cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/669776

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42719582

Web archive link

At least 128 people have died in one of Hong Kong’s deadliest-ever blazes that broke out Wednesday and devastated a multi-block housing estate.

...

But Hong Kong has been the site of many significant fires in the past, which, like the Wang Fuk Court incident, have had various specific causes, but have also often shared some factors that contributed to their deadliness. ...

Density

Hong Kong ... is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with 6,900 residents per sq km. Many buildings are built close to each other, especially in Hong Kong Island and neighboring Kowloon, making it easy for fires to spread.

However, the city also owes much of its high population density to the prevalence of subdivided flats—small cut rooms, sometimes resembling animal cages—where residents can cram and reside in for a fraction of the cost of a standard Hong Kong flat.

In April 2024, a fire involving a 60-year-old tenement block in Yau Ma Tei in the Kowloon area left five people dead and dozens injured. In an op-ed at the time about the risks associated with these homes, the South China Morning Post explained that, while a cigarette may have caused the fire, firefighters said subdivided units and “structural alterations” in the building complicated rescue efforts.

Thirteen years earlier, a fire in Mong Kok, also in the Kowloon area, left nine dead, 34 injured, and more than a hundred people homeless. Authorities then pointed out that the danger was exacerbated by the subdivided flats cutting off points of access for the building.

**Economic struggle **

Hong Kong is also among the most expensive places to live globally, and both individuals and businesses in the Chinese enclave often seek cost-cutting shortcuts that, in the case of fires, have proven immensely costly in the end.

Subdivided flats are a response to an expensive housing market, and many residents have foregone safety requirements for the sake of having a place to live.

Fireproofing is also expensive. In the 2024 Yau Ma Tei fire, the building’s owners reportedly encountered difficulties in raising funds to comply with fire safety guidelines, with a district councillor noting that “the increasingly high cost of upgrading fire prevention facilities and equipment, especially in the bidding process, had not helped,” according to SCMP.

Bamboo scaffolding, which has been linked to the latest conflagration’s devastation, is also known as a cheap alternative for construction businesses despite the city’s Development Bureau pushing to “drive a wider adoption of metal scaffolds in public building works progressively,” with a bureau official citing bamboo’s “intrinsic weaknesses such as variation in mechanical properties, deterioration over time and high combustibility, etc, giving rise to safety concerns.”

...

Lax enforcement

Politicians in the city have flagged that many of the city’s buildings are rapidly aging and in need of better fireproofing.

But previous fires have shown that compliance with government orders has been poor. In the 2024 Yau Ma Tei fire, the city’s Buildings Department already issued fire safety orders to the owners of the block in question in 2008—including calling for them to replace fire doors and outfit the building with more fire-resistant material. But SCMP reported that despite the department’s follow-up, the order had not been followed ...

Latest government data show that more than 8,600 fire hazard abatement notices have been issued in Hong Kong as of January, following inspections of old, high-risk buildings. More than 300 of these notices involved prosecutions or convictions.

...

Here we go.... It took them some time but ads is going to be inside chat gpt as well. And impossible to block.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/31326102

Since it is not designed for individual selfhosters, I'm wondering if any groups are actively attempting to run it together? Idea sounds cool, but I'm wondering about practical execution.

Since it is not designed for individual selfhosters, I'm wondering if any groups are actively attempting to run it together? Idea sounds cool, but I'm wondering about practical execution.

As I understand it for the public web we all use, public DNS servers serve to guide browsers to IP addresses associated with domain names. But of course IPs change for anonymity’s sake on the dark web yet “domain names” stay the same.

How does my Tor browser know the correct route to get to the site that I am trying to visit each time and know that it is always accurate and won’t take me to a different site (assuming that the owner hasn’t changed on that site)? How does this work to keep site owners anonymous without exposing their information to anyone?

Web archive link

The Emile Foundation, an independent The Hague-based non-governmental organisation dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and reunification of Ukrainian children forcibly deported by Russia, condemned the lack of focus by peace negotiators concerning Ukrainian children held captive by Russia.

“Ukrainian children stolen by Russia must be returned,” said Mariam Lambert, Co-Founder of the Emile Foundation. “The return of these innocent children is a matter of moral urgency and legal justification.”

The Foundation does acknowledge that certain reported elements under consideration refer to the return of all abducted Ukrainian children and civilian detainees. However, without enforceable mechanisms, including an independent international monitoring body, real-time family-tracing protocols, and mandatory trauma-informed reintegration compliant with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this provision remains ineffective and risks becoming another unfulfilled promise.

...

