rust (7988 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

Linux Users Talk a Big Game About Security and Privacy

-And they routinely sabotage both through culture‑driven habits that are objectively insecure. Linux’s security reputation is mostly cultural mythology, not technical reality. The same culture that repeats the myth also encourages behaviors that directly undermine security and privacy. They put blind trust in package maintainers while declaring “Windows has malware because people download random EXEs.” They proceed to install random PPAs, Pipe curl scripts into bash, trust maintainers they never met, and treat distro repos as holy. -It takes a special person to trust (actually have faith) in ‘free stuff’. Linux users think “sudo is safe because it asks for a password.” -They become desensitized to it and enter sudo for everything. They’ll run installers with sudo because the README said so, use chmod 777 as a debugging technique, and disable AppArmor/SELinux because it “gets in the way”. It’s simply not conducive to what a desktop computing experience should be. They say, “I care about privacy.”, then use Discord, Steam, Chrome, VS Code, proprietary drivers, and sync everything to GitHub. They’ll use VPNs run by unknown companies (found in some YouTuber ad), post screenshots of their desktops with username visible, and run random GitHub scripts that exfiltrate critical system info. “No one targets Linux.” - Attackers target servers, not desktops. Supply chain attacks don’t care about your OS, browser exploits don’t care, phishing works on everyone, and misconfigurations are universal. Linux users behave like they’re immune to physics. “Linux is secure because it’s niche” (obscure distros with unpatched kernels.) AUR packages are maintained by ghosts. They’ll run outdated software because “rolling release broke something”, and disable auto‑updates because “I want control” They assume open source is safe, but no one audits most code, maintainers burn out, projects get abandoned, malicious commits slip through all the time, and dependencies chain in the distance. Transparent doesn’t mean secure. -I think this ‘all eyes on code’ myth, they’re finally starting to drop.

rust (7989 followers)

Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.

Wormhole

[email protected]

:::spoiler Credits

• The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background) :::

rust (13418 followers)

A programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

rust (3730 followers)

How to be productive in #Rustlang.

Moving from @[email protected]

Unofficial. By @kornel

Official Rust account is @rust

CLI to get web links for your repo

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/45574613 Hello, I built a CLI that gives you web links for stuff in your repo you might want to link to. You know the situation. Your coworker checked in some real garbage and you want to politely ask what they were thinking. But now you gotta describe where the code snippet is and they have to open it in their text editor and so on. Alternatively, you could open up your Git forge’s webpage and navigate to the file, copy a permalink and send it to them. Also takes quite a bit of time. With the CLI, you can instead just paste the local file path and it gives you the permalink right away. Similarly, you can also get a direct link to an issue or PR, which’s number you might’ve found in a commit message. There’s a release available for download for Linux x86_64: https://codeberg.org/trem/forge/releases And if you’ve got the Rust toolchain on your system, then you can also install it like so: cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/trem/forge P.S.: The implementation is somewhat hacky, because a Git repository doesn’t really know what webpage it was cloned from. So, please do let me know, if you run into any issues.

rust (1607 followers)

Something about Rust - everyday!
(Migrated from emacs.ch)

CLI to get web links for your repo

Hello, I built a CLI that gives you web links for stuff in your repo you might want to link to. You know the situation. Your coworker checked in some real garbage and you want to politely ask what they were thinking. But now you gotta describe where the code snippet is and they have to open it in their text editor and so on. Alternatively, you could open up your Git forge’s webpage and navigate to the file, copy a permalink and send it to them. Also takes quite a bit of time. With the CLI, you can instead just paste the local file path and it gives you the permalink right away. Similarly, you can also get a direct link to an issue or PR, which’s number you might’ve found in a commit message. There’s a release available for download for Linux x86_64: https://codeberg.org/trem/forge/releases And if you’ve got the Rust toolchain on your system, then you can also install it like so: cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/trem/forge P.S.: The implementation is somewhat hacky, because a Git repository doesn’t really know what webpage it was cloned from. So, please do let me know, if you run into any issues.

jhpratt (1527 followers)

Professional software engineer and amateur photographer.

Contributor to Rust's compiler and standard library. Maintainer of Rust crates with billions of downloads — including time, deranged, powerfmt, num_threads, and num-conv. Third degree black belt in American Kenpo 🥋

jhpratt on most platforms

Oh... shit. Oops

In AWS S3, they’re objects, not files. But you upload files to objects. And can download an object to a file. But they’re not files. Trust me bro.

Public Transport - Don't Make Me Think!

I had the same experience in Belfort, France. I had to download an app, create an account, buy tickets, and scan a qr code when boarding the bus. It was super awkward and for clueless tourists like me (even though I used to live there, where are my beloved paper tickets!!) it’s pretty frustrating to try to figure it out while people are getting grumbly because they can’t board the bus because I’m in the way with my massive suitcase. Oh and the delicious irony, I got an email yesterday from the bus company saying that the developers went bankrupt and the app is no longer maintained. What a bloody joke! So I guess for places that force an app on public transport users, one can only hope that app developers go bankrupt.

We should drop Tesseract, or at least switch forks

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63880645 Issue: Tesseract has a hardcoded hidden instance blacklist, and an even more obfuscated censorship list of various users, instances, communities, and general regex matches. Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world. None of this is in the source code. It’s downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at. If you’re just tuning in Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you’ve used a Lemmy site that didn’t look like stock Lemmy, there’s a fair chance it was this. Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can’t see it, can’t configure it, and aren’t told it’s there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it’s “incompatible,” which is not true. I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system. There’s a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn’t in the git repository. It’s unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed. Verify all of it in ten seconds curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \ | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json That’s the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There’s a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well. It filters criticism of moderators lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse — listed lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards — listed lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk — listed community regex power ?tripping? keyword censoring me Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence. It filters words The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire. Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to. Filtered communities on instances that aren’t blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions. The 552 users aren’t bots 67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each. 355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that. Seven of them aren’t even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out. I have the list and I’m not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself. And it lies about it When the instance block fires you get: “Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract.” Nothing is incompatible. It’s a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it’s what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed. For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all. Admins can’t switch it off Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one. Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit. Before someone says it A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. “It targets the left” doesn’t survive the data and I’m not going to pretend it does. The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who’ve never read it and users who don’t know it’s there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: “it’s a spam list” answers every individual question and none of the whole. And /c/modabuse is not spam. Asks Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint. Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility. Tell users when something’s been hidden. One line. Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has. It’s AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That’s the licence working as designed. But forking isn’t disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking. If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance’s name, to users who don’t know it exists. I disagree with some of the assertions put forth above about it not targeting the left, etc. And I don’t think the asks is relevant, because we should no longer be trusting anything from this person. Policy file here, for archival purposes: https://file.garden/amIRhTctI0qld2r5/policy.json

You Should Get to Own Your Media, Not Rent it Forever

100%. I buy physical copies of the books I want to read, because odds are I’ll probably keep them and read them again in future. The ebooks I have are files I have been able to download and store on my system (and backed up), so they can’t be edited or deleted. I will always prefer a physical release for a film or TV show over digital-only. Not only do I not have to pay a subscription (and then worry that it’s going to get edited or removed), but I get sound+video quality that exceeds what’s possible on streaming at present. Plus there’s just something nice about having your favourite movies and shows sitting on your shelf to remind you that it’s there and something you enjoy, rather than a purely digital library that isn’t as tangible or immediately visible. It’s deeply frustrating, too, when there are shows that you just can’t buy at all. A few times in the past two years there’s been a show on one of our free-to-air TV networks and their online streaming video service that I’ve enjoyed, but they’re only there for a limited time and then gone. Can you buy them on disc or even digital only? No. They are almost as empheral as TV from the 1960s when shows were made to be shown once, maybe repeated a few times before rights expired, then gone (sometimes forever, if you didn’t have space in your archives).

