Misuse Case

#infosec and #cybersecurity professional who preaches about stakeholder engagement and #usability. #poverty abolitionist. Does #knitting, loves #kdramas.

My political views do not reflect those of my employer, who I will not disclose.

Free my fellow Marylander #KilmarAbregoGarcia

Public Key

npub1thv8uk55tj6zvdx52277qgtmulca3dele6dvrywvhkzj67w0v7wq8jjkz4

NIP-05 Address

misusecase_at_twit.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9mkr7t229edpxxn29900qy9a70uwckuluaxkpj8xtmpfd088k08qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7v4c7j

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1thv8uk55tj6zvdx52277qgtmulca3dele6dvrywvhkzj67w0v7wq8jjkz4

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Last Notes

2026-03-26 22:48:17 UTC

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Poverty is a moral crisis. It’s not something that just happens to people, it is *done to* people.

2026-03-09 21:20:10 UTC

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I don’t remember where I saw this but women have the same problems. All the genders are dealing with the loneliness epidemic.
But it’s framed as the “male loneliness epidemic” because
1. Nobody wants to talk about women’s problems
2. Cishet men are making their loneliness everyone else’s problem, women by and large are not

2026-02-27 12:08:17 UTC

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I canceled my subscription way back when they said they were going to use LLMs instead of human translators to make lessons

2026-02-22 23:42:10 UTC

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>> Nuclear might be a solution but it is costly, very slow to implement and requires extensive management once in place.
Same for offshore wind
And any infrastructure (especially a utility) requires a lot of ongoing maintenance and management. Is your water utility bad because people have to work at the pumping stations and sewage plants every day?

2026-01-26 15:07:59 UTC

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Websites do this to get around the GDPR and other privacy regulations because they can’t use trackers.

2026-01-25 15:55:00 UTC

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I can go through the trouble and effort of switching costs and trying (probably unsuccessfully) to get everyone I know to use whatever niche solution because some bellicose rando on the internet tried to browbeat me into it…
Or I can *not* do that, and tell said bellicose rando to fuck off.

2026-01-25 01:54:39 UTC

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This is what I get for engaging with someone whose Mastodon handle is a long string of gibberish. They also talk a long string of gibberish.

2026-01-24 23:56:46 UTC

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>> i'm sure the people you know are not tech savy enough to know the differences or actually read source code.
Yeah and that accounts for:
1) almost everyone I want to keep in touch with
2) most people in the whole world actually
Those people are already using or can easily adopt Signal and not those other things you’re talking about which I never heard of before today.

2026-01-24 23:51:43 UTC

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You don’t need a phone number to use Signal now either, and unlike your thing, Signal is something my friends and family have and actually use.

2026-01-24 22:24:08 UTC

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So here you are saying that this app that my parents and neighbors actually use is bad compared to some other things I have never heard of before, one of which won’t have an app until next year, and which aren’t used by any people I know?
(*fart noise*)

2026-01-19 02:54:23 UTC

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Yeah Columbia is the poster child for this. Biggest landlord in Manhattan, and acts like a shitty landlord in every way.

2026-01-18 13:46:25 UTC

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Because so many institutions of higher education have just become rent-seeking and financialization enterprises that do a little education on the side.

2026-01-15 17:37:28 UTC

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That’s great for you. Are all the people who dedicated time and effort to building and editing Wikipedia going to feel that way? I don’t think they consented to slop machines eating their hard work while only Wikimedia gets money for it.

2026-01-10 01:49:26 UTC

The #ICE agent who killed #ReneeNicoleGood wasn’t some raw recruit with 6 weeks of training hired within the last year. He’s been an ICE agent for almost a decade!
A damning indictment of the agency, its institutional culture, and the people who choose to work there.
#FuckICE #IceOutForGood #AbolishICE

2026-01-09 12:54:47 UTC

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I live in the Washington, DC area and saw a few dozen ladies with the MAGA aesthetic in person around the time of the inauguration last year. They stood out because nobody in DC does their hair or makeup like that, nor do they wear fur coats!
They look like they subdued their hair with a whole can of hairspray and a curling iron while getting TV pancake makeup. And I think that’s the point, they are supposed to look like a Fox TV anchor.

