Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by jwz:
dnalounge@sfba.social ("DNA Lounge") wrote:

Drink Special @ Bounce Beat presents SJ: Sandwich-Proof Body Armor -- Bacardi Mango Chile Rum, Starry, Pineapple Juice, and a splash of Blue Curaçao

Attachments:

• gifv: 3cd624b426ba4aa7.mp4

Boosted by jwz:
MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social ("Mary Austin VOTED 4 HARRIS!") wrote:

@a_phlaming_phoenix @mcnado

We have a new American hero. Sean Dunn, a 37 year old DOJ employee, bought a sandwich at Subway, walked out, took in the scene of occupied DC, and got so angry he threw his sandwich at a "federal agent," whatever that means any more. They tried to charge him with a felony but the judge just laughed at them.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-man-faces-serious-federal-assault-charge-after-throwing-subway-sub-at-federal-officer/65-df40e8da-febf-44ef-8ebd-4f3d190974be

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

WELL HAVE YOU

RE: https://www.threads.com/@margot.moore.author/post/DNZ2l%5F2OA5Q

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
GeriatricGardener@mstdn.social ("Geriatric Gardener") wrote:

“‘We Can’t Have Greece Become a Playground For IDF Soldiers": Israeli Tourists Traveling to Greek Islands Met With Pro-Palestine Protests’”

by Alexis Daloumis in DropSite News on Substack

@palestine @israel

“As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza continues, Israeli tourists in Greece this summer are facing a growing backlash”

https://open.substack.com/pub/dropsitenews/p/greece-protests-gaza-israeli-tourists-cuise-ship-crown-iris

#Press #Israel #Genocide #Gaza #IDF #Soldiers #Tourism #Greece #Backlash #Palestine #FreePalestine

aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan") wrote:

Future generations will learn:

• That Israel committed genocide in Palestine.
• That “The West” allowed it to happen and many Western countries profited and were complicit in it.
• The names of those who were complicit.

This isn’t a call to change your behaviour. At this point, we know very well who stands on which side of history.

This is just a reminder to be prepared because justice will be served.

#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Palestine #Gaza #WestBank #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #FreePalestine https://piaille.fr/@SolenedeM/115038407391423272

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
SolenedeM@piaille.fr ("Solène de Montmarin 🫏🇫🇷🇲🇲💚🇵🇸") wrote:

#Gaza

Ce témoignage de James Elder, porte parole pour l' #Unicef (Fonds des Nations Unies pour l'enfance), date du 18 juin 2025. Il y a donc presque deux mois.

Je ne suis normalement pas fan des UN, mais je sais qu'iels font un boulot formidable à Gaza. J'ai d'ailleurs un ami qui part bientôt en mission pour eux, à Gaza toujours.

Voici leur site internet : https://www.unicef.fr

Je ne sais pas quoi vous dire de plus, à part d'écouter ce témoignage (sous titré en francais) et de le repoueter si vous le voulez bien.

#Palestine #StopGenocide #UNICEF #JamesElder

Attachments:

• video: Témoignage de James Elder porte parole UNICEF (Fonds des Nations Unies pour l'enfance), le 18 juin 2025

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
fabio@manganiello.social ("Fabio Manganiello") wrote:

In the age of unregulated surveillance capitalism, children are just another product segment to be spied and sold.

A new study (https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998) finds out that, out of 14 companies actively marketing online surveillance on school devices:

• 86% monitors students 24/7, not just during school hours.
• 71% scans content posted by minors through AI.
• Only 43% of them employs human reviewers.
• 36% admitted of spying kids not only on school-owned devices, but also on their own personal devices, although they didn’t clarify how they do that nor what kind of data (photos, texts…) they scrape.
• 50% scrapes content posted on those kids’ own social media profiles too.
• 29% admitted to use the scraped data to process “risk scores” on the level of schools, classes and individual children.

