https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/myanmar-china-watch/mastermind-of-chinas-great-firewall-powering-myanmar-juntas-digital-repression-report.html

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6058319

At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Manal Zaqout accompanies her 6-year-old daughter, Aya, for treatment. Aya had been moved to the hospital from the al-Mawasi areas east of Khan Younis after a continuous cough, fever, and fatigue that refused to resolve itself. The child was diagnosed with the flu, but the symptoms were far more severe than regular influenza.

On Sunday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that a “new strain” of the virus is spreading across Gaza amid a severe shortage in medicines due to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Strip.

“The rapid spread is attributed to extreme overcrowding, lack of water and ventilation, and the deterioration of healthcare services due to the war, in addition to restrictions imposed by the occupation,” the Government Media Office said in the statement.

Full Article

Amid ‘unprecedented’ rise in respiratory disease in Gaza, famine is making routine infections life&

Local authorities in Gaza have identified a “new strain” of respiratory virus in Gaza amid worsening conditions of famine and severe malnutrition, which threaten to cause even routine infections to turn deadly.

^{Tareq S. Hajjaj (Mondoweiss)}

I decided to purchase a one-way pager, a programmer, and a paging subscription to satisfy my curiosity about pagers.

In this post, I am explaining my thought process and describing some of what I have learned about how pagers work. This is especially relevant to the national paging network in the Netherlands, but hopefully others also find it interesting.

The cellular network

Cellphones give us the ability to reach others and to remain reachable regardless of our location if within a network's coverage. The network infrastructure is continuously evolving in ways that make it more efficient, secure, and reliable.

One way that the network becomes more efficient is by improving its device tracking abilities to reduce the amount of radio broadcasting resources needed to deliver data to the recipient. Security and reliability are improved by having two-way communication between the network and devices such that devices can be authenticated, data correctly encrypted, and message delivery confirmed.

A participant within this network must accept one or more of their device's unique identifiers (at the very least the IMSI, often also the IMEI) is associated with an approximate location.

Since I do not want to accept these terms, I do not carry a phone with a SIM card on me.

A burner phone and an emergency pre-paid SIM card gives me the opportunity to connect to the network in the case that I need to contact someone immediately.

However, this does not give the opportunity to others to reach me in the case that they need me or worry about me. This is not common, but there have been cases in which being reachable would have been good.

LoRa / Meshtastic

Last year I learned about LoRa radios and the Meshtastic network implementation. These devices allow one to send encrypted messages directly between devices. The range is decent, especially if there is a line-of-sight between devices. With Meshtastic it is possible to create a network of nodes that route messages, and to make use of tunnels over the internet to connect nodes that are very far apart.

So far, my favorite use-cases for Meshtastic are communicating with my partner as I approach an area to meet them, communication during festivals/events, and when travelling in a small town or camping.

It is a great tool in some contexts, but I cannot be reliably reached with it.

The Pager

I am currently living in the Netherlands and so what I say is most relevant to the Dutch paging network 'KPN Nationaal 3'. Messages are broadcast using POCSAG 1200 at 172.450 MHz. I know that the situation with paging networks vary across the world, with paging networks being no longer available in many countries, but I don't know the details. It may be that the system here is rather special and unique.

The paging network is considered a legacy broadcasting system. Messages to the network are broadcast by transmitters distributed across the full coverage range. The message that is broadcast contains the RIC (Receiver Identify Code) and the message in plain text.

Anyone with an SDR (Software Defined Radio) device can decode and log all of the unencrypted messages. Here is an example using SDRConnect + multimon-ng:

Using a programming interface, a user can select the RIC codes that they want their network-tuned pager to be responsive to. The pager will beep and display on the screen messages sent to that RIC. In my case, the seller of the pager assigned a new RIC from their pool to me and programmed the pager to listen to it.

A pager does not have a built-in transmitter, and so it does not reveal any information to the network.

A subscription to the paging network works the following way:
- You get assigned your own 'RIC', which is publicly broadcast with every message
- You get assigned a private number (0665xxxxxx)
- While your subscription is active, you send an SMS or an e-mail to a specific address with your private number + message, and the network provider will broadcast it with the RIC as the recipient.

Then, anyone who knows your private number is able to reach a pager listening to your RIC. The public RIC is not enough information to request a message to be sent to you.

Registering to the network has a monthly cost (typical current pricing of 8 € - 20 €) depending on whether you want to be able to recieve text messages, numeric messages, or only make the pager beep. Your identity and banking information are known to the network provider. I was able to register as an individual without needing to provide any company information. I had to fill-in a short form and send it over e-mail with a photo of an ID to register.

So:
- The network provider knows your identity
- The service has a monthly cost
- The unencrypted message content, when they are sent, and the recipient's RIC are public information
- The network does not confirm delivery
- Inefficient for the network (all transmitters broadcast every message)
- Being a legacy system, the network may not remain alive for too long

But:
- It is possible to reach you at all times without needing to broadcast your location to the network

The pager is a technology that I looked at early on when I started thinking about privacy and I quickly discarded the idea. Giving my identity to a network provider and broadcasting unencrypted messages publicly did not seem logical to me.

Today, I see the value of having a receive-only device that is supported by a network with national coverage. A paging message would contain only enough information for me to know how urgently I need to find a way to communicate - whether I need to activate the burner phone immediately, or whether I can spend some time to go find another way to communicate.

