Simon Brooke

I've just received one of those 'ᴏᴜʀ ᴀᴜᴛᴏᴍᴀᴛᴇᴅ ꜱʏꜱᴛᴇᴍꜱ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ ᴀ ᴍɪɴᴏʀ ɪʀʀᴇɢᴜʟᴀʀɪᴛʏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴀᴄᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ ᴀᴄᴛɪᴠɪᴛʏ. ᴛᴏ ʀᴇꜱᴛᴏʀᴇ ꜰᴜʟʟ ᴠɪsɪʙɪʟɪᴛʏ ᴀɴᴅ ᴀᴄᴄᴇꜱꜱ, ᴘʟᴇᴀꜱᴇ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴠᴇʀɪꜰɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴘʀᴏᴄᴇꜱꜱ.' messages. If you see one of these, it is DEFINITELY a #phishing attack. Mastodon does not have 'automated systems' to do this. You should report it immediately. Edited: and immediately after, I received a second, identical. Looking at the bot activity, it's targetting pro #Palestine activists.

"Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms" -- @pluralistic@mamot.frhttps://pluralistic.net/2026/07/23/drop-a-dime/#privacy-theater

These are human children, damn you, not units of production for your grey and soulless mills and offices. They should be playing, not being assessed, psychologically profiled and assigned to the optimal task to extract the maximum profit from them for your #kleptocrat masters. This is a monstrous, abhorrent, inhuman proposal. #PrimaryEducation #Capitalism Primary schools to be told to identify children at risk of future unemployment | Youth unemployment | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/07/english-primary-schools-to-be-told-to-identify-children-at-risk-of-future-unemployment

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange But this is true of more or less all legal texts. The law is fundamentally a system for enforcing a system of rules designed to benefit rich on the poor. The GPL is much more significant as a moral text than as a legal one. Yes, you can get away with breaching it (or any other agreement) if you're rich enough; but a moral actor will not, and any actor who does is revealing themselves as not a moral actor.

@gbsills@social.vivaldi.net @pluralistic@mamot.fr Slave traders used to make all their money from trading slaves. We banned it. Opium peddlers used to make all their money by getting people addicted to opium. We banned it. Of course, people still sell slaves and people still sell opium -- but not nearly so many. These bans at least partly work. The same could happen to data broking.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.eu @gazaverified@mastodon.ar.al The number of donations made each week is also rising: #Gaza#GazaVerified#GazaGenocide

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.eu @gazaverified@mastodon.ar.al Source code is here: https://git.journeyman.cc/simon/gaza-stats

@nusher@mastodon.scot @Simon318ppm@mastodon.sdf.org @peterbrown@mastodon.scot @ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk Which is why, in Finland, there is only one exam, at the very end of the school career. Exams do not produce well educated children, just stressed and psychologically damaged children. https://careerteachers.co.uk/what-the-uk-education-system-can-learn-from-finland/

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange every provider of software makes the rules for the software they produce. For many of them, it's 'you pay us lots of money, you don't get the source code, you don't get to modify it, if we have a dispute it gets settled in a court of our choosing, oh, and we get to feed all your data to our pet #AI.' If you want any software I've written under that sort of licence I'm open to discussing it.

@sigue@universeodon.com @mdhughes@appdot.net @Ardubal@mastodon.xyz @vnikolov@ieji.de @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io

In some early #Lisp systems I have played with, it was possible but not advisable to rebind both NIL and T.

"The seven areas officially in drought are East Anglia, Hertfordshire and the whole of London, Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, and Wessex (covering Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire)." That's most of England's cereal growing land and a lot of its horticultural land. England is going to see a very thin harvest this autumn. #FoodSecurity https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/29/half-england-officially-drought-environment-agency

“You see abject poverty and extreme wealth, you see how the family you were born into affects your life and you understand why inequality is wrong. It’s not just that it perpetuates itself, it’s that it’s fundamentally wrong and it needs to be changed. And that’s my core, that pursuit of economic justice.” -- Miatta Fahnbulleh Well, this actually sounds a bit positive! #UKLabour#UKPol https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/23/who-is-miatta-fahnbulleh-the-radical-thinking-new-uk-energy-secretary

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange the community is the community of people who share. Those who will not share exclude themselves; they are not excluded, because there is a simple action that they can take which would include them. And no: if you will not share and share alike, I do not give you permission to profit from my unpaid work. You can pay me.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange a good actor has no need to fear litigation, because what the #GPL requires is simple and clear and very easy to comply with. So a good actor, large or small, will not be deterred. You're right, of course, that a big bad actor won't be deterred in any case, but there is no substitute document — that I know of — that would be any greater deterrent.

