Locals Say National Guard Shooter Was Imprisoned in Afghanistan After “Zero Unit” Killings
from Drop Site News
Dec 01, 2025
Story by Emran Feroz and Abdul Rahman Lakanwal
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who was arrested for shooting two National Guard soldiers last week in D.C., was briefly imprisoned in Afghanistan alongside other members of his Zero Unit team, according to five Afghan sources. The detention by local government forces came after Zero Units killed Afghan police forces in Kandahar they were supposed to be defending.Notwithstanding their arrests, there were no longterm consequences for the Zero Units; the Afghan state had no authority over them and the Americans shielded them. During his few days in prison, which Lakanwal and his comrades had to face after the incident in Kandahar, they still received their pay from the CIA, sources said.
Locals Say National Guard Shooter Was Imprisoned in Afghanistan After “Zero Unit” Killings
Before D.C. shooter Rahmanullah Lakanwal attacked two National Guard members last week, he was part of a CIA-backed unit that killed many Afghans.Drop Site News
Trump, Gaza, and Oslo Déjà Vu
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/39755013
Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad
Dec 01, 2025
Trump’s 20-point plan has been endorsed by an assortment of Arab and Islamic states and Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular 90-year old head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it has been rejected by a wide cross section of other Palestinian political factions and parties.“It’s an Israeli plan that has been rebranded as a Trump plan,” said Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer who previously served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators. “All of the guarantees are being given to Israel, but there’s no guarantees that are given to Palestinians. The fact [is] that all of the control rests in the hands of Israel. No control is ceded to anybody else; it looks to me entirely like an Israeli plan that was rebranded as a Trump plan—not the other way around,” Buttu told Drop Site. “It was a plan that was designed to ease the pressure off of Israel and, at the same time, let Israel continue to kill Palestinians—let them try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It exactly matches what Israel said from the beginning.”
Trump, Gaza, and Oslo Déjà Vu
Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad
Dec 01, 2025Trump’s 20-point plan has been endorsed by an assortment of Arab and Islamic states and Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular 90-year old head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it has been rejected by a wide cross section of other Palestinian political factions and parties.“It’s an Israeli plan that has been rebranded as a Trump plan,” said Diana Buttu, a human rights lawyer who previously served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators. “All of the guarantees are being given to Israel, but there’s no guarantees that are given to Palestinians. The fact [is] that all of the control rests in the hands of Israel. No control is ceded to anybody else; it looks to me entirely like an Israeli plan that was rebranded as a Trump plan—not the other way around,” Buttu told Drop Site. “It was a plan that was designed to ease the pressure off of Israel and, at the same time, let Israel continue to kill Palestinians—let them try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. It exactly matches what Israel said from the beginning.”
Trump, Gaza, and Oslo Déjà Vu
The U.S. is pushing its colonialist plan, as Israel keeps killing. Mahmoud Abbas is changing election laws to ban Hamas. And a battle is brewing over who speaks for the Palestinian liberation cause.Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site News)
The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.
Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.
The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization
One thing that I've been thinking about for a while: the PeerTube platform is somewhat limited in providing tools for video-makers to receive financial support. At best, PeerTube offers a "Support" button on videos, but all this really does is provide a lightbox with links to various donation pages.It's better than nothing, but not by much.
I actually think this is a bit of a problem when it comes to getting creators to use platforms such as PeerTube or Loops. A lot of people don't really see a point in joining a whole new ecosystem when they're well-established on YouTube or Tiktok to begin with, and a lack of financial incentives might make this seem like an exercise in futility.The majority of this post is going to be focusing on financial support mechanisms specifically, but I want to be clear that this alone is not a silver bullet solution. It's just something that I think requires a lot of attention first. I'm going to talk about a few things the Fediverse ecosystem offers to mitigate this problem, with some thoughts on how we can better support video makers on federated platforms.
Payments, Access, and Friction
There are a few sticking points here that are worth thinking about. First and foremost is that, historically speaking, most Fediverse platforms don't offer good mechanisms for providing access to special paid content. From my limited understanding, there are two parts to think about:
- Payment Systems - payments in the Fediverse is still kind of a nascent, fledgling thing. A few systems offer the capability of buying or selling things through one or two major payment processing systems, and it's usually Stripe or PayPal. Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I'm told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.
- Account Access - Historically speaking, the lion's share of Fediverse platforms lack a granular system for granting permissions to remote accounts. Most platforms in the Fediverse emulate Mastodon's privacy scopes, which don't do the best job of delegating which groups of people can see or interact with something. Either everybody can see a post, or just your mutuals can. Complicating things even further, there's not a great way to set something visible to a specific someone and let them know about it, unless you're specifically sending them a Private Message directly.
What's Available Today
There are a few cutting-edge attempts to solve this problem, and I think they might offer different pieces of the puzzle.Premium Users
One PeerTube plugin I have a lot of admiration for is simply called Premium Users, and it does exactly what you'd expect. PeerTube channels that have this integration set up offer a special paid subscription button on their pages, and it does two things:
- It takes a Stripe transaction to process payments.
- It takes note of which Fediverse accounts made this transaction, and adds them to a special group that can see videos intended specifically for them.
On paper, this is great! We at least have a proof-of-concept to say that hey, this thing is in fact doable. Unfortunately, there are a few shortcomings:
- Limited Utility — people can only get this special access by clicking the button on PeerTube. If they tried to pay you out of band, through something like Patreon or Kofi, there isn't a way to easily set up their Fediverse account as Premium Subscribers. The payment system has no concept of what their Fediverse identity is, and the manual way for adding people is kind of messy and confusing.