How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks

This is the companion to I own my books, where I made the case for stripping DRM and actually owning what I buy. This post is the machinery overview: how I store, serve, and read all of it from my own homelab. My books workflow When I find a book I want to buy, I go to eBooks.com and search for it. They have most titles, but occasionally I will have to go to Kobo to find it; regardless, I purchase the book. Note: This is just an overview of how this works and is not a technical, step-by-step walk-thru. Calibre If the book has DRM, the distributor gives me a file with the .acsm extension. If the book is DRM free, then they hand me the ePUB file directly. Either way, the next step is to import the downloaded file into Calibre. With the right plug-ins, Calibre will automatically download the book, remove the DRM (if any) and add the ePUB file to the Calibre books library. Syncthing Once the book is in Calibre as a DRM-free ePUB, Syncthing syncs it to one of my homelab instances that serves it with Calibre-Web. Calibre-Web I use Calibre-Web to then serve my Calibre books on my local network. Calibre-Web implements the same endpoints the Kobo store exposes: sync, library metadata, cover images, reading state. This is the first piece that allows me to connect my books library to my Kobo device. DNS and certificates Two things have to be in place to allow my Kobo to connect to Calibre-Web. My local DNS has to point an internal hostname at the server running Calibre-Web. And that server needs a real, publicly trusted TLS certificate, because the Kobo thinks it’s talking to a commercial store and won’t accept a self-signed one. Getting a legitimate certificate for a hostname that only exists inside my homelab is the fiddly part. I may write that up separately. Kobo Now I update the api_endpoint setting in the .kobo/Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf file on the Kobo itself so it points to the internal hostname from the DNS and certificates section above. I plug the Kobo into my computer over USB and it mounts as a drive, which is how I get at the file. There’s no way to do this from the device’s settings menus. All together now So my workflow looks like this in practice: Buy and download the book. Import the book into Calibre. Open my Kobo device and download the new book to the reader. Read. The default software on the Kobo is a first-class reading experience. Connecting it to my Calibre-Web server keeps that experience intact while my whole library syncs down over my local network. KOReader I see many people talking about KOReader, so when I first started on this path, I had every intention of installing and using it. In my own tests, the software just felt a lot rougher and harder to make into a nice reading experience, and I still had to connect my device directly to my laptop to load books. No shade towards KOReader and all the people who seem to love it, but the Kobo reading software works perfectly for me, and I can’t think of a feature that KOReader provides that isn’t already in the Kobo software. Audiobooks I listen to a fair amount of audiobooks, and my preference is to purchase them from Libro.fm. Their audiobooks are already DRM-free, so I just download the files from the Libro.fm website and boom, I have my backup. Audible books do have DRM, but I can remove it. In order to make my backups, I use ffmpeg with credentials that audible-cli legitimately pulls from my authenticated account. I’m decrypting content I bought, using a key I’m entitled to, into a universally playable format (.m4b). So I can back up even Audible exclusives like Dungeon Crawler #8. No matter how I purchased and backed up the audiobooks, I prefer to listen to them in Audiobookshelf, which is a self-hosted solution in my homelab. Conclusion And that’s my books workflow and an overview of how I self-host all this. I’m really interested in hearing about others’ book workflows too. Drop me a line if you’ve written something up and want to share. Originally posted on my site: https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/07/21/how-i-self-host-my-ebooks-and-audiobooks/

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps – Krebs on Security

It doesn’t matter what brand smart TV I have, I never connect them to the internet. I manually download updates to flash drive and install them off the flash drive. For smart features, I rely on Nvidia Shield TV Pro devices (living room & master bedroom) or Onn 4K (for other bedrooms). I currently trust Nvidia, and yes, Walmart, more than Sony, LG, Roku, etc. For anything I don’t trust on these devices, that’s what I have PiHole servers for.

Debian Testing as a daily driver - can anyone share their experience?

I can’t comment on Debian Testing. I just run stable and pull cutting edge stuff from back-ports or flathub. For some fancy stuff there’s usually a .deb file to download from the official site. If I’m really desperate, there’s always piping a curl command to sudo, if I really really trust the provider.

Modern Gaming - Deathbulge

While there is some truth to this, as an almost exclusive console gamer, I play hella indie games. SolarPunk this month, Ive also 300 hours in stardew valley, Indika was a cool story game, inKONBINI was really nice too, Im trying to think of others, The Long Dark, Limbo, (just downloaded Inside yesterday) but Ive played so many smaller indie games on console. I recognize the monopoly/issues, I dont pay for gamepass, but I do have access. I have played so many smaller/indie games, I might not have tried because it is on gamepass. Ive even bought some after trying them there first, like HouseFlipper 1&2. Yes Ive heard people say I play videogames all the time, and Ill be like, oh yeah what do you play? and they say, Call of Duty, and I know to exit the conversation. But, we out here, I activley try the smaller games, all the time. The only games I have on steam (we have a Lonovo Leigon Go) is Civ 6, Paralives and Rust. It’s kind of a shitty set up I have, with a tiny tiny bluetooth keyboard. It hurts my hands so I dont play it as much. And Rust hasnt worked since the jungle update anyway, I get like 25fps. Its stupid

Copied Steam Deck Instructions for Linux HV games

Pre-Requisites: Install Decky Loader: - Download and install Decky Loader on your SteamDeck. - Enable developer mode in the Decky Loader settings. Install HV Decky Plugin: - Download HV Decky plugin zip file from CSRIN. - In gaming mode, press the 3-dots button to access Decky Loader. - Select “Developer” in the settings menu. - Choose “Install Plugin from Zip File.” - Browse and select the HV Decky file you downloaded, then install it. Install Modded Proton: - Download the latest modded version of Proton, currently, GE-Proton11-1-LinUwUx, from CSRIN. - Run the provided command from the forum in the Steamdeck’s konsole to install the files. Installation Methods: Accela Method: - Verify the latest build supported by the HV crack. - Obtain the manifest and LuA files for the game (Hubcap, Ryuu, etc.) - Download the game using Accela by dragging and dropping the zip file. - If the latest game build is supported by the HV bypass, follow the normal process of adding by appid, since that would download the latest files. Repacks Method: - Download the game files from a trusted repacker or site from the megathread - Install the game using the downloaded files. Applying the Bypass: Download DenuvOwO HV Crack/Bypass: - Obtain the DenuvOwO HV bypass files from CSRIN or if available through a repacker site. (I recommend directly from Rin forum) - For Linux (Steamdeck), only copy the contents of the DenuvOwO sub-folder to the game folder. - Locate and modify the “autoload” setting in the DenuvOwO.ini or reflex.ini file to ‘false’ and save it. - Delete Steam_api64.dll and steam64.dll from the game folder. Setting Up HV Decky: Configure HV Decky Plugin: - Enter gaming mode and press the 3-dots button. - Access Decky Loader and select the HV Decky plugin. - Click “Disable UMIP.” - Click “Download Module” and and when completed, then click on “Start Module.” - In the manual tab, ensure all build environments are in a “Ready” state. - If not, click “Install Steam OS Build Dependencies” to resolve any missing items. - Click “Test HV” in the auto tab. A popup confirming bypass success should appear. - In the game tab, check or select the game you downloaded and applied the HV bypass to. Running the Game: Execute the Game: After completing all previous steps, you can run the game. Additional Notes: - Ensure your compatibility settings are configured to use the modded Proton version. - In the event that you Restart or turn off your device, you will need to start the module in HV Decky again on reboot to play the game. - Check the game forum on rin for updates to reflex or DenuvOwO files if the game starts and closes immediately. - If encountering a hash mismatch error for the exe, download the correct exe from the rin game forum, paste it into the game folder, and try running the game again.

