Israel has closed crossings into northern Gaza, cutting the most direct route for aid to reach hundreds of thousands of people at risk of famine, as airstrikes and shelling killed dozens more people in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The move to close the crossings on Thursday will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as attention shifts from its brief conflict with Iran, back to the violence and grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

During the 12 days Israel was fighting Iran, more than 800 Palestinians were killed in Gaza – either shot as they desperately sought food in increasingly chaotic circumstances or in successive waves of Israeli strikes and shelling.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said Israeli forces had killed 56 people on Thursday, including six who were waiting for food in two separate locations.

Israel closes the most direct route for aid to Palestinians in Gaza

Blockade will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as Spain PM Pedro Sánchez describes situation as ‘genocide’

^{Jason Burke (The Guardian)}

Mercoledì 2 luglio a Chieri è in programma il primo appuntamento serale estivo di Sentiero Verde 2025, il calendario annuale delle iniziative dell’associazione Camminare lentamente, patrocinato dalla Città Metropolitana di Torino, che proporrà un piacevole itinerario ad anello di 6 km nelle colline chieresi. L’escursione che si svolgerà sustrade asfaltate, inghiaiate e sterrate è facile e adatta anche alle famiglie, tra antiche dimore e cascine appartenute nei secoli passati ad importanti famiglie della nobiltà piemontese, come la magnifica villa Cipresso, realizzata su progetto dell’architetto Bernardo Antonio Vittone intorno alla metà del ‘700. Il ritrovo dei partecipanti è fissato a Chieri nella sede del Consorzio dei Servizi Socio Assistenziali del Chierese in strada Valle Pasano 4 e la partenza è prevista per le 20,30.

Un degustazione di vini bianchi e rossi Doc prodotti dalla Cantina Sperimentale Bonafous del Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie Forestali e Ambientali dell’Università di Torino è in programma all’arrivo a Sant’Irene, la “Cappella delle vigne”, costruzione a forma cilindrica costruita nel XIX secolo, sormontata da una cupola e da un lanternino che ricordano la Basilica di Superga, da cui il nome di Superghetta con cui è conosciuta dai chieresi. Il calare delle notte consentirà l’osservazione della Luna al primo quarto e delle costellazioni estive, guidata da Alberto Cora, Roberto Silvotti e Alessandro Spagna, dell’Osservatorio di Torino dell’Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica. A seguire il rientro al punto di partenza della passeggiata.

La quota di partecipazione alla camminata è di 3 euro per i soci di Camminare Lentamente e 10 euro per i non soci (comprensiva della tessera associativa 2025). è prevista la gratuità per i minori di 18 anni.

Per informazioni e iscrizioni, entro il 1° luglio, i numeri telefonici da chiamare sono il 349-7210715 o il 380-6835571, oppure si può scrivere a camminarelentamente2@gmail.com,www.camminarelentamente.it

Alla scoperta di vino, luna e stelle Mercoledì 2 luglio a Chieri (To) con "Sentiero verde 2025" - ViaggieMiraggi

Mercoledì 2 luglio a Chieri è in programma il primo appuntamento serale estivo di Sentiero Verde 2025, il calendario annuale delle iniziative dell’associazione Camminare lentamente, patrocinato dalla Città Metropolitana di Torino, che proporrà un pia…

^{Redazione (ViaggieMiraggi)}

Local law enforcement faces public criticism of biometric surveillance plans

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin is calling on the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider plans to adopt the use of facial recognition technology. Like the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), the sheriff’s office is considering acquiring facial recognition technology from the company Biometrica. The company has offered MPD free access in exchange for 2.5 million images, jail records, and other related data of people who have passed through Milwaukee’s criminal justice system, including many who presumably haven’t been convicted of a crime.

“Given all the public opposition we’ve seen to the Milwaukee Police Department’s push to expand their use of facial recognition, the news of the Sheriffs office’s interest in acquiring this technology is deeply concerning,” Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director for the ACLU of Wisconsin, wrote in a statement for an ACLU press release. “Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software poses a number of serious threats to civil rights and civil liberties, making it dangerous both when it fails and when it functions.”

