Given their history of hostilities. Hell has a better chance of freezing over than a secret agreement existing.

At that time Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were hiding along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and from the wikipedia article:

Pakistan’s government publicly condemned these attacks. However, it also allegedly allowed the drones to operate from Shamsi Airfield in Pakistan until 21 April 2011. According to leaked diplomatic cables, Pakistan’s Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani not only tacitly agreed to the drone flights, but in 2008 requested that Americans increase them.

I doubt Iran has a secret agreement to operate drones within Pakistan.

Cleverly made the joke to female guests while attending a Downing Street reception earlier this month.

Yikes! The added context makes it even worse.

Not sure if it’s related to your story, but a lot of people self indoctrinated through right-wing media. There was a documentary that came out in 2016: The Brainwashing of My Dad.

It’s online if you haven’t seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8

https://piped.video/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8

State is more concerned about US citizens in Lebanon being targeted as a form of retaliation against US support of Israel.

We have a very large christian population, and they all don’t behave in a monolithic manner. For surveys it makes sense to ask which denomination or type of christian they are. Some will response Catholic, Baptist, Protestant. Some will respond christian, sometimes non-denominational christian. It improves the survey results. For example, you might find differences between Catholics and Baptists that wouldn’t show up if you grouped them all together under a christian category.

For reporting them, probably not. For trying to opt-out with a STOP reply, depends on them playing by the rules. Do you think they will play by the rules? I don’t. I would assume malice. That they would forward your number to a bunch of other lists. You might not get Nikki’s spam, but you’ll get spam from 3 other PACs that are only 2 months old.

Digging into the FCC’s website reveals that robotexts are illegal without prior consent. However, if they hand enter the message, that’s legal.

That lines up with my experience the one time I kept getting annoying political texts. There was a human at the other end. They happily removed my number from their list after I threatened to vote for the other team if they kept harassing me. But that was the Democrats.

You can try some of the FCC’s recommendations, but I would generally assume malice in this instance. The political entities will probably disappear before anything can be done.

Report Unwanted Calls and Texts

If you think you’ve received a political robocall or text that does not comply with the FCC’s rules, you can file an informal complaint with the FCC at fcc.gov/complaints. If you are receiving texts that you didn’t ask for, report the sender by forwarding the texts to 7726 (or “SPAM”). Campaigns should also honor opt-out requests if you reply “STOP.”

Given that the 70’s was 50 years ago, most people don’t know the details of what happened. Other than a metric conversion was attempted.

It’s both surprising and not that it was killed by republicans. And given the current nationalist furor in the party, it doesn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of happening in the next decade. If it was proposed, again.

Electronics have to be designed for use in outer space. That includes hardening from radiation. Adding redundancy because there will be glitches and failures due to bit flips. Using components that can operate in a vacuum. There’s thermal considerations, both extreme heat and cold. You also need filters in the optics to protect the image sensor.

You can totally put a GoPro in space. It’s just not going to last very long before it fails.

Reminds me of VideoRedo. Cool niche little program that lets you slice video files quickly and losslessly. Then the main developer died. The other developer has kept the license server up, but he doesn’t own any of the copyrights. And the program was so niche it doesn’t generate much revenue for the work that has to go into it.

Okay, but jpeg xl is looking pretty good. Especially the ability to losslessly convert jpg to jxl.

Recent conversation on lemmy.world and an article about it.

We haven’t learned anything new since June. The BlackCat ransomware group claimed responsibility for the hack. They didn’t expect Reddit to pay the ransom. So, like trifictional said, sold on the dark web is the most likely outcome. But there’s no public indication that’s happened yet. My best guess is they’re waiting for Reddit’s IPO to get closer to try and get a bigger payout for the data.

Reddit confirmed they were hacked back in February. TechCrunch and a few other publications covered it. So, I doubt Reddit is lying.

BlackCat claimed responsibility for the hack. They also didn’t expect Reddit to pay the ransom. Selling the data on the dark web is the most likely outcome. They want a payout after all.

Slightly sarcastic response: “What’s this federation thing? IDK but Facebook has it. I guess I don’t need to go anywhere. Thanks Zuck!”

My take is they see federated protocols as a threat, but they can’t compete directly with them. The next best thing they can do implement them to try and keep people in their walled garden. Even if it means punching some windows into those walls. However, they won’t implement the full protocol, only a subset. They may not even implement them correctly. Causing problems for anyone on the outside. Basically providing a support yet inferior experience for anyone still in the walled garden.

Those people will be none the wiser too. The average person doesn’t understand technology or protocols. As far as they know, they’re still be in Facebook.

Something something antitrust. Something something browser choice. Microsoft is just asking to be fined €1 billion. Really, someone needs to make a big stink about it in Europe because they’ll act before the US does.

Long ago I was searching for a new printer then the printer ads started following me to different places on the Internet. Places that should not have known I was searching for a printer. I decided I wasn’t going to have any of that and installed an ad blocker.

Not sure how effective that will be in future. Pretty sure ads as content written by AI is going to be the hot new thing. And by hot new thing I mean thing that can die in a fire.

Honestly, we really don’t know. mastondon.world and lemmy.world are run by donations and that’s worked so far. Ruud and his folks have been pretty upfront about their finances.

The general temperament I’ve gotten is people around here are opposed to a corporate like monetization. I agree with that. Usually, at least what I’ve observed, is that when a service monetizes it becomes enshitified.

We’ll find out eventually what happens.

Sounds like reddit is having a bad year.

sips coffee

Oh well. How’s everyone’s Sunday? I’m making pulled pork sliders tonight.

They’ve also made a lot of shitty decisions. Reddit decided to invest in NFTs when they had cheap money. That’s been about as successful as a lead balloon. That also burned a bunch of user good will in the process. Meta went all in on VR and the Metaverse. They’ve admitted that’s been a bust. This seems more like an A and B with A being cheap money evaporating and B being bad decisions.

I’m reluctant to call the latest Reddit thing enshittification, but it really seems like they’re between steps 2 and 3.

On a slightly different note, does any think enshittification will be the word of the year?