You’ve probably seen the inflatable frogs, the dance parties, the naked bike ride. Maybe you’ve also seen the darker images: a federal officer aiming a weapon at protesters, or federal agents hurling tear gas and flash bangs into peaceful demonstrations at a Portland, Oregon, immigration facility.

Local journalists have been attacked for bringing images like these to the world. They’re being tear-gassed and shot with crowd-control munitions by federal agents simply for doing their jobs.

Photojournalist John Rudoff is among them. He’s been covering these protests since June, photographing both peaceful marches and violent responses from federal officers that often follow.

On Oct. 11, while documenting a protest, Rudoff was struck by a stinger grenade, even though he was clearly identifiable as press. He was bruised, but not deterred.

“If you cover protests, you’re going to have discomfort and hazard. Period. That’s just the way it is,” Rudoff told us. “They shoot 20-year-old girls, and they shoot 70-year-old men, and they shoot people in wheelchairs, and they shoot blind people,” he added, referring to federal agents using crowd-control munitions. “The word impunity seems to be coined for them.”

Despite the danger, Rudoff refuses to stop documenting. “The entire media ecosystem has been covered with the administration’s rantings about the war-ravaged hellscape of Portland, and the city is burning down, and ICE officers are being attacked, and on and on and on,” he said. “I feel some obligation to try and counter this frankly preposterous narrative that the city’s burning down. It isn’t.”

Independent journalist Kevin Foster, who has also been covering the Portland protests, shares that sense of duty and outrage. “It’s clear the Trump administration wants to paint Portland as a war zone to seize more control, but it’s a lot harder to do that when I’m showing you all the dancing inflatable frogs,” he told us. “At the end of the day, someone needs to be there to document abuses of power.”

Foster has felt the danger up close while reporting from protests. “I’ve seen other press members shot with pepper balls, I’ve had flash bangs go off at my feet, and tear gas canisters explode above my head,” he said. But he continues to work to keep the public informed, reporting on federal agents’ heavy use of force and escalatory tactics at the protests.

For Foster, the concerns go beyond federal agents at protests. “Right-wing influencers and agitators have reportedly doxxed people,” Foster said. “With the state of the presidency and the history of authoritarianism, I do sometimes worry about persecution as well, especially given that a lot of my coverage subverts the narrative produced by right-wing media.”

The incident in Portland that got the most attention involved Katie Daviscourt, a reporter for the conservative news site The Post Millennial. She reported being hit in the face by someone swinging a flagpole at a protest, blackening her eye. Police let the suspect go, prompting feigned outrage from the White House.

Holding federal agents accountable

Violence against the press, from any direction, is an attack on the First Amendment itself, especially when enabled by law enforcement. Unfortunately, those purportedly appalled by the Daviscourt incident have not shown similar concern over federal law enforcement attacks on journalists who don’t further their preferred political narratives.

Since the Portland protests began in June, for instance, photojournalist Mason Lake has been struck by crowd-control munitions twice, pepper-sprayed, and had a rifle aimed at him. Yet federal officials haven’t condemned these attacks, or the attack on Rudoff.

“It’s very disconcerting to see how free press has been trampled,” Lake told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). “The best we can do is push back and make sure the truth isn’t run over.”

In other cities, like Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, federal court orders protect journalists from such assaults. But Portland currently has no such order. Legal precedent from 2020 protests in Portland recognized reporters’ First Amendment right to cover protests and shielded them from dispersal orders. But it has done little to rein in federal agents today.

“They have to be sued, and they have to be enjoined, and they have to be criminally prosecuted until they stop doing it,” suggested Rudoff.

Until that happens, however, journalists must keep speaking up, not just about what they see, but also for being attacked for witnessing it. “Most attacks on journalists aren’t reported,” explained Rudoff. But, he added, “I don’t know a single journalist out there who hasn’t been shot or hit or knocked over or tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed. It’s everybody.”

Foster put it even more bluntly: “Many Americans seem to have this impression that brutalizing protesters and targeting the press only happens in other countries. If that notion hasn’t shattered for you yet, wait until your ears are ringing from flash bangs and you’re enveloped in a cloud of tear gas so thick you can’t see 15 feet.”

This isn’t some distant dictatorship. It’s the city of Portland. And the First Amendment is under siege.

freedom.press/issues/journalis…

noblogo.org/transit/perche-non…

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2025-11-18 15:39:36

Perché non posso scrivere di tutto (anche se mi sta a cuore.)

(181)

Spesso sui social capita che, se parli sempre e solo di una certa causa (per esempio la #Palestina) qualcuno ti accusi di non interessarti ad altri drammi, come quelli che succedono in #Sudan o in altri luoghi del mondo.Questa è una questione che merita un po’ di chiarezza, perché il punto vero è un altro: nessuno di noi è un’agenzia di stampa, e non parlare di una cosa non significa affatto fregarsene. La verità è che tutti noi abbiamo dei limiti: di tempo, di energie, ma anche di capacità emotiva.

Non possiamo essere costantemente presenti su ogni emergenza, su ogni ingiustizia, su ogni tragedia che si presenta nel mondo. E, sinceramente, provarci significherebbe anche rischiare di annullare noi stessi, perdendo quella sensibilità che ci spinge a interessarci davvero di alcune questioni.

La partecipazione emotiva è inevitabilmente selettiva: ci sentiamo più vicini e coinvolti in certe storie perché le conosciamo meglio, le capiamo, o semplicemente perché in quel momento sentiamo di poter fare qualcosa di più concreto.

