"One of the most alarming trends in policing is that companies are regularly pushing police to buy more than they need. Vendors regularly pressure police departments to lock in the price now for a whole bundle of features and tools in the name of “cost savings,” often claiming that the cost à la carte for any of these tools will be higher than the cost of a package, which they warn will also be priced more expensively in the future. Market analysts have touted the benefits of creating “moats” between these surveillance ecosystems and any possible competitors. By making it harder to switch service providers due to integrated features, these companies can lock their cop customers into multi-year subscriptions and long-term dependence.
Think your local police are just getting body-worn cameras (BWCs) to help with public trust or ALPRs to aid their hunt for stolen vehicles? Don’t assume that’s the end of it. If there’s already a relationship between a company and a department, that department is much more likely to get access to a free trial of whatever other device or software that company hopes the department will put on its shopping list.
These vendors also regularly help police departments apply for grants and waivers, and provide other assistance to find funding, so that as soon as there’s money available for a public safety initiative, those funds can make their way directly to their business."
#USA #Police #Surveillance #PoliceState #Privacy
RT @wmhuo168
BREAKING: China just buried the hard drive. A team at Fudan University has built a memory chip so fast, so durable, and so revolutionary it could wipe out SSDs, RAM, and even parts of your CPU. The West isn’t ready for this.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-worlds-fastest-flash-memory-device
RT @yanisvaroufakis
How dare they? While they fully back the intentional starvation of two million Palestinians in Gaza, Western leaders are pouring in to attend Pope Francis' funeral. A weaponised hypocrisy in the service of Israel's genocide.
"When Let’s Encrypt, a free certificate authority, started issuing 90 day TLS certificates for websites, it was considered a bold move that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times. Beforehand, certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more. With 4.0, Certbot is now supporting Let’s Encrypt’s new capability for six day certificates through ACME profiles and dynamic renewal at:
- 1/3rd of lifetime left
- 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/certbot-40-long-live-short-lived-certs
#CyberSecurity #WebSecurity #TLS #Certbot #LetsEncrypt
"I'm not the only person for whom a detailed knowledge of scams created immunity from being scammed. Troy Hunt is the proprietor of HaveIBeenPwned.com, the internet's most comprehensive and reliable breach notification site. Hunt pretty much invented the practice of tracking breaches, and he is steeped – saturated – in up-to-the-minute, nitty-gritty details of how internet scams work.
Guess who got phished?
(...)
Hunt had just gotten off a long-haul flight. He was jetlagged. He got a well-constructed, plausible counterfeit email from Mailchimp telling him that his mailing-list – which he absolutely relies upon – had been frozen after a spam complaint, and advising him to click on a link to contest the suspension. He was taken to a fake login screen that his password manager didn't autopopulate, so he manually pasted the password in (Mailchimp doesn't have 2FA). It was only when the login session hung that he realized he'd been scammed – and by then, it was too late. Within minutes, his mailing list had been exported by the scammers.
In his postmortem of the scam, Hunt identifies the overlapping factors that made him vulnerable. He was jetlagged. The mailing list was important. Bogus spam complaints are common. Big corporate sites like Mailchimp often redirect their logins through different domains, which causes password manager autofill to fail. Hunt had experienced near-identical phishing attempts before and spotted them, but this one just happened to land at the very moment that he was vulnerable. Plus – as with my credit union scam – it seems likely that Mailchimp itself had been breached (or has an insider threat), which allowed the scammers to pad out the scam with plausible details that made it seem legit."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish
#Scams #Phishing #CyberSecurity
"Individually, the reports say little that isn’t already in the news or on social media; but taken as a whole, they depict a government hysteria about the attacks on Tesla, described less like petty crime than some kind of violent insurgency. The entire alerting process, in fact, feels like a government-fueled contagion, a set of reports that create the vague impression of an assault on the American way of life.
What is most glaring about the reports in the immediate sense is that President Trump’s March 21 declaration that violence against Tesla is “terrorism” isn’t being echoed by law enforcement or the national intelligence community. Not yet.
A Joint Intelligence Bulletin produced by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security on March 21 (“Individuals Target Tesla Vehicles and Dealerships Nationwide With Arson, Gunfire and Vandalism”) reveals a sweeping effort by both agencies to “investigate,” “deter” and “disrupt” what it calls “nationwide incidents targeting Tesla electric vehicles” and equipment. But it never once mentions the word ‘terrorism’ to describe the spate of attacks on Tesla vehicles that started in January. (This despite the report being produced by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.) Instead, the assessment uses a different word: “vandalism.”"
