cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/38001927

In this post, I hope to clarify and expand on some of the points and rebut some of the counter-messaging that we have witnessed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in th...

^f-droid.org

‘Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,’ an executive admitted, blaming AI for the layoffs.

Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs

Amazon said the growth of generative AI is to blame for the layoffs.

^{Robert Hart (The Verge)}

cross-posted from: discuss.online/post/29544831

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Johnson and Johnson, accusing the pharmaceutical company of failing to warn consumers about the risk of taking Tylenol while pregnant.

This lawsuit, the first of its kind from a state government, comes a month after President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced updated guidance discouraging pregnant women from taking acetaminophen, citing it as a possible cause of autism. The announcement set off a wave of controversy in the health care community, and confusion among pregnant women unsure how they should manage fever and pain during pregnancy.

Texas attorney general sues Tylenol company over autism claims

This lawsuit comes a month after U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. updated guidance discouraging pregnant women from taking acetaminophen, citing it as a possible cause of autism.

^{Eleanor Klibanoff (The Texas Tribune)}

The rise, and potential fall, of a mainstay academic theory.

From Foreign Policy via this RSS feed

Foreign Policy

The Global Magazine of News and Ideas

^{andrew.baughman1317 (Foreign Policy)}

There's a fair amount of publishing inside baseball here, but what stuck out at me was:

DSJ: Your work is mostly concerned with the past and the present, but what kind of futures do you see unfolding for the world?

TM: There was an extraordinary moment of international class coordination in the 1990s and early 2000s. Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels all agreed—despite their mounting geopolitical tensions—that they wanted their capitalists to get richer, that they no longer faced real threats from their working populations, and that they would help each other in the other great cause of the day, “counterterrorism,” which in practice meant killing and repressing Muslims the world over, whether in Xinjiang, Iraq, or Chechnya. Muslims were the ideal target for fine-tuning the emerging world order because they had no major power base of their own; their wealthiest members in the Gulf had no interest in upsetting the status quo. What is fascinating is how quickly this order broke down. One can point to cracks like the Iraq War, Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, the 2011 Libya intervention, or even further back to the Yugoslav wars, which Beijing and Moscow took to be a grisly preview of coming attractions.

Never genuinely threatened by “terrorism,” untroubled by rebellions of workers at home, the states superintending the 21st-century world economy found their hold on power jeopardized by the very success of the globalized capitalism whose ascendancy they oversaw, as powerful fractions of their ruling classes came to see themselves as unmoored from anything so constrictive as a national interest, however notional. Each state still believed it needed to enrich its elites—that was never in doubt—but there was a question now of which faction of the elite to enrich, and which to cast aside. Major purges were conducted in almost all the major states of the order. The purges were most drastic in China, where Xi in 2020–22 had to prove that the country would resist the liberal script of the business class overpowering the party. Putin conducted his purge more indirectly via the Ukraine war, which neatly separated out his capitalist loyalists from more Western-oriented capitalists in the upper strata around him. Trump, too, has done a purge, to the extent that one even can in the US, where capitalists, to a much greater degree, control the state. Trump had to confine his purge to the US bureaucracy; no major capitalists were threatened or fled the country (though the loyalty oaths extracted from the likes of Zuckerberg made for good television).

The other thing I see emerging is China developing a monopoly on state-backed science, especially climate science—one of Xi’s rumored successors when I was last in China was Chen Jining, the climate scientist who is now the party secretary of Shanghai—while the US will continue to excel in the carnival of recognition and continue to corner the market on identitarian innovation and mimetic desire. This is not a minor form of soft power, though it is one that the US itself barely understands. Meanwhile, the US has so thoroughly financialized itself that it has great difficulty producing basic military hardware, while it commits headlong to a kind of Green New Deal in reverse: the reorganization of its energy infrastructure and capital allocation in order to guarantee wealth transfers to investors in large language models, and to cover the shame of not having developed more socially beneficial innovations.

The last major rearrangement of global fortunes was the Second World War, the best thing—if you hadn’t died in it—that ever happened to American wage earners, and the best thing that ever happened for American technology. It’s doubtful that a war with China would result in a similar uplift, considering not only the obstacles to social mobilization on such a scale but the sheer amount of firepower that could be involved.

That's bleak, baby!

The Future of Magazines… and the World | The Nation

A conversation with Thomas Meaney, the editor of Granta, about literature and the left.

^{The Nation}

As Hurricane Melissa threatens island nations across the Caribbean, many are already burdened by debt from a string of climate-fueled crises.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/climate/hurricane-jamaica-caribbean.html?unlocked_article_code=1.w08.jQ1a._Ek82xvYfkdZ

cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/48759495

Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for an investigation into former Barclays CEO Jes Staley and “all current and former US banking executives who may have facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s illicit conduct,” according to a letter seen by The Guardian.

Staley, who like the Democratic senator is from Massachusetts, was known as one of the chief financial enablers of Epstein, allowing the late sexual predator to continue his account with J.P. Morgan in the midst of his crimes coming to light. The New York Times called Staley Epstein’s “chief defender” at J.P. Morgan, processing billions of dollars for him even as Epstein’s abuse and trafficking crimes were public.

