Updated my search engine article to add information on Ghostery Private Search’s reliance on Brave Search. In my tests, all Ghostery results seem to come straight from Brave. Excerpt from my article (linked):

Ghostery’s own documentation at the time of writing is extremely misleading, using clever language that seems to heavily imply the use of an independent index and crawler while not saying so outright: Ghostery says it “gets you objective results from a unique search index” and that it will “crawl it’s [sic] search index.” Privacy claims require trust, and word games do little to build it.

#SearchEngines

A look at search engines with their own indexes

A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.

^{Seirdy’s Home}

Decades after the first images from Mars rovers, I still can’t get over the fact that we have actual photos of landscapes, sunrises, skies, and formations from the surface of another fucking planet. Sci-fi creators have imagined the extraterrestrial landscapes for centuries, but NASA went out to see the real Martian surface (holy fucking shit) and it was gorgeous. I’m reminded of the “Holy Shit: Man walks on fucking moon” headline from The Onion.

Quote posting to add alt-text: various photos of a Martian landscape. It resembles a desert with large sand dunes. Soil colors range from brown dunes to reflective cracked orange flats below. The sky is a pale yellow-orange. In some images, parts of the Perseverance rover are visible.

Original post by @pomarede
RE: mastodon.social/@pomarede/1128…

Daniel Pomarède (@pomarede@mastodon.social)

Attached: 4 images Check out these views with amazing levels of details! #Mars #Perseverance #rover #Sol1178 #BrightAngel #outcrop #RedPlanet #Mastcam #MastcamZ #camera #image #gallery #mosaic #NeretvaVallis #MastcamZForAll #space #Astrodon #scienc…

^Mastodon

If you pitched the idea of Las Vegas today people would think you're a lunatic.

So no water to speak of?
Correct.
And no oil or natural gas to speak of?
Correct.
And it's a desert?
Yep.
So every single resource will have to be trucked in?
Yep.
And it's interesting because...?
Gambling laws.

Las Vegas is the Bitcoin Island of its time, except the mob actually made it happen.

Sensitive content Click to open/close

Microsoft Recovery Tool available now, with instructions to assist with the Crowdstrike issue impacting Windows endpoints.

This will require physical access & 1GB USB. You will need admin rights (+ access to the Bitlocker key, if Bitlocker is in place).

techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5…

New Recovery Tool to help with CrowdStrike issue impacting Windows endpoints

Steps for how to access and use the recovery tool Microsoft created to generate a USB recovery drive to expedite the repair process from the CrowdStrike issue..

^{TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM}

🎶 “Once again I fall into my feminine ways” 🎶

Full of gratitude that this immersive exhibit was extended at the SFMoMA. I cannot recommend it enough. A beautiful reflection on community, friendship, and music.

This was my third time experiencing it, and I still cried and sang. So moving.

55 years ago, an American became the first person in history to walk on the lunar surface.

As President Kennedy said, it was a challenge we were unwilling to postpone and one we intended to win.

We led the world to the moon in 1969. Now, we'll lead the world back.

Look, I've had numerous (well documented) complaints about the Biden administration and the fact that I don't think its liberal, incrementalist policies go nearly far enough in the face of a fascist project to control every aspect of our society, backed by corporate power. With that having been said however, I dunno how *anyone* can still be arguing that there are political, institutionalist answers to the fascist takeover we're experiencing in America when even straightforward incrementalist policies by an elected Democrat President are being struck down or otherwise blocked by Calvin Ball rulings from federal courts stacked full of fascists:

truthout.org/articles/appeals-…

Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit’s temporary ruling against the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan comes just over a year after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s sweeping student debt cancellation proposal."

This case isn't even about using political power to stop fascism, it's a clear cut situation of providing debt relief for folks being ground up by the student loan industry. If fascist judges are prepared to interfere with regular policy issues and block milquetoast presidential initiatives, you can sure as shit bet they're going to do the same thing about any political efforts to stop the fascist takeover of our society. Whether you're for taking to the streets, or you believe in stopping fascism at the ballot box, it's 100% clear to me that we're not going anywhere good as a country so long as these corrupt, be-robed nazis are running Bartertown.

