Australia has been quietly executing one of the harshest deportation regimes in the so-called democratic world. It has done so not through emergency powers or wartime necessity, but through ordinary legislation — principally the Migration Act 1958, and s 501, the so-called “character” provision.

I pronounce Mario like Maria but with an o.

As part of changing laws in Europe, Meta now offers the option for you to chat with others using third-party messaging apps that have integrated with WhatsApp and that you choose to turn on.

Note: Chats with third-party apps are only available in select regions and may not be available to you.

I feel sorry for all in the wrong region.

Internet Protocol is the protocol underlying all Internet communications, what lets a packet of information get from one computer on the Internet to another.

Since the beginning of the Internet, Internet Protocol has permitted Computer A to send a packet of information to Computer B, regardless of whether Computer B wants that packet or not. Once Computer B receives the packet, it can decide to discard it or not.

The problem is that Computer B also only has so much bandwidth available to it, and if someone can acquire control over sufficient computers that can act as Computer A, then they can overwhelm Computer B's bandwidth by having all of these computers send packets of data to Computer B; this is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Any software running on a computer

a game, pretty much any sort of malware, whatever

normally has enough permission to send information to Computer B. In general, it hasn't been terribly hard for people to acquire enough computers to perform such a DDoS attack.

There have been, in the past, various routes to try to mitigate this. If Computer B was on a home network or on a business's local network, then they could ask their Internet service provider to stop sending traffic from a given address to them. This wasn't ideal in that even some small Internet service providers could be overwhelmed, and trying to filter out good traffic from bad wasn't necessarily a trivial task, especially for an ISP that didn't really specialize in this sort of thing.

As far as I can tell, the current norm in 2026 for dealing with DDoSes is basically "use CloudFlare".

CloudFlare is a large American Content Delivery Network (CDN) company

that is, it has servers in locations around the world that keep identical copies of data, and when a user of a website requests, say, an image for some website using the CDN, instead of the image being returned from a given single fixed server somewhere in the world, they use several tricks to arrange for that content to be provided from a server they control near the user. This sort of thing has generally helped to keep load on international datalinks low (e.g. a user in Australia doesn't need to touch the submarine cables out of Australia if an Australian CloudFlare server already has the image on a website that they want to see) and to keep them more-responsive for users.

However, CDNs also have a certain level of privacy implications. Large ones can monitor a lot of Internet traffic, see traffic from a user spanning many websites, as so much traffic is routed through them. The original idea behind the Internet was that it would work by having many small organizations that talked to each other in a distributed fashion, rather than having one large company basically monitor and address traffic issues Internet-wide.

A CDN is also a position to cut off traffic from an abusive user relatively-close to the source. A request is routed to its server (relatively near the flooding machine), and so a CDN can choose to simply not forward it. CloudFlare has decided to specialize in this DDoS resistance service, and has become very popular. My understanding

I have not used CloudFlare myself

is that they also have a very low barrier to start using them, see it as a way to start small websites out and then later be a path-of-least-resistance to later provide commercial services to them.

Now, I have no technical issue with CloudFlare, and as far as I know, they've conducted themselves appropriately. They solve a real problem, which is not a trivial problem to solve, not as the Internet is structured in 2026.

But.

If DDoSes are a problem that pretty much everyone has to be concerned about and the answer simply becomes "use CloudFlare", that's routing an awful lot of Internet traffic through CloudFlare. That's handing CloudFlare an awful lot of information about what's happening on the Internet, and giving it a lot of leverage. Certainly the Internet's creators did not envision the idea of there basically being an "Internet, Incorporated" that was responsible for dealing with these sort of administrative issues.

We could, theoretically, have an Internet that solves the DDoS problem without use of such centralized companies. It could be that a host on the Internet could have control over who sends it traffic to a much greater degree than it does today, have some mechanism to let Computer B say "I don't want to get traffic from this Computer A for some period of time", and have routers block this traffic as far back as possible.

This is not a trivial problem. For one, determining that a DDoS is underway and identifying which machines are problematic is something of a specialized task. Software would have to do that, be capable of doing that.

For another, currently there is little security at the Internet Protocol layer, where this sort of thing would need to happen. A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question. One doesn't want some Computer C to blacklist traffic from Computer A to Computer B.

For another, many routers are relatively limited as computers. They are not equipped to maintain a terribly-large table of Computer A, Computer B pairs to blacklist.

However, if something like this does not happen, then my expectation is that we will continue to gradually drift down the path to having a large company controlling much of the traffic on the Internet, simply because we don't have another great way to deal with a technical limitation inherent to Internet Protocol.

