Hard Pass

Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

Planet wants to prevent "adversarial actors" from using images for "Battle Damage Assessment" purposes.

Trump’s private comments have not focused on a large-scale ground invasion of Iran, but rather on the idea of a small contingent of U.S. troops that would be used for specific strategic purposes, sources say.

Donald Trump has privately expressed serious interest in deploying U.S. troops on the ground inside of Iran, according to two U.S. officials, a former U.S. official and another person with knowledge of the conversations.

Trump has discussed the idea of deploying ground troops with aides and Republican officials outside the White House while outlining his vision for a post-war Iran in which Iran’s uranium is secure and the U.S. and a new Iranian regime cooperate on oil production similar to how the U.S. and Venezuela are, the sources said.

The president’s comments expressing serious interest in deploying ground troops have not focused on a large-scale ground invasion of Iran, but rather on the idea of a small contingent of U.S. troops that would be used for specific strategic purposes, the U.S. officials, the former U.S. official and the person with knowledge of the discussions said. They said Trump has not made any decisions or given any orders related to ground troops.

As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.

Right now, California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user's age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.

Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.

The EFF's year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was "the year states chose surveillance over safety." The foundation's concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws' overreach.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43968625

This is awesome.

A new Pew Research Center study found 53% of U.S. adults rated Americans’ morals and ethics as “bad,” making the U.S. the only country surveyed where that view prevailed.

Trust in other people underpins everything from civic life to everyday cooperation, so broad skepticism about neighbors’ character can shape politics, institutions and social cohesion.

Pew’s findings add an international benchmark to a long-running American debate about polarization and whether people see opponents—and even fellow citizens—as acting in good faith.

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content.

The workers reportedly work for Kenya-headquartered Sama and provide data annotation for Ray-Ban Metas.

The February report, a collaboration from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa, is, per a machine translation, based on interviews with over 30 employees at various levels of Sama, including several people who work with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems. Some of the people interviewed have worked on projects other than Meta’s smart glasses. The report’s authors said they did not gain access to the materials that Sama workers handle or the area where workers perform data annotation. The report is also based on interviews with former US Meta employees who have reportedly witnessed live data annotation for several Meta projects.

The report pointed to, per the translation, a “stream of privacy-sensitive data that is fed straight into the tech giant’s systems,” and that makes Sama workers uncomfortable. The authors said that several people interviewed for the report said they have seen footage shot with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that shows people having sex and using the bathroom.

This series of inked drawings went viral on Reddit and while the images are all viewable for free, it led me to compile them all into a book available on Amazon. It’s a love letter to the Toronto transit system and my years riding line 2.

https://www.amazon.ca/Transit-People-Jarrett-Young/dp/B0GKDQ9BQ9?

Full tweet:

Iran, which is being beat to HELL, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack. They were looking to take over and rule the Middle East. It is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries. They have said, “Thank you President Trump.” I have said, “You’re welcome!” Iran is no longer the “Bully of the Middle East,” they are, instead, “THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,” and will be for many decades until they surrender or, more likely, completely collapse! Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

The relationship wouldn’t last very long …

Core Architecture

My calendar app is a static, multi-page application with a fixed release cycle (annual deployment). It features a hard-coded UI with immutable data — the dates and layout cannot be modified without manual intervention. It's essentially a read-only interface optimized for offline-first functionality.

Key Features

Data Structure - 12-month dataset rendered as a grid-based layout with pre-populated date objects

State Management - Completely stateless; no persistent storage or sync capabilities

User Interaction - Supports reads and writes; compatible with any pen/pencil (similar to a POST request, but non-reversible)

Rendering - Raster-based output; responsive design (fits on my wall)

Accessibility - Physical accessibility for all members of my cohort

Portability - Take a picture once a month, refer to that on your phone

Performance - O(1) lookup time for any date; zero latency, zero network overhead

Technical Advantages

Zero dependencies, requires only wall space and a pen.

No API to support / learn, no loading times / lag, no version conflicts.

