Generated by TLDR This:

Framework began with the goal to remake consumer electronics to respect people and do less harm to the planet.

Trail-blazing performance The Chromebook Edition leverages design from the Framework Laptop including a high resolution (2256x1504) 3:2 display, comfortable 1.5mm key-travel keyboard, and precision formed and milled aluminum housing, all while remaining extremely portable at 15.85mm thick and 1.3kg.

At the same time, the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition is our most power efficient product yet with optimizations from Google and Intel that allow for long-lasting battery life.

Memory and storage are socketed, enabling you to load up whenever you’d like.

All Framework Bezels are compatible with the Chromebook Edition.

If you're a regular donor to the Daily Sceptic and got an email from me in the small hours of the morning telling you that PayPal had closed our account and urging you to set up a new donation with a link to our donate page, don't panic. It wasn't a scam. PayPal really has shut down our account and the email really was from me.

I'll tell you the full story in a moment, but just to be clear -- this won't affect the majority of people making regular donations, just those whose donations are processed by PayPal. So unless you've received an email from me with instructions about how to donate without using PayPal, please don't cancel your recurring donation. I repeat: Please don't cancel your donation. This just applies to people whose donations are being processed by PayPal and I've written to all of you.

The first I heard about this was on Thursday afternoon last week when I received a notification from my personal PayPal account informing me that it was being shut down because I'd violated the company's 'Acceptable Use Policy'. I looked at that policy and it covers things like fraud and money laundering so my first thought was it must be a mistake. Then, a few minutes later, I got another notification, this one from the Daily Sceptic's PayPal account. That, too, had been shut down and for the same reason. Eh? That was odd. Then, another email, this one from the Free Speech Union's PayPal account. Same story -- the Acceptable Use Policy.

Now call me a cynic, but the chances of all three accounts violating the same policy within minutes of one another struck me as a bit implausible. Was something else going on?

I contacted customer services and asked what I'd done, exactly, on my personal account that ran afoul of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy. I've had it since 2013 and use it, at most, four times a year, usually to receive money from a Swiss weekly magazine I occasionally write for.

The person I spoke to said she had no idea, but if I wanted I could "escalate" the matter and someone higher up the food chain would get back to me. I did that, obviously, and a couple of days later received a notification that my appeal has been unsuccessful. No explanation offered beyond the original one. Oh, and by the way, it would be keeping the money in that account for up to 180 days while it decided whether it was entitled to "damages" for my yet-to-be-explained breach of its Acceptable Use Policy.

It was the same story with the other two accounts. The only clue as to what might be going on was a message sent a couple of days ago from PayPal on the now closed Daily Sceptic account. The crucial passage read:

PayPal's policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance. We regularly assess activity against our long-standing Acceptable Use Policy and carefully review actions reported to us, and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies.

That message was a bit weird since it didn't explicitly accuse the Daily Sceptic of promoting "hate, violence or racial intolerance", or say that that was how we'd violated its precious policy. But it certainly implied it. To which my response is: How exactly? Or, more profanely: What the f*** are you talking about?

Even if the Daily Sceptic is guilty of that sin -- and I defy anyone to point to an article we've published that promotes "hate, violence or racial intolerance" -- why is that a reason to shut down my personal account or the FSU account? I still haven't received any indication of why that's happened. And for what it's worth, I've written to the CEO of PayPal UK -- Vincent Belloc, you can email him here -- and the Corporate Affairs Department of PayPal US and PayPal UK (you can email them here and here), asking for some kind of explanation. No reply, obviously. Laughably, it says on the media contact page of PayPal's website above the email addresses: "Reporter on a deadline? Looking to book an interview or need a comment for a story?" The implication is that someone from its crack Corporate Affairs team will get back to you immediately. But I emailed them last Thursday and still haven't heard back.

I suspect what's really going on is that someone at PayPal -- possibly the entire C-suite -- doesn't like what the Daily Sceptic or the Free Speech Union stands for. The company has form in this area. As Matt Taibbe wrote earlier back in May:

In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journ*lists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress.

Those sites -- Consortium News and Mint Press -- are both left wing and they're opposed to the war in Ukraine, which is presumably why PayPal cancelled them. Is the fact that the Daily Sceptic has published articles critical of the mainstream narrative about that war -- including one in which we linked to Mint Press -- the reason we've been cancelled? Seems a bit harsh, given that we've also published several articles defending Ukraine and its war effort and debunking some of the criticisms of the current Ukrainian regime.

