Mr Penguin

CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc and co-host of syndicated radio show Free Talk Live.

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 19:59:25 UTC

Yikes, talk about socialists bankrupting a country:
"French Lawmakers Back Per-Gigabyte Internet Traffic Tax"
"The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users."
If I did the math right that's going to add about US $18 per month to subscribers bills.
I'll admit I don't know what they currently pay, but there are internet connections that cost just a bit more than that meaning in some instances it might be doubling the cost of an essential service for French households.

2026-10-31 19:03:26 UTC

I get it, you don't like Meta's "pervert glasses", but what human rights and safety concern could possibly exist???
"are requesting that Meta provide more information before Thanksgiving on whether it conducted detailed human rights due diligence and safety testing"

2026-10-31 06:29:40 UTC

Get ready for things to start failing in crazy and unanticipated ways left and right:
"Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren't thinking that way. So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months. Now, he's on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will 'challenge the system and the status quo,' or, as he puts it, be 'an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up.'"
Legacy doesn't equal bad, and an AI re-write doesn't equal good either.
I can't say for sure given I have no idea what the code base they were referring to was, but I suspect someone aught to call bullshit on this one.
You still need to validate the code after the rewrite and it's not the writing of the code that takes forever. It's the decades of testing and QA that went into it that has value.
When your system collapses because you didn't do sufficient QA.... well...

2026-10-31 06:15:54 UTC

"Gen Z can't catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free."
It's worthy of pointing out that this is or was the difference between a salaried employee and an hourly employee.
If you are salaried you work when the boss tells you to work and you get a higher fixed salary.
If you are paid by the hour than your getting a lower hourly salary and overtime for any additional hours over 40 that you work.
Your not putting in overtime for free, you're already being paid for it. It was part of the deal when you took the job.
As far as not showing up for work on time~ that's totally unacceptable at pretty much any job and aught to get you fired almost immediately. 3 no calls or late shows ~15 min or more without a call. No doubt that there may be some leeway with the boss when you work retail, show up at 7AM when the store opens and they've put you down for 6:30AM... because well they don't actually have anything for you to do between 6:30 and 7:00 AM anyway... but...

2026-10-31 06:03:12 UTC

"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan,"
... aww no shit... his intentions never been in your interest.
But the humorous part of it is he's actually got a genuine argument as it relates to running AI models at the moment as on ones personal computers require a lot more ram than those who don't run AI models on their personal computers.
Basically from an efficiency argument he's right within the context it sounds like we're talking.
"Then he explained why that's a bad idea: 'From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,' Altman said. 'You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.'"
And now the part I take issue with:
"'And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that.'"
The people arguing against cloud computing in the context of AI in particular is not an efficiency argument. It's a privacy argument. Their intuition is correct, but your intentionally misreading what people are saying or thinking as they're not concerned about efficiency much at all. Maybe a few people are concerned about the environmental impact... but it's more the noise, immediately impacting pollution, not pollution more generally speaking (no one cares if it's polluting China or Africa or Asia or whatever, but they do care if it's in their backyards).

2026-10-31 05:41:09 UTC

Part 2:
"The Justice Department has charged five people in a crackdown on 'ghost student' loan fraud,"....
And the problem as I surmised without having even read the story:
"If accepted, student aid is distributed first to schools to cover tuition and fees, but any leftover money is deposited into bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters."
And then the part that gets disturbing because of the assumptions being made about those receiving the money into their bank accounts:
"Dozens of Americans have opened bank accounts to act as money mules for fraudsters, the DOJ said."
... so someone receiving money into their bank account doesn't necessarily know the source of the funds. They just know they've been paid and will assume it's for whatever the scammer tells them. In other words someone selling the scammer cryptocurrency won't know they're being used to launder ill-gotten gains. They are at least potentially a VICTIM unless a scammer has for reasons unknown told them the truth about the source of the funds. That seems unlikely and it's all the more reason I find what the DoJ does absolutely disgusting.
The DoJ is contributing to the problem while convicting, prosecuting, or convincing innocent people just trying to get by to take a plea deal in exchange for testimony against folks who also may or may not be the scammer.
The scammers are often overseas and outside the reach of law enforcement so it's often the case the people arrested aren't even the people doing the real harm.
The government literally testified during the Crypto6 case as a perfect example that the agent whose sole job it was to go after scammers HAD NEVER CAUGHT A SCAMMER IN HER 20 or 30 year career (I forget now if she said 20 or 30, but you can look it up either way).

2026-10-31 05:21:05 UTC

"The Justice Department has charged five people in a crackdown on 'ghost student' fraud, in which scammers allegedly use stolen identities and AI to enroll fake students in colleges, complete coursework, and collect federal student loan funds."
I'd really like to know how charging 5 people in 'ghost student' loan fraud is doing anything to resolve the issue of 'ghost student' loan fraud.
All that is happening is we're being bilked twice. Once by the 5 people charged presumably assuming they even did the deed and once by the DoJ.
The impact of charging 5 people over something so much more significantly being done at scale isn't going to leave even a slight dent in the problem, but what it does do is deceive the public that the DoJ can do something about the problem. When will the DoJ charge itself with fraud????

2026-10-31 03:32:28 UTC

"Meta Settles Another Social Media Addiction Case Just Before Trial"
Ohh please, and this is the "social media" companies fault how??? Where were her parents? Who bought her the phone? Who subscribed to the internet? And most importantly teach your f'ing kid some self control. Seriously. When kids have responsibilities and aren't treated like babies cause of helicopter parenting they build important skills like personal responsibility and learn about things like consequences.
"The lawsuit was brought by an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi known as K.D.B who, according to Reuters, has 'described staying awake for hours scrolling social media, losing focus in class and engaging in self-harm using methods shown in social media videos.' Jury selection kicked off earlier this week in Los Angeles."

2026-10-31 03:27:08 UTC

"Apple Is Entering Its Slop Era "
" My ears perked up when I heard Apple's new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it's releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it's borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected."
It's Apple, I mean what did you really expect???
The only reason the corporate world does anything is they think they can make more money. Whether it's selling data it gleans from spying on you, shilling AI to investors to bring in more money, to selling $19 pieces of cloth.
If you don't like being taken advantage of stop using their platforms, their products, their services.
I will be the first to point out we don't actually have a free market, but the idea behind a free market is there is competition and you as a consumer have a choice including not purchasing or using a particular companies products or services if they're doing something that isn't in your interest.
The system may be far less than perfect or a free market, but there are still at least *SOME* things you can do.
Instead of just complaining stop contributing to the downfall of all of us.

2026-10-30 19:59:08 UTC

"Notice that a ban on children becomes a defacto 'get carded at the door" for all adults in the UK to participate in the town square. This is the most authoritarian government the UK has had since Thatcher.'"
Some random persons response whose probably arguing in favor of it:
"Facebook is not the town square. It's the private event venue full of ..."
Umm doesn't that make it all the more disturbing though?
I mean in the United State they argue for FCC-style no curse words style regulation based on the idea radio and TV are accessible to anyone over the airwaves. Now cable networks get a free pass because you don't have to subscribe.
That begs the question then if the internet is in the same boat as cable television shouldn't it also be hands off. Those who don't want their kids on the internet or on social media can simply choose not to subscribe or otherwise block those sites/services/etc utilizing the same sorts of tools that parents have had available to them since the 90s.
Ultimately kids are smart and no regulation or law, school, or parent will be able to keep their 'child' off the internet forever. At some point a 'normal' youngster particularly given the ages we're realistically talking is going to be able to get around these bans.
Maybe you can keep your ~0-10 year old off the internet, but good luck with that for older 'kids' short of being a psychotic lunatic of a parent today.
If kids can get other products like eSmokes or whatever they're called despite humans checking ID and effectively so there is no way your going to be able keep a 'normal' IQ 'child' of 11 from figuring out how to acquire an inexpensive device and getting online~ and then getting around the blocking and/or regulations (ie use non-UK non-compliant sites).

2026-10-30 19:45:59 UTC

Remind me again why Intel shares would drop when they're not even in the AI game? And Reddit? Same thing. Though Redit's announcement that they're going to block their user base might have more to do with it than the AI thing in that instance.
"The Nasdaq fell more than 3.5%, while Intel shares dropped as much as 30%, Reddit fell 26%, and Alphabet extended its losses after shedding more than $500 billion in market value Thursday."

2026-10-30 17:18:19 UTC

Do you know how you create terrorists and kids who shoot up schools and similar?
This:
"'We should expect that motivated children will seek to bypass the restrictions -- just like alcohol laws can't completely eradicate underage drinking -- but there'll be ways for platforms to mitigate this risk,' said Dawes. 'This will be a huge cultural shift for our society, so it'll take time to adjust, and everyone will have a part to play.'"
When you back a dog into a corner it's going eventually bite you. The same thing happens to man kind. The age is largely irrelevant, but teens are probably not a good age group to test this with. Revolutions, and similar are more often than not a consensus of young people. The outcome of which is often not what was intended or hoped for by the participants either. In other words things can and do get worse. Your playing a very dangerous game. Helicopter parents, nanny states, and the like. At some point we're all going to suffer the consequences of these ill-thought out laws.

