Let's try this.

I've been on here since 2017, let's get (re-)acquainted.

My name is Alexis, but folks on here call me Souvka, based on my standard display name which is the title of a 1992 Slowdive song. I hail from the Baltic Sea coast of Germany, but for the past six years I have been living on the Skagerrak coast of Norway because I have a child here.

I'm fluent in German, English, and Norwegian, I speak Danish and Swedish fairly well, and I've studied a lot of languages in my life, including ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Dutch, Kurdish, and Japanese, but I'm no good at any of those.

I've studied sociology and philosophy for eight years but never got a degree because I am suffering from a severely debilitating autoimmune disease. About twelve years ago, I got into permaculture and took my PDC last year, and I'm big time into social ecology as defined by Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan. Politically, I define myself as an eco-socialist. I understand socialism as the collective ownership of the means of production. My political history began with with the Occupy movement, and I've defined as an anarchist for most of my political life, but these days I'm feeling quite estranged from the movement, even though my values haven't changed that much.

I am a member and local candidate of Norway's Red Party, I've been writing a magical realism novel since 2013, and I currently earn my living in end-of-life care. For the most part I've worked as a cook and bartender. I am rather introverted, but enjoy being a positive force in the world and adding joy to the lives of others, and I cherish my friends and comrades for the value they add to my life.

Spiritually, if you were to put a gun to my head, I'd define as a Buddhist, but I adhere to my own strange syncretism. I practice aikido and other martial arts (including historical fencing), yoga, and I lift weights, run, swim and go for long walks to study the local flora and fauna, all depending on what my damaged body allows me to do.

I play the bass guitar, guitar, and keys, and enjoy a bafflingly wide variety of music. If it's not clear by now, I'm a huge nerd, especially when it comes to cultural studies and history.

I'm a huge nature lover, I enjoy the company of animals, plants, fungi and all the other fascinating lifeforms around us, I make stuff from things I find in nature including twigs, bones and feathers, I sew my clothes, and most of the time I'm writing, but I'm bad at putting my writing out there.

If you want to read more about my projects, follow @brisling, go to my blog at indreamsandmirrors@wordpress.com, or support me at ko-fi.com/amendedesfadens. I've got a trilingual podcast coming up as well, so please put your money behind this so I can put food on my kid's plate.

I can be quite uptight and cagey, but I tend to open up quickly when we find a common interest, so don't be shy.

Love,
Lexi / Al

P.S.:
I have a huge backlog of follow requests, so approving you might take forever. Don't take it personally. And it usually takes some getting acquainted for me to follow back. Also, I hate computers.

#meme #humour

Computers were not a mistake.

The Internet was not a mistake.

The mistake was allowing everything to be about money and power rather than community building.

I dunno man if you’re faced with the reality that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and your response is, “I have no agency. I have to be bad. I just have to. It’s society’s fault. You’re not allowed to hold me accountable for my choices! I’m just a cog in the machine!” You might just be a shitty person.

I'm surprised that so many people don't know this.

It's kinda funny that the certificate compromise comes just after another round of upstreams bashing at distro packaging.

Let me get this straight for the people in the back. In a perfect world, you'd just upgrade a single package on your system and be good. Unfortunately, we're far removed from even a reasonably good world.

Pretty much everything that matters in #Python uses certifi. dev-python/certifi in #Gentoo is a fork that uses system certs, so our system install is good. But in every virtual environment (venv, conda, etc.), you need to upgrade certifi.

certifi is also bundled in a bunch of packages, including pip. dev-python/pip in Gentoo has certifi unbundled, but you need to upgrade pip in your virtual environments (using vulnerable pip!). On Gentoo systems, you also need to upgrade dev-python/ensurepip-pip, which is the upstream wheel which we couldn't figure out how to unbundle.

pip is also bundled in Python to bootstrap venvs. In Gentoo, we're configuring Python to use our system dev-python/ensurepip-pip package, so as soon as you upgrade it, you're good. But where this isn't the case, you need to wait for new Python releases and upgrade, because otherwise venvs will start with vulnerable pip. On the plus side, you can remember to upgrade it after creating a new venv.

Lock files are particularly popular in the Python world, and a dependency cooldown is the new fad. You will need to update certifi in them, and exclude it from dependency cooldown.

Many #RustLang packages (think uv) also use a bundled certificate store. All these packages need a lockfile update and rebuilding, meaning downstream patching or new upstream release. So yes, everyone (including Gentoo users, because Rust doesn't really support dynamic linking, great design for #security) need to update uv, and possibly wait to discover more random Rust packages that are vulnerable.

I'm also going to guess that all flatpakers are affected, all popular browsers, and possibly everyone else who knows better than to use distro packaging. All containers are affected, and will need to rebuild, with new system certificate stores and all the packages that bundle their own stores…

And the best part is, most of these upstream package distribution systems have no other security layer except for TLS certificates. You can update Gentoo packages safely, because we are using our own key infrastructure. But pip, uv and so on are subject to a MITM risk while upgrading the vulnerable packages.

This is the true definition of clusterfuck.

an essential part of any sysadmin's toolbox,

I see that LLM use in Debian has escalated from "Don't tell me what tools _I_ can use" to sending "an LLM-based check of its licensing and packaging, run by the DFSG team using the Debian Inference service" for every new package. I don't think this even falls within the extremely broad parameters of the recent GR, since no human signed off on this message. This is not a request to convince me that this is good, actually.

The Berlin police raid a community-organised health centre for trans and intersex people for allegedly distributing “prescription drugs”. You know, mostly hormones. The things people need when a healthcare system that supposedly serves them keeps failing them.

A centre that exists because trans and intersex people have learned, through repeated experience, that the German healthcare system does not reliably meet their needs.

And the cishet commentariat cheers on the police, naturally. Because apparently, when the system fails you, the correct response is to sit quietly, suffer respectably, and wait for permission to exist in your own body.

God forbid people organise. God forbid they help each other. God forbid marginalised people develop the expertise, networks and solidarity required to survive institutional neglect.

And then come the familiar little thank-you notes to the cops for protecting us from ourselves. How very considerate. Nothing says care quite like threatening the people who have built the support structures you couldn't be bothered to provide.

Here is what we learn, yet again:

ACAB. Solidarity is not a crime. And the state is not your friend merely because it claims to know what is best for your body.

We also learn that a considerable part of cishet society has absolutely no idea what trans and intersex life actually looks like, what it costs, what it requires, or what people have to do when the supposedly responsible institutions leave them stranded.

They don't know. They don't ask. They don't listen.

But by all means, they have opinions about our hormones.

Funny how the people least affected by a system's failures are so often the most enthusiastic about enforcing them.

Solidarity with trans and intersex people. Solidarity with community healthcare. And a heartfelt fuck off to anyone who mistakes obedience for safety and institutional violence for care.

🐙💜🏳️‍⚧️

#TransRights #IntersexRights #ACAB #CommunityCare #HealthcareForAll #MutualAid #TransSolidarity