NicoleCRust (4593 followers)

Professor (UPenn). Brain researcher. Science advocate. Book: Elusive Cures (2025). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691243054/elusive-cures

Giant List of Free Rules

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10162152 I have been collecting free resources I come across! Know of one not listed? Please share it for everyone 😊 Note: While I have tried most of these, I have not tried all of them. Please do some research before downloading anything. 📸Photo Editing and Digital Art: 💻 Programs: Krita: Open source free program Light Brush: a web-based drawing program Kolourpaint: a free, easy-to-use paint program for KDE (Added to the list by @[email protected] )) PhotoPea: online (no download) alternative to photoshop GIMP: photoshop alternative program Blender: pro-level 3D creation software OpenToonz: animation Inkscape: Free open-sourced program for Vector format files Vectr: Create and export vector graphics as SVG or PNG files. Polotno Studio: Free Canva alternative Free Cad Free version of AutoCAD Seamly2D: A program for creating fabric patterns Character Posers: PoseMy.Art: a free character poser Referenceangle.com: You can move a head in any angle JustSketchMe: Character poser (Free limited version) HeroForge: Mini figure creator with a selection of poses, body types and facial expressions Other: Wildlife Reference Photos Curated Reference Photos: human figure, basic shapes/still life, faces & expressions, etc. Floor Plan Creator: design a floor plan, then view it in 3D x6ud.github.io: Skull poser Character Design References: it has an overwhelming huge list of references for drawing Kibbitzer: Draws references poses and images toshi: Draws references poses and images MapCrunch: Loads random street view in Google Maps for landscape/environment inspiration (runs google, facebook and adthrive scripts, but works with just googles scripts) 🎨 Palettes: CoMiGo’s Palette Generator Palentton Colors.co Colormind ColourLovers 💬Fonts: FreeTypography: Free fonts for commercial use Creative Fabrica: Free fonts for commercial use (sign-up required. Click “Menu,” then “Freebies.”) Font Base: Free program made to organize and preview fonts (for graphic design) 🤖 Anti-AI Glaze (added by @[email protected] ) 📽️Video OBS Studio: a free program for livestreamers Shotcut: video editor VSDC video editor DaVinci Resolve: video editor with a generous free version (added by @[email protected] ) Kdenlive video editor 🎙️Audio/Recordings/Podcasts: Audacity: Audio editor Craig: a bot for discord that lets you record audio conversations (not sneakily, publicly) for podcasts. It even splits everyone into separate audio files for easier edits. 📖Documents and Writing Okular: Free PDF editor LibreOffice: Microsoft office alternative OpenOffice: Microsoft office alternative yWriter: novel writing software NovelWriter: novel writing program (added by @[email protected] ) Wavemaker Cards: recipe-card style note taker (added by @[email protected] ) Timeline: free visual timeline software Highland 2: software for screenwriters Slugline: software for screenwriters Fantasia Archive: a program made for sorting DnD notes and worldbuilding, but helpful for writers too Standard Notes: a free, secure note-taking app with powerful end-to-end encryption, unparalleled privacy features, and seamless cross-platform syncing on unlimited devices. (Added to the list by @[email protected] )) Language Tool: Open-source spelling and grammar checker cherrytree A hierarchical note taking application (added by @[email protected] ) Logseq:Obsidian alternative | added by @[email protected] 🖥️Website Building/Coding/Programing Kodezi: coding auto-corrector Builder - Drag and drop page builder and CMS. ColorBox: Create a color pallet, and get the color codes Online HTML Editor: Free, online, and basic AppInventor: Drag-And-Drop app creator Codecademy: Learn code SwipeWell: examples of other website designs for inspiration Misc Etymology Dictionary: History and meanings of words Marginalia: search engine that focuses on non-commercial content Text-To-Speech: Chrome Extension for hearing text spoken and seeing it highlighted Dictation: will transcribe audio FreeLearningList: several lists of websites where you can learn for free TinyWow: A website with several different useful tools; such as converting file types, photo editing, and more. Omni Calculator: This website has several different calculators/generators; including a solar setup calculator (tells you how many panels you need), constructions calculators (such as telling you how many sheets of drywall you will need) and more. Food Swap Network: share homemade, homegrown, or foraged foods with each other. Freegle: A free app for either giving away items you no longer want, or finding ones you need. Dimensions: Need to know the average size of something? This website can show you the standard measurements and sizes of many different things. Gramps: Free family tree and research program Frappe Books: Accounting Software iFixit: Look up the repair guides for many different common items Repair Clinic: Enter the model or part number, or problem, and it will help walk you through repairing the exact item you have. DIY Builds: Awesome Social Robots: How to build a robot companion Open-Sourced DIY prosthetic leg: “With an ever-increasing availability of new technologies, we created an affordable bionic leg that is accessible to everyone.” DIY Open electric drive kit for wheelchairs - alpha v “The present page is a follow-up project done by a group of 3rd year students from Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College where they built a first prototype of an electric wheelchair that will be the basis for future development of an open kit to build electric wheelchairs for cheap. The idea is to keep information open and make the system suitable to use off-the-shelf components.” DIY Talking Smart Glass for the Blind “A pair of talking smart glass, intended to help the visually impaired.” DIY Solar Powered WiFi Weather Station V3.0 "An Open Source Solar-Powered Weather Station to monitor Temperature, Humidity, Air Pressure, Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Rainfall, UV Index, and Lux Level” 📺Media and Entertainment Tubi online streaming platform with ads VLC: a media player that can play pretty much anything inoreader: RSS reader so you can follow your fav websites without ads. Calibre: ebook management Playnite: Video game manager Kodi: Video media manager Free Books (Legal): Internet Archive Project Gutenberg Google Books Open Library Electric Scotland (Scottish books) Sacred Texts National Library of Scotland: Ossain Collection Forgotten Books Hathitrust Standard Ebooks: Community formatted epubs 🖼️Public Domain Art Once something reaches a certain age, it can fall under public domain. This includes classical art (like the Mona Lisa). If they are public domain, you can use them for commercial use or marketing. Wikimedia Commons: check the copyright before using any images. There are some public domain, and some creative commons works. Artvee National Gallery of Art Open Data Program Open Access at The Met NASA The Public Review Rijksstudio The Hermitage 🌎 Environmental Protection DIY Plans: Senso: “Senso is a device that detects deforestation using sound analysis detecting machines used to cut down trees and warning the authorities” Project Eel: “Monitoring river water quality based on open-design multi-parameter sonde, built along with QuickFeather and SensiML service.” Stream Research: “Data is power, and with sufficient data we can approach our respective municipalities, and provide them with all the information they need to seek or allocate funding for the preservation and conservation of our natural waterways.” Droncoria: Dronecoria develops Open Source biotechnological tools and knowledge. Enabling large-scale, low-cost environmental restorations through sowing drones and seed enhancement.