2026-10-30 17:00:09 UTC

You really have to wonder what people are thinking when they go and adopt a technology class for an illegal use case that's basically explicitly geared at entrapping them (stablecoins, at least non-privacy friendly fake cryptos that are designed for government to be able to freeze them):
"According to the indictment, the group behind the anime piracy ring collected $12.85 million in USDT through ad network PropellerAds."
In some instances I kinda get it... but in other instances not so much. I don't get it when it comes to a piracy 'operation' and maybe there is something I am missing as someone whose never touched or done something like this (yea, it might be kinda obvious I keep any one whose risky or just attracting attention even away with a 10 ft foot pole.. no desire to get caught up in something of this or another similar nature.. even if I'm being tailed here or there).
What I don't get is when the losses from seizure and arrest are predictable and knowable in advance to one degree or another and you've gone and accepted the general risk why not spend the 2 minutes more and mitigate the seizures via using a more privacy oriented cryptocurrency? You can spend that crypto directly and/or convert it, but it can't be so direct. Have these people literally never watched an organized crime genre film? Or understood that the receivables have to be laundered first? This is why people setup car washes, laundry mats, and other businesses. This is why people pay taxes on their criminally derived assets.
I'm convinced why people get caught is they don't think or are lazy & not that police are good at their job. It's this and/or your looking for a fight (ie activism or something similar etc, Crypto6, maybe Larry Flynt?).
https://torrentfreak.com/vietnam-indicts-hianime-operators-over-12-85-million-in-pirate-ad-revenue/

2026-10-30 16:28:50 UTC

Regarding the recent Binance hack you really have to wonder which exploits were used, did AI generate the code, did it have the appropriate amount of peer-review? Did they take the minimization principles seriously (ie reduce the surface area that was potentially attackable)?
"'This was a complex attack,' said Teng. "The attacker also used a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and tracers, making it more difficult for us to trace." From a report:
Teng said the incident was not carried out by one person. While the initial investigation indicated the involvement of a compromised laptop, further digging revealed additional points of breach. [...] Blockchain analysis firms TRM Labs and Elliptic have linked the theft to North Korean hackers, with TRM attributing it 'with high confidence' to a group known as TraderTraitor, the same group responsible for last year's Bybit hack.
...
The hackers appear to have compromised Binance's wallet-signing infrastructure, allowing them to authorize transactions that drained billions of dollars in cryptocurrency across multiple blockchains, according to the firms. Binance, in its preliminary stage, has conducted an investigation into the hack, which suggests the incident may have begun with a compromised engineer's laptop. The exchange added that it has found no evidence that wallet passwords were leaked. "

2026-10-30 16:12:39 UTC

Reddit: Just another site I won't be using shortly:
"Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit's user experience and its ads business and is "more protective of Reddit data." The "vast majority" of unauthorized Reddit access happens "through our logged-out experiences," though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user's identity --'Honestly, we don't want to know' -- just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver 'more relevant ads.'"

2026-10-30 07:42:46 UTC

Yikes- if I hadn't already grasped why proprietary VPN apps break GNU/Linux installations on the regular this should explain everything:
"Yen reportedly dismissed an employee's request for additional security testing before releasing new code, calling it 'bullshit and loser thinking' and insisting that 'only losers think like that.' In a separate exchange over Proton's post-quantum encryption rollout, Yen criticized how the company communicated the feature's limitations and told employees that 'perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn't matter if you don't win on perception.'"
I'm not anti-AI, but I also am not all Gung ho on AI either. This is just stereotypical startup and corporate bullshit. It doesn't matter how you make your money so long as you make a ton of it and dammed if it's done honestly or not.
Crazy thing is- even those who want to portray themselves as better by pushing "free software" over "open source" are just as bad.
Actually weeding how shitty people with shitty mindsets is hard. 90% of the people doing "good" or promoting themselves as such are evil pieces of shit and it's not just the Google's and Microsoft's and Apples of the world.

2026-10-29 19:31:45 UTC

Entertaining story of the copyright cartels censorship being portrayed for "safety":
"Chile Blocks 1,954 Pirate TV URLs to Protect Citizens’ ‘Privacy and Personal Data’"
"Subtel warns that these unauthorized streaming platforms can collect sensitive data from users, leaving them exposed to cybercrime, data theft, and financial fraud."
All I'm thinking is... umm yea, kinda like how the major 'legal' platforms do it???
Frankly I'd trust an illegal platform more given what we know the legal ones do with your data.

2026-10-29 18:01:26 UTC

Continuation of the fearmongering and FUD from a Slashdot 'story':
"In short, when you hang around online in 2026, you see little worth saving. Perhaps a decade ago, you felt that the glimmers of community and joy, of artistic and intellectual exchange, were enough to balance out the toxic junk. No longer."
Sounds like someone whose exclusively on big tech social media platforms. There is a ton of stuff worth saving. More now than ever before. You just got to open your eyes and not hang around awful people and platforms. Maybe get out of the house once in a while.

2026-10-29 17:56:04 UTC

FUD was invented to distract us from the real problems like privacy invasive devices like TVs/software/FLOCK and similar cameras, socialist redistribution of wealth schemes, and similar.
A entertaining rant and crazy FUD on Slashdot today:
"Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web -- and the social fabric woven there -- is not what they signed up for. "
I 'signed up' in the 90s and I do recall it being marketed as "the world wide web" with implications of diversity. Not convinced, but the left/right getting online hasn't helped.
"Symptoms of advanced cultural decay"
This cultural decay implies the "culture" was worth saving.
"can no longer be ignored."
Yea, sure, we have problems we need to solve, but not the ones you present. You can solve most problems your presenting by not using/buying something.
"This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought over privacy violations"
So don't use their services. I largely haven't. You have no particular right to use their services or use them on your terms. Lied? Sure. Not sure it changes anything.
"and mental health harms allegedly caused by the addictive mechanisms of their platforms."
Keyword here is allegedly.
"Schools are banning smartphones as multiple countries institute social media restrictions for under-16s."
This is stupid. We've had social media for 30 years. Phones have been restricted in many schools since pagers were obsoleted.
"As humans scroll past headlines about AI taking their jobs, "
Overblown fearmongering. No one likes being unsure where their next paycheck is coming from, but advancements have always led to new better paying jobs.

2026-10-28 22:37:01 UTC

This is exactly why we need to abolish 'child protective services', aka 'Division for Children, Youth and Families (DCYF)' and similar state entities and drastically reduce the number of law enforcement officers.
This mother left her 4 kids home for 5 days with someone looking in on them every day before and after school. The one youngster was fully capable of keeping an eye on the others with the youngest being 9. There was also an adult it sounds like checking in before and after school.
So what happened that got the states attention? Apparently a weight of some kind hit the 9 year old on the head and an 11 year old called 911 out of what was probably an abundance of caution.
The state is now calling this 'child neglect'.
Whatever justification there is for a child protective agency or law enforcement action here when they start going after parents who might have ever so slightly misjudged based on changing expectations just evidence why these state organizations staffing need to be severely reduced.
These organizations were setup to investigate real abuse and neglect. Kids not being fed and provided for (and literally starving to death, ie 15 year that is 55 lbs), kids being beaten to near death, and no not because a parent hit their kid. We're talking blood and doctors visits cause of broken bones and similar.
Most of this could be solved if cops simply stopped using violence to return runaways back to their abusive 'caregivers'. Kids don't need state 'protection'. They need the state to stop enabling and assisting abusers.

2026-10-27 22:56:36 UTC

This story is humorous and ridicules. So this mother left her offspring 'home alone' for a few days and was charged for it. The first thing I thought was "well, how old?" right? Well, turns out there were 3 that were on the younger side, but the 4th kid was 14. The entire thing just screams ridicules. A few years ago friends let their kid move out and he was 15 1/2. Just a year and half older than this girl who was presumably left in charge of her 3 siblings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I5I40TkEXQ

2026-10-27 22:19:37 UTC

This is certainly interesting (I'm got my skepticism in me of using a Switzerland-based email provider, but here we are with a real world example of it being effective at protective someone's privacy it sounds like):
"This list of targets isn’t limited to regular members. Several of the site’s administrators are on it as well, identified by Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail addresses. One other administrator, who used a ProtonMail address, was left out, as the Swiss company is beyond the reach of a U.S. subpoena."

2026-10-27 22:13:16 UTC

Entertaining argument for why a copyright cartel member is justifying obtaining identifying information of an email account holder that would ordinarily be used by a defendant:
“'But an IP address identifies an Internet subscription, not a person: it resolves to whoever pays the bill for a household, an office, a university network, or a shared carrier-grade address pool, and it can be masked by a VPN,' FlavaWorks writes."
Their argument however for why they should be able to get identifying information for an email address where it can't be justified for an IP however is equally as flawed:
"An email address, the company argues, is personal to the account holder, which should help to identify the defendants."
There are many situations where an email address does not identify a person just as an IP doesn't identify a person. Think about what happens when you email sales or support at a company. You didn't seriously think that address is connected to a single person did you? There are plenty of people who share an email address for one of numerous reasons.

2026-10-27 21:54:54 UTC

There is a legal concept in law known as prior restraint (also known as prior censorship or pre-publication censorship).
In U.S. constitutional law, it is a fundamental principle that the government cannot prohibit or restrict speech before it occurs, as this is considered a severe violation of First Amendment rights.
What makes corporate censorship disturbing is not that that corporations can censor, but that there are standards being set through threat of law that the government can't constitutionally set itself and there is a really good reason for that. Democracy literally depends on people being able to communicate freely and without fear of reprisals. Anything short of this leads to authoritarian dictatorial regimes and even this doesn't fully stop that from happening.
"Meta also limits the distribution of likely infringing live content and has introduced delays, so its anti-piracy measures can take effect before a stream is visible to the public."

