Meta youth addiction trial seeks up to $1.4 trillion in penalties as 29 state AGs target infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic design aimed at minors.Nikshep Myle (Gadget Review)
A recent series of Flock contract cancellations in Wisconsin shows that the more ALPRs come down, the fewer are likely to go up.Joe Wilkins (Futurism)
In just over a week, the Hanover Institute has published at least 100 articles that appear tailor-made to influence chatbotsNick Cleveland-Stout (Responsible Statecraft)
An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI.Frank Landymore (Futurism)
This three-minute teaser for a full-length animated feature is based on Dutch artist Martin Lodewijk's classic comics series Agent 327. The Blender Animation Studio is currently developing the story and seeks for funding to bring this adventurous comedy animation film to an international audience.
More information: agent327.com
Entirely made in Blender, released as Creative Commons for Blender Cloud subscribers.
Join cloud.blender.org today, get 10 years of film production history, tutorials, and help us making more!
Two amateur art critics meet in a gallery and argue passionately about the pieces they see, until finally they find a piece on which they can agree...
All of the visuals of the film have been realized using Blender and other free/open source software, the film itself and all the assets are being released open and free as Creative Commons CC-BY.
You can support us by joining Blender Cloud, a monthly subscription that makes projects like this possible:
Directed by: Beorn Leonard
Produced by: Ton Roosendaal, Blender Institute
On a desolate island, suicidal sheep Franck meets his fate in a quirky salesman, who offers him the gift of a lifetime. Little does he know that he can only handle so much lifetime. (Target audience age: 13+)
"Cosmos Laundromat" started in 2014 as an experimental feature film, in which an adventurous and absurdist love story is being told by multiple teams - each working in their own unique style. The opening of the film, the 10 minutes pilot "First Cycle", has been made in the Netherlands by the studio of Blender Institute in Amsterdam.
The film itself and all of the artwork files were made with free/open source software and are available under a permissive license. Free to share, free to remix and free to learn from.
Want to see more? Subscribe to the Blender Cloud, our Open Production platform. cloud.blender.org/join
Production website: gooseberry.blender.org
Help us making Free/Open Movies: cloud.blender.org/join
"Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
www.sintel.org
New 4k re-rendered version available! youtu.be/41hv2tW5Lc4
"Tears of Steel" was realized with crowd-funding by users of the open source 3D creation tool Blender. Target was to improve and test a complete open and free pipeline for visual effects in film - and to make a compelling sci-fi film in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The film itself, and all raw material used for making it, have been released under the Creatieve Commons 3.0 Attribution license. Visit the tearsofsteel.org website to find out more about this, or to purchase the 4-DVD box with a lot of extras.
(CC) Blender Foundation - tearsofsteel.org
Duration: 12 minutes. Available also in HD and DCP 2.35:1, Dolby 5.1.
Age: Suitable for 12 years and older.
Language: English spoken
Production: Blender Institute
Producer: Ton Roosendaal
Director & Writer: Ian Hubert
Director of Photography: Joris Kerbosch
Composer: Joram Letwory
Starring: Derek de Lint, Sergio Hasselbaink, Rogier Schippers, Vanja Rukavina, Denise Rebergen, Jody Bhe, Chris Haley
Crew: Andreas Goralczyk, David Revoy, Francesco Siddi, Jeremy Davidson, Kjartan Tysdal, Nicolo Zubbini, Rob Tuytel, Roman Volodin, Sebastian Koenig, Brecht van Lommel, Campbell Barton, Sergey Sharybin.
Project funding: Blender Foundation,
Netherlands Film Fund, Cinegrid Amsterdam
Premium Sponsor: Google
Main Sponsors: NVIDIA, Hewlett-Packard Workstations, Camalot AV Services, BlenderGuru.
facebook.com/mango.open.movie (Facebbok page)
plus.google.com/11205982353113… (Google+ page)
Enjoy this UHD High Frame rate version of one of the iconic short films produced by Blender Institute!
Learn more about the project here bbb3d.renderfarming.net. Support more Open Content at cloud.blender.org.