The companies involved in such large-scale surveillance campaigns usually prefer to remain as anonymous as they can. I believe instead that it’s a civic duty that as many people as possible know their names, publicly shame them, call them accountable, and threaten or intimidate their employees. It’s those morally bankrupt individuals who should feel afraid and ashamed for spying and selling the most sensitive data about our kids without our consent and without accountability. It’s by destroying the morale of their own employees that we can weaken this rotten system:

• Ativion: https://www.ativion.com/
• Bark: https://www.bark.us/schools
• Blocksi: https://blocksi.net/
• Deledao: https://www.deledao.com/activepulse-student-wellness
• Gaggle: https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management
• GoGuardian: https://www.goguardian.com/beacon
• Lightspeed Systems: https://www.lightspeedsystems.com/
• Linewize by Qoria: https://www.linewize.com/
• ManagedMethods: https://managedmethods.com/use-cases/student-self-harm-detection/
• Navigate360: https://navigate360.com/solutions/digital-threat-detection/
• Netsweeper: https://www.netsweeper.com/solutions
• Safer Schools Together: https://saferschoolstogether.com/
• Securly: https://www.securly.com/
• Sergeant Laboratories: https://www.sgtlabs.com/

Note that some of those websites push marketing campaigns that justify their deeply immoral practices by advertising how many potential tragedies they prevented through their massive surveillance schemes - e.g. “18,000 cases of physical harm prevented thanks to our surveillance!”.

They don’t answer however:

• What accounts for “evidence of physical harm” - does a teenager who writes “I hate my math teacher” on social media account as a credible threat? Does potential intent reflect actual crime - i.e. are we already in a Minority Report scenario?
• If the benefit of preventing 18,000 cases of violence is worth the cost of spying on at least tens of millions of children and teenagers worldwide - would you accept the police to monitor each single picture, video or message you send so they can catch a potential criminal in your city?

In the meantime:

• If you trust your own kids and you wouldn’t spy on each single piece of information they share (a principle of basic trust that IMHO every single good parent who wants to raise a healthy adult should agree on), then you shouldn’t let an opaque unaccountable American company spy on them more than you would do yourself. The best way to know your children is to sit next to them while they use digital devices, answer their questions and provide them with guidance. If you can’t do that, then any other less transparent methods of surveillance (which includes both parental control software and 3rd-party surveillance services provided by these companies) is a parental failure.
• Avoid at all costs, unless really required, any phone, tablet or computer given by your kid’s school. Provide them yourself with a device if needed.
• Teach your children to use surveillance-proof instruments - decentralized social networks like Mastodon rather than Facebook/TikTok/Instagram, your own Searxng instance instead of Google, a private Nextcloud instance instead of Google Drive, a self-hosted LLM model instead of ChatGPT, Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger everywhere, and no browser extensions provided by the school, a VPN that uses your PiHole or other privacy-aware DNS servers to filter malicious traffic, etc. I wish I could provide a silver bullet that doesn’t require parents to be expert sysadmins who know how to run their own services, but the truth is that I can’t. Kids’ digital footprint is so sensitive that the best way to handle it is to run your own hardened private services, and in today’s surveillance-based economy not trusting any 3rd-party is usually the best option.
• If teachers object that it’s their right to surveil the activities of your child, please remind them the existence of the following laws:
• (For American parents): COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act): websites and online services are required to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13, and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act): parents have all rights regarding their children’s educational records, including the right to inspect records and consent to disclosure.
• (For European parents): GDPR: requires parental consent for processing children’s data (typically under 16, though member states can lower to 13).
• If your kids’ school uses American cloud services in the class (usually either Google’s or Microsoft’s services for email, calendar, files, messaging, video conference etc., for example most of the schools in the Netherlands use the Google suite) express your concerns over the privacy of your children and lobby them to move away from them. Some of the companies I mentioned earlier purchase data from Google or Microsoft, either directly or through intermediate data brokers. Raise awareness with other parents and push your school to use open-source transparent privacy-respecting alternatives like Nextcloud, Jitsi or Mattermost instead.

https://www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71998

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

In EXACTLY ONE MONTH my new novel, The Shattering Peace, comes out, and I'm on tour for two weeks, with additional appearances through the year. I'm all over the US; please come see me! Tour locations with links to dates/venues are up at my site. See you soon!

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/16/the-shattering-peace-tour-dates-other-remaining-2025-appearances-now-live/

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
sstephenson@indieweb.social ("Sam Stephenson") wrote:

Someone should do to “rowling” today what Dan Savage did to “santorum” 20 years ago

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
rail@flufftech.net ("rail 🦊 (sysadmin puppy)") wrote:

it's only true sabotage if it comes from the Sabot region of France

otherwise it's just generic sparkling interference

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
MikeElgan ("Mike Elgan") wrote:

TIRED: "glasshole"

WIRED: "groksucker"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/groksucker

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

“What’s wrong babe, you’ve barely touched your AI newsroom”