Guaranteed uptime. It's also compliant with most privacy standards, though it does require physical access.

Limitations

The calendar has no real-time sync, no cross-device functionality, and no undo. Annotations are permanent with an ink pen. It cannot adjust for time zones or integrate with other calendar systems. No ICS compatible export of appointment data. And unfortunately, the application will need to be replaced after just one year.

If you're interested in implementing a similar app, I can point you in the right direction...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43965516

It is worth noting that both the hardware and software of Fairphone is heavily dependent on a Chinese company T2Mobile.

For those looking to avoid both US and Chinese companies, then the Jolla phone is the way to go.

Our latest senseless illegal war against brown people, born of ever-shifting lies and fought by the sons of the blithe un-rich, is Trump’s ultimate Wag-the-Dog distraction from his crimes, failures and pedophilia at home. Having oafishly declared the Iran regime “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” - pot/kettle if you add “inept”- his “warriors” are now being told this is “part of God’s divine plan,” with The Rapture imminent (after killing more schoolgirls.) One sage: “It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this.”

Leave it to “the world’s most famous bone-spur patient,” Board of Peace chair, recipient of a fake FIFA peace prize and pilfered real Peace Prize, cornered serial sexual predator facing exposure and pathological liar who vowed “no new wars” while attacking seven nations in a year to launch “the dumbest war in US history” - a tough competition - and the biggest US military operation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell et al at least tried for months to justify with a pack of lies before making “the worst foreign policy decision in history.” Trump: Hold my Coke. Experts have long warned that with his hubris, thin skin, historical ignorance and affinity for heedless demolition of buildings, customs, laws, credibility, he could wreak the most havoc in foreign affairs, where his power is most unbridled - especially now, as he grows increasingly desperate and dangerous.

Thus, having amassed a vast arsenal of US weaponry in the Persian Gulf, did he launch our current “national obscenity.” Ever presidential, he did it in a sober, cogent speech at a White House lectern with all the gravity the occasion called for. Kidding: He did it in a histrionic 2:30 a.m post on his crappy platform from his golf bordello after a $1-million-a-plate fundraiser - cue cringe robotic dancing to God Bless the USA - and a bellicose, garbled speech, his face smeared in make-up beneath a tacky baseball cap?! Later, the White House released a photo of a hastily assembled War Room with black drapes around it and some guy peeking in - looking for the omelette bar? Observers: “Looks secure to me,” “Looks like the Goodman wedding reception had to be moved,” “These clowns seriously started WW lll from a blanket fort at a shitty golf club?!” and, “This is not how democracies go to war.”

While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.

ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.

Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, “This app is unavailable in the country or region you’re in.” The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

Apple and ByteDance declined to comment. TikTok USDS Joint Venture (the new entity controlling TikTok’s US operations) didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its US operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can “distribute, maintain, or update” any app majority-controlled by ByteDance “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the US. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for US audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

WIRED collected dozens of user reports on Chinese social media from people either living in or traveling to the US who said they had been blocked from downloading or updating popular ByteDance-owned apps. These apps are also not available on the Google Play Store, but it’s less of a concern for Android users as their devices have fewer restrictions on downloading apps from non-Google sources.

Traditionally, the primary way Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was according to the country where a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, a person would typically need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. But once their account was registered, they could download apps designed for the Chinese market regardless of where they traveled.

In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.

Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.

"Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future" is a new report from Forbrukerrådet. The report itself is a light read: it's in English, and while it is 100 pages long [PDF], it is in fact enjoyable and even amusing – we laughed quite a few times when reading it. For one thing, it contains a surprising number of puns and the occasional starred-out swearword, such as "Do androids dream of electric s***." A stodgy bureaucratic report this is not.

Another bit of evidence that the report is both fun and accessible is that to go with it, the agency commissioned a short – and hilarious – film about the problem from NewsLab. It's called "A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator," it's a second under four minutes long.

As the video was already linked a week ago, I'll just provide a link to the report.

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance model.

The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260307182752/https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/