A supposed band called The Velvet Sundown has released two albums of AI slop this month.

Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band

^{Ryan Whitwam (Ars Technica)}

Surveillance against the state.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/gizmodo.com/…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Mexican Drug Cartel Hacker Used Surveillance Tech to Target FBI Informants for Execution

^{AJ Dellinger (Gizmodo)}

Apple is seeking external models to run on its Private Cloud Compute servers

Apple considers external AI partners to boost Siri smarts — Anthropic and OpenAI reportedly in early talks to replace in-house models

^{Andrew E. Freedman (Tom's Hardware)}

Steam’s performance monitor got a big upgrade.

Steam can now show you how much frame generation changes your games

Valve has added a new performance monitor to Steam that can break out a game’s actual frame rate and generated frames from DLSS or FSR.

^{Jay Peters (The Verge)}

https://www.rte.ie/news/middle-east/2025/0701/1521178-gaza-israel/

America recently extended tech export bans specifically to stop Beijing building this sort of thing

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

: America recently extended tech export bans specifically to stop Beijing building this sort of thing

^{Simon Sharwood (The Register)}

Somehow I had been stuck on Darktable 3.8 for a while, so I finally uninstalled the system package of it, and bumped up to the 5.2 flatpak, and it's amazing! A bit of adjustment, and there we go! King says hi. I hope eventually rhinos can multiply and be less critically endangered.

Thanks for seeing my work!

Quante volte ci si chiede se un musicista ormai datato della scena artistica mondiale, con decine e decine di album pubblicati, abbia ancora qualcosa di nuovo da farci sentire? ... Leggi e ascolta...

ᗩᐯᗩIᒪᗩᗷᒪᗴ

2025-07-01 06:28:10

Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball (2012)

Quante volte ci si chiede se un musicista ormai datato della scena artistica mondiale, con decine e decine di album pubblicati, abbia ancora qualcosa di nuovo da farci sentire? E' molto probabile che, se il musicista non appartiene alla nostra sfera di preferenza, lo si liquidi subito, a volte ancor prima di ascoltarlo, con un bel “niente di nuovo”, “album inutile”, “ormai finito” ecc. ecc.; se invece è un nostro beniamino o ancor meglio apparteniamo alla sfera dei suoi fans incalliti, è molto probabile che il nostro giudizio sia “oscurato” dal classico velo affettivo che, per carità non è “pietoso”, ma senz'altro poco obbiettivo. Ecco, tutta questa premessa per arrivare a dire che, personalmente, pur appartenendo alla seconda sfera, quella dei fan incalliti e non da tempi recenti, serenamente affermo che Wrecking Ball è un buon album e il nostro sessantatreenne “The Boss” riesce a dirci ancora molto!... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/07…

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Ascolta: album.link/i/581786624

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Home – Identità DigitaleSono su: Mastodon.uno - Pixelfed - Feddit

Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball (2012)

di Silvano Bottaro Quante volte ci si chiede se un musicista ormai datato della scena artistica mondiale, con decine e decine di album pu...

^{Silvano Bottaro (Blogger)}

We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the third experimental version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This is a pre alpha release with an official version number of 2.92.1. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.0 which will be the release we consider ready for end users.

The release can be found on SourceForge and should show up on Flathub Beta shortly.

If you don't want to use the Flathub Beta method, there are build instructions in the README for building a flatpak locally or installing into a meson devenv. Both methods avoid installing directly to your OS installation which is preferred as there is no easy way to uninstall.

About

Just like Experimental 1 and 2, this is a milestone release. It is something we think other tinkerers and developers may want to start playing with, but it is not meant for end users.

Most things are not implemented, the user interface has not been polished at all, and there are so many bugs. As such we are asking that packagers please do not package this for your users yet as the potential support requests will be too much for us to handle at this time.

This release isn’t quite what we wanted as things just didn't align well this cycle, but there’s still a lot of good progress.

Looking forward, Experimental 4 is scheduled for 2025-09-30 and will have a version number of 2.93.0.

We have a bunch of tickets entered for Experimental 4, and you can keep an eye on the Burndown Chart for Experimental 4 to stay informed. As always, priorities and possibilities can and will change, so even if something is listed for this release that doesn't mean it will be in the release until it's actually completed.

Highlights

The main highlights for this release are preferences! We've finally added some much need new sections named Appearance, Privacy, and Development. There's not a whole lot in these three yet, but there's a bunch we want to drop in here in the future.