What, the person in charge of the English #NHS deeply #corrupt? who could possibly have expected it. #Corruption#HealthCarehttps://www.thenational.scot/news/26298685.yvette-cooper-took-thousands-private-health-linked-donors/

“One of the things that further incentivises these geopolitics is that this trade, which is the most corrupt of all trades in the world, feeds our political systems. "If you look at #TonyBlair, who is worth hundreds of millions now, and you look at the way he’s constructed his wealth creation, it’s been directly and indirectly through the decision to invade Iraq, through his association with companies like #BAESystems, so there’s two intertwining aspects.” https://www.thenational.scot/news/26406513.west-profits-gaza-exposed-andrew-feinstein-book/

RE: https://hear-me.social/@TheSwiv/116973340112371440 Who could possibly believe that the #UK #Defence minister was working for a foreign power involved in #Genocide? #Israel#GazaGenocide#Corruption

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @nusher@mastodon.scot @Simon318ppm@mastodon.sdf.org @peterbrown@mastodon.scot @ChrisMayLA6@mastodon.me.uk Second thread: teachers' salaries are depressed in the UK because teaching is feminised: 'women's work'. We expect teachers to be either single women without dependents, or else bringing a second income into a home which already has a breadwinner. This is partly why STEM teachers, often men, are paid more. These expectations are half a century out of date, at least.

@screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org "The great thing about #Lisp is that it has extremely simple syntax"

... except, of course, for #CommonLisp which is a complete baroque mess.

Of course, it's largely a complete baroque mess because reader macros, and reader macros are useful shorthand, but #$(words)? Really?

And noted also that #Clojure has its own baroquery hard-coded into its reader (#{:a :b [:c @D@mastodon.scot]}, anyone?), which is arguably worse, but...

This might as well be #Perl.

@miss_rodent@girlcock.club @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social 'Sooner shall a camel pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 19:24

@Layan2002@ieji.de if you're happy with it, let us both publicise it! Everyone, Here is Layan's reflection on the current state of the #university in #Gaza at which she hoped to continue her #education: https://www.journeyman.cc/layan/posts-output/2026-08-03-A-Survivors-Diary/ #GazaGenocide

"The protracted slaughter in #Gaza stands as one of the defining moral catastrophes of the modern era. With tens of thousands of #Palestinians killed, disproportionately women, children and infants, the descent of an entire enclave into manufactured famine, medical collapse and total annihilation has unfolded in real time." #GazaGenocidehttps://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/11/americans-in-gaza-financiers-of-a-graveyard-2/

@asllop@mastodont.cat @albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz @ketan@climatejustice.social Welcome to the future! Gotta build those data centres! Gotta drill that oil! Got to buy those mega-pickups! Oh, wait.... Shit. #ThereIsNoEconomyOnADeadPlanet

Friends in #Gaza: western media are reporting that #Hamas has agreed to disarm in return for #Israel withdrawing from Gaza. This deal is reported to have been negotiated by the so-called #BoardOfPeace. Do you believe that, if this were true, it would be good news? Do you believe that it is true? Do you trust the Board of Peace? Do you trust Israel to comply? #GazaGenocide#Palestine Trump says Board of Peace has reached agreement for disarmament of Hamas - BBC News https://share.google/55mppBQNyw6bfLKuc

@nakal@mastodon.social @heisedeveloper@social.heise.de It's not a joke. The M-Expression syntax is defined in the #Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, and my Beowulf implementation can read both S-expressions and M-expressions interchangeably. But S-expressions won out, I think, mostly because people found them easy to use. https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf?page=18 https://git.journeyman.cc/simon/beowulf/src/branch/master/src/beowulf/reader/parser.clj#L53

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 4.01 patch level 9. 4.0 is *so* last week.

@aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au @floridamarx@mastodon.social this is a very good description of what a #GiftEconomy — and an #AnarchoSyndicalist society — looks like. #AnarchoSyndicalism is a non #Marxist flavour of #Communism, so you can also see this as a #Communist vision. Indeed, it's what Marxists hope will happen when the state that their #VanguardParty has captured withers away, ignoring the fact that vanguard parties are intrinsically elites and, like all elites, will fortify and entrench their elite power.