This has become somewhat-more important recently, because various parties who would like to train AIs have been running badly-written Web spiders to aggressively scrape website content for their training corpus, often trying to hide that they are a single party to avoid being blocked. This has acted in many cases as a de facto distributed denial of service attack on many websites, so we've had software like Anubis, whose mascot you may have seen on an increasing number of websites, be deployed, in an attempt to try to identify and block these:

We've had some instances on the Threadiverse get overwhelmed and become almost unusable under load in recent months from such aggressive Web spiders trying to scrape content. A number of Threadiverse instances disabled their previously-public access and require users to get accounts to view content as a way of mitigating this. In many cases, blocking traffic at the instance is sufficient, because even though the AI web spiders are aggressive, they aren't sufficiently so to flood a website's Internet connection if it simply doesn't respond to them; something like CloudFlare or Internet Protocol-level support for mitigating DDoS attacks isn't necessarily required. But it does bring the DDoS issue, something that has always been an issue for the Internet, back to prominent light again in a new way.

It would also solve some other problems. CloudFlare is appropriate for websites, but not all Internet activity is over HTTPS. DoS attacks have happened for a long time

IRC users with disputes (IRC traditionally exposing user IP addresses) would flood each other, for example, and it'd be nice to have a general solution to the problem that isn't limited to HTTPS.

It could also potentially mitigate DoS attacks more-effectively than do CDNs, since it'd permit pushing a blacklist request further up the network than a CDN datacenter, up to an ISP level.

Thoughts?

There is growing momentum that the insanely generous capital gains tax discount needs to change.

Recent Parliamentary Budget Office figures show that more than 80% of the discount goes to the top 10% of income earners and if that was not bad enough almost 60% goes to the top 1% (those who earn more than $362,900).

That’s $13 billion a year going just to the top one percenters...

The Government needs to answer... Who should pay more tax on their extra income, those on the lowest wages, or those with the most? It’s over to you Prime Minister.

https://thepoint.com.au/opinions/260302-the-simple-question-at-the-heart-of-the-capital-gains-tax-debate-why-do-should-pay-more-tax-minimum-wage-workers-or-wealthy-investors

Iran-backed militias around the Middle East are intensifying attacks against Israel, the US and their allies, in retaliation for the ongoing joint US-Israeli offensive against Tehran as the war draws in new armed actors, threatening wider chaos and violence.

Israel and the US have targeted Iran’s network of militant groups, with Iraq emerging as a key front in this new and often clandestine confrontation.

Militia in Iraq have launched dozens of attacks since the war began on Saturday, targeting Israel and US bases in Jordan and Iraq itself.

In recent days, they have also targeted the infrastructure of Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups based in the self-governing Kurdish-dominated north of Iraq.

On Tuesday, in a sign of an intensifying war of proxies across the region, officials in Washington suggested they were considering mobilising the opposition Iranian Kurds, possibly for an invasion of Iran’s north-west region.

Ukrainian foreign minister says Hungary 'taking hostages and stealing money'

Ukraine demands release of bank employees

Hungarian PM accuses Kyiv of deliberately stopping Russian oil

Ukrainian president taunts Hungarian leader

Orban makes war in Ukraine a focal point of election campaign

Archive/non-paywall link.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60254450

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60254376

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44094406

Feb. 28, 2026

At the opening of the conference there were calls for dialogue to de-escalate the tensions between Cuba and the US, with Jamaica’s prime minister Andrew Holness raising concerns about the “severe economic hardship, energy shortages and growing humanitarian strain” and its potential consequences on the wider region.

On Friday, the chair of Caricom, St Kitts and Nevis prime minister, Terrance Drew, said that the 15-country bloc will be responding “in a significant way to help the humanitarian situation in Cuba” within a month.

Asked whether there will be a joint Caricom statement condemning the US military intervention in the region, which has included deadly military strikes against suspected drug boats in the area killing at least 151 people without providing evidence of wrongdoing, Drew told reporters that the body was investigating and gathering information to “ensure … a complete and comprehensive response”.

Just one example of many and another off the top of my head

I do remember while there were some cases of teens killing people in the 2000's, they were few and far between, now it's like you got to watch out for teens rather than adults and there's a very potent hazard of being killed by a pack.

What happened? it doesn't seem to be affecting one area of the UK either but most places of the UK at once. what's going on with British teens?

For reference, I have already told them why the sky has no stars (it's because of camera exposure, the moon surface is very reflective so lower exposure is used to not overexpose the image) and why the flag wasn't drooping down (there was an extending arm in the stand to hold it upright, as a flag drooping down is a sad flag). I have also explained that the videos of the moon landing were upscaled/remastered when they asked why the video quality of the clips were so good.