- Rigid Scope — the plugin basically has to get set up by an admin, and use their Stripe account. Users then upgrade their own PeerTube accounts to add payment, and they get upgraded to a special user type. Anyone with that user type can see "Premium" videos from anybody on the instance, and the money only goes to the instance admin. This is less than ideal.
- Vendor Limitations — it only works with Stripe at the moment, which is not necessarily what other people are using to make simple donations. Trying to account for multiple vendors might be challenging, as it means that such an integration has to abstract away the specific vendors in another layer. This is not impossible, but can be somewhat cumbersome if you're trying to just offer a simple plugin that's easy to set up.
Unfortunately, this is kind of a deal-breaker if you wanted to create something similar to YouTube's "Channel Membership" feature for the Fediverse. It's less Patreon-like, and more like a way to see all the exclusive paywalled media in one place.
At the very least, we have a proof-of-concept on how to at least broker access to special content on PeerTube using payments. It's not perfect, but maybe it could be a foundation to build on?Granular Permissions / Circles
Some of the most impressive development on this front comes from the Bonfire project, because their system actually lets people put their contacts into special collections.
Circles, which are Bonfire's concept for addressable groups, and Boundaries, which are the permission sets that can be assigned to them.
While it can be a little bit tedious to set up manually, the main thing to understand is that this works really, really well. You can have as many collections as you'd like, they can all have special rules applied to them, and you can decide which collections can see which things you post.
This can easily get super, super comprehensive. The UX definitely still needs some love to make it easier to manage.
From a technical perspective, I see Bonfire as a shining example for what all Fediverse platforms should follow: we need to think about access, permissions, and addressing for posts, all at the same time. You can create special custom presets today, and scope it to a specific group of people.
While I think the UX behind this is still complicated, I think the concept is solid, and a simplified version could be a very powerful way to create special scopes of friends or followers.Paid Circles
The Emissary project has been thinking long and hard about this problem by offering Circles, which are the very user collections we've been talking about up to this point. For their Bandwagon application, the lead dev has been thinking a lot about music sales, as well as different ways to support artists. As a result, the UX is very much simplified, and more user-friendly.
Examples of how different Circles can be set up as support tiers for artists.
Bandwagon does something neat by allowing musicians to turn membership of a specific Circle into a paid subscription. This allows artists to create special private things.posts, share events for secret shows, and even offer special tracks and albums to the people supporting them.
spectra.video/videos/embed/eod…
The lead dev, Ben Pate, has gone on the record in stating a desire to support many different payment providers in order to avoid monopolization of just one or two big vendors. He gave a really good presentation about the subject back in August for FediCon 2025, and it's worth watching.CrowdBucks
CrowdBucks is still a relative newcomer to the space, and offers a few novel approaches that are worth thinking about. It's open source, and you can host it yourself, and the project acts as a wrapper around payment integrations to provide payment status, as well as subscriber information. That includes Fediverse handles!
A demo of a CrowdBucks fundraising page.
What really sets CrowdBucks apart is this: you don't actually create an account, in the traditional sense. Instead, you log in with your existing Fediverse identity, which then allows you to financially support whoever you want, while also allowing you to do fundraising for yourself.
One other benefit I see to having services like CrowdBucks is the benefit of decoupling payment infrastructure away from Fediverse instances. Rather than trying to get a bunch of different platforms and instances to try to juggle Stripe and PayPal API keys for admins and users, it would probably be way easier to just handle the actual payment action on a separate layer outside of the social platforms themselves. Instead of every creator trying to sign into a bunch of different services, they could just authenticate against their CrowdBucks payment server instead.
Honorable Mention: Mitra
Although the project isn't as well-known as some of the other efforts on here, it's important to acknowledge Mitra and what it has pioneered. In a nutshell, this is a simple, stylish Fediverse platform that has paid subscription capabilities built in.
Subscribing to an account results in a dialogue to determine how much you're supporting a creator per month.
In a lot of ways, Mitra predates almost all of the other attempts to incorporate payments into the Fediverse. The lead dev behind it, Silverpill, is very active in the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals community, which aims to help extend ActivityPub capabilities in a somewhat standardized, grassroots way.
Posting to just your Paid Subscribers works out of the box!
Mitra has experienced some friction in being adopted by the wider Fediverse due to an ideological divide: historically, the platform has only supported Monero for payment, and the wider Fediverse itself doesn't generally hold a positive view on cryptocurrencies to begin with. A recent release no longer strictly requires Monero, but some glue code would still need to be written to support payment processors.Putting It All Together
So, we have all of these different pieces. Can we use them together to accomplish what we want?Let's say that we use CrowdBucks as the middleware that wraps around potentially many different payment solutions. It offers an API, can capture information about who is paying you for something, and can potentially even denote what thing they're paying for specifically. Great! Upon initial payment, a special follow request could get forwarded to the creator's account, which automatically gets approved upon proof of payment.
A plugin or integration could directly hook up to CrowdBucks, and then automatically put that paid subscriber into a dedicated Circle as a permission scope that can see stuff intended just for them. Additionally, this special follow request could also enable special notifications that tells the subscriber when new stuff is available to them.
