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Submission + - X Update Shows Foreign Origin for Many Political Accounts (apnews.com)

skam240 writes: Elon Musk’s X unveiled a feature Saturday that lets users see where an account is based. Online sleuths and experts quickly found that many popular accounts posting in support of the MAGA movement to thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are based outside the United States — raising concerns about foreign influence on U.S. politics.

Researchers at NewsGuard, a firm that tracks online misinformation, identified several popular accounts — purportedly run by Americans interested in politics – that instead were based in Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa.

The accounts were leading disseminators of some misleading and polarizing claims about U.S. politics, including ones that said Democrats bribed the moderators of a 2024 presidential debate.

Comment Re:Deflecting adulthood responsiblities (Score 1) 32

Like buying booze, renting a car, purchasing a handgun, buying a lottery ticket, getting a tatoo?

(some of these vary by state)

I don't see how you're too immature to order a Chianti with your steak dinner but you're mature enough to go $200K in debt based on a sales pitch of returns after investment.

These aren't even reasonable equivalents from a neuroscience perspective.

Comment Re:Can one recharge them? (Score 1) 71

A read is supposed to be fine. At read time the firmware *should* rewrite the cell if the read is weak.

The firmware also *should* go out and patrol the cells when idle and it has power.

you can dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=2M once a year if your firmware behaves.

If your drive is offline you could
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdX bs=2M iflag=fullblock conv=sync,noerror status=progress

to be sure, though write endurance is finite.

If you're running zfs you can 'zpool scrub poolname' to force validation of all the written data. This is most helpful when you can't trust the firmware to not be buggy crap. Which only applies to 90% of drive firmware out there.

Comment Re: And just like that, everyone stopped using Ple (Score 1) 63

> I have found that streaming directly to my Plex home server over TLS is generally smoother without going through Wireguard. Not quite sure why.

I recently had to solve this.

Wireguard should work with a regular 1500byte MTU connection at 1440 or 1420 bytes (the default) --- however --- if your ISP is routing your IPv4 using 4-in-6 internally (like my major cable company) everything goes to hell.

Try dropping your wg MTU to 1360, MSS at 1320, and set up a mangle table to clamp MSS to PMTU (e.g. iptables rule).

I got a 10x bump in TLS over wireguard throughput.

Total pain in the ass and lightly documented.

Submission + - Crime Rings Enlist Hackers to Hijack Trucks (archive.is)

schwit1 writes: By breaking into carriers’ online systems, cyber-powered criminals are making off with truckloads of electronics, beverages and other goods

In the most recent tactics identified by cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, hackers posed as freight middlemen, posting fake loads to the boards. They slipped links with malicious software into email exchanges with bidders such as trucking companies. By clicking on the links, trucking companies unwittingly downloaded remote-access software that lets the hackers take control of their online systems.

Once inside, the hackers used the truckers’ accounts to bid on real shipments, such as electronics and energy drinks, said Selena Larson, a threat researcher at Proofpoint. “They know the business,” she said. “It’s a very convincing full-scale identity takeover.”

Submission + - Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls 4

Nicholas Grayhame writes: The Daily Beast reports: Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors. The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app. Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be based overseas....

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria. In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe. An Ivanka Trump fan account, IvankaNews, has 1 million followers and frequently posts about the dangers of Islam, the threat of illegal immigration and support for Trump. That account is based in Nigeria. ...

Donald Trump and several close associates were investigated for conspiracy or coordination with Russia during the 2016 election. Two of Trump’s campaign members were indicted. Certain content creators are paid for tweets that drive engagement on the site formerly known as Twitter, which gives them a financial incentive to cash in on the divisive nature of U.S. politics. For those in countries like Nigeria or Bangladesh, the American dollars paid by X for their work can make a big difference to their lives. X payouts are calculated on the basis of engagement from verified premium accounts with content on X.

Comment Re:Can't Help But Think (Score 4, Informative) 25

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

Comment Re:I didn't explain enough, my apologies (Score 2) 132

There's a lot to unpack in your 3 lines of text, but most of it is wrong, you should read some history books. Human sacrifice wasn't practiced in the roman empire. Indeed at the time of the Trojan War it was already old memory and found abhorrent. As for gladiator, it was similar to american wrestling: trained pro athletes putting on a show. Accidents did happen, but killing each other wasn't part of the show. Now prisoners condemned to death sometimes yes, but remind me how many people the US executed last year ?

Comment Re:Look and feel (Score 2) 116

Downloaded an hour or two ago from the official websites before I made my previous comment. In the meantime, I tested Manjaro further and managed to get the sound working on it after some experimentation using alsamixer, which strangely enough, the exact same method does not work on Fedora or Mint. I find it funny that alsamixer can even correctly identify the sound card model, while the supposedly much more up-to-date GUIs of KDE and GNOME can't even do that, let alone correctly configure the sound channels (the GUI claims to be able, but does nothing).

Comment Re:Its going to happen whether we want it to or no (Score 0, Troll) 114

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

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