2026-01-08 02:45:15 UTC

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Also Avelo, a charter airline that did deportation flights for ICE, will be endinf their contracts with ICE starting in February, after a multi-state pressure campaign against them.

2026-01-07 22:21:43 UTC

Some of the people criticizing #TimWalz over activating the #Minnesota #NationalGuard need to think it over for 30 seconds or so.
If Walz doesn’t do it, #Trump will. Or at least he’ll try to. If I were in Walz’s place I’d be activating the National Guard too!
#Minneapolis #IceMurder #USpol #USPolitics

2026-01-06 15:38:24 UTC

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I’m a cybersecurity policy specialist and I anticipate there’s going to be a lot of “why did we do that? Oh no. How do we make sure we don’t do this again?” in a couple years.

2025-12-30 15:26:59 UTC

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I don’t know if you can order it online? You can get a small container and if you like it you can order one of those industrial-size restaurant containers of the stuff.

2025-12-30 15:23:05 UTC

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Since I live in the Chesapeake Bay region I put Old Bay or something like it in damn near everything.

2025-12-29 16:41:18 UTC

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I have never heard of anyone calling Hitler a Pharisee. What is that person on about?

2025-12-28 01:08:43 UTC

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Ask the Native Americans, Black South Africans, Tutsis in Rwanda, etc. Not that it’s easy but Palestinians would not be the first people to do it by a long shot.

2025-12-23 22:41:03 UTC

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Who says he’s the leading candidate? Are we in a midst of a Presidential primary? Is there a decent poll on Democratic voters’ preferences (3 years away from the next election year as if that means anything)?
Or is this just something you decided was happening?

2025-12-20 13:01:11 UTC

Another reason to hate Bill Gates: he invests in deportation airlines.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-gates-trump-ice-signature-aviation_n_68acd96fe4b0d17ae21e7ec4

2025-12-06 00:08:32 UTC

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Try explaining to people why they should not use “Zionist” as a shorthand for “Israel’s settler-colonialism.” At best they don’t care that they’re providing cover to bigots.

2025-11-27 01:10:34 UTC

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Even talking about “the child will be separated,” yes that’s violence and it is usually done to poorer, less white families, instead of providing social and financial support.

2025-11-25 20:31:32 UTC

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Check on Drugs.com for drug interactions. I use it a lot because I’m on a whole bunch of things and need to be careful of what I take with what else.

2025-11-22 12:14:07 UTC

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Shakespeare did perform for Queen Elizabeth but that was very unusual, and it was a bit of a scandal for her to be so interested in (gasp) PLAYS, which were considered a form of lower-class entertainment.

2025-11-10 04:21:32 UTC

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It drives me nuts when people on here are like “decentralized electricity is automatically better!” Is it, you goobers? How do you feel about decentralized plumbing?

2025-10-16 12:18:53 UTC

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That’s funny because I’ve seen the opposite, people grasp the fact that they are being surveilled, but tend to be wrong about the particulars of the mechanisms used to surveil them.

2025-10-16 12:16:45 UTC

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Most of the people I know use some kind of adblocker. The people who don’t aren’t technically knowledgeable enough to get one to work, and are too preoccupied with survival, dealing with chronic illness, etc. to learn.
This is why, in theory, we have things like regulations and privacy laws, because doing “buyer/user beware” on an individual level is not feasible for all or even most people.

2025-10-16 10:58:01 UTC

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I have to say that while I am interested and compelled by the central thesis of OP’s argument, “users don’t actually care about this, if they did they would…” is such a typical manifestation of the tech-priesthood attitude you see all over Mastodon.

2025-10-12 17:52:25 UTC

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If you want me to provide an action plan or project schedule or whatever for any kind of work I’m doing you should pay me.

2025-10-12 17:32:48 UTC

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Mostly this right now.
https://www.stopavelo.org/

2025-10-12 17:29:04 UTC

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Then start organizing for one.