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/26/facial-recognition-technology-stirs-more-controversy-in-milwaukee/

Israel has closed crossings into northern Gaza, cutting the most direct route for aid to reach hundreds of thousands of people at risk of famine, as airstrikes and shelling killed dozens more people in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The move to close the crossings on Thursday will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as attention shifts from its brief conflict with Iran, back to the violence and grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

During the 12 days Israel was fighting Iran, more than 800 Palestinians were killed in Gaza – either shot as they desperately sought food in increasingly chaotic circumstances or in successive waves of Israeli strikes and shelling.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said Israeli forces had killed 56 people on Thursday, including six who were waiting for food in two separate locations.

Israel closes the most direct route for aid to Palestinians in Gaza

Blockade will increase diplomatic pressure on Israel as Spain PM Pedro Sánchez describes situation as ‘genocide’

^{Jason Burke (The Guardian)}

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-paywall-in-the-u-s/

https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-paywall-in-the-u-s/

Can the cops get your online data? In short, yes. There are a variety of US federal and state laws which give law enforcement powers to obtain information that you provided to online services. But, there are steps you as a user and/or as a service provider can take to improve online privacy.

Law enforcement demanding access to your private online data goes back to the beginning of the internet. In fact, one of EFF’s first cases, Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, exemplified the now all-too-familiar story where unfounded claims about illegal behavior resulted in overbroad seizures of user messages. But it’s not the ’90s anymore, the internet has become an integral part of everyone’s life. Everyone now relies on organizations big and small to steward our data, from huge service providers like Google, Meta, or your ISP, to hobbyists hosting a blog or Mastodon server.

There is no “cloud,” just someone else's computer—and when the cops come knocking on their door, these hosts need to be willing to stand up for privacy, and know how to do so to the fullest extent under the law. These legal limits are also important for users to know, not only to mitigate risks in their security plan when choosing where to share data, but to understand whether these hosts are going to bat for them. Taking action together, service hosts and users can curb law enforcement getting more data than they’re allowed, protecting not just themselves but targeted populations, present and future.

This is distinct from law enforcement’s methods of collecting public data, such as the information now being collected on student visa applicants. Cops may use social media monitoring tools and sock puppet accounts to collect what you share publicly, or even within “private” communities. Police may also obtain the contents of communication in other ways that do not require court authorization, such as monitoring network traffic passively to catch metadata and possibly using advanced tools to partially reveal encrypted information. They can even outright buy information from online data brokers. Unfortunately there are few restrictions or oversight for these practices—something EFF is fighting to change.

Below however is a general breakdown of the legal processes used by US law enforcement for accessing private data, and what categories of private data these processes can disclose. Because this is a generalized summary, it is neither exhaustive nor should be considered legal advice. Please seek legal help if you have specific data privacy and security needs.

How Cops Can Get Your Private Online Data

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/25/labour-moves-to-ban-palestine-action-and-designate-it-as-a-terrorist-group/

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del film “Into the wild” ma questo secondo album; ‘Ukulele Songs’, non convince del tutto... Leggi e ascolta...

ᗩᐯᗩIᒪᗩᗷᒪᗴ

2025-06-27 07:24:52

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs (2011)

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del film “Into the wild” ma questo secondo album; ‘Ukulele Songs’, non convince del tutto. Nei trentacinque minuti del disco ci sono brani prevalentemente già pubblicati dai Pearl Jam e altri già sentiti perché sono cover o presentati in tournée con il gruppo, solo alcuni sono originali... silvanobottaro.blog/2024/01/02…

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Ascolta: album.link/i/1440665545

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

Eddie Vedder — Ukulele Songs (2011)

Vedder è un grande musicista, una grande voce, un grande leader (I Pearl Jam sono uno dei gruppi più importanti e più amati degli ultimi decenni), ci ha regalato la splendida colonna sonora del fil…

^{Silvano Bottaro Blog}

A battered dollar is taking another beating as investors, unnerved by fresh signs of an erosion in U.S. central bank independence, waste no time in pushing the greenback back to its lowest levels in over three years.