Appearance Preferences

Right now the appearance preference just lets you toggle formatting of message which affects all messages and can be easily restored. We have a number of things to add here in the future, but if there's something you'd like to see, let us know in the comments below!

Privacy Preferences

Just like appearance the privacy preferences page is meant to help you keep your personal information personal. In the future we'll be adding options for how Pidgin should identify itself when queried and a few other things.

Development Preferences

The development preferences are meant to make the development of Pidgin and plugins easier. Developer mode itself does a number of things right now including showing the Bonjour and XMPP protocols which are not yet functional. This way developers can work on them easily and end users won't get confused by something that's not implemented.

ChangeLog

In the past we've tried to filter the ChangeLog to just the bits that might be interesting, but going forward we're just going to include everything that was done for the release.

General

• Add a native file for macos on arm (RR 3956) (Gary Kramlich)
• Run scour over all of the svgs (RR 3990) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add discrete options for protocol plugins (RR 3994) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix a typo in POTFILES.in for the privacy preferences (RR 3998) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add an in-development tag to all protocols that are still early in development (RR 4007) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update the flatpak to gnome 48 and to the matching birb version (RR 4038) (Gary Kramlich)

libpurple:

• Add GListModel versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove GList versions of purple_account_manager_get_{disabled,enabled} (RR 3955) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Update the convey plans (RR 3975) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.ContactInfo:external for tracking external contacts (PIDGIN-18090) (RR 3973) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Conversation:url (PIDGIN-18091) (RR 3974) (Gary Kramlich)
• Make Purple.ProtocolConversation.join_channel_finish return a conversation (RR 3982) (Gary Kramlich)
• Move the connection-state implementation to Purple.Account (PIDGIN-17988) (RR 3964) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Purple.Account::connection-state-changed signal (PIDGIN-18087) (RR 3965) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Presence.primitive-changed signal (PIDGIN-18025) (RR 3966) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Contact.is_own_account (RR 3985) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create purple_core_new_settings (RR 4000) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add Purple.Protocol:tags and add unit tests for protocol properties (RR 4006) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update to birb 0.4 and use the testing helpers in libpurple (RR 4014) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove some unused markup functions (RR 4029) (Gary Kramlich)

Pidgin

• Port PidginApplication to purple_account_manager_get_enabled_model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsDisabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18067) (RR 3952) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Convert PidginAccountsEnabledMenu to the list model (PIDGIN-18066) (RR 3954) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
• Remove a dead assignment in Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 3962) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix Pidgin.Application.get_active_window to only return Pidgin.DisplayWindows (RR 3972) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add keybinding support to the channel join dialog (RR 3971) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a preference for toggling whether or not to show formatting (PIDGIN-18081) (RR 3970) (Gary Kramlich)
• Start of the appearance preferences (PIDGIN-18082) (RR 3996) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove the conversation preferences (RR 3995) (Gary Kramlich)
• Create a Privacy preference page with the send typing notification preference (PIDGIN-17450) (RR 3999) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Pidgin.PresenceIcon to Pidgin.ConversationMember (RR 4004) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add a Developer Settings preference pane (RR 4005) (Gary Kramlich)
• Update Pidgin.ProtocolChooser to hide in-development protocols (RR 4008) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add the operating system to the runtime information (PIDGIN-18005) (RR 4015) (Gary Kramlich)

Demo

• Use EionRobb's typical handle (RR 3967) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix EionRobb's avatar (RR 3976) (Gary Kramlich)
• Fix some unbalanced G_BEGIN_DECLS (RR 3989) (Gary Kramlich)

IRCv3

• Fix privmsg going to the status window before registration is complete (RR 3963) (Gary Kramlich)
• Set the presence to offline when we receive a quit message (PIDGIN-18089) (RR 3969) (Gary Kramlich)
• Add support for away-notify (PIDGIN-18088) (RR 3968) (Gary Kramlich)
• Do a who after joining a channel (PIDGIN-17936) (RR 3981) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle the WHOTOPIC and CHANNEL_URL messages (RR 3983) (Gary Kramlich)
• Check if a member is in a conversation before adding them (RR 3987) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle formatting in server messages (RR 3991) (Gary Kramlich)
• Handle RPL_NOWAWAY and RPL_UNAWAY messages (RR 4003) (Gary Kramlich)
• Remove versioned API (RR 4030) (Gary Kramlich)

SIP

• A stubbed out SIP protocol plugin (RR 3988) (Gary Kramlich)
• Disable SIP by default and update the protocol summaries to reflect what will be built (RR 4028) (Gary Kramlich)

Thank You!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Pidgin, it means a lot to us!

