China's biggest tree-planting effort is the Great Green Wall in the country's arid and semi-arid north. Started in 1978, the Great Green Wall was created to slow the expansion of deserts. Over the last five decades, it has helped grow forest cover from about 10% of China's area in 1949 to more than 25%

Collectively, China's ecosystem restoration initiatives account for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area between 2000 and 2017.

The European Commission said on Thursday it was reviewing tariffs on Volkswagen's electric vehicles built in China, which the automaker hopes could be replaced with an annual import quota and minimum price mechanism.

https://archive.is/Ck8OT

Inserted as Article 23a of the revised Return Regulation, the proposal allows law enforcement to “search homes or other relevant premises” and seize personal belongings as part of deportation operations.

As a bibliophile on the Fediverse, I'm flailing a little. I'm on Mastodon, Lemmy, and BookWyrm.social, but I don't know which is the best place to reach the largest and most active number of fellow readers.

Currently I'm guessing that this is the largest book group in the Fediverse, based entirely on MAU - but I'll be frank, I could easily be wrong.

I'm looking to discuss approaches to reviewing books. It occurred to me recently that the most meaningful and helpful reviews are the ones that tie in to emotion - that emotional impact is by far the most important aspect of art and writing, at least to me. I'm curious to hear what sort of approaches others have tried, and maybe sharing tips.

There's also another issue that's been bothering the hell out of me: BookSNS. It's a book recommendation site that's very active, with a lot of users. I've been following it for quite a while via Mastodon.

Posts from it are echoed or relayed to Mastodon, but replies don't go the other way. Users there seem to think that they are posting on Reddit, at least some of the time. But there is no way to contact anyone at the website itself; no admin address, and you have to have an account there in order to respond on the site. But there are no openings for new accounts.

It drives me completely crazy, because I have a huge amount of experience recommending books - particularly older books. I used to be one of the top book recommenders on Reddit, before I walked away after their IPO sleaze. Over and over I've seen requests for recommendations for which I have the perfect answers, only to find myself absolutely unable to respond.

It's torture. I really love recommending the books that I know, particularly since almost no one else seems to even be aware of their existence. But I just can't get through to those requesters.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

#Books #BookSNS #Mastodon

Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs.

The Department of Justice on Thursday said that Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, of Alexandria, Virginia, deleted databases and documents maintained and belonging to three government agencies. The brothers were federal contractors working for an undisclosed company in Washington, DC, that provides software and services to 45 US agencies. Prosecutors said the men coordinated the crimes and began carrying them out just minutes after being fired.

Props to comrade @ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net for this one 🫡

While exciting, this means that basically anyone can mass-produce many rare plant species, rendering their ‘rare’ status on the market, well, not-so-rare anymore.

It’s also put quite a dent in the illicit rare plant market, where plant smuggling across international borders is common. Proponents of tissue culture argue that cloning is a better alternative to this, which can result in rare plant species being harvested into extinction.

Plants in Jars compared this debate to the marketing around lab-grown diamonds and naturally mined diamonds, noting how the demand for mined diamonds fell significantly when lab-grown gems became more popular.

My natural instincts seem like all the things you need to avoid with an avoidant partner like overwhelming intensity of feelings, going all in, oversharing, excitement, showing raw feelings etc. I was wondering if it's even sustainable.

In case it's not a run while you can scenario, I would appreciate any advice for an early talking stage with an avoidant and later stages if it goes well

Thanks!!

This only makes sense if you have an iGPU, but hear me out.

My system:

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070
Motherboard: MSI PRO B860-P WiFi
RAM: G.Skill 64GB (32GBx2) DDR5-6000
PSU: Corsair RM850X
OS: Arch Linux KDE

I see people always telling others to connect their monitor directly to the dGPU instead of the motherboard/iGPU. I decided to test this with a wattmeter, and the results were interesting.

Power consumption (whole system):

Connected to dGPU:

Idle at 60/165Hz: 33-35.5W (constantly fluctuating)
YouTube 1080p fullscreen: 73-83W (constantly fluctuating)

Connected to iGPU (motherboard):

Idle at 60Hz: 31.8W
Idle at 165Hz: 32.5W
YouTube 1080p fullscreen: 40-44W (occasionally hitting 50-52W)

Not only while playing youtube , doing any light tasks like opening new tabs, moving windows, browsing, chatgpt, claude etc all these things consume about 25-40W more when connected to dgpu directly. Also the system gets to idle power quickly when connected to igpu. Whereas with dgpu, it takes noticeably longer to drop to lower power levels.