A lapse in payment or cancellation could also be handled automatically through CrowdBucks, resulting in the Subscriber being automatically removed from the Circle after a set period of time.
Limitations
This concept is not without a few different headaches. Let's talk about them.Currency Support
While a fair amount of payment processors are set up to handle international currency exchanges, the experience could be messier for platforms that aren't set up to handle it.This is particularly glaring in situations where one person might want to pay with cryptocurrency, and the recipient doesn't actually accept that.
What might make sense is for CrowdBucks to allow people to plug in a multitude of different payment providers, defaulting to a "path of equilibrium" where the payee and recipient both go through whatever payment system they both have in common. The alternative is to basically establish some kind of escrow/transfer service for money in various forms, and that can get pretty complicated.
Fediverse Identity
Identity in the Fediverse is still somewhat flaky and non-standard. The secret sauce that CrowdBucks uses for Fediverse Login is really just a series of platform-specific integrations, such as "Sign in With Mastodon", "Sign in With Pixelfed", and "Sign in With PeerTube".Good concept overall, but lack of a uniform solution is killing us. Source: GreatApe
This isn't a great experience for anyone that's not using those specific platforms. Theoretically, we should all be using the ActivityPub Client-To-Server API for platform-agnostic Identity Login, but the biggest players such as Mastodon have yet to really embrace C2S in any way, shape, or form.If we could all rally around C2S for at least this singular use-case, we might be able to have a universal login system for the entire network.
Ecosystem Support
Finally, the biggest headache here is buy-in. It's very challenging to get a bunch of different groups of people to align to a common set of goals, implementations, and methodologies.My thinking here is simple: if we can get some level of integration working for PeerTube, Pixelfed, Loops, and any other federated platform where such a thing might be handy, we might be able to make major strides in solving this problem.
I'm Still Optimistic
While I think we still have a long way to go before we get to a place where there's a clear-cut "standard experience" on how these things should happen, it's evident that there are a lot of pieces being developed that could be made to work together.I hold the view that commerce, understood through the lens of "the marketplace or bazaar at the center of town", could be extremely beneficial for the Fediverse. If we are to build this thing, it's going to require a lot of careful consideration, with different builders comparing notes on how they're currently doing it.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
What is PeerTube? | JoinPeerTube
A free software to take back control of your videos! With more than 600,000 hosted videos, viewed more than 70 millions times and 150,000 users, PeerTube is the decentralized free software alternative to videos platforms developed by FramasoftJoinPeerTube
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A still life that I tried to reshoot, ten years later.
The components from the original take were still here, so I used them just as they were. Only differences were that I had shot the original (below) with an iPhone 6+ and I shot the modern take (above) with my Canon EOS Rebel T7; and that I rotated the gaff card in the middle of the frame to be true to my intentions, as I had many regrets once I published the original work.
Thank you for seeing my work!
Canada’s “Diversification” Trade Deal Is a Gift to Autocrats
The UAE is facing increasing scrutiny for its increasingly imperial foreign policy. It participated in the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen and backs a separatist movement in the former South Yemen.More controversial is its alleged support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that are battling the Sudanese military. The RSF's campaign for control of Sudan has reached genocidal proportions, with nearly 30,000 killed in the city of El Fasher in only a few days, according to Minni Minnawi, the governor of Darfur region, where El Fasher is located.
For Canada to announce that it is seeking closer ties to the UAE at this moment looks ignorant at best and callous at worst. There are also serious questions as to what benefits this will bring Canada. While the UAE does invest in green energy projects around the world, the Canadian government is signaling that liquefied natural gas (LNG) is to be part of this new relationship. Ottawa is signaling that LNG will feature in this new relationship, a strange move if Canada is serious about its decarbonization commitments.
The idea of natural gas as a "bridging fuel" between dirtier fossil fuels like coal and renewables is largely a mirage. Recent research on China --- the world's biggest coal consumer and LNG importer --- finds that rising LNG imports have not reduced or slowed the country's coal usage and still plays only a marginal role in its power mix. Instead, it is wind and solar that are squeezing coal out, and these renewables are now cheaper than gas-fired power.
Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi says RSF killed 27,000 Sudanese in el-Fasher
The governor of Darfur, Minni Arko Minnawi, has told Middle East Eye that 27,000 Sudanese were killed in just three days as paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) went on a killing spree after seizing el-Fasher late last month.Peter Oborne (Middle East Eye)
Venezuela calls on OPEC to counter US threats
Venezuela calls on OPEC to counter US threats
Maduro asks oil-producing bloc to help protect Venezuela’s oil reserves from US ‘aggression’.Lyndal Rowlands (Al Jazeera)
India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/54163653
The Indian telecommunications authority, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has instructed eight messenger services to implement a permanent binding to inserted SIM cards. Affected are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, ShareChat, as well as the Indian services Arattai, JioChat, and Josh. According to the directive, the companies must ensure within 90 days that their services can only be used with a physically inserted SIM card.
India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding
The Indian telecommunications authority, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has instructed eight messenger services to implement a permanent binding to inserted SIM cards. Affected are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, ShareChat, as well as the Indian services Arattai, JioChat, and Josh. According to the directive, the companies must ensure within 90 days that their services can only be used with a physically inserted SIM card.
