Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
A Kuala Lumpur-bound AirAsia flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirAsia
AirAsia X Berhad (MYX: 5238), operating as AirAsia, is a Malaysian multinational low-cost airline headquartered near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I mean, you’re on a budget Malaysian airline flying to Malaysia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia
National language (official): Malay[a][b][c]
Recognised languages: English[c]
I get some Fastly client challenge failure when trying to view the page. Here it is via archive.org, if anyone else has similar issues.
compromised routers and IoT devices
I mean, that’s kind what you’d expect if you stick devices on the Internet and then they don’t get updates.
I bet that the percentage of IoT devices on networks that are actively-maintained and getting updates is not incredibly high.
I don’t know, but my first search turns up this, which looks like the cable in question.
https://forum.creality.com/t/looking-for-hi-cable/42587
If that’s the right cable, it has gauge and connector data.
Maybe, but I don’t think that the conditions are nearly as bad as they were in 1917. They’re obviously worse than they would have been had Russia not entered into the war, but the collapse in 1917 was due to urban food shortages. I don’t mean “luxury X is unavailable”, but that people couldn’t get staple food to survive because of demands of the war.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/russias-february-revolution-was-led-women-march-180962218/
Like the French Revolution in 1789, a bread shortage in the capital precipitated unrest. After long shifts in the factories, female factory workers stood in bread lines alongside other women including domestic servants, housewives and soldiers’ widows. In these bread lines, news and rumors about planned rationing spread. When Saint Petersburg municipal authorities announced on March 4 that rationing would begin ten days later, there was widespread panic; bakeries were sacked, their windows broken and supplies stolen.
As he had throughout the previous months, Nicholas once again underestimated the extent of the unrest and again departed for military headquarters more than 400 miles away in Mogliev, which is now in Belarus, against the advice of his ministers. In the czar’s mind, leadership of the military took precedence during wartime, and he was concerned by the mass desertions occurring in the aftermath of munitions shortages and defeats at the hands of the Germans.
Though in past moments of revolutionary sentiment, the military had stood by its czar, by 1917, the armed force was demoralized and sympathetic to the demonstrators’ cause. The presence of large groups of women among the demonstrators made soldiers particularly reluctant to fire on the crowds. When the soldiers joined the demonstrators, as opposed to firing upon them, the end of the Romanov dynasty was near.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/ztyk87h/revision/5
There was a severe lack of food in Moscow and, in 1917, Petrograd only received half of the grain required to feed its citizens.
Now, okay. It’s possible that standards for political support are different, that the bar has changed. But the public in Russia of 2026 — though it may be in a worse state than Russia of 2020 due to resources consumed by the war — is also not experiencing the degree of deprivation of Russia of 1917.
This is a Canadian publication.
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narwhal
The Narwhal is a Canadian investigative online magazine that focuses on environmental issues.[1][2]
searches
It sounds like the peacekeeping mission actually is going to end quite soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Interim_Force_in_Lebanon
UNIFIL’s mandate is renewed annually by the United Nations Security Council; it was most recently extended on 28 August 2025 with the passing of UNSCR 2790[2] which set out the final extension of the mission’s mandate until 31 December 2026, with its drawdown and withdrawal to then take place throughout 2027.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/29/un-unifil-lebanon-peacekeeping-mission-withdrawal
UN to end Lebanon peacekeeping mission next year after Israeli and US pressure
Unifil mandate extended but troops patrolling Lebanon-Israel border to be withdrawn in December 2026
After the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Dorothy Shea, said it was the last time the US would extend the Unifil mission. “The United States notes that the first ‘i’ in Unifil stands for ‘interim’. The time has come for Unifil’s mission to end,” she said.
The decision was also praised by the Israeli representative to the UN, Danny Danon, who said: “For a change, we have some good news coming from the UN.”
Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the US has moved closer to Israel’s position on Unifil. Israel has long considered Unifil to provide political cover to Hezbollah by failing to adequately disarm the militia in southern Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war, and has pushed for the mission to be disbanded.
The Political Signifance of the Turkish Moustache
Ülkücü
The MHP moustache, called “ülkücü” in Turkish, is typically worn by nationalists. The end of the moustache extend downwards, like the sides of a horseshoe.
Leftist Style
Left-wingers usually prefer thick, walrus-like moustaches that solely cover the upper lip. This style is inspired by late Soviet leader Stalin, a left communist. Among Kurds, this style is particularly popular.
Almond Moustache
A conservative religious moustache is clipped, does not cover the upper lip and does not droop down the sides. In Turkish the style is called ‘badem bıyık’ (almond moustache). Current president Erdoğan has such a moustache, as well as former president Abdullah Gül.
On the other hand, a clean shaved face used to stand for no particular political affiliation.
So this guy is probably a Kurdish left-winger.
An article I was reading (on marine cable cutting, unrelated topic) mentioned a clause in marine insurance policies.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/october/repairing-submarine-cables-wartime-necessity
Standard marine protection and indemnity insurance policies exclude wartime coverage, stating: “In the event of war or war-like conditions between any of the following states: The United Kingdom, the United States of America, France, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, the insurance against war perils shall automatically terminate.”
It might be that whether-or-not the US is involved determines whether shipowners or insurers are on the hook for a ship getting shot at.
Though…reading it over, maybe it’s only if it’s specifically one of those fighting another of them.
QUIC works hand-in-hand with HTTP/3’s multiplexed connections, allowing multiple streams of data to reach all the endpoints independently, and hence independent of packet losses involving other streams. In contrast, HTTP/2, which is carried over TCP, can suffer head-of-line-blocking delays if multiple streams are multiplexed on a TCP connection and any of the TCP packets on that connection are delayed or lost.
SCTP was going to do that too. It hasn’t seen much uptake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol
Features of SCTP include:
- Delivery of chunks within independent streams eliminates unnecessary head-of-line blocking, as opposed to TCP byte-stream delivery.
Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in [email protected] when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.
However.
End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.
Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like [email protected] still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like [email protected].
I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.
Official Eiffel Tower website:
https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/news/recreation/virtual-tour-eiffel-tower
On the occasion of the Eiffel Tower’s 130th anniversary, TV5 Monde created a 360° virtual reality tour that reveals every aspect of the Tower in 3 minutes, featuring sunrise from the Champ-de-Mars and a panoramic ascent to the top, both inside and out. See the Eiffel Tower as if you were there, and much more! TV5 Monde takes you beyond the summit and behind the scenes to discover an unrivaled view of the French capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKb5r-UMt8
Though…hah. They don’t allow viewing it in the US. Very French.
investigates
$ yt-dlp 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKb5r-UMt8'
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKb5r-UMt8
[youtube] hWKb5r-UMt8: Downloading webpage
[youtube] hWKb5r-UMt8: Downloading android vr player API JSON
ERROR: [youtube] hWKb5r-UMt8: The uploader has not made this video available in your country
This video is available in Andorra, United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan,
Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, Albania, Armenia, Angola, Antarctica,
Argentina, American Samoa, Austria, Australia, Aruba, Åland Islands,
Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Barbados, Bangladesh, Belgium,
Burkina Faso, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Burundi, Benin, Saint Barthélemy,
Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bolivia, Plurinational State of, Bonaire,
Sint Eustatius and Saba, Brazil, Bahamas, Bhutan, Bouvet Island,
Botswana, Belarus, Belize, Canada, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Congo, the
Democratic Republic of the, Central African Republic, Congo,
Switzerland, Côte d'Ivoire, Cook Islands, Chile, Cameroon, China,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Cape Verde, Curaçao, Christmas Island,
Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Djibouti, Denmark, Dominica,
Dominican Republic, Algeria, Ecuador, Estonia, Egypt, Western Sahara,
Eritrea, Spain, Ethiopia, Finland, Fiji, Falkland Islands (Malvinas),
Micronesia, Federated States of, Faroe Islands, France, Gabon, United
Kingdom, Grenada, Georgia, French Guiana, Guernsey, Ghana, Gibraltar,
Greenland, Gambia, Guinea, Guadeloupe, Equatorial Guinea, Greece,
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Guatemala, Guam,
Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Hong Kong, Heard Island and McDonald Islands,
Honduras, Croatia, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Isle of
Man, India, British Indian Ocean Territory, Iraq, Iran, Islamic
Republic of, Iceland, Italy, Jersey, Jamaica, Jordan, Japan, Kenya,
Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Kiribati, Comoros, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Korea,
Democratic People's Republic of, Korea, Republic of, Kuwait, Cayman
Islands, Kazakhstan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Saint
Lucia, Liechtenstein, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Lesotho, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Latvia, Libya, Morocco, Monaco, Moldova, Republic of,
Montenegro, Saint Martin (French part), Madagascar, Marshall Islands,
Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of, Mali, Myanmar, Mongolia,
Macao, Northern Mariana Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Montserrat,
Malta, Mauritius, Maldives, Malawi, Mexico, Malaysia, Mozambique,
Namibia, New Caledonia, Niger, Norfolk Island, Nigeria, Nicaragua,
Netherlands, Norway, Nepal, Nauru, Niue, New Zealand, Oman, Panama,
Peru, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pakistan,
Poland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Pitcairn, Puerto Rico, Palestine,
State of, Portugal, Palau, Paraguay, Qatar, Réunion, Romania, Serbia,
Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Solomon Islands, Seychelles,
Sudan, Sweden, Singapore, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da
Cunha, Slovenia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Slovakia, Sierra Leone, San
Marino, Senegal, Somalia, Suriname, South Sudan, Sao Tome and
Principe, El Salvador, Sint Maarten (Dutch part), Syrian Arab
Republic, Swaziland, Turks and Caicos Islands, Chad, French Southern
Territories, Togo, Thailand, Tajikistan, Tokelau, Timor-Leste,
Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Tonga, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu,
Taiwan, Province of China, Tanzania, United Republic of, Ukraine,
Uganda, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uruguay, Uzbekistan,
Holy See (Vatican City State), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines,
Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of, Virgin Islands, British, Virgin
Islands, U.S., Viet Nam, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Samoa, Yemen,
Mayotte, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
You might want to use a VPN or a proxy server (with --proxy) to workaround.
I guess you could use a VPN with an exit node in Europe or a US territory — which, oddly-enough, they do allow — or something.
EDIT: Here’s a link that bounces through Canada and can view it:
I mean, realistically, countries won’t run out. Ticket prices will rise and price out some users.
goes looking
There are also apparently a few large propeller-driven planes still out there that use aviation gasoline. Gasoline prices are also up, but I assume not as badly as jet fuel, given that diesel prices are up more than gasoline and jet fuel is close to diesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-6
That’s still in use, technically can do a New York-London flight (though I imagine that in real life, you’d stop in Reykjavik to maintain a safety buffer), and uses aviation gasoline. It’s got a cruising speed of 315 mph, though, compared to a (jet-based) Boeing 777’s 554 mph.
EDIT: Oh, but the only DC-6s that are still in use are in a cargo configuration.
EDIT2: Red Bull apparently operates one DC-6 in a passenger configuration.
change the default SSH port
Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65535 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.
SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:
$ nc localhost 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
^C
$
It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.
I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.
If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.
There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.
But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.
Can a single man both be censured by FIFA for raiding people at World Cup events and win the FIFA Peace Prize?
I’m rather concerned about what I do when my Surface Pro 7 dies
Well, most of what I’ve seen expects memory prices to be coming down in 2028. So if it’s got two years of use in it, you’re probably good.
