mastodon - Link to source
Oh Donald, Donald, why such a hurry? Trump’s blizzard of orders gets pushback, questions from GOP lawmakers - The Hill apple.news/AFU6n30OVR-uT9_TU4B…

Trump’s blizzard of orders gets pushback, questions from GOP lawmakers — The Hill

President Trump’s blizzard of executive orders during the first few days of his presidency has sent Republican lawmakers scrambling to make sense of what impact they’ll have on the country, and some GOP senators are already raising questions and conc…
apple.news

mastodon - Link to source

More than 98% of Costco shareholders voted down an anti-DEI proposal at their annual meeting. The proposal had been filed by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank. In its Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Costco's board of directors had urged shareholders to reject the motion, saying: "Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all." Here's more from @AxiosNews.

flip.it/AD2S.m

#DEI #DiversityEquityInclusion #Costco #Retail #Lifestyle

#DEI #DiversityEquityInclusion #retail #lifestyle #costco @Axios
This entry was edited (10 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

In 2022, someone who seems to have given up on the Fediverse posted a cool thing. It's a sequence inside a 3.14 kb executable, which, when run, takes a little bit of time to render, but produces this stupidly effective earworm.
I still have the executable file, which is clean, but I feel weird linking directly to it in a post.

Anyway, if you want to hear what can be squished into a tiny executable, here's the rendered audio from it.

The name of the executable is RedHeat_-_Meow x 3.14.exe

EDIT:
I found the original creator of this, and sadly, he passed away last year.
Red R. R. Tuby, amateur radio call PE1RRR.


This entry was edited (10 months ago)

reshared this

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

wow, but it uses 109 MB of ram once run? That's insane. I wonder how a small 3 KB file can just, use that much Ram. I bet it might error out in something like Win95, unless it can work with less constraints on that.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@rommix0 I guess unlike those annoying keygens, at least you can just press a single escape key and it closes. Ha. When I heard the initial tune I thought it sounded a bit keygen-esk and like chiptune music of course, but I've also seen those coded more lazy and just using a player lib with a data bit in the exe to then play it through that player, which they may or may not link inside of it. It also gets the job done but would be a lot quicker than the way this is made, with the downside of a larger file by a few hundred kilobytes.

mastodon - Link to source

I really enjoyed this #podcast. It is a critique of how the internet has affected democracy. Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein provide some interesting insights. They talk too about podcasts and how the format itself hasn't (yet) been captured by the attention economy. I was reminded about Aaron Swartz’s work to create the open standard build on RSS which is still the way people download podcasts. #democracy #EzraKlein

nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion…

Also available as a podcast:
podcasts.apple.com/na/podcast/…


Opinion | Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

The MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes on why attention has become more valuable than money in politics.
Ezra Klein (The New York Times)
#podcast #democracy #ezraklein

mastodon - Link to source

I really enjoyed this #podcast. It is a critique of how the internet has affected democracy. Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein provide some interesting insights. They talk too about podcasts and how the format itself hasn't (yet) been captured by the attention economy. I was reminded about Aaron Swartz’s work to create the open standard build on RSS which is still the way people download podcasts. #democracy #EzraKlein

nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion…

Also available as a podcast:
podcasts.apple.com/na/podcast/…


Opinion | Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

The MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes on why attention has become more valuable than money in politics.
Ezra Klein (The New York Times)
#podcast #democracy #ezraklein
in reply to Mike Gifford, CPWA

mastodon - Link to source

Brian Dear

IMHO it's more a "war" on shifting attention *away from* important stuff and over to whatever narratives du jour suit the powers that be, including the New York TImes I might add, who spend a lot of time crafting them.

As long as podcasts are "available wherever you get your podcasts" and not only in walled gardens like Spotify and Audible, they will hopefully be ok.

You could not pay me to sign up to Spotify to get a podcast from them--it will never, ever happen.

mastodon - Link to source

Γεια σε όλους! Είχαμε ένα αίτημα από έναν χρήστη που ρωτούσε αν γνωρίζουμε κάποια κοινότητα NVDA ή ομάδα email στην ελληνική γλώσσα, κ.λπ. Γνωρίζει κανείς κάτι που μπορούμε να τον παρακαλέσουμε;

Hi everyone! We had a request from a user asking if we know of a Greek-language NVDA community or email group, etc. Is anyone aware of anything we can direct them to please?