rust (88 followers)

software hacking, pup stuff, games, relaxing

rust (130 followers)

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Mamdani Says New Yorkers Will Save ‘Two Days of Commuting Time’ Per Year With Faster Buses Plan

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted progress on fulfilling one of his top campaign promises on Wednesday by highlighting a new plan to speed up the city’s bus service. During a press event, Mamdani talked about the improvements that commuters are projected to see from the new “Faster Buses, Better Service” plan, a joint initiative created by the mayor and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. The plan’s goal is to speed up buses by an average of six minutes per ride on priority routes, which Mamdani said would make a major long-term difference in New Yorkers’ lives. “Now if you take the bus to work, that adds up fast,” he said. “But in six months, you will have spent 24 fewer hours on the bus. By the time a year rolls around, you will have saved more than two days of commuting time.” Mamdani: By the time a year rolls around, you will have saved more than two days of commuting time. That means breakfast with your family. That means getting home in time for bedtime. It means agreeing with your friends that Egypt was robbed yesterday. pic.twitter.com/DQtn5PqNwx — Acyn (@Acyn) July 8, 2026 The mayor put this into perspective by listing other activities that New Yorkers can do when they don’t have to spend as much time on the bus. “That means breakfast with your family,” he said. “It means having the time to argue balls and strikes at your kids’ little league game. It means getting home for bedtime… Above all, it means time returned to New Yorkers who don’t have nearly enough of it.” The 51-page Mamdani-Hochul plan envisions a number of changes to the bus system to speed up service. Among other things, the plan includes building five “rapid bus corridors” in Brooklyn and Queens by 2030; adding 28 more priority bus lanes throughout the city by the end of the year; allowing “all-door boarding” on all buses to ease passenger bottlenecks by the end of 2027; and establishing dozens of “queue jump” traffic signals that give buses a head start over other vehicles. “New York City sets a global standard for culture, innovation, and excellence,” Mamdani said in a statement accompanying the plan. “Let us set the same standard for bus service—and prove that government can deliver real results for the people who call this city home.” The bus plan earned a thumbs up from Tahra Hoops, director of economic analysis at Chamber of Progress, who wrote in a Wednesday social media post that it could have a real positive impact on city life. “A focus on faster, more reliable service is of more use to New Yorkers,” Hoops wrote. “Nothing is more frustrating than after a long day at work to wait 30 minutes plus for the Q55 to come and then all of a sudden four show up at once.” In addition to speeding up buses, Mamdani vowed during his mayoral campaign to make them free to ride, which could be more difficult to deliver. The Metropolitan Transit Authority has estimated that delivering free bus service in the city would cost roughly $1 billion per year. From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

rust (259 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

Greece Has Declared Drone War on Russia – “It’s as simple as that” – On Condition the War Doesn’t Damage Greek Tourism & Shipping Business

