Linkage

Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.

At the UK's State of Open conference, Dawn Foster, director of data science for the CHAOSS Project, unveiled compelling evidence that forks -- community-driven alternatives to proprietary codebases -- are thriving. At the same time, companies that abandoned open-source principles face stagnant growth and disillusioned users.

[…]

At the event in London, James Governor, RedMonk's co-founder, said: "There is neither a share price rise for public companies nor revenue gains. There's no clear, 'Oh, we relicensed and got a hockey stick.' So, I think that if businesses are making these decisions, the expectation is that relicensing will be the special source that takes it to the next level. The numbers do not indicate that."

Simultaneously, Foster noted at the event that when companies closed their code, communities fought back with successful forks.

[…]

Foster's CHAOSS research also revealed that forks under neutral foundations have three times more organizational diversity than their proprietary counterparts. OpenSearch, for example, saw contributions from 45 organizations in its first year -- a stark contrast to Elasticsearch's single-vendor dominance.

In other words, open-source forks are far more popular than their proprietary counterparts. Foster said users flock to forks to avoid vendor lock-in.

Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.

What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.

Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.

“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded.

[…]

Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.

“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”

“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”

The document, titled “Guidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,’” is ostensibly focused on preventing transgender athletes from traveling to the U.S. However, one section appears to apply far more broadly, targeting all transgender visa applicants—not just athletes. It mandates that “all visas must reflect an applicant’s sex at birth” and grants officials the authority to deny visas based on “reasonable suspicion” of a person’s transgender identity.

“Both immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications request that an applicant identify their sex as either male or female. Moreover, all visas must reflect an applicant’s sex at birth,” the cable reads. When verifying an applicant’s sex assigned at birth, it states that the adjudicator can “rely on documents provided by the applicant,” but that “if other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant’s sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.”

The memo goes on to state that applicants “misrepresenting their purpose of travel or sex” could be targeted for permanent ineligibility. It states that some common scenarios that would trigger this is if the misrepresentation is “material,” which it states would be the case for transgender athletes entering for an athletic competition. However, even this section does not limit it to transgender athletes - many other reasons for entry may be considered “material” for transgender entrants… for instance, transgender activists, immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes, and more could be swept up under this provision.

For ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.

But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.

"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."

[…]

Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.

The political stoking of the spate of antisemitic hate crime scenario, which was concurrently being debunked by admissions from law enforcement in the same reports, staff at the Daily Telegraph concocted the idea for a report that it had entitled “Undercover Jew” in its internal documentation, and it involved a man wearing an Israeli flag cap being sent into various situations.

Israeli Australian man Ofir Birenbaum was employed by the Murdoch rag to be the undercover Jew, wearing a Star of David on his cap, as well as video glasses to record the incident, although the known provocateur has since denied he was recording footage. And what occurred in Enmore at the Cairo Takeaway was set to be repeated in various suburbs throughout Greater Sydney.

The idea was simple, send Birenbaum into the café to provoke an antisemitic response, as the Cairo Takeaway openly displays its support for Palestine on the side of its building, via a Scott Marsh mural.

So, the Jewish man entered the café, ordered at the counter and then received no derision or ridicule, although a staff member did follow him out of the premises as he left, only to find a Daily Telegraph journalist and two camerapeople waiting outside.

This discovery has only served to support suspicions that these incidents are being manufactured to convey a community riddled with antisemitism. The Murdoch scenario serves as a domestic example of what the federal police consider may be orchestrated by foreign actors paying locals to commit the crimes. And it further serves to leave the public suspicious of the authorities.

The stupid use cases for AI just keep coming:

Human capital---encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits---is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel ``Photo Big 5'' predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy

Certain industries—e.g., adult websites, guns-and-ammo, gaming, bail bonds, and lawyers (!)—tend to have higher chargeback rates. These industries are often served by a subset of banks that specialize in high-risk payment processing. Crypto companies also fall into that category of having high chargeback rates, but the chargeback risk posed by crypto is fundamentally different.  Chargeback risk is manageable when it is predictable, but that requires that it be uncorrelated. Lots of happily married men might claim they did not authorize that purchase OnlyFans subscription, but they aren't all making that claim suddenly and at the same time. The chargeback level if high, but basically static and predictable.

Crypto doesn't work like that. Although there is probably always a relatively high baseline level of chargebacks for crypto, the chargebacks are also likely to be highly correlated whenever there is a market crash or allegations of fraud about a particular coin. If the market goes up, everyone is happy with their transactions, but when it falls, customers try to get out of their losses by claiming that the purchase was never authorized in the first place. Now Visa has a 120 day time limit for issuers to chargeback transactions to acquirers, so the acquirer has to worry about market movements in a completely unpredictable market for the next four months.  If say, Bitcoin crashes, chargebacks are going to soar at the very time when the risk of the crypto company customer going bankruptcy rises. So the scenario that the payment processor is facing is that it will be hit with a tidal wave of chargebacks and that it will not be able to recover them from the crypto company, but will instead just have an unsecured claim in the crypto company's bankruptcy.