The dollar was back at multi-year lows against a basket of other major currencies on Thursday , erasing a brief respite provided by safe-haven flows related to Middle East tensions earlier in the week.

Down 10% so far this year and set for its worst year since 2003, the dollar was expected to weaken further as renewed concern about Fed independence comes amid increased expectations for rate cuts and a looming July 9 deadline for trade agreements.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/no-love-dollar-markets-fret-about-fed-independence-2025-06-26/

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump’s trade wars disrupted business, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in an unexpected deterioration of earlier estimates.

First-quarter growth was weighed down by a surge of imports as U.S. companies, and households, rushed to buy foreign goods before Trump could impose tariffs on them. The Commerce Department previously estimated that the economy fell 0.2% in the first quarter. Economists had forecast no change in the department’s third and final estimate.

The January-March drop in gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — reversed a 2.4% increase in the last three months of 2024 and marked the first time in three years that the economy contracted. Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points.

U.S. economy shrank 0.5% between January and March, worse than 2 earlier estimates had revealed

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump’s import taxes at least temporarily disrupted business, the Commerce Department said.

^{PBS News}

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-poaches-three-openai-researchers-eb55eea9?st=8QcsTj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

AI companies could have the legal right to train their large language models on copyrighted works — as long as they obtain copies of those works legally.

That's the upshot of a first-of-its-kind ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco on Monday in an ongoing copyright infringement case that pits a group of authors against a major AI company.

The ruling is significant because it represents the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems.

Fair use doctrine enables copyrighted works to be used by third parties without the copyright holder's consent in some circumstances such as illustrating a point in a news article. Claims of fair use are commonly invoked by AI companies trying to make the case for the use of copyrighted works to train their generative AI models. But authors and other creative industry plaintiffs have been pushing back with a slew of lawsuits.

Elon Musk's xAI made quite a splash when it built a data center with 200,000 GPUs that consumes approximately 250 MW of power. However, it appears that OpenAI has an even larger data center in Texas, which consumes 300 MW and houses hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs, details of which were not disclosed. Furthermore, the company is expanding the site, and by mid-2026, it aims to reach a gigawatt scale, according to SemiAnalysis. Such gargantuan AI clusters are creating challenges for power companies not only in power generation but also in power grid safety.

OpenAI appears to operate what is described as the world's largest single data center building, with an IT load capacity of around 300 MW and a maximum power capacity of approximately 500 MW. This facility includes 210 air-cooled substations and a massive on-site electrical substation, which further highlights its immense scale. A second identical building is already under construction on the same site as of January 2025. When completed, this expansion will bring the total capacity of the campus to around a gigawatt, a record.

OpenAI's gargantuan data center is even bigger than Elon Musk's xAI Colossus — world's largest 300 MW AI data center could reach record 1 gigawatt scale by next year, threatens grid stability

It's the world's largest single building

^{Anton Shilov (Tom's Hardware)}

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that if states decide to unilaterally cut off Medicaid funding to a healthcare provider—in this case Planned Parenthood—patients cannot sue to stop them.

Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the decision in the case, known as Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. In his opinion, he wrote that the Medicaid provision that protects patients’ ability to choose their doctor lacks the “rights-creating language” needed for patients to bring federal lawsuits when a state restricts their choice.

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision would gut the landmark Reconstruction-era civil rights law giving ordinary citizens the ability to sue in federal court when their rights are violated. “South Carolina asks us to hollow out that provision so that the State can evade liability for violating the rights of its Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctors,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court just made it easier for states to defund Planned Parenthood

“Today’s decision…is a dangerous green light for politicians to target any providers they don’t like."

^{Mother Jones}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/32032383

404 Media

2025-06-26 16:41:12

ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.

The news highlights the Trump administration’s growing use of sophisticated technology for its mass deportation efforts and ICE’s enforcement of its arrest quotas. The document also shows how biometric systems built for one reason can be repurposed for another, a constant fear and critique from civil liberties proponents of facial recognition tools.

