We need a movement for conscientious objection to ReCaptchas. I don’t want to be forced to participate in training machine learning models to identify sidewalks, crosswalks, buses and cars in order to go about my daily life digitally.
I don’t want driverless cars on my city streets. I don’t believe the fiction that this technology will ever be safe.
I do not consent to using my own cognitive labor to train the models that will mow down people on foot or bikes later with no accountability.
@cassey Since I have Google blocked, I never see ReCaptcha. If a page won't open without unblocking Google in NoScript, I close the tab. This is much easier when you don't shop online.
You could also screw with Google by going to sites known to use ReCaptcha just to throw a bunch of wrong answers at them and screw up their data. Better yet, program a bot to do this as fast as possible, selecting photos according to the usual pseudorandom number generator.
The abusive behavior that was being used to manipulate Lasse Collin into bringing on more maintainers for #xz went unnoticed because abusive behavior in Open Source communities is so pervasive. In context, we can clearly see it was part of an orchestrated operation. Out of context, it looks like just another asshole complaining about stuff they have no right to complain about. https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/
@swelljoe@Sibshops The ONE defense against this does in fact require access to source code: audit or potential audit by mutually opposing parties that hate each other too much to conspire to hide something
@swelljoe@dango_@philtor I do keep Google's servers all the way out of my life, since I have the option to do so. I don't shop online and so can get away with treating most of the commercial/monetized Internet as broken.
If someplace cannot be found without say, Google Maps, I will not attempt to go there. Same with Snitchbook and Instacrap: no accounts and their servers blocked.
reminder that if Netanyahu & the US gets away with this in #Gaza — targeting journalists, targeting hospitals and schools and refugee camps, starving millions of children, mass murder on the scale of tens of thousands, shutting down press, internet and information, killing humanitarian workers, preventing crucial aid convoy, firing on people receiving aid, and planning resettlement of regions based on ethnic identity — these methods will be normalized & advanced by other western nations & govts
@carl_klitscher@seachanger When this war is over, may it be Netanyahu hiding in a tunnel, looking at his pistol as his world collapses around him. May the ground over his head thunder and shake as the fury of the whole world slams home.
@seachanger Lots of this is shit not even Putin does in Ukraine. Putin is plenty bad himself and BTW he is a longstanding enemy of the LGBTQ community. More generally, his policies basically combine the domestic policies of Trump with the foreign policy of GW Bush.
Netanyahu by comparison is doing the sort of shit STALIN did in Ukraine (notably starvation as a weapon of war), what Imperial Japan did in China and Korea(kill all/loot all/burn all, the "three alls") and generally acting like your worst nightmare about the middle of the last century.
"Resettlement" based on ethnic identity is another one of history's ugliest crimes, this time comparable to what settlers on Turtle Island did. Even the same language: of settlers and settlement.
#US / U.S. signs off on more bombs, warplanes for Israel
The #Biden administration has authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza. The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs. The continued arms transfers have been criticized by some Democrats who argue that the U.S. has a responsibility to withhold weapons in the absence of an Israeli commitment to limit civilian casualties and ease restrictions on humanitarian aid.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.):
[…] “The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza […] We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
@oatmeal What does it take Israel to understand this? An accident with one of their own bombs inside Tel Aviv?
For perspective, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was estimated to have an explosive yield of a bit over 5,500 pounds of TNT, less than three of these 2,000 pound bombs.
That was ONE bomb-and it damaged or destroyed a total of 324 buildings, something like 5 were totalled. Worst of all was the Fascists who detonated it put it right under the Murrow Building's day care center, which would be a war crime even if the building was Gestapo headquarters in 1943.
Now for the math: the fragment danger zone from a single 2,000 pound (about 800 kilos)bomb according to a formula published by mine removal website https://www.mineactionstandards.org/standards/10-20-01/
comes out to 1, 932 meters or well over a mile.
Formula: range in meters is 634 times the 1/6 power of the total weight of the explosive device or devices
Dropping 2,000 pound bombs into a city is thus like throwing fragmentation grenades into a crowd, hugely scaled up.
