torpid

Turo (then Relayrides) partned with GM to allow you to rent your own vehicle out while you were at work or anywhere, so it's not science fiction, it was done back in 2012 and the concept was the same, your vehicle will help pay for itself.

Every mile logged by autonomous driving, every accident caused by a human vs autonomous vehicle where the human is at fault, will make insurance companies price risks accordingly. So far, autonomous vehilces doing very well in the cities where they operate.

It's inevitable these two concepts will merge, and it solves many problems with lack of access to affordable transportation especially for those who can't drive. Public transportation can't survive on fixed route, major infrastructure spends like rail and bus and meet the needs of the greatest number of people.

Wait until they figure out regular people can just use photoshop to hand make photorealistic depictions and regular CAD software to make gun parts. Better license computer use, too.

Long ago, Canonical did some shady stuff with the now-deprecated apt-key "net-update" signing validation for updating of GnuPG keys over the network, an exclusive Ubuntu "feature" Debian didn't even adopt that in theory allowed the same thing.

First I thought CVE-2012-3587 was incompetence... but then seeing CVE-2012-0954 after it, I couldn't help think something more was at bay as something connected to a nation state. It does not surprise me in the least to see nation state attackers exploiting N++. Because I've also on very sensitive enterprise PAM systems in F500/research/academia, and about 10% of the time it felt like I'd see Notepad++ on internet-connected systems used for security tooling because vanilla notepad is indeed garbage. It does not surprise me at all this has been used as an attack vector.

If you cannot tolerate “Russian bots” or “Chinese bots,” then you do not truly stand for free speech. It really is that simple. Free speech, by definition, exists to protect speech that someone finds offensive or objectionable. If everyone only said things that others agreed with, there would be no need for free speech protections at all. In a genuine marketplace of ideas, it is astonishing that anyone would claim the right to censor others, or to strip them of their humanity by dismissing them as mere robots or agents rather than people with sincere views.

Yet we are increasingly binding ourselves (and even “authorized” bots) in chains of verified identity, deliberately suppressing anonymity. Imposing a “zero-trust” architecture on society inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

The right to express ideas without personal attribution has always been a cornerstone of free speech and a free society. It is now being redefined and demonized as mere “bot activity.” While real bots certainly exist (as they have since the days of spam) many accounts labeled as bots are simply human beings who choose anonymity because they hold controversial opinions they do not wish to have traced back to them.

Companies like Cloudflare are among the leaders in this shift by building frameworks ostensibly to monetize AI bot traffic. The consequence, however, is the effective end of online anonymity. When anonymity is forbidden, freedom itself disappears.

If your country shuts off internet access they are probably going to jam bluetooth and wifi at any large demonstration, too.

This isn't new at all - MajorBBS/Worldgroup had a module called Hoteleconference that did this, which if I remember correctly, you could do "world building" to design rooms, descriptions, actions, etc. much like a mud but with a more social context.

That's not the point. The point is making Ukraine pay off the defense contractors rather than the American taxpayers. Trump made a campaign promise to end the war, and was overwhelmingly reelected on those promises, and has so far kept them.

The Century of the Self documentary by Adam Curtis does an incredible job of covering that and is well-worth the watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

I wonder how many people went to icq.com and first provided their phone number thinking it was mandatory, then realized there was a "Login with password link", then went back, put in their ICQ UIN, and tried every last password they've used for the past 20 years before finding the one that worked? Neat trick, Russia!

In any case, I've actually logged in from time to time and only 1 of my 9 friends from the late 90's as nerdy and nostalgic as I actually logged in the past decade and left me a message.

We have natural gas running into the building but not for the residents. All the first floor commercial tenants, and the hallways have the luxury of forced air. Just the apartment units that are cold.

There's several apartments with broken mini split head units, and last I heard the other adjacent building, they've been working to connect the apartments to the forced air ducts in the hallways they think will take the load off.

This building opened 11 years ago and I've been a tenant since then. The HVAC is 2013. Each floor has ~20 apartments and each floor connects to a rooftop unit. The hallways are forced air and stay toasty, it's just the apartments that are on mini splits.

It's one step better than people turning their stoves on.

And hilariously, if too many people artificially heat their apartments, it actually crashes the system somehow because if too many zones in the mini split have heat, it flips to AC mode.

I live in an old furniture factory converted into lofts. LEED certified of course, with mini splits instead of forced air in each unit. This is in the midwest.

For the past 11 years, every season it's failed to maintain minimum temperature of 68 degrees when it hits below 5 degrees outside, or maintain cooling in the summer. Another adjacent building built 2 years after this one with the exact same setup, same story. The complex had resorted to providing residents temporary space heaters up until this year where now they are prohibited by the city from using it to maintain minimum temps thanks to changing the code.

The sheer amount of costs associated they've dumped into the maintenance of this mini split system, along with the electricity costs (electricity is included with rent) is mind boggling and certainly will offset any gains.

Precisely.