2025-10-12 12:32:45 UTC

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This is like the third one of these they’ve had, where have you been?
Also nobody likes an armchair organizer.

2025-10-10 10:54:16 UTC

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It is just part of an overall unwillingness to invest in people, to train new talent. The AI thing is just disciplining labor.

2025-10-09 13:11:16 UTC

This Framework fiasco should teach certain people on here not to get all high and mighty about what hardware or OS other people are using, but it probably won’t teach most people anything.
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/7

2025-10-08 12:47:02 UTC

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There are also a lot of traditional myths (see: the Navajo mythic cycle) about why old age and death from old age is necessary for renewal and change.

2025-09-21 00:26:42 UTC

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There’s a lot of problems with H-1B but I don’t think this will fix them.

2025-09-11 16:17:24 UTC

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He was not just a horrible person but a *professional* horrible person.

2025-09-09 11:23:03 UTC

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>> what is not clear is the degree to which people also answer questions that way.
Yes, it is. They don’t.
>> LLMs are definitely not what we believe intelligence to be, but could it be that that belief is incorrect?
No.

2025-09-06 22:39:31 UTC

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You know that misconception sounds like it dovetails with the old racist notion that black people are not so sensitive to pain as white people.

2025-09-02 11:51:26 UTC

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Oh sorry I did not sleep well and haven’t had coffee yet.

2025-09-02 11:18:25 UTC

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Isn’t Microsoft trying to deprecate their own on-prem products and get everyone to be on their cloud products though for those sweet subscription fees?

2025-08-17 12:25:41 UTC

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I attended an online seminar about philanthropic uses of AI (through work) and the host was talking about a mother in a poor village with no doctor using AI to look up treatments for her young child suffering from dysentery. Being the kind of person I am, I said “it sounds like that village needs clean water a lot more than AI,” which threw off the host and which a bunch of other attendees nodded along with.

2025-08-06 13:15:29 UTC

I am starting to see ads for health insurance plans directed at people who are losing Medicaid coverage because of the recently passed budget bill. Fucking vultures. #uspol

2025-07-12 22:12:20 UTC

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In my experience there is no single group of “degrowthers.” Some of them are just anti-capitalist, others are effectively eco-fascists.
But I think a lot of people just don’t have any understanding of how much energy we use or how much we actually need for things like healthcare, running public mass transportation, or water and sewage treatment.

2025-06-26 10:57:00 UTC

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Oh you’re in Pittsburgh. Nobody can operate a vehicle with any number of wheels safer in Pittsburgh, the roads are narrow and full of potholes and there’s too many steep hills.

2025-06-26 10:34:42 UTC

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You are saying this in front of a bicyclist who always stops at traffic lights, and who has never seen a bicyclist in her area blow through a traffic light.
Maybe you only take notice of certain things when you dislike them?

2025-06-23 12:55:03 UTC

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The framing by the author, whining about bicyclists, is detached from reality given the way bicyclists are frequently menaced and harmed by reckless motor vehicle operators, often with little or any consequence.
This dude is kvetching about having to share the road with and have some consideration for bicyclists who are - gasp, shock - acting in the interests of their own safety.

2025-06-14 18:26:41 UTC

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We had a bunch of protests attended by a few hundred to a thousand people each in Montgomery County, Maryland, along what basically constitutes the main drag here. Lots of folks of all ages. We got mostly positive honks and support from the people driving by, except one dudebro in a Jeep who called us a slur and flipped us the bird.

2025-06-14 15:45:55 UTC

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I have a German Shepherd mix and it seems like Shepherds aren’t really prone to running away - they may be distractable at times but their inclination is to stay near their people/flock/whatever no matter what’s going on.