Florida's Supreme Court just nuked the right to privacy despite strong language in their state constitution. Here are the relevant articles of FL and AK constitutions. Worrisome to think a simple change in Alaska courts could do the same here. But also, FL is going to flip blue, because this is BS that women won't put up with. #abortionhttps://wapo.st/3IYT8ii
@EBecker@Dhmspector@blogdiva
In Florida you cannot vote if you don't have a state ID. On top of that, Florida is also a "Real ID" only state for drivers licenses.
Voter ID alone is said to give about a 5% edge to the GOP, as people with ID are about 5% more likely to vote GOP than those without it. Add "Real ID" and that edge grows. Now add felony disenfranchisement for any of Florida's huge laundry list of felonies. There are lots of people here who are simply not allowed to vote.
Some years ago, some GOP meathead said "if everyone was allowed to vote we'd never win another election." Truer words are rarely spoken.
Then there's the crude shit, like fliers about "how to vote" with fake warnings about warrant checks at the polls or even parking tickets having to be paid up. Unofficial GOP operatives have done shit like that, usually in Black neighborhoods or even the parking lots of Black churches for many years.
Then we have the DeSantis special election police and those 20 people they arrested and threatened with years in prison for technical voting violations that were difficult to even know were issues. Targets were those who had been told their voting rights had been restored after a conviction but where in fact this process had not completed. This sends a message "vote and we will seek any reason to arrest you" to those who they don't want at the polls.
The 2000 "butterfly ballot" fracas that transferred enough Al Gore votes to Ralph Nader (and was called out by Nader for this) happened in Palm Beach County, Florida. May have been that year cops set up a "highway safety" checkpoint somewhere in the US between a Black neighborhood and their polling place.
All of these incidents are just times when they got caught.
These pieces of shit never fight "fair" because they'd always lose if they did.
If you are allowed to vote, PLEASE show up and vote to protect abortion even if this means voting for Mickey Mouse for President over the genocide of Gaza.
If a 60% margin is needed to approve the referendum, add another 5% for votes lost to Voter ID, and a bit more for all the other voter suppression. Yet the referendum is expected to pass, which is why DeSantis fought it so hard. This implies actual support for abortion rights could easily be 70% or even more, possibly everyone that doesn't attend Southern Baptist or similar church services every single Sunday.
@igd_news The electronic battlefield is in fact just another battlefield. Just as on any other, this means we can examine the battlefield to determine where it favors the Enemy and where it favors us.
An obvious example: it is easily seen that the Moscow Metro mentioned in the article is obviously unsafe and used as a honeypot. If the actual activists stop using it, false positives from the facial recognition cameras will send the cops on many ghost hunts.
Counters to this sort of things are many. First and foremost, the use of policing to suppress peaceful protest has caused antiwar activists in Putin's Russia to resort to other, more effective tactics such as incinerating conscription centers and derailing arms trains. Many of these folks never attended a protest and are all but invisible to this type of policing.
Second of all, most of this electronic surveillance can be compared to a road full of license plate reading and traffic enforcement cameras. That system is blind to an unlicensed dirt biker riding an unregistered motorcycle with no plates as well as to cyclists and pedestrians.
Similarly, the combination of dark sunglasses with a covid mask can render many facial recognition systems ineffective at a distance. Usually they still "work" but the results are uselessly spammed with false positives.
These systems can also be exploited. A flash mob of "the usual suspects" or just a fake black bloc actually composed of pacifists can position the cops exactly where you want them, clearing the way for a direct action somewhere else.
Imagine drawing all the cops in Atlanta to Cop City with a fake protest when a convention downtown is the real target!
Also, any time police snatch squads are an issue within protests that have already assembled, there is exactly one defense: that is to treat the entry into the crowd by any cop as an attack and immediately counterattack. Wrap up any likely targets in the center of the crowd, then get them to safety ASAP unless the crowd is so strong as to have at least melee combat superiority over the cops.
You won't be attacked anyway if the cops think you are stronger than they are, instead all the undercovers will be loudly pushing "nonviolence." Been there, seen this. It's when cops have the upper hand (and only then) that undercovers will throw rocks.
Getting people to look straight at the camera up close to pay for something or pass though "security" obviously changes the whole situation when it comes to defeating facial recognition cameras. This is the one situation where it actually seems to work.
That means when you are going to a protest where warrants, pre-emptive arrests, or even pre-emptive detention are possible, do not shop or enter any building in the same city unless you live there. Stay under the radar just as an attack pilot flying at treetop level does.