Won’t link to the Substack, but Henry Blodget’s creepy all-AI-employee news thing hasn’t seen a new post in nearly two months. Did all of the AI employees quit? Or maybe some of that special AI ✨sparkle✨ has faded.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

looking for lunch

Boosted by mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze"):
jswatz_tx@threads.net ("John Schwartz") wrote:

Want to read my article about Jim Sanborn and the Kryptos sculpture at the CIA headquarters? It’s been a wild ride. Here’s a gift link. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/science/kryptos-sculpture-cia-solution-auction.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.ek8.6Ivg.Y%5FFaGs6ctqUg&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

It's been difficult to separate the new World Trade Center building from that terrible day in 2001, but we now have the benefit of just enough time that we can begin to discuss the tower as a piece of architecture and as part of the skyline, on its own terms.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

It's generally simpler to capture tall skyscrapers like this from a distant vantage point; the classic photos of WTC are usually shot from Brooklyn or New Jersey. But here I wanted to show it as it's seen in the neighborhood. The foreground buildings look taller in the frame, but the (much taller) One WTC tower still stands out, given its uncrowded position in the skyline, as if its neighbors maintain a respectful distance.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

This was captured with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR Digaron-W lens. A large image circle allows room for considerable movements, used here to swing to selectively focus on the WTC tower. A polarizer darkened the clear sky a bit, as well as taming some of the highlights reflected off the glass wall of the tower.

The shape of the new One WTC makes the light catch it differently throughout the day and in different weather. I made several exposures at different times before settling on this one.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

One World Trade Center (and Neighbors), NYC, 2019.

All the pixels, none of the tourists, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49291055921

#photography

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

I'm back giving amfora (gemini client) a try. If anyone's got any gem capsules, I'd love to read them.

denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

@Iconfactory

a super fun thing you can do with those pixelated portraits is to downsample them to their "native" resolution, 64x64, save them as a PNG with indexed colors, which gets you down to ~1KIB file size. In my case, it's 996 bytes.

You can then use them on a website with the image-rendering: pixelated; CSS directive and just scale them up as you want. Always looks sharp, perfect results, profile picture for less data than the HTML page it's contained within. Now live at https://overengineer.dev/me/card/ because why not.

adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële") wrote:

I've opened an issue about @Tusky

I'm unable to post a new toot on my #gotosocial instance with #tusky 30.0

Do you encounter the same issue ?

https://codeberg.org/tusky/Tusky/issues/5224

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële"):
marczz@framapiaf.org wrote:

@Edwin085 it seems it is an hoax https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/30/fact-check-story-boy-cardboard-nintendo-console-unproven/4310183001/
@adele

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

I learned a bit of local history today.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/08/16/you-may-have-heard-about-minnesota-winters/

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

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
CarveHerName@mstdn.social wrote:

#OnThisDay, 11 Aug 1942 Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil receive a patent for their radio guidance system – the tech that now underpins wifi.

Learn more about Hedy's remarkable life here: https://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/1/14/star-wars-episode-iii-hedy-lamarr-ymrt-29

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #HollywoodHistory #Histodons

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to ("Smudge The Insult Cat 🐀") wrote:

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Airshow in central Minnesota today. Also more thunderstorms.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/08/16/airshow-today/

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
geekysteven@beige.party wrote:

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
EndIsraeliApartheid ("End Israeli Apartheid") wrote:

Israel’s manufactured famine is being used, according to Amnesty, as a “weapon of war.”

However, public support for the famine amongst Israelis is also disturbingly widespread.

During a speech streamed live on TVs and social media in Israel, Rabbi Ronen Shaulov said: "All of Gaza, and every child in Gaza should starve to death. I have no mercy for them…even though they are still young and hungry, I hope they starve to death."

https://www.thecanary.co/long-read/2025/08/15/israel-famine-gaza-latest/

🕎 🇵🇸 ☮️
#Gaza #Palestine
#Press #News

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
ridicol ("ridicol 🍉🇵🇸 🏳️‍🌈💚") wrote:

#EndTheOccupation
#Gaza #WarCrimes #FreePalestine #IsraelApartheid #Genocide
#EndTheArmsTrade #BoycottBoeing

Attachments:

• video: 0eba99607412532d.mp4

aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan") wrote:

Oh, did you think the israel model would be confined to the Middle East? Why should it? Didn’t all our Western governments just declare it kosher?

First, they came for the Palestinians… https://kolektiva.social/@DoomsdaysCW/115034832497483253