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/tesla-terrorism-intel-reports-stoke
#USA #Trump #Tesla #Musk #Vandalism #Terrorism #FBI
"Since the Trump administration moved to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, the bureau has dropped nine lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of consumers.
The actions effectively freed major financial firms like Capital One and the mortgage giant Rocket Homes from the threat of consequences for their alleged significant wrongdoing, shocking consumer advocates and raising questions about the future of America’s consumer watchdog. For their part, when the cases were dropped, the companies lauded the decisions, with a bank spokesperson welcoming the dismissal of the case, “which we strongly disputed,” and Rocket Homes calling the suit an “empty claim.”
But the administration’s new hands-off approach to enforcement at the CFPB extends far beyond those public lawsuits. Behind the scenes, dozens of ongoing investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance are now frozen at the agency, potentially denying accountability and financial relief for untold numbers of consumers, a ProPublica investigation has found.
Under a stop-work order issued by the agency’s new leaders, CFPB investigators have been unable to press forward on probes into companies whose products and services are used by tens of millions of Americans, including Carvana, the online used-car retailer; Mr. Cooper, one of the country’s largest mortgage servicers; and CareCredit, a leader in medical credit cards, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matters."
#USA #Trump #CFPB #ConsumersRights #Antitrust #BigTech
"People demonstrate against Israel’s genocidal atrocities? That’s antisemitism — those protesters need to be silenced, arrested, and deported. People object to blatant Zionist influence in their governments? Antisemitic conspiracy theories; we need more hate speech laws and internet censorship. Palestinians take up armed resistance against their oppressors? Israel is the victim of unprovoked attacks from Jew-hating Arabs.
Even real anti-Jewish prejudice benefits the Zionists, because it strengthens the narrative about an urgent crisis of antisemitism which must be crushed by any amount of force necessary, as well as the narrative that Jews need a nation of their own where they can feel safe. So Israel can openly mass murder children while Israeli officials make overt statements of genocidal intent, and if someone blames all Jews for this because they see a state committing atrocities under the banner of the Star of David while claiming to represent all Jews, it only benefits Israel and its supporters.
(As an aside, this is why it’s so important not to blame this on “the Jews”. It’s not just that it’s inaccurate — not all Jews are Zionists, the majority of Zionists are non-Jews, and some of the most effective anti-Zionists in the world happen to be Jewish — it’s that you’re doing exactly what the Zionists and the empire propagandists want you to do. You’re doing their job for them. Don’t be a pro bono Israel propagandist. Make them work for that shit.)"
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-exists-simultaneously-as-the
#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #HumanRights #Genocide #Zionism #Antisemitism
"Today, the European Commission introduced a proposed revision to the 2008 Return Directive, amending the EU legal framework on returns or deportations outside of the EU. Following pressure from certain member states, it also introduces a possible legal basis for ‘return hubs’ in EU law through “agreements or arrangements” with third countries.
“The European Commission has caved to the unworkable, expensive and inhumane demands of a few shrill anti-human rights and anti-migration governments. The Commission itself discarded the concept of ‘return hubs’ in 2018. It is well aware that these proposals will lead to human rights violations, waste millions of euros and alienate allies – at a time when the EU needs friends.
Despite this, today’s proposal lays the ground for states to send people to countries to which they have no connection, to languish in detention centres, with little credible guarantees that their rights will be upheld. Frankly, this is a new low for Europe,” said Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office."
#EU #Migrants #Deportation #HumanRights #Democracy
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqnkn4k86w8advjau7hmxj0j5qx2exxgufu8cqaru7khkdgreym3kse9qmne nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq3tkusutqsx0yjr9szc4vhkxf5fkhne3aka84kxm9jwgp9yj20uzs09wu27 :
"The immediate needs are obvious but does aid dependency help long term?"
Probably not and most likely humanitarian aid is also often more a benign element of a larger neo-colonialist policy than anything else. But this doesn't detract from the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives could be at stake in the short and medium term. And you can't just end up with humanitarian aid all of a sudden without attempting to find an alternative, not to mention giving timely prior notice.