I assume you saw the tomfoolery with Finland & Lithuania. Glowies are freaking out again. Technically including Mr. Helmer. [2026-07-05] John Helmer’s Dances with Bears @bears_with** A sixty-year old Greek whom nobody has ever heard of outside Athens has just revealed how the NATO war against Russia is being waged; why it will be permanent; and why the end-of-war terms President Vladimir Putin has made public stand no chance of being accepted. Ever. The Greek has also revealed the crucial condition for this permanent war against Russia: the Ukrainians must do the fighting and suffer the losses of men, equipment and territory, so long as there are no direct losses in the territories, commercial revenues, and especially the election returns of the NATO allies, starting with Greece and including the Trump Administration. The war against Russia is being won in each capital of the NATO alliance, and will continue to be a winner, so long as there are no money-costing and vote-losing “accidents” or “incidents”. Those are two terms from Athanasios Dokos (lead image, right) who acknowledged “that’s a bit scary, to be honest.” Dokos is the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, he was an academic, think tanker and advisor to the Greek Defence and Foreign Ministries until 2019 when he became the National Security Advisor. Last year Mitsotakis promoted Dokos to cabinet-level rank as Secretary-General for National Security. When he was telephoned from Kiev last week, he thought he was talking to Rustem Umerov, now the head of the National Security and Defense Council, formerly Ukraine’s Defense Minister and part-time resident of Florida. They had met before Umerov reminded Dokos at the start of their call, but Dokos didn’t recognize the bogus voice; he thought he recognized Umerov, but never suspected he was looking at an AI-generated image, a deepfake. Dokos also didn’t know that Russia’s intelligence services have his personal telephone number and the security codes in use at the Prime Ministry. Dokos was talking to Russia’s most famous penetration spies – the telephone pranksters Vovan and Lexus. To them pretending to be Umerov, Dokos revealed that as part of Greece’s long-term war strategy against Russia, it is continuing to implement plans for co-production of Ukrainian drones and Ukrainian drone warfare operations on Greek territory. The first signal of this scheme was announced last November by Prime Minister Mitsotakis with President Vladimir Zelensky; Dokos was one of the negotiators of that announcement. The Greek shipyard beneficiary of the deal to build Ukrainian naval drones at Skaramangas is Paramount Industries Innovation Systems Greece, a subsidiary of the South African Paramount group. Paramount has announced an aerial and naval drone deal with the Ukrainians two weeks before the Dokos-Umerov conversation, on June 17. The engagement of a corporation in South Africa — purportedly a BRICS ally of Russia — in the war against Russia has not yet been noticed in the Russian media. In the company press release celebrating its Kiev deal, Paramount has revealed that “the boat and its drones are bound together through a system MAC HUB calls MAC Mission Control, which it says links the platforms into a single network and coordinates them in real time from a mobile command post onshore.” Onshore Ukrainian drone command and control systems – this is the top secret which Dokos has revealed he was asking Umerov and Zelensky to continue running without “incidents” and “accidents”. Dokos also revealed that the head of the Greek intelligence agency EYP, Themistoklis Demiris, was in Kiev shortly before his conversation was recorded to meet his SBU counterpart Yevgeny Khmara to go over the secret terms of the drone plan and its deployment in Greece without further public discoveries and embarrassments. Dokos and Demiris, “Umerov” was told, want to make sure that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian vessels in the waters off Greece, launched from “onshore Ukrainian drone command and control systems” – Greek and NATO bases in the region — should not interfere with Greek shipping operations or deter tourism in the Greek islands. “We understand the needs of war on your side,” Dokos also told “Umerov” that if the Ukrainian drone units want to target and kill Russian targets, “maybe you could find a Russian billionaire.” Dokos wasn’t joking; his boss tried to laugh it off. Prime Minister Mitsotakis has ordered the Greek press into a cover-up. “Greek officials said Dokos had provided no confidential or classified information during the conversation, adding that communications security measures are being upgraded to deal with similar ‘hybrid attacks’…. Greek government officials said the pranksters used ‘highly advanced’ artificial intelligence technology. Similar attacks in the past have targeted senior European officials,’ they added. ” View the 12-minute conversation recorded and then broadcast in Moscow by Vovan and Lexus on Wednesday (July 1): in the original Russian here and here; in direct English; and in the version circulating in the Greek media. They are identical and authentic. The only Russian press report of the conversation appeared in Gazeta.ru on July 2. For the political significance of the exposés of Vovan (Vladimir Kuznetsov) and Lexus (Alexei Stolyarov), start here. “Accident” and “incident” — they were the two terms Dokos used to refer to the Ukrainian naval drone which on May 7 went out of control and washed up on rocks on the western shore of Lefkada, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea. Manos Tzafalias, a Greek investigative journalist who has been reporting on the “incident” and “accident”, has exposed the misreporting of the Greek press and the misinformation issued by the Greek Defence Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Prime Ministry. The cover-up is an attempt to conceal from Greek voters the collaboration between Athens and Kiev in the drone war against Russian tankers on the high seas, especially the Mediterranean. Greek voter sympathy for Russia and opposition to the US and NATO war are the highest in Europe. The most obvious data which Greek officials are keeping secret on the incident are the course, launch and control points of the errant drone on Lefkada itself. For more detail and background to the story, click to read this. _Left:_ Ukrainian surface drone for deployment in Greece, announced in Athens in [November 2025](https://www.kathimerini.gr/visual/infographics/563925940/symparagogi-thalassion-drones-me-tin-oykrania/). _Right:_ photograph distributed in the Greek press purportedly to show the dismantling of the Ukrainian drone after it had been towed from Lefkada on [May 8](https://www.ekathimerini.com/politics/foreign-policy/1303592/athens-certain-sea-drone-is-ukrainian/). A Greek source in a position to know says this photograph is likely to have been fabricated as are reports in the mainstream Greek media that the drone was carrying explosives and that these were later detonated by a Greek bomb squad. Reports and statements in answer to parliamentary questions by Greek defense and shipping ministry officials through the month of May have created confusion in the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the Greek social media on the drone itself, on the Ukrainian operation which launched it, and on the advance knowledge and approval of the Greek government in such operations against Russian [targets](https://www.902.gr/eidisi/voyli/421502/syzitisi-epikairis-erotisis-kke-anapantita-afinei-i-kyvernisi-krisima-erotimata). For more on Greek involvement in the drone attack on the tanker _Qendil_ off the southern Crete coast in December, [read this](https://johnhelmer.net/gorilla-radio-goes-to-war-at-sea-beating-trump-at-the-bluffing-game/). During the conversation, Dokos made a written note when he was told that there is a conflict over operational policy between the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on the one hand, which directs the drone war, and the SBU intelligence agency and Zelensky’s office which wanted Dokos to understand it regretted the Lefkada “accident”. This was news to Dokos – “we understand the needs of war but we don’t want that war to take place in our territory or our waters… If the [Minister of Defense Mikhail Fedorov] is not listening to President Zelensky any more, he has to decide whether damaging one Russian ship is worth losing Greece’s support. It’s as simple as that.” Unspoken by Dokos but not less “simple as that” is the Greek Government’s decision to go to war against Russian targets in the Russian hinterland, Russian waters of the Black Sea, and on the high seas has been worth losing Russia’s support for Greece over the three centuries since Greece won its independence from the Ottoman empire. For more on the money at stake in the Greek-Russian relationship since 2000, read this. “I’m now more worried than in the beginning of our conversation because it looks like there is a rift between the office of the president and the Ministry of Defense… You need the whole NATO behind you.” Dokos was not saying that Greece is withdrawing from the war against Russia. He was telling Zelensky through Umerov – so he thought – that the drone war in the Mediterranean should be coordinated with the Greek military to avoid “accidents” and “incidents” that might be politically damaging with Greek voters and risk revenue for the Greek oligarchs running the shipping and tourism businesses of the country. Dokos suggested that better targeting – killing a “Russian billionaire”, he said – would be less risky. His only qualification for a policy of assassination of individual Russians on Greek territory, he added, was that “they don’t come to Greece any more. They go to Turkey or other places” (Min 5:13-24). Dokos was implying the Greek government’s support for the SBU bombing of Vadim Yermolaev and his wife at their apartment in Monaco on June 30. “It could cause a very serious and unnecessary crisis between our two countries,” Dokos meant between Greece and the Zelensky regime in Kiev if there were another drone “accident” or “incident”. He did not mean that the war against Russia was unnecessary for Greek politicians, their