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:

https://inv.thepixora.com/watch?v=hWKb5r-UMt8

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.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/brazil-weighs-fast-tracking-biodiesel-tests-diesel-prices-spike-2026-04-08/

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.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/indonesia-s-b50-pivot-shows-war-is-stoking-global-biofuel-demand

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?

US car manufacturers were incentivized to do that and to push for policy and marketing that encourages pickup ownership because pickups have had a protective tariff, making them more profitable than other types of vehicles.

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

The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken.[1] The period from 1961 to 1964[2] of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the “Chicken War”, taking place at the height of Cold War politics.[3]

Eventually, the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy were lifted,[4] but since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give US domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors.[5] Though concern remains about its repeal,[6][7] a 2003 Cato Institute study called the tariff “a policy in search of a rationale.”[4]

https://www.slashgear.com/1809287/chicken-tax-explained-history-current-impact/

If you’re an automaker, you want to market those protected vehicles to consumers, because it’s more-profitable. You don’t really have to compete with foreign-made autos in that particular class.

And you want to lobby for policy that encourages consumers to buy them. So, for example, the US has more-stringent towing standards than does Europe. You need a bigger vehicle to tow a given amount of weight…which encourages buying pickups. And the US has emissions standards that give special preference to large vehicles.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180263/epa-tailpipe-emissions-loophole

While the new emissions rules have been praised in most coverage for tightening standards and thus speeding the transition to electric vehicles, they also preserve long-standing special treatment for big trucks and SUVs, which exempt larger cars from more stringent emissions standards. The EPA has made a little-noticed attempt in the rule to keep companies from exploiting the sorts of loopholes they have in the past, but industry giveaways that were added into the final rule could undermine their ability to reduce emissions. When the rules take effect, for instance, starting with cars in the 2027 model year, Ford Super Duty pickups will reportedly be able to emit more than three times as much carbon dioxide as light-duty pickups like the still very large Ford F-150, and nearly four times as much as a passenger car.

“The biggest pickup trucks are allowed very gentle treatment. If you create a loophole, that’s what they will drive through,” Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport campaign, says of the new rules. “Vehicles are getting larger and larger because the larger the vehicle, the weaker the standard.”

It’s going to be emitting less carbon dioxide, at any rate.

so I figured that using pipewire to co-ordinate this would be the easiest way forward, except it turns out that it’s a (GUI) user space process, which doesn’t make sense on a server with no GUI users.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “(GUI) user space process”, but if it’s that it’s a systemd user process (e.g. it shows up when you run $ systemctl --user status pipewire rather than $ systemctl status pipewire, which appears to be the case on my system, where there’s one instance running per user session), then you probably can run it as a systemwide process, where there’s just one always-running process for the whole system. IIRC, PulseAudio could run in both modes. I don’t know if you have concerns about security on access to your mic or something, but that could be something to look into.

searches

Sounds like it’s doable. Not endorsing this particular project, which I’ve never seen before, but it looks like it’s possible:

https://github.com/iddo/pipewire-system

PipeWire System-wide Daemon Package (Arch Linux)

This package configures PipeWire, WirePlumber, and PipeWire-Pulse to run as a single system-wide daemon as the root user. This setup is optimized for headless media servers, HTPCs, or multi-user audio environments.

every hardware website I’ve checked so far, either don’t have any mini pcs, nucs or similar, or they have zero information about the hardware.

Well, if they give you the manufacturer and model number, you should be able to look them up with the manufacturer.

It doesn’t look fake to me, but if you want a way in which it might look different from similar images…

Cameras have changed over time. Like, I can’t list all the technical changes, but I can tell, when I look at an image, whether it looks like a photo that was taken in the 1970s or so.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/4a41b101-86c7-4102-b7b0-8ca9d3d7a0cf.jpeg

I think that saturation on some things might be higher, gamma lower, film grain is present, might be depth-of-field differences, dunno. I’m sure that someone expert in photography could do a better job than me in listing technical differences.

Widespread use of image-editing software to do things like normalize images and change gamma to keep things from looking washed-out may be part of that (and cell phones, that do their own post-processing — redeye reduction, sharpening, etc may also be a factor).

The last time we had photos of people being hauled out of those capsules after coming back from Moon missions, those were the cameras in use:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/93cf055a-31ca-4744-9734-482da219103d.jpeg

And so that might look “normal” and present-day cameras might not look “normal”.

I know that I get a bit of a shock, feels weird, when I see things like re-enacted American Civil War or World War 2 scenes shot with modern cameras, because most of the images I see of that, the photographs, are black-and-white and suddenly the world of color has collided with it.

I’m not on there, but you might have more luck in [email protected]

You might also want to list the hardware that you plan to use, since that’ll constrain what you can reasonably run.

Ah, so I bet what they’re doing is looking like a single VPN from the Android OS level, setting a default route into that, and then doing routing in userspace.

I have not used such a configuration, but I believe that it’s fine to have multiple WireGuard VPNs concurrently up, at least from a Linux client standpoint. I have no idea whether your phone’s client permits that — it could well be that it can’t do it.

Your routing table would have the default route go to a host on one of them (and your Internet-bound traffic would go there), but you should be able to have it be either. Or neither — I’ve set up a WireGuard configuration with a Linux client where the default route wasn’t over the WireGuard VPN, and only traffic destined for the LAN at the other end of the WireGuard VPN traversed the WireGuard VPN.

From Linux’s standpoint, a WireGuard VPN is just like another NIC on the host. You say “all traffic destined for this address range heads out this NIC”. Just that the NIC happens to be virtual and to be software that tunnels the traffic.

EDIT:

It sounds like this is an Android OS-level limitation:

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/261526/are-there-technical-limitation-to-multiple-vpns

In the Android VPN development documentation you can find a clear statement regarding the possibility to have multiple VPNs active at the same time:

There can be only one VPN connection running at the same time. The existing interface is deactivated when a new one is created.

That same page does mention that you can have apps running in different profiles using different VPNs at the same time. That might be an acceptable workaround for you.

Anecdote: some years back, when Google was just getting their self-driving program going, I remember pulling up next to one of their early self-driving cars, rolling down my window, and pointing out to the safety driver that they were supposed to merge into the bicycle lane if doing a right turn and that his car wasn’t doing that.

Today, I was sitting in traffic in the right-hand lane of a road, and a Waymo vehicle — that program, after years more of development — pulled up, merged into the (large enough for a car) bike lane, and then properly stopped and did a right-on-red.