Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Not so excited about the sudden explosion of "supply chain security startups" whose sales pitch seems to basically be that we can solve systemic problems with FOSS dependency security and funding by just Buying Their Specific Magical Product, rather than a commons-based solution.

It's also extremely telling how many people seem to be much angrier about me causing a stink, than about the prospect of vulnerable/disabled folks being excluded.

Also, something I want to clarify: my criticism isn't and never was towards those in orga who were trying to keep the event safe for everybody. I recognize that some of those involved in the orga will have tried their best. My criticisms were specifically about those who didn't.

Update: it's just been announced that (centralized) Congress will be cancelled this year: https://ccc.de/en/updates/2022/no-congress-2022

Mixed feelings; I would have liked to see it continue with safety measures, but this is certainly better than continuing it with *no* measures.

The alternative suggested in the post (smaller local events) is probably a good one; the overall risk should be much lower there. I'm also more optimistic about Camp; with it being outdoors (= lots of natural ventilation), it would be much easier to limit the spread.

From what I'm hearing, the plan is to organize this year's Chaos Communication Congress in an absolutely packed venue with *zero* COVID measures because the orga doesn't care about even *trying* to find workable solutions.

This would be grossly irresponsible and unacceptable. And as usual, vulnerable people are being thrown under the bus.

"Being inclusive is good, sure, buuuut maybe vulnerable people just shouldn't come for a few years."

This is not good enough. Fix this. There are *so many* possible solutions, see eg. the MCH2022 measures.

Encourage people to self-test, and provide free self-tests for those who cannot afford it. They're cheap in bulk now.

Tell people to wear a mask, even if you can't 100% rigidly enforce it. Public health measures are not all-or-nothing, it doesn't *have* to be perfect.

CCC folks speak loudly about inclusivity, but that requires actions, not just words. Pretending that COVID doesn't exist is ableist and needlessly harmful.

If the Congress orga go through with this, I will not go to #37c3, and neither should you.

I think we all know how widespread hacker pest is every Congress, so you're almost *guaranteed* to be exposed to COVID at #37c3, with all the consequences that that entails - including serious risk of chronic disability and, y'know, *your brain* not working right anymore.

And yes, this is information from the grapevine, but this needs to be talked about *now*, before things are set in stone and the only response we'll get is "sorry, it's already decided". I'm sure that the orga will be able to issue a clarification if the policy changes.

Wrote a little library that can be used to do relational queries on linearly-ingested larger-than-RAM datasets, demonstrated here on the (tiny) GTFS sample data feed: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/a1b702e693202653f0d94483e844dd43?ts=4

hey look Musk has finally sent the invoice for his ""donated"" starstink stuff
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/index.html

... why is PayPal serving up a revoked TLS certificate? https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=paypal.com&s=64.4.250.36&latest

A really important thing to understand about bigotry, how a community responds to it, and why they're not spotting the bad vibes that are obvious to you:

The vast, vast majority of people do not actually *understand* bigotry, as a mechanic. They've been taught about "discrimination" as a list of things you cannot say or do, and a list of groups/people to whom you cannot say or do them. The 'protected class' thing, basically.

Nobody has ever really taught them how bigotry *works*, what its consequences are, or how it is experienced by the targets on the other end. They themselves, even with the best intentions, don't actually understand it - they are just following a vague ruleset given to them, because somebody told them to.

(This is likely where the "I can't say anything anymore!" thing comes from, especially in centrist circles. It's frustration that the full ruleset is not known to them, and it feels to them like it is expanding outside of their view.)

That means that they literally *cannot* recognize any form of bigotry that isn't on their 'list'. They don't know about the patterns of behaviour or the social dynamics at all.

They simply don't recognize it when patterns of bigotry are applied towards groups not on their list - say, furries, or users of a particular programming language. They only have the list, it's not on there, therefore it can't be bigotry or discrimination! Even if the consequences are the same in practice.

This can only be fixed by actually teaching people how bigotry *works*, and talking about real-world consequences, including the indirect ones, and how things got to that point, and showing that it is generically applicable - it's the *behaviour and attitude* that matters, not the specific words.

Real-world examples help a lot here, especially for the cases where the cause and effect are a few steps removed from each other, because most people *also* aren't used to thinking about second-order effects.

This is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0_aiTFZ46o