Communick News

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36145028

A nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights in digital spaces across West Asia and North Africa — is warning that Israeli-linked software secretly embedded in Samsung phones across the MENA region poses a serious surveillance threat.

According to SMEX, Samsung’s A and M series devices either come preloaded with the app “Aura” or install it automatically through system updates, without the user’s consent. The application reportedly collects a wide range of personal and device-specific data, including IP addresses, device fingerprints, hardware details, and network information.

​​In 2022, Samsung MENA partnered with Israeli tech company IronSource, integrating its Aura software into Galaxy A and M series phones across the region. The partnership was publicly marketed as a way to “enhance user experience” with AI-powered apps and content suggestions.

PM Carney attempting to speak Spanish using his recently acquired French skills

At a press conference with President Sheinbaum in Mexico City. #MarkCarney #CdnPoli #Mexico #Canada #Sheinbaum @canada

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee rejected a request by Democrats yesterday to subpoena four major banks — JPMorgan, BNY, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank — about their connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The subpoena would have looked into $1.5 billion worth of suspicious transactions previously flagged by the banks. It comes as the committee’s ranking member, Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin, grilled FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday about the Epstein files.

[Posted this earlier but somehow the URL went missing.]

"Here we show that climate change made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed… Overall, one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change. The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850–1900.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37741347

Post content:

More than 10 years ago we started creating Planet Centauri, a 2D sandbox with terraria as main inspiration.

We released the EA many years ago and this is our start just before the 1.0 release :

103 400 units solds

138 675 Wishlist

the sells seem incredible but it's not with so many years behind, when you work for 10 years and have to paid many people helping you with the ten of thousands of monsters frames animations and thousands of pixel art items, you don't have much left on your wallet at the end.

So we were eager for the release of 1.0 because with so many wishlists, the game's visibility would be good, we would appear in the new and trending categories due to sales, etc...

The 1.0 happen in december 2024... we sold... 581 units in 5 days.

The game didn't even appear on page 2; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And we never understood why until today.

We just received this mail from Steam

---

Steam Launch Wishlist Email Issue

Hi there, We found a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent. Unfortunately your game Planet Centauri was among those included. We intend for this feature to work for every game and we’re inviting you to a Daily Deal as a way to help make up for lost visibility from your launch day.

---

It's incredible to win the lottery like this: 100 games impacted in 10 years out of the 86,000 games on Steam. And to reward you, we're giving you 24-hour visibility (which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations).

I don't even have the strength to be angry. We've been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion . Now we know, we understand better, it's unfair, and we can't change anything. We've started a second project because it's financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we're moving forward, because it's the only thing to do.

This article was my way of expressing my anger, I guess, but also to see all the problems that a platform holding 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the cogs don't work as they should.

Have a nice day everyone, may luck be better to you

Comments

• Reddit.

I want to talk to you about Theo Slade, also known as Theodopodopodus, Ishkah, WildVirtue, NihilistDelight, ZonkerStout, and dozens of other monickers. He’s the person behind the Ted K Archive, thelul.org, StealThisWiki, the ActivistJournies Wordpress, the Ishkah Youtube channel, the Ishkah podcast and a giant assortment of anarchist subreddits which he has steadily seized control of over the years for reasons that this expose will make clear.

In his essays, he admits he has been infiltrating anarchist events and platforms, including going to Earth First! gatherings for years in order to “deprogram” anarchists from having “dogmatic beliefs”. For example, he claims anarchists he worked to “save” were “promoting the Cambodian genocide”, which is a ridiculous fantasy of his own concoction, but nonetheless allows him to claim a moral high ground, pretending he’s working to rid the world of imaginary genocidal anarchist tyrants who, he insists, want to create Pol Pot-style communist dictatorships to commit mass-murder.

He gains control of subreddits of philosophies he abhors, such as r/anticiv, r/EgoistCommunism and r/AnarchistNihilism in order to continue this malicious agenda, pushing his largely fallacious critiques of these philosophies and censoring topics and literature that would risk promoting them. In his many essays, he describes openly how he “trolls” anarchists by occupying our spaces, seeding them with his liberal ideology, which he explains corrects our “delusions”. He calls this self-admitted trolling a “long running joke” that he plays on us.

