In 2025, Big Tech—just ten major companies—spent €49 million lobbying Brussels. That’s more than pharma, finance, and automotive combined.

Google funds all sixteen major European think tanks shaping EU policy. Not *some* of them. All of them. Amazon and Meta fund most of the rest.

This is no longer “poor old me, I need a bit of help,” this is full regulatory capture. With a view to becoming even more embedded into businesses and governments, and getting whatever favorable legislation passed or diluted to suit them.

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/big-tech-lobby-budgets-hit-record-levels

@naturepoker maybe those ribosomes are printing something not yours… I try not too think too much about such things!

@naturepoker 🦠 imminent perhaps…

Please, I beg, if you're posting about a new release of the cool thing you made, include a small description of what it is and what it does.

It's hard to boost "libencarbulator turbo++ 2.8a release is now available! Now supports configuring reticulation of splines" in a vacuum, and I want nothing more than to boost the cool thing you made

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@pandoc/116011707001692685

And it's completely ad-free, of course.
Many thanks to everybody sponsoring us!

@neil heap it, brother!

Looks like someone built a tool to check your LinkedIn network for names from the Epstein documents. Soon I expect other tools will follow to work with other social media platforms.

This is what the beginning of community accountability looks like. Just because the legal system is captured doesn’t mean there are zero consequences.

https://github.com/cfinke/EpsteIn

Yes, I know I am mentioned in the files, but I can’t control when other people mention me.
#epstein

Thank you to Steve Bannon for giving away the game:

Step 1: Show the people that ICE can kill anybody.

Step 2: Have ICE show up at polling stations in areas where people vote against Trump, so those neighborhoods do not go vote.

I have had people tell me cybersecurity is essentially being taken out of Connect (yearly goal reviews), which was Microsoft's big commitment to Congress as part of Secure Future Initiative.

Brad Smith testified to US Congress everybody had to demonstrate what they'd done for security - but it's been watered down now to the point where it basically doesn't exist any more, I'm told. MS haven't told public about the changes.

It's one to watch, to see if things start to backslide at MS w/ cyber.

BBC World Service launches a temporary emergency lifeline radio program on medium wave and shortwave for Iran in response to the ongoing turmoil in the country and the unprecedented crackdown on protests. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-launches-emergency-lifeline-radio-programme-for-iran

in view of the recent publication of the new Cybersecurity Act proposal (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/proposal-regulation-eu-cybersecurity-act) and the provisions regarding the 5G toolbox there in,
this excellent piece by @bert_hubert is definitely worth a read.
"5G: The outsourced elephant in the room", - Posted onJan 20 2020
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

If you'd like to have a nice 🤦-y day like me, go ahead, search your internal code repository for the following:

curl -k
wget --no-check-certificate
verify=false
InsecureSkipVerify: true
ssl_verify_mode: 0
TrustSelfSignedStrategy
rejectUnauthorized: false
strict-ssl = false
http.sslVerify = false
--no-verify-ssl
--insecure*
verify_hostname: 0

It'll be great.

@vitaut I bet they use {fmt} too.

@heleenkuiper hallo! :-)

@differentieel @heleenkuiper hmm waar ben ik kandidaat voor? :-)

please help me spread this far and wide:

i want the sourcecode to "gif brewery 3". it's only available for macs, and seems to have changed hands multiple times. its new 'owners' are unresponsive to email.

i want to reboot it into a cross-platform gif making tool, because nothing like it exists for either windows or linux

and i miss making gifs.

help!

absolutely losing it at machine translation rendering "A Farewell to Arms" as "Goodbye Weapons"

#aliexpress #aliexpressfinds

...now which one of you rail policy nerds wants to convince the EU to set standards for ventilation on trains?

Great expression that should be used more.