Do not drive because of license plate readers, and if you cannot pay with cash and while wearing a mask and sunglasses don't take the bus or subway either. Walking and biking are safest.
Never attend any protest where you would have to pass through a "security" checkpoint, this should go without saying.
If an area is so dominated by a combination of surveillance and policing that it is not possible to safely walk around, that area is best considered closed and placed under siege from the outside.
When protest escalates to battle and weapons are used, drones are of course vulnerable both to electronic interference and to shotguns. Remember that this is true for drones used by BOTH sides.
During the Uprising in DC in 2020, in one of the world's most policed of all cities, police air power was neutralized within three weeks. At first we were attacked from the air by such means as that Black Hawk hovering at 50 feet trying to use the rotor wash to knock people down, but we soon turned the tables.
Once people started shooting off big fireworks and shining lasers into the sky, no helicopter pilot would dare get close. Next time it will be drones, note that if the DLJ drones get banned they will be a competitor's commercial drones, otherwise they will be DLJ. These drones like most others can be set to hover, land, or fly "home" if the control signal is lost. In some cases this means they can be captured by doing nothing more than firing up a more powerful transmitter on the drone's control frequency!
Speaking of DLJ: never use DLJ drones with computers that refuse to fly in no-fly zones for anything else illegal! This company requires accounts for at least some kinds of flights, can potentially track user locations, and could theoretically under a request from a government fly the drone to a police pickup point. Their drones are used in Ukraine but if China gets to close to Russia all the DLJ drones in Ukraine would be at risk for being shut down at once.
Five years from now, the only DLJ drones usable by our side in protests may be drones with the entire computer replaced with something like a Raspberry Pi, taking the manufacturer and the government all the way out of the control loop.
Yes, Big Brother remains vulnerable to Little Brother, and the chessboard remains level
@BetaCuck4Lyfe Also possible that your immune system may have repelled or be continuously holding off new exposures in a covid-containing environment. Just the load of that can tire you in some cases.
Note that even the worst vaccine/varient matchups have been at least 30% effective in blocking infection entirely, you could be in that 30%.
Imagine serving aboard a ship in contested waters, and the command "stand by to repel boarders" is going out several times a day. Quite tiring, and that may be exactly what's going on in your body.
This is the NYPD, marching in formation. This message was posted by a former NYPD officer who now is a representative. The police are the army of the rich. In order to heal the world's many woes, they will have to be toppled. Not just resisted, not just protested.
@br00t4c Let's not forget: China is several times larger than the US market, and for relatively inexpensive devices, losing the US market is nowhere near as costly as losing the Chinese market. Huawei doesn't NEED to the US to buy their phones
They killed an activist while destroying an urban forest to replace it with a police training center. they are charging the survivors with terrorism. they are repressing the bail fund. they are throwing away signatures asking for a vote. people wonder why some resort to sabotage.
The Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to forcibly integrate one of their donors, Talitrix, into a city control for ankle monitors. They regularly smuggle the companies of their board members and donors into public resources, which is a major feature of their possibly-criminal, pay-to-play, racket.
Talitrix sells ankle monitors with real-time updates including biometrics. Atlanta is already the most surveilled city in the United States. This kind of contract would essentially turn the city into an open-air prison for anyone out on pre-trial bond, and would be mostly Black men.
@defendATLforest If enough people cut off the bracelets, they won't have enough jail cells for everyone and the program will break down. This has already happened to CBP and ICE. A supermajority of single men w/o worries about protecting family members fitted with tracking monitors by ICE and CBP cut them off and disappear. There are so many cases the risk to each "absconder" is very minimal. This was what "zero voluntary cooperation" can achieve
In 2008, the French government raided the small village of Tarnac, initiating a massive terrorism case that subjected ten defendants to a decade-long ordeal. The case ended in a total defeat for the prosecution.
Yet today, at the bond hearing for Jack Mazurek, who is accused of taking action to #StopCopCity, Atlanta prosecutors called attention to the presence in Jack's house of books associated with the exonerated Tarnac defendants.
For the prosecutors engaged in this witch hunt, facts are beside the point. All that matters is using the blunt force of the judicial process itself to try to crush dissent.
