That's a lot. I can't remember a time flooding in Europe had this large of a death toll.
Even German media is now reporting that "Ukraine is currently losing ground faster than ever – except for the first few weeks of the war."
Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung (use Bypass Paywalls Clean browser extension to read whole article)
Of course there's also cope about how many soldiers Russia is losing and how they're going to run out of armored vehicles.
"Friedenspreis" aka peace price of the German book sellers actually.
Did he acknowledge the creators of that track which would be (British) Sea Power? Because dick move if he didn't.
Ffmpeg is used by everybody so you'd hope people are looking at it, but I'm sure there's security bugs in there, and probably plenty of them, since it's C parser/decoder code, probably the most dangerous kind of code. I think web browsers do some kind of sandboxing around ffmpeg, plus web browser restrict the kinds of formats they support, but ffmpeg (and peertube?) supports a lot more, many of which will not be audited/fuzzed to the same degree.
Ideally this would be sandboxed so much it can't call anything but read(2) and write(2). I have no idea if any of this software does any sandboxing at all.
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Maybe, depends on the what exactly you're worried about. There's potentially political actors that might be interested in fucking with tankie.tube, whereas you can't really target anyone specifically with bittorrent. Also the attacker knows exactly what software will be used to decode the videos, which makes this easier to exploit. I assume that videos can get uploaded to tankie.tube by basically anybody, and those videos would be sent out to be transcoded on random people's machines?
If you assume tankie.tube (maybe peertube in general) is just too small to be on anyone's radar, then that's probably fine.
Ffmpeg is used by everybody so you'd hope people are looking at it, but I'm sure there's security bugs in there, and probably plenty of them, since it's C parser/decoder code, probably the most dangerous kind of code. I think web browsers do some kind of sandboxing around ffmpeg, plus web browser restrict the kinds of formats they support, but ffmpeg (and peertube?) supports a lot more, many of which will not be audited/fuzzed to the same degree.
Ideally this would be sandboxed so much it can't call anything but read(2) and write(2). I have no idea if any of this software does any sandboxing at all.
Is this any more dangerous than BitTorrenting anime?
Maybe, depends on the what exactly you're worried about. There's potentially political actors that might be interested in fucking with tankie.tube, whereas you can't really target anyone specifically with bittorrent. Also the attacker knows exactly what software will be used to decode the videos, which makes this easier to exploit. I assume that videos can get uploaded to tankie.tube by basically anybody, and those videos would be sent out to be transcoded on random people's machines?
If you assume tankie.tube (maybe peertube in general) is just too small to be on anyone's radar, then that's probably fine.
Video decoders are all written in C and almost certainly full of exploitable bugs, thus people participating in this are making their personal computers vulnerable to attack via manipulated video files. You'd at least want this sandboxed as much as possible, and have it run as it's own user.
I've been replaying Celeste because last time I stopped in frustration at 5b. Now I'm on 7c and oh boy the last screen is something else. I've been stuck for two hours already.
School is deliberately set up to produce good and bad students. The working class is subdivided into higher-paying higher-status workers, precarious low-wage workers and the unemployed, and schools are tasked with reproducing and justifying these divisions. Pretty sure this can't be done without some pretty fucked up abusive bullying, and so here we are, most are more or less traumatized by school.
*Mark
Die Zeit found the perfect framing device in a young man the reporter just happened upon in front of the bomb crater south of Beirut, and apparently follows him around all night. He's perfect for the story. Too perfect.
He's looking for his family from one of the nearby damaged buildings (no worries happy ending). His father is Hezbollah, he's Hezbollah technically, but doesn't want to become a fighter against his father's wishes. They had a fight and he's the black sheep of the family now. He works at a hair salon and rather likes beautiful hair, no, beauty itself! He blames Hezbollah for this. He says there were of course weapons at the Hezbollah HQ next to his home. He thinks Israel is just too powerful; can't be beaten. He just wants to live in a real country with a proper army and a president.
This conversation with a young man who lives and grew up in the heart of the Hezbollah movement, who, as he says, is of course a member, like everyone in this neighborhood, but is not convinced, who criticizes Hezbollah so bluntly amidst a crowd of irritated Hezbollah guards, is completely improbable - and perhaps only possible for this reason. Nobody pays attention to us anymore.
OK now they're just fucking with me, right?
Youth org of Green Party Germany: The complete leadership council (10 people) quit job and party.
Link to the resignation letter (CW: reddit)
They say they have been in opposition to the party leadership/majority on various issues, like the 100 bn "special fund" for the Bundeswehr, that new brown coal mine, and when they took away the rights of asylum seekers.