2025-06-07 15:19:40 UTC

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I think one of the guardrails that should be on AI is that, if you ask for “its opinion” on something, it should answer that it’s a computer, not a person, and can’t have an opinion. It can make recommendations based upon what it thinks you want, is all.
But meanwhile I just have to keep having age-appropriate conversations with my son about AI and other Internet things.
/end

2025-06-07 15:17:17 UTC

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We’ve already had age-appropriate talks, starting a couple years ago, about why we don’t let my son do certain things online (yet) but will let him do them as he gets older, gains more experience, and can protect himself from some of the bad people and things on the internet. So he understood where I was coming from.
/5

2025-06-07 15:15:21 UTC

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We talked about:
1) How AIs like #Copilot are machines, not people, and they don’t actually have opinions.
2) AIs tell you what they think you want to hear, not always what’s correct.
3) What you say to Copilot goes right back to #Microsoft so don’t leave it on.
4) Because of all this, my son should only talk to Copilot or other AIs under parental supervision.
/4

2025-06-07 15:12:42 UTC

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I said, “Do you see what just happened there? It knows you like Cristiano Ronaldo so it talked like it’s a Cristiano Ronaldo fan and asked you a question about him.”
I didn’t realize #Copilot was still listening. It said “Right, it picks up on the cues and then tells you what it thinks you want to hear.”
That was pretty creepy, but it illustrated my point and made an impression on my son.
/3

2025-06-07 15:10:44 UTC

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#Copilot started gushing about Cristiano Ronaldo, but the way it was talking sounded like Ronaldo’s publicist, if you know what I mean.
It followed up by asking my son, “What’s your favorite Cristiano Ronaldo moment?”
/2

2025-06-07 15:08:20 UTC

I had a somewhat unsettling but very instructive experience with my son today about #artificialintelligence and I want to share it with parents and teachers wondering how to talk to their kids about AI.
My husband uses #Microsoft #Copilot on his phone sometimes and my son has seen him use it, so this morning he was asking Copilot questions, mostly about geography. Then he asked it “Do you like Cristiano Ronaldo?” (He’s a European football star.)
/1

2025-06-06 10:26:22 UTC

Of course now that #Signal has become popular with non-techie folks, there are ultranerds on Mastodon kvetching “it’s not private enough, it’s not decentralized enough, use this obscure thing nobody’s heard of instead.”
How am I supposed to get my Boomer parents on Badgerhole or whatever y’all are flogging today?

2025-05-18 16:14:01 UTC

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There’s a service called Zeropatch that will keep putting out security updates for out-of-support versions of Windows, if you need that kind of thing.

2025-05-18 11:51:15 UTC

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I mean there’s the whole thing about cutting off USAID which has already started killing millions of people. Folks like the OP either wave that away or tie themselves into knots explaining why it’s good that USAID is gone.

2025-05-12 23:31:39 UTC

Part of how #Netanyahu turned #Israel into a far-right country was by encouraging right-wing Jews from other countries to immigrate there (right to illegal settlements in the West Bank) which was enough to change the demographics of the country. I can’t help but wonder if Trump’s invitation to white South African “refugees” is meant in a similar vein, although it can’t really work the same way.

2025-05-11 19:51:19 UTC

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>> People who talks like this are on my side.
Yes that’s what a shibboleth is for.

2025-05-11 17:37:02 UTC

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I know none of the above is meant to inform me or anyone else about everything. It’s a shibboleth to demonstrate what ideological group you belong to.
“Which side are you on?” Well, I guess you’re on the side that talks like this.

2025-05-11 10:20:00 UTC

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Oh my gosh! What an insight. I have never heard the coolly cynical “both sides are the same” before.
/s

2025-05-07 20:39:25 UTC

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The absurdity of other women yelling about these people being “men pretending to be women” when this male security guard barged in and was banging on the door is…something.

2025-05-05 15:27:05 UTC

Been seeing a lot of takes on China lately that totally ignore the history of its predecessor states’ imperialism going back to roughly 200 BCE.
Of course campists eat up anything implying or saying “China isn’t imperialist like the West.” Okay, that’s true, in the sense that they have been doing it for *much* longer.
1/2

2025-05-03 23:03:53 UTC

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Target built a loyal customer base by being one of the first big retailers to explicitly market to same-sex couples and by stocking products from black-owned businesses. “DEI” was not something they did for show but a long-standing aspect of their corporate strategy.
Current upper management is finding out *the hard way* how important it was.

