jwz

Anti-ICE Protest in Minneapolis Ends With 50+ Arrests:

Demonstrators shouted "Eat a dick!" and "Fuck ICE!" as they pelted the vehicles with dildos.

Activist Russell Ellis, who posted video of the demonstration on Instagram, said the protesters "showed real balls." "Dildos coming your way! Dildos! Dildos!" Ellis barked as the toys rained down on vehicles, landing with rubbery thwunks. "It's raining dicks!" [...]

Later in the afternoon, police declared the protest an unlawful assembly before rushing in to arrest 54 demonstrators.

"Declared an unlawful assembly" is one of those phrases like "officer-involved shooting" that our lickspittle copagandist media like to trot out un-challenged and un-examined.

There are no unlawful assemblies. Fuck you.

Protesters Wield Sex Toys Outside ICE Facility In Broadview:

The protests were held Saturday outside immigration facilities in Broadview, Portland and Los Angeles, as well as the ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., with dildos donated by a sex shop that went out of business in Minneapolis.

"The logistics of the last couple of weeks have been insane," said Abe, an organizer of the local protest who declined to give their last name. "[We've] been moving dicks around all these states and we have more than 350 [dildos here at Broadview today] with more than 6,000 available nationally."

I have seen articles about a similar protest in Los Angeles, but the contemptibly cowardly LA media have seemingly all blurred out the dildos in their photo coverage. You call this journalism???

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I asked this 6 months ago and got no good answers so let's try again.

Against my better judgment, I let my staff start using Basecamp about 8 years ago, and now I want to ditch it for something open source and self-hosted.

Several people suggested Nextcloud. After much pain, I got that installed, and finally convinced my general manager to take a look at it. Here is his review:

I spent more time poking at this today, and on several occasions it took it 20-30 seconds to respond to link clicks.

I've also spent some time reading the manual, and... I hate these people so much. it's all about how to access your data with various protocols, and nothing about how to use the actual software or WTF the software is expected to do or how you might use it.

It looks like the "todo lists" is all those "cards". They even have an example set that implies each card has more details, but opening them, it just says DESCRIPTION and you can't edit it.

I cannot make any sense out of this. Is it mostly hosting infrasrtucture that is used by other, more sane front-ends? it alludes to a bunch of features, but it seems like those are "apps" that you have to add. on it's own, it's about as friendly as teaching a Boomer to set up a linux desktop so they can check emails.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate this "I'd rather have my gums planed".

A few other people suggested Openproject.

It seems that the only method of installation that Openproject documents is "install an entire VM" or "install these RPMs" and of course they don't have a package for the OS that I use ("Amazon Linux 2023"). There's not a single mention of how one might go about installing from source, so I don't even know where to begin trying to test it out.

Also they say "whatever you do, don't install our software on a server that has anything else running on it, because we might completely scorch anything that isn't ours." Confidence-inspiring!

Even more confidence-inspiring: "A user you've blocked has previously contributed to this repository: Claude". So it's slopware, too.

I am now soliciting suggestions. Please give me non-terrible suggestions.

What I am seeking:

• Create and organize sets of documents.
• Create tasks and assign them to people.
• Sometimes with due dates.
• In both of these things, edit text, with basic styling and inlined images, WYSIWYG, including from a phone.
• Attach things like PDFs.
• 100% locally hosted.
• Not paying a monthly fee to an unhinged fascist to keep my files on their computer.

What I don't care about: Anything not on that list, including but not limited to:

• git;
• Markdown;
• AWS buckets;
• Dropbox;
• Learning what business-brain buzzwords like "Gantt" or "Scrum" mean.

Things that should not need to be said but do:

• Do not suggest software that you do not use.
• Do not just Google it for me.

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Last year I wrote popup-video.js, a Google-surveillance-defeating YouTube player. You may have noticed it in action on the DNA Lounge calendar pages and galleries but I've made some improvements recently.

• The web page contains only a locally-hosted thumbnail. Nothing from YouTube is loaded until someone clicks play. This means no surveillance trackers on every one of your pages that has a video, and also the pages load dozens fewer megabytes.

• When you click play, a fake-window pops up inside the page with a YouTube player.

• Clicking anywhere makes it go away.

• There's a "minimize" button that makes it drop back down into the place where the thumbnail was and continue playing.

• If the inline thumb is nearly as wide as the page, it plays inline instead of doing the popup thing (this is often the case on mobile).

• It works on playlists as well as single videos.

• For single videos, it generates an ad-hoc playlist of all of the other YouTube videos linked on the current page, so the "previous" and "next" buttons show those.

• It works on portrait videos and videos with weird aspect ratios.

Dear Lazyweb,

If you understand the ever-changing rules about auto-play, perhaps you can offer some guidance.

On desktop Safari, you have to click twice to get the first video to play: the YouTube player pops up but does not then auto-play, unless you have done "Website settings / Allow all auto-play" for jwz.org. This is -- what's the word -- fucked up, because the creation of the IFRAME and the sending of the "play" event all happen underneath the user's "click" event, so this should be considered interactive.

And on mobile Safari you always have to click twice.

(I don't remember what the situation is on Chrome or Firefox on account of not caring.)

Anyway, if you know how to make it play with one click instead of two, I would like to know how to do that. Your suggestion should take the form of, "Here's a modified version of your JS file that works". Your speculation is acknowledged and ignored.

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Please enjoy jwz mixtape 258.

Because of the recent unpleasantness, here's a mixtape of songs about nuclear war!

This idea popped into my head while I was standing at the bar last night and I thought, "Yeah, I probably have enough videos for that" and started writing down song names... 10 minutes later I had more than 2 hours worth.

Oh yeah, and I had to find an alternate upload of the Two Tribes video because the official one is marked "inappropriate for some users, sign in to confirm your age." "Based on community guidelines." That video played hourly on MTV from like 1984 through 1988. I hate you, Milkman Youtube.

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So what is with all of this amateurish phishing spam that has been sliding right past SpamAssassin like shit through a goose for the past few months? Has someone recently discovered a new technique for finding open relays that will SPF-sign anything?

Received: from mail.vividdreamqb.name (milestone.clevervistakb.com [170.130.167.11])
From: Dicks Rewards Team
Subject: Final notice: YETI Beach Lounge Wagon unlocked by your gear score
Message-ID:
X-Request-ID: d36d3311-8a4b-4ac9-91b0-4afeee106923
Feedback-ID: jhkmk:vividdreamqb.name:mail
X-Spam-Report:
    * 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
    * 0.4 KHOP_HELO_FCRDNS Relay HELO differs from its IP's reverse DNS

I can't even tell who has been popped here. "clevervistakb.com" and "vividdreamqb.name" have the same IPs but different registrars (maybe that's a TLD thing?) It's also not clear to me which of those domains sender_access matches on.

I have, however, come to the conclusion that that there are simply too many web sites.

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Andrew Paul:

But -- and just hear me out here -- the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship. This is classic Negotiating 101 courtesy of the Faceless God himself! Sure, he may have kicked it up a notch from "sheer madness" to "abject depravity," but that's for the pundits to debate.

That said, yes, it seems like the promise to "fill every womb with salt and every testicle with spiders" is sort of backfiring. People don't respond well to that type of unprompted threat, and his immovable, hulking form appears to have finally met an immovable object. It's a little ironic that the "immovable object" in this metaphor is reality itself, but I'll take the poetic flourishes where I can these days. You can never have too much light in these dark times.

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▶︎I miss the olden days when I could manage to give even one fractional shit about human spaceflight.

When every news article didn't require navigating whether it was propaganda, or a grift, or both (because it's never science).

When I thought that humanity surviving beyond Earth was even remotely possible.

This timeline sucks.

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Arguing with robots has become something of a hobby of mine.

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I see we are at the "US Navy base in Virginia asking for donations of toiletries" stage of the victory lap.

Sailors have been arriving in Norfolk, Va., home to the world's biggest naval base, since at least the middle of March. Several groups that provide aid to military personnel say that the sailors arrived with very little. A call went out to community groups, asking for basic supplies like hygiene products.

"The base was asking for donations of toiletries and different things for the sailors coming back, because they were coming back with nothing," said Derrick Johnson, commander of American Legion Post 327 in Norfolk.

The post hosted a spaghetti dinner for some of the sailors, said Keith Shanesy, one of the post's vice commanders.

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▶︎Each message starts with the Farsi word for "attention" followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take 20 minutes, and there are six messages in each transmission.

Direction finding has traced the signal to a US base near Stuttgart, Germany. In addition to using Farsi, Iran has repeatedly attempted to jam the signal, causing V32 to change frequencies a few times. There's also a more recent, so far unidentified, jammer trying to block the signal.

In addition to direction finding, there is a surprising amount of information you can glean from the audio. The first few days of broadcasts had specific beeps in the background, which appear to be warning tones from a specific type of American military transmitter that warns the operator when encryption is not engaged. At first, a human read the numbers. Eventually, the station switched to using automated numbers. In addition, there have been a few times when Windows 10 system sounds have leaked into the transmission.

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