A group of illegal settlers stormed the outskirts of the Abu Falah village and torched the one-story home, causing parts of the house to burn, local sources told the state news agency Wafa.

Israeli forces raided the area and opened fire at residents who gathered near the scene, though no injuries were reported, the agency said.

The UN warned on Friday of a sharp rise in illegal Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, reporting 264 settler attacks in October alone, the highest monthly toll in nearly two decades.

“That’s the highest monthly toll in nearly two decades of record keeping, averaging more than eight incidents every single day since 2006,” UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said, citing the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In a separate attack, Palestinian farmers, journalists, and foreign activists sustained fractures and bruises after illegal settlers assaulted them during an olive-harvesting activity in the town of Beita, south of Nablus, Wafa said.

Mohammad Hamayel, deputy mayor of Beita, said that illegal settlers attacked participants harvesting olives in the Qamas Mountain area.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said its medical teams treated several injured people and transferred them to hospitals, but did not specify a number.

Among those injured were foreign solidarity activists, paramedics, and journalists, including Reuters reporter Raneen Sawafta and two journalists from Al Jazeera, according to local sources cited by Anadolu.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/?p=821670

Cross-posted from fediverse user @peachy@goto.micromail.me

Is there such a thing as a configurable full-body input controller for computers? Is anyone working on that? I know there is work on controlling computers directly with the brain, which will be ace for people with full paralysis, but what I’m interested in is something that goes in the other direction - using more of the body. Think Tom Cruise’s interface in Minority Report but better.
Sitting, or even standing, to work at a computer takes its toll on the body, especially the back. Our bodies didn’t evolve to be so static while we’re awake. Emerging from a flare-up of a slipped disc, it has got me thinking of better ways to interface with machines.

Imagine the following:

You come to see me in my studio to see how I and my colleagues do image editing and graphic design in GIMP 4.0. Some of us are stood in front of large displays but no one seems to be using a keyboard, mouse or graphics tablet. I appear to be doing a dance routine from a music video... As I bounce my knee up and across my body you see that the Move tool has been selected. As I raise my left fist above my head it is as though I am holding shift to toggle “Pick a layer or guide”. I draw my right hand across my body with my thumb and forefinger pinched and the selected layer moves with me. Finally, I quickly raise both hands, like I'm flipping over a table and my project is saved and closed. Now that I’ve stopped moving around so energetically you notice that my stylish and comfortable cotton loungewear and gloves have small sensors dotted around them. I explain that the position of these sensors relative to each other and to the space have been mapped to traditional keyboard and mouse inputs via my operating system.

Moving to the next workspace you see my colleague Babs. Her white hair pokes out above a VR headset and she has a number of small cameras tracking her movement to the soundtrack of Chinese classical music. She is an elder and a veteran and even contributed some of the code that makes this stuff work, back in the day. She says it was no big deal; she mostly just connected up different programs, some of which Hollywood has been using since the 1990s.
Her movements are slow and smooth. It looks like she’s doing Qi Gong or Tai Chi or something. Raising a hand in front of her heart you see the Filters menu open and lowering it slowly the menu scrolls down to Enhance. Gracefully stepping sideways and lowering her hand further, Heal Selection is highlighted in the submenu. Turning her hand palm-up launches the plugin. She tells you that one of her first contributions to the interface was to make the body position tolerances configurable by the user in their desktop settings.

Lastly you watch my cousin Tommy at work. When we met I told you about how a head injury had left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. He too is using a VR headset, but instead of having cameras pointed at him he has a HD sonar array. His disability was caused by an error in the police’s facial-recognition software and understandably he’s had a thing about cameras ever since. The bad guy got away and he never caught the bus he was running to catch. Every couple of days he asks whether Nancy’s cameras are still disconnected from the network, which they always are.
Tapping his ring-finger once on the armrest of his wheelchair selects the Text tool. Turning his head to the side, he purses his lips and sweeps his face back around to make his text box. You see his mouth moving but there is no sound. “Hi, nice to meet you” appears in his projects new text layer. “You too” you reply. Twitching his right shoulder you see his text layer is duplicated, blinking twice and nodding his head replaces the text with what you just said. He must have used speech-to-text to record your words to his desktop clipboard and then pasted them into the text field. Pressing his index finger against the arm rest and looking toward the ceiling brings the new text layer to the top of the stack.
Running the same sequence of movements again, a third text layer becomes visible onscreen. “I’d never edited a picture in my life until I got into this tech as part of my physiotherapy treatment. My cousin ended up offering me this job and now I can work faster than anyone else here, especially Babs. I’m pretty sure she’s just here for fun but none of us mind.”