Warren also noted that Staley is already banned for life in the UK banking industry for his connections to Epstein, and referred to court documents suggesting that Staley told Epstein about the bank’s apprehension towards him (and his large cash withdrawals), allowing him to alter his approach so that his account wouldn’t raise further suspicion.

Warren has urged the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to announce plans for an investigation by 7 November.

“It is critical to send a message to the public and current bank employees that this type of egregious misconduct has no place in the American banking system,” Warren wrote.

“Staley is not the only bank executive with concerning ties to Epstein. For example, according to Staley’s sworn deposition, he discussed Epstein with [J.P. Morgan] CEO Jamie Dimon on at least two occasions,” she continued. “The Fed, OCC and FDIC should investigate any other current or former banking executives who engaged in similar conduct to determine whether their conduct satisfies the legal standards for a ban on working in the banking industry and civil monetary penalties.... Any banking executives who facilitated the crimes of one of the world’s most notorious sex criminals should be held to account.”

Elizabeth Warren Calls for Investigation of Top Banker Tied to Epstein

Senator Warren is demanding regulators look into Jes Staley for protecting convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

^{The New Republic}

https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-openai-reach-new-deal-allow-openai-restructure-2025-10-28/

NodeBB has a very simple allow/deny list capability at present. You paste in a bunch of newline-separated domains, and we block (or optionally, only allow) them all.

On the road to more fine-grained controls, I discovered that IFTAS publishes a Do Not Interact list in an importable CSV format.

As maintenance of these lists is important (adding new entries as well as handling removals), it looks to be increasingly important that I add into NodeBB the functionality to follow these lists automatically and update as necessary.

IFTAS

2025-10-23 18:52:23

IFTAS Do Not Interact (DNI) List

The Do Not Interact List is an IFTAS-curated list of domains that are highly recommended for defederation. Each domain is labelled using an IFTAS label. Each domain is investigated by human review for governance, common content, network and service activities, hosting location and more.

Inclusion on this list means we believe:

1. Federating with this domain poses significant risk to your service, and
2. We are extremely unlikely to ever retract an entry.

In all cases we strongly recommend you use a Federation Policy to aid you in your decision making.

iftas-dni-latest.csv (Mastodon import format)

The permanent file location is:
about.iftas.org/wp-content/upl…
(The file date will not change, but the latest version will overwrite any previous version at this URL)

Related Resources

• IFTAS Abandoned Unmanaged Denylist
• CARIAD Domain Observatory
• Denylist Resources
• Denylist Management Tools

Shared Vocabulary: Labels

The community shared vocabulary is a collaboratively maintained set of terms and definitions used by moderators and administrators to ensure clarity, fairness, and consistency in community governan…

^IFTAS

Platforms expect to monitor a range of signals, but age detection will be spotty.

Australia’s social media ban is “problematic,” but platforms will comply anyway

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}

A terrible time all round

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/fake-nvidia-gtc-stream-hosting-jensen-huang-deepfake-crypto-scam-garners-100-000-youtube-viewers-video-was-even-promoted-above-nvidias-real-event

Not implementing climate friendly policies could cost European countries around six times as much as the price of decarbonisation, a new study finds.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/euobserver.c…

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.

Climate inaction could cost Europe €5.6 trillion by 2050, study finds

^EUobserver

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday ordered air strikes on Gaza as he accused Hamas of only pretending to actively search for captive remains.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/middleeastey…

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.

Netanyahu orders air strikes on Gaza

^{Middle East Eye}

Dictator wannabe Donald Trump appears to be trying to change the constitution so he can serve a third term

Archived version: archive.is/newest/thecanary.co…

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.

Trumps tries to change the constitution so he can serve a third term - Canary

^{HG (The Canary)}

Of course, israeli prisoners/hostages are well treated, in the futile hope that israelis will have some empathy, and treat palestinians as they'd want to be treated.
I hold for a fact that Israel wouldn't be able to do the horrors it does if the world was better informed(, the most important is to inform the israelis themselves, and i know that people here will claim that they all perfectly know, but i disagree). Mistakes are the root of evil.
From vm.tiktok.com/ZNdcE3Fgc

It's obviously far from the only testimony of tortures, even teenagers aren't spared.

I posted that two years ago, but didn't know how widespread it was.
With only a few minutes of researchs you can find dozens of testimonies : youtu.be/eIXCI3NuKQ8, youtu.be/-On--4b6qf8, youtu.be/7BJtpL1aGFs, youtu.be/AJi52pMblgQ, youtube.com/shorts/IcrF9d8rnJA… youtu.be/1JDEXsSuffo, ...
I'm so sorry for that useless suffering(, useless because it was supposed to have been over in the 90s).

sousmerde_rtrdataire

2025-10-16 19:47:36

Mahmoud Abu Foul, freed after the ceasefire, lost a leg in 2015, was kidnapped in Kamal Adwan hospital last december, and is now blind after the beatings and lack of medical treatment in israeli jails

https://x.com/Channel4News/status/1978860897201197412

Other mentions of prisoners from today on this community :
- lemmy.ml/post/37589373 ;
- lemmy.world/post/37423140

Others :
- lemmy.world/post/37491370

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percent-of-windows-games-now-run-on-linux-latest-data-shows-as-windows-10-dies-gaming-on-linux-is-more-viable-than-ever