2026-10-27 21:50:02 UTC

Apparently the copyright cartels want a monopoly on streaming now too, not just their own work:
"The AI tool works alongside changes to Facebook Live. New accounts are not allowed to use Live at all"
This apparently was some kind of response to the copyright cartels demands to go after sports streaming pirates.

2026-10-27 21:42:46 UTC

."AI-Predicted Pirate Streams
Meta describes a three-pronged response to piracy. It aims to stop infringing content from being posted, remove what gets through, and make the rest harder to find. According to the company, its recent efforts against live streaming piracy show that this approach works.
The most prominent example is a new AI tool that spots pirated sports broadcasts while they are being streamed.
'[I]n 2026, we built and launched an advanced AI enforcement tool that analyzes video content along with additional signals, to predict whether the content is an unauthorized stream of a professional sports broadcast,' Meta writes.
'Based on the prediction results, we can proactively remove this content in real time, before it gains a significant audience, and without a rights holder ever having to intervene.'”
It's worth pointing out that YouTubers, radio streams, and pod-casts are regularly being taken down without any of the AI.
Who owns the market? Who is it built for? It's clearly not creators. It's the copyright cartel.
Neither the hosting providers nor the streamers should be negatively impacted by a desire for some subgroup to make more money.
If you want something taken down you should have to put up a retainer at a minimum so that in the event you demand something be taken down that you had no right to said demand your held liable for the damage causes. The retainer shouldn't be the liability itself, but a deterrent to sending take downs in the first place that you aren't 100% correct on.
Anything less than this is a scheme to steal from others.

2026-10-26 18:58:00 UTC

Fuck Europe.
The amount of paperwork involved is LITERALLY impoverishing those in Europe and they don't even understand why they're so poor.
Here is another great example of socialism increasing costs, reducing competition, and undermining the middle and lower classes.
Instead of taking 5 minutes to ship a package it now takes 15-30 minutes to ship a package to Europe. That has REAL economic costs to those in Europe. Europeans are paying more and more for goods as a consequences of the bureaucracy and red tape. Now to ship a single item (and often there are many items in an order) you have to supply a model number, a SKU, and a UPC, and apparently the receivers email address as well.
Maybe this doesn't seem unreasonable to you, but you've clearly missed the amount of time each order takes to ship as this is NOT all the information required for customs.
It actually costs more to ship to Europe than it does to manufacture the good shipping to Europe. It's that insane.
This is just part of the list of some portion of the crap you have to do to ship goods to Europe:
* There are also plans in the works to demand a tax ID # from each person that has already been implemented in some countries like Mexico (not part of the EU, but it's a new trend, and the EU from what I understanding is doing it, just taking longer to implement).
https://social.freetalklive.com/system/media_attachments/files/117/508/735/984/004/246/original/3243c079430786a3.png

2026-10-26 17:40:07 UTC

Some "open source" Reddit thread just banned AI and there is a somewhat humorous comment about it:
"The use of AI 'doesn't change whether something is open source or not,' complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now.""
It's true, but there are also talks of folks forking the kernel and reverting all known AI contributions.
Not everybody thinks the AI contributions are a good thing. There are legitimate security concerns and implications from the use of AI to generate code.
I'm not going to say AI should be banned, but I can understand people's distaste for AI being injected into everything.
There may also be a place for AI generated code while projects reject it elsewhere. For instance it may make sense as a helper to identify flaws in software or for more superficial or less risky components sitting on top of the stack.

2026-10-25 08:15:26 UTC

"
The research published in Origina's The Software Tax report, in partnership with Thinkers50, suggests these costs have shifted the balance of power between buyers and sellers. Customers exercise choice once, at the point of purchase. After that, control over the timing and terms of change passes largely to the IT supplier. Out of those surveyed, 78% agree their primary provider of enterprise software, rather than their own organisation, sets the timing and terms of change."
This is why you shouldn't make yourself dependent on shitty proprietary software solutions.
At least for those large enough and wise enough you always have the option of hiring someone in-house to maintain your free software if a supplier decides to screw you.
A perfect example of this even with a smaller company is a legacy subscription for security updates. When the PHP security issue was discovered 'enterprise' users on long ago discontinued versions of Ubuntu were able to continue their support subscriptions and get the fix for outdated versions of PHP.
If Canonical did something bad enough you could probably migrate to Redhat Enterprise Linux from IBM and receive something equivalent or maybe swap the two. IBM has in some respect done worse in my mind than Canonical.

2026-10-25 06:05:04 UTC

"Sure PHP has come a long way since those early days, but it carries decades of technical debt with it, as difficult as it can be for some people, it is time to move on. I moved to Go about 5 years ago and haven’t looked back, there are other options out there as well. I get that recreating projects like Drupal an Wordpress would be a major undertaking, but I am surprised that people are still using PHP for new projects in production, time to move on IMHO."
The problem is sometimes the old ways were better. When I'm relying on a repository of software that I have NO IDEA what I'm running and for which the developers are relying on others that can't be trusted... looking at you NPM ... umm yea. Or "docker" where 99.95% of the time the tool is being used badly and for which there is a crap ton of proprietary or license violating components.
Try building a product completely from source that you can understand and actually reasonably maintain going forward. It's near impossible today.
I'm one of the very few people who umm actually do this shit and look through the code bases. You'd be blown away with the crap you find in "open source" projects.
From proprietary amazon components to license violating proprietary code to digital restrictions to .. god knows what else. WTF is there a binary blob of some amazon component in your project buddy? Why does every single distribution for ARM64 devices include a sketchy binary being pulled from the Chinese equivalent of Google's gDrive??? Particularly when there is a complete set of source code available for said component???

2026-10-25 05:38:37 UTC

This was funny:
This documentary of a sort was talking about how we don't have a free market, and it was playing devils advocate saying we need laws to protect the public good, like not speeding, selling jack denials to 5 year olds, and how many return trips you can make to a buffet . Then it says "well, maybe not the last one".
It would seemingly be advocating for less regulation, but trying to be reasonable, but entertainingly I'm not so sure we need laws dictating that sellers can't sell jack to 5 year olds so even the ones where it might come off as reasonable I'm not convinced are. The speeding example may not be great either. Laws don't stop people from speeding after all. Liability on the other hand makes sense so it begs the question of if there is risk what's the point of the law restricting the speed? Either way there re penalties whether they're liabilities/risk or there is a liability/risk from breaking a law (unrelated to liability law).
Ultimately at the end of the day maybe it makes sense to put some of that liability onto the driver rather than the insurance company, but a penalty for speeding isn't the solution.
There are also other ways to slow down drivers without implementing speed limits in many cases where it may make sense. Stick in some round abouts, narrow the road, speed bumps/humps, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxRhzIhLIGE

2026-10-25 01:36:57 UTC

Every once in a while you can coax the AI into saying something that makes a little bit of sense:
In relation to the recent major PHP security issue:
"I'm also struck by how much of this story revolves around coordinated disclosures, embargoes, privileged access, advance distribution of patches, and leaks. Open source originally leaned heavily on transparency, yet modern security practice often seems to move toward security through obscurity. The irony is that this very episode is largely about how difficult that secrecy proved to maintain."

2026-10-24 22:03:45 UTC

" In West Virginia, a grove of critically endangered Chestnut trees is under threat of being bulldozed to make way for a new Anthropic hyperscale facility. Outside of Fort Wayne, a chunk of Indiana's once-bountiful wetlands is being tilled to fit a new Google data center. In Southern New Jersey, a data center operator was recently slapped with a $1 million fine after inspectors uncovered 62 illegal gas generators belching exhaust into the surrounding environment. "
I think people don't understand that holding up development is part of the increasing costs of living in western societies. I understand that there are legitimate harmful environmental impacts, but at some point you have to accept those costs else the demand is going to exceed the supply and the costs of living go up.
This applies to high speed rail in California to data centers that are being built all over the place.
There may be things that need to be done to mitigate problems like some neighborhoods being located too close to data centers or a killing off of the newly problematic wolves. However there will be costs one way or another. I am not an AI-fanboy and I'm not pro-Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/etc. I avoid these companies like the plague, but ... simultaneously I get that data centers are a necessity to modern infrastructure that we all rely on every day whether we know it or not. Do we need AI integrated into everything? Certainly not. Do we need companies to operate websites? Yea- and where are those websites hosted? Data centers.

2026-10-24 08:04:03 UTC

Half of the students in Texas high schools have been suspended or expelled at least once. Can you say holly crap- that's the kind of statistic that screams something is wrong with the schools, not the students.

2026-10-24 04:31:00 UTC

Who do you think is the bigger scammer? The banks with their fancy buildings or the guys in the scam call center ripping off little old ladies?
Neither are good, but I think it's clear as day whose the more successful scammer. It's the banks.
https://social.freetalklive.com/system/media_attachments/files/117/494/002/786/731/987/original/1b88c483f430a079.png

2026-10-24 04:13:33 UTC

Scam victim:
"I'll never be comfortable with anyone calling claiming to be from a bank."
Holly shit. Duhh. This is exactly why it's a dumb idea socialize losses from people making poor decisions.
Most people have to learn the hard way [unfortunately] and it's far better that they learn sooner than later.
My mom lost about $10k from a travel scam in the late 90s. She went out to some BS variant of the "time share" travel scam where for $10,000 or $12,000 she'd get 10 or 12 "free" vacations anywhere in the world she wanted to go. She did the math and it was a great deal! Mind you this was IN PERSON. The shady business selling this product never intended to provide the service. No. What they did was take your money and repeat from as many people as they could while at first effectively finding other "time share" scammers of a more traditional nature with a tweak in-so-far as you didn't have to listen to the time share when you got to the destination. Rather you got a huge "discount" from excessively marked up prices for things like food where there was no other place to go for food. Long story short- the moment she got back that night and told us about this 'great deal' I thought in the back of my head 'this is a scam' and I realized then just how stupid people really are- even those who are "well educated" (my mom had a masters degree in education). I was ~11 years old, my mom was ~42 and my dad ~47. My dad was a programmer.

