In a completely unsurprising turn of events, Meta's Muse AI is stealing Apple Messages, past and present, and uploading the contents to its cloud, even if explicitly told not to.

What is the rise of AI capital, and what does it mean for contemporary work, culture, and the ecological state of our planet? John Bellamy Foster dispels the myth of... READ MORE

It always fascinates me how the moderate mind has to use foreign events to describe and condemn the very western things happening. When censorship, disinformation, and authoritarianism is on the rise in the United States of America, they cannot be put into historical context with a plethora of domestic examples to choose from, these forms of oppression must be compared to the currently constructed enemy figures, and hence, while appearing on the surface as criticism of the status quo, it's inadvertently reinforced. “I Never Thought the Middle East Would Come to Minneapolis” is a New York Times article from the 25th of January 2026, discussing something so uniquely, historically American, yet portrayed through the lense of it actually being similar to the imperial enemy. I've [recently discussed](https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/115887883153311140) why ICE should rather be compared to the American „Slave Patrol” than the Gestapo. While I see the purpose of utilizing the declining, but still somewhat held belief in the general populace of the United States of America that Nazis were and maybe are bad, in order to rally people against a fascist movement with too many similarities to it, I'd argue that it's necessary to use people's rightful anger about current day events to educate about our history and our violence. That violence isn't new or foreign, many of our PoC, queer, or feminine peers have experienced it for their whole life. It didn't just become an issue recently, you just began recognizing that violence recently, the lies became so obvious recently that our propagandization became impossible to deny, and and you've just recently stopped listening to the media perpetrating these lies anyway. Our world, our countries, they didn't change, you did. That's good, but you need to go further than that and unlearn the entire basis on which the western world relies. Of course there's way more legitimacy to comparing a western fascist force inspired by American segregation, the Nazis and their secret police the Gestapo, to a different western fascist force and their secret police, MAGA and ICE, than to use a comparison from the global south which is simply the result of our imperialist policies. Additionally, many people asked about the necessity and accused me of pedantry after my statements, and again, I can see that argument given we're speaking of two western powers, but generally this is very important. I once said that: > A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that is going on right now. — Erik Uden, [29th of November 2023](https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/111495020626209973). I'd update this sentiment by arguing that a liberal is someone who can oppose today's war and support today's civil rights movements, but only by continuing to use the framing, the methods, and still adhering to the morality of our oppressor. That in itself turns my original statement true once again, as none of that can ever be opposition to war nor support for the right cause. Dancing ICE away, peacefully protesting outside of the internment centers, arguing for better training of ICE officers. When ICE throws someone into an unmarked van, never to hear from them again, liberals will yell “mark the van!” In doing so liberals and their conservative parliamentary arm, which in the United States of America is the Democratic party, serve as a legitimization of the status quo by smothering true opposition. Instead of unlearning all of our propaganda, instead of beginning to question our economic power structures, our so-called rules based world order, our so-called representative democracy, the liberal project reaffirms the entire path that lead up to our violent reality today, and offers miniscule, surface level impractical opposition. A not too uncomfortable option for change, instead of a revolution, that's what a liberal offers.

Response to e-Panic button security vulnerabilities is misleading

Herschal Jackson is going through the request-for-adminship process on four South African language Wikipedias. He doesn’t speak any of them. It’s a rough measure of how dire the situation is, he says: many of South Africa’s local-language wikis have no administrators, no technical contributors, and no one in the community advocating for them consistently. On several of those wikis, the home page still greets readers with the English phrase “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” because no technical contributor has come along to configure the localised phrasing. Wikimedia South Africa Executive director Mr Herschal Jackson Jackson was appointed Executive Director of Wikimedia South Africa after a few years in the movement, making history as the Chapter’s first. He was first an outside facilitator brought in to run the board’s strategy session for 2024–2027, and then an executive coordinator. What drew him in wasn’t the planning documents but the lightning talks at that first session: Wikipedians recounting how they got involved, including one librarian who described a colleague “hammering” on them every day until they signed up. That on-ramp (the moment someone realises they can write for Wikipedia, not just read it) has become the thread running through the chapter’s current work. Jackson’s plan for South Africa’s twelve official languages rests on a simple diagnosis: a healthy language wiki has four kinds of contributors, and most of South Africa’s local wikis are missing three: 1. Editors add and revise articles. 2. Language champions run meetups, keep community members active, and pull newcomers in. 3. Administrators 4. And there are technical contributors who build tools and localise the wiki so it doesn’t feel like an English wiki in disguise. Where all four exist in abundance, a language wiki grows on its own. Where any are missing, the burden falls on a small handful of people. On one South African language wiki, one or two volunteers wrote close to 9,000 articles before stepping back to occasional edits, worn out from running workshops, campaigns, and advocacy on top of their day jobs. Before the end of the current financial year, Wikimedia South Africa will pilot the four-role ecosystem model on a subset of the country’s language wikis, deliberately trying to seed each role rather than only adding editors. If the pilot demonstrates what Jackson thinks it can, the proposal for next year is a two- to three-year rollout across every South African language Wikipedia. Programming that draws people onto Wikipedia in the first place is running in parallel. The chapter’s annual Heritage Month translation campaign — coordinated this year by board member and City of Johannesburg librarian Matete Lesele — mobilises South Africans every September to translate articles on heritage, history and culture into official local languages. An October follow-up will engage the South African Sign Language community (SASL became the country’s twelfth official language in 2023) to help sign the openings of the month’s top-performing articles so they can be embedded across language wikis. Wikimedia South Africa is one of the only formal chapters on the African continent, and Jackson wants that presence to translate into mentorship rather than just visibility. Chapter scholarships now include a member from a neighbouring SADC community by design. Workshops have begun to run outside South Africa’s borders — a Wikipedia training for university students in Eswatini, mentorship work in Botswana. He holds the chapter to the line that the broader movement should be able to see the benefit of its existence, not only South Africans. Asked where he’d like the movement’s attention pointed over the next year, Jackson lands on the ecosystem pilot. If it works, he says, it should be cheap to replicate wherever the same problem exists — which is almost everywhere small-language wikis are trying to grow. What he’d like it to demonstrate is what a working community around a language actually looks like: enough editors, one or two champions, at least one administrator, at least one technical contributor. Enough of the right people, in the right roles, that no single Wikipedian has to hold a language up on their own.

Grant retirement went off the rails, so Redmond is offering affected organizations help starting over