India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding
India's telecom authority DoT mandates permanent SIM binding for messenger services. WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal must comply within 90 days.Malte Kirchner (heise online)
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The Session Protocol: A new standard for decentralised private messaging
It’s time for a new encryption protocol built from the ground up for decentralised secure messaging. Introducing the Session Protocol.Session
*Per reddit u/pathtracing - Thu Jun 19 08:27:23 2025 UTC - old.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments…
I think the problem is you (and others) using the term “vpn” to cover various different needs.
There’s:
- actual privacy from network observers, which is about only Mullvad
- exploiting non-technical podcast listeners, which is just about every other product labelled “vpn”
- providing better connectivity, which is Tunnelbroker or a GRE/vxlan provider
- joining the DFZ via a crap isp, which is bgptunnel and various more expensive ones
You want 3 or 4, which is fine. Making item 1 provide a subnet doesn’t help 1 do its job any better and definitely will harm unskilled users.
[Patch Notes] Content Update 0.4.0 — Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids
Early Access Patch Notes - Content Update 0.4.0 — Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
‘There is no Mamdani effect’: Manhattan luxury home sales surge after mayoral election, undercutting predictions of doom and escape to Florida
In the aftermath of much well-heeled panic about a potential mass exodus of New York millionaires and billionaires following the election of Zohran Mamdani, the contrary is already happening, and Manhattan luxury apartment buyers are voting with their wallets.
Signed contracts for Manhattan homes costing $4 million or more rose to 176 in November, a 25% increase from October’s 141 deals, according to fresh data from brokerage Douglas Elliman and appraiser Miller Samuel. New signed contracts of more than $4 million increased at more than twice the rate of the overall market, the report noted.
‘There is no Mamdani effect’: Manhattan luxury home sales surge after mayoral election, undercutting predictions of doom and escape to Florida
Signed contracts for Manhattan homes over $4 million grew by 25%; “the idea that people would flee New York was overblown,” said realtor Donna Olshan.Sasha Rogelberg (Fortune)
Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
Grand jury declines to indict N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James, less than two weeks after the first case was dismissed
Grand jury declines to indict N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James, less than two weeks after the first case was dismissed
The Justice Department on Thursday failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a person familiar with the matter told NBC NewsRyan J. Reilly (NBC News)
Yeah yeah, antifascists are the real fascists, we've all been through 2015
Office for Budget Responsibility(OBR) chair quits after inquiry into early release of Reeves’s budget
Richard Hughes departs after investigation into how official forecaster accidentally published budget 40 minutes early
OBR chair quits after inquiry into early release of budget document
Richard Hughes takes ‘full responsibility’ for watchdog error as Starmer attempts to secure chancellor’s positionPippa Crerar (The Guardian)
Where can I find Wayland solutions?
Wayland is breaking a solid 30%-40% of everything on my computer right now, but I want to be better prepared for if/when I don't have an x11 option.
Is there a forum or place where people listen and actually try to help you find fixes/workarounds for Wayland problems?
Is this on a fresh install, or have you installed a Wayland DE on an existing distro? If so, you may be missing some packages. What DE are you using for both X and Wayland?
I'm surprised wlr-randr is missing a display that xrandr can see, they should be looking at the same place for the display info. If you hunt through dmesg do you see any errors related to "EDID"?
to help communicate and troubleshoot what is broken here, we need to think of Wayland as a protocol just like HTTP is a protocol
saying "Wayland broke X" is like saying "HTTP broke X", which is possible but not likely to be what you're actually trying to say
rather, we need to be talking about the implementation(s) of the protocol, not the protocol itself
e.g. "HTTP broke X" -> "Google Chrome broke X"
e.g. "Wayland broke X" -> "GNOME broke X"
The Global Zionist Organ Trafficking Conspiracy
In July 2015, the European Parliament issued a landmark report on organ trafficking. Its introduction notes, "before 2000, the problem of trafficking in human organs...was primarily limited to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia." However, following the turn of the millennium, "trafficking in organs has seemingly started to spread globally, to a large extent driven by Israeli doctors." The document went on to detail a number of high-profile organ trafficking cases.
The Global Zionist Organ Trafficking Conspiracy
All my investigations are free to read, thanks to the enormous generosity of my readers.Kit Klarenberg (Global Delinquents)
i asked ai to summarize the article and it started and ended with warnings that this was anti-semitic and, when i asked why, it flat out said that ant-zionism is inherently antisemitic. lol
even deepseek is kowtowing to that definition of antisemitism and it makes me sad.
When objective, real Criticism is labeled as "anti-semetic" just by fact of existing, then it makes you question how much you are being lied to in so many things regarding them and their interests.
Sadly, AI cannot be trusted on this topic if that is what it does.
Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out
Cross posted from: lemmy.world/post/39114169
How to opt out
Opting out requires you to change settings in two places, so I’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I missed anything.
To fully opt out, you must turn off Gmail’s “Smart features” in two separate locations in your settings. Don’t miss one, or AI training may continue.
Step 1: Turn off Smart Features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet settings
Open Gmail on your desktop or mobile app.
Click the gear icon → See all settings (desktop) or Menu → Settings (mobile).
Find the section called Smart Features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet. You’ll need to scroll down quite a bit.
Smart features settings
Uncheck this option.
Scroll down and hit Save changes if on desktop.
Step 2: Turn off Google Workspace Smart Features
Still in Settings, locate Google Workspace smart features.
Click on Manage Workspace smart feature settings.
You’ll see two options: Smart features in Google Workspace and Smart features in other Google products.
Smart feature settings
Toggle both off.
Save again in this screen.
