jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
DNA Lounge: Wherein we are going hard on movie nights
As our "Cyberdelia" series has seen a bit of success at branching out from being only the "Hackers" party, we've decided to try and screen roughly one cult movie a month! I hope you will join us. Our bill through the rest of the year: Conan the Barbarian (this Sunday!), Evil Dead 2 + Army of Darkness double bill, Hackers (the main event), The Crow, and Batman Returns (the greatest Christmas movie).

And you can get a discounted seated "Season Pass" ticket that gets you a seat at all five events through the end of the year!

You may be wondering what our criteria is for selecting movies for this odd mini-festival of ours. You probably think you have some great suggestions. I gotta say, it's a tough line to walk. First of all, just thematically with the Cyberdelia origins, my pitch is that they should be movies that Zero Cool and the gang would have watched over at Nikon's house. So: cyber, scifi, fantasy; not romcoms. Second, we're doing this in a bar, not a movie theatre, so they have to be heckle-able, movies you can gleefully and drunkenly yell at. We're not doing an "Alamo" thing here, no polite applause, no sensible chuckle; we want rowdy.

As just a few examples of "great movie, but bad fit": Aliens, Strange Days, The Thing. They're great movies! But they aren't party movies. They're too good.

On the other end of the scale is the obscurity problem: I'd love to do Barbarella, Danger Diabolik, Dr. Phibes, but nobody's heard of them. The 6 people who would show up (8, counting me and Kingfish) would love it, but it would be a flop.

Anyway, we've got a list, and if these next five movies go well and we start getting some regulars, maybe we'll be able to dip into the backstock as well. So if you want us to keep doing this kind of thing... vote by showing up.

Avery Pennarun
thundersnap 0.01: an undo button for everything

Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensive cloud infrastructure for our fundamental computing needs.

With that in mind, here is my latest toy project: an open source tool that makes replicating, forking, sharing, and running container snapshots fast and easy across cloud and personal devices.

It's fun to play with, especially on bare metal hardware you run at home, or rent from a provider like Hetzner or OVH. Or, because it uses Tailscale, why not all of them in a single mesh?

There's a lot more to say but I don't have time right now. Details are in the README.

I will say this: humans and AI agents both want the same things when they're trying to get work done. Ephemeral containers aren't really it. But how about unlimited disk space, fast CPUs, an undo button, and the ability to move to whatever provider offers the best hardware at the best price? That's more like it.

Go visit thundersnap on github and tell me what you think!

Richard Stallman
Arbitrary criminalization of stating support for Palestine Action

A British appeals court sustained the arbitrary criminalization of stating support for Palestine Action.

A few more levels of appeal are possible, but Stormer's government is dead set on repression of criticism where it counts.

Posted
Richard Stallman
Children from all countries exposed to climate hazards

* Unicef analyzed young people's exposure to eight climate hazards: coastal floods, droughts, extreme heat, fires, heatwaves, river floods, sand and dust storms, and tropical storms… Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard.*

Posted
Richard Stallman
Commercially sold cannabis increases number of users

* Decriminalizing the possession of cannabis or strictly regulating access to the drug do not appear to drive up usage, but when the drug is sold commercially the number of users increases and more mental health problems are seen, a review has found.*

Posted
Richard Stallman
Excavators used by Israeli military

* The Guardian geolocated and verified images showing the Israeli military using excavators made by six companies – Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi and Komatsu – to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.*

Posted
Richard Stallman
Expensive electricity killing British industry

"Expensive electricity is killing British industry" — but subsidizing energy made from fossil fuels is killing civilization.

The UK government should look for a way to subsidize the customers for energy, but not subsidize fossil fuel or electricity made from that. We must maintain the incentive to use less fossil fuel. There are other ways to keep industrial production going.

Posted
Richard Stallman
How surveillance companies are allowed to track students and parents

Explaining how surveillance companies recruit schools, classes and teachers to pressure students and their parents into giving their personal data to the companies, and allowing those companies to track the students and parents.

I suspect that refusing to run anything from Google Prey Store or the Crapple Crap Store will keep them from tracking you. But protecting students in school calls for a law prohibiting schools from ever asking students to run nonfree programs or hosting activities that do so.

Posted
Richard Stallman
Wrecker not convincing public increased fossil fuel use is safe

The wrecker is going all-out to increase the use of fossil fuels, but is not convincing the American public that that is safe.

*Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this.*

I don't think the wrecker cares about the danger of global climate disaster, only about rewarding the planet roasters to keep them in his corner. They all deserve to end up broke and experience living on however much support the US provides to the poor.

Posted
jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Scientists decry conference's use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews
Better title: "cheaters outraged that they got caught."

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) -- which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026 -- bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. [...] To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event's organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.

The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases -- such as "This work addresses the central challenge" and "The claims of the paper" -- in a peer-review report. [...]

"Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on," Sören Auer, a computer scientist at Leibniz University Hannover, wrote on LinkedIn. "You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects."

But others see merits in the approach. A similar prompt-injection effort has caught hundreds of reviewers misusing LLMs in submissions for next week's 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea, according to Nihar Shah, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and scientific integrity chair of that conference.

Culture of trust, uh huh.

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the "black chamber" -- the State Department's code‐breaking office -- on the principle that the way to make men and nations trustworthy was to trust them. As he later told aide McGeorge Bundy, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
DNA Lounge: Wherein it's a series of tubes
We replaced our network rack with a slightly larger one. Exciting news, I know, but I'm posting these photos because I know that there is a certain segment of my readership who will be upset by them, perhaps even scarred. Is this what peak performance looks like? Probably.

jwz (Jamie Zawinski)
Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good and should be indicted.
ICE Tracks Down Woman to Force Her to Delete Instagram Post.

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her workplace. "I've seen the news, especially in Minnesota," she said. "And I didn't want anything to happen to me at all."

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver's license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. "They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working," she said. The agents told her to "remove and/or discontinue" the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram. [...]

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat. [...]

Gonyea's experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting left-wing zines linked to a protest at ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Posted

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