The National Flag of Greece consists of four white and five blue alternating horizontal stripes, with a white cross on the upper left corner. Blue and white are the national colours of Greece, as blue symbolizes the sky and seas and white denotes the purity of the Greek independence struggle. The cross represents the Christian religion. The nine blue-and-white horizontal stripes of the flag stand for the nine syllables of the Greek motto Eleftheria i Thanatos (Greek for Freedom or Death).

mastodon - Link to source

Earlier today, Google rejected a feature request asking for the option to use DNS-over-HTTPS servers other than Google’s and Cloudflare’s in Android: issuetracker.google.com/issues…

According to Google’s own testing, DoH is more private, secure, and performant than DoT on Android. There is no reason whatsoever to limit it to a handful of Google-approved servers.

Just like with Manifest V3 in Chrome, this arbitrary restriction on what DNS servers can use the most modern technologies in Android is a clear example of Google abusing their position to campaign against blocking invasive trackers. One of the clearest uses for custom DNS servers is the ability to block privacy-invasive services like Google’s at the DNS level.

Further details & discussion on our forum: discuss.privacyguides.net/t/go…

#android #google #privacy #dns


Google rejects feature request for arbitrary DNS-over-HTTPS server support

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/331250145?pli=1#comment7 Some background, since 2022 Android has used DNS-over-HTTP/3 instead of DNS-over-TLS for its Private DNS setting, but only for two predefined servers (Google and Cloudflare).
Privacy Guides Community
#android #google #privacy #dns
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

@rommix0 @luiscarlosgonzalez oooh yeah. I guess that makes a lot more sense why I got a model trained for RVC in like 30-40 mins on Google Notebook at the time, that's actually not the worse performance difference. I'm hoping as more we get the optimized models and less epics required for training, that can improve for other things too. I've used the M1Pro GPU so far for the local LLM stuff and just being able to code in a massively wasteful way offline with still decent output return is hard to beat, so having that on Windows as well would tempt me for a GPU, for sure.
@Luis Carlos

mastodon - Link to source
A sick sunfish stopped eating after its aquarium closed for renovations so the staff put cutouts of humans and pictures of smiling faces outside the tank and then it started eating the next day. apnews.com/article/japan-ailin…

Sunfish that got sick after aquarium closed has recovered — thanks to human cutouts

A solitary sunfish at an aquarium in Japan lost its appetite, began banging into the side of the fish tank and appeared unwell days after the facility closed last month for renovations.
MARI YAMAGUCHI (AP News)

mastodon - Link to source

Trump has unleashed a wave of fear among immigrant families by stripping away critical protections that kept ICE out of schools, hospitals, and places of worship.

The Safe Schools for Every Student campaign gives you the tools to demand that your local school board takes a stand and adopts policies that keep schools safe for all students, no matter their immigration status. indivisi.org/safe-schools


Safe Schools for Every Student: A Comprehensive Guide for Action

INTRODUCTION Donald Trump’s reckless rescission of the “sensitive locations” guidance has unleashed a wave of fear among immigrant families, stripping away critical protections that kept ICE out of schools, hospitals, and places of worship.
Google Docs

mastodon - Link to source
🕛Z #NowPlaying at the top of the hour, 2 hours of relaxing #NewAge, #ambient, and #meditationmusic on Northern Lights: The New Age Show, #live with Kelly Sapergia. More information is at ksapergia.net/northernlights/. Tune in either by visiting theglobalvoice.info and clicking on the Listen Live link, or go directly to theglobalvoice.info:8443/broad… #TGVRadio #audio #radio 📺🗣️📻🎶🎙️🌌🌈🫣🫰🩵🪬🫶

Welcome to The Global Voice - The Global Voice

The Global Voice brings together an international team of broadcasters, producers and radio journalists to present for you a wide range of entertaining and informative programs.
The Global Voice
#audio #radio #nowplaying #ambient #live #newage #meditationmusic #tgvradio

mastodon - Link to source

"our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary."

Diverse employees and suppliers have fostered

"creativity and innovation in the merchandise and services that we offer,"

- Costco Board.

98% of Costco shareholders agreed with the board.👍🏿

Segregationists denied.

axios.com/2025/01/23/costco-de…

Segregationists are going to test each and every one of you, to see where your heart is at.

If they haven't tested you already, they will test you soon.

