Paywall Bypass Link: https://archive.is/3G4fp

Dec 14 (Reuters) - Roomba vacuum cleaner maker iRobot (IRBT.O), said on Sunday that it had filed for bankruptcy protection, and would go private after being acquired by Picea, its primary manufacturer.

The company, which raised concerns about staying in business in March, filed for bankruptcy in the District of Delaware as it grapples with macroeconomic and tariff-related uncertainties.

More than a third of the nation's 11,000 citizens applied for the new climate visa — a deal forged between the two countries to preserve Tuvaluan culture as the atolls disappear.

The intake is capped at 280 visas annually to prevent a brain drain from the tiny island nation.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chile’s ultra-conservative former lawmaker José Antonio Kast secured a stunning victory in the presidential election Sunday, defeating the candidate of the center-left governing coalition and setting the stage for the country’s most right-wing government in 35 years of democracy.

Add context: Under former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime (1973-1990) many were tortured ( ca. 10 K) and killed (ca. 3/4 K)

This is a genuine question. I've always had an interest in learning languages and I have a list I want to learn. I am already somewhat decent in Spanish, so I'm picking up that, practicing my Portuguese, going to learn French and Italian, maybe German, learning Polish, and possibly Russian.

I already canceled the idea of living in Russia due to obvious reasons, but will I have any need to learn the language? Will it be useful? Will that be offensive? Many people HATE Russia and the language.

Thousands of contracts and documents outline the contours of DHS’s surveillance capabilities: geolocation, facial recognition, DNA testing, eye scans, spyware, licence plate cameras, credit reports and more. AI tools cross-reference datasets, while mobile apps give field agents information at their fingertips.

At the same time, the proliferation of data brokers and digital, “open-source” intelligence has made surveillance easier than ever. Unlike the government programmes revealed by Edward Snowden over a decade ago, DHS has not needed to build extensive in-house capabilities — vendors now offer sweeping tools at relatively low cost.

A wide array of private corporations, from global powerhouses to niche start-ups, have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, including AT&T, Thomson Reuters, Palantir and Clearview AI. Some have hired lobbyists with ties to the White House to capitalise on ICE’s growing ambitions.

Individual surveillance technologies should be understood within the “mass surveillance context”, says Emily Tucker, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “All this stuff is being used together.”

Former officials say internal safeguards have been sidelined. “There’s less oversight and more willingness to break the rules,” says Deborah Fleischaker, who served as DHS’s privacy officer and ICE chief of staff under Biden.

“Things are just unbound,” she adds. “People are doing things that have never been done before, in ways that have never been done before, with fewer safeguards in place.”

More than a dozen former senior government officials familiar with Trump’s deportation push spoke with the FT, most on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution.

They hold a range of views about the administration’s policies and left the department for a variety of reasons, but all shared concerns about the volume of data collection, the lack of oversight, and the shift from criminal to immigration work. Many raised fears that surveillance tools may soon be used on left-wing groups and protestors who ICE claims are threats to its agents.

An FT analysis of federal procurement data shows ICE has spent at least $353mn on surveillance contracts this year, up 27 per cent from 2024. In July, Trump’s spending bill gave ICE $29bn for operations on top of its existing annual budgets for the next four years, empowering the agency to buy more tools.

ICE is hiring staff to monitor social media, seeking contractors in Vermont and California to gather “information obtained from commercial and law enforcement databases as well as publicly accessible, open-source and social media platforms.”

ICE is also hiring old-fashioned private investigators. A tender posted last month seeks contractors to “use all technology systems available” to find addresses for persons of interest, including “physical observation”. The agency says it has approximately 1.5mn names it will divide among these vendors, who can earn between $7.5mn and $281mn based on the number of people they locate.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection also collect DNA from detainees and asylum applicants, according to a privacy disclosure. One attorney says he was representing a US citizen who was given a cheek swab while incorrectly detained. Samples are stored in an FBI database where they are queryable by a range of law enforcement agencies.

ICE has also signed a contract with BI² Technologies, a vendor selling handheld eye scanners. Former officials questioned the need for the devices, noting that the agency held few, if any, iris scans to search. “My first question is why?” a former privacy official says. “What do you expect to get out of this? If they’re just out there collecting irises and biometrics, that’s a problem for me.”

“They’re spending a lot of money on things they might not even use, to benefit people who are maybe close to the administration,” says Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit monitoring ICE’s surveillance purchases. “They’re moving very fast.”

Procurement records also show that ICE has obtained tools previous administrations found problematic.

In August, ICE removed a hold on a $2mn contract with the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, which sells a phone-hacking tool called Graphite. It has been used by the Italian government to target European journalists with iMessage and WhatsApp attacks, according to researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

The contract was paused by the Biden White House, which had banned the use of spyware sold by foreign companies with human rights concerns. Paragon was subsequently acquired by US-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which also controls Department of Defense contractor REDLattice.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/31427438

Beijing is pouring vast resources into fusion research, while the U.S. wants private industry to lead the way. The winner could reshape civilization.

I've been de-googling, de-microsofting, and de-Amazoning my life.

One thing I still use for self hosting is AWS Route 53 for Domain Name Services (DNS).

I don't feel ready to self-host DNS.

Do you all have recommendations for reliable and ethical DNS hosting providers?

Or is self hosting some DNS records less of a big deal than I'm imagining?

Advice on either would be welcome. Thank you!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/55016857

Hello everyone!