If you’re interested in contributing, you can check out our Contributing Guide to get started.

Also be sure to check out our merch store as well as our sticker store!

And if you’re feeling generous, you can learn how to donate to the project on our Donation Page.

Discuss this on our forum.

https://www.jacoporanieri.com/blog/?p=42614

Can't we just ship Cruz off to Cancun permanently at this point?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.

Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.

When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz's bill would instead exclude the 7.4–8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.

Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi

Cruz bill could take 6 GHz spectrum away from Wi-Fi, give it to mobile carriers.

^{Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)}

https://www.top.org.nz/citizens-voice

https://neuters.de/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/apple-loses-bid-dismiss-us-smartphone-monopoly-case-2025-06-30/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5371548-hog-dnc-young-progressives-democrats-future/

Hello! How are folks self-hosting online storage, similar to Google Drive?

Some options I've found:
- filebrowser.org/ (maintenance-only mode)
- seafile.com/en/home/ (weird disk layout scares me)
- tinyfilemanager.github.io/ (i like simple!)
- github.com/mickael-kerjean/fil…

A bunch more: github.com/awesome-selfhosted/…

I mainly just need basic file management features. I don't plan to share files outside of my tailscale VPN. I do need to support multiple users though.

I'm not considering Nextcloud because that seems too big. I'm also not considering syncthing for this project because I don't want copies on multiple devices.

I'm currently just using ssh+nautilus and that's worked great for just me, but something similar to Google Drive would be easier to onboard my family.

GitHub - mickael-kerjean/filestash: :file_folder: A file manager / web client for SFTP, S3, FTP, WebDAV, Git, Minio, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, Mysql, Backblaze, ...

:file_folder: A file manager / web client for SFTP, S3, FTP, WebDAV, Git, Minio, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, Mysql, Backblaze, ... - mickael-kerjean/filestash

^GitHub

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/32194427

GodlessCommie

2025-06-29 02:17:31

Capitalism ends poverty

U.S. officials said they would stop providing the satellite data online on July 31 rather at the end of June.

Data from this instrument also reveals sea ice extent, and that can't be allowed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/climate/noaa-hurricane-data-offline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S08.kqbU.j0qTfurfIEkT

On the wall of the League of Social Democrats office, the Chinese characters for freedom are spelt out with court admission slips.

Members of the party take turns speaking into a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. They stand in front of a banner that reads "rather be ashes than dust", written in Chinese. Founded close to 20 years ago, the party is known as the last protest group in Hong Kong.

"The red lines are now everywhere," Chan Po Ying, the chair of the party, tells the BBC. "Our decision to disband was because we were facing a lot of pressure."

One of Hong Kong's last major pro-democracy parties disbands

It is the third major opposition party to disband this year, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Beijing-imposed national security law.

^{Danny Vincent (BBC News)}

Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.

"If you look at Salesforce, they price the automation per conversation," he told The Register in a phone interview. "So essentially, if you have a conversation with AI, no matter what it leads to, you pay $2."

According to Salesforce's own researchers, leading LLM-based agents tested on the CRMArena-Pro benchmark successfully complete single-turn (prompt and reply) tasks about 58 percent of the time and only about 35 percent of the time for multi-turn (back-and-forth conversation) requests.

That's both bad for customers and bad for the progress of AI agents overall. Paying regardless of results, said Masin, "doesn't create any incentive for Salesforce to actually make their agent better."

Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment. But the stats it touts in its marketing copy are, unsurprisingly, a lot better.

Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO

interview: Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin

^{Thomas Claburn (The Register)}

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a group of Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. By a vote of 6-3, the justices agreed with the parents – who are Muslim, Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox – that the Montgomery County school board’s refusal to provide them with that option violates their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that “courts are not school boards or legislatures, and are ill-equipped to determine the ‘necessity’ of discrete aspects of a State’s program of compulsory education.” But he emphasized that “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children’” under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Court allows parents to opt their children out of school lessons involving LGBTQ+ themes

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a group of Maryland parents have a right to opt their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes. By a vote […]

^{Amy Howe (SCOTUSblog)}

The US Supreme Court on Friday upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires health plans to fully cover many preventive health care services recommended by a federal panel.

