Yeah, it’s amazing how quickly the “don’t trust anyone on the internet” mindset changed. The same boomers who were cautioning us against playing online games with friends are now the same ones sharing blatantly AI generated slop from strangers on Facebook as if it were gospel.

Yeah, Calibre is ubiquitous at this point. You really can’t discuss ebooks without it inevitably coming up. Syncing with calibre would be huge, because it would open the door to the single largest library management program in use.

Not off the top of my head.

You can think of Usenet as a sort of second internet. Usenet providers sell subscriptions to access their servers, just like ISPs sell subscriptions to access the internet. Each Usenet provider has their own servers, and multiple providers will group together and share data. These clusters of shared servers are called News Groups. Each news group occasionally has different stuff on them, but most have started cooperating to try and establish parity. So in most cases, you only need one news group subscription.

There are occasionally updated news group maps that get posted, and they usually look something like this:

The important point is that the providers in the same news groups will all essentially have the same content.

Subscriptions come in two different forms. The first is a pretty standard monthly subscription. You pay for a month, you get unlimited access for a month. The other form is a pre-paid plan, sort of like pre-paid cell phones. You buy a certain amount of data, and then can download that much data. So maybe you buy 500GB, and then when you hit your 500GB cap it either charges you again for another block of data, or it cuts you off if you don’t have it set to auto-renew.

Most Usenet users will have both types of sub; They’ll use a monthly unlimited subscription for their primary news group, and then have a prepaid plan for a second news group (or just fall back to torrents). The idea is that the vast majority of your downloads happen via your primary news group, and you only fall back to your prepaid plan (or torrents) if something isn’t available on the primary news group. So you’re not constantly burning through a prepaid data cap.

Browsing Usenet is done with a news reader. This is a program that acts sort of like a torrent program does for torrents. It connects to the usenet servers, and you can browse what they have. Most usenet subscriptions will also come with a free news reader download, or there are a few FOSS ones you can use instead. Or if you’re using the *arr suite, you configure it to search for files automatically based off of certain criteria, and it handles the searching for you.

The important point of Usenet is that it’s not peer-to-peer. It’s more like a dead drop, where an uploader drops the file onto the news server, and then other users can download that file for a certain amount of time. Each provider has their own retention period (how long they’ll hold onto files, that got uploaded) so that’s something worth looking at when you’re shopping for a provider; Longer retention periods will mean finding older content is easier. So you’re not going to be stuck waiting on seeds or buried in leeches, because the server already has the entire file ready to go. In my regular use, Usenet downloads regularly max out my gigabit connection.

Worth noting that copyright takedowns are the primary reason for failed downloads. DMCA takedown requests will still affect Usenet, but only if their servers are in the US. Try to search for NTD providers instead. NTD is the Dutch implementation of DMCA. It still results in takedowns, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often.

Yeah, private trackers really think they’re the best thing in the world, but Usenet is 10x better for half the effort. My current ratio is ~30:1 for public torrents, but I pretty much only use them on the rare occasion that Usenet is missing something. I honestly couldn’t give a fuck about private trackers when Usenet exists.

That only works if they’re on the same drive or petition.

It means there are two separate chemicals inside of the building. Each chemical would have their individual labels on their containers, but these external signs are for first responders who haven’t entered the building yet.

Let’s say there’s a fire. The red diamond tells them how likely it is that the chemicals are the cause of the fire, and where they should direct their efforts. The blue corner tells them what kind of PPE they need to use if they enter. The yellow tells them what kind of potential explosive risks the chemicals have. And the white one is especially important, because the W means the chemical reacts with water; If there’s a fire at the facility, they can’t simply use fire hoses to fight it.

The reason for listing them separately is because each individual chemical has its own ratings. You can’t simply take the highest of each and combine them into a single sign. For instance, in this case one chemical isn’t flammable but is explosive when heated. The other chemical is flammable but not explosive. So if you see a chemical on fire, you know it’s the second chemical and isn’t explosive. But if you see something that isn’t burning in a room full of fire, you know it’s a potential powder keg waiting to explode.

Those are hazardous chemical markers. You commonly see them on tanker trucks as well.

The numbers range from 0 to 4, with higher numbers indicating more risk. The red top corner is flammability. The right yellow corner is instability; How likely it is to react with other things around it. The left blue corner is risk to health; Even if a chemical isn’t unstable or flammable, it can still be hazardous. The bottom white is for special markings. In this case, one of those chemicals is marked with a W, meaning it reacts to water.