There's more than one way to reform the American federal court system, and I don't have all the answers for you. It's entirely possible the Biden administration can keep working around these rulings for a little while to continue offering student loan debt relief to millions of Americans victimized by the student loan industry. What I do know however is that sooner or later the political issues raised by the fascist takeover of our courts will come to a head, and by hook, or by crook, we need to find a way to shatter the power of corrupt judges who're now running the country for their reactionary corporate donors; rich donors and corpos who clearly support the larger fascist project, might I add. Ignoring this reality is a nonstarter - both politically, and in our greater society.

#StudentLoans #USPolitics #CourtReform #Biden

Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

More than half of the more than 8 million borrowers who have enrolled in the program have a $0 monthly payment.

^{Jessica Corbett (Truthout)}

"The ... PAC effort is spearheaded by Mike Novogratz, the cryptocurrency billionaire who backed Dean Phillips in the Democratic primary"

Folks, the movement to replace Joe Biden is being led and funded and promoted by media moguls (who hate that he's going after them for antitrust) and by cryptocurrency bros (who hate that he's regulating and taxing their magic internet money), and rich folks in general (who hate that he's staffing and funding the IRS to make them pay their fair share).

The people standing by him? Bernie Sanders. AOC. The Congressional Black Caucus. The United Auto Workers.

Of those, which side do *you* think is more likely to be right about this?

hawaiitribune-herald.com/2024/…

Major Democratic donors devise plans to pressure Biden to step aside - Hawaii Tribune-Herald

After several days of quiet griping and hoping that President Joe Biden would abandon his reelection campaign on his own, many wealthy Democratic donors are trying to take matters into their own hands.

^{none (Hawaii Tribune-Herald)}

I'm about to spin up a single-user GoToSocial test instance for myself to figure out if it'd be a good fit for me. Venera.social has been struggling a bit lately with multi-day outages, and after switching to firefish.social and losing that account when the server tanked, I think I just need to manage this infrastructure myself if it's going to be something I count on.

If you get a follow from @Nolan Darilek, that's me. Think I added most followers who I recognize posting regularly, but if I missed you then feel free to follow there.

If this works out then I'll switch to it for my main account.

Related: blind folks, what's the latest in Windows Masto client accessibility? GTS doesn't have a web interface so I'll need a custom client.

After many years away from the stage, I am back! It looks like I’m accepted to give a talk at the Matrix Conference (2024.matrix.org/) to present ✨ native simplified sliding sync ✨: how it differs from the first version of sliding sync (an experimental project implemented inside a proxy), how we’ve implemented it inside the Matrix Rust SDK etc. Gonna be fun!

#matrix #RustLang

Matrix.org

The Matrix Conference is coming to Berlin, Germany on September 19–22, 2024.

^{2024.matrix.org}

A short story of a question turned into a new pending #curl feature:

github.com/curl/curl/discussio…

How to Request rate limiting with fraction/custom time unit? · curl curl · Discussion #14242

I naively tested to rate limit curl with --rate 5/10s but complained with following message: curl: unsupported --rate unit curl: conf:1: '--rate' is badly used here curl: cannot read config from 'c...

^GitHub

Genuinely curious about what the Fediverse thinks about this specific issue.

Do you think it’s important to have a free desktop (and mobile) environment, and if yes why?

🔄 Boosts welcome and don’t be shy, please let me know WHY you or others need it.

• Yes. I use one personally. (81%, 132 votes)
• Yes. I don’t use one, but others need it. (18%, 30 votes)
• No, it’s just a toy for engineers. (0%, 1 vote)

Goodness. I just need to fill my house with speakers. So when I'm in the shower, I can listen to my books. When I'm in bed, I can listen to my books. When I'm eating, I can listen to my books. When I'm leaving to go to work, I can listen to the last few words of my books. And then I need one in my head so I can always be listening to my books. And when I'm dreaming, lol, I can still follow the plot of my books.

#books #audioBooks