Hagen

One of the stories we have in the book is about that Apple Crush ad. There was that ad where they had all these instruments and drawing materials, et cetera, like all these art related things. on the hydraulic press, and then the hydraulic press crushes it. The piano keys shudder, the trumpet gets crushed, the paint gushes out, and at the end of the hydraulic press, there’s, the iPad.

BITM

And people hated it. They had to apologize for it.

Hagen

Yeah, they apologized—for an ad. So there’s this sense of, “yes, this is actually about transferring knowledge and skills into a tool so that you can pay people who use the tool less.” This is happening over and over again in capitalism. And we’re going to dismantle by force all of these things that you love and that create beautiful art.

It’s such a useful metaphor that they handed us. It was so beautifully clear that this is a way of bulldozing precisely the aspects of like human creative activity, which labor should be. Labor should be, you’re changing something in the world in accordance with your will. And that’s what it means to be alive as a human.

"AI is an attack from above on wages": An interview with cognitive scientist Hagen Blix

The author of 'Why We Fear AI' on why he sees generative AI as "class warfare through enshittification."

^{Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine)}

Frankfurt (Germany) (AFP) – They could soon be unboxing fines rather than freebies -- Germany's online influencers are facing a tax evasion crackdown that has left them screaming OMG!

The issue hit the headlines after the country's most populous state announced a specialised unit of investigators was probing influencer tax dodging on a massive scale.

They are assessing a stash of some 6,000 data records from social media platforms that point to unpaid taxes on everything from earnings from views to advertising products.

"We know that there is a lot of money circulating right now," Stephanie Thien, head of the state office for combating financial crime in North-Rhine Westphalia, told AFP.

"And we also know that not all of it is being taxed properly."

Like elsewhere, the number of influencers on platforms like TikTok and Instagram has exploded in Europe's top economy in recent years.

According to the German Association for the Digital Economy, the amount of money that companies spend on influencer marketing rose from 223 million euros ($262 million) in 2019 to 477 million euros in 2022.

For some teens who become overnight sensations by cracking jokes or pulling pranks online, failing to pay taxes is a simple error.

"There have been cases where people come to us and say, I've been doing this for two or three years, but I've never thought about taxes," Christian Gebert, head of the tax advisory firm Steuerberaten.de, told AFP.

"Many influencers achieve success quickly, and at the start, they often lack proper tax arrangements", added Gebert, whose firm counts many creators among its clients.

But there are others who seek to evade paying tax by under-declaring their earnings, or not making a declaration at all.

A common trick is pretending to relocate overseas -- Dubai is a popular choice -- to avoid high tax rates at home, and then in reality spending most of the time in Germany.

It is these cases of intentional evasion that North Rhine-Westphalia is targeting.

Thien said her office was "truly targeting serious financial crime, the big cases".

Even before the launch of the recent campaign, the state was already conducting criminal proceedings against about 200 influencers based there -- with some accused of underpaying their taxes by millions of euros.

Other German tax authorities are getting in on the act, with the city-state of Hamburg and the state of Thuringia among those conducting probes.

Such investigations are tricky because of the numerous ways to earn money online.

These range from getting paid by for clicks and views, to payments from brands for product placement, and earning commissions when followers buy promoted items.

It is also common for influencers to receive gifts, from hotel rooms to flights, in exchange for promoting businesses.

But all theses earnings could be subject to tax -- including income, business or sales tax -- and it is up to creators to navigate bureaucracy-loving Germany's complex web of rules.

Alex Schoenen, who runs an agency that supports up-and-coming TikTok creators, said that authorities had not done enough to explain rules that were "far too complex".

They should run more information campaigns, including on social media, said Schoenen, who is himself a popular influencer on TikTok under the handle "Der_Typ_ist_anders" ('That guy is different').

"What I've witnessed in the past three years has been a pure disaster," he told AFP, saying he felt many young people were badly advised by tax consultants.

Even before North Rhine-Westphalia's probe hit the headlines, there was growing debate about influencers being targeted.

In an episode of the German podcast "Das A&O vom Kaffequatsch" earlier this year, hosted by influencers Anahita Rehbein and Olivia von Platen, the pair took a break from their usual topics of motherhood and lifestyle to talk taxes with two experts.

Von Platen said that a tax official had told her: "Influencers are the new top targets for the tax office because they're the easiest to 'take down'".

Authorities say their aim is simply to ensure people pay their taxes fairly.

