streetfestival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts

4 months old but new to me and pretty funny.

~

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

https://newsie.social/@Geewhizpat/113028457198325540

#ALTtext: Parody video of video footage of various 1-on-1 interviews with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin combined with closed captioning of lyrics related to a Trump scandal(s) and to the tune of Shaggy's hit (2000) "It wasn't me." There's a music backing track as well. There are Trump-like and Putin-like voices singing their respective parts. Trump lists things he's done like "dabbling in election fraud" to his confidant, Putin, who elaborates on his general advice, to say "it wasn't me."

source: https://mastodon.social/@Blinxeto/112833043655692211

I recently migrated to Librewolf from Firefox due to Mozilla's recent blunder of covertly adding adware to their browser.

I like the ResistFingerprinting feature for added privacy, but enabling it seems to set my browser time to GMT instead of ET, with most times on webpages (which refer to browser time) ahead by several hours as a result.

Can I define my desired timezone in the browser settings so I don't have to pick one or the other between a correct browser time and better privacy? TIA :D!

Palestinians calling home to Gaza on Skype have had their digital lives destroyed, after Microsoft closed their email accounts without warning.

BBC News has spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad who say Microsoft, which owns the voice and video chat app, kicked them out of their accounts. The total number affected is thought to be much higher.

In some cases, these email accounts are more than 15 years old and the users have no way to retrieve emails, contacts or memories.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final.

The Gazans say they have no links to Hamas - designated as a terrorist organisation by some Western countries, including the US, where Microsoft is headquartered - and accuse the technology giant, the most valuable company in the world, of persecuting them unfairly.

I’ve been at this university for the past three years and I’ve been pretty limited in my engagement with other disciplines. I tend to speak to the same people who take the same classes as me. This is one of the first times that I feel myself engaging with the academic community here. I’ve witnessed people put their studies to use: engineering students have stopped our canopies from leaking when it rains, urban planning students organized the setup of our tents, and philosophy and humanities students created a beautiful library space and held reading circles. It feels as if we have taken our classes and put them into practice.

Being at the Circle is one of the only times on campus I have felt a Palestinian presence. This university has a habit of alienating Palestinians, especially in the last eight months. There is an active genocide going on and academic departments refuse to acknowledge it. I have watched my professors get more and more uncomfortable when people bring up Palestine. They act as if senior administrators will pop in at any time and fire them on the spot.

The Circle is the only place on campus where I feel we can talk about Palestine for what it is and what it can be.

https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112535649882421445

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.

Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.

In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.

I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a 'user agreement,' or remove them from your library if/when they like.

I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I've turned off all auto-updates, and I didn't make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don't have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.

After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I'd never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven't backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)

Many people probably won't be bothered by these things, but I am. I don't want to pay full price for something that I don't truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it's mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.

Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren't connected to the internet

1:21 video shows the scale of the protest.

Shulamit Ron, Demonstrator: "We hope the world hears us: the people of Israel are not the government of Israel. We don't agree with the policy; we don't agree with the way they behave; and we want to have a different future."

Roi Tzohar, Demonstrator: "The Israeli people are hostages to their right-wing government. The people of Gaza are hostages to Hamas. And, basically, there has to be a way to overcome that and to stop the fighting and the killing. This [demonstration?] is to give everybody hope."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15001340

"Such an invasion could lead to horrific massacres and raise scenarios of a second Nakba," the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said recently. "After 200 days of horrific genocidal acts in Gaza, the real objectives of the attack are the continuation of the 76-year-long ongoing Nakba and the erasure and genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel is laying the groundwork to fulfill its settler-colonial plan of colonizing Gaza."

Human rights defenders have warned that Israel may ultimately seek to ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza.