It’s been a good week, which is a strange sentence to write. So far, no civil war. Trump is no longer in office. Without a doubt, Biden will commit war crimes and further the tendrils of American empire the same as every president, but Trump is out of office. The fight continues.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
The Portland General Defense Committee has written an open letter regarding the monstrously, cruelly bad technology that the county uses for its bail system. It’s a fascinating read because it exposes both the technological and social problems baked into the system that activists have poured tens of thousands of dollars into in the past year.
In this week’s union news, Instacart is laying off its unionized workers, cops arrested peaceful strikers who were fighting for a $1 an hour raise, and Motherboard has a good expose on how union-busting companies collect dossiers on employees.
Finally, I just want to share this paper by Ed Whitfield, a senior fellow at Seed Commons, that describes anticapitalism and how to enrich communities in an accessible, clear way that I found particularly compelling. What Must We Do to be Free? On the Building of Liberated Zones.
Ghetto Symposium: On Freedom and Surplus
Ed Whitfield, who wrote that paper, also gave a short talk about how the nature of surplus and how it can be used to for the benefit of the people and how it hasn’t been.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Nonsense verse with Python and machine learning
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
So much is happening, all at once, that it’s easy for my brain to lose track of it all. Was it really only a week or so ago that people stormed the Capitol? Did 2020 even happen? I do know that someone hacked terabytes of video from Parler and released them, and it’s honestly the first time I’ve heard the pronouns she and her used for a high profile hack. I know that gig workers are being excluded from priority vaccine lists and that Amazon is trying to prevent workers from collective bargaining.
I also know that, well, we’re all preppers now. In this article I lay out what I’ve learned about how to get involved in individual and community preparedness while eschewing both the bunker mentality and the rugged frontiersman mentality.
Ologies: Vaccine Infodemiology (COVID-19 IMMUNITY) with Jessica Malaty Rivera
On this episode host Allie Ward asks questions about how exactly the vaccines work and how distribution is going.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Tea and Anarchy
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
It’s hard writing a weekly newsletter when nothing of note happens. Like this week. I mean, sure, an angry pro-autocratic mob stormed the Capitol building after pushing past a lackluster and inconsistent police presence. Yeah, they had zip ties with them. And a West Virginian lawmaker came along. Oh and an Illinois Congresswoman gave a speech including a Hitler quote outside the Capitol two days earlier.
And of course, Republicans are trying to blame it on Antifa.
But other than that, kind of a slow news week. Sorry everyone!
My Year in Mensa
Jamie Loftus produced one of the funniest and most insightful podcast series I’ve listened to, a four-part series about how she joined Mensa as a joke and about how culture propagates rightwing ideas.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
This talk has been disabled (a talk on accessibility)
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Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
Tabletop roleplaying over Zoom has been a pretty major part of how I’m keeping myself together. So it’s heartening to hear that Wizards of the Coast is working pretty actively to address some of the major racial issues in Dungeons & Dragons. Lots of players have been working against these tropes forever, and it’s wonderful to see that work integrated into the core game.
Most of the other news this week isn’t as positive. We’re in a strange place, a sort of lame duck Covid administration where Covid is able to get away with an awful lot because it feels like it’s almost over. The US hit 20 million cases today. And as much as we wish it would, we know in our hearts that the Biden administration isn’t going to magically fix pretty much any of the problems we’re facing as a society. Certainly, the work to release ICE detainees will continue.
And because technology has two sides, activists have started developing facial recognition software to wield against the police who brutalize people and hide their identities while they do it.
Live Like the World is Dying: Dibs on Fitness for Every Body
It’s actually a strange coincidence that I’m releasing the fitness episode on New Year’s Day, but on the latest episode of my community preparedness podcast, I talk with a trans personal fitness trainer about how to move joyfully in ways that take into account your relationship with your body.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Debugging Diversity in Tech
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
Two of the most anxiety-inducing components of modern life–the pandemic and algorithms with real-world consequences–interacted this week, when Standford Medical Center used software to determine whom among their staff to prioritize for Covid vaccination. The AI prioritized age over exposure risk and remote workers found themselves at the front of the line while frontline workers were not. This is, of course, not the computer’s fault. It’s a design flaw. The kind we need to be far more aware of.
NYC decided it was a better idea to spend millions of dollars on software that catches plagiarism than to continue to hire teachers. So… people who write algorithms should get paid but not professional educators. I’m sure nothing bad will come of that.
Plus, if your curious how the algorithms that run world decided that everyone needed to see assless pajamas this week, here’s a breakdown of how that happened.
Live Like the World is Dying: Walidah Imarisha on Envisioning the Future
On the latest episode of my podcast, I talk with science fiction author, activist, historian, and teacher Walidah Imarisha about how vital it is that we realize we have a future and that we work towards it.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
For those of us who’ve been isolated or are especially vulnerable, vaccines are on our minds. How will the infrastructure be created to vaccinate millions of people? How do we convince people it’s safe–or at least safer than Covid? In one of the best science explainers around, Popular Science goes over exactly how a “cold chain” keeps the Pfizer vaccine cold enough by comparing it to the cold chain that keeps Dippin’ Dots cold enough. Meanwhile, we ought not to forget the union drivers at UPS who are delivering the vaccine to hospitals.
The Teamsters are also trying to get a full disclosure about lobbying efforts from Uber and Lyft. Oh and remember how those companies promised that Prop 22 would prevent price hikes? Nah, they’re hiking prices anyway.
Oh, right, and the DOE got hacked.
Cyber: My First Hack: Emily Crose
On this new series on Cyber, hackers talk about how they got into it. Emily Crose got into it by hacking herself with Back Orifice by accident.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Fun With FOIA
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Things are heating up again in Portland. For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
This week we learned more about Google’s firing of Timnit Gebru, the ethicist, and what it means for the argument that “a seat at the table” is enough. This week, three different podcaster unions performed a work stoppage at Spotify. This week, we’ve learned that Uber Eats lets anyone label their business as black-owned. Cyberpunk isn’t something that happens in 2077. It’s happening now.
Despite how much people claim it pays to be marginalized in the media, publishing continues to be an incredibly white field. Here’s a breakdown of why that is and the money involved.
Oh, and, to no one’s surprise, Baltimore police have been misusing information from spy planes.
Behind the Bastards: The Worst Police Union in History
When I lived in Portland years ago, organizing against the Iraq war, the police were pretty unhinged. Listening to this podcast helped me understand why.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Quantum Tunneling Explained
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
We’re facing a grim winter. I know it hasn’t even left our minds, but it’s worth remembering that we’re at more than 200,000 new cases of Covid per day in the US. Please keep that in mind as we get deeper into the holiday season.
Labor struggle at tech companies–enacted by both white collar and blue collar workers–is one of the most important, least known things happening in the news these days. Spain’s largest union is suing Amazon for spying on workers with Pinkertons. In the US, the National Labor Review Board has filed a complaint against Google. Google, of course, is in the news recently for firing an AI ethicist who pointed out problems.
Cyber: Amazon Hired Pinkertons to Union Bust
On this episode, Lauren Kaori-Gurley talks about who the Pinkertons are and why they’re suddenly back in the news.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
How Niantic switched Pokémon GO to use Envoy
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Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
Amazon has been hiring Pinkertons (a private security company known for the violent suppression of unions in the 19th century) to spy on labor rights groups, which, while evil as hell, shouldn’t be too surprising. They’re spying on environmentalists too, though.
Today, their employees are planning actions in 15 different countries.
Oh, and apparently the way one California sheriff’s department decided to get new iPads was to blackmail an Apple employee into bribing them before he could get his concealed carry permit.
Live Like the World is Dying: Deviant on How to Let Yourself In
Getting more hackers onto my prepping podcast has been a goal for awhile, and this episode I talk with Deviant Ollam about all the keyed-alike systems you might want to get into during a crisis situation.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Just My Type
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
The weather’s turning colder, at least here in the South where I’m typing this, and it’s strange how “there might be a coup in the country with the most powerful military force on the planet” takes a back seat in some of our minds while “there’s a pandemic raging at what is already one of the more lonely times of the year, in which human connection is vital” comes to foreground. At least, that’s how it’s been for me. I hope wherever you are, you’re feeling as safe as you can.
For updates about the Portland protests, Audrey is still maintaining a blog about what’s going on there.
I don’t think I’ve shared Recompiler editor Audrey Eschright’s community preparedness article yet, and this is a terrible shame! This moment of (relative) calm is an excellent time to go over what you have and what you need and how to get ready for whatever life brings.
With the new wave of Covid comes a new wave of tech worker protests, strikes, and other actions, most of which are being led by the low-wage segment of the tech industry such as gig workers and Amazon warehouse employees. It seems like those who work at home have a lot they can learn from the actions of those who have to work in person.
If you were caught up in the recent round of doxxes, or care about those of us who were, or worry you might one day be, it might be worth reading this dox about the proud boy in North Carolina who was involved in the list of 8000+ names and social media profiles that went around rightwing channels last week. It’s a good time to update your security and figure out what you’re doing and not doing well, or to read this guide to how to handle being doxed.
Live Like the World is Dying: Moira on Know Your Rights
As state and especially federal repression continues to crack down on those involved in the uprisings, it’s a good idea to remember all the ways that you can shut up to keep yourself safe. On this episode I talk with movement lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen about how to handle police and federal law enforcement encounters as safely as possible.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
The Cost of Freedom
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Sorry we missed you last week! If you’re in the US, I’m sure you, along with us, were caught up waiting, wondering, what was going to happen with the election. Fortunately, all our troubles are magically fixed, now that Biden won, Trump is conceding, and Biden is a suitably progressive candidate to start solving all our problems! Oh wait, only the first one of those things is true. Still, it’s reassuring that the majority of the US population didn’t vote for outright authoritarianism.
Covid is back on our minds, of course. It never really left, but with its current wild spike and the election sort-of over, it’s really set to take the front seat in our anxieties again. Vaccines are on the horizon. Do they work? Can they be distributed in enough quantity? WIRED talks about those issues in a fairly even-handed way that I appreciate.
Biden is living up to his promise to return the US from its fascist nightmare to its previous neoliberal nightmare and seems to insist on replicating the conditions that produced an authoritarian candidate like Trump. In particular, he’s filling his transition team with execs from companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.
Labor lost in California, with Proposition 22 passing due to an overwhelming propaganda campaign by companies that hire gig workers. And now Uber is plotting how to expand from there.
Live Like the World is Dying: The Basics, pt 1
In the US we’ve won a reprieve, of sorts, on some of the worst-case doomsday scenarios. But things are still positioned to get less stable, not more stable, in the near future. In this episode I talk about my basic understanding of how individual and community preparedness interrelate and how to get started.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Making Envoy Sustainable
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
I love to tell myself that in a week, this will all be over and we’ll have election results. Or, if it’s not over, then at least things might start to get better. Or, at least, if it’s not getting better, we’ll have a sense of that. I love to tell myself, that in a week, I can stop holding my breath and waiting to see what will happen. But we all know that isn’t true. Here’s a map of when we can expect election results for each state.
Yet whoever wins, and however the transition of power goes, movement struggle will continue. All that will change will be appropriate tactics and the likely intensity of that struggle. Either way, it continues to be a good time to learn new skills for survival and protest. If you’re technologically inclined, consider putting that temperament to good use while still learning something new. Here’s a primer from the Indigenous Anarchist Federation about how to use radio to set up communications networks.
Finally, it seems like every week there’s new evidence of the government hacking people’s phones, and here’s this week’s news about it.
Cyber: Talking ‘Culture Warlords’ and the Second Civil War
Host Ben Makuch talks with journalist Talia Lavin about her work investigating the online world of the far right.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Freedom in My Heart and Everywhere: Lessons from a Cyborg Lawyer
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
We’ve known for quite some time that police like to search the phones of people they arrest, including protestors, but I don’t think I’d quite wrapped my head around the massive scale of the problem. This report goes into it all in terrifying detail. Or you can read Wired‘s short version. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection is using data they bought without warrants and won’t even tell Congress what they’re doing with it.
Oh, and turns out the Trump Twitter hack was probably fake.
Live Like the World is Dying: Eepa and Hań on Indigenous Prepping and Field Skills
On this recent episode of my community prepper podcast I talk with two people from the Indigenous Anarchist Federation about what non-colonized approaches to community and individual preparation can look like.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Cloud Native Policy Deep Dive
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
It’s all quite a lot to take in. I personally find myself intentionally skipping some news stories, because my brain is just already so full of doomscroll fatigue. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that the US president admitted, proudly, that he sent US Marshals to assassinate an antifascist. We’ve known this for awhile now, but hearing him admit it is chilling. For a “law and order” president, Trump sure is keen to ignore the law, like how he appointed an extremist to direct the Bureau of Land Management without congressional approval and is somehow just getting away with it.
An app we’ve all got an increasing need for is this one that simplifies the task of writing prisoners in the US, helping navigate the Kafkaesque rules that limit the communications of people who live in cages.
Oh, and while abolishing the police in Minneapolis seems to not actually be happening, at least the city is considering a facial recognition ban.
Behind the Bastards: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible
I’ve been a fan of this podcast for awhile, but this episode, in which host Robert Evans talks with Sofiya Alexandra about the reluctant members of the Nazi party, is particularly relevant and chilling. I recommend listening to both halves of it.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Hacking on Network Service Mesh Dataplane
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
If you want to get a laugh out of the terrifying reality that random right wing men are organizing themselves into terrorist cells over Facebook, you can take a look at what a miserable failure the opsec was on the recent foiled “kidnap a governor” plan. And speaking of opsec, Google is now handing the police information not just about an individual’s search history, but about anyone who has searched a given term. Oh and the IRS is using people’s location data without a warrant. And border control facial recognition ain’t staying at the border.
Even more directly relevant to for many of us, the FBI has worked hard to crack the phones of those arrested at least in Portland.
The Final Straw: Lorax B. Horne on BlueLeaks
Nonbinary journalist Lorax B. Home talks about their work with DDOSecrets and the massive dataleak of police documents.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
I Can Has Linux?
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
]]>Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Breaking news comes faster and faster, and is harder to keep up with, yet it’s hard to see today as anything other than “the day we found out Trump has Covid.” Weeks from now who knows what we’ll look back on today and think. All we know is that several prominent members of the Republican party have tested positive for Covid. We also know that Twitter is not allowing people to pray for Trump’s death on their platform. We know that this year, for many of us, has been categorized by an intense feeling of just… not knowing what is going to happen next. The New York Times lays out some of the specifics about the election if what so many people cannot tweet about comes to pass.
Meanwhile, Amazon workers have walked off the job in protest of the firing of someone who raised safety concerns and Google is coming under fire for potential disability discrimination.
Live Like the World is Dying: Kitty Stryker on disability and prepping
On the latest episode of my prepping podcast, I talk with Kitty Stryker about what it means to prepare for disaster while navigating mobility and mental health concerns.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Hello World
Ian Coldwater talks at Intro Sec Con 2020 offers an introduction to infosec for people who have not felt traditionally welcome in the space.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
There’s some evidence that making fun of conspiracy theorists, and offering rational responses, is more useful in pulling someone out of a conspiracy theory than empathizing with them. Most important, according to this analysis, is that the person who is offering the truth–or ridiculization–is perceived as intelligent and rational by the conspiracy theorist.
Hootsuite signed a $500,000 deal with ICE against the protestations of their workers–many of whom had personally experienced harassment at the hands of ICE. Then Hootsuite lied about the contract.
Oh and in the back of my mind when I read any news at all this week I just keep thinking about how Trump will not commit to a peaceful transferal of power if he loses the election.
Live Like the World is Dying: Mixæl Laufer on open source medical chemistry
On the latest episode of my prepping podcast, I talk with someone from the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective about how you can set up your own wet chemistry microlab to produce life-saving medications.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Introductory Network Vulnerability Scanning
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
“When we don’t plan and prepare from a whole-systems perspective, our societies tend to respond to escalating crises by becoming more militarized to maintain order and control in an environment of escalating chaos.” I usually rewrite little bits of articles in this newsletter, but this opening sentence is so spot-on I don’t want to change a thing. The British military is planning to plow forward, business as usual, in the world’s hotter future.
You may or may not want to know what’s in all this smoke, but, here you go in case you do. There’s a lot, and it’s messy, and it will affect even those of us on the east coast. So if you haven’t already, you might want to look into DIY air filters.
As I write this newsletter, the news broke that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.
Live Like the World is Dying: Kai on Wildland Fire
My prepping podcast is back after a long, apocalypse-induced break. In this episode I talk with my friend Kai who has recently taken some time off tech work to moonlight as a wildland fire fighter.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Identity and Access Management for Newbies
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
You’ve probably noticed that the West Coast of the USA is on fire. You might even have noticed it because the sky is orange, you can’t breathe, or you’ve had to flee your home. There’s no problem that the police state can’t make worse, and evacuated prisoners have been forced into deep overcrowding that is guaranteed to continue the spread of Covid. There’s also no problem that the far fright can’t make worse, and at least one militia checkpoint has been set up to point guns at people fleeing from the fires–because the militia movement is spreading the rumor that antifa is responsible for these fires.
Every time we make a political demand in earnest, we will run across two obstacles: the forces of conservative reaction who seek to preserve the status quo, and the forces of faux-progressive reaction who will seek to co-opt our demands to further repression under a different guise. California, of course, is one of the centers of the latter style of reaction. Activists have been working hard to eliminate cash bail, which affects poor people disproportionately, but lawmakers have offered to replace it with a dystopian crime-prediction algorithm that will not make the world any better.
In a bit of more hopeful news, protestors in Belarus have been using Telegram and VPNs to continue to communicate despite governmental attempts to shut down the internet to quell dissent.
Finally, Cory Doctorow, a friend of Recompiler, is pre-selling his new book Attack Surface in audio and ebook format on Kickstarter because Audible won’t carry it because Doctorow steadfastly refuses to let his work be locked under DRM. Personally, I’ve never met a Doctorow book I didn’t like, so I just preordered the audio version.
Cyber: Inside Amazon’s Spy Campaign Against it’s Own Workers
Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley discusses how Amazon hires spy agencies to keep tabs on their workers.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Talk the talk! Information security jargon
Dorothea Salo at Intro Sec Con 2020 gives a 101 talk about infosec jargon
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Geofencing warrants, a practice by which police gather cell phone data about anyone who was in the vicinity of a crime, is on the rise. It’s increasingly being challenged on fourth amendment grounds, however, as especially in urban environments it is fantastically overbroad in its scope.
Deep dive discussions on protest gear are starting to come out, including these two discussions about helmets and gas masks & goggles from CrimethInc or these explainers about individual first aid kits (IFAKs) and ballistic protection from the Indigenous Anarchist Federation.
Amazon continues to build its own little internal police state, and new documents prove that the company spies on the private Facebook groups frequented by its employees.
Finally, Recompiler’s own Audrey Eschright has a new blogpost discussing the changing face of individual and community preparedness in times of civil unrest.
This Is America #124: Report from Kenosha & Kim Kelly on Sports Strike
Journalist Kim Kelly talks about the importance of the recent wildcat sports strike.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Advanced Persistence Threats: The Future of Kubernetes Attacks
Ian Coldwater and Brad Geesaman at RSA Conference 2020 discuss the current landscape of Kubernetes and its vulnerabilities.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Bias can’t be written out of algorithms through a simple software update, Janus Rose argues in this article. Even if facial recognition becomes more accurate at recognizing non-white faces, that doesn’t take away the fundamental racism of the larger social system that the AI has been deployed within.
Short explainer slideshows on Instagram have become vital in spreading information about protest safety, such as this 10-slide explainer on helmets put up by Black Powder Press or this guide to respirators and filters by Frontline Medics.
This week we saw wildcat strikes from the WNBA, the NBA, and MLB (women’s basketball, men’s basketball, and men’s baseball respectively, for those who don’t follow sports) in protest of the ongoing murder of Black people at the hands of the police. This might be the most important labor action ever taken by major league sports players in US history, and it’s vital to understanding how all of us, as workers, have the power not only to fight for better conditions for ourselves, but to fight for a better society.
The Final Straw: We Need To Spread This Freely: JN On Hong Kong Under National Security Law
An anarchist activist who works with the anticolonial Leftist Hong Konger platform Lausan talks about the ongoing struggle there.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Stop the Bleed Tourniquet Training
In light of the current wave of gun violence against protestors, here’s a short video explaining the basics of stopping bleeding, so that you as a bystander can save someone’s life before help arrives.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
This week Facebook changed its policies in a dangerous way that could have disastrous long term effects: they decided to ban large numbers of anarchist news sources and publishers, such as the venerable publisher CrimethInc and the news site It’s Going Down. Anarchists, as some of the Leftists who envision the most sweeping change to society, have served for a hundred and fifty years as a sort of canary in a birdcage when it comes to political repression.
For an example of the kind of essential work done by It’s Going Down, here is a tactical and strategic analysis of protests in a small city, from a Black anarchist perspective. These are the kinds of stories that Facebook is trying to repress.
Teachers in Detroit have developed a novel form of labor protest: a safety strike. If their safety protocol demands are not met, they will not teach in-person, but only online. 91% of teachers agreed to the strike.
The Final Straw: RVA In The Uprising with L and Buzz
Activists from Richmond, Virginia talk about their anti-repression work during the uprising.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Apply for Grants to Fund Open Source Work
Recompiler favorite Sumana Harihareswara at PyOhio 2020 explains how to get money for your projects.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Here’s a firsthand account of the more-successful-than-usual rowdy protest in Bend, Oregon that stopped ICE buses for hours. The protestors first blocked buses with their bodies and then struggled against police to keep them from kidnapping a man into the forest. They didn’t succeed in those goals. Yet ICE showed up with two large buses and only left with two people they’d captured.
The upcoming election fraud (we all know it’s coming, no use fooling ourselves) is almost Too Much Problem to wrap our heads around, but wrap our heads around it we must. For example, you can read this account of how the USPS is deactivating and often destroying mail sorting machines ahead of the election.
In California, judges have denied Uber and Lyft a delay in classifying their employees as employees. Across Latin America, thousands and thousands of rideshare drivers are striking.
POPcast: Crafting Tech Talks and Pie with Ian Coldwater
One of my favorite speakers, Ian Coldwater, talks how she designs the tech talks she gives.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
What would Beyonce Do? A Privacy Model
At BSides Orlando, Katrina Roberts mixes pop culture and information security, using Beyonce as an example of someone who does a remarkable job of keep her private life private.
SeaGL has an open call for proposals until August 19.
SeaGL, Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2020, November 13-14, held online.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
In other news I can’t find a source for, my twitter and instagram feed is reporting that police around the country, particularly in Eugene, Oregon, have been using IMSI catchers (stingrays) to determine who was at protests. There are more and more reports of police arresting people at home later. I haven’t found confirmation of the use of IMSI catching specifically for these arrests, and have found more evidence of them using social media posts and livestreams to catch people, but we do know they’ve been using IMSI catchers more broadly. Be careful out there!
This concise guide to leafblowers and balloons and shields and angle grinders and all the tools and tactics being developed in Portland (and Hong Kong, and elsewhere) is probably the single most informative thing I’ve read this week.
As always in 2020, there’s so much going on, all at once, that it’s hard to keep up. But Trump has declared a national emergency over the social media app TikTok, a move that seems designed to position the US to have similar internet restrictions as, you know, China. A large umbrella company has paid billions of dollars for all our DNA by buying Ancestry.com, which honestly probably won’t actually amount to anything dystopian but sounds scary. Big tech’s anti-trust case has gotten surprising support from some Republicans. Oh and those Atomwaffen Nazi murderers have rebranded themselves as the National Socialist Order.
The Final Straw: Keep Calm and Get Prepared: A Look Into Month 3 and Beyond of the Portland Uprising with the Portland GDC
In this episode, William Goodenough sits down with two folks who are on the ground in Portland with the General Defense Committee.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Why Aren’t There More Black People In Oregon: A Hidden History
Walidah Imarisha presents the Black history of Oregon in 2014, providing important context to understand the social struggle happening there now.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Journalists at Motherboard were able to obtain footage from a police spy plane that monitored George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. While the footage that the State Patrol chose to release does not include protests themselves, it does reveal quite a bit about the capabilities of just one of the planes that has been spying on us this summer.
The US government claims that the mastermind behind the Twitter hack was a 17-year-old from Florida. Two others have been arrested as well. As if in a badly scripted movie, the State made a statement about how they were going to find and catch all the nefarious hackers.
As my own country devolves into police riots and authoritarianism, countered by brave demonstrators, I find myself drawn to look again at Hong Kong. The fact that China is seeking the extradition of 6 pro-democracy demonstrators is on my mind. Fortunately, many countries have now canceled their extradition treaties with China in wake of this.
This is America #122: Report from DC; Mapping the Strategy of the DHS
In this episode, a DC-based anarchist of color talks at length about what’s been going on in DC outside the white house.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
How To Write Tech Documentation That Will Save Your Career
Carmen Chung talks at RubyConf AU 2020 about just how crucial tech documentation can be
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Some of the editors of Recompiler (not me, I’m just a newsletter-writer) have started a blog to track the Portland protests and it’s one of the best resources I’ve seen to keep up with what’s going on, with timelines of each night and a roundup of news.
Trump carried through on his promise to invade the United States, and as expected the “State’s Rights” crowd is silent on the issue. No one else is silent about it though, and this weekend, protestors all over the US and the world are responding to a call for solidarity actions.
If you want to lose yourself in Covid numbers, there’s an interactive tool that lets you calculate the likelihood of deaths in your county.
If you want something nicer, here’s a transcript (and a short video, if you want) of Richard Pryor, in 1977, perfectly laying out exactly why capitalism promotes racism and why “getting into positions of power” within existing structures to solve that problem is a trap.
Oh, and: cops in Minnesota are using drones to look for topless women to ticket.
Worst Year Ever: Moms Vs. The Feds, The Service Industry Vs. The Virus
I’m stuck at home, in my small quiet town, and FOMO is eating me up, so I’m consuming as much reporting about what’s going on in Portland as I can. The conflict between the people, the city government, and the Feds is endlessly fascinating. So here’s some reporting and analysis from on the ground.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Start your own engineering apprenticeship program
Elle Meredith talks at the RubyConf AU 2020 about how companies can help their junior developers become senior developers.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
I can’t be the only one who feels like time has lost a lot of meaning. So much happens in a week, yet nothing seems to change.
If you haven’t yet, check out Recompiler’s Reasons and Strategies for Avoiding Obsolete Terms, which lays out exactly why and how to replace “master/slave” in programming with “primary/replica,” written by Erin Grace. It’s an excerpt from the book The Responsible Communication Style Guide Supplement on Python.
The big tech news of the week is of course the hacking of numerous high-profile accounts, which were used to solicit bitcoin. (See the header image.) The hackers have made at least $100,000 as a result. The fallout, though, has been fascinating. Twitter wound up disabling all verified accounts from tweeting for awhile, which of course had interesting social ramifications. And Senator Ron Wydon is back to pushing Twitter to use end-to-end encryption for its direct messages, which considering the current fight to ban end-to-end, is hopeful.
Unfortunately, the more important news from a US point of view is that the white house is ordering hospitals to make Covid data unavailable to the public. It seems hard to overstate how big of a problem this is, since Trump has said multiple times that he wants the reported numbers of cases to be lower so that he looks better.
Every week for the past four years there’s been something in the US that you can point to and say “this is a sign of fascism,” but this week was particularly dire from that point of view. Federal police in Portland, Oregon have been attacking protestors, and in at least one instance, unmarked federal police kidnapped a man to question him without giving him any indication as to whether or not what happened was a legal arrest.
Behind the Police: Slavery, Mass Murder and the Birth of American Policing
I prefer to listen to podcasts that aren’t just two men talking, but occasionally there is content important and engaging enough that I make an exception. This whole series, Behind the Police, is a spinoff of journalist Robert Evans’ Behind the Bastards podcast, and in this episode he talks with hip hop artist Propaganda about the origin of American policing, including their unbroken connection to slave patrols in the South.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Inclusiveness – It’s In Your Hands
Adel Smee talks at the RubyConf AU 2020 about why diverse teams are effective teams.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
It hasn’t been an optimistic week to live in the US. It’s hard not to look around, a bit desperately, at all the closed borders and open bars. It’s hard to not look at how every other developed nation has handled covid in comparison to us. Still, the fight continues, and we’ve made social gains in these past two months I never thought we’d see.
If you haven’t yet, check out Recompiler’s Reasons and Strategies for Avoiding Obsolete Terms, which lays out exactly why and how to replace “master/slave” in programming with “primary/replica,” written by Erin Grace. It’s an excerpt from the book The Responsible Communication Style Guide Supplement on Python.
I don’t know if I can point to a single, clearer condemnation of capitalism than this article about the network of hackers who illegally repair ventilators. A few months ago we covered the “all in it together” spirit that had several manufacturers open up their intellectual property, but it clearly wasn’t enough, and we have to break laws and TOSs to save lives.
(Jason Koebler for Vice)
I’ve been as guilty as anyone of spreading concern about the use of police drones at protests, but ironically, with where the technology is at currently, the fear of police drones is probably worse for our movements than the drones themselves. One journalist investigating the matter couldn’t find a single instance of successful drone-assisted facial recognition at a demonstration and also points out that the civilian drones available to most police departments have such short battery lives that you could likely wait under an awning or a tree for half an hour to outlast your pursuit.
(Faine Greenwood for Slate)
If you’re quarantined in a place without easy access to internet and are reliant on a tethered cell phone connection, you might be running into the problem of hotspot throttling. In which case, you might be interested to know the means by which your cell service provider determines what traffic is coming from your phone and what is coming from your tethered computer. Obviously, don’t do anything that might violate your TOS!
Gadget Lab: I Can’t Stop Doomscrolling
Wired senior editor Angela Watercutter joins the podcast hosts to talk about why we scroll endlessly through bad news on social media.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
This Talk Has Been Disabled
Dawn Collett talks at the February 2020 Melbourne Ruby Meetup about accessibility advocacy
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Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Last week I scaled the side of my house to put up a new antenna, and my rural internet is all the richer for it. Now it’s even easier to doomscroll my way through the slow apocalypse!
If you haven’t yet, check out Recompiler’s Reasons and Strategies for Avoiding Obsolete Terms, which lays out exactly why and how to replace “master/slave” in programming with “primary/replica,” written by Erin Grace. It’s an excerpt from the book The Responsible Communication Style Guide Supplement on Python.
Tech isn’t neutral, of course. It’s built with intentions, or prejudices, in mind. But it’s still being used by both (all?) sides of the current uprising in the states. A tech company released a “demographics report” on 17,000 protestors they tracked surreptitiously, with no accountability about whom they might sell that information to. And Arizona cops used drones to target protestors for arrest. On the other hand, activists are beaming free wifi to protestors at the NYC city hall occupation. Even more promising, SeaGlass is a system designed to track IMSI-catchers (the notorious “stingrays” used by police to intercept phone data) and its developers are working with ridesharing drivers to better map out police surveillance.
In the US, the measly protections and handouts given to people to help them stay at home during the pandemic are starting to run out even as COVID continues to ramp up. An eviction wave looms, unemployment benefits are ending, and ISPs are reinstating the data caps they dropped to help people stay sheltered. Oh, and, proving the US not only doesn’t know how to handle a pandemic, but is also run by selfish monsters, the US has bought up the world’s supply of remdesivir, a life-saving drug for those with COVID.
Worst Year Ever Talks Antifa With a Lawyer
Maybe, like me, you got a little bit worried when the President of the largest military force in the world declared “antifa” a domestic terrorist group. Can he do that? I mean, yes, he can say that, because he can say anything he wants. It’s not legally binding, but that doesn’t always matter. Host Robert Evans talks to the amazingly talented movement lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen about exactly what the announcement does and doesn’t mean.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Decoding bias and narrative in competitive video games
Kim-Adeline Miguel talks at PyCon 2020 about her work using python to understand the bias in coverage of Overwatch.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
As June comes to a close, the pandemic is ramping up in the United States even as it begins to wane throughout much of the rest of the world, and a lot of us here are looking enviously at countries with socialized healthcare and reasonable cultural ideas around social responsibility and science. Yet the uprising continues, and it continues to, basically, put bricks through the overton window, so there’s some room for hope still. In the meantime, if you haven’t, check out Recompiler’s Reasons and Strategies for Avoiding Obsolete Terms, which lays out exactly why and how to replace “master/slave” in programming with “primary/replica,” written by Erin Grace. It’s an excerpt from the book The Responsible Communication Style Guide Supplement on Python.
Edited to add a call for talk proposals, deadline July 5: PyGotham TV is the online version of NYC’s annual Python conference. It will take place this October 2nd and 3rd. Registration is free. PyGotham is an eclectic conference that covers policy, culture, and art, along with standard tech and Python topics. Our entire conference will have ASL interpretation and captioning. The call for talk proposals is open now through July 5, and we’d love to receive submissions from Recompiler readers! You could propose an infomercial, a talk show, a comedy routine, a sitcom, or just a regular tech talk about Python or any technology subject that interests you.
There’s been a lot of discussion this week about the culpability of big tech in the evils of the criminal justice system, and some are making the case that in addition to abolishing the police and prisons, it’s time to abolish big tech.
(Edward Ongweso Jr, for Motherboard)
The federal government is considering a law that would ban federal law enforcement from using facial recognition software. The bill, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020, comes after a high profile case drew attention to the racist nature of this type of dystopian policing.
(Kevin Truong, for Motherboard)
On the other hand, Congress is considering a law to functionally destroy end-to-end encryption by insisting on governmental access. The bill could fundamentally change how we interact with technology if it’s passed and enforced.
(Andrew Crocker, for the EFF)
Ologies: BlackAFinSTEM with various Ologists
In this special episode of Ologies, Allie Ward talks to thirty different Black ologists about all kinds of things.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Kubernetes Security
Ian Coldwater at the Minneapolis DevOps Meetup 2019 talks about, well, Kubernetes security.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Happy Juneteenth! This week the Recompiler is excited to release Reasons and Strategies for Avoiding Obsolete Terms, which lays out exactly why and how to replace “master/slave” in programming with “primary/replica,” written by Erin Grace. It’s an excerpt from the book The Responsible Communication Style Guide Supplement on Python.
This year Juneteenth exploded out into mainstream, non-Black consciousness. The holiday has been celebrated for over 150 years and marks when enslaved people in Texas were finally told they were free. Wired has an interesting exploration of exactly how the holiday went viral in 2020.
Today, to celebrate Juneteenth and demonstration the power of the working class, 38,000 dockworkers are shutting down all 29 of the US’s ports on the West Coast. The action was called by the International Warehouse and Longshore Union, the ILWU.
Sociology professor Simone Browne tracks the surveillance of Black people and this week Browne broke down exactly why Big Tech’s overtures towards racial equality ring so hollow.
Bandcamp is donating its share of proceeds today to the NAACP, so today is a perfect day to buy music from Black musicians. Blackbandcamp.info maintains a directory if you’d like to explore new artists.
The Final Straw: “Every Day!”: A View on the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
The Final Straw talks with a Black anarchist who grew up near Capitol Hill in Seattle about the autonomous protest that has sprung up, called either the CHAZ or CHOP depending on who you ask. He discusses the history of Seattle radicalism and occupation as well as the specific groundwork that was laid to allow for the space to form. He also touches on the ways in which the Black community is not monolithic and how people can be deceived as a result.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Successfully Onboarding a Junior Engineer in Three Steps
Emily Giurleo at RailsConf 2020 couch edition talks about why onboarding shouldn’t be an afterthought.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
These days I’m not certain if I’m reading the news or a sourcebook for Shadowrun. The wild thing for me personally though is, I’m so used to us losing all the time it’s hard to really wrap my head around the precipice we stand on, looking down at possibly… winning. Everyone is going to define “winning” differently and that’s for the best, but statues are coming down and cities are considering disbanding the police altogether and seemingly overnight huge swathes of people have woken up to the fact that some problems can’t be solved by patching the software. Some problems are built into the operating system as features and it’s time for a whole new platform.
Microsoft, IBM, and even Amazon have decided to stop selling police facial recognition software to police. Amazon is only putting a one-year moratorium on such sales, presumably to see which way the wind blows so they end up on the right side of history no matter what. IBM is no longer going to develop such software at all until issues around its inherent racial bias can be addressed. Motherboard has offered a full round-up of responses from 43 facial recognition software developers about the issue.
The latest issue of the Tech Worker’s Coalition offers personal statements from various black tech workers. “[I] want this movement to be more than a moment, more than a well-written email. Beyond book clubs and Slack chats, I also don’t want to be afraid to call out the symbiosis between racism and capitalism. It’s so easy for me to share info about empathetic listening, but what about sharing a passionate defense of looting?”
The Plug has compiled a spreadsheet of tech company statements about the uprising. Snapchat decided to stop letting Donald Trump’s calls for violence be featured on the platform. A co-founder of Reddit stepped down, insisting that he be replaced by a black candidate. Thousands of scientists went on strike for Black lives this week. Microsoft employees are demanding that the company cut ties with the Seattle police.
A decent-sized chunk of Seattle has been liberated from police and the national guard and is currently being held as an autonomous zone by residents and protestors sick of the violence they’ve experienced. Here’s an interview with a participant.
Some audio engineers built a DIY-able prototype of an anti-LRAD shield, in case you’re feeling crafty. And it’s probably worth knowing that the SPLC maintains a map of racist monuments across the country.
From an opsec point of view, Twitter has made changes that reduce the ability to remain anonymous on the site, and Tails was recently compromised with a zero-day that Facebook hired a company to discover. (Serious content warning for the article, which describes the tactics and repeats the words of a sexual predator.)
The Final Straw: Hotel Sanctuary in MPLS
The Final Straw talks with Rosemary, an organizer in Minneapolis, about the former Sheraton that was liberated and turned into a sanctuary for houseless people during the uprising.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Why we Worry About all the Wrong Things
Hilary Stohs-Krause at RailsConf 2020 couch edition talks about anxiety, mental health, and why humans are so bad at threat analysis.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Last week I was talking about how Trump had declared war on Twitter and I was being a bit hyperbolic. This week he’s declared war on the American people and I’m not being so hyperbolic. He’s threatening that he will use federal troops whether states approve or not.
There isn’t a lot of middle ground left, and various platforms are busy making their positions clear. Zoom has committed publicly to working with law enforcement. They have announced they are not seeking end-to-end encryption for their free users so that governments may more easily monitor people’s communications. Slack, on the other hand, has stated they support Black Lives Matter and have taken the small but tangible step of removing a three-year-old post on their blog that taught law enforcement how to use their platform.
Techies are getting in on it too, of course. Hackers have been jamming police scanner signals in Chicago by playing “Fuck the Police” and “Chocolate Rain,” or in NYC “Breaking the Law.” An anonymous developer has made an app to help people email their councilmembers about the need to defund police departments.
My sleepy mountain town made international news when the local police destroyed a medical triage area set up for the largely-peaceful protests. After intense public pressure, the police department apologized and said they should have stolen the equipment instead of destroying it. Which serves as a convenient little parable about broader patterns of how hard it is to hold police accountable in the USA. Oh and nationally, cops seized tens of thousands of dollars of anti-covid masks from the mail because they might be used by demonstrators to not catch or spread disease.
Behind the Bastards: The Man Who Teaches Our Cops To Kill
Host Robert Evans is joined by Jack O’Brien to discuss the pseudoscience peddled by David Grossman, inventor of “killology” and probably the single most influential police trainer in US history.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Keynote: Technically, a Talk by Eileen Uchitelle
Eileen Uchitelle at RailsConf 2020 talks about Rails connection management.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
It all kind of happens at once, doesn’t it? Last week I was futzing around trying to get solar power at home and thinking abstractly about what kinds of reasons are worth leaving quarantine for. This week… well things are happening. The right wing has lost its short-lived monopoly on street protest.
George Floyd. Regis Korchinski-Paquet. Tony McDade.
Protests are sweeping the country. A police station in Minneapolis was destroyed after the police retreated, after they used up all their ammunition on protestors outside. The border patrol is flying a predator drone, used to surveil and kill people overseas, over the city. City bus drivers are refusing to drive arrested protestors to jail.
As a white American, I have no interest in judging the tactics used by demonstrators and no interest in directing them either. A friend of mine, though, told me they were going to their first militant street demonstration and I compiled advice for them about how to stay safe and effective in the streets, which someone on twitter unrolled.
Oh, and somewhere in all of this Trump started a war on social media because Twitter decided to inform Americans he was lying to them.
The Radical AI: Robot Rights? Exploring Algorithmic Colonization with Abeba Birhane
PhD candidate in cognitive science Abeba Birhane joins the hosts to talk about robot rights and the implications of emerging technologies on colonized terrain like Africa.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Deeper Understanding & Better Communication through Art
Anna Rankin at RailsConf Couch 2020 talks about how visual art helps technologists deepen their understanding of subjects and allows them to communicate ideas.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Another week! Maybe things are opening up where you’re at, maybe they’re not. Maybe you’re itching to carefully go interact with the world, maybe you take one look at the actual numbers and say nope. Myself, still in this cabin! Fixed and broke my solar again. Turns out you shouldn’t use butt end connectors to join 4ga wire and 10ga wire. Also? Turns out propane regulators on camp stoves aren’t really designed to hold back a 20lbs tank’s worth of pressure indefinitely. But I’m okay and everything is on the mend.
We’re settling into a new normal, and of course the surveillance state is rushing to catch up to the changes. Companies are training AI to recognize faces despite masks, and our masked selfies are getting used for the job.
Contact tracing seems to sit on the horizon as always. Privacy concerns have been paramount, of course, but the success of an app also depend on a belief that the app is effective. Thanks to some governments’ lackluster testing, the concept of a contact tracing app might not catch on, which of course, only minimizes its efficacy further.
The uncomfortable merging of police and military in the US continue, and new documents reveal that police used military surveillance tech for their operations against striking UC Santa Cruz workers last year. Police militarizing to act against labor organizing has a long history of going very badly for everyone.
Ologies: Architectural Technology (COMPUTER PROGRAMMING) with Iddris Sandu
It’s no secret that I love Ologies and I’d listen to Alie Ward interview more or less anyone, but on this episode she talks about computer programming.
Oh, and The Tolkien Experience Podcast interviewed me about my experience as an artist who draws on the works of Tolkien so if you want to hear me rant about his xenophobia and what we can still get from Lord of the Rings, you can do so.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Achieving Inclusivity Through Remote Work
Jameson Hampton at RailsConf Couch 2020 talks about how remote work enables a more diverse workforce and the advantages that entails.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Whenever I hear people making fun of how every ad starts “in these uncertain times…” I think about my little introduction blurbs to this newsletter and cringe a little. But here we are! Another week! Of uncertain times! Today I broke my solar setup (for those of you following along) by forgetting to calculate the amps OUT of the charge controller, tripping a cheap breaker, and the breaker… broke. The $14 part brought my $2000 setup to a standstill. I’ll have it fixed soon. But I feel like there’s a lesson in there. About how huge, powerful things can be broken if targeted correctly.
This week wasn’t short on news, from Zoom buying Keybase to the Senate voting to allow the FBI to view your web browsing data without a warrant. I’m particularly fascinated about how all of the coverage of Chinese hackers trying to steal vaccine IP is being presented as if that is an unreasonable thing for those hackers to want access to. Or rather, I’m baffled that information like that would need to be stolen in the first place. It should be given.
Naomi Klein weighed in on the tech dystopia we’re marching towards, about how tech giants are leveraging the pandemic for the private takeover of public services. I didn’t find myself agreeing with everything she has to say, but frankly, as discussion about COVID becomes more and more polarized politically, I appreciated her progressive voice being critical of some of what seems to be coming.
There are a lot of discussions happening right now about privacy and human rights. About ethics, about government. One of the more fascinating and divisive discussions is happening around the implementation of contact tracing apps, as this interview with an ethicist gets into. Personally, I think the problem is that we live in a system that has in no way earned our trust. They haven’t earned our trust in terms of how they handle our data, nor in terms of how they handle the pandemic. Still, we want to keep ourselves and our communities safe. It’s complicated. We have to let it be complicated.
The Final Straw: Digital Security Tools for Organizing with the CLDC
Continuing from the episode I posted a link to last week, Civil Liberty Defense Center activists Cora Borradaile and Michele Gretes go further into all kinds of digital security tools, from what’s wrong with PGP to the threat modeling one should consider with your VPN and email provider.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Blank Page Panic! Creating Confidence with Test Driven … by
Elayne Juten at RailsConf 2020 talks about how to get past the blank page
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
I hope you’re all healthy and happy, wherever you are. I’m sitting in a cabin listening to the rain and birds, wishing I had better internet connectivity but glad for what I do have. Like this fresh loaf of sourdough a neighbor baked for me.
May 5th was the national day of awareness for missing and murdered indigenous women here in the United States. The epidemic continues, and official data continues to be sparsely available. On some reservations, women are murdered at a rate ten times the national average.
The EFF has released a Creative Commons ebook called EFF’s Guide to Digital Rights and the Pandemic. It’s available for free or for donation, and the five sections are Surveillance, Free Speech, Government Transparency, Innovation, and Living More Online.
The struggle at Amazon continues this week as workers plan on delivering thousands of petitions at the homes of Bezos and Carney. And Tim Bray, a vice president, quit in disgust at the firing of organizing workers, marking one of the highest-profile employees to protest the working conditions.
The Final Straw: Tracking Technology and Food Distro in Pandemic
Civil Liberty Defense Center activists Cora Borradaile and Michele Gretes discuss contact tracing apps.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Debugging: Techniques for Uncertain Times
Chelsea Troy at RailsConf 2020 discusses how a debugging mindset is useful not just for coding but for adapting to the current crisis.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Happy May Day! Well, day-after-May-Day. I spent my May 1st installing 400 more watts of solar panels, moving my input voltage to 24v from 12v. Hopefully this will give me enough power to get back to work! It’s an odd time to try to celebrate the coming of spring and the international labor holiday, as the US considers re-opening while the pandemic continues to spread.
May Day protesters had to get creative this year, and across the country rent strikers and others put on raucous, celebratory car parades. Of course, while right-wingers storming government building with rifles is apparently encouraged, driving slowly as a leftist or progressive is criminalized and 22 people were arrested in Austin during a May Day rent strike demonstration.
Yesterday saw one of the widest and potentially-impactful strikes in living memory in the US, as workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, Target, and other companies went on strike demanding hazard pay and safer working conditions. Better to just hear it from the workers themselves why they struck. Reports haven’t yet come out about the impact the protests, but we should know soon.
On the other end of the spectrum, the re-open protests are a bizarre phenomena, easy to make fun of as one part astroturf and one part LARP. Unfortunately, the propaganda they spread is clever: someone who is unable to pay their rent or meet their basic needs could easily be swayed by the argument that it is worth risking their lives to continue to work. But perpetuating the status quo that has them one paycheck from homelessness is not the answer. Demanding and creating a better world is.
Ologies: Gastroegyptology (BREAD BAKING) with Seamus Blackley
Okay I listened to a lot of doom and gloom on podcasts this week but I also spent an hour happily listening to someone explain sourdough cultures and baking and how to culture yeast from ancient artifacts, and that was absolutely worth it.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
A11y First and Everyone Wins
Ava Wroten speaks at Virtual EmberConf 2020 to tell a success story about how by focusing on accessibility, she was able to help create a better product for everyone.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Sorry this week’s newsletter is a bit late! My life has become an interesting and unplanned experiment in off-grid living, and nearly a week without sunshine left me unable to access to my computer. I hope wherever you’re reading this, you’re doing the best you can, mentally and physically. We’ve stepped into an odd sort of routine and status quo of late: Trump says horrible things, causing people to die, while we learn how to adopt to isolated life and dream of ways to restart our economy to maybe be better this time.
I grew up a lot more comfortable with the idea of building a computer than growing food, but times are changing. Kim Kelly breaks down the basics of what you need to get started gardening during this pandemic, from starting seeds to raised beds to sunlight.
One of the most frustrating parts of the fight against COVID continues to be intellectual property restrictions. After enormous pressure from PIRGs and state governments, multiple ventilator manufacturers are finally making it easier for people to access repair manuals for their machines.
As dire as everything seems, especially in places where the government seems incapable or unwilling to do anything to help its people, it’s hard to remember that the most specialized minds of the world are working on this day and night. Slowing the spread gives those people the time they need to do their work.
Cyber: How Amazon Has Continued to Exploit Workers During the Pandemic
On this episode, Lauren Kaori Gurley of Motherboard talks about how workers are being exploited by the richest man in the world.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
10X your teamwork through pair programming
Selena Small and Michael Milewski talk at RubyConf AU 2020 about how to get started with pair programming.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on, and sometimes it’s not even healthy to. For myself, I’ve been holed up in my cabin in the woods, trying frantically to make it sustain me full time–I’m spending more time reading about solar charge controllers and propane regulators than COVID, at least when I can help it. I hope you’ve been able to find what works for you.
Protests to force the economy to re-open have sprung up all around the country, largely led by rightwing interests that prioritize economic health over physical health. Trump is cheering on these armed protestors, calling for them to “liberate” states controlled by democrats. Some of these protests are blocking access to hospitals. The even-further-Right is continuing its tactic of accelerationism and yet another racist was arrested for trying to cause mass fatalities–this time trying, but failing, to firebomb a Jewish assisted living facility.
In the meantime, frontline workers at grocery stores and other retail outlets continue to be underpaid and under-protected. Instacart’s promise to its workers to provide them with PPE seems to be largely a PR move and hasn’t led to tangible results.
One of the more fascinating things to watch is how the cyberpunk promise/threat of corporate rule is moving forward in this pandemic as governments fail to meet people’s needs. Amazon is building its own testing facilities. Apple and Google might be the only entities capable of rolling out COVID contact tracing–for better or worse.
Worst Year Ever: The History and Possible Future of Rent Strikes
On this episode, the multiple hosts talk about the economic implications of rent striking, of how it is most effectively organized, and who exactly are the landlords in the USA.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Your Tests Lack Vision: Adding Eyes to Your Automation Framework
Angie Jones at JSConf Hawaii 2020 goes over what we miss out on when we entirely rely on automation for regression testing.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Every day feels like a week, yet at the end of every week it feels like so little has changed. A lot of hope fled from the world in the past few days, when the last progressive candidate gave up in the US. I’ve found it useful for me to list out and focus on the things that do give me hope, like the blooming of the world outside my door. My list will look different from yours, of course, and that’s okay.
One of the single biggest sources of hope, for me, are the workers–and even businesses–that are willing to drop everything to help us all take care of one another. Now workers at four different General Electric factories are demanding to repurpose their production to make ventilators. Intel has opened up over 72,000 patents under the new Open Covid Pledge, in which owners of intellectual property are releasing their work for the public good for the length of the pandemic. And mutual aid networks (mentioned in this week’s podcast suggestion) are deepening and developing their strategy.
The apocalypse didn’t look like what macho preppers had assumed. It’s not about guns and doing lots of pullups. It’s about care work, baking bread, and managing mental and physical health.
But maybe the single most important fight that’s happening right now, the one that will determine what our world looks like, is the fight against nationalism. We’re watching each country face a global crisis largely alone, and while individuals are increasingly looking to help their neighbors and develop knowledge on a global scale, a lot of nationstates are going the opposite route.
The Final Straw: Seeing the World Elsewhere: Rural Mutual Aid in Appalachia
Apologies for linking to the same podcast series two weeks in a row, and one that isn’t specifically tech-focused. But this is, simply, the best thing I listened to this week. It starts with longterm anarcist prisoner Sean Swain giving a clear talk about how to manage your mental health in isolation. Longterm prisoners are, frankly, the experts in this. No offense to astronauts. From there, host Bursts talks with an organizer who works with a rural mutual aid organization about how some underserved communities are able to take care of one another.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
The Etymology of Programming
Brittany Storoz at JSConf EU 2018 runs through the history of all the strange phrases programmers have developed over the years.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
How’s everyone holding up? I hope you’re able to stay safe and help everyone else stay safe too, while still getting done what needs to be done. I know personally I’m struggling to be useful while maintaining social distance, but I try to remind myself that my main job right now is to not get and therefore spread illness. I’m doing okay at that so far I think!
We could be on the verge of a general strike. Our economic system is failing everyone right now, and there isn’t time to wait for the election to solve some of these fundamental problems. Yet now more than ever, workers are coming to understand that it is their labor that keeps us fed, clothed, and cared for. We can turn that into real power, but only by working together across industries.
(Aaron Gordon, Lauren Kaori Gurley, Edward Ongweso Jr, and Jordan Pearson for Motherboard)
Of course, individual strikes are still an excellent way to win concessions! The Instacart strike, only a single day, led to hazard pay, PPE for the shoppers, and extended access to sick time.
(Chris Mills Rodrigo
Within individual fields it’s important to break down international (and corporate) borders to work together to solve our problems collectively. Just One Big Lab is “the first research and innovation laboratory operating as a distributed, open and massive mobilisation platform for collaborative task solving.” And it’s dedicated to confronting this pandemic. And you can help.
The Final Straw: Doing For Selves: Open Source Supplies and Tenant Organizing
Host Bursts O’Goodness talks with Bill Slavin, a chemist from Indie Lab in Virginia, about open source medical work and then to Julian of Tenants United of Hyde Park and Woodlawn in Chicago about how to organize with your neighbors.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Not Self Taught, But Community Taught
Katrin Kampfrath presents a short talk at the Community Lounge at JSConf EU 2019 about why she’s not “self-taught” but “community-taught.”
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Every week feels like a year right now. I hope you’re doing your best to keep busy and to keep safe. I hope you’re doing your best to help other people keep safe, too, either by helping directly on the frontlines of this or just working your best to not become a vector.
All over the world, people are stepping up to try to tackle this pandemic–except for some specific corporations and politicians, who are really showing the world what they’re actually made of. Fortunately, people are fighting back. Instacart workers have a strike scheduled for Monday, demanding safety protocols. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders are leading a probe into Amazon’s wild misconduct. And Rideshare Drivers United has launched an online tool to help California drivers file complaints against their employers.
Techies are doing the best they can. Individuals and institutions alike are designing personal protective gear made with 3d printers and other rapid prototyping technologies. Individuals have contributed more computing power to the protein-folding simulator Folding@Home than that generated by the several supercomputers IBM has donated to the task. Union workers are working around the clock to produce ventilators.
Throughout it all, though, the USA still has this huge Nazi problem, and one died this week trying to blow up a hospital of COVID patients.
Live Like the World is Dying: Paul on the Autonomous Region of Northern Syria.
No matter what happens, it seems pretty unlikely that the world is going to return to the way it was before all of this. The status quo always seems invincible until it isn’t. Whatever status quo replaces this one won’t be invincible either. In the midst of a societal collapse, millions of people in northern Syria started an experiment in radical, stateless democracy. Years later, it’s still going, despite an ongoing invasion from Turkey. In this episode of the podcast I talk with my friend Paul who recently returned from doing frontline medical work there about what that experiment looks like and what lessons we can draw from it.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
The Art of Code Comments
Sarah Drasner at JSConf Hawaii 2020 gives an entertaining talk about commenting up your code.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Well, it’s a funny time to be alive. Some of us are stuck working at home, an awful lot of us are unemployed, and an awful lot of people are at the frontlines of this crisis, whether serving the sick or serving those who are trying not to get themselves or others sick. But community support and mutual aid projects are well underway and personally I’m blown away by watching so much of the world come together so that we can keep the most vulnerable people in our society safe.
We have mutual aid networks. They’re everywhere now. Here’s a list. When the existing economic model is failing us, it doesn’t mean we can’t take care of one another, directly. I never thought I’d see the day when a US politician would quote the anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, but here we are.
We have online education and entertainment. Musicians and theaters are moving to livestream format, and many many places are making their services free since so many people are in hard economic times right now. Others are still charging, because they themselves are facing hard economic times. Here’s a pole class you can take from home, for example.
Not everyone is acting in good faith, unfortunately. Particularly, the most powerful people are treating this as an opportunity to grab more power. Lowe’s was trying to take advantage of the crisis to boost profits while their competitors were more concerned with public health. Amazon has been refusing to close facilities when employees get the virus, leading to walkouts in NY and Spain. And multiple US politicians are under investigation for selling off their stock just before the crash.
Worst Year Ever: The Reasonable Person’s Guide to Prepping
I spent several hours this week starting to write down a leftist/anarchist/progressive’s introduction to prepping, but I should have realized someone more experienced had already put one together. This podcast goes over the basics of why prepping can be a pro-social thing instead of an antisocial thing and frames it in the context of the current crisis. Highly recommended.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Look What You MIDI Me Do!
Rachel White at JSConf Hawaii 2020 talks about all the things you can do with MIDI controllers.
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
Mutual aid networks are popping up all over at least the US to help people meet the needs that the government and capitalism are failing to meet. This is a master list of US projects currently underway. The basic idea is that people come together to organize grocery delivery to people who can’t leave their residences, financial aid to people suddenly at risk, and community organizing to defend people from eviction and the like.
Slack decided to fire baristas just around the time its employees went remote, and those baristas were able to organize to get 90 day severance to help them through this crisis. Faith in our economic system is crumbling and this is a good time to organize for our needs.
(Lauren Kaori Gurley for Motherboard)
Data caps are starting to go away as more people spend more time online. Afraid of looking like the monsters they usually are, some ISPs are raising or eliminating data caps and more are likely to follow.
(Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch)
Live Like the World is Dying: Smokey on Urban Preparedness and Better Organizing Models
In this week’s episode of my disaster preparedness podcast, I talk with a longtime activist, social worker, and anthropologist about how societies adapt to dramatic change and how with better organizing models we can help make oppressive systems obsolete.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Parsing Parsers
Jenna Zeigen at JSConf Hawaii 2020 talks about what a parser is and how to build one in JavaScript.
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Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Jean Beaufort (CC0 Public Domain)
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
Online discussion about Covid-19 is wildly ableist and ageist and it reveals deep-seated prejudice in our society. If you’re under 50 and reasonably healthy, like I am, you should not turn a blind eye to people who are more directly affected and you still ought to do your part to contain this virus to keep people safe.
(Julia Mastroianni for National Post)
Scientists are crowdsourcing computing power to develop a cure for Covid-19. Folding@home is a program that uses your spare processing power to simulate protein folding, a crucial part of the puzzle of how to stop this coronavirus from infecting humans.
(Matthew Gault for Motherboard)
The current pandemic has cost the convention industry $666 million and rising. Of course, the economic impacts are not nearly as important as the impacts of the disease on vulnerable members of our society.
(Rani Molla and Shirin Ghaffary for Recode)
Live Like the World is Dying: Zoe Martínez on Community Coronavirus Preparedness
In this second episode of my podcast, I talk with a leftist public health professional about who should and shouldn’t self-isolate and how we can protect people collectively during this time of crisis.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Keeping abandoned watches ticking!
Katharine Berry at !!Con West 2019 talks about how when official support of a product stops, the community keeps it running.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
Silicon Valley’s insistence on work/life integration is overtaking work/life balance in every industry. Behind the unlimited vacation days and the foosball tables lies a sinister attempt to force us to be working all of the time.
(Arielle Pardes for Wired)
When algorithms dictate work schedules, life suffers. Seven-day “open availability” is wrecking home lives and leaving us with ruined sleep schedules.
(Kaye Loggins for Motherboard)
The US Department of Justice now has a Denaturalization Section. This is, of course, a bald attempt to strip people of US citizenship and is a remarkably obvious sign of fascism.
(Thom Dunn for Boing Boing)
Live Like the World is Dying: Kitty Stryker on Anarchist Prepping
Well, having one podcast wasn’t enough for me, so I launched a second one. This first episode features a discussion with urban prepper Kitty Stryker on how she prepares for earthquakes or worse.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Cache is King
Molly Struve at RailsConf 2019 talks about how to avoid hitting your database with queries.
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!!Con CFP is open until March 1
NYC, May 9-10
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This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
Kickstarter unionized! I’ve been following this story excitedly for a long time now, both because I’m an artist who has taken advantage of crowdfunding and also because this marks the first successful unionization of white collar workers at a major US tech company. May it be only the beginning!
(Kate Conger and Noam Scheiber for The New York Times)
Organizing and pressure from students has forced UCLA to drop its plan to use facial recognition. Throwing a fuss is a better tactic than people realize.
(Edward Ongweso Jr for Motherboard)
Influencers are having their faces stolen to sell products. Companies in one country are taking faces from people in other countries, without permission or compensation, and it feels like there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
(Emma Grey Ellis for Wired)
We Will Remember Freedom: Pelecanimimus and the Battle for Mosquito Ridge, by Izzy Wasserstein
In the sixth episode of my fiction podcast, a gay Jewish man fighting in the Spanish Civil War recruits dinosaurs to the antifascist cause.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
A Quick Guide to RPC Frameworks
Yulia Oletskaya at Birmingham on Rails 2020 talks about remote procedure calls.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
California police are using license plate readers without any written guidelines about who they do and don’t share the information with. Their database collects hundreds of millions of images of license plates whether or not the car pictured is suspected of any connection to any crime.
(Todd Feathers for Motherboard)
Kickstarter has hired a law firm that specializes in maintaining a “union-free workplace.” In the middle of a unionization drive by their employees, the management has been meeting with lawyers who focus on preventing exactly that.
(Lauren Kaori Gurley for Motherboard)
Media collective Unicorn Riot has released leaked customs investigator manuals. While these manuals are 20-30 years old, they inform current policy and are of interest to any activist who wants to work against ICE.
Software Engineering Unlocked: Done playing Microsoft’s corporate game with Suz Hinton
Past Recompiler contributor Suz Hinton left Microsoft for Stripe and talks about why she did it and how she makes sure that her workplace meets her needs.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
JavaScript: Who, What, Where, Why and Next
Laurie Voss at JSConf EU 2019 goes over the state of JavaScript based on an overview of over 30,000 developers.
Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Issue #11 of the Recompiler is out! This issue highlights how technology is used in and has an impact on our relationships, dating, and family experiences. It includes contributions by Thursday Bram, Jackie Kazil, Courtney Milan, Amelia Abreu, Morgen Bromwell, and Lilly Ryan.
ICE is using commercially-available location data to round people up for arrest and deportation. This includes data derived from weather apps and games.
(Xeni Jardin for BoingBoing)
An artist tricked google maps into recording a traffic jam by dragging a bunch of cell phones around slowly in a cart. Admittedly, I’m particularly drawn to this story because I predicted a hack like this in my story One Star.
(Matthew Gault for Motherboard)
Europe is starting to limit AI-informed predictive policing. The US isn’t. A court in the Netherlands has ruled that overly-invasive software should not be used in government oversight.
(Tom Simonite for Wired)
The Final Straw: Gitdimten Access Point Before The Raid
Indigenous land defenders on unceded territory claimed by British Columbia are being raided and arrested right now. This interview has the voices of three warriors discussing why they are defending the area they are defending and what “unceded” means and doesn’t mean.
This talk is part of our “Favorite Talks” YouTube Playlist. Check it out and subscribe!
Asynchrony: Under the Hood
Shelley Vohr at JSConf EU 2018 gives a concise introduction to the concepts of asynchronous programming.
MetaFilter is hiring a part-time moderator.
Oh, and Recompiler is hiring editors and designers.
Do you know an upcoming conference or CFP that should be included in this newsletter? Email leads to [email protected].
This newsletter compiled by Margaret Killjoy (@magpiekilljoy). Margaret is an author, activist, and musician based in Appalachia. Her most recent book series is the Danielle Cain novella series, which starts with The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.