"It is very important that our tax system is there to enable the state to fulfil its obligations for the common good," said Thien.

"We are interested in tax justice."

OMG! German influencers face tax dodging crackdown

^RFI

In a compelling, entertaining and accessible format, we present these negative awards to companies, organisations, and politicians. The BigBrotherAwards highlight privacy and data protection offenders in business and politics, or as the French paper Le Monde once put it, they are the “Oscars for data leeches”.

I can really recommend Digitalcourage and the event. I am not directly involved.

2025 | BigBrotherAwards

25 years of BigBrotherAwards – that calls for a celebration! On October 10, 2025, at the Hechelei in Bielefeld

^{bigbrotherawards.de}

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/10/climate/methane-seeps-antarctica

Generational experience has taught us what happens when the state builds a weapon for someone else: Sooner or later, it finds a way back to us.

U.S citizens and children were zip-tied, families separated, and residents of a community that is 92 percent African American reported being met with guns and flash-bang grenades. When a Chicago alderperson went to check on hospitalized residents, she says she was handcuffed by agents.

For some, the Trump administration’s Chicago assault was a shock. But for Black Americans, none of it felt extraordinary. It felt remembered. Generational experience has taught us what happens when the state builds a weapon for someone else: Sooner or later, it finds a way back to us.

The raid wasn’t an aberration; it was a continuation, the latest verse in a long American refrain where safety is promised, and Black lives become the proving grounds. What the nation calls “targeted enforcement,” we recognize as the same searchlight sweeping back across the map.

We’ve seen this movie before, and Black communities have been telling America how it ends.

La storia di Melania Rea diventa una miniserie HBO: nel ruolo della giovane donna uccisa nel 2011 ci sarà Maria Esposito, pronta a lasciare alle spalle l’iconico personaggio di Rosa Ricci per misurarsi con un racconto di forte impatto civile. A interpretare Stefano Parolisi sarà Daniele Rienzo, mentre la regia è affidata a Stefano Mordini. Il progetto nasce come crime in quattro episodi e punta a ricostruire uno dei casi più discussi degli ultimi anni.

SCOPRI I DETTAGLI: Maria Esposito è Melania Rea nella nuova serie HBO sul caso Parolisi: cast, regia e riprese

Maria Esposito è Melania Rea nella serie HBO sul caso Parolisi: cast e riprese

Maria Esposito interpreta Melania Rea nella miniserie HBO sul caso Parolisi diretta da Stefano Mordini. Quattro episodi, set a metà novembre.

^{Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)}

We were excited to see the recent release of Ghost 6 with ActivityPub features. The Ghost team have been an active participant in our Long-form Text project. John O’Nolan, founder and CEO of Ghost.org, was kind enough to answer our questions about the software and its community.

SWF: For our readers who don’t know Ghost, how would you describe the platform?

JO: Ghost is an independent publishing platform for people who take writing seriously. We’re open source, non-profit, and built to give creators complete ownership of their content and their audience. We’ve helped indie publishers generate over $100 million in revenue from sustainable modern media businesses like 404Media, Platformer and Tangle News.

SWF: Tell us about your user community. Can you paint a picture of them with a broad brush? What kind of people choose Ghost?

JO: Ghost attracts people who care about owning their home on the internet, rather than having another profile on a social media platform. Our publishers range from solo journalists and creators, to established news outlets and large businesses. They value independence, and they’re willing to do the work to maintain control of their brand, distribution, data, and relationship with readers.

SWF: What is it like to be a Ghost user in 2025? What kind of problems are your users facing today?

JO: The big challenge today is the same one that’s haunted independent publishers for two decades: discovery. You can own your platform and serve your audience beautifully, but if people can’t find you, none of it matters. Email newsletters have been a solid answer, but they’re still dependent on deliverability and inbox placement. Algorithms on social platforms actively suppress links now, so sharing your work there is like shouting into a hurricane.

SWF: Tell us about your experience with ActivityPub. Why did you decide to add ActivityPub support to your software?

JO: Ghost has had support for delivering content by email newsletters for a number of years, and email has remained an unassailable distribution platform for publishers because it’s an open protocol. No company controls your email list except you, so it’s one of the best investments you can make. ActivityPub is now doing the same thing for social technology. It allows publishers to own and control a distribution channel that allows their work to spread and be discovered by others. For the first time, you can publish independently and grow faster than ever before.