#tech #health #disability #GIMP #solarpunk

Post by 🐚 📷 Jack Burton🌛 🎸, @peachy@goto.micromail.me

The human body as an input controller. Is there such a thing as a configurable full-body input controller for computers? Is anyone working on that? I know th…

^{goto.micromail.me}

The MAGA representative is continuing her break with the Republican Party—and the president himself.

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is still one of the few GOP members to rebuke Trump and his lies in any meaningful way.

Taylor Greene spoke freely in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday night. “The president says there’s virtually no inflation, and that grocery prices are going down,” Collins asked the Georgia representative. “Do you agree with him on that?”

“No, I go to the grocery store myself. Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, D.C., at my apartment, and they’re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia, higher than they were a year ago,” MTG said. “Affordability is a problem, and I’m a mom. My kids are 22, 26, and 28. That’s the generation I worry about the most, and they’re having a very hard time.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls Out Trump’s Blatant Lie on Inflation

^{The New Republic}

These fraudulent ads purport to offer a product or service that isn't actually real, and may be intended to solicit payments from less savvy users.

Meta estimates that it earns 10% of its revenue from scams, report says | TechCrunch

^{Amanda Silberling (TechCrunch)}

Pwetty colours.

Photographer @smetterling@pixelfed.de

Angelino Desmet (@smetterling@pixelfed.de)

🍂

^Pixelfed

Wall Street Journal reports Kristi Noem arranged purchase to expand deportation flights and for personal travel

The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.

The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski -- who managed Donald Trump's first winning presidential campaign -- had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights -- and for personal travel.

Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.

DHS head reportedly authorized purchase of 10 engineless Spirit Airlines planes that airline didn’t own

^{Marina Dunbar (The Guardian)}

https://www.techspot.com/news/110139-new-data-shows-companies-rehiring-former-employees-ai.html

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.

Full Days and the Long Walk

The key is simply — full days out in the world over thin days with the algorithm

^{Craig Mod}

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness.

We spoke with three people in their 40s and 50s about the wonders — and anxieties — of romance with a chatbot.

Inside Three Longterm Relationships With A.I. Chatbots

Three people on the joys and anxieties of A.I. romances.

^{Coralie Kraft (The New York Times)}

They were tricked. Do they deserve to die because they believed a lie? I don't think so.

Human suffering is human suffering. In my experienced opinion, whether or not they brought it upon themselves through their own stupidity/ignorance/obstinacy, it is still human suffering. That is still a toll in human life measurable in mass graves, and saying they deserve to suffer, struggle, and die is sick.

Coal miners in Virginia are dying of black lung faster than their grandfathers did. Farms that feed us are collapsing because of tariffs--meaning your food is going to disappear too. Water, power, and electricity are going to disappear overnight. They are killing themselves faster than they're killing us.

Yes, because of shitbags they voted for. Many of them, they were lied to for their entire lives. If you were raised in any dogmatic belief and had to face the struggle against coming to terms with reality like I have, maybe you'd have a heart and at least give a damn about their lives. Maybe because, even if they're fools and they got what they voted for, they're human too.

Dehumanization is the first step to a purge. The same mental glitch that they have fallen victim to exists in your brain too. You are not immune to propaganda. Take it from someone who knows.

Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.

“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.

“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”

Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Air Traffic Controllers Start Resigning as Shutdown Bites

Unpaid air traffic controllers are quitting their jobs altogether as the longest government shutdown in U.S. history continues.