Non è una questione di indifferenza verso le altre cause, ma una scelta, consapevole o meno, di dove concentrare le nostre forze, anche per proteggere la nostra salute mentale. E poi, diciamolo: sui #socialmedia la pressione è fortissima. Se non ti vedi parlare di tutto, c’è chi pensa che non ti importi. Ma questa è una falsa aspettativa.

La responsabilità di dare voce a ogni singola emergenza non spetta a noi singoli individui, ma a un sistema di informazione ben più complesso.Noi partecipiamo con ciò che possiamo, con quello che sappiamo, con quello che ci muove davvero.

Quando vedi qualcuno che si concentra spesso su una sola causa, non darla per scontata: può significare un impegno profondo, non una mancanza di interesse per il resto. E chi ti conosce sa che dietro quel silenzio ci sono comunque solidarietà, preoccupazione e rispetto. Non serve parlare di tutto per esserci davvero.

In fondo, la vera indifferenza è un’altra cosa: è non provarci nemmeno, è non farsi toccare da niente, è voltare le spalle senza nemmeno chiedersi come si potrebbe fare la differenza. La partecipazione selettiva, invece, è umana, corretta e spesso necessaria. Insomma, non siamo agenzie di stampa, ma persone. E va bene così.

#Blog #SocialMedia #Opinioni #EmpatiaSelettiva #PartecipazioneEmotiva

Mastodon: @alda7069@mastodon.unoTelegram: t.me/transitblogFriendica: @danmatt@poliverso.orgBlue Sky: bsky.app/profile/mattiolidanie…Bio Site (tutto in un posto solo, diamine): bio.site/danielemattioli

Gli scritti sono tutelati da “Creative Commons” (qui)

Tutte le opinioni qui riportate sono da considerarsi personali. Per eventuali problemi riscontrati con i testi, si prega di scrivere a: corubomatt@gmail.com

Transit

Il blog di Alessandra Corubolo & Daniele Mattioli. On line -in varie forme- dal 2005.

^Telegram

In case you didn’t hear — on October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive, who host the Wayback Machine at archive.org, celebrated a milestone: one trillion web pages archived, for posterity.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle the organization and its facilities grew through the late nineties; in 2001 access to their archive was greatly improved by the introduction of the Wayback Machine. From their own website on Oct 21 2009 they explained their mission and purpose:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

We were curious about the Internet Archive technology. Storing a copy (in fact two copies!) of the internet is no mean feat, so we did some digging to find out how it’s done. The best information available is in this article from 2016: 20,000 Hard Drives on a Mission. They keep two copies of every “item”, which are stored in Linux directories. In 2016 they had over 30 petabytes of content and were ingesting at a rate of 13 to 15 terabytes per day, web, and television being the most voluminous.

In 2016 they had around 20,000 individual disk drives, each housed in specialized computers called “datanodes”. The datanodes have 36 data drives plus two operating system drives per machine. Datanodes are organized into racks of 10 machines, having 360 data drives per rack. These racks are interconnected via high-speed Ethernet to form a storage cluster.

Even though content storage tripled over 2012 to 2016, the count of disk drives stayed about the same; this is because of disk drive technology improvements. Datanodes that were once populated with 36 individual 2 terabyte drives are today filled with 8 terabyte drives, moving single node capacity from 72 terabytes (64.8 T formatted) to 288 terabytes (259.2 T formatted) in the same physical space. The evolution of disk density did not happen in a single step, so there are populations of 2, 3, 4, and 8 T drives in the storage clusters.

We will leave you with the visual styling of Hackaday Beta in 2004, and what an early google.com or amazon.com looked like back in the day. Super big shout out to the Internet Archive, thanks for providing such an invaluable service to our community, and congratulations on this excellent achievement.

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/intern…

The Micro:bit is a fun microcontroller development platform, designed specifically for educational use. Out of the box, it’s got a pretty basic sound output feature that can play a single note at a time. However, if you’re willing to get a bit tricky, you can do some pseudo-polyphonic stuff as [microbit-noob] explains.

The trick to polyphony in a monophonic world? Rapidly alternating between the different notes you want to be playing at the same time. Do this fast enough and it feels like they’re playing together rather than seperately. [microbit-noob] demonstrates how to implement this with a simple function coded for the Micro:bit. Otherwise, it uses the completely stock sound hardware. However, the IR receiver is added to the device in order to allow a simple remote control to be used to command the notes desired, along with some extra tactile buttons to add further control.

Is it chiptune? Well, it’s a chip, playing a tune, so yes. Even if it is through a tiny speaker stuck to the PCB. In any case, if you’re trying to get some better bleeps and bloops out of the Micro:bit, this is a great place to start. If you’ve got other hacks for Britain’s educational little board, let us know on the tipsline!

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/microb…

The Political Tech Summit is organised by Partisan, a Berlin-based hub for political professionals working at the intersection of tech, campaigning, and democracy. Through events, research, and community-building, Partisan brings together practitioners from across Europe to share tools, strategies, and insights that shape modern politics.

The post Political Tech Summit appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

The conference will reflect on the DSA and European platform regulation, including in its broader legal and political context, under the overall theme of platform governance and democracy.

The post The DSA and Platform Regulation Conference 2026 appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

@Signor Amministratore ⁂ ciao Super Admin, volevo sapere come mai non ci sono nuove versioni del software di friendica... ? Anche la release installata su poliverso.org è di dicembre 2024. Ho visto au GitHub che negli anni precedenti c'erano sempre varie release durante l'anno, ma nel 2025 nessuna! Ho visto che c'è un branch di luglio 2025, ho anche visto una sua preview su friendica.world e devo dire che è molto buona... Molto più usabile, accessibile e ottimizzata per smartphone. Resto in attesa ciao

#friendica #release #a11y #mobile