@Layan2002@ieji.de That's posted now, here: https://www.journeyman.cc/layan/posts-output/2026-08-03-A-Survivors-Diary/

The only 'pragmatic approach' to #OilAndGas, Mr #Burnham, is to shut it all down, arrest all the executives, and put them all on trial charged with conspiracy to commit murder. The #MetOffice is already predicting temperatures which will cause mass deaths in the #UK within thirty years. #NorthSeaOilAndGas#ClimateEmergency#ThereIsNoEconomyOnADeadPlanethttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/30/burnham-promises-pragmatic-approach-to-north-sea-oil-and-gas

RE: https://mastodon.social/@haya200/116975602681617946 Friends You know there are many, many people in #Gaza in need, and one person cannot support them all. I have no spare money to take on anyone new. Haya is living with her parents and two married brothers in a tent on rented land; there are three children in the household. Please, if you have spare money, consider supporting her. #Gaza#GazaGenocide#DirectAidRequest

We can have oil and gas now, or we can have a habitable planet for our children and grandchildren to live on into the future. We cannot have both. Which would you prefer? #ClimateEmergency#ThereIsNoEconomyOnADeadPlanethttps://www.thenational.scot/politics/26405675.scotland-burning---not-considering-new-oil-fields/

"Since this enormous initial atrocity, there have been further atrocities on both sides; but, although attacks against civilians in either direction are inexcusable, the scale of death, suffering, rape, damage and destruction wrought by #Israel on #Gaza is orders of magnitude worse than the other way. Yes, there's wrong on both sides. But there is by no means equal wrong on both sides." #GazaGenocide https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2026-07-20-Helping-Gaza/

@urlyman@mastodon.social I think a key point is that we are not going to have nearly enough 'green' structural materials quickly enough to build all the green infrastructure we need urgently. So if we concentrate on building renewable power generation, we don't have enough material to build new electric arc smelters for steel and aluminium, or electric kilns to make cement. So for the medium term, we don't have structural materials to build anything else. /Continued

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz @ketan@climatejustice.social The real question here is how quickly the post-AMOC cooling will happen. A very plausible trajectory is that our weather could first get hot and humid enough to kill the majority of the population, and then cold enough to make food production extremely difficult for the survivors. #ClimateEmergency#ThereIsNoEconomyOnADeadPlanet

@nada@manganiello.eu This is much better news than I expected when I saw your first post. Congratulations! This is a wonderful achievement.

@Gardenia@eldritch.cafe @Rania@freesewing.social @apenkop@mstdn.social @palestine@lemmy.ml @palestine@fedibird.com @Geri@veganism.social @AnnaLion@piaille.fr @Shibanarchiste@piaille.fr The tragedy is that those who are deliberately causing your suffering have their own history of being on the receiving end of #Genocide, from which it seems they have learned no lessons of humanity.

@Nour_gaza_s@mastodon.social Many other people in #Gaza are reporting critical hunger too. The food situation seems to have grown very much worse since May.

Here's @Layan2002@mastodon.social with an extraordinary story of honesty and community solidarity from within #Gazahttps://www.journeyman.cc/layan/posts-output/2026-07-16-The-fruit-vendors-cart/

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange if you are concerned that you may have a corner case, either apply to the original authors for a parallel licence, or do a clean room reimplantation from scratch. Simple as that. You are not entitled to profit from the gifts of another, unless you abide by the conditions of gift.

@urlyman@mastodon.social alternatively, if we concentrate on electric smelters and kilns, we won't have enough clean energy to power them. Of course, we could continue to burn #FossilFuels to do either the power generation or the materials processing, but in that case we all die fairly quickly — probably this century. Or else we could use our available power and structural materials to build #GenAI #DataCentres, in which case we all die even more quickly. #ClimateEmergency /Continued

@urlyman@mastodon.social if we want to survive, we have pretty quickly (within at most 5 years) switch to

1. Stop burning #FossilFuels altogether;
2. Build some new clean generating capacity;
3. Build some new clean materials processing capacity;
4. Invest in #Organic low input agriculture;
5. Invest in efficient transport infrastructure to distribute food;
6. Use an absolute minimum of power or structural materials for anything else at all;
7. Fight no wars at all.

#ClimateEmergency /Continued

@nada@manganiello.eu Are these your pictures? How close to you was the bomb?

@infobeautiful@vis.social If you're as old as I am, you know that as you age *everything* gets less cool. The whole planet is substantially warmer than it was when I was a child, and that is NOT a good thing. #ClimateEmergency

"The bombs flattening apartment blocks, tent camps and the entirety of #Gaza, are branded with “Made in the USA” and paid for with billions of dollars plucked from American taxpayers. The diversion of public funds towards the slaughter in Gaza, while domestic pillars like healthcare, housing and education deteriorate, renders our silence a form of complicity. We have become the financiers of a graveyard" #GazaGenocidehttps://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/11/americans-in-gaza-financiers-of-a-graveyard-2/

@Rania@freesewing.social @BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to @aral@mastodon.ar.al @apenkop@mstdn.social Call them what they are. They are not 'settlers'. They are thieves and #Terrorists#WestBank

@nada@manganiello.eu My mother remembered the German flying bombs -- 'Doodlebugs', a bit like Shaheed drones -- during the second world war. Also bombs from aircraft. The stories she told of them made me understand how frightening they'd been. Have you had to move your tent, or leave it?