Do you know what you are going to say?

reshared this

in reply to Hubert Figuière

hometown - Link to source

Rick Scott 🏳️‍⚧️

uspoli, canpoli, trade

Sensitive content

@Hubert Figuière

glitchsoc - Link to source

"È il principale ipocrita al mondo della libertà di parola": la battaglia di Elon Musk con Wikipedia fa parte della sua guerra alla verità


Elon Musk è arrabbiato con Wikipedia per aver riportato il suo presunto "saluto nazista". Ma i suoi attacchi fanno parte di una lunga e inquietante storia di tentativi di sopprimere informazioni che ritiene scomode

the-independent.com/tech/elon-…

@pirati


The likely reason why Elon Musk is mad at Wikipedia

Elon Musk is angry at Wikipedia for reporting on his alleged ‘Nazi salute’. But his attacks are part of a long and troubling history of trying to suppress information he finds inconvenient, writes Io Dodds
Io Dodds (The Independent)
@Pirati Europei

mastodon - Link to source

For those of you on mastodon social, please be aware that your instance is becoming a real headache for other instances and their admins. mastodon social has attracted/not blocked too many trolls and disinformation bots.

It's up to you whether you stay there, but people are blocking the whole instance to avoid these bad actors.

If you are worried about how to migrate to a new instance, fedi tips is a great help, with instructions on how to do the switch.

If you need help finding an instance that is a good fit for you, there is help for that, too.

fedi.tips/transferring-your-ma…

fedi.tips/which-server-should-…


Transferring your Mastodon account to another server | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse
fedi.tips
in reply to Dale Reardon

pleroma - Link to source

Jason J.G. White

I'm fairly confident it will be Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), which is used widely by Android devices. Linux supports MTP, at least under the GNOME desktop environment, where it's mounted by default. Microsoft Windows supports it by default in File Explorer. However, macOS doesn't and you need to install additional tools that I haven't personally tried but which may work in this case.

glitchsoc - Link to source

Day three of Trump's term and the largest push for surveillance capitalism yet has been made: Project Stargate will be a $500.000.000.000 (500 billion USD) data center used for running a multitude of AIs with the purpose of spying on you.

Larry Ellison, the world's second richest man and CEO of Oracle, one of the main partners of Stargate, said:

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on [...]. We're using A.I. to monitor the video.”


— Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle on how the company's A.I. systems will be used for in the future [Source: Business Insider]

This is who is in power now. This is the vision they have.

This entry was edited (10 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source
uspol

Sensitive content

#Accessibility #uspol
This entry was edited (10 months ago)

reshared this

in reply to Zach Bennoui

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

re: uspol

Sensitive content

@Zach Bennoui
in reply to Tamas G

mastodon - Link to source

James Scholes

re: uspol

Sensitive content

@Tamas G @Zach Bennoui
in reply to Tamas G

mastodon - Link to source

Curtis Wilcox

re: uspol

Sensitive content

@James Scholes @Tamas G @Zach Bennoui

mastodon - Link to source

Twilio says its adjusted operating margin will reach 21%- 22% in 2027, exceeding est. and up from 16.1% in the most recent quarter; TWLO jumps 11%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

cnbc.com/2025/01/23/twilio-ann…
techmeme.com/250123/p46#a25012…


Twilio stock surges after company issues optimistic 2027 profit forecast

Twilio wants to grow in conversational artificial intelligence while also becoming more profitable.
Jordan Novet (CNBC)

mastodon - Link to source

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 19 updated and 1 added apps:

* Remind Me! – Set alarms for a specific date in the future 🛡️

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo

And thanks for all your kind words and congratulations to our grant 😍


IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
IzzyOnDroid App Repo
#android #free #apps #AndroidAppRain #izzyondroid

mastodon - Link to source
A calque is a word that has been loaned *and translated* from another language. Some English calques: flea market, potsticker, beer garden, iceberg, refried beans, superman, scapegoat, stormtrooper, killer whale. englishlanguagethoughts.com/20…

Calque or Loanword?

Reading about Anglish yesterday, I realised that one of the most useful methods for proponents of this form of English is creating calques. What’s a calque, I hear you ask?
English-Language Thoughts

mastodon - Link to source
Voor onze veiligheid, vrijheid en welvaart hebben we meer grip & autonomie op onze digitale infrastructuur nodig. Ambities zijn er, maar dat wordt steeds meer zoals ‘wereldvrede’ roepen! Kabinet moet keuzes & een plan maken! Blij dat onze moties voor twee Zeekabels en een AI fabriek zijn aangenomen!

mastodon - Link to source

🐦 "Sans les étourneaux le chant des saisons s'éteint" : Faute d'étourneaux, #ExtinctionRebellion La Rochelle les placarde en tags dans leur ville.