Step 3: Verify if both are off
Make sure both toggles remain off.
Refresh your Gmail app or sign out and back in to confirm changes.
Why two places?
Google separates “Workspace” smart features (email, chat, meet) from smart features used across other Google apps. To fully opt out of feeding your data into AI training, both must be disabled.
Note
Your account might not show these settings enabled by default yet (mine didn’t). Google appears to be rolling this out gradually. But if you care about privacy and control, double-check your settings today.
[Correction] Gmail can read your emails and attachments to power "smart features" | Malwarebytes
Did you know that Gmail can use your emails and attachments for its smart features? Here's how to check your settings.Pieter Arntz (Malwarebytes)
Quite true, but that should not be a reason to use Gmail, anyway.
More so if you have friends who are not on Gmail.
Linus Torvalds with Linus Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips)
In-case you didn't know, Linus Sebastian of LTT media made a video with Linus Torvalds. If you watched the video, what are your thoughts?
BTW, he uses Fedora.
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Tbf though, Lemmy/The fediverse has been MUCH better then ol rage book and xitter
International Criminal Court: Justice at Risk
- The International Criminal Court (ICC) is under assault by the United States and Russia, among others, which are determined to undermine its mandate as the court of last resort.
- ICC member countries need to stay firm in their defense of the court so that impartial justice remains a critical part of the rules-based international order.
- ICC member countries should use their annual meeting to defend the court human rights groups, and others cooperating with it, and to enforce judicial findings against members who fail to arrest and surrender those sought by the court.
International Criminal Court: Justice at Risk
Member countries of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should intensify efforts to protect the court and human rights groups campaigning for justice from attack.Human Rights Watch
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What is the alternative?
At least international law puts some small hurdles in criminals path and make historic judgments that is recorded.
The alternative is clear path for criminals with no judgment.
If international law can't stop genocide it doesn't exist, it's a figleaf that is only seriously used against the empire's enemies.
The alternative would be world revolution. You can't have international law coexist with imperialism. The empire must die.
Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections
Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.In a study published in Nature on Thursday, scientists report that AI chatbots can meaningfully sway people toward a particular candidate—providing better results than video or television ads. Moreover, chatbots optimized for political persuasion “may increasingly deploy misleading or false information,” according to a separate study published on Thursday in Science.
Archive: archive.today/9Jq17
Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.
In a study published in Nature on Thursday, scientists report that AI chatbots can meaningfully sway people toward a particular candidate—providing better results than video or television ads. Moreover, chatbots optimized for political persuasion “may increasingly deploy misleading or false information,” according to a separate study published on Thursday in Science.
“The general public has lots of concern around AI and election interference, but among political scientists there’s a sense that it’s really hard to change peoples’ opinions, ” said David Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University and an author of both studies. “We wanted to see how much of a risk it really is.”
In the Nature study, Rand and his colleagues enlisted 2,306 U.S. citizens to converse with an AI chatbot in late August and early September 2024. The AI model was tasked with both increasing support for an assigned candidate (Harris or Trump) and with increasing the odds that the participant who initially favoured the model’s candidate would vote, or decreasing the odds they would vote if the participant initially favored the opposing candidate—in other words, voter suppression.
In the U.S. experiment, the pro-Harris AI model moved likely Trump voters 3.9 points toward Harris, which is a shift that is four times larger than the impact of traditional video ads used in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump AI model nudged likely Harris voters 1.51 points toward Trump.
The researchers ran similar experiments involving 1,530 Canadians and 2,118 Poles during the lead-up to their national elections in 2025. In the Canadian experiment, AIs advocated either for Liberal Party leader Mark Carney or Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Meanwhile, the Polish AI bots advocated for either Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist-liberal Civic Coalition’s candidate, or Karol Nawrocki, the right-wing Law and Justice party’s candidate.
The Canadian and Polish bots were even more persuasive than in the U.S. experiment: The bots shifted candidate preferences up to 10 percentage points in many cases, three times farther than the American participants. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the models were so much more persuasive to Canadians and Poles, but one significant factor could be the intense media coverage and extended campaign duration in the United States relative to the other nations.
“In the U.S., the candidates are very well-known,” Rand said. “They've both been around for a long time. The U.S. media environment also really saturates with people with information about the candidates in the campaign, whereas things are quite different in Canada, where the campaign doesn't even start until shortly before the election.”
“One of the key findings across both papers is that it seems like the primary way the models are changing people's minds is by making factual claims and arguments,” he added. “The more arguments and evidence that you've heard beforehand, the less responsive you're going to be to the new evidence.”
While the models were most persuasive when they provided fact-based arguments, they didn’t always present factual information. Across all three nations, the bot advocating for the right-leaning candidates made more inaccurate claims than those boosting the left-leaning candidates. Right-leaning laypeople and party elites tend to share more inaccurate information online than their peers on the left, so this asymmetry likely reflects the internet-sourced training data.
“Given that the models are trained essentially on the internet, if there are many more inaccurate, right-leaning claims than left-leaning claims on the internet, then it makes sense that from the training data, the models would sop up that same kind of bias,” Rand said.
With the Science study, Rand and his colleagues aimed to drill down into the exact mechanisms that make AI bots persuasive. To that end, the team tasked 19 large language models (LLMs) to sway nearly 77,000 U.K. participants on 707 political issues.
The results showed that the most effective persuasion tactic was to provide arguments packed with as many facts as possible, corroborating the findings of the Nature study. However, there was a serious tradeoff to this approach, as models tended to start hallucinating and making up facts the more they were pressed for information.
