rimu

On more than 30 occasions, the United Nations Assembly has discussed the blockade against Cuba, which costs the island 5 billion dollars annually, according to some estimates. Every year the resolution is proposed and the whole world, through the vote of the absolute majority of the member countries of the United Nations General Assembly, has condemned the imperialist attitude of the United States towards Cuba.

edit: result of the vote: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/system/cache/media_attachments/files/113/398/372/180/881/996/original/82c4d1f509e933fa.jpg

Archive link https://archive.is/20241027174823/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/opinion/body-muscles-40s-aging.html

Our workflows and productivity metrics regularly ask knowledge workers for things that do not make good knowledge work.

Bloggers on reddit lament how much “meta-work” and “not-work” exists in tech. They kvetch about the conversations and the waiting. They consider the principal engineer’s calendar, packed with meetings, quod erat demonstratum that those roles are “easy” and “airware.” They insist that, if they could manage to not get caught, they could keep several such positions simultaneously and never under-deliver on any of them. None of these jobs, they claim, ask them for all that much code.

Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.

The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.

Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.

The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.

These federally-mandated backdoors were first required on phone systems in 1994 by the CALEA law, then controversially extended to broadband by the FCC in '04.

Archive link

See also https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/05/china-linked-security-breach-targeted-us-wiretap-systems-wsj-reports.html

An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.

Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.

He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-rally-arrest-taser-media-68fe78b79ae65556c4efc850e142998c

Much more at https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).

As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.

ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.

That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.

To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.

This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.