Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

President Joe Biden plans to send an additional $1 billion arms shipment to Israel, despite the U.S. being opposed to a full-scale invasion by the Israeli military on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

BBC News has the latest: https://flip.it/KZ5Rwb

Do you think the U.S. should halt all weapons shipments to Israel until there's a ceasefire?

#Israel #Gaza #Biden #Palestine #Hamas #News

My Ubuntu installation of Discord is borked.

snap refresh discord

gives:

snap "discord" has no updates available

but when I try to launch it, it gets caught in an update failed, retrying loop.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it.

Any ideas?

#ubuntu #discord

I'm being asked why I think #Google is pulling the standard "Undo" function out many Chrome text input right-click context menus, and replacing that menu selection (without any advance warning or explanation) with their AI-based "Help me write".

I don't know, but I can guess. I suspect it was something like this at a team meeting:

"Hey, word is that we really need to up the AI engagement metrics. What haven't we covered yet? [ laughter ]"

"Well, we could get rid of context menus Undo and replace it with an AI selection. Then when users right-click during text input, they'll get the "Help me write" prompt where they've pretty much always expected undo to be."

"I like that. It'll be right in their faces. Do you think there will be any blowback from people not finding Undo in those context menus anymore?"

"Naw, pretty much everyone knows the keyboard shortcut for undo is Control-Z. They can just use the shortcut. Only a fool wouldn't know that. And we don't care about fools!"

"Absolutely. OK, I'm in. Should there be any kind of warning or explanation for this?"

"No way -- let it be a surprise to the users! More impact!"

"Wow, I can feel those AI engagement metrics going up already!"

"Great work, team! All AI, all the time!"

Whenever Americans talk about "fighting for freedoms" I remember that one time some dude who got thwarted by his own flopsweat tried to blow up his shoes and twenty years later anyone who goes through an American airport has to shuffle around in their socks hoping their pants don't fall down while they get millimeter-radared for a security pageant and the whole country just rolled over and decided that's totally reasonable.

A moderator of a FB group I frequent has fallen headlong into the “politeness” trap, insisting that participarts observe “civility” and “manners” when they post.

Many of you probably already recognize that #politeness is a trap. It is a tool used by aristocrats and the powerful to silence dissent, by protesting *how* the oppressed choose to cry, instead of dealing with *why* they are crying. Southern slaveowners were probably the most polite bunch of folks you’ll ever know.

Focus on what’s important: kindess, empathy, respect, tolerance. And tell politeness to go fuck itself.

"Virtually every major wave of campus protests in the past sixty or so years has been met with condemnation by established elites. And virtually all--civil rights, anti-war, anti-apartheid--over the decades have proven the protestors to be on the right side of history."
-David Rothkopf

#StudentSpring #1A🇺🇸

Call me naive and woolly and ignorant of realpolitik, but if I'd had snipers posted on the roof of my university when I was 20 years old, in response to me saying "genocide is a bad thing, actually"....I'd have probably not felt kindly towards whoever was ostensibly in charge of running my country (Tony Blair, at the time, lol) and would have been disinclined to listen to anyone telling me that the alternative to rooftop police snipers was fascism.

Do you think private ownership of the means of production(MoP) should be limited to ensure fair access to resources, and if so, to what degree?

We made a comic about sharing.

Some thoughts about attribution in the XZ backdoor, having just wasted so many hours digging into the details.

The email addresses used for a couple of years at least by the parties involved have absolutely *zero* trace in any kind data breach or database beyond Github/Gitlab, and maybe Tukaani and Debian and a few mailing lists.

Normally when I see this, the assumption is that we're dealing with a single-use or single-purpose email address that was created either for fraud or b/c someone is super paranoid about privacy.

The people in the latter camp who do this tend to have other tells that give them away, or at least *some* trace or home base in the online world. Especially if we're talking on the order of years using that address.

Either way, very few people do opsec well, and for every year you're operating under the same name, nick, number, email, etc you dramatically increase the risk of screwing up that opsec. And almost everyone does, eventually.

To see this complete lack of presence in breached databases once or twice in the course of an investigation is rare, but to find it multiple times suggests we're dealing with an operation that was set up carefully from the beginning. And that almost certainly means a group project (state-sponsored).

Thinking about Easter reminded me of something I learned about Uruguay.

Uruguay is determinedly secular, and doesn't want to give special status to religious holidays. So the week leading up to Easter was renamed "Tourism Week”.

But people still celebrate Easter, because it’s a longstanding tradition.

And that's why you're quite likely to find a sign on the door of the tourist office that says "Closed for Tourism Week”.

Happy Tourism Week to all who celebrate!

Mildly interesting: these two trucks have the same bed length.

It's important to understand that "age verification" schemes being passed by states, ostensibly to "protect the children", won't do that and will bring about incredible abuses.

In order to age verify children, obviously EVERYBODY of any age must be verified, for every account, under every name or pseudonym, ultimately on every site no matter how public or private the topic, and before downloading any apps.

Children will find ways to work around this. They'll use the accounts of adults, which will be openly traded. But because these age verification systems must by definition be based on government IDs, the verification process creates a linkage between your account names and your actual identity, subjecting you to all manner of leaked personal information, government abuses (think MAGA in charge), and worse. Firms will claim their systems either don't keep this data or can't be abused. History strongly suggests otherwise, and when courts step in, those firms will have to do what the courts say, often in secret, when it comes to collecting data.

Age verification is in actuality a massive Chinese-style Internet identity tracking project -- nothing less -- and there are many politicians in the U.S. who look with envy at how China controls their Internet and keeps their Internet users under police state controls.

Just a reminder folks, unless you agree with them, no matter how polite you are, you will always get blocked... I get 10 examples a day why I cant stand the left, even as a person who is on the left (slightly)

https://mastodon.social/@Radical_EgoCom/112147596006629998