Currently, their main argument is the fact that the U.S. were able to do the moon landing in the mid 20th century while are experiencing delays for the current moon mission. They argue that, if the moon landing could be done way back then, with modern technology, it should be possible to quickly get back to the moon. They also argue NASA could have just reused the same designs as the Apollo missions if they actually went to the moon.

I have argued that NASA's budget is a fraction of what is used to be, and that the addition of new modern technologies introduces additional parts that could break and thus need to be tested. I have also mentioned that the Soviet Union would immediately call out the US if they faked the moon landing, and that samples of moon rocks were sent to Soviet scientists to study and verify. They insist that the Soviets were scared of what the US would do if they spoke out against a fake moon landing, which I didn't agree with (given they were both nuclear superpowers)

They then argued that it's impossible to tell whether the moon rocks are actually from the moon landing, they could be samples collected by rovers. I responded that no rovers had successfully collected moon rocks at the time, and then they switched to arguing that it's impossible to verify the rocks are from the moon. I followed up by saying there are methods of doing that (through the composition of the rocks and such). They then asked how anybody knows what moon rocks look like if nobody else has been to the moon, and I got kind of stumped. I tried to explain that there are models to how the moon formed, how we know the rocks aren't from Earth, satellites that map out the surface, etc., but they reiterated that no one can "prove" that they were from the moon without going there in the first place.

One interesting thing they also mentioned is that, if the US really did do a moon landing, why the Soviets (during cold war era) or Chinese (in modern era) didn't do what they do best and copied their designs to land on the moon. Given that the US and China are having a new space race with the goal of being the first to establish a lunar base, they argue that China could just copy the Apollo program designs if the US really did do a moon landing.

To summarise, their main points/questions right now are: a) Explain why the US hasn't gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult? (especially given that NASA has been experiencing numerous delays in the Artemis missions, that certainly hasn't given them a good impression...) b) How do you verify moon rocks without having actually been on the moon? How did scientists figure out what a moon rock looks like? c) Why aren't the old Apollo designs being reused for a moon landing? (by either the Americans or the Chinese)

They say that there isn't strong evidence either side (but believes that it is false, saying that "we will see" once someone else lands on the moon)

And what other points can I bring up to definitively say, yes, the moon landing wasn't faked?

edit:

Another thing, they also can't believe that astronauts could bring and ride the little moon buggies. I am also partially interested in how that was achieved to be honest!

And psychologists as well as practitioners, therapists and people doing all manner of different kinds of healing work with trauma survivors have learned that there are all these different ways that people can heal. But many of those ways are not only through the mind, right? They’re accessed through changing our habits and behaviors, through shifting our relationships with people and through different types of therapies that also some of them have an element of mystery to them, right? Hypnosis, meditation, therapeutic treatments that involve light and sound, and all these kind of engage the full bodiness of our neurological systems that we actually … The nervous system is not just in the brain, it extends throughout our entire bodies.

But it’s not a one-way street, the nervous system sends messages out through our entire bodies. But the body can also send messages back to the nervous system and cause automatic reactions. That’s often what is happening when we talk about somebody being triggered or somebody being activated.

A PTSD trigger is not the same thing as a defensive reaction in a political context. But it has a really close physiological relationship. And so I ended up sort of transferring some of that research onto the question of like, how do we approach defensiveness or mental, emotional, spiritual blocks when we’re trying to unlearn or when we’re trying to have transformative conversations? Or get to a place of political transformation collectively. That there’s just a lot that we can learn from trauma practitioners, trauma therapy and trauma science about that. Because trauma is sort of the most extreme version of the casual day-to-day defensiveness, polarization, expressions of I’m not open to this. It’s like a pretty similar physiological reaction in the body just at a smaller scale.

The United States attended India's International Fleet Review and MILAN 2026 training events, just days before attacking an unarmed Iranian warship that had also been in attendance.

India held their first MILAN event in 1995, and has since hosted additional events every two years. The event requires vessels be unarmed or carrying minimal munitions. The United States had also previously attended in 2022 and 2024.

The Iranian ship was attacked on March 4, less than a week after the conclusion of MILAN 2026 on February 26.

Having frequently attended these exercises, the United States likely knew the IRIS Dena was not carrying munitions as they torpedoed the returning Iranian vessel.

Of coure he doesn't always express it the best. He's Nick Fuentes. He's going to put his foot in his mouth at least once.