i see ICE have joined bluesky

noai.duckduckgo.com #NoAI #DuckDuckGo

I just found out - from recognising her photo in a BBC news report - that someone I used to work with was murdered by her husband 10 years ago. She was a lovely, friendly, helpful, bubbly girl, and would be in her 40s now. That really hits home.

Tangerine Troll of his Trolley. Film at 11. (And 12, and 13, and 38.5...) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Christian Concern". Now there's a misnomer of an organisation if ever there was. There is nothing Christ-like about their concerns.

Tangerine Troll of his Trolley. Film at 11. (And 12, and 13, and 38.5...)

If you are organizing folks in Minneapolis right now, you may find this guide to Signal for beginners by @mshelton.bsky.social useful: freedom.press/digisec/blog...

ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest, 404 Media reports. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.

World News: 🇺🇸 Please stop calling our Gestapo the Gestapo, they think they’re the SS 🇷🇺 Thank you, America, for keeping us out of the news 🇨🇳 [redacted] 🇬🇱 Oh what is this shit.

The symptoms of fascism are prejudice, social unrest, and violence, but that is not the purpose. The purpose is to create a new nobility, and a new peasantry, to protect and encircle the assets and power of the wealthy. The division is just a means to an end.

Europe having to perform military exercises against their primary threat, the United States.

I miss simpler times, when “shooting mothers in the face” had a different meaning.

We don't need Artificial Insanity. There's plenty of the real stuff to go around.

I did NOT have the US threatening to start a trans-Atlantic war in the Northern Hemisphere on my imminent risks bingo card. Well I didn't until a couple of months back.

And here we see one reason why login verification by email is not a smart idea. Despite a certain insurance company just sending me 4 emails confirming my new policy, to actually access it I have to log in, and their login sends email verifications for 2FA. Said verification email is not turning up.

Query: can brid.gy be set up to bridge between existing Mastodon and Bluesky accounts? It is not at all clear how, if it can.

I would like to get some long-fingered tipless gloves (wool or cotton); plain black or very dark green or navy blue. I'm UK-based, and I have small hands by male standards, so women's gloves may do. Any shop suggestions?

What is it about the molecular structure of water that makes it so good at retaining heat?

What site do people find is best for (cheap) short-notice flight bookings? (No, not Ryanair or Easyjet.)

Two local charity shops have closed down, because the charity they were supposed to fund has gone bust (despite a year's wrangling behind the scenes to try to save it).

We need a Digital Sovereignty strategy to reduce our reliance on US tech companies. The Cybersecurity Bill is in Parliament TODAY. MPs must ensure our digital infrastructure isn't vulnerable to policies and actions of foreign powers like the US and China. www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releas...

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

#uksnow KT9 0/10 stopped, and it is warming up a little...

I would like to see #uksnow on Mastodon, too...

The usefulness of Phishtank (www.phishtank.com) is rather less than it once was, simply because the scammers are wise to its scraping and simply block it, making verification of reports a lot harder. It's a shame Phishtank don't use some of the evasion tactics the scammers and AI scrapers do...

#uksnow KT9 1/10 - barely anything; watching individual flakes drift down.

Whilst I am sympathetic to all those people who will lose their jobs as a result, and hope they find better in the near future, I can't say that I would be at all sorry to see Claire's disappear from the high street.

Starmer has shown his colours as a lily-livered lawyer. Waiting for the Trump regime's justification of legality for bombing and murdering foreign civillians and kidnapping their president, is pointless. It will amount to Trump's imperious "because I said so".

Incredible, isn't it, the companies who source their "content" by scraping material freely available on other sites, and then whinge about ad-blockers.

"US action in Venezuela not legal, senior Labour MP says" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #NoShitSherlock

I have a great little unbranded web cam. Bought it dirt cheap, second-hand. Beautiful picture using v4l2. But it has this nasty habit of suddenly deciding to refocus the frame. (It clearly has a mechanical focus of some description.)

For all you weird daylight-lovers, in and around the London environs, you will be pleased to know today is 9 minutes longer than the shortest day two weeks ago.

BREAKING: Ed Davey’s response to Keir Starmer’s statement

Quite a few of the far right would end in prison for good, so expect this "promise" to go away quickly. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Them: “no one had pronouns in my day” A TV Character from their day:

Internet 2026: ChatGPT: like owning a parrot that encourages you to kill yourself X: slobbering attention whores eat all the child porn they can AI-generate while complaining women won’t talk to them BlueSky: pleasant and well-meaning, but slightly itching to correct my use of the word “whores”

This is WAY funnier than it should be...

My pitch: Equip the train quiet carriage with a faraday cage

Happy New Year, everyone. We're back meeting on January 27th: See dc4420.org. The Greene Man 383 Euston Road London NW1 3AU Nearest Tube: Great Portland Street. (Regents Park and Warren Street both short walks away; Euston Square and Euston a brisk 10 minutes.)

Happy New Year. We will be back meeting up again at the end of the month.

The countdown to @emfcamp.bsky.social starts in earnest (for me) today. (I know the event planning and behind the scenes management started months ago.)

Donald Trump’s lying again. He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.

Why the hell is YouTube suddenly offering me only "shorts"? Bloody stupid vertically oriented format. Half the videos I see these days are either shrunk to fit, or pan/scanned (or simply cropped) from a sensible horizontal format.

notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/email-to-tar... Peter Thiel (who openly objects to the NHS) wants to get control of it from the inside. Palantir has blood on its hands in Gaza, is helping Trump's ICE with surveillance data, and has frequently shown disdain for data privacy that hinders profit.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

The worst part about Trump mkII is not the administration (although its actions have been atrocious), it is the fact that despite all the evidence of Trump mkI, and the relief at the end of it, and all the open ambitions of his puppet masters in the interim, the voting public voted for him again.

Hans Zimmer's "No Time to Die" has to be the least Bond soundtrack since Serra's Goledeneye. Bloody awful.

Demonstrating just how frustratingly wrong so-called AI of the current standards can be: Search for methods compressing a list of file names to a glob and you will get pages and pages of methods for using an existing glob to locate files.