NOTE: currently, YouTube allows 60fps only on 1080p videos. We uploaded the video in UHD, so maybe in the future it will be available in UHD 60p. You can download the original version at bbb3d.renderfarming.net.
Spring is the latest short film produced by Blender Animation Studio. Made in Blender 2.8.
Get the production files, assets and exclusive making-of videos by joining Blender Cloud at cloud.blender.org
--
Spring is the story of a shepherd girl and her dog, who face ancient spirits in order to continue the cycle of life. This poetic and visually stunning short film was written and directed by Andy Goralczyk, inspired by his childhood in the mountains of Germany.
The Spring team used the development version of Blender 2.80 for the entire production, before the software was in official Beta even. As for all of Blender’s Open Movies, the entire production process and all its source files are being shared on the production platform Blender Cloud.
Director: Andy Goralczyk
Producer: Francesco Siddi
Executive producer: Ton Roosendaal
Music: Torin Borrowdale
Sound: Sander Houtman
Concept art: David Revoy
Animation director: Hjalti Hjalmarsson
Modeling and shading: Julien Kaspar
Animation: Ignacio Conesa, Nathan Dillow, Pablo Fournier
Rigging: Juan Pablo Bouza
Lighting and effects: Pablo Vazquez, Sam Van Hulle
Software and Pipeline: Brecht van Lommel, Jacques Lucke, Jeroen Bakker, Sergey Sharybin, Sybren Stüvel, Tobias Johansson
Rendering IT4INNOVATIONS VSB - Technical University of Ostrava
Format: 3D animated film, 7:44 minutes. 5.1 sound. No dialogs. Fit for an audience of 6 years and older (PG). Everything you see was made with Blender, GIMP, Krita and Inkscape.
Fueled by caffeine, a young woman runs through the bittersweet memories of her past relationship. Get the production files, assets, tutorials and exclusive making-of videos by joining Blender Cloud at cloud.blender.org/p/coffee-run
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CHARGE is an open movie, made entire with Blender. Get the production files, assets and exclusive making-of videos by joining Blender Studio at studio.blender.org/films/charg…
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In an energy-scarce dystopia, an old destitute man breaks into a battery factory but soon finds himself confronted by a deadly security droid and no way out.
Blender Studio is the creative part of the Blender HQ. A dedicated team of artists and developers challenge themselves with creative-technical targets to help Blender users and to drive Blender development forward. This happens in an open source production environment and by sharing everything they make in an open and free license.
Want to know more? Join the studio today and help the team to create & share. studio.blender.org/
Our story takes place in a distant age of the universe, when the stars and galaxies were young. When an ominous cosmic event swallows the icy home of a small space critter, he must find refuge among a group of luminous creatures watched over by a mysterious celestial being.
Subscribe to Blender Studio to access invaluable production knowledge from Blender Studio, while securing Blender's future. Learn more at studio.blender.org/welcome/
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Follow Blender:
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Facebook: facebook.com/YourOwn3DSoftware
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I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground.
That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car.
Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we're all running in our homelabs.
Here's what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting.
Every service you don't self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It's baked into the infrastructure.
Individual privacy is a losing game. You can't opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here's what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn't feed their systems at all.
When you run Nextcloud, you're not just protecting your files from Google - you're creating a node in a network they can't access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren't sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren't being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE.
I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That's when I realized: we can't rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own.
This isn't about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:
Communication that can't be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control
File storage that can't be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing
Passwords that aren't in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass
Media that doesn't feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea
Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger.
Where to start if you're new:
Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation.
Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft.
Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust.
Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.
If you're already self-hosting:
Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person.
Run services for friends and family, not just yourself.
Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure.
Support municipal and community network alternatives.
The goal isn't purity. You're probably still going to use some corporate services. That's fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there's a network that can't be dismantled by a single executive order.
I'm working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it'll be profitable, but because I've realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure.
We're not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we're building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that's a node in a system they can't control.
They want us to be data points. Let's refuse.
What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What's stopping people you know from taking this step?
EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I'm just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think "rule of three" sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.