👉 La population d'étourneaux décline depuis les années 70, les individus restant se concentrant dans les villes faute de haies bocagères / refuges et sur-usage de pesticides dans les champs nos campagnes 🌱

#extinctionrebellion

mastodon - Link to source
This post about I/O bound "ruby" apps applies equally well to Python, PHP, JS, or any other high-level backend language. We use tools with poor CPU performance and then self-soothe with fairy tales about things being "I/O bound" or "only a few critical loops being hot" and there is *some* truth to those tropes, but it's important not to let them become thought-terminating clichés about performance. Anyway, it's important reading: byroot.github.io/ruby/performa…

The Mythical IO-Bound Rails App

When the topic of Rails performance comes up, it is commonplace to hear that the database is the bottleneck, so Rails applications are IO-bound anyway, hence Ruby performance doesn’t matter that much, and all you need is a healthy dose of concurrency…
byroot’s blog

mastodon - Link to source

Mark Your Calendars and Join the Party!

We’re less than a week away from our 10th Anniversary Celebration on January 29th from 2:00-4:00pm PST! 🎉

Be part of this milestone event as we unveil our new mascot (a community-chosen favorite!) and celebrate a decade of innovation together. We'll be hearing from team members, both past and present, connecting with our incredible community, and reflecting on how far we’ve come.

We can’t wait to celebrate with you! 🎊

✨ Join the celebration in-app or on Zoom
aira.zoom.us/j/89073345341

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems.
Zoom Video

mastodon - Link to source

Some fascinating research out on hacking a Subaru via STARLINK connected vehicle service.

"On November 20, 2024, Shubham Shah and I discovered a security vulnerability in Subaru’s STARLINK connected vehicle service that gave us unrestricted targeted access to all vehicles and customer accounts in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

Using the access provided by the vulnerability, an attacker who only knew the victim’s last name and ZIP code, email address, phone number, or license plate could have done the following:

Remotely start, stop, lock, unlock, and retrieve the current location of any vehicle.

Retrieve any vehicle’s complete location history from the past year, accurate to within 5 meters and updated each time the engine starts.

Query and retrieve the personally identifiable information (PII) of any customer, including emergency contacts, authorized users, physical address, billing information (e.g., last 4 digits of credit card, excluding full card number), and vehicle PIN.

Access miscellaneous user data including support call history, previous owners, odometer reading, sales history, and more.

After reporting the vulnerability, the affected system was patched within 24 hours and never exploited maliciously."

samcurry.net/hacking-subaru#in…

#cars #security #subaru @starlink


Hacking Subaru: Tracking and Controlling Cars via the STARLINK Admin Panel

On November 20, 2024, Shubham Shah and I discovered a security vulnerability in Subaru’s STARLINK admin panel that gave us unrestricted access to all vehicles and customer accounts in the United States, Canada, and Japan.
samcurry.net
#security #cars #subaru

mastodon - Link to source

Signal is a secure messenger, but there are interesting alternatives, such as @matrix , @session , @delta , @simplex or XMPP …

➡️ matrix.org

➡️ getsession.org

➡️ delta.chat

➡️ simplex.chat

➡️ xmpp.org

If you’d like to learn more about these options, have a look at the responses to this toot.

#matrix #session #signal #XMPP #messenger #decentralized #tech #technology #OpenSource #FOSS #WhatsApp #security #InfoSec #data #safety


Session | Send Messages, Not Metadata. | Private Messenger

Session is a private messenger that aims to remove any chance of metadata collection by routing all messages through an onion routing network.
Session
#xmpp #foss #matrix #opensource #infosec #signal #whatsapp #technology #security #messenger #decentralized #tech #data #session #Safety @The Matrix.org Foundation @Delta Chat (39c3) @Session @SimpleX Chat
This entry was edited (10 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Lest we forget the lessons of the XZ Utils backdoor, which was nearly a year ago now, I'll repost @ariadne's post about what we can learn from it: ariadne.space/2024/04/02/the-x…

I was thinking about this today because I happened to look at the transitive dependencies of a program that uses libxml2, and noticed that Debian's build of libxml2 depends on liblzma (the library in XZ Utils where the backdoor was inserted).

