AmbiguousProps

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42655760

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the western German city of Giessen on Saturday as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization was set to kick off its founding convention.

Groups of protesters blocked or tried to block roads in and around the city of some 93,000 people in the early morning. Police said they used pepper spray after stones were thrown at officers at one location.

The new youth organization of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is to be set up in a meeting at Giessen’s convention center. Its predecessor, the Young Alternative — a largely autonomous group with relatively loose links to the party — was dissolved at the end of March after AfD decided to formally cut ties with it.

More in the article.

Police in Hong Kong arrested three men on suspicion of manslaughter, several local news media reported, in connection with a blaze that has killed at least 36 people and left another 279 missing in the city’s deadliest fire in years.

Hundreds of residents were evacuated as the fire which started on Wednesday afternoon, spread across seven of the eight high-rise apartment buildings in a housing complex in Tai Po district, a suburb in the New Territories. At least 29 others remained hospitalized. Bright flames and smoke shot out of windows as night fell.

Authorities said earlier that investigators would be looking into factors including whether material on the exterior walls of high-rise buildings met fire resistance standards, as the rapid spread of the fire was unusual.

Officials said the fire started on the external scaffolding of one of the buildings, a 32-storey tower, and later spread to inside the building and then to nearby buildings, likely aided by windy conditions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42209343

When Russians look back at 2025, they might remember it as the year when the government took even tighter control of the internet.

Credit cards that won’t buy a ticket on public transport. ATMs that don’t connect to a network. Messaging apps that are down. Cellphones that don’t receive texts or data after a trip abroad. Mothers of diabetic children even complain with alarm that they can’t monitor their kids’ blood glucose levels during outages.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38929150

Overview here

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/39

The new owner of the repo has a fresh github account and apparently has the signing keys from Catfriend1 too.

Time will tell if they are trustworthy, but for the extra paranoid it might make sense to pause updates for a while.

The new repo has two releases in it now. GitHub is silently redirecting to the new repo, even in Obtainium, meaning it's possible that if you had this previously installed via Obtainium and updated now, you may have apks installed that may or may not contain the changes in the repo.

This is a mess. I deleted the repo from Obtainium (luckily I don't auto install updates) and will wait to see what happens over the next few months. Might just save my notes in a network share instead of using syncthing from my phone. Idk, notes are all that I was using it for.

In this edition, a libertarian who voted for Trump is surprised that Trump is going after Thomas Massie and Rand Paul.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37968628

Amazon is preparing to lay off tens of thousands of corporate workers, reversing its pandemic hiring spree. The cuts come months after the retail giant’s CEO warned white-collar employees their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence.

I'm sure the tRump slump has nothing to do with it

Wildland fire veterans are seething at a claim made by federal officials that two crews raided by immigration agents at the scene of a wildfire in Washington state were “NOT firefighters.”

Many political figures and media outlets have repeated the claim, even though public documents show the crews have firefighting classifications and were assigned to key frontline roles battling the blaze.

“Everybody in the profession sees through it, but the public doesn’t and that’s concerning,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief who served more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. “It’s a lie. Everybody I’ve talked to is very upset about it. It does not just those two crews a disservice, but it does all firefighters a disservice.”

Duncan also serves as vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of wildfire professionals.

Last week, federal immigration officials staged a raid at the site of the Bear Gulch fire in Washington, the largest active wildfire in the state. Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection questioned two crews, totaling 44 members, and arrested two firefighters who they said were in the country illegally.

But the facts clearly show that the crews were firefighters. In planning documents drafted by the management team overseeing the fire and posted to a public federal database, the crew from contracting company ASI Arden Solutions, Inc., is listed as a “CR2I” crew. That’s shorthand for a Type II Initial Attack wildland firefighting crew.

“They’re just one level below a hotshot crew,” Duncan said. “[Saying they’re not firefighters] is incredibly insulting to them.”

The other crew, from contracting company Table Rock Forestry, Inc., is listed as a “CRW2,” short for a Type II wildland firefighting hand crew. That means both crews were certified under National Wildfire Coordinating Group standards as firefighters who met rigorous qualifications and held “red cards” verifying their status to fight fire.

Additionally, the documents show that both crews were assigned to active firefighting roles in the days leading up to the raid. The crews were tasked with securing the fire edge, protecting structures, constructing fire lines and addressing hazards caused by the initial suppression work.

Many wildfire veterans who have served in similar roles privately expressed anger that the crew’s status was called into question because they had been assigned to cut firewood on the day of the raid. That frustration is heightened by the widespread belief, shared by many fire professionals, that the crews were given that assignment under false pretenses to lead them into contact with federal immigration agents.

“They were doing suppression work, and it was only when they were reassigned that day [that they were raided],” Duncan said. “To paint this picture that they would never do that to actual firefighters, it’s total spin.”

More in the article.

Archive link

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22132981

In 2019, Tesla set out to lower insurance rates for owners of its electric cars. The goal was simple, at least in theory: fix the broken cost of car insurance. Instead, Tesla may have broken its own calculator trying to make sense of repair costs.

See, Musk's vision of Tesla's insurance product was that traditional companies just didn't "get it." Tesla's data claims that its Full Self-Driving software has fewer accidents than a human driver. Plus, its cars are rolling computers that can collect copious amounts of data on its drivers and adjust risk based on their driving. So why wouldn't drivers get a lower rate for putting around with FSD enabled if they also happen to be a safe driver? Tesla quickly found out that despite these assumptions, it's still taking a bath on claim-related losses.

The data comes from S&P Global and shows that the automaker's insurance subsidiary took a loss ratio of 103.3 in 2024. The loss ratio, for those who don't know, is the amount of money that Tesla pays out per claim versus the money it takes in from premiums. The lower the number, the better, and break-even is a flat 100. In 2024, the rest of the industry averaged 66.1.

Archive link: https://archive.is/G4Kvj

The Federal Trade Commission has delayed the start of a rule that aims to make the process of canceling subscriptions less of a nightmare. Last year, the FTC voted to ratify amendments to a regulation known as the Negative Option Rule, adding a new "click-to-cancel" rule that requires companies to be upfront about the terms of subscription signups and prohibits them "from making it any more difficult for consumers to cancel than it was to sign up." Surprising no one, telecom companies were not happy, and sued the FTC. While the rule was nevertheless set to be implemented on May 14, the FTC now says enforcement has been pushed back 60 days to July 14.

Some parts of the updated Negative Option Rule went into effect on January 19, but the enforcement of certain provisions were deferred to May 14 by the previous administration to give companies more time to comply. Under the new administration, the FTC says it has "conducted a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose" and decided it "insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance."

Once the July 14 deadline hits, the FTC says "regulated entities must be in compliance with the whole of the Rule because the Commission will begin enforcing it." But, the statement adds, "if that enforcement experience exposes problems with the Rule, the Commission is open to amending" it.

Archive link: https://archive.is/7XDVE

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned the National Weather Service of possible attacks from an armed conspiracy group targeting Doppler radar stations, according to a report from CNN. The group, Veterans on Patrol, is going after government radars because it believes they're being used as "weather weapons."

CNN learned of the possible attacks through NOAA emails warning NWS staff that Veterans on Patrol was planning to conduct "penetration drills on NEXRAD sites to identify weaknesses," with the ultimate goal of destroying NEXRAD. Despite its cooler-than-average name, the NWS uses NEXRAD or "Next Generation Weather Radar" for a fairly mundane purpose: detecting precipitation in the atmosphere. NEXRAD plays a vital role in locating thunderstorms and tornados, making it easier to evacuate vulnerable communities before disaster strikes.

Archive link: https://archive.is/GVsgP