Seems like they're planning on creating a new radlib organization.
I have never heard them talk about wanting to overcome capitalism, not even through reform, and they don't call themselves socialists. They don't even call themselves social democrats but rather "left-conservatives", whatever that is supposed to mean.
I mean all socdems are nationalist and BSW isn't socialist, but I guess patsocs aren't socialist either so that checks out.
Brandenburg (the state surrounding Berlin, but w/o Berlin) voted. Somehow the SPD ("socdem" i.e. neolib) gained seats and is slightly ahead of the far-right AfD. Greens and Left look to be below 5% and out. BSW (Wagenknecht; new socdem nationalist/bigot (aka socdem) splitters from The Left) get 13%. CDU (conservatives) at 12%.
By current estimates, it's just enough for an SPD-BSW coalition, and not enough for SPD-CDU or AfD-CDU. This likely means we can all observe how the BSW is going to behave in coalition talks and government and that will be interesting/disappointing.
I saw something on "The Anti-Empire Project" and they said Hezbollah claimed something like 30 of the dead (which was <40 total I think) as their own martyrs and released their names and all. I guess this means they were Hezbollah.
One should keep in mind that Hezbollah is more than just a militia, not everybody there was necessarily involved with the military side of things.
Maybe? We don't know that? You'd expect children to get hurt and killed even if literally everyone with the pager was Hezbollah, since Hezbollah members would wear them more-or-less all the time, even with children right next to them.
This is a terror attack either way, bombing people in their home while not engaged in fighting is some sort of violation even by liberal international law standards.
Don't even know about X-rays, there's like copper foil in the batteries. Some batteries come wrapped up in an aluminium also.
You all know and love debunking. But have you heard of pre-bunking?
> One approach is so-called “pre-bunking” - the targeted presentation of other perspectives and fact-based information. This involves being proactive instead of just reacting. In other words, not just trying to refute disinformation after the fact.
Check out the big brain on Mr. Osintguy. I spent way too much time looking at their sponsors. You can find the funniest shit in their mission statements:
PulseOfEurope: Defend the heart of Europe – with your vote. !vote
iac Berlin: Understanding and developing relational approaches in the field of philanthropy !yud-rational
> Relational approaches are increasingly recognized for their potential to support sustainable solutions and to nurture greater resilience while navigating complex challenges.
The good Lobby: We democratise lobbying !not-good
Toguna Leadership:
> What do we see as the art of leading people? To be an invested sparring partner as those we lead wrestle with the most fundamental questions, we all bring to work and life: Does my contribution matter? Do I belong (here)? Will I stay relevant and have a future (here)? !agony-limitless
Front Europjeski: Literally just "European Front", I guess Eastern Front was too on the nose? !freedom-and-democracy
Very clever puzzle game. Combines Sokoban-like block pushing with predicate logic. So for example, if you create a rule like "Walls is you", you now control the walls, or you can undo an existing "Walls is stop"-rule and the walls are now non-colliding. The rules themselves are created/destroyed by pushing three blocks together: object IS property.
KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe”...
Pro-Israel American academic cries of 'Islamo-fascist mob', claims Malaysia 'unsafe' for travellers despite spending days here
> KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe” country to travel to, despite spending several days here. > > Gilley also accused Putrajaya of stirring an “Islamo-fascist mob” after receiving backlash for his remark claiming Malaysian leaders of advocating a “second Holocaust” for Jews. > > “I have safely departed from Malaysia, one step ahead of the Islamo-fascist mob whipped up by the government there. > > “This is not a safe country to travel to now. Updates to follow,” he wrote on his X account. > > Despite his claim, there was no such mob protesting or physically harassing him in the country.
This guy is something else. He wrote an article called "The Case for Colonialism" (archive):
> There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. The “good governance” agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, should be replaced with the “colonial governance” agenda. A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about “shared sovereignty” or “neo-trusteeship,” such actions should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.
He wants to "reclaim" colonialism and make new colonies. Guess where he got this idea?
> His views about the good side of colonialism were strongly influenced by his years as a journalist. We has worked in Hong Kong for the Far Eastern Economic Review, an English language weekly with a good audience among the political and economic elite, and a typical product of the British colonial empire, now defunct. It stood for the values which Gilley defends in his essay: Free government, free press, free market. > > In Hong Kong he got to know the last British governor, Chris Patten, and he saw how this man had the guts to defend ‘the fundamental values of British colonialism’ in the face of a powerful Chinese neighbour. (source | archive)
Also in there is this hot take:
> "Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti."
So... you've probably noticed that when downloading a game or doing serious p2p piracy, your internet latency suffers: websites take longer to load, video chats stutter, online games glitch.