^{Adam Downer (The Daily Beast)}

Alright so I'm both a physical media freak and a data hoarder, and I generally want to get into making my own torrents of very, very niche movies and TV shows. Trouble is, one BD is very flimsy and data can be even flimsier. I want to duplicate my BluRays and burn them onto other BluRay discs but I've heard that this generally makes the duplicate unreadable because of copy protection.

Is there any specific guide out there that does this or teaches it? I'm not really planning on becoming a bootlegger but a sneakernet of 50-100 disks in boxes is a hell of a lot less startup cost than LTO or even HDDs

Israel’s merciless slaughter of Palestinian civilians, which dates back decades but intensified after the Hamas attack of October 7, is remaking American politics on both the left and the right. As Kamala Harris acknowledges in her recent memoir, 107 Days, Joe Biden’s lack of empathy for Palestinians helped shatter the Democratic Party and was a constant anchor dragging down her campaign against Donald Trump. Even now, although more Democratic politicians are catching up with public opinion by criticizing Israel and eschewing AIPAC funding, left-of-center political leaders remain polarized. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer reportedly sees support for Israel as so core to his personal and political mission that he pointedly refused to endorse—or, by all available evidence, even vote for—New York City’s Democratic Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani due to Mamdani’s criticism of Israel.

The internecine fights on the left are mirrored by internal wrangling on the right, but with one crucial difference. Whereas the common labeling of leftist anti-Zionists as antisemites is usually a spurious accusation made to deflect from legitimate criticism of Israeli human rights abuses and war crimes, there is, in fact, a long history of anti-Zionism and antisemitism being linked on the right. There’s also a long history of conservatives who criticize Israel for perfectly legitimate, non-bigoted reasons—but these days, it’s the antisemitic wing of conservatism that seems to be in the ascendant.

The Heritage Foundation, the once-storied conservative think tank that spearheaded Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, is now an epicenter for the right’s internal battle over Israel. On October 27, Tucker Carlson, who has long-standing ties with Heritage, conducted a lengthy and respectful interview with Nick Fuentes, an overt antisemite and Holocaust denier who opposes America’s alliance with Israel on both anti-Jewish and nationalist grounds. Three days later, Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video affirming that Carlson would “always be a close friend” of the think tank, that his critics were part of a “globalist class,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government.” That last statement may seem uncontroversial, but in the context of Roberts’s other comments, and his defense of Carlson’s flirtation with virulent antisemitism, it rang alarm bells.

This went really well last time.

The Return of Right-Wing Anti-Zionism—and Antisemitism | The Nation

For reasons both good and bad, Israel is dividing the Republican Party.

^{The Nation}

https://www.techspot.com/news/110139-new-data-shows-companies-rehiring-former-employees-ai.html

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.

I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.

There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.

Enter CyberGhost.

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.

For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.

At the risk of sounding like a shill, Mullvad is the answer.

CyberGhost DMCAs Our Story About Their Bogus DMCA (Yes, Really)

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright. I’m not sure …

^Techdirt

Worth noting ... the feds are coming for archival sites.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”

The subpoena is supposed to be secret, but the Archive.today X account posted the document on October 30, the same day the subpoena was issued. The X post contained a link to the PDF and the word “canary.”

“If you refuse to obey this subpoena, the United States Attorney General may invoke the aid of a United States District Court to compel compliance. Your failure to obey the resulting court order may be punished as contempt,” the document said. It gave a deadline of November 29.

FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

Tucows subpoenaed in criminal probe for info on “customer behind archive.today.”…

^{Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)}

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/08/democrats-snap-funding-pause-00643731

È morto Peppe Vessicchio, all’età di 69 anni. Il celebre direttore d’orchestra, arrangiatore e volto televisivo amatissimo dal pubblico italiano, si è spento questo pomeriggio all’ospedale San Camillo di Roma, dove era stato ricoverato a causa di una complicazione improvvisa.

I DETTAGLI: Peppe Vessicchio è morto a 69 anni: addio al maestro icona di Sanremo

Peppe Vessicchio è morto: addio al maestro di Sanremo

È morto Peppe Vessicchio, celebre direttore d’orchestra e icona di Sanremo. Il maestro aveva 69 anni ed è deceduto a Roma

^{Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)}