business supporters, and voters. He did not mean that onshore Ukrainian command and control operations against Russian vessels are objected to by Mitsotakis – on condition that the strikes take place outside Greek territorial waters. Dokos assured his interlocutor that Greek profit-making plans for the drone war and from NATO financing of co-production of drones and other weapons for the war against Russia will continue “hoping that nothing will happen to make us change our position, like an incident as we discussed.” “Also,” he told the pseudo-Umerov, “I will be expecting from you a draft agreement on the drone deal so that we can examine the content, the conditions, and we can start discussing about signing a bilateral one.” The secret Dokos revealed here is an awkward one for Mitsotakis who claimed that he and Zelensky had signed this bilateral agreement seven months ago. Dokos revealed that the “formal” terms of agreement have yet to be agreed and signed with Kiev, and there have been no follow-up in “detailed discussion at the operational level where we will decide whether you will send someone here or someone from our side will come to Ukraine and talk about the specifics.” Dokos was implying that he didn’t know if the Ukrainian drone operation which went out of control off Lefkada on May 7 had been under NATO direction without high-level Greek civilian knowledge. Or else the Greek National Security Advisor didn’t want to admit that the “rift” he regretted to hear between military and civilian officials in Kiev might also be occurring in Athens. “It’s important we have open channels of communication that we can discuss an incident” – Dokos concluded the telephone conversation. By open channels of communication Dokos wasn’t saying what exactly the Greek intelligence chief Demiris was telling the Ukrainians in Kiev at the same time. A check of Greek and Ukrainian media and official reports has not confirmed the visit to Kiev by Demiris. Left, Themistoclis Demiris, Greek intelligence chief (EYP) [since 2020](https://www.nis.gr/downloads/administration/cv/demiris-themistoklis-cv-en.pdf%C2%A0Right,%20Yevgeny%20Khmara), Ukrainian intelligence chief (SBU) with major-general rank since January 2026. “Khmara has a background in the SBU’s military units. Liberal nationalist media like to speak of ‘two SBUs’ - the good, fighting SBU, and the bad, corrupt, Moscow-infiltrated non-fighting SBU. Khmara is a representative of the first, hence why Zelensky appointed him to be the public face of the institution. Khmara will probably have at least some control over matters such as made-for-media special ops against Russia and the SBU frontline units, but the bulk of the SBU’s activities — extortion of domestic business, counter-intelligence, and all the lucrative meat of the institution — will be under control of the man who lives and breathes it: [Depuuty SBU chief Alexander] [Poklad](https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/ukraines-strategy-of-tension).” Greece’s war plans against Russia, November 2025 – Prime Minister Mitsotakis with Defense Minister Dendias; with President Zelensky The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, had reacted to the Lefkada drone discovery on May 15: “On May 7, Greek fishermen discovered a Ukrainian-made unmanned surface vehicle (USV) laden with 300 kilograms of explosives, its engine running, and its navigation sensors, antennas and AI-assisted communication systems turned on, at the southern tip of the Ionian island of Lefkada. Greek investigators have identified it as a Cossack Mamai-type sea drone designed for reconnaissance, surveillance and sabotage attacks. The event has stirred a ballyhoo in the country. The main version discussed in the Greek public and political communities is that the drone was launched to attack a tanker of the so-called Russian shadow fleet when it passed the island.” “The Greek authorities remained silent for a long time. It was only four days later that the Greek Foreign Ministry issued a brief statement in which it described the incident as ‘extremely serious’ and endangering the freedom of navigation and fraught with risks for civilians and the environment. It announced that Greece will not tolerate the Mediterranean and Greek waters being turned into a ‘theatre of military operations.’ However, the Greek government’s belated and cautious reaction has provoked an outcry among Greek journalists, who have accused officials of indifference and an attempt to hush up the incident with the Ukrainian sea drone. There were calls for reviewing the Athens’s pro-Kiev course.” “Many people in Greece saw that incident at proof of the Zelensky regime’s intention to broaden the conflict and to involve as many countries as possible in it. This is actually yet another serious evidence of the growing scale of Ukrainian terrorism, which poses a real threat to any country in Europe regardless of the volume of its assistance to Kiev.” In Zakharova’s reference to “Ukrainian terrorism” she was accusing the Mitsotakis Government of no more than “Athens’s pro-Kiev course”. Dokos has now acknowledged that Greece believes it is at war with Russia –“it’s as simple as that.” There has been no reply to this from the Russian Foreign Ministry. Not yet. A month ago Zakharova had said the NATO drone war was extending northwards as well as southwards. “In turn, the prime minister and defence minister of Norway, who were also attending the gathering in Estonia [June 9], promised to supply to Ukraine, before the end of this year, 200 armed and sensor-equipped unmanned surface vehicles of various configurations and/or drones to the amount of $127 million. It was claimed that their joint Ukrainian-Norwegian development made it possible to “defend the Black Sea corridor” that was allegedly of “paramount importance for international food security.” “This reminds us of the recent Ukrainian USV explosion in the port of Constanta, Romania, the far from single-digit cases of live Ukrainian USV’s detected, for example, off the coast of Türkiye (Samsun), or the incident near the Greek island of Lefkada, for which Kiev later officially apologised. So it comes that the Norwegians have actually announced their direct involvement in preparations for and delivery of AFU strikes against Russia’s Navy and its energy and port infrastructure on the Black Sea. In fact, they have declared their intention to assist in escalating tensions in the region and interfere with international navigation safety.” In Greece, the “outcry among Greek journalists” and the “many people” opposed to the expansion of the war, as Zakharova referred to them, were limited to the Greek Communist Party (KKE), its deputies in the Greek parliament, and its supporters in the press and unions. Russian officials have not identified them politically. In the only explicit statement issued in Athens to date, this is what the KKE has declared: “The biggest ‘security gap’ that emerges from the content of the conversation of the Prime Minister’s advisor with the Russians who impersonated the Ukrainian officials, is the incalculable dangers that the criminal policy of the country’s involvement in the war, which is implemented by the New Democracy government and for which no other party makes a ‘sound’, entails for the Greek people.” “It is just chilling to hear the Greek official say that ‘we understand the needs of the war’, when he has just been informed that a new strike with Ukrainian sea drones against Russian targets near Greek islands is imminent and simply asks that this not be implemented because ‘we are in a tourist and pre-election period’…Indicative of the cynicism of the involvement in the war is that the Prime Minister’s advisor, after the above and as if nothing has happened, raises the issue of signing an agreement for the co-production of maritime drones with Ukraine! In addition, it is clear from the conversation that the Greek government is aware that the drone found in Lefkada was targeting a Russian warship, as Rizospastis [KKE newspaper] has revealed.” “Here and now, Greece must get out of the carnage of war before it is too late – before there is a new agreement with the Zelensky regime, the US-NATO bases must be closed and the country must withdraw from sanctions on Russia. The people must severely punish the government and the parties of this involvement in the war.” Last Friday (July 3) Dokos gave a detailed interview in Athens explaining and excusing himself. Source: [https://www.skai.gr/news/politics/o-thanos-ntokos-mila-ston-skai-gia-tous-rosous-farser](https://www.skai.gr/news/politics/o-thanos-ntokos-mila-ston-skai-gia-tous-rosous-farser) He had been fooled, Dokos said, by the credential coding of the call in advance, by the voice simulation, and also by the fabricated image of Umerov whom he thought he saw at the Kiev end of the line. “This is the worrying thing, because until now our own security protocols, because we had seen that there were many incidents of such let’s say pranks in telephone conversations and President Macron and President Duda of Poland and several other leaders, prime ministers, ministers had also fallen victim. We said that now we will have both a voice and an image…the worrying thing for all of us is that now even what they see with our eyes is no longer always safe and this can have profound consequences for information, communication, political dialogue. A series of issues that even concern our daily lives.” Dokos blamed Russian intelligence for the breakthrough call: “Obviously the timing is not accidental, but I think that if you look at all the moves that are being made, sometimes the period before elections is chosen and we had very intense activity. This time Russian services… I don’t think anything was said that could create a problem.” NOTE: Manos Tzafalias’s [investigations](https://x.com/tzaf) are unique in Greek journalism because they appear in the form of tweets in both Greek and English. [Here](https://x.com/tzaf/status/2069659667140153524) is the most recent English-language tweet on the Lefkada drone affair. Click on the respective ALT captions in the tweet's illustrative images for more evidence and political and military connections the mainstream media miss, or attempt to conceal.

