A YouTube representative confirmed that the practice will now become commonplace “as we’ve seen…strong viewer response.”
I have often lamented about those boring times when I have to suffer through a plain old paused screen, with nary an ad to be found.
I recently commented on NCD with a twelve-year-old, humorous-given-present-context review I found of that radio on eham, when apparently counterfeit IC-V82 radios were a serious problem:
https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046
Watch out for fake v82’s! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.
Words of wisdom there, eham.net.
https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820808
The walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others could not have made the exploding devices, the Japanese company said on Thursday.
“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at ICOM, told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday.
ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” Enomoto said.
There’s no one single model doing projections.
Five Thirty Eight’s, which is one prominent one, has favored Harris somewhat for a while.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
Harris wins 64 times out of 100
in our simulations of the 2024 presidential election.
Trump wins 36 times out of 100.
There is a less than 1-in-100 chance of no Electoral College winner.
Nate Silver – who started Five Thirty Eight and is now off doing his own thing and runs a fork of the model that Five Thirty Eight used to run – had them, last I looked, had Harris and Trump at about about even chances.
Both Silver’s model and Five Thirty Eight’s model agreed that the debate improved Harris’s chances.
deleted by creator
Or even a dead one.
From what I’ve read in the past, Iranian state actors – influence campaigns and breaking into computers and such – have opposed another Trump presidency.
Trump greenlighted the hit on Soleimani, and is more-supportive of Israel.
Russian state actors, on the other hand, have been supportive of another Trump presidency.
I imagine that that’s something that Tehran and Moscow probably need to work out.
EDIT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/business/media/iran-disinformation-us-presidential-race.html
Iran Emerges as a Top Disinformation Threat in U.S. Presidential Race
With a flurry of hacks and fake websites, Iran has intensified its efforts to discredit American democracy and possibly tip the race against former President Donald Trump.
EDIT2: I was just (critically) discussing Microsoft’s naming scheme for hostile groups the other day. Russian ones are named “something Blizzard” and Iranian ones “something Sandstorm”.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-xdr/microsoft-threat-actor-naming
A hacker group with suspected ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called Mint Sandstorm is suspected of successfully infiltrating the campaign of Trump, a US law enforcement official said at the time.
Those Iranian guys are APT42, aka “Mint Sandstorm”.
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-fancy-bear-us-hacking-campaign-government-energy/
referring to the Hillary Clinton campaign director whose emails were stolen and leaked by APT28 ahead of the 2016 election.
https://www.logpoint.com/en/blog/emerging-threats/forest-blizzard/
The Cyber espionage group Forest Blizzard is attributed to the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency).
Forest Blizzard is also known by its numerous aliases: APT 28, Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sednit Gang, Sofacy Group, BlueDelta, and STRONTIUM.
And Russian guys, APT28, aka “Forest Blizzard”.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-accuses-russia-election-interference/
Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of efforts to influence the upcoming presidential election. He said an internal planning document created by the Kremlin stated one of the campaign’s goals is “securing Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”
The campaigns involved using “cybersquatted” domains, which are intended to mimic another entity’s domain name and trick visitors into believing they are visiting the legitimate website. These sites, Garland said, were designed to look like major U.S.-based news outlets such as the Washington Post or Fox News, by using the same layout and design, but were fake sites spreading Russian propaganda created by the Kremlin.
Among the goals of the campaigns are to “reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests, and influence voters in the U.S. and foreign elections” while concealing the Russian government and its agents as the source of the content, according to the court filings.
The Justice Department accused Doppelganger of using “influencers” worldwide, paid social media advertisements and fake social media profiles purporting to be U.S. citizens to drive viewership to the domains, “all of which attempted to trick viewers into believing they were being directed to a legitimate news media outlet’s website.”
Projects directed at the U.S. include the “Good Old USA Project,” “Guerilla Media Campaign,” and “U.S. Social Media Influencers Network Project,” according to court filings.
