Communick News

From 2024, but funny to read....

What makes this situation so ridiculous is that while we're all watching for scammers attempting to imitate legitimate organisations, FedEx is out there imitating scammers!

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11421325

Rogue drones are targeting Britain’s military bases almost daily, leaving the UK vulnerable to growing threats from Russia and Iran, The Independent can reveal.

Some 340 security incidents involving drones were reported at or near Ministry of Defence [MoD] sites in the year to August 2026, data obtained under freedom of information laws show. In 2025, there were a total of 250 incidents recorded – double the 126 recorded the year before.

Experts warn the alarming increase reflects the government’s woeful lack of security and unreadiness to combat hostile threats at a time of intense escalation from Vladimir Putin, as well as aggression from Iran.

The MoD would not give details of who it suspected was behind the threats, but experts say hostile actors working on behalf of Moscow or Tehran were the obvious culprits. The stark figures, obtained under freedom of information laws, come as Poland warned that Putin is planning a drone attack on a Nato country.

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Former Tory defence minister and former Army captain Tobias Ellwood said the large sharp uptick in detected drone incidents in the UK showed that the British military is viewed “as a target” and said the government is “asleep” to such threats.

He added: “Here in the UK we are doing nothing about protecting our critical national infrastructure, as well as military bases, and it’s such an easy way to disrupt.

“At the moment these are just rogue drones, and they’re passive, but it’s not a huge step to then add a kinetic dimension to them to make them introduce lethality.

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Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warned on Friday that Moscow was planning hybrid strikes with drones or missiles targeting Nato countries supporting Ukraine.

“There is a real risk that drones or other types of projectiles will enter the territory of one or several countries on the eastern flank and even cause destruction,” he added.

UK chief of the defence staff, Sir Richard Knighton, cautioned earlier this year that the UK is facing the highest level of threat from Russia since the Cold War. And security minister Angela Eagle also warned of the dangers posed by Iran after the UK “identified activity linked to the IRGC involving threats to life and intimidation on UK soil”.

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Archived

I used to little milk but i don't like to waste food, so i err on the side of caution.

Beans are some Guatemalan natural from Antigua, finca Medina. Very brightly roasted. Nailed the turbo shot dial in on the first try.

Hans Zimmer is one of the most famous composers of soundtracks for Hollywood (e.g. Dune, Interstellar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Nolan's Batman Trilogy, Gladiator and many many more)

Edit: For example "Time" from "Inception" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SswRnJgX1_s

Partner and I have had a blast with our first garden. It's been a tough year with a very serious drought in our area for much of the summer, but our squash have not minded at all and have thrived! We've harvested over 50 lbs of assorted squash from 8 plants! The acorn squash got ravaged by vine borers, so those got harvest very early and are just for decoration haha.

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Every other stream brings a new face and a peek into the mind of another ‘ordinary Russian’ — proud to have started a war, eager to get the next ‘coffin payment,’ and totally unaware of how democracy works.

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Apart from outright coercion, Russia continues to bribe fighters into the army by writing off overdue loans and paying millions of rubles for signing military contracts. Some regions have increased such payments to over $51,000, despite local budget deficits. So-called ‘coffin money’ for the dead comprises 38 percent of all Russia’s military expenditures in 2026.

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As signing a contract becomes the only social lift for many Russians from economically depressed regions, this has made Russian economic inequality not just a domestic issue but a catalyst to continue its war efforts in Ukraine.

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“They live in poverty... For Russians, life at home is worse than being at war. They’re trying to escape this life of theirs, where they’re completely insignificant, and they have to survive on payday loans. Russians want to fight because they’re offered great money for it."

Quite an illustrative example is Tuva, a region near the Russian border with Mongolia. In 2022, it was deemed the poorest. It has no railway; buses run irregularly; access to education, employment, and, in some districts, to basic utilities like water, sewage, and heating is a luxury.

In Tuva, one in 200 residents was killed on the battlefield in Ukraine. Other poor regions like Transbaikal, Chukotka, and Buryatia are also sending overwhelming numbers of their men to war to improve their economic condition.

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The group that probably benefits from Russia’s war against Ukraine the most is the soldiers’ family members who receive millions of rubles for sending recruits to the army and even more for their death. Since 2023, the influx of contract payments and ‘coffin money’ into Russia’s poorest regions, which provide most of the recruits, has led to a sharp increase in household bank deposits. For instance, in Siberian regions, savings grew drastically, by about 19 percent in Altai, 33 percent in Buryatia, and the record-breaking 57 percent in Tuva.

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At the same time, recent data shows that these sudden riches are rather fleeting. Ukrainian intelligence reports that some regions started paying less for newly signed military contracts in 2025. Recently, at least six regions have cut ‘coffin money,’ too. Namely, soldiers from the Bashkortostan and Ulianovsk regions get 20 times less money than in 2025, while the Orenburg region canceled local bonuses and now provides only federal payments.

If this trend spreads across the country, it might further slow mobilization.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412342/companies-make-it-hard-to-access-your-personal-data-under-state-privacy-laws-cr-finds-on

Nearly every time you buy something online or sign up for a loyalty program, you leave behind personal information that can be collected, shared, and sold among companies including advertisers, retailers, and data brokers. This kind of information is sometimes used to charge consumers more for a range of products and services, from groceries to insurance to mortgages, and to target them for financial fraud and identity theft.