“The Mobile Fortify App empowers users with real-time biometric identity verification capabilities utilizing contactless fingerprints and facial images captured by the camera on an ICE issued cell phone without a secondary collection device,” one of the emails, which was sent to all Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) personnel and seen by 404 Media, reads. ERO is the section of ICE specifically focused on deporting people.

The idea is for ICE to use this new tool to identify people whose identity ICE officers do not know. “This information can be used to identify unknown subjects in the field,” the email continues. “Officers are reminded that the fingerprint matching is currently the most accurate biometric indicator available in the application,” it adds, indicating that the fingerprint functionality is more accurate than the facial recognition component.

The emails also show the app has a “training range,” a feature that lets ICE officers practice capturing facial images and fingerprints in a “training non-live environment.”

💡
Do you know anything else about this app? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

A video posted to social media this month shows apparent ICE officers carefully pointing their phones at a protester in his vehicle, but it is not clear if the officers were taking ordinary photos or using this tool.

Broadly, facial recognition tools work by taking one image to be tested and comparing it to a database of other images. Clearview AI for example, a commercially available facial recognition tool which is used by law enforcement but which doesn’t appear to be related to this ICE tool, compares a photo to a massive database of peoples’ photos scraped from social media and the wider web.

For the facial recognition capability of this ICE tool, the emails say Mobile Fortify is using two government systems. The first is Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Traveler Verification Service. As part of the Traveler Verification Service, CBP takes photos of peoples’ faces when they enter the U.S. and compares these to previously collected ones. In an airport those can include photos from a passport, visa, or earlier CBP encounters, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) previously published by CBP. With land crossings, that can include a gallery of “frequent” crossers for that port of entry, the PIA adds.

The second is the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow. This is what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) describes as an “intelligence aggregator,” bringing together information related to searches and seizures.

“The app uses CBP's Traveler Verification Service and the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information for facial recognition,” the email reads. The exact definition of derogatory information in this context is not clear but 404 Media has previously reported on a database that ICE uses to find “derogatory” speech online.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
One of the internal ICE emails says the app also has a “Super Query” functionality, which is available to ICE officers who also have access to another CBP system called the Unified Passenger Login system (UPAX) which is used for passenger vetting. “This additional tool allows the user to Super Query the facial or biometric results to better assist in determining the immigration status of the person in question,” the email says.

One of the emails says the tool uses DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), the agency’s central biometric system, for the fingerprint matches.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. CBP acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

ICE already has access to other facial recognition tools. A 404 Media review of public procurement records shows at least $3,614,000 worth of contracts between the agency and Clearview, for example. Clearview’s tool may reveal a subject’s name and social media profiles. But the company’s results won’t include information on a person’s immigration status or other data held by the government, whereas a government curated tool might.

“This information can be used to identify unknown subjects in the field.”

The Mobile Fortify app is just the latest example of ICE turning to technological solutions to support its deportation mission. 404 Media previously revealed Palantir, for example, was working with ICE to build a system to help find the location of people flagged for deportation as part of a $30 million contract extension. Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” according to leaked internal Palantir discussions 404 Media obtained.

At first facial recognition was a capability only available to the government. Over the last several years the technology has proliferated enough that ordinary members of the public can access commercially available tools that reveal someone’s identity just with a photo, or build their own tailored tools. On Tuesday 404 Media reported that a site called ‘FuckLAPD.com’ is able to identify police officers using a database of officer photos obtained through public records requests. The same artist who made that tool also created one called ICEspy, which is designed to identify employees of ICE, although the underlying data is out of date.

ICE officers are consistently wearing masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to mask their identity while detaining people.

According to internal ICE data obtained by NBC News, the Trump administration has arrested only 6 percent of known immigrant murderers. Meanwhile, ICE continues to detain nonviolent, working members of immigrant communities who have lived in the country for decades, particularly in Los Angeles. NBC News says almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted or charged with any crime.

In May, the Trump administration gave ICE a quota of 3,000 arrests a day.

