Jonathan Beckford Minnamon

An update from us here at PBS 💙

It’s great that now that Palestine is entirely rubble all our leaders and the surrounding countries have the guts to *whisper* that it’s a genocide and call to stop supplying arms!

We can’t ever stop a genocide if it’s only a genocide in hindsight, and you condemned everyone who tried to name it.

So please, do not move forward as normal. This isn't normal.

It's imperative to put pressure on Microsoft to end this. Whether that's by canceling Game Pass, refusing to cover their games with your normal cadence on your platforms, or to pressure them internally as employees.

Now is the time.

The BDS movement is calling for people to pressure Microsoft with divestment and exclusion from contracts, whenever feasible. We also call for boycotting Microsoft’s gaming products, with the following options as tiers of engagement: Cancel your Xbox Game Pass subscription. Boycott Candy Crush, Minecraft and Call of Duty – flagship videogame franchises owned by Microsoft. Boycott all Microsoft Gaming products, including Xbox-branded consoles, headsets, accessories and all games published by Microsoft-owned publishing labels (such as Xbox Game Studios, Activision, Bethesda and Blizzard).

And I've obviously been saying this a lot lately, but BDS does not expect anyone to drop everything made by Microsoft all at once. They pick very specific targets in order to get as wide a coalition as possible, and in the case of Xbox, even suggest different tiers of engagement.

But the initial focus of the system was the West Bank, where an estimated 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Unit 8200 sources said the information stored in Azure amounted to a rich repository of intelligence about its population that some in the unit claimed had been used to blackmail people, place them in detention, or even justify their killing after the fact. “When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse,” one said, referring to the information stored in the cloud.

However, Unit 8200 sources said intelligence drawn from the enormous repositories of phone calls held in Azure had been used to research and identify bombing targets in Gaza. One of the sources said that when planning an airstrike on an individual located within densely populated areas where high numbers of civilians are present, officers would use the cloud-based system to examine calls made by people in the immediate vicinity. The sources also said use of the system had increased during the campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 people in the territory, the majority of whom are civilians, including over 18,000 children.

It's a direct line. First, Microsoft's Azure enabled the mass surveillance of a civilian population living in apartheid conditions on the West bank. Then, that same technology was deployed in Gaza to support airstrikes into "densely populated" civillian areas.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Do not accept the question "But how do we pay for it?" about social programs ever again. That talking point is done forever.

I am Israa, a journalist from Gaza. The war has taken my family, my home, my work, and my only means of living. Still, I refuse to give up. I am fighting to rebuild my life and continue my mission.

Your support can make all the difference. Please share and donate.

💙 Donate here:
gofund.me/2b2f55f6

I know a lot of you have already heard or read about BDS Movement's call against Microsoft, and felt weird and bad about it all, but decided to move forward as normal because of some degree of ambiguity.

"What service is Microsoft providing?"

Here it is, clear as day. A direct line to death.

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

Writing in a jokey tone to your wife is in fact one of the main benefits of having a wife. Once again, why are you outsourcing the fun part of existence to the machine.

With every atom of my being I hate rfk and all who have enabled his war on the public health. may he know hard days, and may those who have enabled him share in his suffering

Picture of a dresser tipping over but stopped from falling by an anchor kit. The text reads: Our Anchor It! campaign is 10 years old. 8 years older than dozens of children who have died from falling furniture before their third birthday. Since 2015, we've taught millions of Americans how to anchor their furniture and protect their kids, but there's still more to do. Always Anchor It!

Furniture tip-overs can happen even when you're in the same room as your child. Always Anchor It!

Someone else said something very similar to this the other day, but.

It really burns me that our (millennials') generation was legally terrorized for like, downloading Radiohead discographies

But we're supposed to be ok with billionaires stealing human intellectual output in its entirety bc AI

Alright, due to popular demand, let's start talking about the

🎶 Beasts with the fur (with the fur) 🎶

in ✨HERDLING ✨

Here's a 🧵 with the process and tech behind the fur on our fluffy Calicorns:

Policy takes research and time. We have to see what other jurisdictions are doing. We have to work around federal preemption because the federal government is A LOT MORE POWERFUL than your little city council that handles pot holes and shit!

It does not happen at the snap of a finger.

I actually didn’t have a platform specifically on protecting immigrants. I’m forced to bc if I don’t I die along with everyone else.

As for ur other comments that I’m not saying what I’m working on, that’s not true. Ppl are not listening.

Ur doing to me what you did to Jo Ann Hardesty during BLM.

YouTube video by gray2rgb Low-Budget Repairs Trailer

This trailer is incredible.

youtu.be/efMgfRTalT8

People around here seem to think that having a few progressive folks on Portland City Council means that any policy idea that pops into their head should be reality immediately.

Nope! It just means there’s a little less organizing and persuasion work to do, because you already have a few votes.

Why did we stop kicking politicians and media creeps out of restaurants

It's the only thing they value and we have total power over taking it away

YouTube video by SmallButera BAMAN PIDERMAN - Episode 1 - Find Da Sandwich

BAMAN PIDERMAN ARE FINALLY BACK HOME UNDER @smallbu.bsky.social'S ROOF!

Truly a day of celebration for indie animators everywhere...
#FizzVsComics

Photo grid of five headshots of members of Briet's team. Photos are, clockwise from top left: Flaming Hydra collective's Maria Bustillos, Aboard co-founder Paul Ford, developer Matthew McVickar, developer Jacob Ford, and Sludge founder David Moore.

Worried about the move from libraries owning books to just renting temporary access to eBooks? @MariaBustillos.com & the Brick House team have launched BRIET, inviting publishers to sell, not license, eBooks to libraries!

More ⤵️
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

@ftrain.bsky.social

Coming soon: Coyote & Crow: Digital Expand Coyote & Crow across multiple digital platforms

Big news, folks! On September 9th, we're launching Coyote & Crow Digital on Kickstarter - a 2-week campaign to raise money for multiple VTT iterations of the Coyote & Crow RPG, along with an actual play podcast of Ahu Tiiko, and a ton of other digital gifts!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/coy...

RSS is the *real internet*
It's what really enables podcasts to exist, not Spotify.

mister rogers says to become enraged and this is not a joke

This is going to ruin so many cis women's lives. They had to end it in the 2000's because it resulted in women having their lives destroyed, partners leaving them, family disowning them etc. After some high profile suicides and attempts , they had to stop.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_o...

Everyone on Bluesky is telling us their favorite gentle flute songs. Wake up the right way with gentle flute.

Motherfucking wind farms…

Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.

getting my phrenology checked by my laptop camera before I can listen to WAP, a future I always wanted www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

We need to teach people the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. Because the discomfort of the safest people is endangering the most vulnerable, all day every day.