Well, good news! You can do something about that if you have a router capable of running the free OpenWrt firmware.
The problem of downloads (or uploads) clogging up the pipes is called bufferbloat. Basically, there's a traffic jam somewhere, usually where your ISP throttles your internet speed. This means data packets have to queue up behind whatever data is clogging up the pipes, and so they get delivered with a noticeable latency.
Some boffins have looked at that and identified ways to improve the situation:
- Have shorter buffers, so stuff cannot queue up as much.
- Create express lanes where other traffic can skip the queue of Final Fantasy asset deliveries.
- Tell the Final Fantasy asset delivery service to slow the fuck down.
Unfortunately, the queuing policy and the size of the buffers coming into your home is controlled by the ISP, so you can't really do much about that, but you can actually do #3.
This works by setting a speed limit on the OpenWrt router in your home, which tells anyone sending too much shit your way to slow down, which means the buffer on the ISPs side never get full, and therefore no traffic jam! You won't even notice you're downloading Final Fantasy. The web browsing and video chatting will feel like there's no download going on at all. You got to set the bandwidth limit 10-20% below your actual internet speed though, which I think is well worth it.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
Robert Habeck (German economy minister, Greens) about the DFB (German Football Association) ditching Adidas and signing a sponsorship deal with Nike:
> I can barely imagine the German football jersey without the three stripes. For me, Adidas and black-red-gold have always belonged together. A piece of German identity. I would have hoped for a bit more economic patriotism.
So there is a report going around (originally by Der Spiegel and ZDF), based on "research" by Adrian Zenz, about German companies' involvement in Uyghur oppression. I couldn't find the document that Zenz is basing this on.
In this article, though not directly related to the allegations against BASF and VW, they put a face to Uyghur oppression: Gulpiya Qazybek, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang (left for Almaty in 2019), confesses her involvement in spying on people and even helping detain them. She says her own mother was also imprisoned.
I read through a bunch of articles based on interviews with her, the first one I could find is from 2021 (see sources at the end).
I found some discrepancies:
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None of the pre-2024 articles mention her being complicit. The older articles are just about her mother being in prison.
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According to Der Spiegel, her mother was 65 in 2017, but according to Eurasianet, she was 78 in 2022.
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According to Der Spiegel (Feb 2024), the mother was released and put under house arrest in autumn of 2023. The Telegraph article (Jan 2024) does not mention this, but says "Gulpyia campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother", implying she is still imprisoned.
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According to Der Spiegel, two of them were responsible for monitoring 12 families. The Telegraph article, however, says "she was ordered to monitor 60 families".
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According to Der Spiegel, the mother was sentenced to 15 years. All the other articles say 12.
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In 2021 New East Archive article, the timeline is: The mother gets detained more than 5 years ago, turns up in the hospital several months later. They get told that she was sentenced by a court 8 months after that. In the 2024 Telegraph story, the mother gets detained by the end of 2017, then, 8 months later, she is in the hospital, and then, the following year, they are told of her sentencing. So this "8 months" figure is after the hospital in story one, but before the hospital in story two. And the detention in story one cannot possibly take place by the end of 2017 (as in story two), because it is supposedly more than 5 years before Dec 2021, i.e. 2016 or earlier.
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In the 2021 New East Archive article, she says she "know[s] of people who sleep in their clothes in case they are detained in the night." In the 2022 Meduza story, the people sleeping in their clothes are her relatives. In the 2024 Der Spiegel article, the people doing this are farmers, but she ("we") eventually did that also. This anecdote goes from basically hearsay to something that happened to her personally.
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In the New East Archive story, her mother tells her she is in the hospital because she was kicked in the chest during interrogation, and there is no mention of any other health condition. In the Telegraph article, her mother "had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing". Though the mother does does also tell her "they beat me."
Sources
- New East Archive (London-based NGO) | archive (dated Dec 06, 2021)
- Meduza (Latvian-based Russian opposition media) | archive (dated Jun 07, 2022; but the original Russian version is from Mar 31, 2022)
- Eurasianet (US NGO, chair former RFE/RL, funded by NED etc.) | archive (dated Sep 29, 2022)
- The Daily Telegraph (UK arch-conservative establishment media) | archive (dated Jan 06, 2024)
- Der Spiegel (German establishment media) | archive (dated Feb 02, 2024)
The anti-racist libs of "Munich is colorful" are calling for a protest against an event by a Jewish-Palestinian peace group.
Radlibs love this cursed French-German propaganda channel
arte ultras :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"
"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"
"How very intuitive are these menus!"
"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
***
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
