunching our Digital Commons Community Platform (DCCP), with generous technical and community support from the @matrix Foundation!
🇪🇺 This platform will be promoted today #EUOpenSourcePolicySummit2025 hosted by @OpenForumEurope and during this weekend's @fosdem 2025 activities, which NGI Commons will take part in on Sunday, 2 February from 12:25-12:55.
🙌 Would you like to get involved? Here is the QR code below.
We are excited to announce that F-Droid has been awarded a grant from #OpenTechFund designed to support FOSS projects in addressing long-term sustainability challenges.
We are excited to announce that F-Droid has been awarded $396,044 from theOpen Technology Fund’s FOSS SustainabilityFund.This grant is specifically designed ...
These 2 papers provide compelling empirical evidence that competition in #science leads to sloppy work being preferentially published in hi-ranking journals: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1… academic.oup.com/qje/advance-a… Using the example of structural #biology , the authors report that scientists overestimate the damage of being scooped, leading to corner-cutting and sloppy work in the race to be first. Faster scientists then end up publishing sloppier work in higher-ranking journals.
Besides the AMD crasher, I wondered why the dev version of Showtime, #GNOME's power-efficient video player in incubation, sometimes still refused to launch; turns out it's randomly crashing with a segfault on startup for another reason.
After jumping through hoops to get a backtrace (#Python in #Flatpak makes things somewhat harder to debug), it turns out that #GStreamer is not the culprit. Presumably, it may be a bug in #GTK or somewhere else in the stack. Details here: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubat…
Testing the latest nightly flatpak version on my desktop workstation with discrete open source AMD graphics (and another testbench with onboard AMD graphics), I realized one of the...
Join us and special guest, David Hartl from SCHWEIZER, on Thursday, February 13 at Noon ET for the live webinar, "Low Vision and AMD: The Importance of Lighting."
We will provide an overview of the SCHWEIZER low vision lighting solutions, plus show how our lighting solutions significantly impacts daily living activities, like reading, writing, and crafts.
ACVREP credits available during live presentation.
Today, I celebrate my one year anniversary of working for Blazie Technologies. Truth be told, I had been providing feedback on the BT Speak Pro as a volunteer beta tester while I was still an employee at Comcast working as a product manager. Of course, I was not able to talk about the BT Speak in those days as it was still very much a secret project but I was thrilled to help test what would eventually be a brand new device, similar to the Braille ‘n Speak for the modern age.
The original Braille ‘n Speak was also a major part of my life. After buying a BNS Classic in 1989, I used it professionally in two different roles to help me manage data, along with using it as my only computer for managing contacts, creative writing and going online. I soon realized that I’d love to work for the company that developed it. I was in contact with Blazie Engineering fairly often, submitting bug reports and sometimes answering questions from other users on their bulletin board system, a type of online service that many of us engaged with before the Internet became a thing.
In 1991, my wish came true and I worked for Blazie Engineering primarily doing tech support as well as writing some of the user documentation, software beta testing and continuing to answer users’ questions on the BBS, later doing so on the first Blazie mailing list. Sounds remarkably like the job that I have now. 😀 Even in those early days, I wasn’t looking enough at the big picture. I didn’t view that role as the potential start of a career. I was a lot younger then and pretty much saw it as a cool job to have, which I admit it was. However, it did launch my career in this field, for which I will always be grateful to Deane and Bryan Blazie for making the decision to hire a very inexperienced, young and sometimes rather headstrong, starry-eyed kid.
After being one of those who was impacted by layoffs at my previous employer in October of 2023, I eventually started getting more involved with testing the BT Speak and an eventual opportunity opened to make my role with Blazie Technologies more formal, which I gladly accepted. I would like to thank Bryan and Deane Blazie, along with other members of the Blazie family, for giving me this opportunity and allowing me to be a part of an exciting and innovative project. @BTSpeak@TweeseCake.social #BTSpeak davidgoldfield.wordpress.com/2…
Celebrating My First Anniversary Working for Blazie Technologies Today, I celebrate my one year anniversary of working for Blazie Technologies. Truth be told, I had been providing feedback on the B…
how have you found it, David, using what must feel like a very retro bit of kit.
I spent a lot of time in the 1990's on bulletin board systems and have fond memories of many of the things from that era. is the BTSpeak truly useful, day to day? Can you honestly say it's an efficient way of computing in 2025?
Estrenamos la llegada de ACO al fediverso con algo grande. Muy grande.
Mañana presentaremos una denuncia contra Daniel Esteve, líder de Desokupa, por delitos de odio. Hemos recopilado pruebas que demuestran que su actividad en redes sociales se basa en generar, sistemáticamente, odio contra el colectivo de personas migrantes. Y lo hace a través de mentiras y desinformación.
cURL 8.12 Released With Its Rust Hyper Backend Removed
Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its "Hyper" Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code. The cURL 8.12 release is out today with Hyper stripped out... phoronix.com/news/cURL-8.12-Re…
Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its 'Hyper' Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code
Thats a joy to read, been using it since dawn, it's good software. You have no idea how frustrating job interviews were because bill gates pushed the ECDL down our throat and it seemed like Excel, Access, Word were the only things that were valuable knowledge.
@aquarianoak1 I started using it a couple months ago and am impressed with how smoothly it works. I'm recommending it to other writer friends. 2 features I would *like* to see in the word processor: embedding links in words; a comments mode.
@AskPippa Glad you like it! For the features you meant, you can already turn words into links by selecting them and then Insert > Hyperlink. What do you mean by "comments mode"? You can add comments to sections of text too.
I just installed LibreOffice the other day! As ridiculous as it is, it's a pain to set a custom font in Google and Microsoft's line of products so I decided to give your software a spin and it is amazing! Thank you!