So if there’s a fire at the warehouse, this tells the responding crew “hey just so you know, there’s some nasty shit in here. One presents a severe health hazard, becomes potentially explosive when heated, and reacts with water… But at least it isn’t flammable. The other is flammable and can present a moderate health risk. Because of the one on the left, it would be a bad idea to use water to fight this fire.”

Yup, odometers were regulated specifically to protect consumers from widespread odometer fraud. Shit like companies requiring oil changes every 5k miles, and the odometer shows 5000 when it’s actually only 4000, so consumers pay for more service than they need. Or cases like this one, where a company is required to provide a warranty until the 50k odometer reading, and then fudges the odometer so it voids the warranty sooner than it should.

When !datahoarder@lemmy.ml and !tipofmypenis@lemmynsfw.com collide.

A really divisive minigame, to be sure. My wife and I both hated blitzball, (I save-scummed to get Wakka’s ultimates ASAP, then never touched it again) but my buddy probably sank 150 hours into it during his first play through.

Yeah, Chao Garden 2 Battle had some really amazing minigames. One of the best was the ability to play as Sonic or Shadow, and experience an entire plotline. Lots of players missed it almost entirely, because they were just too wrapped up in the main Chao Garden game to bother with the Light/Dark story stuff.

34 or 35, I think. I remember learning that she was around my age.

It’s in French, but here’s a link:
https://www.watson.ch/fr/!884988581

Basically, Yen did an interview for Watson (a magazine) where he talked about the swedish government encroaching on encryption. He got political when he started talking about how all of the Swedish government officials were useless bureaucrats, and praised the US government’s methods instead.

And the CEO just did it again, because apparently it wasn’t enough backlash the first time.

The app has already been inactive for a while now. There hasn’t been any active development in several years. They clearly have no interest in continuing it, and just want to move on to other projects.

What’s to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it’s AI generated?

Aside from the other arguments people have presented, this wrecks one of the largest reasons that people produce CSAM. Pedophiles are insular data hoarders by necessity, because actually creating and procuring it is such a big risk. Every time they go online to find new content, they’re at risk of stumbling into a honeypot. And producing it requires IRL work, and a LOT of risk of being caught/turned in by the victim. They tend to form tight-knit rings, and one of the only reliable ways to get into a ring as an outsider is to provide your own CSAM to the others. CSAM is traded in these rings like baseball cards, where you need fresh content in order to receive fresh content.

The data hoarding side of things is where all of the “cops bust pedophile with 100TB of CSAM” headlines come from; In reality, it was probably like 1TB of videos, (which is a lot, but not unheard of) but was backed up multiple times in multiple places, because losing it would be catastrophic for the CSAM producer; They can’t simply go grab a new blue ray of it. And the cops counted the full size of each backup disk, not just the space that was used.

Intentionally marking your content as AI-generated would ruin the trading value, because nobody will see it as valuable/worth trading for if it’s fake. At best, you won’t get anything for it. At worst, you’d be labeled a cop trying to pass off AI content to gather evidence.

My guess is that the algorithm is really good at predicting who will be likely to follow that kind of content, rather than report it. Basically, it flies under the radar purely because the only people who see it are the ones who have a vested interest in it flying under the radar.

In a scenario where things are so bad that the US has halted all financial electronic transactions than your electronic dollars don’t mean anything no matter where you are, amd your paper dollars mean almost nothing either.

This is honestly the biggest takeaway. If the US actually stops cooperating with foreign banks, the dollar will instantly become worthless; The dollar only holds international worth because other countries want to have and hold dollars. If those other countries are unable to do so, there is no incentive for them to accept dollars as valid currency.

This may be easier to do on your home network’s router. For instance, mine allows me to set it up as a VPN host, and also to connect to a VPN provider. It has the option to pass all of the connected clients through the connected VPN. So for instance, if I connect my phone to my home VPN, and my home router is connected to Mullvad, my phone’s traffic also gets passed through Mullvad.

Here’s a reminder that you can submit photos of your hotel room to law enforcement, to assist in tracking down CSAM producers. The vast majority of sex trafficking media is produced in hotels. So being able to match furniture, bedspreads, carpet patterns, wallpaper, curtains, etc in the background to a specific hotel helps investigators narrow down when and where it was produced.

https://traffickcam.com/