2026-10-24 03:55:48 UTC

We regularly have to explain to customers that their bank has put up friction and it's why their card is being declined. Many financial institutions restrict purchases to $1000 and non-domestic transactions.
None of this stops the scammers. Banks can't stop scammers. They can take steps to properly authenticate the individuals they're issuing loans to however and humorously they don't which is why they should be liable when people claim they didn't take out a loan. Where is the evidence a given individual took out a given loan? Is that the social security number and a signature you can't even compare to the persons real signature? Yea... it's sad.
Politicians and humans suck. Scammers suck, your average ignorant human sucks that is the victim, and the financial institutions suck for refusing to properly authenticate those they are issuing loans to.

2026-10-24 03:40:50 UTC

Scam victim:
"I didn't want to leave the house. I didn't want to go anywhere. I lost all of my saving and it was my fault."
Yup, exactly right. Blindly trusting a random caller and doing exactly what they tell you particularly under "urgent" conditions is certainly no one else's fault.
Could you imagine if someone bought something after watching a TV advertisement and then blaming the company that advertised the product? It's only slightly worse here. Yet that is what they're doing.
I get it- if the timing is perfect this *COULD* happen to anyone. The problem is it rarely is anywhere near sufficient enough that it's not the consumer whose primarily responsible for their own losses.

2026-10-24 03:28:33 UTC

The UK is the first country to make "banks" pay:
"Mandatory reimbursement for scam victims"
Who the fuck do you think is going to pay for that? It's certainly not going to be the bank at the end of the day. No. It's going to be a cost spread out on customers and it's going to hinder legitimate transactions.
Your a small business needing to purchasing $100k of a product from a factory in China? Good luck with that. How does the bank know the Chinese factory is legit and not a scammer? THEY HAVE ZERO means of knowing this. The consumer trying to send the money on the other hand *DOES* have a means of doing their due diligence. So why on earth would you make EVERYONE ELSE pay?
It's a nice idea to socialize the cost of fraud until you realize it's how you end up impoverishing the population because now there is no risk to the very people who could have stopped the scam. Who is that? The "victim". What incentive does the victim have to say no to the scammer when they know that if it turns out that it isn't their bank calling that they'll get their money back? Or for that matter the little old lady worse sending $60,000 to her lover she's NEVER met!!!!

2026-10-23 21:12:26 UTC

"'are sinking into the internet every day, and I believe a responsible government must do what it is obliged to do," said Greece's digital governance and AI minister, Dimitris Papastergiou."
Ummm so let me get this straight, isn't this the parents responsibility and whichever school you presumably are sending your kid to???? I fail to see how a national government is obligated or should be somehow responsible for or otherwise obligated to raise someone else's kids.

2026-10-23 20:05:38 UTC

I have no idea what I wrote my congress critter about here, but I can tell you one thing for sure and that is this certainly isn't what I wrote her about:
"Thank you for contacting my office about local TV and radio stations. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.
I understand the important role that local broadcast radio plays in our state, and I believe we must provide the resources necessary to support these local stations so they can continue providing news and creative programming to our communities.
In 2023, I joined a group of Democratic senators in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the Commission to improve access to local media on streaming platforms. I am also a proud cosponsor of a resolution supporting the Local Radio Freedom Act. This resolution declares that Congress should not impose new taxes or fees on locally owned radio stations and underscores the critical importance of locally owned radio stations to communities.
This resolution is currently pending before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. As a cosponsor of this resolution, please be assured that I will continue to advocate for its passage.
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with me, and please do not hesitate to contact my office with any future concerns.
Sincerely,
Jeanne Shaheen
United States Senator"

2026-10-23 17:36:20 UTC

"DNS Resolver Quad9 Will Leave France After Court Orders Piracy Blocking Penalty"
...
"How Quad9 will stop serving French users hasn’t been decided yet. The foundation told us that it’s still evaluating its options, which it believes are all imperfect."
It's actually pretty simple. Your liable for actions in the jurisdictions you operate in. Don't operate in France, and you won't be liable. Problem solved. If France wants to hinder access to Quad9 it's up to France to order entities within France to block their service at that point.
What does 'not operating in France' look like? Don't setup bank accounts, hire employees in France, market, or utilize other service providers operating in the country.
At that point they'll have to ask a foreign jurisdiction to enforce a French court order. That is difficult, though sometimes possible, but that's why you got to cross your t's and dot your i's. It would be wise to investigate the particularities as there are sometimes scenarios where another jurisdiction may enforce an order. Don't pay a bill on an oil delivery to your cruse ship and end up with a US court order against you? A Bahamian port call may result in your ship temporarily being seized. However that's a very specific situation.
That wouldn't necessarily apply here as usually there is an equivalent law required in both jurisdictions or a compact of some kind (think drivers licenses with states enforcing fines issued by other US states).

2026-10-23 17:08:32 UTC

"Starting in November, Game Pass subscribers will receive only 5 to 15 included cloud-gaming hours depending on their tier and will have to buy additional time -- even to stream games they've already purchased."
...
"before these changes were announced, you paid full purchase price for a game that isn't in the Game Pass library on the assumption that you'd be able to play it via cloud streaming."
..
"Now you find that in addition to the cost of the game you bought, you're going to be paying by the hour to play it"
Another example of something the vast majority of people deserve. You knew Microsoft was evil and would pull this kind of crap yet you insisted on using their products and services anyway.
I have no sympathy for you.
I do have sympathy for those fleeced of the traditional options because of the masses however.
The free market only works if you have a bit of self control and tell companies to f' off when they do evil shit.

2026-10-23 16:46:20 UTC

"Unvetted AI Agents Are Accessing US Bank Accounts"
All I can say is I can't wait for people to lose their shirt over this.
Most of mankind is deserving of the consequences of their stupidity and laziness. Now if only the rest of us weren't forced to bear the brunt of the costs associated with that stupidity.
I'm looking at you victims of online 'scams' who refuse to take two seconds to think about their actions before taking steps that could compromise their fiscal situation.
I'm looking at those using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
I'm looking at those who are constantly on their smart phone, but in particular running Android/iOS and installing random and malicious apps.
I'm looking at you who've purchased a new vehicle in the last handful of years.
I'm looking at you who've purchased a 'smart' TV. OK, I'm guilty of that one. This one is a little harder to blame on folks given there hasn't been an option for a non-smart TV in quite some years now and it isn't entirely unreasonable to have thought simply not connecting the device to the internet largely solves the spying issue. It may in practice not be enough based on what we know now with some TVs connecting to open access points without user-interaction or permission.

2026-10-23 02:04:00 UTC

Interesting statistic: If government wasn't interfering in the market the cost of a new house today would be around $100,000.

2026-10-23 00:45:49 UTC

Watching this video by a progressive, and found this funny:
"Neither progressivism nor capitalism is the villain, the actual cause is zoning"
I can agree with the problem being zoning, but that certainly isn't free market capitalism. Those are progressive policies that right-wing conservatives probably also go along with.
The truth is both right-wing conservatives and progressives/socialists are VERY similar in practical terms.
The libertarians wouldn't have had any of it... and we wouldn't be in this shit today because the homeowner would have burdened the costs and that would have undermined the sales pitch far earlier.
Zoning has forced up costs through things like minimum lot sizes and making division of lots costly which has reduced the availability and created insane prices for smaller lots relative to larger lots even though the smaller lots have a lower cost per household (running utilities, sewers, water infrastructure, power, etc).

2026-10-22 05:22:04 UTC

Interesting statistic that explains why young people get into more accidents than older populations and it has nothing to do maturity, inexperience, distractions, or other youth/people in the car. No. It's a consequence of teenage brains being forced out of bed at hours that don't jive with their bodies. This is what the science says. Teenage accidents decrease 70% when high schools start a few hours later. It's laterally that simple. At some point as you age the body changes and this is not an issue. It doesn't impact pre-pubescent children and those who've aged out of this "teen" period (which varies a little from person to person).

2026-10-22 00:09:52 UTC

"so much competition among streaming services"
In the 1990s there were 31,000 video rental shops. There are only about 300 streaming services available in the United States, but really it's closer to a dozen because most aren't licensing content from hollywood studios.
Of the platforms that actually carry content from major Hollywood studios (Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, Paramount, MGM, Lionsgate, etc.) there are roughly just 12–15.
Competition? Call me skeptical.

2026-10-21 23:59:21 UTC

"If AI were to make someone commit suicide"
OMG. AI doesn't make anyone do anything. If AI "convinced" you to commit suicide and that's a big if it still didn't make you commit suicide. You chose to commit suicide. Otherwise you wouldn't be calling it suicide. You'd be calling it murder or an accident more likely. Murder = human. Accident = machine.
If you asked the AI to write you a program for your widget that had the power to move and potentially kill you and you then run that program on that widget and it does... there is an air of negligence on the part of the user.