I love Libre Office. I used it for a bit when I was still a Mac person, and after switching full time to Linux with Linux Mint, I then used it with my job almost every day for six years.
I found building tools in LO Calc was significantly easier than Excel.
One other point I'd like to make is that, given the current political and Wall Street climate in the U.S., the EU's response through passing the ACI, etc., I think breaking and eliminating dependence upon Microsoft and, in practice, any other American tech corporation, is in national, state, and even city-level security and economic interest.
I think adopting LibreOffice is a good first step, but you also need to switch to Linux, and Germany's own SUSE is an excellent choice.
@James_Steinhaus Text-to-speech is normally a feature provided by your operating system on a global base, and not individual apps. What operating system are you using?
Is this available for mobile android devices, I really want to move away from Microsoft Office, I really hate the constant updates that frequently hamper my work, also unnecessary things that keep slowing down my mobile and take up memory.
just boosting in #dk #dkmastodon … 30,000 PCs are moving from Microsoft Office to #LibreOffice in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. At the recent Univention Summit 2025, we met the people handling the migration
let's GOOOOO - I'm still not buying a german car (I'm not buying a car for the next 10 years) - but .. I am buying some other german quality stuff : knives, maybe a washing machine, go Germany, GOOOO -- P.S. F the AFD
Hopefully someone in government gets that THIS is an answer to US tariffs. Finding (and implementing) free and open alternatives to the money milking machines from overseas hits US economy where it hurts.
@James_Steinhaus Ah, understood. We have very limited resources so we focus on the core office suite components, but you could consider funding a developer to work on this, so that all users benefit: documentfoundation.org/certifi… – Thank you!
LibreOffice Certified Developers LibreOffice Certified Developers are individuals who have proven their ability to master LibreOffice code: to develop new features; provide L3 Support to enterprise users; research and develop solutions to new or unkn…
@EUCommission #EUCommission How much expenditure could be reduced if the European Union decided that administrations should primarily use free software? Only if unavoidable, in individual cases, should the public administration be dependent on expensive, commercial license products. In almost all cases, this is old-fashioned, unnecessary and outdated. #publicmoney 💡 Public Money, Public Code - A campaign for releasing publicly financed software as Free Software. www.publiccode.eu
Because over time i had replaced all proprietary Windows software i used with open source multi-platform software like LibreOffice, moving to Linux recently went like a breeze. Thanks for giving me the freedom of choice for my OS.
@jeanjo As the article says, "The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice."
Вчера впервые за долгое время оказалась в районе Третьяковки. А там - новые элитнейшие ЖК, доминируют над всем районом. Уже построен "Armani", в процессе - "Лаврушенский" и, чуть дальше, "Русские сезоны". Район теперь выглядит незнакомым...
Сейчас прочла у Галины Юзефович о том же: "Не укореняйтесь, ничего не любите, ни к чему не привязывайтесь, оно не важно. Оно не ваше. Это не ваш город. Ваши теплые эмоции, ваши привязанности, ваши представления о норме, ваша школа и ваш троллейбус - все это не стоит гроша ломаного. За вас решат - в большом и в малом." t.me/ryba_lotsman/2409
Мне интересно, что случилось с ограничениями по высотности жилой застройки в центре. Хотя вопрос, конечно, риторический.
Полюбовалась на проекты "реконструкции" цирка на проспекте Вернадского и нового (огромного) небоскреба на месте здания СЭВ в начале Нового Арбата. Испытала бессильную ярость.
@menelion лет 20 назад ещё более-менее соблюдали высотный регламент в центре. Самым ярким нарушителем был ЖК Патриарх. А в последние годы практически официально отказались от ограничений высоты.
J'ai passé le week-end entourée de gens se questionnant sur quitter ou non insta et quel endroit est safe... je peux vous dire que j'ai plus prononcé le mot "Mastodon" ce week-end que le prénom de mon mari (déso mon amour) #MastoPub #humour #Propagande #ViveMasto
Did you catch us at FOSDEM ?! We had a blast and it was great to see so many of the visitors took posters to put up at their local hacker spaces and schools 🚀
If you also want to receive some promo material, please do reach out to our team info!
Daniel makes the curl 8.12.0 release. Shows how a curl release is done. This is the 264th curl release. Shows the scripts, the procedures and the general pro...
Hello, no AI slop this time. I promise!
The current master branch of [libcurl](https://github.com/curl/curl/tree/7e814c8717939393d4436d75f5f0c3ffa98c8c53) contains a vulnerability in...
thank you for writing and publishing security advisory like this. It's always a pleasure to read them. Honest. Detailed. Precise. Thanks! Keep on the great work!
yup, that's huge difference. I kinda got use to check the stress level in the morning, to see how hard I can push during the day. I have to say, that it helps me get through the day and not be exhausted at the end of the day.
Been there two weeks ago as well (the whole family to make it more challenging). Ibuprofen helped me get through the nights (it improved both HR and HRV, and sleep:) and later Olynth. It was quite bad for 5 days (and higher stress during sleep lasted ~1 more week). Hopefully you are allowed to rest:). Get well soon!
Kevin Beaumont
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) | USAGov
www.usa.govKevin Beaumont
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Kevin Beaumont
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Elon announced the US Agency for International Development was shutting down on an X stream, where he called the staff "evil" and a "criminal organisation".
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdjdmx…
USAID in turmoil as Trump and Musk aim to shut down aid agency
Kayla Epstein (BBC News)Kevin Beaumont
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Elon Musk's Enemy, USAID, Was Investigating Starlink Over Its Contracts in Ukraine
Lucas Ropek (Gizmodo)