A number of sites that have raised questions about the Covid vaccines have also been demonetised by PayPal in the past few months, including the U.K. Medical Freedom Alliance. Liz Evans, the head of the UKMFA, also had her personal PayPal account closed at the same time.

Is that fact that we've published data suggesting the mRNA vaccines aren't as efficacious or as safe as we were initially led to believe why we've been cancelled?

Colin Wright, a former colleague of mine at Quillette and a staunch critic of trans rights dogma, was deplatformed by PayPal in June, presumably because some people in the company didn't approve of his gender critical views. We've expressed similar views on the Daily Sceptic. Was that the issue?

My hunch is it's all of the above. PayPal just doesn't like free speech, which is why it has shut down the FSU account at the same time. There are five issues in particular where it's completely verboten to express sceptical views and if you do you can expect to be cancelled, not just by PayPal but by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.: the wisdom of the lockdown policy and associated Covid restrictions, the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines, Net Zero and the 'climate emergency', the need to teach five year-olds that s*x is a social construct and the war in Ukraine. Dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy in any of those areas is no longer permitted.

This is the new front in the ongoing war against free speech: the withdrawal of financial services from people and organisations that express dissenting opinions on those topics. And not just those who express them, but those who defend them, too, like the FSU. That's what makes this an escalation in the war on free speech. Until now, companies like PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon and CrowdJustice have only demonetised individuals and groups whose views they disapprove of. Now, PayPal has closed the account of an organisation that defends people's right to free speech, without taking sides on the issues they're speaking about. Even that is no longer allowed, according to this Silicon Valley behemoth.

Fear not, comrades. I may not be able to use PayPal again in a personal capacity, but I'm confident the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union will survive. Yes, we'll take a hit, but I hope people who still believe in free speech and the importance of casting a sceptical eye over the prevailing orthodoxy will show their support by joining or donating.

To join the FSU, click here. To donate to the FSU, click here. And to donate to the Daily Sceptic, click here.

And rest assured, PayPal has been expunged from all our payment systems. There's zero risk that if you give money to either of those organisations it will be pocketed by the fintech Death Star.

I thought about launching a campaign to get PayPal to restore its services to the three accounts, but then decided I didn't want to have anything more to do with the wretched company. Even if it did a reverse ferret, what guarantee is there it won't demonetise us again? No, from now on I will have nothing more to do with PayPal and if you're a customer of the company I hope you'll follow suit. (Here is a handy YouTube video explaining how to close your PayPal account.)

Stop Press: If anyone reading this is a donor to the Daily Sceptic or a member of the FSU based in Texas, please get in touch. In Texas, it's illegal for large social media companies to ban users' posts based on their political viewpoints. Is PayPal a social media company? Users can send messages to each other so... maybe. Worth exploring.

Stop Press 2: I spoke about this on GB News last night.

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/21/paypal-demonetises-the-daily-sceptic/

Generated by TLDR This:

The phenomenon of quiet quitting is not actually new.

Effective leaders confront the causes and ... [+] issues directly.

getty The phenomenon of quiet quitting, made viral by a TikTok video this summer, is not actually new; the concepts of low employee engagement and reduced discretionary effort have existed for decades.

Effective leaders use these key elements to re-energize workers, especially as their organizations undergo change.

Effective leaders make sure managers understand their role and value in addressing engagement and quiet quitting, rethink how managers are trained and deployed, and invest in their own development in a very different world.

Focus on wellbeing - Research shows 30% of U.S. workers are struggling financially, 43% are having difficulty meeting basic needs, and 62% feel burned out from work.

The Democratic Party will collapse by 2030.

Also nuclear threats but let's not talk about that haha

use strict;
use warnings;
use experimental 'smartmatch';

use Data::Dumper;
use JSON::XS;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
my $json = JSON::XS->new->utf8->allow_nonref;
my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'https://rdrama.net/marsey_list.json');
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("Mozillacels stay losing");

my $response = $ua->request($request);
die "Failed to fetch" unless defined $response;

sub contents_to_file($$)
{
        my ($filename, $content) = @_;
        open(my $fh, '>', $filename) or die "Couldn't open file $filename: $!";
        print $fh $$content;
        close $fh;
}

# Get emojis
my $emojos = $json->decode($response->content);
my %pack = (
        'files' => {},
        # empty?
        pack => {},
        files_count => 0,
);

# Case sensitive: 'Marsey', 'Misc', 'Wojak', 'Classic', 'Tay', 'Wolf', 'Marsey Alphabet', 'Platy', 'Marsey Flags', 'Rage', 'Flags', 'Sets'
my @categories = ('Marsey');

foreach my $emojo (@{$emojos})
{
        if ($emojo->{class} ~~ @categories)
        {
                $pack{'files'}->{$emojo->{name}} = $emojo->{name} . '.webp';
        }
}

$pack{files_count} = keys %{$pack{files}};

my $output = $json->encode(\%pack);
# Write content to file
contents_to_file 'pack.json', \$output;

I wrote it because I setup an Apache Reverse Proxy where I created a "fake" emoji-pack, where all the requests where Pleroma expects them just redirect to /e/{emojiname}.webp here

Just felt like sharing, incase any of you want to read Perl

It allows me to steal emojis here without manually submitting them all like I was before.