SWF: What stack is Ghost built on? What development tools does your team use?

JO: Ghost is all built in modern JavaScript; mainly Node and React. Our ActivityPub service is built on Fedify, and everything we build is released under an open source MIT license. Our development tools are constantly evolving, and now more quickly than ever before with the advent of AI tools, which seem to change on a near weekly basis.

SWF: What was the development process like?

JO: Challenging, honestly. ActivityPub is beautifully designed but the spec leaves room for interpretation, and when you’re building something new, there’s no roadmap. Building interoperability between other platforms, who’ve all interpreted the spec in their own unique ways, has been a real challenge. The approach we took was to ship early versions as quickly as possible to beta testers so we could learn as we go, using real-world data and issues to guide our process. We’re in a good spot, now, but there’s still a lot to do!

SWF: Ghost produces long-form blog posts, articles and newsletters. How was the experience adapting Ghost articles to the microblogging interfaces of Mastodon and Threads?

JO: In some ways really easy, and in other ways quite tricky. We’re at a pretty early stage for long-form content on ActivityPub, and the majority of other products out there don’t necessarily have interfaces for supporting it yet. The easy part is that we can provide fallbacks, so if you’re scrolling on Mastodon you might see an article title and excerpt, with a link to read the full post – and that works pretty well! The dream, though, is to make it so you can just consume the full article within whatever app you happen to be using, and doing that requires more collaboration between different platforms to agree on how to make that possible.

SWF: You’ve been an active participant in the ActivityPub community since you decided to implement the standard. Why?

JO: ActivityPub is a movement as much as a technology protocol, and behind it is a group of people who all believe in making the web a weird, wonderful open place for collaboration. Getting to know those humans and being a part of that movement has been every bit as important to the success of our work as writing the code that powers our software. We’ve received incredible support from the Mastodon team, AP spec authors, and other platforms who are building ActivityPub support. Without actively participating in the community, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten as far as we have already.

SWF: Ghost has implemented not only a publishing interface, but also a reading experience. Why?

JO: The big difference between ActivityPub and email is that it’s a 2-way protocol. When you send an email newsletter, that’s it. You’re done. But with ActivityPub, it’s possible to achieve what – in the olden days – we fondly referred to as ‘the blogosphere’. People all over the world writing and reading each other’s work. If an email newsletter is like standing on a stage giving a keynote to an audience, participating in a network is more like mingling at the afterparty. You can’t just talk the whole time, you have to listen, too. Being successful within the context of a network has always involved following and engaging with others, as peers, so it felt really important to make sure that we brought that aspect into the product.

SWF: Your reader is, frankly, one of the most interesting UIs for ActivityPub we’ve seen. Tell us about why you put the time and effort into making a beautiful reading experience for Ghost.

JO: We didn’t want to just tick the “ActivityPub support” checkbox – we wanted to create something that actually feels great to use every day. The idea was to bring some of the product ideas over from RSS readers and kindles, where people currently consume long-form content, and use them as the basis for an ActivityPub-native reading experience. We experimented with multiple different approaches to try and create an experience with a mix of familiarity and novelty. People intuitively understand a list of articles and a view for opening and reading them, but then when you start to see inline replies and live notifications happening around those stories – suddenly it feels like something new and different.

SWF: If people want to get a taste of the kind of content Ghost publishers produce, what are some good examples to follow?

JO: Tough question! There are so many out there, and it really depends on what you’re into. The best place to start would be on ghost.org/explore – when you can browse through all sorts of different categories of creators and content, and explore the things that interest you the most.

SWF: If I’m a Fediverse enthusiast, what can I do to help make Ghost 6 a success?

JO: Follow Ghost publishers and engage with their content – likes, replies, reposts all help! Most importantly, help us spread the word about what’s possible when platforms collaborate rather than compete. And if you’re technical, our ActivityPub implementation is entirely open source on GitHub – contributions, bug reports, and feedback make the whole ecosystem stronger.

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/37159807

Have fun digging, and please share interesting findings below.

https://epstein-docs.github.io/

Why aren’t more elected officials turning Donald Trump’s assault on the basic rights of both noncitizens and citizens into a major national scandal?

Where Is Politicians’ Urgency Over Donald Trump’s ICE Raids?

