China has a considerable competitive edge over Korea in robotics, electric vehicles (EVs), battery and also semiconductor industries, excluding the memory chip sector, the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade (KIET) said in its latest report on the countries' competitiveness in advanced industries. The report is based on a survey conducted on industrial experts in September.

The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.

Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.

I am on a really tight budget so I really don't want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.

I don't expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.

In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.

Possibilites I came up with until now:

1. Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
2. Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.

I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!

If the overall EU budget is reduced, the EU’s Horizon research and innovation fund is the most likely casualty, according to the analyst. The Commission has proposed €175 billion for the fund, compared to €95 billion in the current budget.

Cuts to Horizon would undermine Europe’s attempt to attract researchers from across the globe, mainly the US.

“What started as a ruckus at a K-pop concert in Malaysia has snowballed into a wave of racist online attacks by some South Korean users against Southeast Asians, triggering a rare show of regional solidarity across social media,” the Jakarta Post reported on Monday.

The dispute reportedly began following a DAY6 concert in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Jan. 31, when a person identified as a Korean fan site operator allegedly snuck a professional camera with a long lens into the venue, despite such equipment being banned on the premises. After Malaysian netizens shared a video of the individual in question on social media, Korean online users accused them of violating the person's privacy. Malaysians countered that the person was being exposed for breaking the rules.

Users from other Southeast Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, chipped in and even asserted their willingness to boycott Korean pop culture content and Korean-made items from brands such as Samsung Electronics and Olive Young. This led to the online hashtag “SEAbling,” a portmanteau of the abbreviation for Southeast Asia and “sibling.”

Archive/non-paywall link.

Demonstrations spread to Tehran’s Al Zahra University one month after security crackdown left thousands dead

Students at universities in Iran have held a third consecutive day of protests just over a month after the violent suppression by security services of mass street demonstrations left thousands dead.

The protests came amid tensions between Iran and the US. Washington has built up military forces and pressure in the Middle East as it negotiates with Tehran – with the next round in Geneva on Thursday. Donald Trump has warned “really bad things will happen” if there is no deal.

. . .

In a bid to ridicule Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, some students climbed trees in the campus and hung toy mice from its branches – a way of saying he was hiding underground like a mouse. Reports said students chanted “death to the dictator”, “for every one killed, a thousand will follow” and “the blood that has been spilled will never be washed away”.

MBFC
Archive

It is their juvenile form that has turned an odd-looking, slippery fish into an expensive commodity. Elvers are now Canada’s most valuable fish. Driven by demand in Asia, glass eels can fetch thousands of dollars per kilogram (approximately a one-litre bottle full)—even sometimes more than $5,000 per kilogram. In 2022, fishers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick earned $39 million from 7,557 kilograms of elvers harvested, according to DFO.

Authorities mounted rescue operation after group of five lost control of ice sheet in Stockholm archipelago

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51341510

Archived

The Philippines is facing a “coordinated and sustained” cyber offensive from China, signaling a shift in geopolitical tensions from the West Philippine Sea into the digital domain through influence operations aimed at shaping public perception, manipulating discourse, and weakening institutional trust, a think tank said over the weekend.

Speaking during the two-day “Navigating Digital Crossroads” cybersecurity forum held in partnership with the Embassy of Canada to the Philippines, Stratbase ADR Institute president Victor Andres Manhit said the country was engaged in what he described as an “unseen war” waged through information dominance, psychological operations, and digital manipulation rather than conventional military force.

Manhit said modern conflict was no longer determined solely by weapons systems or troop deployments but by the ability to control narratives, influence decision-making environments, and shape public perception — developments he said were increasingly evident as regional tensions spilled over into cyberspace across the broader Indo-Pacific.

[...]

“What reverberates within our domestic context affects the broader region. And developments in the region inevitably shape outcomes in the Philippines,” he said, describing the phenomenon as coordinated political warfare in which physical operations and informational campaigns move in lockstep to secure strategic narrative superiority.

He cited Beijing’s so-called “three warfares” doctrine — composed of psychological, legal, and public opinion warfare — as a framework already reflected in operations that seek to undermine Philippine sovereignty by embedding strategic messaging into public discourse and amplifying pro-China narratives across online platforms.

[...]

He pointed to what he described as China’s use of coordinated networks linked to its United Front Work to embed strategic narratives into Philippine public discourse through associations spanning business and chamber groups, academic exchanges, think tanks, study centers, and even sister-city partnerships.

“We have observed a network of associations functioning as amplifiers of pro-Beijing narratives and actions,” he said, noting that influence campaigns may operate through both formal partnerships and informal online communities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51341402

A series of patents filed the past two years indicates that institutions across China are working out how to use AI to improve grassroots surveillance.

Archived

Reading between the lines, a dry little document released by the Fujian Police Academy in December last year is a small window onto the future of authoritarianism.

