October
Riseup users everywhere, even in your toilet
When we asked for riseup users to let us know what they’re working on, we got this response from the Rhizome Collective (rhizomecollective.org): We just finished construction on the City of Austin Texas’s first code approved composting toilet.
Rhizome’s new toilet sits on their 9.8 acre former Brownfield in the Montopolis neighborhood of East Austin. Composting toilets are progressive, innovative resource recovery systems that use no water and safely compost human wastes into a benign and beneficial soil amendment. The newly built composting toilet demonstrates an ideal in sustainability and the continued efforts of the Rhizome Collective to be leaders in developing appropriate technologies that are accessible to anyone.
The completion of the toilet is also a demonstration that the Rhizome Collective is still active in the wake of its having been evicted from its Eastside warehouse by the City of Austin Code Enforcement officials on March 17th, 2009. This first step in developing infrastructure on the Field opens the doors of possibility for the future use of the space.
How to block people from your email
If you are receiving harassing email or spam and want to ensure that a particular email address is automatically deleted, you can follow these steps:
- Login to user.riseup.net with your riseup username and password.
- Click on Email (on the left side of the screen).
- Click on the Mail Filters tab
- Click on Add filter
- Name the filter whatever you’d like, e.g. “Move to trash”
- Under the messages matching section, select From and Contains and then type the email address, e.g. “barack_obama@whitehouse.gov”
- In the Will be placed in folder field type “Trash” (case sensitive- do not use “trash” or “TRASH” or it will not work).
- Now click Save
You’re done! Any email from that address will automatically be moved to your trash folder. And, if you want to add more email addresses that you want moved to the trash, you can just click on add condition follow steps 6-8 above - you don’t need to create a new filter.
The tale of two love birds
This summer our beloved red-plumed Sunbird stood on a windy hill on the top of an island in the middle of Puget Sound and pledged his love and commitment to an amber-hued bird. All of us in the collective wish them both lives of big softness, huge hope, productive struggle, belly-deep laughter, wonder, and courage.
Notes from the surveillance apocalypse
A company has developed artificial intelligence system that can learn to detect aberrant behavior in video. The problem with surveillance video is that there is far more of it than there are people to watch it. This new system promises to allow automation for analyzing video, removing the limitation of human labor. www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=8144
Surveillance as video game: “The online service, set to go live in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire in the UK next month, opens up access to closed-circuit cameras placed in shops, restaurants and on streets to the public, awarding cash prizes up to £1,000 each month to the users who catch the most crooks.” https://www.psfk.com/2009/10/internet-eyes-video-surveillance-as-video-game.html
Money pitch
Do you work at a company that does matching grants for donations to tax-exempt nonprofits? Did you know that Riseup Labs, our mad scientist laboratory where we develop secure free software, is a tax-exempt nonprofit? If you work at a company, check to see if they match donations to nonprofit organizations; if so, you can double your donation to Riseup Labs, and move money from the man to the movement. There is information about Riseup Networks and Riseup Labs at https://help.riseup.net/about-us/donate/