The ruling means that tens of millions of Americans can continue getting a variety of preventive services for free under their plans. Those cost-free services include an array of screenings, such as cancer screenings like mammograms and colonoscopies, as well as screens for obesity, lead exposure in children, high blood pressure, diabetes, and some sexually transmitted diseases, to name a few. The free services also include recommended vaccines for children and adults, well-baby and well-child doctor visits, birth control, statins, PrEP HIV prevention drugs, and fluoride supplements and varnishes for children's teeth.

SCOTUS upholds part of ACA that makes preventive care fully covered

Cancer screenings, statins, vaccines, PrEP, will continue to be covered in full.

^{Beth Mole (Ars Technica)}

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took Personal Cut of Political Donations

A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say.

^ProPublica

Rogue websites capitalizing on the borderless nature of the Internet have met their match, as an Indian court has wielded a "dynamic+" injunction to defend the global streaming rights of British sports platform DAZN for the FIFA World Cup 2025 currently underway in the US. The court emphasized the urgency of the order, stating that without the injunction, DAZN would suffer "irreparable loss and injury" due to the rapid spread of illicit streams.

Rogue websites capitalizing on the borderless nature of the Internet have met their match, as an Indian court has wielded a "dynamic+" injunction to defend the global streaming rights of British sports platform DAZN for the FIFA World Cup 2025 currently underway in the US.

The court order, issued by the Delhi High Court on May 28, represents a significant multi-jurisdictional triumph over online piracy. It restrains identified rogue websites and any future infringing sites from "communicating, hosting, streaming and/or making available for viewing and downloading" DAZN's FIFA World Cup content without authorization on their websites or any other platforms.

The dynamic+ injunction also compels domain name registrars to "lock/suspend (on real time basis)" the infringing domain names and disclose complete details of the registrants and payment information.

In addition, the court has directed local Internet Service Providers to "block access (on real time basis)" to these various websites. The Department of Telecommunications and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology were impleaded to ensure comprehensive enforcement.

Delhi High Court Judge Saurabh Banerjee said in his 10-page ruling that the case "appears to be a classic case of copyright infringement by masked players... who use the veil of today’s technology to conveniently conceal their true identities and unabashedly abuse and enrich themselves by using the protected works of parties like the plaintiff herein through URL redirection/ masking, etc. Such entities are sprouting and have to be stopped at the earliest given opportunity."

"The Delhi High Court has always played the role of a swift, vigilant but fair referee in the ever-evolving game against digital piracy," IP lawyer Aman Sinha told MLex.

Just like the Video Assistant Referee who catches an offside before a goal can be counted, the court judgment "ensures that piracy is flagged and removed before it can score" illicit gains, Sinha said.

"In the digital match against piracy, dynamic+ injunctions are the new offside trap, anticipating the move before the infringers strike," he added.

A second IP lawyer agreed and pointed out the global reach of Indian courts. "The judgment — demonstrating a robust approach to intellectual property enforcement across international digital borders — proves that the Internet's borderless nature doesn't equate to lawlessness," he said.

DAZN, incorporated in England and Wales, alongside its Indian operations arm, DAZN Software, holds exclusive global media rights for the FIFA World Cup 2025, which is being hosted in the US from June 14 to July 13. These rights — encompassing television, digital and ancillary rights — grant DAZN the sole authority to broadcast, re-broadcast, retransmit and stream the event worldwide.

DAZN filed a lawsuit against "BUFFSPORTS" and a number of unnamed defendants, detailing how rogue websites were illegally broadcasting its streams for the World Cup. The suit followed DAZN's investigations of these sites circumventing its exclusive streaming mechanisms, effectively "financially enrich[ing] themselves" by providing pirated content. DAZN sought a permanent injunction, damages and a clear directive for immediate action.

Emphasizing the urgency in his ruling, Judge Banerjee said that if a dynamic+ injunction is not granted, DAZN "will likely suffer irreparable loss and injury." He also highlighted that "any delay in blocking these 'rogue websites' would, in fact, result in irreparable loss and injury to the plaintiffs and cause violation of the intellectual property rights of the plaintiffs."

The "dynamic+" nature of the injunction allows DAZN to inform relevant Domain Name Registrars and ISPs of any new mirror, redirect or alphanumeric variations of the infringing websites that emerge, thereby ensuring that these are promptly blocked on a real-time basis. This proactive measure is a crucial tool against the ever-evolving tactics of online pirates.

The case is set for its next hearing on Oct. 8, 2025, as the legal battle to secure digital content in a borderless world continues.