The academy, which is directly under the Fujian provincial government and conducts research to improve public security mechanisms, proposes a new method for detecting an abnormal build-up of people into “potential mass incidents” (潜在群体性事件) — referring to an oft-used official bureaucratic euphemism for collective protests, riots, demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of organized public unrest. The academy’s new method uses AI that is fed data from sound sensors, cameras and official reports. The AI system flags an incident as soon as it starts to develop, giving the police advance warning. If the system overlooks an incident, it reviews the video footage and recordings to improve detection in future. This is machine learning in the service of AI-based surveillance.

[...]

Throughout the past year, institutions across China, both private and state-owned, have proposed variations of the same system: taking big data from China’s extensive surveillance system — including input from street cameras and satellites, noise sensors, social media posts, as well as reports from social services — and feeding it into AI models to aid predictive policing. This is part of the government’s vision of a fusion of human and machine response, making for a more robust domestic security system.

The trend does not bode well for the most vulnerable sections of Chinese society.

[...]

While some institutions are making use of Chinese AI models for these projects, Western ones are also being considered. In August 2025 Guizhou Normal University suggested using OpenAI’s GPT models as a “core reasoning tool” in a system to predict “social governance incidents” based on reports of an individual’s “personality traits,” “long-term emotional states” or “degree of exposure to negative cultural influences.” The patent does not specify how data on “negative cultural influences” would be collected, though any such system would depend on extensive pre-existing surveillance infrastructure. While OpenAI has banned individual Chinese users from accessing its products since 2024, businesses in China can still access OpenAI models through Microsoft Azure.

[...]

How would these inventions impact society? The systems described in these patents would likely fall hardest on the most vulnerable members of Chinese society. The algorithms are programmed around catch-all risk categories commonly associated with violent or disorderly behavior, with little apparent regard for individual circumstances. Guizhou’s risk monitoring system for assessing the danger levels of an individual include a “criminal record, drug abuse record, serious mental illness” as well as tense relationships with family members. It is not clear how the algorithm would make allowances for those, say, who have a criminal record through minor offences as opposed to a major one, or whose family relationships are tense due to living with abusive parents or spouses.

[...]

It is also a chance to exert greater control over a system that has persistently caused trouble for local authorities. The Southwestern University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing has created a risk monitoring system specifically targeted at petitioners, individuals who are seeking redress for a wrong done to them either by a local cadre or peer. Petitioners are frequently driven to increasingly desperate acts after years spent navigating a grievance system that rarely produces results — a dynamic that authorities have long treated as a public order problem rather than a governance failure.

The invention would see sensors and cameras placed in spaces where citizens meet officials, flagging a warning to police based on detecting heightened emotion through noise sensors and facial recognition software. But the algorithm is also programmed to take “Life Observations” into account. Subjects are considered high risk if they have spread inflammatory comments on social media over three times in one month, not had steady employment for over a year or do not have any social security, are homeless or reported as “not going out [of the house] for a long time (≥ 7 days).”

[...]

Had the surgery 2/19 to remove the entire sigmoid colon and all the related lymph nodes.

Was in recovery 2/19 to 2/23 and released to go home!

The biopsy results came in late today and confirmed 0/12 lymph nodes were malignant. That's it! It's clean! No stage 3, no chemo required!

Follow up with the surgeon on 4/1 to talk about where we go from here, my guess is colonoscopies 2x a year for life now since it went from 0 to stage 2 in 6 months.

March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month, wear blue and get checked!

#✅UR:

Not sure when I'll be back modding, I still feel like someone slammed me in the gut with a baseball bat. Cricket bat for our international folks! Maybe another 2-3 weeks.

I still lurk and comment occasionally, just as my health allows!

Edit Bonus - Since my wife had her own medical event this year involving a massive infection, spinal intrusion and below knee amputation, we already hit the out of pocket maximum on our insurance for the year.

Sooo...

Get insurance guys, no, seriously, get insurance.

Impeach and imprison these cunts. They are directly COMITTING A WAR CRIME. Ukraine's civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, powerplants, etc.) is under sustained fire by Russians.

Wilkinson only understood what was happening once officers drove them, still in their pajamas, nearly two hours to the NYPD’s Seventh Precinct, where they overheard one officer tell another they were with the hate crimes unit. There, Wilkinson was for the first time able to get their eyes on an actual search warrant — not because police finally showed them one but because someone they were sharing a cell with who had been arrested as part of the same operation had one in their pocket. Wilkinson was finally released from jail by a judge at 1 a.m.

“They ripped my entire apartment and life apart,” says Wilkinson.

The Privacy Commissioners Office has been calling for proper fines for data breaches for YEARS.

Not a single muppet in the beehive has even given it a thought, from what i can tell.

The current maximum penalty is $10000.

Australia has their maximum penalty set to $50 million.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43616072

Excerpt:

When the US negotiates with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, it is because the US was unable to replace Chavismo with some clown like María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó. “Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. But it also exposed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they detest.”

Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president while Maduro is held hostage by the empire, met with US Department of Energy officials, and immediately narratives emerged that she had betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution by privatizing oil. This is false. The reform of the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons dictates that the state remains the owner of the natural resources and that public entities maintain majority ownership of all joint ventures with private corporations in the oil sector. Furthermore, the law stipulates that the final authority for all disputes will be the Venezuelan courts, rather than some court in Washington or New York. Misión Verdad wrote that “the Venezuelan State externalizes and transfers to others the risks of commercial activity, while directly benefiting from the activities of the operators, fully preserving public ownership of the deposits and resources.” Changes in the royalty structure and external marketing and sales does not reflect privatization; instead it is a reaction to the technical and financial barriers that the United States has imposed on Venezuela through a sustained siege. Rather than spreading social media tabloids, we should reflect on the reasons why Venezuela lacks the machinery and capability to refine its heavy crude, or the barriers to investment in PDVSA and why it is severely limited in its capacity to engage in foreign sales. The answer to these is the reality of the US blockade.

It is painful to see revolutionaries shaking hands with kidnappers, but politics is not a movie. Expecting Venezuela to strike back militarily ignores reality. The US maintains an enormous armada off the Venezuelan coast, air bases nearby, and is strangling Cuba simultaneously. The US has proven that it will airstrike civilian targets and destroy civilian infrastructure and then brag about its crimes to the world and get away with it. This is exactly what happened in Yemen just last year and has been inflicted upon Gaza for over two years.

Therefore, negotiation is not betrayal; it is survival. We must distinguish between compromise of principle and compromise of necessity. Venezuela is being extorted to sell oil to US companies that supply the Zionist entity. This is not a choice; because the alternative is nothing. The reality, for millions of Venezuelans and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela is that the revolution must retreat following military defeat, but it is not ideological surrender. Revenue returns to the people, preventing the total collapse of the government. We can compare this to the imperialist war on Syria, where US-backed terrorists stole oil revenues and strangled the state and its people.

Excerpt:

When the US negotiates with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, it is because the US was unable to replace Chavismo with some clown like María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó. “Washington’s kidnapping of Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. But it also exposed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they detest.”

Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president while Maduro is held hostage by the empire, met with US Department of Energy officials, and immediately narratives emerged that she had betrayed the Bolivarian Revolution by privatizing oil. This is false. The reform of the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons dictates that the state remains the owner of the natural resources and that public entities maintain majority ownership of all joint ventures with private corporations in the oil sector. Furthermore, the law stipulates that the final authority for all disputes will be the Venezuelan courts, rather than some court in Washington or New York. Misión Verdad wrote that “the Venezuelan State externalizes and transfers to others the risks of commercial activity, while directly benefiting from the activities of the operators, fully preserving public ownership of the deposits and resources.” Changes in the royalty structure and external marketing and sales does not reflect privatization; instead it is a reaction to the technical and financial barriers that the United States has imposed on Venezuela through a sustained siege. Rather than spreading social media tabloids, we should reflect on the reasons why Venezuela lacks the machinery and capability to refine its heavy crude, or the barriers to investment in PDVSA and why it is severely limited in its capacity to engage in foreign sales. The answer to these is the reality of the US blockade.

It is painful to see revolutionaries shaking hands with kidnappers, but politics is not a movie. Expecting Venezuela to strike back militarily ignores reality. The US maintains an enormous armada off the Venezuelan coast, air bases nearby, and is strangling Cuba simultaneously. The US has proven that it will airstrike civilian targets and destroy civilian infrastructure and then brag about its crimes to the world and get away with it. This is exactly what happened in Yemen just last year and has been inflicted upon Gaza for over two years.

Therefore, negotiation is not betrayal; it is survival. We must distinguish between compromise of principle and compromise of necessity. Venezuela is being extorted to sell oil to US companies that supply the Zionist entity. This is not a choice; because the alternative is nothing. The reality, for millions of Venezuelans and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela is that the revolution must retreat following military defeat, but it is not ideological surrender. Revenue returns to the people, preventing the total collapse of the government. We can compare this to the imperialist war on Syria, where US-backed terrorists stole oil revenues and strangled the state and its people.

France’s top diplomat Monday requested that U.S. Ambassador Charles Kushner no longer be allowed direct access to members of the French government after he skipped a meeting to discuss comments by the Trump administration over the beating death of a far-right activist.

French authorities had summoned Kushner, the father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, to the Quai d’Orsay, which houses the Foreign Affairs Ministry, on Monday evening but he did not show up, according to diplomatic sources.

Jean-Noel Barrot, the foreign affairs minister, moved to restrict Kushner’s access “in light of this apparent misunderstanding of the basic expectations of the mission of an ambassador, who has the honor of representing his country.”