Destroying Autocracy – July 3, 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.

Next week I will be on holiday so there won’t be an issue. I will probably boost some things on the Fediverse though.

Featured Item

DevCollaborative writes:

The Trump administration and its supporters are attacking dissenting views on a terrifying scale. With so much of online communications compromised and censored, independent websites are a critical piece of social movement infrastructure that we need to promote and defend.

If your nonprofit has a website, you are part of this essential communications work.

There are looming threats of financially independent nonprofits being censored under the guise of fighting “terrorism” or “sedition.”

Protecting Nonprofit Websites from a Hostile Government

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

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

Time has a profile:

How Signal President Meredith Whittaker Took on Signal-Gate

The Register reports:

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

Huawei can’t wriggle out of Iran sanctions trial, judge rules

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Tara Tarakiyee explores:

Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check

TechPolicy reports:

EU Disinformation Code Takes Effect Amid Censorship Claims and Trade Tensions

TechCrunch reports:

EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule

Politico reports:

The first American ‘scientific refugees’ arrive in France

BleepingComputer reports:

Hikvision Canada ordered to cease operations over security risks

Germany asks Google, Apple to remove DeepSeek AI from app stores

Raconteur has:

‘You need to be a little bit crazy’: Nextcloud CEO on confronting the hyperscalers

Nextclound reports on:

Why organizations migrate from Microsoft 365 in 2025

TechCrunch reports:

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism

Ars Technica reports:

Meta, TikTok can’t toss wrongful death suit from mom of “subway surfing” teen

Ted Cruz plan to punish states that regulate AI shot down in 99-1 vote

The Markup has more:

State AI regulations safe after Senate strips moratorium from ‘big, beautiful bill’

MIT Technology Review reports:

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

Cloudfare has the details:

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content

The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

Neutral

CNBC reports:

The AI-boom’s multi-billion dollar blind spot: Reasoning models hitting a wall

Dries Buyaert (of Drupal fame) writes:

The web’s broken deal with AI companies

Dries, you say you may be naive. You are if you think anything other than politics (regulation or huge boycotts) are going to fix the problem.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Guardian opines:

Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

TechDirt reports:

Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible

The Supreme C^nts strike again.

The Guardian reports:

Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

TechPolicy reports:

Countering the Politics of Deservingness in the Fight for Digital Equity

How US Firms Are Weakening the EU AI Code of Practice

Pariah States

TechCrunch reports:

US government takes down major North Korean ‘remote IT workers’ operation

DarkReading reports:

Scope, Scale of Spurious North Korean IT Workers Emerges

Silver Fox Suspected in Taiwanese Campaign Using DeepSeek Lure

Russian APT ‘Gamaredon’ Hits Ukraine With Fierce Phishing

The Kyiv Independent reports:

US sanctions Russian IT company Aeza Group over ransomware operations

Big Media

The PressGazette reports:

How SFGATE is making local news pay and filling California’s news gaps

Ars Technica reports:

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court

Torment Nexus reports:

Why Substack shouldn’t be the future of online publishing

CNN reports:

After settling with Trump, CBS News staffers fear what comes next

There are cowards, and then there are cowardly c^nts.

Big Tech

TechPolicy reports:

Tech Oligarchs and the Rise of Silicon Valley Pronatalism

The Guardian reports:

Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories

Ars Technica reports:

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google’s Veo 3

Android Authority reports:

You’re not alone: This email from Google’s Gemini team was concerning (Updated: Google statement)

Open Web Advocacy reports on:

Google’s Hotseat Hypocrisy

Tuta asks:

“Sovereign cloud” or “sovereign washing”? A Trojan Horse at Europe’s digital gates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe

The Register reports:

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren’t AI at all

AI models just don’t understand what they’re talking about

The Verge reports:

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

TechCrunch reports:

Meta users say paying for Verified support has been useless in the face of mass bans

TechCrunch reports:

Meta has found another way to keep you engaged: Chatbots that message you first

I guess if you are amoral enough to use Meta products and you are a moron who talks to AI, this is what you deserve.