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqnkn4k86w8advjau7hmxj0j5qx2exxgufu8cqaru7khkdgreym3kse9qmne nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq3tkusutqsx0yjr9szc4vhkxf5fkhne3aka84kxm9jwgp9yj20uzs09wu27 This kind of idealistic stance that feigns total detachment from materialist issues concerning mere survival are obnoxious. You don't care about respecting human life. You just want to make a point and that's terrible. Go back to your desert island because living in society requires mutual aid.
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq34u08yp6rdcgcamfdcra9aysvhne9wpssft8ntm9qvfu95erxdcq6y33jv I don't give a damn about Joe Rogan's political opinions. For all I know, he can very well be a left-wing anarchist. The matter of fact is that his podcast includes an increasing number of right-wingers. Joe Rogan may personally disagree with his interviewees but the fact is it doesn't displays it. Maybe that would be bad for his business model. In any case, Joe Rogan's podcast ultimately acts as a vessel for right-wing ideas. This is ideology in action.
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq34u08yp6rdcgcamfdcra9aysvhne9wpssft8ntm9qvfu95erxdcq6y33jv ""Over the last two years, Rogan and his band of politically incorrect merry men in Texas, have grown more openly partisan and more explicitly right-wing. But their brand of politics looks nothing like the WASPy Chamber of Commerce conservatism of old that hates gays and loves austerity.
It’s a bit of a “Don’t Tread on Me,” Bro-style of Ron Paul–adjacent libertarianism that favors free markets, low taxes, and deregulated vices — everyone should be able to do drugs, gamble on sports, watch porn, and trade crypto on demand. They also agree with Democrats on gay marriage and abortions but can’t stand liberals’ sometimes shrill moralism when it comes to matters of top-down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and what they consider the “woke” agenda. It’s what some have branded “Barstool Conservatism” after Barstool Sports and its obnoxious founder, Dave Portnoy. But Rogan’s politics are less Barstool than Portnoy and others in the Manosphere. He sometimes sounds more like a disaffected progressive. “Free health care? Yes!” Rogan once told his Mothership audience. “Education for all? Right on! Men can get pregnant — fuck! I didn’t realize it was a package deal.”
But that disaffection, plus the courting of his big audience among those in MAGAworld has led Rogan to become something during the 2024 election cycle that he wasn’t before — a quirky but relatively garden-variety Republican talking head, like a tattooed Tucker Carlson. Roughly a third of his shows now feature right-leaning pundits and tech CEOs to riff on, say, cancel culture and the joys of dismantling the federal government. Rogan’s now something like the court jester for Big Tech and MAGA’s counterrevolution.""
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/joe-rogan-podcast-manosphere-influencer
"Nonpolitical", a new synonym for reactionary and fascist bullshit propaganda, disinformation, and blatant lies mixed with bad jokes:
"- We found 320 online shows — 191 right-leaning and 129 left-leaning — that were active in 2024 and covered news and politics and/or had related guests. These shows had at least 584.6 million total followers and subscribers.
- We found substantial asymmetry in total following across platforms: Right-leaning online shows had at least 480.6 million total followers and subscribers — nearly five times as many as left-leaning.
- Across platforms — YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — right-leaning online shows accounted for roughly 82% of the total following of the online shows we assessed.
- Comparatively, left-leaning online shows had nearly 104 million followers and subscribers across the eight platforms — nearly five times less.
- Nine out of the 10 online shows with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million. The only left-leaning show among the top 10 was What Now? with Trevor Noah, which had 21.1 million total followers and subscribers across platforms.
- Our analysis — which looked entirely at shows with an ideological bent — found over a third self-identify as nonpolitical, even though 72% of those shows were determined to be right-leaning. Instead, these shows describe themselves as comedy, entertainment, sports, or put themselves in other supposedly nonpolitical categories.
- Out of 320 online shows, right-leaning programs categorized as comedy — 15 shows in all — had 117.5 million followers and subscribers, or 20% of the total following of all programs we assessed. This category included The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, and Full Send Podcast."
#Media #OnlineMedia #Podcasts #Videocasts #Ideology #Propaganda #SocialMedia #Disinformation
Google Translation: "The German Federal Government has detailed information that suggests with some probability that the Sars-CoV-2 virus was created by humans through the manipulation of an existing virus and that it originated in a Chinese biolaboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to information obtained by the NZZ, several specialized scientists at the German foreign intelligence service, the Federal Intelligence Service, have been meeting in recent weeks, initiated by the Federal Chancellery. The first meetings took place last year. Participants included well-known virologists. In several meetings, the researchers also investigated the origin of the virus."