We can stop the ship carrying those bombs here at a US port, or the Yemeni warriors can stop it at sea. May the obstacles combine into an impassable gauntlet.
Andy Ngô trying to portray me as a scary terrorist while also posting images of my bloodied up face after his own followers beat me up in an alley kind of betrays the initial point trying to be made. At least it should, but a core part of fascism is portraying the out-group as both scary enough to fight against but weak and degenerate enough to defeat. See Umberto Eco’s famous essay Ur-Fascism for more on this.
@VPS_Reports Andy Ngo IS a terrorist, given the shootings he has recruited. Let's let Tom Clancy explain this: he once said you could easily take out all the shooters you want but that's like cutting the grass: it grows back. His point is that it's the recruiters who need to be stopped if the terrorism is to stop. He was discussing the Daesh/Al Qaeda form of theocratic terror, I am talking of the mixed dictatorial/Christian nationalist (again theocratic) terrorism we get here but the same rules apply. Different wood, same saw.
This could mean Andy Ngo being wiped out by a lawsuit like the Sandy Hook lawsuit that cleaned out Alex Jones. It could mean him being indicted for solicitation of murder in some liberal jurisdiction. It could mean a sex scandal ruining his reputation so his words fall on closed ears, etc.
1: The Florida Supreme Court approved the referendum to protect abortion rights. It is very likely to pass BUT...
2: The same court also approved the existing 15 week ban, meaning the 6 week "heartbeat bill" the Christian Nationalists from DeathSantis on down rammed through goes into effect in 30 days, presumably MAY 1.
3: Assuming the referendum is approved, from May 1 until sometime after Nov 5 almost all abortion will be illegal in Florida. Thanks to the pill networks, this is basically unenforceable. The GOP and "Church First!" types have been screaming about that but unable to change the facts on the ground.
IF YOU LIVE IN FL AND CAN GET PREGNANT, consider stockpiling abortion pills now to avoid mail delays/lost orders or any of the other problems associated with buying anything by mail order later. We know DeathSantis and even a future Trump presidency cannot win a war on abortion drugs but that doesn't mean our victory will be cheap.
The Southern Bapist Convention, Opus Dei, and the Pentacostals can kiss my ass on this!
St Petersburg, FL: Vets burn uniforms, other protesters burn Genocide Joe "dollar bills" for Gaza
On the 30th of March, protesters gathered at Mirror Lake in St Peterburg, FL to remember the martyrs of Gaza's desperate fight to survive Israel's all-out genocidal attack. US martyr Aaron Bushnell was invoked for his sacrifice that brought so much pressure down on Netanyahu and Biden.
The invocation of Aaron Bushnell was because he has been recognized by those on the ground in Gaza as a martyr for their fight.
After the uniforms had been fed to the flames, "Genocide Joe" dollar bills were next to burn. Finally, protesters marched to City Hall to lay flowers and candles for the tens of thousands of people Israel has murdered in Gaza.
I got there after the veterans had tossed their uniforms into the flames. For obvious reasons that had to be a surprise. None the less, the distinctive smell of burning military uniforms remained in my hair until I got home.
Further warning on Florida and abortion: the FL Supreme Court says that the referendum "could conflict with the rights of the unborn child." This is an open invocation of fetal (and embryonic) personhood, which is the most likely way for the GOP to override abortion rights referendums or even ban abortion in all 50 states.
In other words, this is for ALL the marbles. University of California-Davis law professor Mary Ziegler was quoted in the Washington Post as calling this language in the referendum ruling "shots fired." In other words, these "justices" have just stated their intend to let the referendum be voted on (as they lack legal cover to kill the vote), but refuse to recognize the results. This stinks of J6...
Statement from Gaza read at pro-Palestine protest at Orlando's "Trump Corner
The intersection of FL 436 and US 92/US 17 north of Orlando has long been known as "Trump Corner" due to MAGA meatheads protesting there. On the 28th of March, pro-Palestine protesters took it over, repurposing this highly visible site at the intersection of two highways.
During the protest, a statement sent from Occupied Gaza was read out. The statement recounted horrific events in Gaza such as children in the north starving. Also in the statement was a vow to refuse to surrender and hold out for either victory or martyrdom, emphasizing that people there love their land and are refusing to yield it to the invaders.