Trump administration sets quota to arrest 3,000 people a day in anti-immigration agenda

The target was delivered by Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, and triples figures fromearlier this year

^{José Olivares (The Guardian)}

Hey everyone, Thunder v0.7.1 is finally here! This release primarily focuses on improving Thunder’s core architecture in preparation for upcoming API changes. As a result, there aren’t too many new features this time around. The work is still ongoing and will take a bit more time to complete, but doing so will lay the foundation for Thunder to more easily support future API versions and platforms.

As always, if you experience any issues or have suggestions or feedback, feel free to share them with the Thunder community or on GitHub.

For those using Google Play or the App Store, it may take a couple of days to receive the update as it's being rolled out.

If you're enjoying Thunder and would like to show some support, star this project on GitHub! This helps gain visibility for the project and allows more contributors to help with the continued development of Thunder. If you'd like to show some appreciation, here is a post with details on how to donate to the active contributors of Thunder.

We have a Matrix space if you would like to join in on discussions: matrix.to/#/#thunderapp:matrix…

Here are the changes between versions v0.6.1 and v0.7.1. For improved readability, internal issues introduced and fixed in nightly versions will be largely omitted.

Additions
* Added ability to search for top-level settings by micahmo in #1668
* Added semantic labels to all overflow/popup buttons by micahmo in #1705
* Added semantic label to community search subscription button by micahmo in #1790
* Added ability to mark private messages as read by hjiangsu in #1762
* Added ability to toggle community icons in compact mode by hjiangsu in #1746
* Added prompt to add original post body when cross-posting links and images by hjiangsu in #1759
* Added action chips to user and community headers by hjiangsu in #1851
* Added loading indicator on startup under slow network connections by micahmo in #1795
* Added additional support contact in About page by hjiangsu in #1866

Changes
* Enabled the experimental post page to be the default by hjiangsu in #1713
* Enabled full-height images in default configuration by hjiangsu in #1756
* Enabled ability for last tapped post to preserve it's state by micahmo in #1520
* Improved markdown link behaviour by micahmo in #1700
* Improved UX for toggling pure black theme by hjiangsu in #1690
* Improved visibility of comment navigator in dark mode by micahmo in #1691
* Improved message clarity of "Mark all as read" action by micahmo in #1766
* Improved reply preview actions touch area by hjiangsu in #1815
* Improved notification user handling by micahmo in #1865
* Improved handling of tall images in feed/post by hjiangsu in #1709
* Improved comment depth indicators by hjiangsu in #1788
* Improved post loading under slow network connections by micahmo in #1796
* Improved image handling for instances with image proxy enabled by hjiangsu in #1807
* Improved error handling when navigating to a post of a blocked community by hjiangsu in #1808
* Improved initial feed loading API calls by hjiangsu in #1852
* Display full username in private messages by micahmo in #1823
* Display user avatars only when they have an associated image by hjiangsu in #1806
* Featured posts are compacted when using card mode by hjiangsu in #1757
* Moved author and community metadata to the top of post page by hjiangsu in #1844
* Improved community icon setting terminology by hjiangsu in #1747
* Removed scrape missing previews option by hjiangsu in #1721

Fixes
* Fixed profile modal staying open after logging into new account by micahmo in #1701
* Fixed profile modal not closing after switching accounts by micahmo in #1706
* Fixed issue navigating to post after creation by micahmo in #1797
* Fixed post body not updating after performing an edit by micahmo in #1789
* Fixed instance display in post by micahmo in #1799
* Fixed comment sort setting label not matching selected comment sort option by micahmo in #1771
* Fixed issue where blocked user comments are attached to wrong comment tree by hjiangsu in #1835
* Fixed color of block icon on "Block User" button by micahmo in #1693
* Fixed color of block community button by micahmo in #1834
* Fixed size of vote buttons on the post page by micahmo in #1792
* Fixed link images not respecting edge-to-edge option by hjiangsu in #1708
* Fixed Bluesky image URL parsing by hjiangsu in #1801
* Fixed issue with block quotes not being applied in some cases by micahmo in #1727
* Fixed taglines not showing on anonymous accounts by hjiangsu in #1817
* Fixed advanced share sheet overflow by micahmo in #1794
* Fixed visual glitch when navigating to posts via link by micahmo in #1760
* Fixed visual glitch on post page app bar by micahmo in #1783
* Fixed search keyboard popping up when using back navigation by hjiangsu in #1738
* Fixed video player back button on landscape mode not being displayed by hjiangsu in #1749
* Fixed notification page overlapping with bottom navigation bar by micahmo in #1761
* Fixed positioning of the pull-to-refresh indicator by micahmo in #1861
* Fixed full date setting not accounting for user timezone by hjiangsu in #1758
* Fixed FAB settings page navigation by micahmo in #1811
* Fixed issue where empty inbox message is shown prematurely by micahmo in #1791
* Fixed issue with the feed FAB appearing on the account page by micahmo in #1793
* Fixed community naming by micahmo in #1878