2026-10-21 23:44:22 UTC

The "tiger test" vs AI. So there is this argument that is being made that companies should be liable because the owner of a tiger is liable for the actions of their tiger even if they attempt to train the tiger and fail.
This is an utter fallacy and completely misses the point that a manufacturer isn't automatically liable because a user missuses a tool. A gun manufacturer isn't liable for the murder of an individual with that tool.
A manufacturer may be liable for negligence in the product in terms of safety, but that's a very different scenario. It's how the AI is used is the potential danger, not a failure in the design of the product.
That is to say the developer of a AI tool that is purely informational shouldn't be liable for either the misuse of that tool, but they may be liable if that AI tool is used as intended/designed and fails causing injury or similar.
Where the line is is effectively inserting AI into everything without consideration for the implementation of the tool's end use/purpose.
If you design a product that incorporates AI to assist with software development a failure in perfection of the tool is expected behavior.
If you design a product like a vehicle and connect it to AI where the product can't fail, well, then you've been negligent, and as a manufacturer you could be liable.

2026-10-21 00:10:14 UTC

"The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity."
This is like asking a company who approved a system admin make regular backups.
umm the specific thing wasn't signed off on, but it may very well be presumed to be part of the job even if it's not explicitly spelled out in the job post.

2026-10-21 00:03:12 UTC

"Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.
These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings."
I find it entertaining that this is presumed to exist. Not only have "command histories" not always existed or not existed on every system they may not exist depending on the system or configuration of a modern system today.
Anyone sane doing anything that might come back to haunt them later should be aware of "command histories", logging of messages, "recent history", (recently opened files, etc) "browser histories", "login histories' , time stamps (involving file creation/modification/copying), etc and these things should be turned off where it's possible and not preserved to disk where it's not possible. There are a variety of ways that can be done to one degree or another using different operating systems from using a live image and shutdown, to packages like overlayroot on Ubuntu and Ubuntu-derived distribution that turns a system into a read-only kiosk device that upon reboot loses its data/logs/etc. I believe something exists for Microsoft Windows even and I don't know what it is called or how effective it is compared to Linux or other OS equivalents, but the point is these things exist.
https://torrentfreak.com/judge-orders-meta-to-name-employees-who-approved-torrenting-annas-archive-and-libgen/

2026-10-20 23:22:07 UTC

There is an update on that GrapheneOS user that is accused of and charged with wiping his phone at the US boarder, of whom merely handed over a distress code.
So the crazy thing about this story is he took no such action to destroy any data. The boarder patrol officer asked for his password to his phone and he apparently provided a distress code. The officer entered that distress code into the password entry box and it wiped the phone. The actor who destroyed what appears to have been non-existent evidence was in fact the boarder patrol officer, not the accused owner of the phone.
"As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly "did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government's lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control."
He did no such thing obviously. He provided information. He took no action and last I checked while you don't have all your rights at the boarder something tells me he still had free speech.

2026-10-20 02:40:45 UTC

OMG: This is hilarious:
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80

2026-10-20 02:23:37 UTC

"TP-Link Moves to Assemble Routers In the US Following Import Ban "
Literally a jobs program. You know who else has a similar jobs program? Brazil. Do you know what they pay as a consequence for electronics? 200-400% more than we use to pay in the US. They also forced 'manufacturing' into the country and the consequences of it was obvious. They'd manufacture in China, disassemble, ship the components to Brazil, and then re-assemble the electronics. Brazil is no small market either. It's population is 216 million or so people vs the US's 320 million people. The negative consequences are society are fucking huge.

2026-10-19 03:22:08 UTC

"New Video Game Law Proposed: 'If You Pay For It, You Own It'"
Ha, yea, I could half-get behind something like this, but the problem is you shouldn't be able to force the company to do shit, but you should be entitled to reverse engineer it, copy it, modify it, etc. When companies behave badly you should stop doing business with them. It's really that simple most of the time.
The problem really comes down to government interference in the free market as to why we have many of the problems we do. It is copyright, patents, and similar that most significantly undermine competition in the market place and hind folks ability to seek out a competing solution from a better behaving actor.
Governments should never grant monopolies and should look for solutions to undo what monopolies have handed unfair first mover advantages that benefited from such temporary or permanent monopolies of the past. Think electricity, telephone, internet, copyrights, patents, etc.
It's near impossible to open and compete against a pizza place that has been in business for 20 years already. They've paid off loans to get started and anything you do they'll be able to out-compete you on [probably] at least as far as price is concerned. They won't have the loans to pay off so if you set one price they'll just drop theirs to just below what you can afford until you go out of business. This a common practice of bigger corporations. Once they've run out their smaller competitors they then raise prices.
We should not be enabling this kind of behavior. It's also the case we should not be rigging our financial systems to reward larger companies over smaller ones.
It's these sorts of things that lead to less competition & it's effectively bad for everyone except those at the top.

2026-10-19 02:36:26 UTC

Raspberry Pi's suck as it is. It's amazing anyone would want to use one even without these digital restrictions.
"Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers."
This has got to be one of the lamest excuses I've heard and it's the same kind of bullshit justification for Apple locking down it's devices:
"Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users."
Say no to Raspberry Pi and get something else. Anything else.
My recommendation is effectively something with a Rockchip SoC at the moment.
While I don't have a solid image I can point anyone at in terms of OS and free bootloader/etc all of the pieces are there. I've built completely free Trisquel images for Rockchip SoC devices. You can install mostly free software images as most of the support is in the mainline kernel for at least some Rockchip based devices already and it's still better than Raspberry Pi either way.

2026-10-18 03:09:03 UTC

I'm not quite seeing how this is an offense... if you were to hinder someone from leaving it might constitute kidnapping, but getting in the path of a robot? It's not like she's preventing it from being moved or going around. It comes off as inconsiderate, not a criminal act. Her defense of her actions is also somewhat humorous. It's not protected speech. Actions can be speech, but your actions can't violate other laws at least to the extent those other laws aren't prohibiting or restricting speech in some way.
"According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move.."

2026-10-17 23:02:36 UTC

Yikes- MapQuest apparently requires WebGL which is really fucked up. No thank you. I'll go somewhere else:
https://social.freetalklive.com/system/media_attachments/files/117/458/741/214/106/556/original/6785efa77d1512e0.png

2026-10-17 22:23:45 UTC

I'm getting tired of people bitching about how expensive it is to live while simultaneously looking at houses in some of the most desirable places or near the most desirable places. Of course it's going to cost you millions when you want to live near the ocean. Sane people buy houses where it's not absurdly expensive and the jobs pay better after getting an education or otherwise getting into a trade. As expensive as it may be you can get a house for $400-500k in a decent area. It just ain't going to be by the water in California or Florida.

2026-10-17 20:52:26 UTC

"Ontario woman shocked to discover Amazon blocked her account"
The disturbing thing about this story is that Amazon has a literal monopoly on obtaining a long list of items. It's a problem that has in part been created by folks doing exactly what she's done and exclusively shopping on a single online platform. This causes many businesses to sell through a single company because other platforms simply aren't worth the effort.
The lesson to be learned is avoid Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot and other similar retailers that have concerned markets. Avoid purchasing the "best" product. Often there are products on the market that are simply fine and sufficient even if they don't offer perfectly equivalent performance or quality or what not. You don't have to go with garbage, but going with 2nd best is often better as it smooths over issues that cause companies to be the sole manufacturer of a product of which later conduct themselves in less than desirable ways and of which you then can't avoid.
All modern TVs spy on you is a perfect example of this. People wanted to save a little bit of money and eventually the only TVs on the market left were spying apparatuses doing the bidding of others and not what is in your best interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9q0jvYpZIU

2026-10-17 20:36:32 UTC

Have you attended a public school in the past couple of decades? Your personal data has probably been obtained no thanks to the poor security practices and decisions to computerize student records. Even if your haven't attended a public school in decades your personal information may now be in the hands of malicious actors (and I'm not just talking about the schools themselves).
"Personal Data for Millions of California Students Stolen in Massive Breach"
...
"The breach affects students 'who took the state's mandated standardized tests that annually assess their academic proficiency, education officials announced Friday.'"

2026-10-16 09:41:03 UTC

The government is coming for your electronics. The FCC is now demanding a FCC ID which will undermine your ability to sell used electronics online or get electronics they don't "approve" of all in the false name of national security.
This does NOTHING for national security or actual security / privacy etc. MOST devices have an FCC ID and are running malicious software. In fact nearly everything is. There are very few exceptions. I should know this is literally my business. We weed through and develop products that aren't hostile to a users freedom, control, privacy, and security.
Send your political critter a message telling this new FCC rule (not passed by the congress critters themselves, but arbitrarily created through a dictator that heads an organization with the authority to make up arbitrary rules that harm everyone) is completely unacceptable:
https://flipwise.app/ebay-fcc-id-sellers-speak-up

2026-10-16 00:36:40 UTC

States shouldn't implement qualifiers to qualify for federal SNAP benefits and pay more of the administrative costs that the federal government use to cover.
Rather they should end social and corporate benefit programs entirely.
New Hampshire actually does this to one degree or another. Rather than subsidizing industries to attract them the benefit of setting up in New Hampshire is lower taxes.
If you stop the subsidizing bull shit people will learn to navigate their finances better and setup their own safety nets. Back in the day people saved for a rainy day, they bagged lunch, they maintained a checkbook, etc.
New Hampshire may have a long ways to go here, but the state has done a better job than most at NOT incentivizing companies to setup shop, but rather focused on maintaining lower taxes. When your economic situation declines in Mass you get your liquor in New Hampshire for a fraction of the price. You spent your dollars at New Hampshire grocery stores because there is no sales tax, etc.