#COVID19 #China #Wuhan #PublicHealth
"Words can’t express how disgusted I am with Trump supporters who defend their president stomping out speech rights for Israel after spending years wailing about the loss of free speech in America. It’s beyond mere political differences. I don’t respect them as people.
Of all the pathetic, groveling, bootlicking positions anyone could possibly espouse, it’s hard to imagine one more egregious than twisting yourself into cognitive knots trying to find ways to excuse a president crushing free speech in your country to advance the interests of a foreign state after spending years yelling “America First” and whining about freedom of speech, just because that President happens to be a Republican.
If you are doing this, you’re just admitting that you don’t stand for anything, and you’re just drifting along with the herd and supporting whatever the man in charge tells you to support. You’re unthinking human livestock. A mindless, useless, pointless NPC. You have wasted all of your time on this planet, because you did not use that time to mature into a sovereign adult with basic intellectual agency and integrity."
#USA #Trump #Censorship #StudentActivism #Israel #Palestine #Genocide #FreeSpeech #HumanRights
"The Trump administration may soon demand the social media accounts of people applying for green cards, US citizenship, and asylum or refugee status. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — the federal agency that oversees legal migration, proposed the new policy in the Federal Register this week — calling this information “necessary for a rigorous vetting and screening” of all people applying for “immigration-related benefits.”
In its Federal Register notice, USCIS said the proposed social media surveillance policy is needed to comply with President Trump’s “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats” executive order, issued on his first day in office. That order requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies to “identify all resources that may be used to ensure that all aliens seeking admission to the United States, or who are already in the United States, are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”"
#USA #Trump #USCIS #SocialMedia #Surveillance #Privacy #PoliceState
"-Financial records in the leak show that, in four years, two groups of call centers based in Israel, Europe, and the country of Georgia raked in about $275 million from would-be investors.
- These operations have all the hallmarks of a massive scam: The call center agents use false identities, forged paperwork, and deceptive advertising; “investors” were systematically prevented from withdrawing their money; and almost all of the investment “products” on offer were unlicensed and had official warnings from authorities.
- Over 20,000 hours of leaked phone calls between scammers and their victims across dozens of countries give unprecedented insight into the brutality, efficiency, and global reach of the investment scam industry.
- Many victims are left penniless; some express suicidal thoughts. But the scammers — who adopt false identities and use software that can be manipulated to create illusory profits — keep coming back for more.
- The leaked files show the call centers are professionally run, with HR departments, corporate parties, and offices in slick office buildings. Marketing firms, payment service providers, and software companies enable their operations.
- The call centers have twisted corporate strategies, running leaderboards for top scammers and issuing performance-related bonuses — including a Rolex watch awarded after a particularly lucrative swindle."
#Scams #Scammers #Fraud #CallCenters
"The Trump administration has informed NOAA that two pivotal centers for weather forecasting will soon have their leases canceled, sources told Axios.
Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts.
It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.
Driving the news: The NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction is on the lease cancellation list, according to a NOAA employee who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution."
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/03/doge-noaa-weather-building-leases-trump
#USA #Trump #DOGE #Musk #NOAA #WeatherForecasting #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming
Encryption backdoors are like leaving the door open for a totalitarian society... I don't see why people are unable to understand this...
"If they're going to cave into Zuck's demand to facilitate spying on Instagram users, do we really think they'll resist Kier Starmer's demands to remove Signal – and any other app that stands up to the Snooper's Charter – from the App Store?
It goes without saying that the "bad guys" the UK government claims it wants to target will be able to communicate in secret no matter what Apple does here. They can just use an Android phone and sideload a secure messaging app, or register an iPhone in Ireland or any other country and bring it to the UK. The only people who will be harmed by the combination of the British government's reckless disregard for security, and Apple's designs that trade the security of its users for the security of its shareholders are millions of law-abiding Britons, whose most sensitive data will be up for grabs by anyone who hacks their accounts."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/25/sneak-and-peek/
#CyberSecurity #UK #Apple #Encryption #Backdoors #Privacy #Totalitarianism #iCloud