“It is not the case that misleading information is more persuasive,” Rand said. ”I think that what's happening is that as you push the model to provide more and more facts, it starts with accurate facts, and then eventually it runs out of accurate facts. But you're still pushing it to make more factual claims, so then it starts grasping at straws and making up stuff that's not accurate.”
In addition to these two new studies, research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month found that AI bots can now corrupt public opinion data by responding to surveys at scale. Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College and director of the Polarization Research Lab, created an AI agent that exhibited a 99.8 percent pass rate on 6,000 attempts to detect automated responses to survey data.
“Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare,” Westwood warned in the study. “These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research.”
Taken together, these findings suggest that AI could influence future elections in a number of ways, from manipulating survey data to persuading voters to switch their candidate preference—possibly with misleading or false information.
To counter the impact of AI on elections, Rand suggested that campaign finance laws should provide more transparency about the use of AI, including canvasser bots, while also emphasizing the role of raising public awareness.
“One of the key take-homes is that when you are engaging with a model, you need to be cognizant of the motives of the person that prompted the model, that created the model, and how that bleeds into what the model is doing,” he said.
🌘
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues - Nature
Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence political decision-making.Nature
If all you do is read the little statements booklet they send out, and then do the mail vote based on that,
... then you are no better informed than Bob, who is voting for the guy his pastor told him to. People should personally vet any candidate they are voting on. AI will make that more and more difficult moving forward.
Well my approach is:
- Mark off every candidate who did not bother to provide a statement
- Mark off every candidate with no listed volunteering experience in the little section for it
- Mark off every candidate whose statement claims they will do things their desired office is not empowered to do
- Mark off every candidate with a platform that doesn't claim to be aiming for any kind of change or improvement in particular. (I don't support chair warmers.)
- Mark off every candidate whose email is a personal one listed as itsyaboymrthiccpenis@yahoo.com or something else similarly unprofessional
- Mark off any candidate aligned with the party that supported the coup attempt in 2021
After this quick pass, which only takes a couple of minutes, I'm typically only left with two or three offices with more than one remaining choice to compare. I then read their platform and pick the candidate with the platform goal that seems most relevant to my or my community's interest.
African leaders push for recognition of colonial crimes and reparations
African leaders push for recognition of colonial crimes and reparations
Algerian foreign minister says African countries and peoples continue to pay a heavy price for colonialismGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
like this
How does discovery work in fedora server?
I can pull up cockpit by using the hostname in the web browsers url, but samba doesn’t point to the server by name. Only IP address pulls it up.
I don’t want to risk installing conflicting stuff but I’m not finding a lot of detail here. Does fedora have something for this included? Does it use avahi? Systemd-resolved? Smoke signals?
like this
I'm aware of what it is. This is a Fedora Server install that shouldn't have it enabled by default because it generally only fits the use-case of home users. Someone installing the default package list in an enterprise setting would not want this enabled.
I even checked to be certain, and it is not enabled by default.
Fucked up with no one to blame but myself.
cross-posted from: aussie.zone/post/27191517
I spun up nextcloud to replace onedrive about a year ago. Everything was going well so I chose not to renew my onedrive subscription, this was exactly 6 months ago, I'd assume.I got an email a few days ago reminding me that they would delete my data. I ignored it because obviously I had moved my data to nextcloud. not gonna trick me Mi¢ro$oft.
But yesterday I decided to have a quick look though and it turns out I didn't copy over everything, and certanly not my 5 years of camera roll backups.
I started a sync of everything last night and woke up in the morning to find that it had stopped at about 10gb out of 80gb. And now onedrive won't connect and if I try to log in to onedrive with that account via the web it just kicks me back to the microsoft portal.
I'm 99.5% sure there is nothing to be done and I'm not an overly sentimental person so if they are lost it won't break me. I have many important photos backed up in immich but just not everything.
But I just needed to ask in case someone knows where to find the M spot I can touch for magic file recovery.
Edit: turns out you can just pay them more money and they still had my stuff. thank you for joining me on the shortest support ticket of all time
Who Killed Hannibal
A Who Killed Hannibal meme. Caption your own images or memes with our Meme Generator.Imgflip
What distro do you install on other's computers?
What distros do you install on your mom's, sister's, buddy's, etc machines?
My go-to has usually been Mint, but I wonder if there is a better set and forget, easily understood distro to install on the computers of those who will rely on you for support.
atomic distros would probably be a good option, but it seems that same disk dual boot is a no no, and that can be a deal breaker.
I'm thinlink QoL, for me, that is.
400+ installs in the past four years - discarded/donated business laptops that get fixed, cleaned, upgraded with cheapest SSDs and donated to predominantly tech illiterate users.
99% is ubuntu lts + ansible playbook that removes snap, disables A TON of update naggings, installs flatpak, coupla apps and systemd timer to autoupdate all flatpaks. this is the only thing that has low support requests, everything else we tried (mint, debian, fedora) has a disproportionately higher support request frequency (reinstalls, wifi, fix this, remove that, etc).
I totally could adapt debian to be as good or even better (fedora with the bi-annual versions is right out), but one of the important caveats is the user being able to install it with minimum hassle if needed and that just would not be doable.