The XZ Utils backdoor is a symptom of a larger problem

On March 29th, Andres Freund dropped a bombshell on the oss-security mailing list: recent XZ Utils source code tarball releases made by Jia Tan were released with a backdoor.
ariadne.space
@Ariadne Conill 🐰
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Matt Campbell

Then again, if a library is built with all unnecessary features and transitive dependencies eliminated, then depending on the library and the transitive dependencies, perhaps a lot of security updates become irrelevant.

Thinking about all this as I consider whether to build ffmpeg from source with minimal features. Perhaps ffmpeg is one of the worst offenders when it comes to "junk drawer" libraries as discussed in the article.

in reply to Josh Simmons

mastodon - Link to source

Matt Campbell

@dotstdy True. Still, the fact that a typical distro build of ffmpeg has lots of dependencies linked as shared libraries, even though one typically uses very few of them, means that someone could repeat an XZ-style attack via any one of them. If we don't at least modify our processes to avoid a repeat of the same kind of attack, then we've learned nothing.
@Josh Simmons
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Glyph

@dotstdy I think ffmpeg lives in a different part of the ecosystem than openssh; specifically, the part where the code is big and complicated enough that you ought to be leaning hard into sandboxing and privilege reduction to limit its blast radius rather than trying to reduce its binary footprint (because even in the best possible case, the binary footprint is going to be huge, as josh points out)
@Josh Simmons
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Josh Simmons

"one typically uses very few of them" isn't really true though, you'll use different codecs for different media, and fundamentally that requires a wide range of support libraries. furthermore, the xz backdoor was interesting due to *which* process it injected into - the openssh daemon. unless you start linking ffmpeg into openssh you don't have anything close to the same threat model.
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

Ariadne Conill 🐰

if that is your takeaway i think you missed the point.

the point is that application authors shouldn’t pull in junk drawer libraries for a few convenience functions, not that we should build multiple copies of the same library to support different apps.

or more directly to the point, the person who originated the patch all the linux distributions were using to integrate systemd’s readiness notifications and openssh should have just included a reimplementation of sd_notify(), which is a fairly trivial function to write.

in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

equi

(self-plug:) here's how removing a junk drawer libraries looks like: github.com/FRRouting/frr/pull/…

I also think we should maybe move the "modularize and use dlopen() a bit more" slider a bit further out; and maybe there's room there for DX improvement as well (dlopen/dlsym are… clunky…). If the decision to include features can be made by installing packages, Debian doesn't _need_ to do "just the features required", it's the end user doing that with more and smaller packages.


remove libsystemd-dev external dependency & --enable-systemd switch by eqvinox · Pull Request #8508 · FRRouting/frr

Turns out the amount of code from libsystemd that is relevant to us is... almost nonexisting. To the point of it being simpler to just open-code our own notification function & looking at env...
GitHub
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

TheConstructor (he/him)

I like Gentoo for the fact, that you can decide if you want certain features, and can there by decide against certain dependencies. It's not perfect or complete, but it can remove the burden of updating everything by hand, and minimises the number of library copies. Not sure this will help you right now, but if you want to try something later, it may be interesting

mastodon - Link to source
Arrow Lake's had three months of Windows and BIOS updates to fix its performance, and my testing shows in some games, it's worse
pcgamer.com/hardware/processor…

Arrow Lake's had three months of Windows and BIOS updates to fix its performance, and my testing shows in some games, it's worse

I thought fixes were supposed to improve things.
Nick Evanson (PC Gamer)
This entry was edited (10 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

In a community assembly, the Indigenous Ayuujk residents of Mogoñe Viejo, Oaxaca, decided to rebuild a resistance encampment on the path of the neoliberal Interoceanic Corridor megaproject in the northern part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

avispa.org/pueblos-indigenas-d…

#Mexico #Oaxaca #Indigenous


Pueblos indígenas deciden retomar campamento contra Corredor Interoceánico; autoridades intensifican persecución - Avispa Midia

Existen procesos penales contra 24 personas defensoras del territorio quienes denuncian afectaciones por las obras del Corredor Interoceánico
Aldo Santiago (Avispa Midia)
#indigenous #méxico #oaxaca
⇧