“There is not a word about the fate of people under occupation in this plan. The paragraph on the humanitarian committee contains a mention of […] the return of civilian hostages, including children, which is not formulated as an imperative requirement," warns Oleksandra Matviichuk, Emile Foundation Goodwill Ambassador and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

"The plan does not provide for any negative consequences for aggression, but instead provides amnesty for war crimes committed by Russia.”

...

Thousands of demonstrators gathered Saturday in the central German city of Giessen for the launch of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s new youth organisation. The meeting was delayed as some AfD supporters clashed with police.

He is also the author of great books

Archive article: https://archive.is/UxAQB

I'm almost certainly deficient and I thought maybe it could improve my mood :/

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American liberal hoaxes.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal Maga base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put American first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70% of the vote – the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

So you'd expect anger at Trump but you'd be wrong !

yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

Families are combing hospitals hoping to find their loved ones as about 200 people still listed as missing, and at least 128 killed

An outpouring of grief was set to sweep Hong Kong on Saturday as an official, three-day mourning period began with a moment of silence for the 128 people killed in one of the city’s deadliest fires.

City leader John Lee, along with senior ministers and dozens of top civil servants, stood in silence for three minutes on Saturday morning outside the government headquarters, where the flags of China and Hong Kong were flown at half-mast.

Hours before that, citizens placed flowers near the charred shell of Wang Fuk Court, the residential complex that burned for more than 40 hours.

Self hosting helps make the internet more decentralized, but at the end of the day someone else owns that series of tubes.

This is probably a pipe dream, but I think it would be cool if we self hosted not just servers but networking infrastructure as well.

I have an extra class amateur radio license and one of the many niches within the ham radio hobby I'm interested in is packet radio and wireless mesh networking.

Packet radio could technically refer to any RF communication that uses packets, including wifi, but I mostly see it used to refer to the AX.25 protocol, which works like an old-school dial-up modem in that it converts data into audio tones that are transmitted using FM or single sideband radios built for voice communication. AX.25 is used mostly nowadays in Amateur Packet Reporting System (APRS) which is used to report location and status info. There's a website, aprs.fi, where you can track vehicles sending their location or weather stations reporting conditions and so on.

In the olden days there were tons of bulletin boards hosted over AX.25 all over the globe that you could reach either directly or through repeaters. There are a few hangers on, and I even hosted one for a while but nobody visited. You could by hardware terminal node controllers (TNCs) that had a BBS feature, and nowadays there are a few software TNCs available.

Several Wifi frequency bands overlap with ham bands, and various projects have arisen that modify commercial wifi gear to turn them into mesh nodes forming a wireless wide area network, operating under FCC part 97 rules rather than the unlicensed part 15 rules that they use out of the box. This allows higher power and channels otherwise off limits to wifi stations. The project I'm most familiar with is Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) which uses a fork of openWRT firmware. I've tried a couple times to get the other hams in my area interested in setting up a network, but it's slow going.

There are also ham-adjacent projects like Meshtastic that I'm not as familiar with.

This barely scratches the surface of what's out there. The ham bands are explicitly non commercial and there are limits on what you can transmit and how much bandwidth you can use, but I dream of a day when everyone's wifi router meshes with all the other routers in the neighborhood which is connected to all the other neighborhoods in the city which is connected via repeaters to all the other cities and so on. Sure it would be slow, but we'd be communicating on our own system that only costs as much as the hardware you run it on.

Immediate software change on ‘significant number’ of jets to result in disruption to half the worldwide fleet

Airlines around the world cancelled and delayed flights heading into the weekend after Airbus announced on Friday that it had ordered immediate repairs to 6,000 of its A320 family of jets in a recall affecting more than half of the global fleet.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which is the main certifying authority for A320 aircraft, issued the instruction on Friday night as a precautionary action, saying that “safety is paramount”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration also issued an emergency airworthiness directive for certain Airbus planes, requiring the aircraft to replace or modify specific software.

The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters.

"Nobody will make concessions on the territories, because it’s our land and we stand here," one soldier told NBC News about the proposal's call for Ukraine to cede land to Russia.

From his position on the eastern front lines, the original peace plan backed by Donald Trump looked more like a proposal for Volodymyr Rzhavskyi’s surrender.

“It’s not a plan. It’s a real capitulation. There is nothing to discuss here,” said Rzhavskyi, a senior sergeant serving near Pokrovsk, a supply hub under intense pressure from Russian forces for some 18 months.

While Ukrainian officials fought for changes to the 28-point plan that emerged last week, NBC News spoke with soldiers in the country’s embattled military who expressed frustration at the idea Moscow would be handed its hard-line demands but also hope that they might soon be able to return to their lives.