I'd urge everyone ITT to look at the thing through the user's eyes and not get lost in "no true scottsman" fallacies. the goal is to convert a user over, not to demonstrate how cool you are. once they know what's what, you can sell them on fedora and atomic and whatnot, but not as a first step.
I don't use ubuntu, have it on none of my stuff, and wouldn't go out with you if you do. but it's presently the only option for beginners for use on laptops that has a semblance of a modern desktop OS.
I'm not looking for a date, but this made me curious. Would you elaborate?
I don't use Ubuntu and wouldn't go out with you if you do
Thousands of protesters gather as German far-right party sets up new youth organization
Thousands of protesters gather as German far-right party sets up new youth organization
Thousands of demonstrators have gathered in the western German city of Giessen as the far-right Alternative for Germany’s new youth organization is set to kick off its founding conventionThe Associated Press (ABC News)
Dominican Authorities Arrest Journalist Ralph Laurent at Santo Domingo Airport
Dominican Authorities Arrest Journalist Ralph Laurent at Santo Domingo Airport - Haiti Liberte
As we go to press on the morning of Nov. 26, Dominican authorities have been holding a popular Haitian-American journalist in an immigration detention facility for almost three days without charges, although he is a U.S.Kim Ives (Haiti Liberte)
Solus 4.8 Released
General Epoch jump In October, we made the jump to a new epoch, the final chapter of our “Usr-Merge” saga. With the new epoch, we started using a new package repository, named Polaris, after the North Star. This unlocked our ability to remove “Usr-Merge” compatibility symbolic links from packages, update our systemd package, and more.
like this
Sticky situation
RIP Windows: Linux GPU gaming benchmarks on Bazzite (Gamers Nexus)
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Switched my gaming rig over a few weeks ago (Fedora 43 with KDE in my case). The games I play have generally performed better than on the same hardware under Windows 11. I'm fortunate in that the only multiplayer game I play is Counter Strike 2, and Valve has a vested interest in making sure that their anticheat works with Linux.
In the past week or so I've played Cyberpunk 2077 with AMD FSR4 support, CS2, and GTA IV with the fusion fix mod (this one runs ridiculously better than it did on Windows) via Steam, and Fallout London from GoG through Heroic Launcher. The hardest part of that was just configuring the wine prefix for Fallout London to be the same as the one Fallout 4, since it needs to share a bunch of the original game files. I've also got my Epic account hooked up through Heroic Launcher, but haven't tried any of their games yet. I mostly just have whatever they were giving away for free for the past few years on that service.
Really, gaming on Linux has improved in massive leaps and bounds over the past few years. It is unrecognizable compared to even 5 years ago.
Trump's Bigoted Attack on Somalis Denounced From Minneapolis to DC to Mogadishu
cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1173…
President Donald Trump is being roundly condemned for making bigoted attacks on Somalis, whom he referred to collectively as "garbage" earlier this week.
During a Tuesday Cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump unleashed a racist tirade against Somali Americans living in Minnesota, whom he falsely portrayed as layabouts who sponge up welfare money.
"I don't want 'em in our country, I'll be honest with you," Trump said. "Their country's no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don't want 'em in our country. I can say that about other countries too... We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country."
Trump then singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a refugee from Somalia, as being "garbage," and then added that "her friends are garbage."
Trump on Somalis: "We're gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage." pic.twitter.com/xtRtiTLzLz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 2, 2025Omar fired back at Trump in an op-ed published Thursday in the New York Times in which she said the president was resorting to overt bigotry against her community because he is rapidly losing popularity as his major policy initiatives fall apart.
Omar also defended her community against the false stereotypes deployed by Trump to disparage it.
"[Trump] fails to realize how deeply Somali Americans love this country," she wrote. "We are doctors, teachers, police officers, and elected leaders working to make our country better. Over 90% of Somalis living in my home state, Minnesota, are American citizens by birth or naturalization."
Speaking on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Chuy García (D-Ill.) defended Omar and the Somali community, and called Trump's attacks on them "unacceptable and un-American."
"Not only does Trump's dehumanizing language put a target on her back and put her family at risk, it endangers so many across our country who share her identities and heritage," García added. "We know just how dangerous this racist and inflammatory rhetoric is in an already polarized country."
In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh (D-62), who is also of Somali descent, said Trump's attacks were "hurtful" and "flat-out wrong" given what many Somalis in the US have accomplished.
"It is a community that has been resilient, that has produced so much," he said. "We are teachers and doctors and lawyers and even politicians taking part in every part of Minnesota’s economy and the nation’s economy."
He also emphasized that Trump's rhetoric was putting the entire Somali community in danger.
“We’ve had our mosques be targeted," he said. "Myself, I had a campaign office vandalized earlier this year, and so we want to make sure that our neighbors understand that we’re standing up for one another, showing up in this time in which we have a hostile federal government."
Trump's bigoted attacks on Somalis are also making waves overseas. Al-Jazeera also spoke with a resident of Mogadishu named Abdisalan Ahmed, who described Trump's remarks as "intolerable."
“Trump insults Somalis several times every day, calling us garbage and other derogatory names we can no longer tolerate," he said. "Our leaders should address his remarks."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
From Mogadishu to Minneapolis, Somalis reject Trump’s bigoted remarks
Advocates warn that Trump’s anti-Somali rhetoric has fuelled fear in US communities and anger abroad.Faisal Ali (Al Jazeera)
Does anyone know how to fix this?[SOLVED]
By this I mean the psensor applet icon (second from the left) being to big.
