So, visa length restrictions might be a reasonable approach for some types of illegally-operated businesses. I could buy this:

Authorities have also launched operations against foreigners accused of illegally operating bars, restaurants and tourism businesses in popular resort areas.

But…

Security concerns escalated further this month after Thai police arrested a Chinese national in Pattaya who was allegedly found in possession of a large cache of military-grade weapons, including assault rifles, explosives, grenades, Russian landmines and anti-personnel mines.

The suspect, arrested on 9 May, was charged with illegal possession of unauthorised weapons and could face up to 10 years in prison.

Like, that seems like it’s a customs problem. I mean, if you’re seeing said weapons illicitly entering the country in the first place, that seems like it’s already running afoul of most issues that you might have. I don’t think that it’s going to matter much whether it’'s a Thai native gunrunning or a Chinese national.

Alcohol and/or drugs, I imagine.

Emily Darlington, a Labour MP who sits on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee, said: “There’s clearly a market for hate content in the UK. When social media, intended to connect us, instead feeds us an endless stream of divisive and anger-fuelling content it distorts not only how we feel about our neighbours, but how we think the nation feels about our neighbours.

“The fact that this tactic is successful enough with a UK audience that individuals in other countries can profit off it shows how vulnerable we are. There’s nothing stopping foreign states from doing the same.”

Maybe the best way to counter xenophobia isn’t to rely on anti-immigrant views not being expressed — a fragile convention that can easily fall apart — but to actively explain why immigration is advantageous.

If people do not understand the purpose of a policy, they will try to make sense of it, either on their own or via adopting the takes that seem most-plausible to them.

If one’s way of dealing with politicially-unpopular policy is to hope that it doesn’t come up and thus falls out of public discussion rather than to sell the public on it…shrugs

Democracy is intended to have the public act as final, ultimate overseers of policy. At the end of the day, one has to sell the public on major policy decisions or be at risk of the public acting in opposition to that policy.

Frankly, being taken for $100 on a phone is probably a lot better than putting your life savings into one of Trump’s memecoins or Truth Social, which some people did.

My impression is that Trump mostly just licenses his name to these ventures for a payment and isn’t affiliated with them otherwise. I don’t think that he likely cares much what happens to the phone buyers or sellers. He’s made his money either way.

Truth Social?

Desktop PC with a lotta hard drives in it and big fans that don’t have to spin fast and make a lot of noise.

I use a USB DAS JBOD enclosure with fans, which is also an option if you have a mini-PC and just want a bunch of drive space.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

This particular enclosure has physical buttons that lock in place so that the power state is restored on power loss, something that (to my surprise) a number of USB DAS enclosures apparently don’t do.

You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.

If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.

searches

https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8

I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.

If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.

EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:

https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U

Is there a way to make reddit illegal? and put the creators to jail?

I mean, hypothetically you could have a law passed to make anything you want illegal. I won’t speak as to the practicality of that in your particular case, but it’s theoretically possible.

However, wherever you are, it’s likely not permissible under its constitution or treaties to make a law to make someone’s legal actions illegal after they have done whatever it is so that you can punish them for actions that were legal at the time of the action; this is an ex post facto law, and are often one of the things that legal systems don’t accept.

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

An ex post facto law[1] is a law that retrospectively changes the legal consequences or status of actions that were committed, or relationships that existed, before the enactment of the law. In criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed; it may aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe category than it was in when it was committed; it may change the punishment prescribed for a crime, as by adding new penalties or extending sentences; it may extend the statute of limitations; or it may alter the rules of evidence in order to make conviction for a crime likelier than it would have been when the deed was committed.

Some common-law jurisdictions do not permit retroactive criminal legislation, though new precedent generally applies to events that occurred before the judicial decision. Some countries, such as the United States, explicitly forbid ex post facto laws in their constitution. In some nations that follow the Westminster system of government, ex post facto laws may be possible, because the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy allows Parliament to pass any law it wishes, within legal constraints.[clarification needed][citation needed] In a nation with an entrenched bill of rights or a written constitution, ex post facto legislation may be prohibited or allowed, and this provision may be general or specific.

Ex post facto criminalization is prohibited by Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 15(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,[3] and Article 9 of the American Convention on Human Rights.[4]

It means that he wasn’t going to get an AUMF from Congress in his 60 day window, which is what I pretty much expected. Now it sounds like he’s going to try to continue the blockade portion (i.e. not the bombing) but argue that imposing a blockade doesn’t constitute deployment of troops, which I suspect isn’t going to fly if it comes to court. But we’ll see how the legal and political maneuvering plays out.

Northern Ireland apparently doesn’t currently have an animal, but that’s at least somewhat-used for the area.

Put a bulldog, dragon, unicorn, and red deer up there, one on each panel, and it’ll make the orientation pretty clear.

Chris Klimis, a minister in Orlando who was recruited to be the company’s chief operating officer, says part of the reason he got involved was to offer Christians a real way to “do something” about what he sees as a pornography crisis in the faith. He was appalled by a recent survey showing that 67% of pastors have a “personal history” with porn use.

Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher

Managing website block lists is a professional pivot for Fisher, who spent his career not in telecoms but in fashion; he was an agent for supermodels like Naomi Campbell and members of the Hilton and Getty families, and he later hosted a reality show in which he found people in rehab facilities and homeless shelters and tried to turn them into models. He ultimately left the industry and now says he regrets the role he played in it: “Am I proud that I spent 35 years creating star models or star influencers? Not at all.”

COO: Only those with a pure and unblemished past shall pass the bar to…well, that doesn’t apply to our founder, of course…

On the other hand, then your mobile provider can’t see what you’re doing, so six of this, half a dozen of the other.

So would it be possible for a whole bunch of people to ddos google/other big popular websites ipv4 to ipv6 translation such that their services would still function over ipv6 but make everyone’s day awful if running ipv4. Enough angry customers and pissed off users seems like a very effective way to get isps and mobile service providers to get their act together and start issue sing ipv6 to people.

Trying to DDoS attack Google’s IPv4 services to get your mobile provider to provide IPv6 support seems kind of…indirect.

goes to look up numbers

It looks like it was pretty close around 2009.

https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/blog/natural-gas/070521-ct-european-gas-lng-ukraine-co2-emissions-us-henry-hub-aluminum-coal

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.

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260424115234/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/24/tokyo-workers-asked-to-swap-suits-for-shorts-to-combat-energy-costs-and-heat

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.