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.
It doesn’t look like anyone’s built much by way of spacecraft intended to enter interstellar space recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System
Pioneer 10, launched 1972, last contact January 2003
Pioneer 11, launched 1973, last contact November 1995
Voyager 2, launched August 1977, still active
Voyager 1, launched September 1977, still active
New Horizons, launched 2006, still active
All NASA projects.
There’s one ESA-led project, Ulysses, launched in 1990, shut down in 2008. This is still in the solar system, but WP says that there’s some chance that in November 2098, it may undergo a gravitational slingshot induced by Jupiter that will eventually send it out of the solar system.
And…looks like that’s it. The sum total of what mankind has built to date that will make it out of the solar system. The last launch humanity did towards interstellar space was 18 years ago.
looks at list
Microsoft’s list of allocated names apparently includes:
Crimson Sandstorm
Diamond Sleet
Ghost Blizzard
Leopard Typhoon
Luna Tempest
Night Tsunami
Silk Typhoon
Star Blizzard
This does not pass my basic sniff test of being able to tell whether a name is a group from a hostile intelligence agency or the latest Razer gaming product, a cyberpunk video game gang name, or a video gaming guild name.
https://robinpiree.com/blog/guild-names
Twilight Vanguard
Crimson Shadows
That’s too similar in my book.
Russia is not alone in its activity. Microsoft also saw efforts by a China-linked group, known as Storm-1852
rolls eyes
You give them a cool name, you make them sound cool.
Just do the plain ol’ number thing. Let them do their own marketing work if they want marketing.
While APT43’s link with the North Korean government was confirmed for the first time in the Mandiant report, the threat actor was already known by threat analysts under other names, such as Thallium, Kimsuky, Velvet Chollima, Black Banshee and STOLEN PENCIL.
This confusion comes down to each cyber threat intelligence (CTI) vendor operating its own attribution process for cyber-attacks – something we recently investigated on Infosecurity Magazine.
The most prominent threat group name is the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Commonly used by the whole CTI community, including US non-profit organization MITRE, which provides a standardized framework for tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), APT groups refer to clusters of sophisticated threat actors sponsored by, or acting on behalf of a government.
With geopolitical rather than financial motivations, APT groups typically operate cyber espionage campaigns and destructive cyber-attacks.
Once a threat actor has been confirmed to be a coherent group of hackers backed by a nation-state, the threat analysts who lead the cyber attribution allocate it a new APT number – the latest being APT43.
Other ‘sober’ naming conventions exist, consisting of codenames and numbers only. For example, APT-C groups are Chinese cybersecurity vendor 360 Security Technology’s equivalent to APT groups. APT-C numbers are sometimes used by other vendors.
Others, like MITRE’s G[XXX] (e.g. G1002) or SecureWorks’ legacy TG-[XXXX] (e.g. TG-3279), are mere identification numbers and their names do not reveal anything about the threat actor.
“We use a sober, or even dull, naming convention because we don’t want to glamorise those groups,” Collier added.
What is this, a Microsoft naming scheme?
kagis
Sounds like it.
A Chinese-linked influence actor Microsoft tracks as Storm-1852 successfully pivoted to short-form video content that criticizes the Biden administration and Harris campaign before some of its assets disappeared from social media following reports of its activity. While most Storm-1852 personas masquerade as conservative US voters voting for Trump, a handful of accounts also create anti-Trump content and use political slogans and hashtags associated with American progressive politics.
For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.
Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.
If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.
PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.
https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/
I don’t know of a Linux equivalent, though I’d swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author’s young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.
YouTube desperately needs to fix the recommendations for music.
I mean, I guess if someone has a YouTube account, there’s nothing wrong with using YouTube as a music recommendations system, but it isn’t really the first thing I’d think of. I mean, music isn’t really what it was designed for.
And YouTube doesn’t know what a user would listen to offline, so unless all their music-listening is from YouTube tracks…I’m not sure how representative the listening data would be of what a user would listen to.