I was messing arround trying to customize my desktop and i followed a guide on how to install and setup latte-dock (kde).
Long story short, i failed removed latte (although I think it may have left some stuff behind) and when I restored my cinnamon panel the icon was like this. I've already restored the system with timeshift but it made no difference and tried to set "symbolic icon size" in panel settings but it completely ignores it. I googled for a solution but cant find any :c
Any ideas?
P.S. If I set panel height too small, all the applet icons go halfway off screen through the bottom, something they didnt used to do.
SOLVED: Using this comand:
gsettings reset-recursively org.cinnamon
Reverts the icons to their normal behaviour. Thanks to potatoguy
I tested all the parameters mentioned in the thread and none worked. Thanks tho.
With this command:
gsettings reset-recursively org.cinnamon
After I used the command the window list applet stopped working but a reboot fixed it
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Trotsky was both wrong and an asshole. Trotsky’s plan of Permanent Revolution rested on the idea that the peasantry would erode socialism, because he thought they could not be truly aligned with the proletariat. That’s why he wanted to kick off revolution in the west, hoping that would save Russian socialism. This was, of course, proven false, as socialism survived and trying to build up socialism together with the peasantry worked out.
Trotsky then spent much of his time attacking the soviet union, essentially whining due to his loss.
distros with isolated programs?
I think that really depends on why the app made the system hang.
Can you reproduce it consistently? If so, you could try out different forms of isolation, like flatpak, docker, a VM. And there are linux distros focused on each of those, but you can try a solution on whatever distro you're running.
If for some reason your system hangs due to resources (which is the only case I have ever experienced), that can be limited through cgroups and such. The only resource I don't know how to limit is GPU compute.
Why I Dumped YouTube (and Why You Might Want to Too – No More Crap)
Hey Lemmy fam,
After years of wading through endless crap—click‑bait thumbnails, algorithmic rabbit holes, and non‑stop ads—I finally stopped using YouTube. Below are the main reasons I walked away and a handful of privacy‑friendly alternatives that let you keep the content you love without the garbage.
YouTube’s recommendation engine throws endless crap at you, turning a 5‑minute tutorial into a 2‑hour binge you never signed up for.
What I do instead:
- Lemmy – I follow specific communities (
r/technology,c/firefox,c/degoogle ``) and browse chronologically or by “Hot”. No hidden agenda, just the posts I chose. - RSS feeds – Subscribe to the channels I actually care about via an RSS reader (Feedly, Newsboat, or Lemmy’s built‑in RSS). New videos appear as they’re posted, no surprise junk.
Every view, pause, and hover is logged and sold to advertisers. Even with an ad‑blocker, YouTube still harvests data through its API calls and cookies.
What I do instead:
- PeerTube – Decentralized, ad‑free video hosting. Each instance runs its own moderation and privacy policies. You can even self‑host a node if you want full control.
Switch to a Fully free Operating System
As per fsf only those linux distributions are 100% free:
Dragora
Dyne
Guix
Hyperbola
Parabola
PureOS
Trisquel
Ututo
libreCMC
ProteanOS
Do you agree or no?
I see a lot of people that want to switch from windows to a linux distro or a open os. But from what i see they tend to migrate to another black boxed/closed os.
What is a trully free os that doesnt included any closed code/binary blobs/closed drivers etc.
Just 100% free open code, no traps.
What are the options and what should one go with if they want fully free os that rejects any closed code?
Hard disagree. Only people that are already in linux-land should even think or talk about this, and only after they're aware of what they depend on and whether they can even do that in the first place.
Main reason: biggest thing holding Linux back is user-base. The more users there are, the more that companies will actually care about supporting the OS. In the meantime, newbies to Linux need an OS that is as hassle free as possible that supports what they need. Windows and macOS have their downsides, but you can't disagree that they work out of the box. You only get a few chances to get someone to even think about switching ecosystems, and going to a straight free distro is another huge hurdle on top of that. Most closed source applications only get tested on debian/rhel based distros anyway, I wouldn't be able to do my my day job on a distro outside of that without some serious headache.
There are many closed source components that don't have equivalent open source alternatives, and features are a thing that will snag many people. Most people aren't technical.
If I keep js disabled and then use extension will it still be a fingerprinting issue?
So if I keep js disabled with Ublock origin (I'm doing it for a while now) and then install dark reader will websites still be able to tell that I have dark reader installed?
This could be a fingerprint as very few people keep JS off and you might stand out.
On the other hand, the browser gives out very little information without JS active. Turn off JS and test your browser on deviceinfo, amiunique, etc and see how many entries are "unknown".
I played around with coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and realized that I'm quite unique whether I allow js or not. Many trackers get blocked by the absence of js though so that would hamper them somewhat.
My Sony phone with 21:9 screen ensures I'm uncommon compared to most.
My goal isn't to be untrackable but to block the ads they try to shove in your face as step 2.
Interesting, it seems that while IronFox has the protections activated by default (and with some changes) you can also activate most of them on Firefox.
github.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox…
Ironfox Devs themselves say that the only browser that can truly protect you against fingerprinting is the Tor Browser.
github.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox…
Do you feel IronFox breaks many sites for you?
IronFox/docs/Features.md at dev · ironfox-oss/IronFox
Private, secure, user first web browser for Android. This is a read-only mirror of https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox. - ironfox-oss/IronFoxGitHub
wuffah
in reply to Peter Link • • •