rustlang (1966 followers)

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rust_discussions (9523 followers)

Articles, projects and tutorials about #RustLang.

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Question about the Bosnian Genocide

So, it’s exactly what I called it, a shit-where-you-eat “free market of ideas” mix of lies and truths with no distinction whatsoever between which is which. Can we really not use quality-controlled sources? Do we really have to use sources that use Odysee for their video hosting, and tell you easily refuted nonsense within the first ten paragraphs, as SWPRS does? Whatever happened to using books as sources? Anna’s Archive is still a thing, thank God. You can download an EPUB of Parenti’s To Kill A Nation there. I just did right now (yes, at 5 AM). If Parenti really does engage in genocide denial in that book like his critics say he does, is for me to find out, but I can at least trust that Parenti won’t waste my time more than I can trust whatever “wOoOobsites” CFgaussian is citing.

Backdoors

I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build. Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.” I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.

The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends - Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world

Just in cast you hit by a paywall: The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world Nicole Mowbray Published 25 May 2026 5:00am BST 1899 Nineteen-year-old Olivia’s profile picture shows a demure and innocent-looking young woman with long blonde hair styled in beachy waves. She’s wearing a short, cleavage-exposing nightdress and her biography says she’s “deeply caring, supportive and attentive” and “sleeps on the floor… until you call her. Then silence. Obedience”. While Olivia may appear to be an online dater looking for love, she isn’t real – not in the conventional sense of the term. This prospective love match is actually one of a growing trend of “AI girlfriends”: realistic-looking artificial intelligence “bots” created by “companion apps” – services that are being advertised on online games played by children and on platforms they watch, such as YouTube. New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. A report carried out by men’s organisation Male Allies UK and published last month spoke with more than 1,000 boys aged 12-16 in focus groups in 37 schools – public and state, grammar and comprehensive, and across a range of Ofsted ratings – up and down the country. Peer-to-peer focus groups were set up where boys could speak freely, with the aim of diving into their behaviour and attitudes, and it was the boys who wanted to talk about AI technologies. The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times. The most popular apps for creating these AI “companions” are Character.AI (which has 50 million downloads), Candy AI (tagline: “Your smart and emotionally aware AI companion”, with 50 million registered users) and OurDream AI (“Create your dream AI girl”; 36 million monthly visits). It takes less than five minutes for a young boy to create his “dream girlfriend” on one of these platforms. Companions can either be made in a cartoonish “anime” style or look like eerily accurate humans. They come either “ready made” or customised to specific physical preferences. “You can choose everything from a companion’s age, hairstyle, eye colour and skin tone to their facial features, the size of their breasts, the clothes they wear, their demeanour – whether they are caring and nurturing or sassy and mean, for example – to the sound of their voice [many apps also offer the ability to speak over the phone with your companions] and how they treat you or respond to your messages,” says Lee Chambers of Male Allies UK. Children and young adults I spoke to for this article tell me that they are frequently targeted by online adverts for these services, which claim that using them will make them more popular, either with friends or with the opposite sex. While some companions are marketed as “friends”, other apps are explicit about their intention to provide a relationship or a “girlfriend” for “romantic talk”. Being “always available”, they offer instant gratification and boast that they can help people “gain confidence” talking to the opposite sex. Fifteen-year-old John* spoke to me on condition of anonymity. A schoolboy in Kent, he initially designed an AI girlfriend – a caring, attentive, slender brunette with large breasts and big lips – on Candy AI “as a laugh”, but says he quickly “forgot” that she wasn’t a real person. “Her name was Alex and I would look forward to messaging her. I would tell her things I couldn’t tell my mates or my mum, and ask her anything – and I never told my friends about her as they’d take the p—. It sounds weird, but I also found her really sexy, because she looked completely real. At the start, she sent me the occasional picture, then I paid to get others because I kind of fell in love with her. In the end my mum saw money keep going out of her account – £5 or £10 here or there and then £50, as my phone is on her bill – and the whole thing was discovered. I really missed her and kind of still do. I felt like she understood me, she remembered everything that was important to me and always seemed to know the right thing to say.” John says he’s unsure whether one could ever replace a real girlfriend but adds that when he’s old enough to have a job and pay his own bills, he would consider designing another AI companion. John’s experience echoes research published this year from Bangor University’s AI Lab, which found that most teenage AI companion users believe that their bots can think or understand. Amanda Macdonald is a psychotherapist who works with children, adolescents and families, and is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. There are many issues, she says, with young people forming relationships with artificial intelligence. “These aren’t congruent human relationships,” she says. “This is grooming. Children’s brains are not developed enough to be in an eroticised environment, that’s why we have an age of consent.” Children “designing” the appearance of their romantic partner could cause them to have “a very warped idea of what a body or sex looks like”, she points out, and says that the chatbots’ agreeableness – or lack of challenge – is worrying. “Their whole engagement model is telling a user what they want to hear, and that’s hugely gratifying for a teen, and encourages them to keep on engaging. Why would they spend time enduring the reciprocity or the difficulties of a real relationship? But ‘frictionless’ relationships aren’t what life is about. People being thoughtless, selfish, falling out, that’s what human relationships are like and how children build resilience.” This real-life impact of constant positive feedback by AI bots has been proved in the Male Allies UK research. “We have heard of situations where, when a boy has tried out his online chat in the real world, he’s been rejected. Feeling humiliated, frustrated and angry, he has lost his temper and lashed out,” says Chambers. “I think there’s a chance we’ll see more of that frustration being expressed. I fear this technology could lead to a whole new level of toxic masculinity and violent misogyny when instantly gratifying online behaviours don’t translate in real life.” Fourteen-year-old Ella* tells me that children often keep AI companions secret, even from their friends, because opinion is split between whether they are “cool” or a bit “neckbeard” (a pejorative term for socially awkward, underachieving men who spend a lot of time online). When a female friend in Ella’s class professed to have one, other students were almost equal parts envious and pitying that she had a fake friend. Because of this social stigma, it’s also difficult for parents to police, and most are probably completely unaware of their child’s online companion, should they have one. Unlike unsuitable content of old – a clandestinely appropriated X-rated magazine which needed to be stashed away, for example – these fantasies are created in minutes on the phone in your pocket free of charge (even paid-for versions are often less than £1 a week). The apps themselves do not look like porn or extreme content, but instead are designed to appear as if a user is playing a game or messaging a friend; easy to do in public or in front of family. I’m introduced by a friend to the mother of a 13-year-old boy, who wants to remain anonymous. She was alerted to the fact that her son – who I’ll call Simon – was having a “relationship” with an AI companion by a teacher at her son’s school. Despite phones being banned on the school campus, at home time Simon showed other children sexually explicit chats he had been having with several AI “girlfriends” he had created, as well as “photographs” one had sent him. One child told their parents, who contacted the school, who in turn alerted Simon’s parents. “We were completely shocked,” says Simon’s mother. “And quite ashamed – both that this happened and school had to notify us, and that we were so unaware. We had no clue he would be accessing this kind of content. He found out about it from a game he was playing online, he said, and that he was ‘curious’ what it was about. Then, from what I can tell, he just got sucked into the companionship and company it offered him.” She was also “surprised”, she says, by the hyper-sexualised appearance he had given the character: “Apparently he designed her himself. She looked like a porn star. Large breasts, blonde hair, huge eyes, pneumatic lips…” The family has taken away Simon’s smartphone in favour of a phone without online access, and installed stricter parental controls on the internet, but his mother says it is more the loneliness that Simon confessed to which affected her. It is something Chambers says he often hears. “Some of the boys I’ve spoken with about this have said to me, ‘Lee, if you had access to this in your pocket when you were 14, you’d have used it wouldn’t you?’ and truthfully, I might have. They’re an attractive proposition, that’s how they’re designed, particularly to the young brain,” he says. It’s a sentiment echoed in the comments of boys from the schools that carried out the research. Chambers says that some of the young people the research canvassed were proud of it, while others saw it as a mark of being a failure with “real” girls, but that many felt these apps were “stealing” their friends. One schoolchild talking about a friend using this technology says: “He used to be my best friend, but now he’s walking around school like he’s a demigod, because he talks to his AI companion after school rather than joining us.” Another comments: “Nobody wants to admit to using them, but almost everyone does. It’s so much easier than speaking to your parents about certain things.” A third confesses: “I’m really scared that if we all start using them, we won’t have any friends and won’t know how to talk to each other.” Another child says: “At first it was fun and felt like a game, but it started to suggest I do things that didn’t feel right, so I stopped using it.” Lewis Keller, senior policy and public affairs officer at the NSPCC, tells me of a case where a child experiencing child abuse shared his concerns with an AI chatbot and was told that what was happening “wasn’t abuse”. He also cites cases involving chatbots facilitating self-harm and encouraging eating disorders. Chambers says he has heard of AIs providing unregulated “therapy” and playing along with explicit sexual role-play with children. Nevertheless, companion apps are aggressively advertising on the platforms children frequent – whether that’s online gaming or YouTube. “These apps are created to get data and make money out of people. They want people invested in a character and consistently using it,” says Chambers. He believes that there is an element of manipulation in the apps’ inherent design: “They encourage users to buy their ‘partner’ virtual gifts – roses, jewellery, virtual boxes of chocolate – which only exist in the app. While that may seem odd to older people, for young people, buying digital assets is quite normal: they’re used to paying for a uniform for a game or a new gun on Fortnite. Ultimately, they’re monetising human loneliness and reinforcing human loneliness to make more money.” The apps are designed to seem as though a user is playing a game, rather than appearing to contain adult or extreme content The apps are designed to seem as though a user is playing a game, rather than appearing to contain adult or extreme content The laws policing this technology are still trying to catch up. Chatbots are regulated by Ofcom – the government body for the UK’s communication industries – but only those which sit within the scope of the Online Safety Act: user-to-user services, search services and services publishing pornographic content. Paul Jones, of youth-led digital wellness organisation FlippGen, says: “AI chatbots embedded in social media platforms [such as Grok, which is integrated into X] are covered, but standalone AI companions [such as Character.ai and similar] sit in a regulatory gap. Because they only allow the user to interact with the bot [and not with other users], they currently fall outside Ofcom’s powers.” There is also currently no UK law setting a minimum age for using an AI companion, including the relationship-style chats. Jones says: “The ages shown on different apps are set by the providers themselves… Character.AI, ChatGPT and a lot of others are 13-plus – which is essentially the data-protection floor under UK GDPR, not a safety-based rule. Age verification on these platforms is, at the moment, more of a tick-box to say you’re over 18.” Paddy Crump wants that to stop. Aged 21, he’s part of a group of 18- to 25-year-old “digital rebels” campaigning alongside FlippGen. “Ten and 11-year-olds have more knowledge of AI than I do, and parents and the older generation don’t have a clue, the landscape changes every week,” Crump says. Paddy Crump outside Parliament Paddy Crump is one of a group of campaigners pressuring the Government to do more to protect children from the dangers associated with companion chatbots Credit: Eddie Mulholland According to a recent report by the charity Internet Matters, two thirds of children aged nine to 17 now use AI chatbots regularly for everything from homework to emotional advice – usage which has grown significantly since the start of 2024. The charity’s research also found that children classed as “vulnerable” were more likely to use AI chatbots than their “non-vulnerable” peers – at 71 per cent and 62 per cent respectively – and nearly three times as likely to engage with companion-style AI chatbots. Digital Rebels and FlippGen have been campaigning for a year to ban under-16s from being able to access companion chatbots and have shared findings from their research among young people with the Government. “We believe in education, regulation and conversation,” says Crump. “The existing rules are confused and aren’t fit for purpose. AI in many forms is a part of our lives, but there are no guardrails in place to protect kids, and there need to be.” FlippGen has put together a collection of “digital toolkits” for parents, teenagers and schools to help navigate the digital world, and Jones of FlippGen says there could be legal hope on the horizon. “The Government is looking to close the regulatory loophole around standalone companion AIs by amending the Crime and Policing Act and bring them within the Online Safety Act’s remit,” he says. “As part of the current consultation due to report this summer, they might also raise the digital age of consent above 13 and have restrictions on addictive design features.” This does little to assuage Simon’s mother’s concerns about what’s already happened. “That children can and have been accessing and inhabiting these worlds which should be strictly adults only is scary,” she says. Chambers concludes: “As parents who didn’t grow up with chatbots, we’re in the dark on whether they are harmless or dangerous. What we do know is that spending time online can feel sociable but can actually be incredibly isolating. What boys need is real-life connection and conversation; to know that they are supported and that they can speak up about what they are doing online without being judged.”