2026-10-15 23:37:07 UTC

Ubuntu 26.10 was released today, and this is why no one is exactly why no one is using it:
"system-wide controls for disabling Ubuntu Insights data collection"
Yea, umm most people are using GNU/Linux because they DON'T like what certain other companies are doing in this regard. So why one earth would you incorporate data collection into your OS????
Linux Mint has done the exact opposite and it's far from perfect, but it's SOOOO much better than other operating systems and Ubuntu it's hard to be overly critical. Linux Mint has mostly played it safe, maybe even a bit more than need be. What they haven't done is pissed off their user base to the point where they've seen the majority of their users hop ship. Canonical in one fell swing lost half its user base to Linux Mint decades ago now.... and they've done everything they could to undermine users trust.

2026-10-15 08:46:07 UTC

I seriously want to know where these people live that it costs $27 for a kids meal. No doubt prices have skyrocketed and are out of control, but if you live somewhere that the prices are $53 for a mean your cost of living is insane and you aught best move.
It costs me ~$10-20 for an ADULT meal these days. I'm having a hard time believing some place like Dennys or Apple Bees or similar is charging $53 a plate. Maybe a steak or something like that at some of the higher end places, but that's also been the case at high end places. Some places like Chris Ruth's stake house you won't walk away for less than $100 two decades ago.

2026-10-15 07:24:30 UTC

Somehow I doubt anyone is actually going to lose access to the internet. If folks value the internet and we all know the vast majority of even the poorest of the poor in society do they'll pay for access out of their own pockets:
"'Schools and libraries from around the U.S. pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to drop the idea of ending E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year program that connects students and library visitors to the Internet. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has criticized school districts for having 'experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students,' and said E-Rate expanded too far beyond its original purpose of "supporting basic Internet access to schools and libraries for educational purposes.' In June, Carr led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking public comment on whether E-Rate should be 'limited or sunset to reflect today's extensive connectivity rates.'"

2026-10-15 01:48:30 UTC

"ZDNet notes that other Dutch government agencies are developing an open-source alternative called DAWO (Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government), which would begin by replacing Windows with the Linux distribution NixOS."
I'm not anti-NixOS, but I have to question the sanity and likelihood of success given the particular distribution.
There are things to like about NixOS, I'd be concerned about NixOS lacking the resources, support, documentation, etc and similar by comparison to a variety of other distributions.
One of the things that you'll be able to source for end-users if you build a spin off other distributions are things like books and extensive documentation.
My company stocks education materials and where Ubuntu, Redhat Enterprise Linux, and similar distros are fine for servers they're lacking in educational resources for use on the desktop. NixOS this is going to likely be even more true. The only distribution that we even have a few solid end-user English oriented desktop focused books on is Linux Mint. There are two that I'm aware of. There might be a crummier option for Ubuntu. I'm trying to recall what is in my companies catalog. I know there are more extensive books for the desktop for Ubuntu, but, the point is it's not just this alone.
There are other things to think about like hardware support.
With something like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, or even Trisquel there are sources for hardware and distribution and version specific documentation.
If your organization is in need of a hardware authentication solution what options do you have for NixOS? Is there documentation? I can pretty much confidently say it's piss poor cause I'm the only one properly documenting fingerprint reader & smart card reader support.

2026-10-15 01:27:20 UTC

"US Tech Giants Warn Europe That Data Sovereignty Requirements Could Cost $128 Billion "
Talk about more self-serving bullshit... whatever the cost retaining control has serious value from a security stand point. It's insane to think companies are outsourcing to foreign entities like they do with 'cloud' services. It's even more disturbing that governments are doing it and forcing it on their own citizens whether they want it or not.
" A study commissioned by CCIA Europe, whose members include Amazon, Google, and Meta, estimates that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act could impose 115 billion euros ($128 billion) in costs over a decade as governments and companies migrate workloads and rewrite software. The figure is more than six times the European Commission's upper estimate. However, roughly 80 billion euros ($89 billion) of it comes from a modeled scenario assuming sovereignty rules are extended to 25% of cloud workloads in essential private-sector industries.The Register reports: "
While a little different NH's department of motor vehicle is openly and illegally partaking in sharing data the law says it can't except for on a case by case basis. Partaking in a sharing scheme is illegal, but this shares similarities with governments using 'cloud' services. They're giving others your info whether or not you want them to or have agreed to it. In-house technical solutions where security is maintained may make sense, but exposing your populations data is NOT COOL.

2026-10-15 01:11:09 UTC

Yep- Microsoft being malicious as I expected. So the new Microsoft 'defender' for GNU/Linux is proprietary. We can't even have a serious conversation about security if we don't know what it is doing and have to "trust" a company best known for umm being malicious.
"Microsoft Defender for Linux is proprietary, closed-source commercial software"
..
"Microsoft is also making it easier to onboard desktops through streamlined methods, offering a unified security operations experience, strengthened security, and improved response times. Organizations that are already familiar with securing Linux servers via Defender should feel right at home securing desktops too, as the experience is exactly the same. "
..
"As stated previously, all Linux server distros are supported via Defender on desktops too. These include RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, SLES, Fedora, and Oracle Linux, GNOME, KDE, and more. "
...
And the rent seeking exploitative part we're all super familiar with from Microsoft:
"That said, you do need Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 or a Microsoft 365 E5 and E7 subscription. You can enroll Defender on workstations using the same deployment methods you use for servers, but do check out the prerequisites here. "
I'm not against companies making money where they're providing GENUINE services that aren't purely self-serving (like a service your providing should actually be desirable to the customer) and inflicted by the same entities causing the problem. I'm far more amenable to paying for a subscription to Canonical for security updates as an example even if I'm not a fan of Canonical. Just as an example.
A privacy oriented VPN provider that isn't spying on their end user for example offers a genuine service if it's not from the ISP.

2026-10-15 00:45:54 UTC

Am I the only one who understands what a scam anti-virus/anti-malware are? Ya know it's not just these tools, but a lot of the VPN providers out there too. It's one thing when your providing a genuine service that's advertising a degree of pseudo-anonymity, protection from malicious ISP actors your basically forced to go through due to duopolies and shitty politicians, etc, but another when your lying through your teeth and spying/tracking the very customers you sold yourself as protecting.
Anti-virus is very much like that particularly where Microsoft is concerned. They produce a buggy insecure product, then basically make up a 'solution' that isn't effective rather than issuing a recall and fixing design flaws.

2026-10-15 00:21:56 UTC

"Attorneys general from the states, which include Iowa, Kansas and Arizona, filed the lawsuits independently in state courts, claiming ChatGPT is designed to be agreeable and engaging to earn the trust of users. But the chatbot reinforces delusions, encourages dangerous behavior and assists users in planning violence like mass shootings, the lawsuits claim."
Yes, but it's not a human you morons. It's a fucking tool. If your kid is mental it's up to you to get them help. While this is PERFECTLY fine for 99.95% of youngsters are are SANE it may not be appropriate to hand them if they're MENTALLY ILL. It's like handing a kid a gun (well, probably something far less potentially dangerous really), or saw where they could potentially injure themselves, or something with a bit of risk attached. Skiing might be a great example sort of- there is anticipated risk, but of which your waiving liability that might otherwise exist for for the ski resort. We don't ban kids from skiing or hold ski resorts liable. Why the hell should companies developing AI be liable? EVEN IF THEY TARGETED YOUTH!!!! The onus is on the parents. There is no getting away from 'the internet be potentially dangerous user beware'. You can't play ignorant. It was NEVER designed for your precious baby.

2026-10-11 20:20:24 UTC

Entertaining headline on Slashdot:
"FBI Arrests Cybersecurity Executive Over Data Breach After Contractor Fails to Update Oracle HR Platform"
The FBI is also charging the guy with:
"Dubrovsky is facing charges related to extortion and making threats."
The problem I have is nothing law enforcement says is connected to reality. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there was some good reason the system wasn't updated and his knowledge within the criminal sphere was used against him independent of any actual malice or action. Or it's some other absurdity like 'if not for' the threats couldn't be made and therefore he's somehow an accessory of the crime even though he didn't even know about the incident at the time it happened.
And yea... they pull that kind of crap. In the Crypto6 case with Ian Freeman they pulled a 'if not for' him selling crypto to what they wanted us to perceive as 'little old laddies' being conned out of life savings (few if any really) when they [prosecutors] admitted in court (though this was never in front of the jury) that Ian had ZERO knowledge that the individuals in question were being scammed at the time. He only became aware of any of these victims the day he was arrested after a ~5 year investigation (with the exception of like ~1 person of whom he did become aware they had been victimized before the transaction fully completed I believe, and he spent 6 months working to get that victims money back via her son).

2026-10-10 21:00:19 UTC

So I'm watching this video on how evil Amazon is with their price fixing where sellers on the platform are coerced into getting other retailers to raise their prices such that the prices on Amazon are lower and many of the companies are claiming they have no choice. It's their only income and it's 90% of the revenue. That may be true, but it was still YOUR decision to sell on Amazon in the first place.
I run a business too and I've always chosen to NOT sell on Amazon. It may be more work. It may be I'm 'losing sales', but at the end of the day I'm in control and not contributing to the problem (err to the degree I don't use Amazon I suppose myself, but that is admittedly often difficult).
Anyhow... the answer? Stop selling on Amazon. Save up some of your profits and tear yourself away from Amazon. It is possible. My small company is proof of that.

2026-10-09 19:47:03 UTC

"I use to be registered republican, but then I got my heating bill. We all know trump is responsible with the never ending war in Iran..."
And all I'm thinking is... right... so I switched to independent, and vote libertarian.
Pretty sure that wasn't the intent of the messaging, but I thought it was hilarious.