For me, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that this legacy system fills the specific gap of reachability without tracking.

I also recently became aware of the existence of paging networks that rely on volunteer HAM radio operators (like DAPNET), and would like to explore these systems in the future.

The Trump administration is seeking to nominate New York City Mayor Eric Adams to a top ambassadorial role in exchange for dropping his re-election bid ahead of the November race, a new report says.

If Adams were to exit the race, it would clear the path for former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is staunchly backed by pro-Israel groups, to be the main challenger to the leading candidate, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.

The New York Times, citing four unnamed sources on Friday, said President Donald Trump's special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, has been working diligently to persuade Adams to consider being the ambassador to Saudi Arabia - a very plum posting at a critical time for US relations with the kingdom.

Trump offering NYC mayor Saudi ambassadorship to drop re-election bid: Report

^{MEE staff (Middle East Eye)}

The Trump administration is seeking to nominate New York City Mayor Eric Adams to a top ambassadorial role in exchange for dropping his re-election bid ahead of the November race, a new report says.

If Adams were to exit the race, it would clear the path for former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is staunchly backed by pro-Israel groups, to be the main challenger to the leading candidate, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.

The New York Times, citing four unnamed sources on Friday, said President Donald Trump's special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, has been working diligently to persuade Adams to consider being the ambassador to Saudi Arabia - a very plum posting at a critical time for US relations with the kingdom.

Trump offering NYC mayor Saudi ambassadorship to drop re-election bid: Report

^{MEE staff (Middle East Eye)}

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

I'm planning on flashing LineageOS on my phone to debloat and to degoogle, and additionally to increase overall privacy but apparently from what I've heard here that it's not private enough or even at all?

I know about it being less secure because of the opened bootloader and the higher chances of you rooting to achieve what you want with a degoogled phone, but beyond that (especially privacy-wise) I don't know anything.

I've seen a video on how to degoogle it further, but surely it isn't all I need to do.

I need some education.

Unfortunately my phone is so obscure that it isn't supported by literally anything, but fortunately there's an unofficial port of LineageOS I found on Telegram, and that's the one I'll be using. So if you're thinking of suggesting another custom ROM, you're out of luck. Also you can't make me buy a Pixel - that thing ain't supported in my country (5G and others) and it's hella expensive as well.

"The Earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.

The Earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again.

I wish the Earth was our mother so she’d be kind to us.

I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry as mirrors.

We saw the faces of those who will throw our children out of the window of this last space. Our star will hang up mirrors.

Where should we go after the last frontiers ?

Where should the birds fly after the last sky ?

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air ?

We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the hand of the song, to be finished by our flesh.

We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree."

– Mahmoud Darwish

"Oh rascal children of Gaza,

You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,

You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,

You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,

Come back –

And scream as you want,

And break all the vases,

Steal all the flowers,

Come back,

Just come back…"

• Khaled Juma

I am not generally in the habit of criticizing the editorial decisions of The Washington Post, my employer for 11 years and an institution that continues to good, important work in covering the unwinding of American democracy. But I think the paper’s assessment of the putative debate over Donald Trump’s signature on the note provided for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday demands some context.

The article’s original headline was “No clear answers on whether Trump signed the Epstein birthday book,” a declaration that was eventually softened to “Is the signature Trump’s? Epstein birthday book feeds speculation.” The article first presents the denials of Trump’s staff and allies that he couldn’t have signed the bizarre, creepy, suggestive document. It then quotes handwriting experts, some of whom who indicated uncertainty about the signature’s provenance. A number of full signatures of Trump’s are shown in an apparent effort to demonstrate variation.

The use of full signatures doesn’t make sense because the signature in the book — created in 2003, before Epstein was on law enforcement’s radar — includes only Trump’s first name. The New York Times compared that signature to other examples of Trump signing only his first name, showing that they are nearly identical. In fact, the Wall Street Journal, which originally reported on the note, also published an article demonstrating why the note was almost certainly from Trump, including similar first-name-only signatures from the now-president.

The Journal did so, it’s safe to assume, because its initial report on the letter was rejected as invented or “fake news” by Trump et al. (Trump even sued, claiming, in part, that no such letter existed.) In other words, it probably assumed that publication of the note would trigger precisely the response that it did, an effort to move the goalposts of claimed fraudulence.

There is absolutely no reason to think that the note was not, in fact, from Trump and no reason to think that the signature is not his own. Even setting aside the obvious-to-any-layperson similarity to other signatures, the idea that someone would create a phony Trump letter as a private gift to someone Trump had praised publicly the year prior doesn’t make any sense.

So why treat the idea that the signature isn’t his seriously? Why treat the assertions of people with demonstrated track records of lying on Trump’s behalf — including Trump, his communications team and right-wing influencers — as offering sincere complaints on this particular issue? Why grant them the benefit of the doubt that they actually think the signature isn’t his?

The climate of fear is self-imposed

^pbump

Looking for a simple mini device that I can plug into TV for streaming stuff via browser/jellyfin and similar, with hdmi and control via bluetooth keyboard/mouse. What do you guys recommend?

Would this be powerful enough for example? komplett.no/product/1323029/pc…

EDIT: lemmy is awesome, thanks to you I'll save myself a ton of work and/or costly mistakes