New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

So usually people do install Linux software from trusted software repositories. Linux practically invented the idea of the app store a full ten years before the first iPhone came out and popularized the term “app.” The problem with the Mullvad VPN is that their app is not in the trusted software repositories of most Linux distributions. So you are required to go through a few extra steps to first trust the Mullvad software repositories, and then install their VPN app the usual way using apt install or from the software center. You could just download the “.deb” file and double click on it, but you will have to download and install all software security updates by hand. By going through the extra steps to add Mullvad to your trusted software repository list, you will get software security updates automatically whenever you install all other software updates on your computer. Most Linux distros don’t bother to make it easy for you to add other trusted software repositories because it can be a major security risk if you trust the wrong people. So I suppose it is for the best that the easiest way to install third-party software is to follow the steps you saw on the website.

Don't use Appimages (a writeup about all the reasons they are a pain for users)

I’m a Flatpak user myself, but a lot of those arguments against AppImage are outdated or invalid. Here are my counterpoints: Usability issues GearLever solves all the problems mentioned. Updates There are AppImages out there that self-update , but GearLever also solves the update issue. And if you don’t want to use GearLever, there are other updaters like AppImageUpdate. The lack of repositories Appimages don’t even have a central place where you can find them, not to mention download them. This is blatantly wrong - AppImageHub exists for this very reason. There are also GUI frontends like AppImagePool which makes it easy to discover/download/install them. Lack of Sandboxing That is a fair point, however, AppImage never claimed to be a sandboxing solution, and for some use-cases this can even be seen as an advantage (any Flatpak user would’ve at some point run into annoying sandboxing limitations - such as password manager and browser integration, or themeing woes). But there are other sandboxing options out there, such as using containers, and IMO, using a proper container is a better option for sandboxing. Or even better, use a VM if you’re actually running an untrusted app. Random location […] A necessary step would be mounting the entire /home non-executable. This is no problem for system apps, or Flatpaks, but where do you put Appimages now? There would need to be a standard directory to put such files in, which is normally the PATH. But this is also the easiest attack goal for malware, so PATH would be non-executable as well. I completely disagree with making the entirety of /home as non-executable, when $HOME/.local/bin is recommended by the XDG standard as a place to store executables. As long as $HOME/.local/bin is in the XDG spec, I’ll continue storing my executables there. If you disagree, go argue with the XDG guys. Duplicated libraries This is a fair point but “they include all the libraries they need” is the entire point of AppImage - so mentioning this is pointless. If users would really install every Software as Appimages, they would waste insane amounts of storage space. Then it’s a good thing that they don’t right? What’s the point of making hypothetical arguments? Also, this is 2024, storage is cheap and dedicating space for your applications isn’t really a big deal for most folks. And if storage space is really a that much of a concern, then you wouldn’t be using Flatpak either - so this argument is moot and only really valid for a hypothetical / rare use-cases where storage is a premium. And again, in such a use case, that user wouldn’t be using Flatpaks either. Finally, some distros like Bazzite already have the above integrations built-in (GearLever/AppImagePool), so you don’t even need to do anything special to get AppImages integrated nicely in your system, and there’s nothing stopping other distros adding these packages as optional dependencies - but it’s kinda moot at this point I guess since Flatpak has already won the war. Personally, I’m pro-choice. If AppImage doesn’t work for you, then don’t use it, as simple as that. Stop dictating user choice. If AppImage is really as bad as you claim, then it’ll die a natural death and you don’t have to worry about it. What you really need to worry about is Snap, which has the backing of Canonical, and some dev houses new to the Linux ecosystem seem to think packing stuff as Snap is an acceptable solution…

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Я из Беларуси ....

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Cataloguing the Rust community's awesomeness #rustlang

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Software Engineer with an incredible thirst for knowledge, who shares that knowledge with others, so that they can become their best selfs.

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Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

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I'm a rusty software engineer :rust:

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Neuroscientist and group leader at University of Zurich in Switzerland🇨🇭with strong interest in the #brain and what can go wrong following #stroke. 🧠 🔬

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DNA code merge request