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Submission + - France Passes New Bill Allowing Police to Remotely Activate Cameras on Phones (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Amidst ongoing protests in France, the country has just passed a new bill that will allow police to remotely access suspects’ cameras, microphones, and GPS on cell phones and other devices. As reported by Le Monde, the bill has been criticized by the French people as a “snoopers” charter that allows police unfettered access to the location of its citizens. Moreover, police can activate cameras and microphones to take video and audio recordings of suspects. The bill will reportedly only apply to suspects in crimes that are punishable by a minimum of five years in jail and Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti claimed that the new provision would only affect a few dozen cases per year. During a debate over the bill yesterday, French politicians added an amendment that orders judge approval for any surveillance conducted under the scope of the bill and limits the duration of surveillance to six months, according to Le Monde.

“For organized crime, the police can have access to the sound and image of a device. This concerns any connected device: telephone, speaker microphone, computer camera, computer system of a car... all without the knowledge of the persons concerned,” French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net said in a statement on Twitter last month, machine translated by Gizmodo. “In view of the growing place of digital tools in our lives, accepting the very principle that they are transformed into police auxiliaries without our being aware of it poses a serious problem in our societies.”

Submission + - CDC altered death certificates related to vaccines (brownstone.org) 2

schwit1 writes: “Someone (who needs to remain anonymous) was able to obtain the death certificates from Minnesota for all deaths that occurred from 2015 to the present, which presented the opportunity to see if the CDC is being entirely honest about the US death data. Unsurprisingly, the CDC is not”

Once I would have assumed that a story like this had to be wrong.

Comment Re:Thanks Mozilla! (Score 1) 75

There is setting/preference called "Always show scrollbars". It toggles the "widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled" pref as mentioned by the Anonymous Coward. It will not force the scrollbar to be visible on a page that cannot scroll. I think that requires GTK v3 tweaks for UNIX systems.

Comment Re:What about Mozilla's unwanted horseshit? (Score 1) 75

There is an about:config setting to prevent Firefox from loading a new page on every new version. So I set that setting and then Firefox reverted it on upgrade.

Have you tried making a setting in user.js in the profile directory to force it every time you start Firefox? Check out the arkenfox link at the bottom of my post.

Firefox on Linux doesn't let you set scrollbar width, citing CSS control over that element. But on Windows, you can.

Try setting:
- widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled to false
- widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override to the size you want

In the old plugin model, extensions could write to disk. Therefore you could save a webpage as displayed, with edits from other extensions and such. Pocket doesn't do that. They spent $20M on Pocket, which is a tool for keeping track of what webpages users find important. Mozilla is now a PII-harvesting organization that generates unwanted page loads in order to collect your information.

I cannot help you there. Pocket is one of the first things disabled for me.

You should take a gander at https://github.com/arkenfox/us... to minimize the junk in Firefox.

Comment Re:The rest of the story (Score 1) 294

I am not sure how to put that into perspective. In the U.S., an estimated 12% of people will develop a thyroid disease. This paper makes it sound like that COVID hits those people a bit harder.

On the other hand, there are many types of thyroid disease and symptoms. Is it going after those with hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism symptoms more often? Perhaps, it is hitting primarily those with thyroid cancer? Thyroid issues can cause cardiovascular issues. Maybe, COVID prefers those with chronic heart disease caused by thyroid disease. I lack access to the paper, assuming I could understand it :), so have plenty of questions about what the paper is finding. I am not questioning if they are wrong; I am just full of questions about what it means.

So many variables; so little time. ;)

Comment Re:Avoiding USA (Score 1) 429

You really should not use O'Hare as an example. I have bad luck flying through there domestically as well as internationally for years. I am a U.S. citizen. Queues, lost seats, lost luggage, etc. are just some of what I have experienced. You can probably find numerous Top 10 Bad Airports and it will be on the list.

I had to queue in Hokkaido for an hour and a half last year. Does that make Japan an inhospitable place to visit too? BTW, an hour and a half in a queue at O'Hare is probably record time. ;)

With all that said, I do not care for all the non-security screenings. Social media screening of a phone? Oh, please! If they are going to do something really bad, they *probably* did not say anything on social media.

To all those saying it is because of Trump, they are wrong. It gets crazier year after year regardless of the president in charge.

Comment Re:So you exclude half the taxes and what you get? (Score 3, Insightful) 903

If they did not take into account state taxes, they also skipped city, township and county taxes. Sales tax can come from state, city and county, I think.

Gas taxis 18.4/gallon at the federal level, so it should be already in there, right? I am not sure. Anyway, state and city can add their own gas taxes.

Does the UK's VAT replace the income tax there or do both exist?

A more thorough report would be nice regardless of whether the U.S. is higher or lower on the chart.

A report for value obtained by those taxes would also be nice. However, that can be highly subjective.

Comment Re:So you exclude half the taxes and what you get? (Score 1) 903

Exactly my thoughts. Ignoring a lot of different tax avenues that governments utilize is one deficiency in the report. The other is the value provided. Ignoring whether the country should or should not provide services (i.e., healthcare), what the country does provide as part of taxation(s) should also be accounted. Well, I guess that could go into a separate report.

Also, what about evaluating the individual states of the United States? The European Union countries were rated individually while the United States was rated as a whole. I am ignorant on how tight the EU is, so evaluating them individually may be appropriate.

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