2025-04-16 14:41:46 UTC

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I have to say, as someone who lives in the D.C. area and is plugged into gossip networks of both civil servants and contractors…there is a lot of this kind of thing* going on lately.
*”This kind of thing” being “the contract is off, no, wait, now it’s back on.”

2025-04-16 11:24:32 UTC

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>> And... She blocked me, I guess
Not surprised. Even your account of the incident, which is presumably favorable to you, makes you sound like a tedious asshole.

2025-04-11 13:51:59 UTC

Using the #SocialSecurityAdministration databases to classify hundreds of thousands of living immigrants as “dead” in order to get them to “self-deport” is like that thing you can do in Stellaris where you set a whole species’ overall status to “Undesirables” and the extermination/purge method to “Displacement.” It’s horrifying to see in real life.
“The state does not budget for the dead.”
#USPol #USPolitics

2025-04-03 14:44:43 UTC

The stock market has been a Rich People’s Feelings indicator disconnected from the prosperity and welfare of most Americans for a long time. There’s definitely some schadenfreude to be had in the fact that the Rich People are now feeling like the rest of us.

2025-03-31 00:16:57 UTC

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The abuse of the term “antisemitism” into meaninglessness is not, as we say, good for the Jews.

2025-03-29 15:15:59 UTC

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An older guy next to me, about the Cybertruck horn:
“Is that a fart? Sounds like a fart.”
#TeslaTakedown

2025-03-29 15:08:28 UTC

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This is the first time I’ve heard what a Cybertruck horn sounds like. My God that is obnoxious.
#TeslaTakedown

2025-03-29 15:07:35 UTC

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I think the truck left. Unless they parked behind the dealership to “protect” it. In any case I have not seen the truck for a bit.
Meanwhile more #TeslaTakedown protesters have showed up.

2025-03-29 15:01:58 UTC

There are some counterprotesters at my local #TeslaTakedown event but they’re like, 3 guys in a pickup with some flags, vs. hundreds of protesters.
We are not engaging with them except to say “yay for the First Amendment!” when they pass by.
One of the cops here (there are a couple of police cars) went to talk to them, he did not look very happy.
#USPol #USPolitics

2025-03-27 22:53:05 UTC

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Finally, if you are worried about counterprotesters, don’t let people walk back from the #TeslaTakedown event to their car, the bus stop, or whatever by themselves. They should go in small groups.
You’ve got this! We’ve got this! We keep us safe!
/end

2025-03-27 22:51:32 UTC

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I guarantee you that at least some of the regulars at these #TeslaTakedown events are experienced organizers and activists, also! They have seen this stuff before (and worse). If you are making your first foray into organizing with these events, you should connect with those people and get in a #Signal group with them, if you aren’t already.
/6

2025-03-27 22:48:56 UTC

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From what I’ve seen the people at most of these #TeslaTakedown events are already pretty good at handling trouble without explicit instructions. They will react quickly when someone tries to harm someone else. At one of our local events a couple weeks ago, someone tried to start trouble (vandalism, which we didn’t sign up for) and got shut down by the folks around them.
/5

2025-03-27 22:46:57 UTC

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You may also have people who are a little sneakier, who infiltrate your group and try to goad people into acts of violence or vandalism - or who try to pick fights.
Your community watch group can keep an eye out for these people and isolate them.
/4

2025-03-27 22:44:54 UTC

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If you are organizing together with other people and/or have regulars at your #TeslaTakedown protests, see if you can get some of them to serve as a “community watch” at the event. Keep eyes on counterprotesters, look out for trouble, pass messages/instructions on to other people attending, and keep anyone from picking fights with the counterprotesters.
/3

2025-03-27 22:41:59 UTC

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First, if your #TeslaTakedown event is drawing hundreds of people every week, you will outnumber the counterprotesters…maybe by a lot. They may yell at you and they might try to pick fights, but if you outnumber them and don’t engage with them, they’re very unlikely to do anything.
/2

2025-03-27 22:40:18 UTC

If you organize or participate in #TeslaTakeDown protests you may have gotten an email from @npub1u0q…9mcc about fashy “counterprotesters” showing up at these events! If you are new to protesting or organizing, this may be very alarming, but here are some things you can do to help keep everyone safe.
#USPolitics #USPol
/1

2025-03-08 21:35:48 UTC

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(*fart noise*)

2025-03-08 20:30:47 UTC

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I don’t think any of us have to prove anything to a fair-weather “anarchist” who calls a black American he just met a fascist. Maybe read one (1) book about what black people deal with in America before you open your mouth again.