PC Gamer reports:

‘AI is no longer optional’: Microsoft is allegedly pressuring employees to use AI tools through manager evaluations

Cybersecurity/Privacy

The Verge asks:

How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

Bleeping Computer reports:

FBI: Cybercriminals steal health data posing as fraud investigators

BleepingComputer reports:

Spain arrests hackers who targeted politicians and journalists

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – #123

Mastodon has:

Mastodon 4.4 for Developers

Dead Superher looks at:

Mitigating the “7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins”

Jaz-Michael King shares:

Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter

Viger has:

Flipboard Surf

TechCrunch reports:

Automattic puts Tumblr migration to WordPress on hold

Ghost has:

The Longformers: Ghost, WordPress, Flipboard, Fediverse

NodeBB asks:

What drew you to ActivityPub?

Longform content has the best chance to grow the Fediverse, IMHO.

IT Notes shares:

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

Forgejo has its:

Forgejo monthly report – June 2025

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon

TechCrunch reports:

Not everyone is thrilled with Threads’ DMs

RSS

Preslav Rachev shares:

From Outbound to Inbound and Back Again: The Hidden Power of RSS Feeds

Great stuff. RSS is still my main curation source. So, get an RSS feed on your blog, handle, etc. 🙂

Slightly Federated Social Media

Connected Places has:

Bluesky Report – #123

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

#123 #ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Forgejo #Ghost #Mastodon #NodeBB #RSS #StopChina #StopIran #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=2072

If you are still using Substack, it is time to leave.

You might want to try #Ghost, a free open source self-hostable alternative to Substack (more info: https://ghost.org/vs/substack/). If you don't self-host, you can sign up at https://ghost.org

Ghost has Fediverse support in testing, Ghost users can sign up at https://activitypub.ghost.org

If you are still using Substack, it is time to leave.

You might want to try #Ghost, a free open source self-hostable alternative to Substack (more info: https://ghost.org/vs/substack/). If you don't self-host, you can sign up at https://ghost.org

Ghost has Fediverse support in testing, Ghost users can sign up at https://activitypub.ghost.org

Destroying Autocracy – July 3, 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.

Next week I will be on holiday so there won’t be an issue. I will probably boost some things on the Fediverse though.

Featured Item

DevCollaborative writes:

The Trump administration and its supporters are attacking dissenting views on a terrifying scale. With so much of online communications compromised and censored, independent websites are a critical piece of social movement infrastructure that we need to promote and defend.

If your nonprofit has a website, you are part of this essential communications work.

There are looming threats of financially independent nonprofits being censored under the guise of fighting “terrorism” or “sedition.”

Protecting Nonprofit Websites from a Hostile Government

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

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

Time has a profile:

How Signal President Meredith Whittaker Took on Signal-Gate

The Register reports:

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

Huawei can’t wriggle out of Iran sanctions trial, judge rules

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Tara Tarakiyee explores:

Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check

TechPolicy reports:

EU Disinformation Code Takes Effect Amid Censorship Claims and Trade Tensions

TechCrunch reports:

EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule

Politico reports:

The first American ‘scientific refugees’ arrive in France

BleepingComputer reports:

Hikvision Canada ordered to cease operations over security risks

Germany asks Google, Apple to remove DeepSeek AI from app stores

Raconteur has:

‘You need to be a little bit crazy’: Nextcloud CEO on confronting the hyperscalers

Nextclound reports on:

Why organizations migrate from Microsoft 365 in 2025

TechCrunch reports:

ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism

Ars Technica reports:

Meta, TikTok can’t toss wrongful death suit from mom of “subway surfing” teen

Ted Cruz plan to punish states that regulate AI shot down in 99-1 vote

The Markup has more:

State AI regulations safe after Senate strips moratorium from ‘big, beautiful bill’

MIT Technology Review reports:

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

Cloudfare has the details:

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content

The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

Neutral

CNBC reports:

The AI-boom’s multi-billion dollar blind spot: Reasoning models hitting a wall

Dries Buyaert (of Drupal fame) writes:

The web’s broken deal with AI companies

Dries, you say you may be naive. You are if you think anything other than politics (regulation or huge boycotts) are going to fix the problem.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

The Guardian opines:

Peter Thiel’s Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans

TechDirt reports:

Supreme Court Cripples FCC Further, Making Robocall Enforcement Likely Impossible

The Supreme C^nts strike again.