Journiv is a self-hosted private journaling application that puts you in complete control of your personal reflections. Built with privacy and simplicity at its core, Journiv offers comprehensive journaling capabilities including mood tracking, prompt-based journaling, media uploads, analytics, and advanced search. All while keeping your data on your own infrastructure.

Journiv v0.1.0-beta.10 is out with

See timeline and calendar demo

• Timeline view - See your entries across all journals.
• Calendar view - See your entries on a calendar with media thumbnails
• Dynamic tags - Improved tag support to support filter as your type and shows tag usage counter.
• Many bug fixes and improvements.

The Journey Ahead

Journiv is in active development, with a fully functional backend, a web frontend, and mobile apps launching soon. It is self-hosted, and designed to be your companion for decades.

Journiv is being built because our memories deserve to be ours, forever.

Learn More

• Spin up Journiv
• Watch other demo videos
• Want to just try a demo? https://demo.almostadatacenter.com/ (Thanks to JasonFieldz for hosting a demo instance): username: demo@test.com password: Demo1234

Grok has repeatedly misidentified video of the Bondi Beach shooting and the hero who disarmed a gunman.

On a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, a survivor tells of their detainment in Libya, which the EU helped to fund

A story of the kind of disdain Palestine Action hunger strikers experience in UK prisons.

“Can you ring an ambulance? I’m scared”. They hung up on her.

[hours later] the nurse returned and informed her that “you don’t decide if you go to hospital, I do”.

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed close to 220 journalists, leading the press freedom watchdog to describe it as "the worst enemy of journalists".

Yet, despite the severity of these findings, major western news outlets that sanctimoniously champion press freedom and human rights found little space for the deadliest year in RSF's records, much less that the overwhelming majority of those journalists were Palestinian.

And few institutions illustrate this selective outrage more clearly than The New York Times, whose editorial board had the gall last month to condemn US President Donald Trump over his meeting with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, citing the crown prince's "almost [certain]" role in ordering the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Alas, the NYT declared that "the realities of geopolitics have long required the United States to ally itself with foreign leaders who commit terrible deeds". You might assume they were speaking of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but you would be mistaken. They were referring to an Arab potentate murdering an Arab journalist.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday voiced readiness to drop his country’s bid to join NATO in exchange for Western security guarantees, but rejected the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia as he held talks with U.S. envoys on ending the war.

Zelenskyy sat down with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Ukrainian leader posted pictures of the negotiating table with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sitting next to him facing the U.S. delegation.

Responding to journalists’ questions in audio clips on a WhatsApp group chat before the talks, Zelenskyy said that since the U.S. and some European nations had rejected Ukraine’s push to join NATO, Kyiv expects the West to offer a set of guarantees similar to those offered to the alliance members.

xAI’s chatbot has repeatedly misidentified video of the incident and the hero who disarmed a gunman.

Grok’s track record is spotty at best. But even by the very low standards of xAI, its failure in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia is shocking. The AI chatbot has repeatedly misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who heroically disarmed one of the shooters, and claimed the verified video of his deed was something else entirely — including that it was an old viral video of a man climbing a tree.

In the aftermath of the attack, Ahmed has been widely praised for his heroism, but some have tried to dismiss or even deny his actions. Someone even quickly whipped up a fake news site that appears to be AI-generated, with an article naming a fictitious IT professional, Edward Crabtree, as the man who disarmed the attacker. This, of course, got picked up by Grok and regurgitated on X.

But Grok also suggested that images of Ahmed were of an Israeli being held hostage by Hamas. And it claimed that video taken at the scene was actually of Currumbin Beach, Australia, during Cyclone Alfred.

Hi, so I'm very young and this may change, but I wanna get started at learning a language anyway. I either wanna go to Germany, Austria, Poland, or Italy. According to the Wikipedia, I believe Italy speaks the least amount of English out of the 4.

However, which country would have what I'm looking for: rich culture (probably all), good writing inspiration, friendly people, cheap places but still good to live, good pay for jobs like teachers, and in need of English education. Also, not a lot of far-right, homophobic/Nazi groups (I'm a lesbian).

It turns out the difference between what devices work for 000 on Vodafone and those that don't is quite literally a 1.3 Kilobyte text file!

That's the 'fix'.

This file has the VoLTE 000 settings for Vodafone.
Whereas Optus and Telstra have had settings and support for the feature since at least 2017. 

Your device Does NOT need Android 13 or higher, nor a 'Custom ROM' (if on an older version).

Your device simply just needs a little more than the 1KB worth of settings for Vodafone's 000 'SOS' Network.

[...]

Reportedly Vodafone is also now moving to a more restrictive device 'whitelist' blocking 'unknown' capability devices, including some phones recently sold at Officeworks!

Seems TPG/Vodafone is trying to improve how the list 'looks' whilst not actually addressing the problem and punishing consumers in the process.

A JetBlue flight from the small Caribbean nation of Curaçao halted its ascent to avoid colliding with a US air force refueling tanker on Friday, and the pilot blamed the military plane for crossing his path.

“We almost had a midair collision up here,” the JetBlue pilot said, according to a recording of his conversation with air traffic control. “They passed directly in our flight path ... They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous.”

Hello, my question is: is there big difderwnce in making m.2 nvme disk with storage of 250gb instead of 1TB or more? Maybe it is stupid question. Is there physical difference?