Destroying Autocracy – May 01, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

DA comes out on Thursday and is updated through the end of day on Friday. Then we start over. So take your time in perusing it and check back in over the weekend.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

Happy May Day! Cast off your chains.

Featured Item(s)

Cory Doctorow writes:

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There’ve been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers’ scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death — but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies — and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

The enshittification of tech jobs

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, TechnoFeudalism, and other douchebaggery

Tech Policy reports:

Labor Unions Can Counterbalance the Big Tech Oligarchy, But Only If They Rediscover Their Power

Expats Czechia reports:

Court rules that Czechia collects phone data illegally in landmark decision

Mashable reports:

Elon Musk’s X lost 11 million users in the EU over the past 5 months

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Calyx Institute: A Case Study in Grassroots Innovation

EFF Leads Prominent Security Experts in Urging Trump Administration to Leave Chris Krebs Alone

EuroNews reports:

EU governments discuss action on disinformation over climate policy

Fast Company reports:

How Big Tech’s Faustian bargain with Trump backfired

Framablog has:

Docilités numériques

The Verge reports:

A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store

The Register reports:

Cook’d: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Double awesome.

Neutral

The Register reports:

DARPA to ‘radically’ rev up mathematics research. And yes, with AI

The Journal of Online Trust and Safety has:

Science and Causality in Technology Litigation

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

TechDirt has:

Government Actually Threatens Wikipedia’s Editorial Freedom; Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warriors Suddenly Have Other Plans

Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act

Ars Technica reports:

Trump’s hasty Take It Down Act has “gaping flaws” that threaten encryption

The Register reports:

DOGE may help Elon Musk’s biz empire dodge $2.4B in liabilities – Senate probe

Framablog looks at:

L’État artificiel : la vie civique automatisée

Pariah States

BleepingComputer reports:

France ties Russian APT28 hackers to 12 cyberattacks on French orgs

Pro-Russia hacktivists bombard Dutch public orgs with DDoS attacks

DarkReading has:

Putin’s Cyberattacks on Ukraine Rise 70%, With Little Effect

Adversaries Are Toying With US Networks & DC Is Short on Answers

Billbug Expands Cyber-Espionage Campaign in Southeast Asia

The Register reports:

China now America’s number one cyber threat – US must get up to speed

Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users

Big Media

NPR reports:

Corporation for Public Broadcasting sues Trump after he tries to fire board members

The Daily Beast reports:

MAGA Billionaire Leads L.A. Times to Lose $50 Million

Ars Technica reports:

CBS owner Paramount reportedly intends to settle Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit

Big Tech

Semafor reports:

The group chats that changed America

The Guardian reports:

Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators

Meta slowest to remove scam content, says City watchdog

TechCrunch reports:

Report finds Meta’s celebrity-voiced chatbots could discuss sex with minors

OpenAI is fixing a ‘bug’ that allowed minors to generate erotic conversations

404 Media has:

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users

Mbin or PieFed, peeps.

Reddit Issuing ‘Formal Legal Demands’ Against Researchers Who Conducted Secret AI Experiment on Users

This Is Palantir’s Justification for Building ICE’s Master Database

Instagram’s AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists

The Markup reports:

Kids should avoid AI companion bots—under force of law, assessment says

The Center for Democracy and Technology reports:

Report – In Deep Trouble: Surfacing Tech-Powered Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools

Cybersecurity/Privacy

Lawfare covers:

Advancing Secure by Design through Security Research

404 Media reports:

The Age of Realtime Deepfake Fraud Is Here

The Markup reports:

How California sent residents’ personal health data to LinkedIn

BleepingComputer reports:

Hackers ramp up scans for leaked Git tokens and secrets

FBI shares massive list of 42,000 LabHost phishing domains

Tech Policy Press reports:

Reverse Keyword Search Warrants and the Threat to Online Privacy

The Jacobin reports:

Big Tech Wants Free Rein to Sell Your Data

Fediverse

The Fediverse Report has:

Fediverse Report – #114

Fosstodon has more on its drama:

An Intro/Update From Gina

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

V5.8.0 – If it’s on the Fediverse, you can embed it.

ActivityPods shares:

Key learnings from building social apps with ActivityPods

Forgejo has:

Forgejo monthly update – April 2025

The Social Web Foundation has:

Steps Forward in Long-form Text

Mastodon is:

Evolving the Team

Matthew Tift has:

Finding an Ethical Path Through Social Media: Why I Choose Mastodon

PieFed has:

PieFed development update Apr 2025 – S3, OAuth, Federation retry queue, Stripe

NodeBB has:

NodeBB v4.3.0 — Remote Categories are a go!

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

WinBuzzer reports:

Bluesky’s Decentralized Network Faces Major Outage Caused by Centralized Servers

The Internet Review asks:

Where Does Bluesky Go from Here? What is the Bluesky of 2036?

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

• That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
• Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS.

Keep fighting!

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#114 #ActivityPub #AI #ATProtocol #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Bluesky #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Mastodon #NodeBB #PieFed #StopChina #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=1772

NodeBB v4.3.0 — Remote Categories are a go!

We're happy to announce the release of NodeBB v4.3.0, which contains native support for remote categories, bringing better integration with other NodeBB forums, WordPress, Lemmy, PieFed, mbin, and other "group-based" implementors on the ActivityPub network!

What does this mean?

It means that starting with this release, you will be able to "browse" to other categories simply by searching for them in your /world page. Just like with regular categories, you can "track" or "watch" remote categories — the former will show up in your /unread page, and the latter will also send notifications on new topics.

Prior to this change, remote categories were rendered just like regular users, and there was some confusion over who was a user and who was a publisher.

The integration with blog platforms like WordPress also mean you'll be able to use NodeBB kind of like a feed reader, with built-in notifications when new content is received. We're hoping to also extend this to support Ghost as well

Some examples of categories loaded remotely in this NodeBB:

• "Fediverse" on piefed.social (running Piefed) — @fediverse@piefed.social
• "ActivityPub Protocol" on SocialHub (running Discourse) — @protocol@socialhub.activitypub.rocks
• Vivaldi Browser Blog (running WordPress) — @blog@vivaldi.com
• "General Climbing News" on community.openbeta.io (running NodeBB) — @news@community.openbeta.io
• Fediverse memes (running Lemmy) — @fedimemes@feddit.uk

Other notable changes in v4.3.0

Chat allow/deny list

There was some desire for more fine-grained support for allow/deny lists for the chat system. This is now available in v4.3.0. Per @baris:

Leaving allow list empty would mean anyone who is not in deny list can message you.
Leaving deny list empty would mean anyone who is in allow list can message you.
If both are empty everyone can message you.
Current restrictChat toggle can be turned into a toggle to disable chat completely.
Upgrade script can add the users following to the allow list if they have restrictChat turned on.

Show number of topic watchers

You are now able to see the number of users watching a specific topic alongside the existing stats (posts, views, etc.)

Accessibility updates

• Avatar background colours are now selectable via keyboard navigation
• Post drafts are now accessible via keyboard navigation

... and of course

• Bug fixes and security updates

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104357