Misc
* Consolidated navigation, account, and authentication logic by hjiangsu in #1707, #1826
* Reorganized account, settings, and removed unused functions/classes by hjiangsu in #1822, #1824
* Refactored media thumbnails and related logic by hjiangsu in #1720, #1714, #1715
* Refactored post-related components (cards, metadata, widgets) by hjiangsu in #1784, #1730, #1723, #1734, #1740, #1743, #1862, #1867, #1868
* Refactored comment-related components (cards, headers, widgets) by hjiangsu in #1800, #1847
* Refactored user-related components (avatar, chips, header, indicator, sidebar) by hjiangsu in #1752, #1751, #1753, #1755, #1754, #1764, #1763, #1769
* Refactored community-related widgets and logic by hjiangsu in #1750, #1702, #1773
* Refactored core logic to use internal models (account, post, feed type) by hjiangsu in #1814, #1838, #1839, #1853, #1836
* Refactored user preferences and modlog logic by hjiangsu in #1842, #1831
* Refactored navigation and linking (sharing intent, deep link, feed page app bar) by hjiangsu in #1832, #1829, #1863
* Refactored instance-related components (list entry, info response) by hjiangsu in #1821
* Updated translations from Weblate by hjiangsu in #1781
* Updated instances by github-actions in #1688, #1782
* Upgraded Thunder to Flutter 3.32.0 and updated gradle/NDK versions by hjiangsu in #1850, #1859

Is there a way to contribute monetarily to active Thunder developers?

I.e. librepay, buymeacoffee or patreon, so we can contribute to the developers who donate their time and skills to develop Thunder. :)

^{Coehill (GitHub)}

More Info.

More Info.

• Source Code.
• Orange Meets
  > Developing a new video conferencing application often begins with a peer-to-peer setup using WebRTC, facilitating direct data exchange between clients. While effective for small demonstrations, this method encounters scalability hurdles with increased participants. The data transmission load for each client escalates significantly in proportion to the number of users, as each client is required to send data to every other client except themselves (n-1).

In the scaling of video conferencing applications, Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) are essential. Essentially a media stream routing hub, an SFU receives media and data flows from participants and intelligently determines which streams to forward. By strategically distributing media based on network conditions and participant needs, this mechanism minimizes bandwidth usage and greatly enhances scalability. Nearly every video conferencing application today uses SFUs.

In 2024, we announced Cloudflare Realtime (then called Cloudflare Calls), our suite of WebRTC products, and we also released Orange Meets, an open source video chat application built on top of our SFU.

We also realized that use of an SFU often comes with a privacy cost, as there is now a centralized hub that could see and listen to all the media contents, even though its sole job is to forward media bytes between clients as a data plane.

We believe end-to-end encryption should be the industry standard for secure communication and that’s why today we’re excited to share that we’ve implemented and open sourced end-to-end encryption in Orange Meets. Our generic implementation is client-only, so it can be used with any WebRTC infrastructure. Finally, our new designated committer distributed algorithm is verified in a bounded model checker to verify this algorithm handles edge cases gracefully.

Orange Me2eets: We made an end-to-end encrypted video calling app and it was easy

Orange Meets, our open-source video calling web application, now supports end-to-end encryption using the MLS protocol with continuous group key agreement

^{The Cloudflare Blog}

archive.is link

At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?

In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?

The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.

Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.

https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/