If you’re desperate for a laptop sooner and cheaper, you can get used laptops on eBay (well, maybe somewhere else if you’re not in the US; dunno what the used PC market is like globally).
The WordPress plugin marketplace has a trust problem.
I think that the problem is really broader — that for any system, be it Linux distros or browser plugins or AI Python packages or NPM packages or whatever — even trustworthy software can change ownership. Most users are probably not monitoring those changes and are not in a position to evaluate the impact of those changes.
Some of that can (and probably should) be handled by compartmentalizing software, limiting the effect it can have, though that has some costs of its own. But I don’t think that that’s going to handle everything.
Biodiesel might actually be meaningful, given that diesel prices in particular are way up and soy exports are down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_in_the_United_States
Biodiesel is commercially available in most oilseed-producing states in the United States. As of 2023, it is less expensive than petroleum-diesel,[1] though it is still commonly produced in relatively small quantities (in comparison to petroleum products and ethanol fuel).
I don’t know how practical it is to scale up production, though. And fertilizer’s probably a global market, so fertilizer prices in the US are going to be up, even aside from Trump’s trade restrictions.
searches
It sounds like some places are looking into it.
Brazil weighs fast-tracking biodiesel tests as diesel prices spike
BRASILIA, April 8 (Reuters) - Brazil’s government is looking at ways to accelerate testing of higher biodiesel blends in diesel, aiming to reach a conclusion this year, the head of a soy crushers association said on Wednesday, amid a spike in fuel prices due to the Iran war.
The measure could boost soybean demand in the world’s largest producer of the oilseed, most of which is shipped to China for animal feed. Brazil’s biofuels industry has seized on the disruptions to oil and gas supplies in the Middle East as a chance to push for higher mandated blends of soy-based diesel and ethanol in gasoline.
Latin America’s largest economy imports about a quarter of the diesel it consumes. As Brazilian biodiesel is now cheaper than diesel, higher blends enhance energy security, Nassar said.
“We have an asset that guarantees energy security and will never be in short supply, as Brazil has abundant feedstock,” he said. “This war could drag on … We need a much shorter timeline to complete the tests.”
Indonesia’s B50 Pivot Shows War Is Stoking Global Biofuel Demand
Indonesia’s abrupt pivot to expand its biodiesel mandate is the latest sign of how the war in Iran is reshaping energy policy, tightening global vegetable oil supplies as more gets funneled into fuel.
The world’s top palm oil producer will implement its B50 program — an ambitious target to boost the level of biodiesel blended in its fuel to 50% — starting from July 1, Airlangga Hartarto, coordinating minister for economic affairs announced late Tuesday. The move is part of efforts to mitigate energy supply disruptions wrought by the conflict, with Airlangga saying it could reduce fossil fuel consumption by 4 million kiloliters annually.
It kills Iran’s ability to extract tolls from ships that want to get past. Assuming that it’s enforced, which I am not at all sure it will be. Like, are we honestly going to, say, put an anti-ship missile into a China-flagged merchant ship because they paid off Iran?
For a given user, I suppose that depends largely upon whether what a given end user wants to use character.ai for is copyrighted characters.
EDIT: I’d also add that copyrighting of characters and settings is something of a pet peeve of mine. Historically, many of our great works, like, say, the collection of literature dealing with Greek mythology or around Robin Hood or that sort of thing relied on many unaffiliated authors being able to write about the same set of characters and in the same settings.
But most copyright holders don’t permit that. H. P. Lovecraft was something of an exception, which is why you see so much Cthulhu stuff in random places.
I do think that if you’re Disney, you should have some route to make it clear that you are the original-rights-holder to, say, the Star Wars IP, so that someone else can’t pass off their work as canon as being endorsed by them. You should have some way to distinctly identify yourself, maybe via use of trademark. But I also have grave doubts that we would be unable to fund the creation of fictional works if characters and settings had a fair use exemption, so that a third party was guaranteed the ability to be able to create works in the same fictional universe.