When doing GPU intensive tasks like gaming or running LLMs, the OS (at least on Linux, should be the same on Windows) automatically runs them on the dGPU. I get the same performance, or at worst within margin of error.

So, it makes no sense to connect directly to the dGPU unless you’re only gaming. If you have mixed workloads - work, browsing, movies, youtube AND gaming , then connecting to the iGPU saves significant power without sacrificing performance where it matters.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/11686

Highly invasive spyware from consortium led by a former senior Israeli intelligence official and sanctioned by the US government is still being used to target people in multiple countries, a joint investigation published Thursday revealed.

Inside Story in Greece, Haaretz in Israel, Swiss-based WAV Research Collective, and Amnesty International collaborated on the investigation into Intellexa Consortium, maker of Predator commercial spyware. The "Intellexa Leaks" show that clients in Pakistan—and likely also in other countries—are using Predator to spy on people, including a featured Pakistani human rights lawyer.

“This investigation provides one of the clearest and most damning views yet into Intellexa’s internal operations and technology," said Amnesty International Security Lab technologist Jurre van Bergen.

🚨Intellexa Leaks:"Among the most startling findings is evidence that—at the time of the leaked training videos—Intellexa retained the capability to remotely access Predator customer systems, even those physically located on the premises of its govt customers."securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2025/...

[image or embed]
— Vas Panagiotopoulos (@vaspanagiotopoulos.com) December 3, 2025 at 9:07 PM

Predator works by sending malicious links to a targeted phone or other hardware. When the victim clicks the link, the spyware infects and provide access to the targeted device, including its encrypted instant messages on applications such as Signal and WhatsApp, as well as stored passwords, emails, contact lists, call logs, microphones, audio recordings, and more. The spyware then uploads gleaned data to a Predator back-end server.

The new investigation also revealed that in addition to the aforementioned "one-click" attacks, Intellexa has developed "zero-click" capabilities in which devices are infected via malicious advertising.

In March 2024, the US Treasury Department sanctioned two people and five entities associated with Intellexa for their alleged role "in developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology used to target Americans, including US government officials, journalists, and policy experts."

"The proliferation of commercial spyware poses distinct and growing security risks to the United States and has been misused by foreign actors to enable human rights abuses and the targeting of dissidents around the world for repression and reprisal," the department said at the time.

Those sanctioned include Intellexa, its founder Tal Jonathan Dilian—a former chief commander of the Israel Defense Forces' top-secret Technological Unit—his wife and business partner Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou; and three companies within the Intellexa Consortium based in North Macedonia, Hungary, and Ireland.

In September 2024, Treasury sanctioned five more people and one more entity associated with the Intellexa Consortium, including Felix Bitzios, owner of an Intellexa consortium company accused of selling Predator to an unnamed foreign government, for alleged activities likely posing "a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States."

The Intellexa Leaks reveal that new consortium employees were trained using a video demonstrating Predator capabilities on live clients. raising serious questions regarding clients' understanding of or consent to such access.

"The fact that, at least in some cases, Intellexa appears to have retained the capability to remotely access Predator customer logs—allowing company staff to see details of surveillance operations and targeted individuals raises questions about its own human rights due diligence processes," said van Bergen.

"If a mercenary spyware company is found to be directly involved in the operation of its product, then by human rights standards, it could potentially leave them open to claims of liability in cases of misuse and if any human rights abuses are caused by the use of spyware," he added.

Dilian, Hamou, Bitzios, and Giannis Lavranos—whose company Krikel purchased Predator spyware—are currently on trial in Greece for allegedly violating the privacy of Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis and Artemis Seaford, a Greek-American woman who worked for tech giant Meta. Dilian denies any wrongdoing or involvement in the case.

Earlier this week, former Intellexa pre-sale engineer Panagiotis Koutsios testified about traveling to countries including Colombia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Mongolia, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan, where he pitched Predator to public, intelligence, and state security agencies.

The new joint investigation follows Amnesty International's "Predator Files," a 2023 report detailing "how a suite of highly invasive surveillance technologies supplied by the Intellexa alliance is being sold and transferred around the world with impunity."

The Predator case has drawn comparisons with Pegasus, the zero-click spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group that has been used by governments, spy agencies, and others to invade the privacy of targeted world leaders, political opponents, dissidents, journalists, and others.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.