The Guardian reports:

Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

TechPolicy reports:

Countering the Politics of Deservingness in the Fight for Digital Equity

How US Firms Are Weakening the EU AI Code of Practice

Pariah States

TechCrunch reports:

US government takes down major North Korean ‘remote IT workers’ operation

DarkReading reports:

Scope, Scale of Spurious North Korean IT Workers Emerges

Silver Fox Suspected in Taiwanese Campaign Using DeepSeek Lure

Russian APT ‘Gamaredon’ Hits Ukraine With Fierce Phishing

The Kyiv Independent reports:

US sanctions Russian IT company Aeza Group over ransomware operations

Big Media

The PressGazette reports:

How SFGATE is making local news pay and filling California’s news gaps

Ars Technica reports:

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court

Torment Nexus reports:

Why Substack shouldn’t be the future of online publishing

CNN reports:

After settling with Trump, CBS News staffers fear what comes next

There are cowards, and then there are cowardly c^nts.

Big Tech

TechPolicy reports:

Tech Oligarchs and the Rise of Silicon Valley Pronatalism

The Guardian reports:

Fears AI factcheckers on X could increase promotion of conspiracy theories

Ars Technica reports:

Everything that could go wrong with X’s new AI-written community notes

TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google’s Veo 3

Android Authority reports:

You’re not alone: This email from Google’s Gemini team was concerning (Updated: Google statement)

Open Web Advocacy reports on:

Google’s Hotseat Hypocrisy

Tuta asks:

“Sovereign cloud” or “sovereign washing”? A Trojan Horse at Europe’s digital gates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe

The Register reports:

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren’t AI at all

AI models just don’t understand what they’re talking about

The Verge reports:

Facebook is starting to feed its AI with private, unpublished photos

TechCrunch reports:

Meta users say paying for Verified support has been useless in the face of mass bans

TechCrunch reports:

Meta has found another way to keep you engaged: Chatbots that message you first

I guess if you are amoral enough to use Meta products and you are a moron who talks to AI, this is what you deserve.

PC Gamer reports:

‘AI is no longer optional’: Microsoft is allegedly pressuring employees to use AI tools through manager evaluations

Cybersecurity/Privacy

The Verge asks:

How vulnerable is critical infrastructure to cyberattack in the US?

Bleeping Computer reports:

FBI: Cybercriminals steal health data posing as fraud investigators

BleepingComputer reports:

Spain arrests hackers who targeted politicians and journalists

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – #123

Mastodon has:

Mastodon 4.4 for Developers

Dead Superher looks at:

Mitigating the “7 Deadly Fediverse UX Sins”

Jaz-Michael King shares:

Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter

Viger has:

Flipboard Surf

TechCrunch reports:

Automattic puts Tumblr migration to WordPress on hold

Ghost has:

The Longformers: Ghost, WordPress, Flipboard, Fediverse

NodeBB asks:

What drew you to ActivityPub?

Longform content has the best chance to grow the Fediverse, IMHO.

IT Notes shares:

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

Forgejo has its:

Forgejo monthly report – June 2025

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

HTTP Signature Upgrades Coming Soon

TechCrunch reports:

Not everyone is thrilled with Threads’ DMs

RSS

Preslav Rachev shares:

From Outbound to Inbound and Back Again: The Hidden Power of RSS Feeds

Great stuff. RSS is still my main curation source. So, get an RSS feed on your blog, handle, etc. 🙂

Slightly Federated Social Media

Connected Places has:

Bluesky Report – #123

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

#123 #ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Forgejo #Ghost #Mastodon #NodeBB #RSS #StopChina #StopIran #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=2072

@Strypey Still, the headbutting was often justified for Mike. Unless, of course, you say that Mastodon is and has always been the one and only Fediverse gold standard and the one and only ActivityPub reference implementation.

