cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/43260260

Human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who advocates for Ukraine on the international stage, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has called on Germany to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles and to take a more decisive stance against Russia.

...

Matviichuk noted that it takes Russian missiles less than a minute to reach, for example, a school in Kharkiv.

“The only way to prevent this is to stop these missiles while they are still at a military airfield in Russia. For that, we need Taurus,” she told the media group Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) in an interview.

As stated, the human rights defender urged Germany to more thoroughly analyse the mistakes the country had made in its relations with Russia, particularly highlighting cases of bribery of the German elite during the construction of the gas pipeline.

In her view, until 2022, Germany — like the civilised world in general — allowed Moscow to act with impunity for far too long.

...

“Russian war crimes in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Mali, Libya, Syria — no one was held accountable,” Matviichuk emphasised, calling on Berlin to act more decisively now by reassessing its overall policy toward Moscow.

“We are living in times that test all of us for genuine leadership, genuine courage, and genuine responsibility,” she stated.

Earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not oppose supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine. However, after taking office, he has not made the corresponding decision.

...

Nobel laureate Matviichuk urges Germany to provide Ukraine with Taurus missiles

Human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who advocates for Ukraine on the international stage, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has called on Germany to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles and to take a more decisive stance against Russi…

^Ukrinform

Hi, my name is @dohpaz42@lemmy.world and I am a HomeKit user.

My draw to HomeKit is the ecosystem, and its ease of use for me and for my kids (we are all iOS users).

I have been reading about the differences between both Home Assistant (HA) and HomeKit (HK), and I do like the idea of having more control over everything, and exponentially more devices available to me through HA.

In fact, what inspired my research is to look for an alternative to myQ for my garage door opener. And while I have found ratgdo that can do everything myQ can do, and more, it’s my basic understanding that HK support is not as great as HA.

I do understand that to use HA, I will need something to use as a dedicated hub; I have a few Pis running in my house already that I could easily make into a dedicated hub. So that’s not an issue.

I am also tech savvy, but I do not wish to spend all of my waking hours tweaking things. More importantly, I want to know if my kids can easily use HA devices without them having to be tech savvy.

Can HA be set up in a way that my kids can just point and click using apps on their devices? Can anybody help show me (screenshots, videos) what that might look like?

Thank you in advance.

Thousands of contracts and documents outline the contours of DHS’s surveillance capabilities: geolocation, facial recognition, DNA testing, eye scans, spyware, licence plate cameras, credit reports and more. AI tools cross-reference datasets, while mobile apps give field agents information at their fingertips.

At the same time, the proliferation of data brokers and digital, “open-source” intelligence has made surveillance easier than ever. Unlike the government programmes revealed by Edward Snowden over a decade ago, DHS has not needed to build extensive in-house capabilities — vendors now offer sweeping tools at relatively low cost.

A wide array of private corporations, from global powerhouses to niche start-ups, have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, including AT&T, Thomson Reuters, Palantir and Clearview AI. Some have hired lobbyists with ties to the White House to capitalise on ICE’s growing ambitions.

Individual surveillance technologies should be understood within the “mass surveillance context”, says Emily Tucker, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “All this stuff is being used together.”

Former officials say internal safeguards have been sidelined. “There’s less oversight and more willingness to break the rules,” says Deborah Fleischaker, who served as DHS’s privacy officer and ICE chief of staff under Biden.

“Things are just unbound,” she adds. “People are doing things that have never been done before, in ways that have never been done before, with fewer safeguards in place.”

More than a dozen former senior government officials familiar with Trump’s deportation push spoke with the FT, most on the condition of anonymity fearing retribution.

They hold a range of views about the administration’s policies and left the department for a variety of reasons, but all shared concerns about the volume of data collection, the lack of oversight, and the shift from criminal to immigration work. Many raised fears that surveillance tools may soon be used on left-wing groups and protestors who ICE claims are threats to its agents.

An FT analysis of federal procurement data shows ICE has spent at least $353mn on surveillance contracts this year, up 27 per cent from 2024. In July, Trump’s spending bill gave ICE $29bn for operations on top of its existing annual budgets for the next four years, empowering the agency to buy more tools.

ICE is hiring staff to monitor social media, seeking contractors in Vermont and California to gather “information obtained from commercial and law enforcement databases as well as publicly accessible, open-source and social media platforms.”

ICE is also hiring old-fashioned private investigators. A tender posted last month seeks contractors to “use all technology systems available” to find addresses for persons of interest, including “physical observation”. The agency says it has approximately 1.5mn names it will divide among these vendors, who can earn between $7.5mn and $281mn based on the number of people they locate.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection also collect DNA from detainees and asylum applicants, according to a privacy disclosure. One attorney says he was representing a US citizen who was given a cheek swab while incorrectly detained. Samples are stored in an FBI database where they are queryable by a range of law enforcement agencies.

ICE has also signed a contract with BI² Technologies, a vendor selling handheld eye scanners. Former officials questioned the need for the devices, noting that the agency held few, if any, iris scans to search. “My first question is why?” a former privacy official says. “What do you expect to get out of this? If they’re just out there collecting irises and biometrics, that’s a problem for me.”

“They’re spending a lot of money on things they might not even use, to benefit people who are maybe close to the administration,” says Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit monitoring ICE’s surveillance purchases. “They’re moving very fast.”

Procurement records also show that ICE has obtained tools previous administrations found problematic.

In August, ICE removed a hold on a $2mn contract with the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, which sells a phone-hacking tool called Graphite. It has been used by the Italian government to target European journalists with iMessage and WhatsApp attacks, according to researchers at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

The contract was paused by the Biden White House, which had banned the use of spyware sold by foreign companies with human rights concerns. Paragon was subsequently acquired by US-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which also controls Department of Defense contractor REDLattice.

A major earthquake of magnitude 7.6 has hit Japan's north-eastern region.

The quake occurred at 23:15 (14:15 GMT) at a depth of 50km (31 miles), about 80km off the coast of the Aomori region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said,

It prompted tsunami warnings which have now been downgraded to advisories, while waves of 40cm (16in) were seen in some places.

Local media reports that some people in the region have been injured, while trains have been suspended as a precaution.

A Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) is a document that provides information to the Fediverse community. The goal of a FEP is to improve interoperability and well-being of diverse services, applications and communities that form the Fediverse.

The FEP Process is an initiative of the SocialHub developer community, a liaison of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group.

Discovered this today. If you're on the developer side of things or are interested in how the Fediverse / ActivityPub is being built and enhanced, take a look at this codeberg repo.

fep

Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

^Codeberg.org

when reading through the jellyfin with chromecast guide i realized that it would probably be less effort to just let the casting api be public, with the added bonus that i could then cast my library to any device that supports it. but that seems like it would paint a giant target on the server.

what's the recommended way of doing stuff like this? ideally i want to be able to go to someone's house and just play some of my media on their tv.

not that any of this is doable in the near future, since i'm behind cgnat and won't get my colocated bounce server up until spring.

Jellyfin with Chromecast

Jellyfin with Chromecast. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

^Gist