Law and Order ICE: "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. The secret police who throw suspects into unmarked vans, and the secret attorneys who deport them to third world concentration camps. These are their stories."

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court:

"I've never heard of someone in open court not being identified," said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. "Part of the court's ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government."

"Part of the court's ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties." [...]

When Judge ShaSha Xu omitted the ICE lawyer's name, Attorney Jeffrey Okun asked her to identify who was arguing to deport his client. She refused.

Xu attributed the change to "privacy" because "things lately have changed." Xu told Okun that he could use Webex's direct messaging function to send the ICE lawyer his email, and the ICE lawyer would probably respond with her own name and address. [...]

The government's mystery attorney, who was prosecuting both Okun's and Gonzalez-Venegas's clients, wore glasses and a navy blue suit; her hair was pulled back primly from her face. She spoke quietly, with a tinge of vocal fry. Her name, according to Gonzalez Venegas, was Cosette Shachnow.

Shachnow, 33, began working for ICE in 2021, shortly after she graduated from law school, according to public records and her LinkedIn account. The latter lists "Civil Rights and Social Action" among her "favored causes."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Bald Baby J.D. Vance Meme Can Now Be Your Boarding Pass:

James Steinberg has designed an app that allows you to change the background your digital airplane boarding pass to display a now-infamous image of the vice president as a bald, bearded baby-man. [...]

He says there was no issue at security. "The TSA tried not to show emotion but looked mildly amused," Steinberg says. "Maybe I should try in a less liberal airport."

As someone who, regrettably, has a lot of experience with Apple Wallet, I was curious how he's altering the picture, since pkpass files are signed. He's not! He's taking your info and issuing a new pkpass with the same content.

One of the cool features of pkpass is that they receive push updates, so that, for example, if the time of the event / flight changes, your pass can be updated remotely and notify you. Bald Boarding almost certainly breaks that connection.

Previously.

Just a little fuzz testing for them. Absolutely free of charge.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

DHS is urging local police to consider a wide range of protest activity as violent tactics, including mundane acts like riding a bike or livestreaming a police encounter:

Blaming intense media coverage and backlash to the US military deployment in Los Angeles, DHS expects the demonstrations to "continue and grow across the nation" as protesters focused on other issues shift to immigration, following a broad "embracement of anti-ICE messaging."

Don't threaten me with a good time.

The guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear -- like masks, flashlights, and cameras -- as potential precursors to violence [...] Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even "on foot" are framed as potential "scouts" conducting reconnaissance or searching for "items to be used as weapons." Livestreaming is listed alongside "doxxing" as a "tactic" for "threatening" police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters -- or as participants in "surveillance sharing."

One list of "violent tactics" shared by the Los Angeles -- based Joint Regional Intelligence Center -- part of a post-9/11 fusion network -- includes both protesters' attempts to avoid identification and efforts to identify police.

That can't be correct. Skateboarding, I have been reliably informed, is not a crime.

In advance of protests, agencies increasingly rely on intelligence forecasting to identify groups seen as ideologically subversive or tactically unpredictable. Demonstrators labeled "transgressive" may be monitored, detained without charges, or met with force.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

In xscreensaver-settings, any time I select a different item in the list, I get a crash with:

GLib: g_ptr_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed

This assertion fires late, with none of my code on the stack, so I have no idea what it is complaining about; and valgrind provides no clues. It started happening recently, but happens against releases as far back as XScreenSaver 6.05, so something about GTK changed, not my code. Commenting out every call to g*_free does not make it go away. Happens under X11 or Wayland.

I have no patience for dealing with GTK, so I would be very appreciative if someone else would figure this out...

Update: I am seeing this consistently on GTK 3.24.38-2 on Raspbian 12.11, but a few people have told me that they can't reproduce it. So that's even weirder.

Previously.

Jack Dorsey says his 'secure' new Bitchat app has not been tested for security.

Security researcher Alex Radocea found that it's possible to impersonate someone else and trick a person's contacts into thinking they are talking to the legitimate contact. [...]

"Security is a great feature to have for going viral. But a basic sanity check, like, do the identity keys actually do any cryptography, would be a very obvious thing to test when building something like this." [...]

Referring to his and other people's findings, Radocea criticized Dorsey's warning that Bitchat has not been tested for security.

"I'd argue it has received external security review, and it's not looking good," he said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

A man broke into an enclosure containing the NextGen Live Radar system operated by News 9 in Oklahoma City, damaging its power supply and briefly knocking it offline:

The man also damaged CCTV cameras monitoring the site, but cameras captured a clear image of his face before they were destroyed. [...]

"Anyone that's going out to eliminate a Nexrad, if they haven't harmed life, and they're doing it according to the videos that we're providing, they are part of our group," Meyer tells WIRED. "We're going to have to take out every single media's capabilities of lying to the American people. Mainstream media is the biggest threat right now."

