R.NF

It feel like a bad unreal dream. I am honestly concerned and scared.

American here. I have a job where they have a perk where you submit receipts through their app or website and you earn points you can cash out at some point if you shop with clients of our company. Sounds like a nice little promotional incentive, right?

Well, they say it’s optional but it’s not. You can apparently get in trouble for not using this and we’ve been pulled aside about it and warned we must use this stupid thing.

The idea is the app you install must be given permission to see your location at all times. It then checks the area to ensure you are favoring clients of our company as opposed to our competitors when you shop. When you shop at one of our clients, you must report your receipt to the company showing everything you bought while there. Even if you are buying gas, you need to report it.

I don’t participate in this invasion of privacy. I actually want to put less of my data out there in general, not more. I don’t even have a grocery store discount card. We were told in a meeting this week that promotions in this company are influenced by how much/if you participate in the program. We were told people have been denied promotions because they did not participate in this program.

If I’m off the clock they don’t get to decide what I do. They can fuck themselves. And I am surely not giving them a little report of what I buy. But saying we are ineligible for career advancement within the company unless we buy groceries, gas, etc from preferred vendors seems sketchy. Is this legal?

The German government has denied a media report claiming that the newly elected Chancellor Friedrich Merz had declared a state of national emergency in a bid to ramp up border controls.

A spokesperson for the government cleared the rumours on Thursday, assuring the public that the special Brussels clause, Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, has not been triggered.

Since Some of you guys asked about more details of how I migrated the entire school's infrastructure into Linux Mint, I made a small neocities website where I retell the story with a bit more details as much as I can remember them, took me around a week to make it so go have fun there and enjoy (the website is under the AGPL license, if you are interested you can check out the source code under "License" in the website or go here https://github.com/Ace120C/my-personal-website ) there is more things to improve upon so lemme know if there is anything I should be adding etc.

once again, cheers!

EDIT: The post is in the blogs tab, as now the latest button takes you to the videos tab instead

For me AutoKey is absolutely essential to my workflow. I have tons of text expansions and shortcuts to "remap" keys. E.g., respectively, typing dAt expands into 2025-05-08, 13:47:40 CEST, and pressing alt + k simulates the arrow down key.

Secondly there's XScreenSaver which has so many wonderful (mathematical) visualizations that it would be a damn shame if these eventually get lost as Wayland gets more adoption.

None of these have Wayland alternatives as far as I know. For text expansion there's Espanso, but it doesn't support keyboard shortcuts yet.

I think she's a keeper

Source

[...]

European intelligence agencies say Moscow has launched a campaign of sabotage, arson and disinformation against the continent. Sometimes, it is focused on specific targets related to support for the Ukrainian war effort, but more often it is simply aimed at causing chaos and unease.

In Lithuania, an Ikea shop was set on fire; in Britain, seven people were charged over an arson attack on a business with links to Ukraine; in France, five coffins inscribed with the words “French soldiers in Ukraine” were left under the Eiffel Tower; in Estonia, the car windows of the interior minister and a local journalist were smashed. There have been numerous suspicious fires in Poland, including one that destroyed a huge shopping centre in Warsaw.

Taken together, the incidents point to how Russia’s intelligence services have moved towards a new kind of attack on the west, one that is dangerous and violent but also piecemeal and hard to prove.

On the ground, the acts are carried out by people who are recruited online and often paid in cryptocurrency. Some know exactly what they are doing and why, others do not realise they are ultimately working for Moscow. The professional intelligence officers who direct the operations never need to leave Russian territory.

[...]