The Justice Department obtained notes, project proposals, planning documents and other records during its investigation, some of which detail objectives, target audiences and campaign topics. The department redacted the names of the political parties and presidential candidates, labeling them only as U.S. Political Party A or B, or Candidate A or B, but the documents include information that makes them identifiable.
Objectives of the “Good Old USA” project include boosting the percentage of Americans who believe the U.S. is “doing way too much to support Ukraine,” and lowering President Biden’s confidence rating down to at least 29% in the lead-up to the November election, according to documents submitted by the Justice Department. The document appears to have been prepared in late 2023, when Mr. Biden was still seeking reelection.
EDIT3: Both the Russian and Iranian camps have been reported to be trying to increase political division and decrease trust in the American political system, so I guess they’re aligned on that much, at any rate.
Endoscope profile pics are the future.
The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.
Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.
And while in war, there are prohibitions on targeting non-combatants, they don’t require that there be no collateral damage. Israel’s pretty clearly targeting Hezbollah here, not random Lebanese.
I do wonder if Hezbollah can maybe agree to stay out of part of Lebanon. I don’t think that that’d need to compromise either Israel’s or Hezbollah’s war plans, so maybe it’d be possible to come to some sort of agreement like that; you’d need buy-in from both parties. Then that area could be used as a safe area for Lebanese non-combatants.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-crackdown-on-mobile-phones-in-schools
Mobile phones are set to be prohibited in schools across England as part of the government’s plan to minimise disruption and improve behaviour in classrooms.
New mobile phones in schools guidance issued today (19 February 2024) backs headteachers in prohibiting the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including at break times.
Many schools around the country are already prohibiting mobile phone use with great results. This guidance will ensure there is a consistent approach across all schools.
I suppose if enough countries do that sort of thing, pagers might start doing a comeback.
EDIT: Though looking at the wording, I’m not actually sure if this is a “we’re banning cell phones” or a “we’re talking about policies that make it look like we’re banning cell phones to keep the anti-cell-phone crowd happy”.
While 44.3 percent of union members polled between April 9 and July 3 backed Biden compared to 36.3 percent for Trump, polling in the wake of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions found the Teamsters members support Trump over Harris.
In a union-commissioned survey conducted by an independent third party between July 24 and Sept. 15, 59.6 percent of Teamsters members voted to endorse Trump, compared to 34 percent for Harris.
Teamsters members seem to have been dramatically more supportive of Biden than they are of Harris. Hmm.
Don’t know if election models, like Five Thirty Eight’s or similar, take endorsements as an input, whether that may affect their projection.
There are a large number of people in Hezbollah. Israel is fighting them.
You’re talking about using a Hellfire R-9X.
In order to launch those concurrently against, I dunno, sounds like there are maybe hundreds or thousands of targets, you’re going to need to have hundreds or thousands of drones. You’re gonna need something like a TB-2 at least to be lobbing them, not a tiny little drone. You’re talking about a lot of medium-size UAVs. That’s where your scale limitation is gonna come from.
Those things are fine if you’re trying to kill one person. But Israel’s fighting a number of people, even if it can identify them. They aren’t gonna have thousands of drones above Lebanon.
And if they’re hitting buildings and such, then you’re gonna be collapsing buildings and stuff like that.
Secondly, I assume that the Lebanese government is not going to give Israel free reign to do drone strikes on Hezbollah on Lebanese territory, will shoot at those drones, so to use those, you’d need to destroy any air defense that Lebanon has. My guess is that Israel’s looking to just fight Hezbollah as much as possible.
There’s still gonna be some collateral damage with those, that can’t be employed at scale as readily – you’d have to concurrently target huge numbers of people from airborne platforms, and these are pretty small charges. Given that Hezbollah isn’t fighting in the open – understandably – this is probably about as good as it realistically gets in terms of collateral damage.