Nexrads refer to Next Generation Weather Radar systems used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to detect precipitation, wind, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. Meyer says that his group wants to disable these as well as satellite systems used by media outlets to broadcast weather updates.

The attack on the News 9 weather radar system comes amid a sustained disinformation campaign on social media platforms including everyone from extremist figures like Meyer to elected GOP lawmakers. What united these disparate figures is that they were all promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the devastating flooding in Texas last weekend was caused not by a month's worth of rain falling in the space of just a few hours -- the intensity of which, meteorologists say, was difficult to predict ahead of time -- but by a targeted attack on American citizens using directed energy weapons or cloud seeding technology to manipulate the weather. The result has not only been possible damage to a radar system but death threats against those who are being wrongly blamed for causing the floods. [...]

Within hours of the tragedy happening, conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers, and lawmakers were pushing wild claims on social media that the floods were somehow geoengineered.

"Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake," Kandiss Taylor, who intends to run as a GOP candidate to represent Georgia's 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives, wrote in a post viewed 2.4 million times. "That doesn't even seem natural," Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, wrote on X, in a post that has been viewed 9 million times.

As the emergency response to the floods was still taking place on Saturday, US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted that she would be introducing a bill to "end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering." Greene, who once blamed California wildfires on laser beams or light beams connected to an electric company with purported ties to an organization affiliated with a powerful Jewish family, said that the bill will be similar to Florida's Senate Bill 56, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in June. That bill makes weather modification a third-degree felony, punishable by up to $100,000.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Mission Local:

The clash started at 11:18 a.m. on Tuesday when around 10 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, almost all with faces covered, tried to enter the courthouse at 100 Montgomery St. to escort other agents already inside who had a young immigrant man in custody.

ICE has been routinely arresting asylum-seekers following their immigration hearings, and anti-ICE protesters had gathered at the courthouse that morning, as they said they've been doing every Tuesday. [...]

Protesters tried to grab the man in handcuffs and pull him away from officers, but were tossed back by the ICE agents. As police pulled the man back into a waiting black SUV and began driving away, protesters jumped onto the van's front hood.

A half-dozen protesters blocked the van by amassing in front of it. The van inched forward, indifferent, before gaining speed and driving off quickly. One protester, still lying on the hood of the car, fell off the car's hood half a block away and was almost run over.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Alejandro Orellana, a 29-year-old member of the Boyle Heights-based community organization Centro CSO, faces charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting civil disorder:

According to the indictment, Orellana and at least two others drove around downtown L.A. in a pickup truck distributing Uvex Bionic face shields and other items to a crowd engaged in a protest near the federal building on Los Angeles Street on June 9.

Prosecutors allege Orellana was helping protesters withstand less-lethal munitions being deployed by Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies. [...]

Asked how handing out defensive equipment was a crime during a news conference last month, U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli [said] "He wasn't handing masks out at the beach. ... They're covering their faces. They're wearing backpacks. These weren't peaceful protesters." [...] Essayli described anyone who remained at a protest scene after an unlawful assembly was declared as a "rioter" and said peaceful protesters "don't need a face shield." [...]

"It's ridiculous charges. We're demanding they drop the charges now. They're insignificant, ridiculous," Montes said. "The most it amounts to is that he was passing out personal protective equipment, which includes boxes of water, hand sanitizer and snacks."

If you want a picture of the future, it's a rubber bullet screaming "STOP RESISTING". When people wear protective equipment, "the ability of that officer to gain compliance is restricted."

Remember, kids: all protests are peaceful until the cops declare that they are not!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

XScreenSaver 6.12 is out now. This is another Unix-only release.

• DPMS works on Wayland, using either "wlr-output-power-management-unstable-v1" or "kde-dpms".
• Fading should perform much better on both Wayland and X11.
• GNOME continues to be unsupported. Oh dear. How sad. Nevermind.
• Still no locking.

What I would like to know:

• Do you have a non-GNOME Wayland system on which either idle detection or DPMS does not work?

• Does fading look good? To clarify how it should look, on both Wayland and X11:
  • When the screen saver activates, your desktops fade to black on all monitors, then the savers start.
  • When the screen un-blanks, the running savers should freeze; then fade to black; then the desktops fade in over that black.
  • There should be no surprise single-frame flickers.
  • All of this should be at least 30fps.

One thing I have noticed is that during fade-in, that initial fade-out-to-black sometimes doesn't happen. It snaps to black immediately, so you'll see 1 sec of solid black, then the desktop fade-in starts. This seems to be timing related, possibly related to the saver's OpenGL context being torn down and becoming un-screenshottable?

On Wayland, fading (and hacks that manipulate the desktop image) require "grim" to be installed.

Because Wayland is incredible (pej., obs.), grim sometimes takes between 1.5 and 7 seconds to grab a screenshot on my Pi 4b at 1080p.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.