jwz

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.

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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.

One of the disposable e-cigarettes studied released more lead during a day's use than nearly 20 packs of traditional cigarettes:

"When I first saw the lead concentrations, they were so high I thought our instrument was broken," Salazar said. [...]

"We found that these disposable devices have toxins already present in the e-liquid, or they're leaching quite extensively from their components into e-liquids and ultimately transferred to the smoke," Salazar said.

Leaded bronze alloy components in some devices leached nickel and lead to the e-liquid. Nickel was also released from heating coils, and antimony was present in unused e-liquids at high levels, both of which increase the risk of cancer.

The researchers also assessed the health risk for daily users. Vapors from three of the devices had nickel levels and two devices had antimony levels that exceeded cancer risk limits. Vapors from four of the devices had nickel and lead emissions that surpassed health-risk thresholds for illnesses besides cancer, such as neurological damage and respiratory diseases.

I'll bet Bobby Brainworms think you need a lot more lead and antimony supplements in your diet. But he's not going to state that outright, he's just asking questions...

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Eric Bailey:

It turns out you can just pay people to do things.

I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of "Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive, condescending way possible. Like, if you think it's too much, take that feeling, ignore it, and crank things up one more notch."

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

XScreenSaver 6.11 is out now. This is a Unix-only release -- this version contains preliminary support for Wayland.

This is maybe not entirely ready for prime time, but I figured I'd get it out there so that some people who actually understand Wayland can poke at it.

1. This version only supports blanking, not locking.

2. It requires compositor support for either the "org_kde_kwin_idle" or "ext_idle_notifier_v1" protocols. That means "everything but GNOME", I think.

3. Fading in and out, and grabbing screen images, require the program "grim" to be installed, and work. And it does not work under GNOME or KDE.

4. It is unable to configure DPMS, or detect changes in it.

Things I could use your help with:

1. Tell me if you have a Wayland system on which it does not work, besides GNOME.

2. I have not tested "ext_idle_notifier_v1". Please let me know if you have a system that supports that. Alternately, if it is the case that there are no compositors that provide "ext_idle_notifier_v1" that do not also provide "org_kde_kwin_idle", then I can just remove it.

3. Figure out a better (or dare I dream, faster) way to get screen shots than running "grim".

4. Figure out this GNOME and KDE shit, because I'm probably gonna just say "screw those guys" otherwise.

5. Write me some sample Wayland code that places two windows on the screen, one atop the other, and changes the alpha on the front window to make the back window appear to fade to black.

6. I have barely begun to think about locking, but probably "ext-session-lock-v1" is going to continue to be the only game in town, even though it is absolutely the wrong way to go about any of this, FFS. Anyway, it takes a list of surfaces which are the only ones displayed while locked. Possibly we can get the underlying Wayland surface out of the X11 saver windows and feed those in to it? I guess the xscreensaver-auth window would have to be re-parented to under one of those.

   I have little interest in working on this part, so if you want XScreenSaver to be able to lock your screen, you might wanna pitch in here.

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See Something, Tap Something:

ICEBlock is an innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone.

The app ensures user privacy by storing no personal data, making it impossible to trace reports back to individual users. Available exclusively for iOS devices, ICEBlock empowers communities to stay informed about ICE presence within a 5-mile radius while maintaining their anonymity through real-time updates and automatic deletion of sightings after four hours.

The cowards at Time wrote a whole article about the app and didn't include a link to it:

Joshua Aaron:

"When I saw what was going on in this country, I just really felt like I had to do something," Aaron says, referencing the ICE raids that have taken place following Trump's return to the White House. As of June, over 100,000 people have reportedly been arrested by ICE during Trump's second term. [...]

"The app is 100% anonymous and free for anybody who wants to use it. We don't collect user data. We don't even capture user data. That's extremely important," Aaron says, recognizing the privacy concerns people may have. As such, the app is not available on Android because it "requires a device ID in order to send push notifications, which requires a user account and a password." [...]

"Before [the protests started], there were around 2,500 users, and I was thrilled. Then I logged on two days later, and there were over 20,000 users, and the app went to number 32 for 'Social Networking' in the App Store," he says. [...]

In response to a request for comment, ICE referred TIME to a statement from acting director Todd Lyons, who called the app "sickening," saying it "paints a target on federal law enforcement officers' backs" and "incites violence."

Aaron says he hopes the app, which became available to iPhone users in April, is used as a tool to avoid interactions with ICE agents, rather than users directly involving themselves in potential altercations. [...]

Aaron says his ultimate goal is to look out for the community. "When I see things like ICE outside of elementary schools, that's what we are trying to push back against, because you need to do more. You need to protect your neighbors," he says.

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Phineas:

I've been getting mad a lot about hollow-eyed, artless money ghouls telling me what's inevitable and then I had an idea I had to draw about it.

T-shirt!

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Dear Lazyweb, how do I test a version of Wayland that supports ext-idle-notify-v1? The docs say it is supported on Wayfire, but that is what I am running and it is not. Do I have to turn it on somehow?

"/usr/share/wayland-protocols/staging/ext-idle-notify" exists.

Previously, previously.