To be clear: He doesn’t admit openly to being a liberal. He identifies as a “big tent libertarian socialist with the expertise to build democratic institutions”, but make no mistake — every ideological position he holds completely conflicts with anarchy and aligns with the establishment.

He also squats the subreddits for Hindu anarchism, Islamic anarchism and indigenous anarchism, despite having no affiliation with those identities as a white British man. He uses his "NihilistDelight" Reddit account to spread anti-nihilist rhetoric across the several nihilist subreddits he controls, further illustrating his disingenuous entryism.

His often-repeated goal is to rid the world of “extremist” or “purist” anarchists, and his methods for achieving this include stalking them, gathering troves of data on them, surreptitiously logging their conversations and finding exploits in their websites to compile yet more data on them and their activities, which he publishes to his various websites. He then links to his creepy adventures in spycraft on anarchist platforms in order to gloat and mock us. This is quite obviously the behavior of an informant, or snitch, even if he only does it for his own amusement, which is highly unlikely given his eagerness to “expose” people he repeatedly calls “criminals”, “Satanist death cultists” and “terrorists” but who are almost always simply insurrectionist, post-left, green, egoist, indigenous, mutualist and nihilist anarchists who are guilty of nothing more than holding philosophical views he disagrees with.

His infamous one-man war against theanarchistlibrary.org and its librarians should tell you all you need to know about his unscrupulous character. He spent years logging the correspondences and activities of the librarians and then published it all on his own library, and then berated the librarians when they asked him to remove their private messages and to respect their privacy. He's been banned from their chat room countless times for his unremitting harassment and demands that they censor essays he doesn't approve of and give more space to his own sophistic essays.

He often claims to be an anarchist when he’s busy gnawing away at our defences, trying to convince us to buy what he’s selling, but in his essays he can’t help boasting about his actual inclinations. He says he sees anarchy as part of a “big tent socialism” to advocate for “workplace democracy”, but this milquetoast interpretation of anarchy is only a front for him to spread his retrogressive, establishment ideology and harass anarchists of all stripes, from hard-working mutualist librarians to elderly green anarchist writers and anyone in-between who won’t fall in line with his program to “deradicalize” anarchy.

The latest subreddit he’s added to his immense collection is r/raddle — a subreddit I made to promote the raddle.me forum I founded, before he petitioned the reddit admins to hand control of it over to him. He has refused to return it, and already it’s being used, with his jubilant approval, by a dangerous stalker to smear and harass one of the anarchists who worked on the Raddle project before being forced to leave due to said stalker.

His mission statement for the Ted K. Archive is to analyze “mentally ill” and “neurodiverse” people, including “environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists and criminals” and present them with literature he claims will act as “mental health support” and have a “deprogramming effect” on them. Yes, really.

He uses the Ted Kaczynski name for his library because he believes it gives his project some sort of pedigree, but also allows him to basely conflate anarchism with Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Of course, Kaczynski was ardently against anarchism and vocally advocated for an authoritarian government, but facts have never stopped Slade from pursuing his agenda.

In his essays, he repeatedly conflates multiple forms of anarchy with authoritarian constructs that have no relation to anarchy in order to attack the philosophy and present it as terroristic and criminal and the domain of “mentally ill” miscreants and “Satanists”. By depicting anarchy as a menace to society, he attempts to present himself as someone who can rescue the world from the dangerously insane anarchist criminals who “take pleasure in terrorizing people”.

He employs the same methods in the vegan spaces he occupies, cautioning that vegans risk becoming neo-Nazis if they develop violent tendencies. He works at “deprogramming vegans who glorify violence” and criticizes animal rights activists who would “take the risk to slash slaughterhouse truck tires” as he “could never condone risking injury to people”.

He says vegans “work up to taking unethical violent acts” by blocking fox hunts, which he says causes them to “gain the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters”. He explains how sabotaging fox hunts is comparable with anti-fascist activists “blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighbourhoods”, asserting that both these confrontational actions lead activists down the path to fascism — his essays repeatedly strive to equate direct action and even non-violent resistance with fascism. He tells animal rights activists that instead of taking direct action against animal suffering, “you could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature.” This statement encapsulates his liberal ideological position perfectly.