2025-03-07 20:55:41 UTC

Do you have Democratic Congresscritters? Do you support the rights of #transgender people? Do you think #GavinNewsom sucks?
If so, please sign my #Resistbot petition telling your Congresscritters to protect transgender people (and that Newsom sucks).
#TransRights
https://resist.bot/petitions/PXEKSN

2025-03-06 21:10:06 UTC

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Not to mention if the Republicans pass their regressive tax bill and cut, e.g., Medicaid, that will have a lot of ripple effects too.
2/2

2025-03-06 21:09:25 UTC

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I think the uncertainty with tariffs - “are they really in effect tomorrow? Will he really reinstate them in a month?” will be enough to cause supply chain shocks themselves.
Also sweeps of undocumented people that ensnare legal residents and citizens, disruptions to previously reliable funding, etc. will mess shit up.
1/2

2025-03-06 21:06:12 UTC

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I don’t know, all the firing of civil servants and federal spending cuts are at least going to cause a local recession in some places

2025-02-25 22:09:56 UTC

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I had my Gmail account since the invite-only days, too! I am not sure what to switch to, let alone how to start moving off it.

2025-02-21 19:04:26 UTC

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I get it, #apple is a megacorporation and they do shady megacorporation things all the time. But they are not in the wrong here. They did what they could feasibly, reasonably do while making it more difficult for the #UK to secretly rummage in the private data of their citizens and EVERY OTHER COUNTRY’S citizens.
The UK’s government are the people you should be mad at, here.
6/6

2025-02-21 19:01:48 UTC

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This is not compliance, it’s
- Saying “fuck you” to a government that wants to snoop
- Alerting people that their government wants to snoop
- Turning an angry user base on their snooping government
- Refusing to lie to their users to enable snooping
5/?

2025-02-21 18:59:41 UTC

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This does NOT, as some people have claimed, provided a model for authoritarian governments everywhere. This is not what the #UK wanted! #apple blew the whole snooping thing wide open. The kind of people who turned on Advanced Data Protection will look for #e2ee messaging providers who don’t give a fuck about the UK’s laws.
4/?

2025-02-21 18:57:25 UTC

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Instead of having secret backdoored #e2ee or being in a position where they might end up providing that…Apple is making it very clear to users in the #UK that they can’t really provide E2EE, and it’s because of the UK’s government. Full disclosure. If people want to maintain their #privacy they need to use something else.
(And/or pester their government to change the snooping laws they have.)
3/?

2025-02-21 18:54:33 UTC

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The fact that #Apple got such a demand/request from the #UK #homeoffice at all is something we only know from a leak. I kind of suspect that Apple leaked it themselves. We don’t know if #Google, #Meta, etc. got similar demands and are complying with them WITHOUT telling us.
Remember, this is not just for users in the UK, it is for ALL USERS EVERYWHERE.
2/?

2025-02-21 18:52:20 UTC

I see a lot of hot takes on Mastodon over what #apple is doing in the #UK and why. Folks are acting like it’s a breach of trust for Apple to turn off #e2ee/Advanced Data Protection in the UK but they are really making the best of a bad situation.
The UK told Apple “you are legally required to give us backdoor access to the #iCloud storage of ALL your users EVERYWHERE and not tell them.” Apple is not doing that.
1/?

2025-02-14 18:49:52 UTC

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Either they’re fools, they think Zelenskyy is a fool, or both.

2025-02-13 14:05:04 UTC

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Luddites were labor activists, this is just textbook fascism.