From what I’ve just found in archives, Rote Hilfe has also once advocated for Borotba, a left-conservative pro-Russian group. That was… stupid of them, or at least disingenuous. https://web.archive.org/web/20150227230349/https://www.nihilist.li/2014/12/16/nam-ne-potribna-vasha-pidtrimka-wir-brauchen-diese-unterstutzung-nicht/

Still, they stopped doing that, and they’re not alone being debanked (their leftist opponents are, too), and not for that reason. There seems to be crackdown on leftist organizations in progress. Which is a very upsetting trend. https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2026/04/05/abc-dresden-on-debanking-and-us-anti-antifascist-pressure/

There doesn’t have to be a sinister plot for the result - mandatory, ubiquitous tracking and bank commisions in the middle - to be real and problematic, is what I’m saying. The governments have all the resources they need to make it possible to pay with cash anywhere you go, but the trajectory they choose is the opposite. Regarding the costs, I think IT and integration work required for cashless payments are an order of magnitude costlier than cash and coin slots, because of the telecom equipment, data centers and IT professionals working on it.

You’re explaining to two Ukrainians that Russia does human rights abuses. We know that. I don’t think it’s an excuse for other countries to make it difficult to support prisoners through legal means. Including those jailed for violent crimes. I’m more interested in ABC-Dresden than Rote Hilfe tbh, I’m not a fan of Jacobin of their branch of politics.

Before city bus cards, there was cash. Then cashless was made mandatory, but possible to prepay with cash anonymously. Then the anonymity was forbidden.

Cash is under attack even in public transit, you are required to provide a working phone number and government name to put money on a city bus card. Here at least. It’s being made inconvenient on purpose.

And the lawyer too? These types of transactions involve contracts and intermediaries.

the organization supports activists financially, through paying fines and funding ongoing legal help

Pretty sure the state and the lawyers only accept bank transfers in official currency, plus lots of paperwork. Civil rights organizations can accept individual donations in cryptocurrency, but the very type of the work they do means they need to convert them to state money in aboveground, official bank accounts.

How would the muggers even know you have the money?

Depends on where you buy a house. There are many rural houses and small apartments in tower blocks. And why a suitcase? You probably have a few dozen low-value banknotes lying around at home, stack them together and see they don’t take up much space (high-value banknotes aren’t thicker).

People who have lived through numerous economic crashes and bank closings. In Eastern Europe, cash in EUR and USD has good reputation, despite efforts by governments to bully people out of paying with cash altogether.

I really like the illustration style.

Moreover, the article mentions that it’s one of multiple organizations debanked in a row, preceeded by ABC-Dresden, which is one of the loudest grassroots voices for international solidarity with Ukrainian anti-authoritarians fighting against the invasion. While Rote Hilfe has a different position (amplifying refugees and deserters, which IMO is also important despite not being treated as politically correct), they don’t seem to be debanked because of their specific connections, but because of a blanket ban on anything leftist and radical.

The exact chosen letters in the article are likely from the name of the organization mentioned, International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which started as ILGA and added letters later.

Unsurprisingly, only the countries that export very little meat and dairy have a smaller problem, that nonetheless remains significant. There’s no “overuse” as in the title, because for the machine that enslaves and slaughters billions of animals every year antibiotics are an absolute requirement. This industry needs to be abolished.

A smaller amount but yes, my relative with diabetes who uses FB did get scammed by an ad for a smartwatch monitoring sugar levels without an implant. Ads like these appear all the time in the feed, and political disinformation, and links to ragebait from Threads. To many people these inclusions don’t differ much visually from posts from their friends, so they don’t understand they’re not getting recommendations from equals, from whom they trust, but from a machine trying to exploit them.

Thought “behind the scenes” in the title, three authors with good credentials, and featured article category, would mean the article presents some interesting technical details about the bugs, from which a software engineer could learn to plan better programs. But the article is just a verbose, non-technical ad for Claude, same as “The zero-days are numbered” by Firefox CTO in the Mozilla blog.

I’m still sure that direct monetary investments in work on software commons, from public budgets, without AI sellers in the middle, would result in similar or better fixes while producing public knowledge and new generations of specialists. Anthropic isn’t doing a public good by donating early access to an LLM API to Firefox developers, it’s doing extortion: we’ll sell this model to anyone who pays, including your enemies, so give us good PR if you don’t want them to get it first.

Together with the attack on web anonymity, sounds like Greek officials really fear those whom they govern. Sadly the anti-cash and anti-anonymity (marketed as anti-corruption and pro-age verification) astroturfing by “thought leaders” is plenty in Ukraine too.

“Incorrect email or password”. I tried setting a new password on piefed.social as suggested, same result. Neither email nor username works as login; IIRC both used to sign me in a few weeks ago.

What is the business model? The way they emphasize AI features, it sounds venture capital-ish and thus prone to enshittification.

That’s why I like it) Simple, accessible, big buttons, high-quality icons. Personally I use KDE when on GNU/Linux, but I definitely see what in GNOME would appeal to people sharing a computer with grandparents or children, or people who value design aesthetics more than extra functionality.