2026-10-08 23:16:49 UTC

What a great story, Cloudflare escaped penalties and further scrutiny over it's limited site blocking regime after the copyright cartels requested penalties for failing to sufficiently comply in-so-far as they aren't blocking sites via their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver (only through their CDN):
"Canal+ also argued that, under the EU Court of Justice’s UPC Telekabel Wien ruling, intermediaries must block effectively. The Paris court disagreed. In its view of the same ruling, intermediaries only have to take reasonable measures, which Cloudflare did with its CDN blocks.
The court therefore rejected the requested penalties as neither necessary nor proportionate. In addition, Canal+’s request for €20,000 in legal costs was also denied."
https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-keeps-1-1-1-1-out-of-piracy-blocking-escapes-penalties-in-france/

2026-10-08 22:39:12 UTC

Talk about insane. I'm watching this video on the largest apartment building in the world (and failing), and then I hear something that just don't go together and think 'wow', just 'wow'. This thing has an AI powered alarm system for smoke. Talk about just asking for a disaster to occur.

2026-10-03 17:36:19 UTC

Holly crap: The leading socialist figure in America (Bernie Sanders) appears to have just introduced one of the most libertarian sounds bills if the description below is to believed I've ever encountered:
"on Friday U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Ban Flock Act. The proposed bill bans federal agencies in America from using automated license plate reader systems 'without explicit statutory authorization'. The bill also lets certain federal agencies (including the Homeland Security Department) withhold grant money from State and local governments that use automatic license plate readers."
It's NOT perfect, but it's as solid as anything I've heard proposed before, or probably close to it:
"covers any and all ALPR systems. The bill allows exceptions only for toll collection and for uses that Congress approves in future legislation, which would have to limit data retention to no longer than 48 hours."
New Hampshire might have a slightly better restriction on ALPR cameras already as it also limits the time the data can be retained by police and is very short.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/02/sanders-introduces-bill-to-ban-the-federal-government-from-using-flock/

2026-10-03 08:42:32 UTC

I'm watching this Al Jazeera video (not something I do very often, but it's good to get in a bit of non-totally western aligned propaganda once in a while in addition to Russia Today and other outlets) and one thing I can say about non-western aligned outlets is they'll throw on socialist and libertarians here and there and it creates some really entertaining videos.
Here both sides make some good points. Social Security is failing even if it's not a total collapse. The socialist insists it's not stealing if we start forcing billionaires to contribute more, and they think, he thinks it'll solve the problem, but in reality it won't. It gets us part of the way there and it is theft. It's a new tax on billionaires so to speak. Social Security has always been essentially a pyramid scheme. On the other hand the socialist is right in saying the wealthiest have stolen from the rest of us. The question is how they're doing it and they're doing it through copyrights, patents, and similar artificial creations created through law.
The solution is partly an end to copyright/patents. You don't need to steal from the billionaires via taxes. Foster real competition by not protect the 1% from 'piracy'. IP laws don't protect the masses. IP funnels the wealth to the top 1%. This will not totally solve the 1% taking near everything, but it's a start. Monopolization by other means exist and it can't be solved this way as a short monopoly granted in the 80s is still paying dividends because no one can come in now and compete. It's a type of 'first mover advantage'. This is when your debts were long ago paid off so you can outlast any new competitor that might dare enter the market. If someone tries you just drop prices till they go under.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOwQQQSHfMQ

2026-10-02 18:58:41 UTC

This is entertaining:
"The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as a self-hosted 'sovereign back-up' to Microsoft Teams and the reviews aren't great. Politico reported that several officials questioned its usefulness and usability, with one calling it 'absolute shit.'"
So they rolled out a self-hosted Matrix solution. I'm not sure how well it was rolled out, but I've been using Element and Matrix for several years, including hosting a self-hosted server. It's a PITA to maintain and keep up and really it collapsed in on itself after ~5 years. It was complicated and lacked solid documentation to maintain.
The user-complaints are very general, but I think the reality is the solution does overall work and is comparable in terms of features to Telegram.
The interface isn't great, and it is built off one of these new fangled development solutions. It uses rust and Electron. Both of which are garbage by comparison to properly written software based on languages like C/C++ that have officials standards. Rust is ever-changing with no standard and it's bloated. Electron apps are similarly garbage- a cross platform solution.
The good news is Matrix is end to end encrypted, feature rich, decentralized, and there are clients written in proper programming languages that while not entirely ready for prime time are MUCH better.
Right now you probably will have to suffer with Element if you use Matrix, but I do believe at least one of the C/C++ alternative clients will come of age at some point and there are some other aspects to like about Matrix. There is support for at least one of these other clients properly written packaged for distributions like Debian already.
Overall it's probably the way to go for decentralized self-hosted solutions.

2026-10-02 05:38:06 UTC

"at some point the tech companies have to be held responsible because ultimately they are providing the tools"
So are we going to start requiring an ID before someone can purchase a hammer? I mean seriously. Just because folks are doing something bad with a tool is a poor excuse to ban or restrict or ID everyone else.

2026-10-01 22:58:29 UTC

Like seriously.. scammers are using addresses such as:
"web361.cc"
If you don't understand technology at such a fundamental level maybe you shouldn't be investing in it.
People make stupid investments all the time and yet we don't make them whole when the investments fail. Why should anyone feel bad for someone who didn't take even rudimentary steps when the scams should have been easily spotted even by folks with little technical know-how???

2026-10-01 22:44:39 UTC

Victim of scam:
"paranoid, questioning everything"
aww yea, that is how you should have been before.
It's the fucking internet. Did you do zero research before going online? Do you not understand that the world is full of bad apples? I mean seriously.
Your fucking television is spying on you. Corporations are doing all sorts of evil shit.
There are people out there who are actually victims through no fault of their own (maybe it is cancer, or being born into poverty or a religious household, or any number of things.. having a disability ...). It's sickening that 95% of the problem is self-inflicted by lazy people advocating for 'protection' rather than taking responsibility for their own actions.
If your genuinely stupid I can understand... but 95% of this is people being lazy stupid not that they're incapable stupid.

2026-10-01 22:10:09 UTC

"Investigating the Online Scam Epidemic"
So there is this documentary on scams and they're talking about how folks, in this case 'kids' (probably more like teenagers) are being scammed and committing suicide.
The scam is intended to extract money from those with mental illnesses and/or those in areas where mental illness is ripe (aka religious areas).
The way the scam works is the scammer pretends to be a girl (I think the specific scam primarily targets guys... but other variations probably target elderly ladies and older men, ie romance scams) and gets the guy to send sexual photos of themselves to the scammer. The scammer than demands a ransom else the photos will be publicly released and sent to friends and family.
In at least some instances the victim of the scam can't pay up and the pressure is too great. The victims kill themselves.
The underlying problem is religion and authoritarianism. A scam like this only works because the persons being threatened are made to feel like they have everything to lose. The reality is mental illness in society and authoritarianism holding peoples options back.
The scam isn't the real problem. Religious nuts and those advocating "protection" are.
When youth/people have options that don't involve suicide they'll take those options. When you tie young people/anyone to parents/or forced schooling/etc they become vulnerable and victims.
Stop tying kids to adults and giving others authority and these problems literally wouldn't exist.
When young people have options, like work instead of school (ie get rid of laws prohibiting employment), aren't forced to live in abusive homes with mentally ill parents (religious), etc. there is no longer a reason to commit suicide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8I2b1TK2EY

2026-10-01 20:42:24 UTC

The world is getting crazier and crazier. There is a proposal for the EU Kids Act that would effectively ban personal servers.
It's not just crazy rules and regulations like this, but even real humans that are nuts.
I was in a parking lot today and driving extraordinarily slowly in just in front of a strip mall style store. This women who isn't paying attention to where she was going walks into the parking lot from the sidewalk without even taking a cursory glance. I'm pretty far away considering how slowly I'm driving, but well within eyesight for a pedestrian taking a cursory glance around them. Well, she's halfway between the part of the parking lot where cars drive and the first parking spots before she looks up and sees me. I'm still pretty far away, but she stops and so I take that as an acknowledgement to keep going because she's waiting for me to pass to continue forward.
As I pass her she starts yelling at me! If she had continued I would have stopped, but here she was standing in the middle for "street" in front of the store where cars drive.... crazy. If your going to cross a street you look both ways, then either continue walking until you get to the other side, or you wait for the cars going by to pass. You don't walk halfway blindly then stop in the middle and yell at the driver who was literally watching you BLINDLY walk into the street without looking.

2026-10-01 17:08:50 UTC

I always find it humors in what tech reviewers, tech enthusiasts, and the tech industry think matter vs what your average user cares about (like stuff actually working):
"And while the inclusion of OLED across the range is a major draw to the new OmniBook, the base config only has a passable 1920 x 1200 resolution and 300 nits of max brightness on its non-touch panel."
I get that not everyone gives two shits about their privacy... but that is also a market segment and a seemingly growing market segment.