Read the report here

Orange Site

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xjdpc8/youtubes_dislike_and_not_interested_buttons/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xjhw7z/youtubes_dislike_button_rarely_shifts/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xjamor/youtubes_dislike_barely_works_according_to_new/

https://old.reddit.com/r/tech/comments/xjgvjh/youtubes_dislike_and_not_interested_buttons/

https://x.com/nytimes/status/1572188848871948293

https://x.com/verge/status/1572133489775886338

Generated by TLDR This:

If you’ve ever felt like it’s difficult to “un-train” YouTube’s algorithm from suggesting a certain type of video once it slips into your recommendations, you’re not alone.

One major issue, according to new research conducted by Mozilla, is that YouTube’s in-app controls such as the “dislike” button, are largely ineffective as a tool for controlling suggested content.

Turn on browser notifications to receive breaking news alerts from Engadget You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu.

The “dislike” button was nearly the same at 12 percent, and “remove from watch history” weeded out about 29 percent.

But it's a little bit of a paternalistic way to operate where you're kind of making choices on behalf of people.

The European Union is even farther ahead.

Orange Site

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xj4lom/indiscriminate_data_retention_is_illegal_eu_top/

Generated from TLDR This:

LUXEMBOURG, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Germany's general data retention law violates EU law, Europe's top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security.

The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years.

"The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security," the judges said.

In another case, the CJEU said financial market regulators cannot use EU laws against insider dealing and market manipulation to force telecoms providers to hand over the personal data of traders suspected of these violations.

The cases are C-793/19 SpaceNet and C-794/19 Telekom Deutschland, C-339/20 VD and C-397/20 SR.

@float-trip

Meet Marsey! An adorable cat from a Telegram sticker pack. I've been trying to get SD to generate more of this character, and wanted to share my results for anyone else working on a specific 2D style.

Comparisons

a photo of a spaceman Marsey in outer space

Textual Inversion / DreamBooth

/

a photo of Marsey as a lifeguard

Textual Inversion / DreamBooth

/

a photo of Marsey as a scientist

Textual Inversion / DreamBooth

SHOW MORE

Orange Site Discussion

Prior Orange Site discussion

https://x.com/josephruscio/status/1570957688405917698

Generated from TLDR This:

Today I got an email titled ‘Your Manuscript Account Balance’ which said: Your Manuscript account is now in arrears in the amount of $31.25.

It appears that: The venerable FogBugz application was recently sold on to https://ignitetech.com and they appear to be trying to demand money from anyone who ever used FogBugz.

Which is likely to be thousands of people.

IgniteTech describe themselves as “Where software goes to live”, but “Where software goes to die” might be a better description.

This is the reply I got: Hi, In an effort to provide a better experience to our existing customers, we are consolidating our email support channel into our Help-Center.

Replies made to this mailbox are routed to an unmonitored mailbox.

Orange Site

Orange site discusses

Well nvidia finally announced the 40 series - the scam 4080 was confirmed (they slapped a 4080 label on a 4070 so they could crank the price up) and they set absurd prices on the 4090/actual 4080.

Will amd take a short term loss to gain a lot of market share and build brand loyalty, or will they greed out like nvidia? Find out in November.

Hello everyone,

I just finished creating TxtNet Browser, which is a web browser that sends pre-parsed HTML over SMS using Brotli compression and a custom encoding method developed to use as many characters of the GSM-7 alphabet as possible. The result is a simple browsing experience which, when working properly, can transmit websites at a blistering speed of 6kbps! I was inspired by the GitHub user coldsauce who also created a similar project back in 2014. The app doesn't even request internet permissions, so it is entirely SMS reliant. More information, downloads (both server and client), and my reasoning for developing this app is available in the GitHub page:

https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser

I'm currently relying on the paid SMS API to communicate with users by buying a US toll-free number. I have a couple hundred dollars of Twilio credits in my server right now, so hopefully that will last! In the future, I'm looking into selfhosting options, such as a server app that can be run on any Android phone with an active internet connection and a phone plan.

