Alex / catileptic

#introduction I'm an hacker, activist, FOSS programmer and community builder focused on making technology work for people. I work on digital rights advocacy in Romania & the EU with Asociația pentru Tehnologie și Internet (apti.ro) and European Digital Rights (edri.org).

St. Petersburg just got its mobile internet fully cut. Digital detox, Russian edition.

🚨 BREAKING: Oversight Dems received 95,000 new photos from Jeffrey Epstein's estate. These disturbing images raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. Time to end this White House cover-up. Release the files!

It is intensely funny to me that tech bro CEOs on an annual salary of 15 petabillion dollars think data centres can go in space because it's very cold but actually they would get obscenely hot because heat won't radiate into the vacuum of space taranis.ie/datacenters-...

I don't think generative #AI should be used in schools, as an "educational tool". However, the Ministry of Education, in #Romania, certainly thinks it should. I wrote up my personal position and translated it into English catileptic.tech/posts/no-gen... Fuck #genAI

The Epstein files released so far are now searchable: search.libraryofleaks.org/datasets/65

A poem I wrote some months ago showed up at my door today in the first issue of the relaunched Southerly magazine.

hire all the fired political teen vogue writers and make a new magazine call teen rogue. we’ll all subscribe en masse

underground band, an absolutely gorgeous one. the kind that layers musicality, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes soothing. quite a trip, this entire album! goodbyetitan.bandcamp.com/album/daedalus

Denmark dropped detection orders from the #ChatControl regulation proposal. A bunch of issues remain. The proposal still treats all citizens as already-guilty, already-suspect. It instills generalized surveillance, even if platforms get to do it voluntarily. www.patrick-breyer.de/en/half-good...

"Well, well, well. Look who it is. The global academic, scientific, and pro-fact community. I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry?" www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-...

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

loving and sharing underground bands: came across Comme Un Rat recently. dark & dreamy music, with beautiful lyrics! commeunrat.bandcamp.com/album/the-ra...

NEW: A digital fashion startup that works w/ Puma, Lacoste, Snap advertised its AI product on Meta as a tool for non-consensual sexualized image generation. “Dress up your buddy’s wife in a Tiny latex dress," said one ad. The company blamed a contractor

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

"we need to focus on kitchen-table issues" hey wtf are you talking about at your kitchen table, if not the military being deployed to your cities and your family members being kidnapped by ICE and the genocide in Gaza going on two years and states maneuvering to make elections less democratic and

“It looks like you are trying to stop me” #originalart #pixelart #art

Everyone should know about jury nullification! A jury has an absolute right to return any verdict it chooses. You can return a verdict of NOT GUILTY if you consider a law, punishment, or prosecutor unjust. Mind you, if you mention this during selection, you may not end up on a jury. Pass it on!

You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough. — Samuel R. Delany

finished my homoerotic fantasy story~! it ended up being 10000 words and only a relatively condensed amount of sex. Ah well. it owns will host it (and the rest of my stories) once I get a new website up, hup hup.

Smotrich in direct challenge to the EU, on the plans to build in E1 area, that bisects the West Bank to two: "We are burying the Palestinian state. By September the hypocritical European leaders will have nothing to recognise"

An Israeli settler murdered Awdah Hathleen, Israel refused to release his body for 10 days and then IDF soldiers disrupted his funeral, declaring the Palestinian village a closed military zone in order to expel all journalists. Stuart Ramsay reporting.

Mourning a Friend Killed by the Israeli Occupation "Awdah Hathaleen and his community faced injustices and violence all the time, but simply because he was my friend, I never thought that he would die." www.commondreams.org/opinion/mour...

'Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research [led by Sam Rickman, LSE] has found.' 1/2

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Constitution Sections on Due Process and Foreign Gifts Just Vanished from Congress' Website 🔗 www.404media.co/constitution...

Existence Patch Set #OmniumGatherum library.hrmtc.com/20...

Israel is committing genocide as part of a war of conquest. If Israel is not isolated diplomatically and economically, this will become the new normal. Good news for Russia, the US, China. Good news for fascism. apnews.com/article/isra...

eugenics is based in seeing politics as a tool for improving humanity rather than seeing politics as a tool for improving the conditions that humanity inhabits

Anyone who still refuses to call it genocide is actively complicit. Denying that one is carrying out genocide is a fundamental part of perpetrating genocide. Why do neo-Nazis engage in Holocaust denial? Because erasure is essential to the program. The Israeli government is doing the same in Gaza.

anyway if you enjoy(?) learning about this history guess what I wrote a whole book about it samleecole.com/about/

when it comes to porn panics, we're repeating the mistakes of the past every damn day www.404media.co/steam-itchio...

A reminder not to let the National Center On Sexual Exploitation's official-sounding name fool you: they're the rebranded busybody group "Morality In Media", whom you might remember from such hits as "Trying to have Life Of Brian pulled from theatres" and "trying to connect queerness to mass murder"

Comedian and political commentator John Oliver has called out Israel’s role in the Gaza famine, saying, “Gaza is being starved by Israel,” and that the crisis has a “manmade off switch.”

Canadians with an X gender marker on your passports: maybe do not go to the U.S.. An innacurate Nexus card is the least of your worries, be more concerned about an ICE abduction and prison camp extended stay.

"LinkedIn has quietly stripped explicit protections for transgender and nonwhite users from its English-language hate speech rules, repeating a playbook now familiar to LGBTQ+ advocates tracking the rollback of content safeguards across major social media platforms." www.advocate.com/news/linkedi...

The 12th annual international Gender Census 2025 is now open until at least 30th August 2025! survey.gendercensus.com It's for anyone whose gender (or lack thereof) isn't described by the M/F binary. It's short and easy, and results are useful in academia, business and self-advocacy.

I played this with Jess when it first released and it facilitated the most emotionally intense session of roleplay I've ever felt. it was heartbreaking and great. Highly recommendddd

On X, Masaki Nobushiro posts a recurring (and useful) drawing about how people wrongly think a 1m tsunami is a cresting wave when it's actually a wall of water filled with dangerous and deadly debris that's strong enough to sweep up a car. #tsunami

everyone is being very normal, as usual www.404media.co/women-dating...

The way online censorship works is that it's easy to ban the word "incest", but much harder to catch people skirting the lines, so you end up keeping the worst shit while banning games trying to tackle difficult subjects 👍

BREAKING: President Trump signed an executive order directing states to criminalize and institutionalize people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental health disabilities.

Is it possible to imagine a better future where we use less computation? The effects of AI hype almost demand it. This week @danmcquillan.bsky.social joins @parismarx.com to lay out the concept of decomputing as a different way of assessing technology. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/286_...

instead of being mad at itch, maybe let's acknowledge that we got to this point through a consistent campaign of weaponized, strategic litigation, conducted by groups who wish to control, surveil and punish and will bend the law to their will? then, can we bite back? itch.io/updates/upda...

Gaza is 'hell on earth' with doctors fainting from hunger, UN warns, as 1,000 estimated to have been killed seeking food www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...