A growing number of state privacy laws were designed to give consumers some control over that information, including the right to see what companies know about them. But a yearlong Consumer Reports investigation found that exercising those rights can often be extremely difficult—and that many companies and data brokers appear to be falling short of their legal obligations.

Over the past year, CR worked with 84 citizen volunteers to request their personal data from 169 companies they regularly interact with and 22 data brokers. The results were concerning: Roughly 25 percent of requests to companies failed to receive a response. Among data brokers, the failure rate was 34 percent, even though some of those brokers claim to maintain data on the vast majority of U.S. households.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/75748303

A reimplementation of android auto for degoogled phones!

The incoming version of Inkscape is brilliantly engineered masterpiece designed to punch Adobe Illustrator in the face.

The scale of Inkscape 1.5 is hard to put into words.

• A full port from GTK 3 to GTK 4
• A new rendering engine
• The Unified Font Browser becoming default,
• Document Tabs being introduced,
• Many long-standing issues finally being addressed,
• New and changed dependencies across multiple target platforms.
• UI/UX improvements

GTK 4 unlocks several possibilities, but it also exacts its own costs. This transition is definitely being felt in the amount and complexity of the work the developers have had to undertake.

Inkscape developers have been pouring their nights and weekends into 1.5 but they are currently feeling overwhelmed.

If you’re a C++ developer, particularly with graphics experience, Inkscape could use your help in pushing 1.5 forward.

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items

Adobe has unlimited ressources. Inkscape relies on us

🙏🙏🙏

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52141617

A (very new) short piece on navigating privileges, social capital, and ironic labels as an immigrant — but also why I chose this label.

I know some don't like the design, but I like it.

I've been unsuccessful in getting the FitGirl and DODI repacks of Dark Souls Remastered to run on my CachyOS laptop. I've tried Lutris, Heroic, Faugus, and Bottles and I've tried various combinations of runtimes ranging from Proton, Wine, UWU, etc, but the best I can get is the game runs for about 30 seconds, then freezes.

The thing is, it works fine on my partner's computer. She has an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 where as I have an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong and the Lutris logs aren't very clear as to why the game is freezing. I've even installed the vulkan-intel drives.

Today’s game is some more Assassin’s Creed 3. I’ve been working on clearing the DLC. I made it about half way through. So far the story has been a bit mediocre, but I am really loving the new gameplay mechanics. I think in a base game they’d get old fast but in a small DLC like this? They’re a blast because they’re these cool overpowered tools that bring up the scope of what you can do.

So far my favorite has been the eagle ability just because it’s like a grappling hook. It’s a blast to use.

I’ve also been trying to get all the optional objectives. I want to 100% the DLCs too so those are something I’ll have to work towards too. So far it hasn’t been that bad. Some of the objectives are hard, nowhere near the level of the base game though.

I stopped for today and ended up going back to the first episode to finish a few tasks I missed. I thought they’d be a pain to do but I found I could farm them all by running out of the space where they spawn and running back, then I could keep farming that for the goal. I doubt this will be of any use to anyone, but the location is the hill between Lexington (or Concord, I can’t remember, whichever is closer to Valley Forge) and Valley Forge. I found running across the River and back would force it to spawn and I could repeat that for the 5 “Save the NPC from wolves” goal.

Source: https://www.gocomics.com/super-fun-pak-comix/2026/09/19

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11421475

Former German member of the European Parliament Reinhard Butikofer on Thursday urged the international community to counter China’s use of UN Resolution 2758 against Taiwan.

He made the comments at a conference hosted by the Taipei Representative Office in Berlin, saying that the deliberate misinterpretation of the resolution is an aspect of Beijing’s “lawfare.”

Resolution 2758, passed in 1971, states that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the only legitimate representative of China at the UN, which enabled Beijing to replace the Republic of China (ROC), Taiwan’s official name, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

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Butikofer, who chaired the event, said that the essence of China’s legal warfare is to export its domestic system of rule by law as part of the global order.

The EU as a whole, including Germany, does not recognize China’s interpretation of UN Resolution 2758 as making Taiwan part of its sovereign territory, he said.

As Beijing is aggressively seeking the support of foreign countries to lend legitimacy to its claims, democracies around the world must take a stronger stance against China’s false narrative, he said.

The resolution was concerned with determining China’s representation in the UN, without making any reference to Taiwan, its legal status or representation in the UN framework, he said.

Beijing’s push to conflate its distorted version of the resolution with the so-called “one China” principle has repercussions not only for Taiwan’s representation in international organizations, but also peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region, Representative to Germany Ku Jiu-Sheng (谷瑞生) said.

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Archived

Hi everyone!

Over the years, I’ve started having big collection of cables or dongles.

Mostly USB-C, USB-A to Micro USB, USB A to C, USB C to A, HDMI..

I was wondering how I could know their specifications as nothing is written on them. Maybe through a Linux program telling me how fast they can transfer data.

I was wondering also if there was a way to know how much power was sent to a device when these cables are used to power one. For instance, I’ve noticed that my Steam Deck battery was draining when playing games with 15TDP and being charged with an iPhone charger.

I don’t know if it’s useful, but here are my computers: Steam Deck running Steam OS, Surface Go 1 running Fedora Silverblue, MacBook Pro 2012 running PopOs.

I don’t want to buy anything to be able to measure how much data or power these cables can send😇

Thanks in advance for your help.