I don’t use them, because I don’t really want to hand them a profile of me, but if I wanted to get music recommendations, I’d probably use something like Audioscrobbler, which was designed for building a profile on someone’s music-listening habits and then handing them recommendations based on that.
This Popsie Funk channel is upfront, that the music is AI generated.
goes looking
Yeah, the description reads:
Popsie Funk is a fictitious creation. The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.
I am adding this disclaimer due to repeated questions about the genuine authenticity of Popsie Funk and his music.
I don’t think that the artist in question is faking this.
All that being said, while this particular case isn’t, I suppose one could imagine such a “trying to pretend to be human” artist existing. That is, if you think about all the websites out there with AI-generated questions and answers that do try to appear human-generated, you gotta figure that someone is thinking about doing the same with musicians…and at mass scale, not manually doing one or two.
One other interesting tidbit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569955
Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be down.
What if the company itself was a front?
I’m not familiar with the company, but it looks like it goes way back on archive.org, so I don’t think that it was a front. Might just be all the interested people hitting the website simultaneously taking it down.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hezbollah-pagers-blast-israel-lebanon-1.7325913
What type of pager exploded?
Images of the destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back consistent with those made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.
The firm did not immediately reply to questions from Reuters. Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers.
TRTWorld – not my ideal source, but I don’t think that they have a reason to make anything up here – says AAA rather than AA, but in either case, IIRC alkalines are normally intrinsically safe, can’t discharge quickly enough to explode. So if it’s alkaline rather than lithium, then it’d need to be be a supply chain attack:
The Alphanumeric Pager (AP-900) produced by Gold Apollo Co., Ltd. has been identified as one of the devices that exploded, killing and injuring scores in Lebanon.
At least nine people have been killed and over 2,750 others, including Hezbollah militants and medics, were injured when their paging devices exploded across Lebanon.
Speculation has emerged surrounding how the devices could have exploded and caused such high casualties, especially a pager like the AP-900 that operates on AAA alkaline batteries.
Initial investigations suggest that the pager’s standard battery configuration is unlikely to be the cause of the explosions.
Instead, authorities are leaning towards the possibility that the devices were intentionally rigged with explosive materials.
If explosives were rigged inside the device before it reached Hezbollah members, it could cause such significant damage when detonated by signal.
That probably isn’t good news for Hezbollah, but it’s good news for me, because I’m not in a fight with some nation-state and probably am not going to wind up with explosive-rigged devices.
A video I looked at of a 18650 lithium battery cell exploding – if it was the battery, and not sabotaged pagers being injected into Hezbollah’s supplies before they were distributed – was not a very large explosion.
If it’s the battery, I think it’d have to be really close to you, probably on you, to likely hurt you. Like, not just a random device nearby.
That being said…
I reckon that Bluetooth-enabled lithium battery buttplugs, vibrators, and onaholes maybe just got more potentially exciting.
Trusted by over 20 Million+ customers worldwide
Those 20+ million better trust the hardware and software engineers on that to have their security stuff together, because one of those going off probably isn’t gonna be much fun.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was one of those injured, according to Iranian state media
What a remarkable coincidence that he happened to to be in close proximity to the same type of pagers that the Hezbollah crowd was wearing.
If the Republican Party and the Democratic Party want to propose and agree on some basic rules for discussion, that might be worth consideration.
It’s not gonna be perfect, because they can’t bind the public. But I can at least imagine there being a set of conventions for more civil public discourse that would improve the situation.
That doesn’t sound like it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package – or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service – that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.
Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.
I just posted it myself as the first thing that came to mind with something small and cute and noise-making. Hadn’t read other comments at that point.
Didn’t L. Ron Hubbard do exactly that?
Like, with Sea Org? The relevant legislation for the US went through in 2003. Hubbard died in 1986.