I was replying to yours and took issue with what seemed to be a dismissal of allegations based on where or how these allegations are communicated. My understanding of these specific first amendment violations is in part based on the revelations by Mike Benz, former US State Dept official who is behind the Foundation for Freedom Online. He asserts Twitter Files are the tip of the iceberg.

Here's a bite-sized video of the EIP and Atlantic Council under CISA openly bragging about how they accomplish it - pressure them to draft policy, then pressure them to uphold those policies.

Coercion to self-regulate: https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1608688753052377088

The Election Integrity Project was also recently highlighted in this recent WaPO Article: https://archive.ph/PjiVe

With this retort citing direct conversations that highlight that succinctly lays out everything: https://rumble.com/v2t4bha-censorship-industry-decoded-ep.-1...

It bears repeating how these allegations would make it unconstitutional via Supreme Court precedent and the law of agency (citations within link): https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-colluded-twitter-suppress-free-...

It's not like any of this was a secret, either: CISA openly admitted such on their website and even tried to quietly scrub it. Thanks to the Internet Archive preventing a rewrite of history (archive.org links within): https://theohiostar.com/commentary/commentary-government-cen...

A person who is more concerned about the source or origin of potential evidence rather than weighing the merits on the content itself isn't engaging in a good faith discussion.

Genetic fallacies don't help yours.

SCOTUS has already ruled that for first amendment purposes, if the government hires a contractor to censor, it is still censoring and violating the first amendment.

The FBI does not enforce supreme laws to which they are subject to, they have throughout their pathetic existence continue to routinely break laws largely with impunity.

They've been shown to follow the law in jurisdictions where it's lawful for the government to censor citizens' speech.

What you're missing is it's ILLEGAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL to do such a thing in the US by the US government, which is at the heart of the Twitter Files controversy. Censoring public discourse among the voting electorate especially concerning matters of national importance and electoral candidates is without question a form of election manipulation, which has, and will continue to, affect the outcome. So it is not wrong to say that our elections, or any elections amidst broad, systemic censorship/collusion by the government with contractors, academia and corporations, was a government-manipulated one.

With free speech one can accept that there will be inaccurate takes from all sides that have to be distilled and debated, but that stops when these ideas can't even be spoken about.

The people hacking this and those behind the reddit blackout are not interested in preventing censorship or government collusion for these activities.. in fact, I would argue thats likely the MOTIVE, because its no longer free and anonymous.

I did watch it. Mehdi Hassan found two errors in the entire body of work: One acronym (Taibbi wrote CIS when it was supposed to be CISA), and one date that he got wrong.

Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.

Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.

Petty and desperate nonsense indeed.

Two minor and inconsequential errors that he owned up to even before the segment aired.

This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the government contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach.

Per SCOTUS, working through an intermediary is not a loophole around the First Amendment. For purposes of regulating free speech, a government contractor IS the government.

So yes, in hundreds of tweets and articles reporting the Twitter Files, there were a couple errors that Taibbi instantly corrected. That's how you build trust and integrity with readers. It's what MSNBC, CNN, and FOX almost never do.

So I have to beg? A programmer so busy coding a high-demand bleeding edge IRC client all the kids are using that needs to resort to manual e-mail to distribute licenses to the people he owes it to, every one he has (or should have) the e-mail for that helped him pay the bills? Please.

The original license terms never specified an end and the need of an "extension" or renewal when I bought this software in 97.

Like any other software company that have done similar things with free / lifetime software, he could have just dropped support for the original branded mIRC client, respun it into another program with most of the code base, add a few entirely useless features (maybe you can slap other people in channels with things other than large trouts!) and sell it under his new license model. He's still branding and selling it as mIRC. That's problematic.

What's wrong with asking first and letting the web operator opt in?

The gist of your argument is if I go up and try to pick your pocket but say my intentions are only to help you from real pickpockets, there's nothing but your personal choice to walk on public sidewalk and should just accept it.

Jiggling door handles without consent is a defacto criminal act. It's no different if I tried to pick your wallet as you walked down the street and said, "better me than a criminal..." then flashed my badge.

CISA will jiggle your door handles for free, if you ask and consent first. Web server operators who aren't asking for vuln assessments aren't apt to keep them regularly patched to begin with.

Why is asking for permission first bad? The CISA does this very thing, but businesses have to explicitly ask first and consent unlike the UK. That's the difference between a nanny state policy and one that respects choice and the property rights of others.

Sure, if you value authoritarianism and an intrusive nanny state. The government jiggling the door handles of everyone's house to see if it's unlocked crosses a huge line.

This is what getting clean from from heroin does to someone who got famous for writing angry, dark music.

I had a kickass wardriving rig back in the day. A dedicated netbook with kismet, gpsd, and a kismet script i hacked together before they had a plugin framework that would alert me on certain ssid probes, which would reliably tell me of the presence of police MCTs thus police cars (the mcts used motorola airmobile iirc). Was also really fun compiling stats knowing how often police would drive past my house, and knowing which vehicles they were.