More importantly, a few people asked about a "0 to 100" guide - or even just "0 to 50" for those who don't want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my "Where to start" list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:
The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It's appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.
The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.
The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.
I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.
Late to the party, but worth resounding all the same.
This exactly.
My community's corner of the internet, is very much seen as a cyber-fort of sorts, not just due to the sovereignty aspect, but as a safe space where the right to privacy is upheld. We started with on-boarding friends and friends of friends. But now? We're on-boarding families. We're exploring on-boarding smaller communities that cannot host their own infra.
Even if you're in your 30's or 40's or potentially older, we take technology and the internet for granted - But so many seem to not realize how we have all the tools we need to take power back, to ensure, in a verifiable way, governments work for the people and not the other way around. We just need to take action. And that begins with us. The practitioners of technomancy. The Homelabbers. The Infra gurus. Heck, all the rebels. We need to build censorship-resistant, resilient infra that shows every person has the right to, and is able to, hold their own data and solely share it as, when and if they see fit.
When it comes to decentralization and sovereignty it's easy to think every**one **should host their own data, and while this would be the ideal scenario, this is also much harder to achieve, and at that thought we arrive and face a brick-wall - In which case, it's important to accept TRUST through COMMUNITY and VERIFIABLE software. Communities CAN build a trust-model to host others' data as long as the individual is not willing. And this is ok, it's a stepping stone towards the ideal.
In the end, the only real option is to opt-out of a system we can no longer in good conscious adhere to.
WING IT! is an open movie, made entirely with Blender. Get the production files, assets and exclusive making-of videos by joining Blender Studio at studio.blender.org/wing-it
--
An uptight engineer gets an unwelcome visit from a enthusiastic wannabe-pilot, causing both of them to be launched into the air inside an out-of-control space shuttle.
Blender Studio is the creative part of the Blender. A dedicated team of artists and developers challenge themselves with creative-technical targets to help Blender users and to drive Blender development forward. This happens in an open source production environment and by sharing everything they make in an open and free license.
Want to know more? Join the studio today and help the team to create & share. studio.blender.org/
Spring snowflake #flowers
Shot on:
• Sony α5000
• Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 DC DN | C
#art #artistic #bloomscrolling #blossom #bokeh #florespondence #flowerphotography #flower #forest #nature #photography #poland #spring #wildflowers
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:45 Sponsor: SquareSpace
02:21 EU parliament ditches Google for Qwant
03:47 EU unveils their plan to ditch Big Tech
07:12 Brave launches debloated version for $60USD
09:33 Canonical takes over the maintenance of Flutter on Desktop
11:08 Ubuntu has a big desktop roadmap
16:00 X11 disappears in 5 months on Plasma
17:56 Acer launches Debian based handheld
19:16 Microsoft adds the Linux core utilities to Windows
20:34 Microsoft will de-activate older Office suites people bought
22:09 Steam machine and Frame planned for summer release
23:26 Proton Drive gets faster + Linux client in the works
24:49 UK orders Google to have attribution and opt-outs for AI summaries
28:03 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
Links:
EU parliament ditches Google for Qwant
politico.eu/article/european-p…
EU unveils their plan to ditch Big Tech
politico.eu/article/eu-plots-l…
Brave launches debloated version for $60USD
brave.com/blog/brave-origin/
Canonical takes over the maintenance of Flutter on Desktop
omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/05/flutte…
Ubuntu has a big desktop roadmap
omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/06/ubuntu…
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-…
X11 disappears in 5 months on Plasma
blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog…
Acer launches Debian based handheld
cnet.com/tech/gaming/acer-nitr…
pcmag.com/news/acer-launching-…
Microsoft adds the Linux core utilities to Windows
itsfoss.com/news/windows-coreu…
Microsoft will de-activate older Office suites people bought
consumerrights.wiki/w/Microsof…
Steam machine and Frame planned for summer release
steamcommunity.com/groups/stea…
Proton Drive gets faster + Linux client in the works
proton.me/blog/drive-sdk-june-…
UK orders Google to have attribution and opt-outs for AI summaries
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