Israel could maybe use DIME charges to have a smaller difference between lethal radius and damaging radius, but that’s got its own unpleasant aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_inert_metal_explosive
Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material (such as phlegmatized HMX or RDX) and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. It is intended to limit the effective distance of the explosion, to avoid collateral damage in warfare.
Upon detonation of the explosive, the casing disintegrates into extremely small particles, as opposed to larger pieces of shrapnel which results from the fragmentation of a metal shell casing. The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.
If Israel isn’t using those already, I guess we could send 'em some, if we have some sitting around. Realistically, though, I doubt that collateral damage is gonna be possible to reduce a whole lot, given the fact that Hezbollah’s hiding in a civilian population.
looks dubious
The problem here is that if this is unreliable – and I’m skeptical that Google can produce a system that will work across-the-board – then you have a synthesized image that now has Google attesting to be non-synthetic.
Maybe they can make it clear that this is a best-effort system, and that they only will flag some of them.
There are a limited number of ways that I’m aware of to detect whether an image is edited.
If the image has been previously compressed via lossy compression, there are ways to modify the image to make the difference in artifacts in different points of the image more visible, or – I’m sure – statistically look for such artifacts.
If an image has been previously indexed by something like Google Images and Google has an index sufficient to permit Google to do fuzzy search for portions of the image, then they can identify an edited image because they can find the original.
It’s possible to try to identify light sources based on shading and specular in an image, and try to find points of the image that don’t match. There are complexities to this; for example, a surface might simply be shaded in such a way that it looks like light is shining on it, like if you have a realistic poster on a wall. For generation rather than photomanipulation, better generative AI systems will also probably tend to make this go away as they improve; it’s a flaw in the image.
But none of these is a surefire mechanism.
For AI-generated images, my guess is that there are some other routes.
Some images are going to have metadata attached. That’s trivial to strip, so not very good if someone is actually trying to fool people.
Maybe some generative AIs will try doing digital watermarks. I’m not very bullish on this approach. It’s a little harder to remove, but invariably, any kind of lossy compression is at odds with watermarks that aren’t very visible. As lossy compression gets better, it either automatically tends to strip watermarks – because lossy compression tries to remove data that doesn’t noticeably alter an image, and watermarks rely on hiding data there – or watermarks have to visibly alter the image. And that’s before people actively developing tools to strip them. And you’re never gonna get all the generative AIs out there adding digital watermarks.
I don’t know what the right terminology is, but my guess is that latent diffusion models try to approach a minimum error for some model during the iteration process. If you have a copy of the model used to generate the image, you can probably measure the error from what the model would predict – basically, how much one iteration would change an image or part of it. I’d guess that that only works well if you have a copy of the model in question or a model similar to it.
I don’t think that any of those are likely surefire mechanisms either.
It did both the original link and archive.org
I don’t much like scary games myself, but here’s someone asking /r/HorrorGaming what their scariest games are:
EDIT: And yet somehow, despite not liking scary games, I’ve wound up owning some of these, like Darkwood, the Amnesia games, Clive Barker’s Undying – which I wouldn’t call that scary – Doom 3, Lone Survivor, Outlast, and Subnautica.
I’ve also played Clock Tower, which was on there.
Internet Archive - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Internet Archive:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America
I think that the MBFC database should probably have some special case for the Internet Archive. Either parse the archived domain out of Wayback Machine links and use the MBFC assessment for the domain or just don’t have a rating.
Any aggregate rating of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is going to basically be useless, because it shows archives of sites spanning the spectrum on politics and factuality.
On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.”
On one hand, the Almighty appears to have thrown several assassins at Trump but had them fail. One might take that as an expression of divine endorsement for Trump’s leadership. But, then, on the other hand, He hasn’t sent any against Harris.
Definitely a tough theological knot, that one.
If we send rocket(s) up and can fiddle with its velocity enough, we could keep it.
I feel like if you capture a new moon, you should also get to name it.
If McDonalds will sponsor it, we could have Luna and 98 Big Macs.