I'll give you an example: In July, 2017, Mike's Hubzilla was the very first Fediverse server software to implement ActivityPub. Mike played strictly by the rules. As Hubzilla has a character limit of over 16.7 million and supports text formatting on the same level as the best long-form blogging platforms out there, he declared Hubzilla long-form and made Hubzilla send Article-type objects. Just as the spec demands.

In September, Mastodon became the second Fediverse server software to implement ActivityPub. But Gargron did not play by the rules. He only implemented a tiny subset of the protocol, namely what suited him. And he also broke it: Mastodon could display Article-type objects at their full length. But Gargron staunchly refused to implement any support for anything that goes beyond plain text. The ActivityPub spec explicitly says that Article-type objects are formatted. But Gargron wanted Mastodon to be a purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-cloning microblogging platform. And stuff like bold type, italics, headlines, embedded in-line images or titles aren't purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-cloning microblogging.

And so Mastodon took fully formatted, long-form-blog-style posts from Hubzilla and ripped everything out that wasn't plain text. It basically defaced Hubzilla posts. That is, it had been defacing Friendica and Hubzilla posts all the same ever since it was launched. But this time, there was a spec that actually defined what Mastodon was doing as wrong. And that spec had been finalised and pronounced a W3C standard meanwhile.

So Mike asked Gargron to please follow the official ActivityPub spec and make Mastodon support full HTML rendering for Article-type objects.

Gargron refused. Old-skool microblogging is plain text and only plain text, full stop.

This went back and forth. Eventually, Gargron presented a "solution": Mastodon now "renders" Article-type objects by showing the title and, right below, a link to the original. That is, basically not at all anymore. Of course, this meant that the vast majority of Mastodon users no longer read what came from Friendica and Hubzilla because they couldn't be bothered to open that link.

Mike saw this as a direct assault against Friendica and Hubzilla and an attempt at excluding both from "the Fediverse" which was almost entirely Mastodon at that point already. So he himself had to break the spec and make Hubzilla send Note-type objects instead so that Mastodon renders them at all. It still defaces them to this day.

(Friendica's solution was to send an Article-type object when a post has a title and a Note-type object when it doesn't have a title. Optionally, it can always send Note-type objects.)

By the way: This very same head-butting has returned. Not between Gargron and Mike, though, but between Gargron and much bigger players. Platforms like Flipboard and Ghost have introduced ActivityPub, and they send Article-type objects just as the ActivityPub spec demands. The same goes for WordPress. And, of course, they don't send plain-text "long tweets". They send fully formatted news articles and blog posts.

And now they demand Mastodon, as the biggest player in the Fediverse by user count, make their Article-type objects look just like they look at the source. They demand Mastodon not only render bold type, italics, headlines and the rest of the subset of text formatting that was introduced with Mastodon 4 in October, 2022. They also demand Mastodon show the titles and, most importantly, leave the images embedded within the articles in place, no matter how many they are.

This is no longer Gargron and his devs vs a guy in the Australian outback. This is Gargron and his devs who try hard to bend the Fediverse to their will and assume supreme control over it vs the Ghost Foundation, Flipboard, Inc. and Automattic, Inc. that play strictly by the ActivityPub rules. And I dare say that Automattic, Inc. alone has more money and more market power than Mastodon gGmbH and Mastodon, Inc. combined.

Mastodon has always gotten away with ignoring and breaking standards, re-inventing wheels and implying towards its religious followers that the whole Fediverse was built upon Mastodon and around Mastodon, and that everything that does things differently from Mastodon is inherently a broken add-on to Mastodon or an evil intruder. This time, they won't. And I guess they've actually taken it into consideration.

CC: @Tim Chambers @rakoo

# Long # LongPost # CWLong # CWLongPost # FediMeta # FediverseMeta # CWFediMeta # CWFediverseMeta # Fediverse # ActivityPub # Mastodon # Friendica # Hubzilla # WordPress # Ghost # Flipboard