2026-10-01 03:32:25 UTC

I am not convinced cloudflare is the solution ... it seems like I see more connectivity issues with cloudflare in the picture than before sites add cloudflare to the picture. I get it... it's a firewall of sorts for sites... but if the complexity it such that it causes more downtime than not... is it really the best solution to the problem?
https://social.freetalklive.com/system/media_attachments/files/117/363/538/455/407/033/original/b4ec8f7cefbbc479.png

2026-09-30 21:56:05 UTC

"Singapore's government is trying its hand at matchmaking again. The country's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) has launched FirstDate, a pilot dating service for singles aged 21 to 35."
It's no wonder we have a baby crises (not enough babies born to replace those retiring in terms of social security and the like, or for the matter sustain population levels).
If you convince young people not to reproduce and they manage to not reproduce before they hit 21 chances are your not going to be successful at convincing them to reproduce.
Your "First Date" solution needs to be focused on IDK actual youth in school. That's probably somewhere between the 5th-8th grades for US students which is probably in the 11-14 age bracket.
It's crazy to think that conservatives demonizing sex was so effective as to result in a baby crises 20-30 years later. Then again the aids crises probably didn't help any. A baby is one thing, but death.. eee that might be a stronger argument against it. The problem is the system over-sold the danger and created or contributed to a major modern crises.

2026-09-30 00:37:24 UTC

I'd like to point out that about 5.74 billion investors (70% of the worlds population) lost about $1.14 trillion on their entertainment purchases over the last 12 months.
I bring this up because of of the negative publicity California is bringing and laws they're pushing to ban public officials from creating memecoins or anyone from using public officials likeness in producing memecoins.
The question is why are people permitted to invest in other entertainment, ya know like hollywood's movies and tvs hows/streaming content/etc, but when we start talking memecoins it's an 'investment' and has to be regulated or even banned????
I say this as someone who would NEVER buy a memecoin and I don't 'invest' in memecoins. I do however use cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin was intended (not that I am a fan of BTC, it's not privacy friendly, Monero is better):
"The governor's office pointed to reports that about a million investors lost an alleged $3.8 billion on their purchases of the memecoin released by President Donald Trump in 2025 as a the motivation behind the new rule."

2026-09-30 00:18:53 UTC

This should probably concern everyone. They're falsely arresting people on the basis of AI matches and not even catching 'bad guys':
"A six-month British Transport Police trial of live facial recognition at London railway stations scanned more than 500,000 faces, cost over 320,000 pounds, and produced just one alert with no arrests directly resulting from the technology. That one alert ended up being a false positive.
Despite those results, BTP has extended the pilot through November and expanded it to selected Underground stations."

2026-09-29 16:32:56 UTC

The copyright cartels are back at it trying to take down YouTube-DL:
“'YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation,' IFPI writes."
Umm the app is just a general purpose tool and isn't specifically geared at downloading copyright'd content or music from YouTube. Nor is this rolling cipher anything other than a fiction of your imagination. Not every algorithm is an obscuring mechanism to prevent people from downloading your content. There is legit DRM on some YouTube content, but this app does not support it.

2026-09-28 22:13:01 UTC

95% of the problem as far as I can see is the noise from there being homes too close to the data center. Instead of $10k checks you probably need to offer serious money to buy out those living around the area you want to build and tear the homes down. The water issues are basically bullshit scare tactics for the north east where water is plentiful and the extent of the impact is just fearmongering. All industries need water and there are real benefits from having *some* industry particularly light industry like this that have little in the way of environmental impacts by comparison to industries of the past in your area. Potentially lower taxes for example. Screw the schools and other money going to "improving" those. Money to the schools was never the problem. It's the potential tax savings if these businesses are taxed right and permitted and the payouts make sense in the areas that will be impacted by "noise pollution". Not to entirely write off the noise pollution, but 95% of that is they're just building too close to neighborhoods. The electric impact is also solvable by capping rates to inflation and forcing the data centers to offset the costs that result from increased demand. The more they demand and the higher the prices the more they pay in offsetting everyone else's increased costs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/data-center-developer-offers-usd10-000-checks-to-4-500-households-if-the-1-300-acre-facility-is-approved-locals-push-back-over-noise-and-bribe-concerns

2026-09-28 21:59:47 UTC

Absolutely disgusting:
"TikTok to Pay Alabama $100 Million, Limit Teen Use In First State Settlement"
"TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100 million and adopt new restrictions for teenage users, including a two-hour daily limit, overnight access restrictions, stronger age verification, a ban on beauty filters, and an option for a non-personalized feed."
While I'll be the first to say I don't utilize TikTok the idea that these platforms should take actions to "protect" their "younger" users is just ridicules particularly when it negatively harms the privacy and anonymity of EVERYONE including their younger users. Just say no to ID checks and stop using these shitty platforms.
Good parenting includes things like teaching your kid the basics our terrible government "education" systems don't. Essentials like basic financial planning/management and IDK instilling a solid work discipline and time management skills.
If your kids constantly on TikTok and your response and justification to support or suing TikTok is you have no control half the problem is you were TOO controlling in the first place. Kids need freedom and someone to lead by example.
It's been shown that Mom and Dad are just as shit with these subjects as the kids are these days particularly when it comes to their phones. So MAYBE you should start with learning to control your own bad behaviors and get off your damn phone rather than blaming what I'd agree are shitty platforms... but of which you are NOT paying to be your kids babysitter.

2026-09-28 20:42:38 UTC

I really want to know how this protects free speech or consumers, this literally makes zero sense, talk about propaganda:
"'By enacting this legislation, our country can deploy a highly effective tool to protect creators and consumers from overseas digital piracy, all while safeguarding free speech and preserving the open internet,' MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin says. "
Bill to censor the US internet:
https://torrentfreak.com/unified-u-s-site-blocking-bill-targets-isps-and-dns-resolvers-but-spares-vpns/

2026-09-28 20:25:39 UTC

How you know the law is unfair to your average user / individual publisher:
"Websites that are blocked by mistake can ask the court to modify the order. However, unlike Issa’s bill, which offers up to $250,000 in compensation, the DEFEND IP Act has no payout for collateral damage."
So in other words there is basically zero chance that a small guy is going to be able to get stuff blocked, but the ~7 hollywood studios (do we even have 7 left???) will be able to basically block any site they like without consequences even if it's non-infringing or primarily non-infringing because the little guy won't have the funds / lawyers on staff / etc to defend against the over-blocking that is inevitable and has occurred in EVERY country that has implemented a censorship regime.
Lets not forget that this also is one of the tactics that is used against political opponents. Particularly the authoritarian kinds (and yes- the very folks we have in congress too!). They have pushed for financial "sanctions" and used such censorship (of a financial nature) in Canada (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts, credit cards, and donations of those he disliked for protesting thanks to a highly regulated financial system) and the US against those they oppose. Europe has done the same thing for that matter, but it isn't just who you think. It's a large number of groups from "conservatives" during democrat administrations to folks previously involved in the legal porn industry (bank accounts being shut down by order of republican administrations).
In Canada which does have a censorship regime and site blocking like this bill proposes has attempted to add (?and maybe has?) other non-piracy sites to the list including gambling sites. Censorship doesn't end.

2026-09-28 20:04:06 UTC

You heard SOPA was back? Right??? And the copyright cartel are back with a vengeance now that they've succeeded at getting other governments around the world to introduce censorship regimes. Now there isn't just one bill in the US either, but two. The copyright cartel's cronies (representatives in the house and senate) have introduced a 2nd US bill to censor the internet in just the past week!
"The DEFEND IP Act. The proposal comes less than two weeks after Rep. Darrell Issa's competing proposal, and both bills allow rightsholders to obtain court orders requiring ISPs and large DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites."
If you haven't written your representative(s) don't wait! It's never too early to start writing and let them know that you don't support this bill or any other that would introduce censorship to the internet.
Here is the full story:
https://torrentfreak.com/unified-u-s-site-blocking-bill-targets-isps-and-dns-resolvers-but-spares-vpns/

2026-09-27 07:25:12 UTC

Authoritarian "socialism" is going to be the death of us all:
"The White House said that the leaders had agreed to use the term 'super intelligence' in place of "artificial intelligence." In a separate statement, the Chinese ministry said that Beijing valued Washington's use of the new term. As AI technology continues to advance, the two sides should step up exchanges and work toward consensus in line with new developments, it said."

2026-09-27 03:51:08 UTC

All I'm thinking is ... maybe this is an indicator that there is a lot of concern by your users that you and/or the developers more generally are moving away from what draws people to GNU/Linux and your software in the first place. People want to know there able to utilize software they can trust and they're pushing back and saying no to LLM development/features/etc. I'm not against LLMs, but like any sane person on this issue these are not issues that should be ignored and any functionality that adds AI needs to be a clearly designated separate feature and not embedded in everything everywhere. Something that can be disabled / not installed in the first place.
"KDE and GNOME Developers Ponder How to Handle AI-Generated Contributions"
"Two people unknown to any KDE contributors appeared and began fighting with one another about the broader topic of the morality of AI, not the proposed guidelines... Someone else outside of KDE set up kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to... pressure KDE into banning LLMs. A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors. "

2026-09-26 18:24:02 UTC

Interesting story covered on Lehto's Law about a guy pulled over in a self-driving car who was drunk and said it wasn't him driving. The entertaining part is Steve Lehto says "yea, but someone was in control" in response to "but it was driving itself", and it occurs to me that there are at least some vehicles where a third party control center with human operators take over which does kinda beg the question then, that sure, someone was driving, but it was likely someone outside the jurisdiction of the United States in control of the vehicle and the defense may not be quite as crazy as it sounds.

2026-09-25 08:10:37 UTC

"The judge agreed. At roughly $50 per game, lost sales could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, making the maximum damages request 'not an unrealistic estimate' of Nintendo’s actual damages, the order reads."
Talk about a total logic fail here. A pirated game is not equivalent to a lost sale as it assumes a pirate would have paid for the game in the first place.