List of URLs submitted to Reddit on this domain:
https://old.reddit.com/domain/reclaimthenet.org/
As best I can tell, it seems to be mostly material related to conspiracy or political promotion of Donald Trump.
I’m also not incredibly sanguine about some of the Reddit users regularly submitting material from the domain. For example, /u/ExtHD is submitting material from this domain and from alethonews.com, like “Georgia to apologize for starting 2008 war | The country will find the strength to apologize to the Ossetians for the “bloody conflict” and strive to restore trust and unity between the two brotherly nations”. That looks kinda like Russian information campaign stuff to me.
The first snapshot of the top-level webpage on this domain shows it promoting Laura Loomer’s stuff (the woman who was recently in the news as being responsible for the “pet-eating Haitians” thing).
https://web.archive.org/web/20190320223919/https://reclaimthenet.org/
Beyond the status symbol
I’m pretty sure that that’s a large part of it. If it weren’t, the race to have the largest and most expensive yacht wouldn’t be such a thing.
I guess it’s an isolated environment with controlled access, so you don’t have to deal with paparazzi or whatever.
considers
I guess you’re only subject to the laws of the flag state. I don’t suppose that that matters much for Russian oligarchs.
There are a couple laws in the US where the US will still assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over its citizens, even if they’re in territory normally outside of US jurisdiction. One of those is child sex tourism – and it looks like a similar thing is done by the EU and UK – so you can’t just go out on your yacht and have sex with twelve-year-olds to your heart’s content. But for most other stuff, I believe that as long as you select your ship’s flag carefully, it’s probably more-or-less outside the law for most purposes. For some people, that might be rather significant.
We’ve genetically engineered other colored foods before, like golden rice.
We’ve genetically-engineered many bioluminescent plants and animals.
kagis
We’ve genetically-engineered blue flowers:
We all think we’ve seen blue flowers before. And in some cases, it’s true. But according to the Royal Horticultural Society’s color scale—the gold standard for flowers—most “blues” are really violet or purple. Florists and gardeners are forever on the lookout for new colors and varieties of plants, however, but making popular ornamental and cut flowers, like roses, vibrant blue has proved quite difficult. “We’ve all been trying to do this for a long time and it’s never worked perfectly,” says Thomas Colquhoun, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the work.
True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins—pigment molecules in the petals, stem, and fruit—consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple, or blue, depending on what sugars or other groups of atoms are attached. Conditions inside the plant cell also matter. So just transplanting an anthocyanin from a blue flower like a delphinium didn’t really work.
Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, tackled this problem by first putting a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom appear purple instead of reddish. To get closer to blue, Noda and his colleagues then added a second gene, this one from the blue-flowering butterfly pea. This gene’s protein adds a sugar molecule to the anthocyanin. The scientists thought they would need to add a third gene, but the chrysanthemum flowers were blue with just the two genes, they report today in Science Advances.
“That allowed them to get the best blue they could obtain,” says Neil Anderson, a horticultural scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who was not involved with the work.
Chemical analyses showed that the blue color came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colorless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue color. “It was a stroke of luck,” Colquhoun says. Until now, researchers had thought it would take many more genes to make a flower blue, Nakayama adds.
The next step for Noda and his colleagues is to make blue chrysanthemums that can’t reproduce and spread into the environment, making it possible to commercialize the transgenic flower. But that approach could spell trouble in some parts of the world. “As long as GMO [genetically modified organism] continues to be a problem in Europe, blue [flowers] face a difficult economic future,” predicts Ronald Koes, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work. But others think this new blue flower will prevail. “It’s certainly an advance for the retail florist,” Anderson says. “It would have a lot of market value worldwide.”
I imagine that it’s quite possibly within the realm of what we could do.
CRIMINALS…IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS
Trump is the only U.S. president or former president to be convicted of a crime and the first major-party candidate to run for president after a felony conviction.[637] He faces numerous criminal charges and civil cases.[638][639]
Um.
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.