This goes without saying, but the app is currently in a beta release stage. As a second-year CS student, I still need to work on polishing the app and fixing remaining bugs before releasing the app on Google Play.

Let me know what comments or questions you have!

Author's reddit post

Extension is a Work in Progress and since I don't use any loser Manifest v3 browsers no I will not test it

oranges site

500 or so comments in an hour so far. $1200 for the 4080, I think 1449€ in Europe. Cheaper 4080, which was planned to be released as 4070Ti but got renamed a month ago, for $899 and over €1k in Evropa. Another thread here https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/xjbxye/meta_nvidia_geforce_rtx_4090_24gb_gddr6x_to/

Le orange site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912953

Generated by TLDR This:

Burmese influencer Han Nyein Oo rose to prominence in 2020, posting memes and gossip about Burmese celebrities on Facebook to an audience that grew to several hundred thousand people in Myanmar by early 2021.

He was soon banned from Facebook for violating its terms of service, so he moved to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app and social sharing platform.

Dozens of premises were raided by police.

He did not respond to a request to comment.

Over the past eight months, Han Nyein Oo’s Telegram channels, and those of other pro-coup figures, including self-defined journ*list Thazin Oo and influencers Kyaw Swar and Sergeant Phoe Si, have doxed hundreds of people that they accuse of siding with the resistance movement, from high-profile celebrities to small business owners and students.

Dozens have since been arrested or been killed in vigilante violence.

Orange Site

Generated by TLDR This:

I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’ve angered one of the titans of the internet!

Unfortunately, not every web request can run the Cloudflare challenge page.

So, my original offense might not even have been against Cloudflare.

I had a terrible experience online for almost a week before everything cleared up.

The extension provides, what Cloudflare claims, is a privacy-preserving alternative to resolving CAPTCHA s on its challenge pages.

This might have affected the situation, but again, I have no insight into Cloudflare’s automated decision-making.

http://paulgraham.com/users.html

Generated by TLDR This:

September 2022

I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was Explain what you've learned from users.

That tests a lot of things: whether you're paying attention to users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need what you're making.

I only had a few data points: our own startup, and those started by friends.

Which is why YC partners should usually have been founders themselves.

Focus is doubly important for early stage startups, because not only do they have a hundred different problems, they don't have anyone to work on them except the founders.

Whether or not YC manages one day to be listed alongside those famous clusters, it won't be for lack of trying.

First American company to appoint AI CEO when?

Orange Site

Generated by TLDR This:

A Chinese tech company has appointed a humanoid robot, powered by artificial intelligence, as its CEO – claiming it will ensure ‘a fair and efficient workplace for all employees.

The tech company has become one of China’s most well-respected video game and mobile application developers since it was founded in 1999.

It is responsible for online multiplayer games Heroes Evolved and Conquer Online, and their corresponding Android apps along with Conquer Poker – Texas Hold’em.

‘Tang Yu will also serve as a real-time data hub and analytical tool to support rational decision-making in daily operations, as well as to enable a more effective risk management system.

Chairman of NetDragon, Dr Dejian Liu, revealed that the company would continue to develop the algorithms behind Tang Yu to ‘transform to a metaverse-based working community’.

He said: ‘We believe AI is the future of corporate management, and our appointment of Ms. Tang Yu represents our commitment to truly embrace the use of AI to transform the way we operate our business, and ultimately drive our future strategic growth.’

Speaking of languages, it's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++ and use Rust for those scenarios where a non-GC language is required. For the sake of security and reliability. the industry should declare those languages as deprecated.

— Mark Russinovich (@markrussinovich) September 19, 2022

r/technology thread

Generated by TLDR This:

The head of Kiwi Farms, the Internet forum best known for organizing harassment campaigns against trans and non-binary people, said the site experienced a breach that allowed hackers to access his administrator account and possibly the accounts of all other users.

Assume any IP you've used on your Kiwi Farms account in the last month has been leaked.

The session hijacking was made possible after uploading malicious content to XenForo, a site Kiwi Farms uses to power its user forums.

While the command to download all users’ data didn’t appear to succeed, the attacker was able to load the file, most likely as an iframe, that caused certain users to send the attacker their Kiwi Farms authentication cookies.

“In fairness to Joshua (the Admin), he appears to know technically what he’s doing based on his comments in Telegram chat,” independent researcher Kevin Beaumont wrote on Twitter in a thread documenting the breach. Unfortunately for him all the companies he’s working with and the users... Don’t.”