^jacobin.com

Tancredi torna con “DAY OFF”, il nuovo album disponibile sulle piattaforme digitali da venerdì 24 ottobre per Pulp Music/Warner Music Italy. Un progetto che arriva a quattro anni di distanza dal precedente lavoro e che fotografa la sua crescita artistica: 12 tracce tra elettronica, cassa dritta e brani suonati, con una cura totale di scrittura e produzione.

LEGGI L'ARTICOLO: Tancredi annuncia “DAY OFF”: nuovo album in uscita il 24 ottobre e presentazione live all’Apollo di Milano

Tancredi: “DAY OFF” esce il 24 ottobre, presentazione all’Apollo di Milano

“DAY OFF”, il nuovo album di Tancredi, esce il 24 ottobre per Pulp Music/Warner. Presentazione live il 23 ottobre all’Apollo di Milano.

^{Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)}

Sono cominciate in Sicilia le riprese di Il giudice e i suoi assassini, la nuova miniserie destinata a Rai 1 che ripercorre la vicenda umana e professionale del magistrato Rosario Livatino, ucciso dalla mafia nel 1990 e proclamato beato nel 2021. La regia è di Michele Placido, qui al suo esordio dietro la macchina da presa di una serie Rai, affiancato da una produzione che punta su luoghi reali, rigore storico e sguardo civile.

TUTTI I DETTAGLI: Il giudice e i suoi assassini: al via le riprese della miniserie Rai sulla vita del giudice Rosario Livatino

Michele Placido dirige “Il giudice e i suoi assassini”: riprese e cast della miniserie Rai

Iniziano in Sicilia le riprese de “Il giudice e i suoi assassini”, miniserie Rai diretta da Michele Placido sulla vita del giudice Rosario Livatino.

^{Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)}

If you're archiving a scriptbin.works script url(or a user profile url) to the wbm or elsewhere, append ?__termsofaccessagree=y to it. This skips directly to the actual script, so the actual script is captured.
Important: The creator of scriptbin also told me to NOT use that suffix when "normally" sharing script urls, as that will be problematic for scriptbin.
In other words, ONLY use ?__termsofaccessagree=y suffix for archiving purposes.
Now that you know this, if someone else asks you about it, DON'T just comment "Append ?__termsofaccessagree=y " and walk away.
Be a good steward of the internet and also mention the aforementioned warning along with your comment.
To reiterate the warning, DO NOT use that suffix for regular normal sharing of scriptbin urls. That suffix is only for archiving purposes.

Have fun archiving.
Cheers!

E' da quasi due mesi che uso NodeBB, la piattaforma di forum federata, e le mie impressioni sono positive. Per apprezzare al meglio le caratteristiche e le potenzialità di NodeBB occorre loggarsi come utente amministratore e non come utente normale.

Quando mi collego a NodeBB come utente normale, ad esempio, è difficile seguire le vecchie discussioni, perché tanti post risultano eliminati, probabilmente dall'utente che li ha scritti o dalla piattaforma remota, come può essere Mastodon che tra le opzioni ha la possibilità di eliminare i post dopo tot giorni.

Questa caratteristica di eliminare i vecchi post post rende molto frustrante l'esperienza forum.

Se invece mi collego a NodeBB come utente amministratore riesco a seguire i thread delle vecchie discussioni molto meglio, perché i post "eliminati" me li ritrovo intatti al loro posto, probabilmente perché sono stati memorizzati da qualche parte da NodeBB che li riproduce solo agli utenti amministratori.

Comunque l'utente amministratore ha a disposizione una tale quantità di caratteristiche e opzioni di configurazione che non sono a disposizione dell'utente normale.

NodeBB poi, lo si apprezza decisamente meglio se lo si naviga dal browser del desktop sul monitor del PC, piuttosto che dallo smartphone. L'esperienza mobile di NodeBB, secondo me, è da migliorare, anche perché NodeBB ha caratteristiche evolute che per essere gestite e apprezzate necessitano di uno schermo ampio, poco gestibili invece dallo schermo di uno smartphone.

Tra le cose belle di NodeBB c'è quella di poter definire le categorie di argomenti e indirizzare i vari post degli utenti remoti seguiti nella giusta categoria, in base ai tag presenti nei post. Inoltre è possibile anche per le categorie seguire categorie remote, come se fossero degli utenti e ritrovarsi i post degli utenti delle categorie remote nelle categorie locali che le seguono. Così tante opzioni e caratteristiche che neppure io riesco ancora a capire il funzionamento di alcune, rendono inevitabile la presenza di bug da correggere.