When he convinced renowned anarchist author John Zerzan to sit down for an interview, Slade proceeded to mis-quote Zerzan in the transcript in order to tarnish his ideas. When it was pointed out that Zerzan actually said the direct opposite of what Slade had transcribed, Slade doubled down, insisting Zerzan must have misspoke and he was simply correcting the transcript to say what Zerzan must have intended to say. After much protest, Slade quietly corrected the transcript. This wilful misrepresentation, going as far as re-writing an interview transcript with an anarchist who has made his positions clear for decades, is the perfect example of Slade’s duplicity.

The notion that we’re mentally unfit to participate in society and need to be saved from our disgusting criminal ways by the great Theo Slade, is astonishingly patronizing. His attempts to “deradicalize extremists” by attracting anarchists to his various coercive projects and then persuading us to read supposedly pacifying literature that promotes passive resistance and working within the system to affect change through “democratic means” perfectly encapsulates his conservative (and highly ableist) ideas.

In his magnum opus, Slade talks about “disrupting the purist anarchist pipeline”, which he says leads to “more and more fringe ideologies”. In this essay, he talks about anarchy as a pipeline to far-right ideology, slavery and white supremacy. He equates anarchy with a thirst for blood, a “violent hatred for all things unnatural”. In another piece, he calls the egalitarian freedom anarchists pursue a “deluded” notion. He then accuses anarchists of wanting to “take away modern people’s positive liberties”, before insisting that anarchists want to “bomb society back to the stone age”. His irrational fear of anarchists is really something to behold, and he's often able to disguise it as a "critique" of "fake" or "extreme" or "violent" anarchists when he addresses an audience that isn't familiar with his history of unprovoked attacks on anarchists of all stripes.

It's always disheartening for me to watch anarchists ready to believe he's only after the “bad” anarchists and would never inflict damage on them when he uses emotive phrases like “conspiracy nuts”, “terrorists”, “deranged lunatics“ and “criminals” to describe many of the good people he targets.

Further down in the Purist Anarchist Pipeline essay, he claims to support a “libertarian socialist revolution” while opposing “a vulgar anarchist insurrection”, which he illustrates with a crude diagram showing his opposition to violence towards police officers, the movie Mad Max, people who wish to live in “small communities” (??) and people “terrorizing symbols of technological progress”, by which I assume he means Apple Stores, banks, Amazon warehouses and Tesla dealerships.

These can only be seen as the ravings of a frightened conservative who is willing to pour years of his life into “reprogramming” anarchists so we stop resisting the cruel systems of authority that surround us and instead work to preserve the status quo that obviously serves him so well.

He then proceeds to attack the brilliant anarchist essay “bolo’bolo” for being opposed to “humanist, liberal and democratic laws and the state that enforces them”. Yes, this supposed “libertarian socialist” won’t tolerate anyone writing against states imposing their rule of law. He insists an anti-state philosophy would “terrorize whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes.”

These statements are honestly indistinguishable from a Fox News commenter trying to spread panic about Antifa, but here we are. He goes on to tarnish the anarchist proposal for Temporary Autonomous Zones, claiming they enable “fascist creep” by rejecting “humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy”. He decries the “racist position of Stirnerism” (egoism) and condemns the “nihilist and insurrectionary theories” of post-left anarchism, then in a further attempt to associate anarchy with fascism, quotes Bonnano saying “Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss”, insinuating this is the definition of fascism.

He then condemns an Italian anarchist group for calling for “fires against capital everywhere”. Finally, he chides an anarchist he says attacked a nuclear CEO, saying the anarchist was “spreading fear” and sabotaging that corporation’s ambitions, before defending that industry. These ideological statements couldn’t be clearer — he’s so disgusted by the idea of violence against the system because he is the system. Part and parcel. This is not someone who only hates “lifestylists” or “individualists” or people he deems “anti-democratic”. This is a man who abhors anarchism in all its guises and has seemingly dedicated his life to eradicating it.

It’s quite an accomplishment that this person has taken control of 200 (!) subreddits, that he operates multiple online libraries that purport to be set up for anarchists by anarchists, but instead strive to debunk anarchy and promote his demonstrably conservative views.

He is a devious little man who has spent untold hours harassing anarchist librarians and publishers, which includes compiling and releasing troves of their private correspondences against their will. He’s a proud informant who takes pleasure in violating the privacy of dedicated volunteers and publicizing these logs for all to see, obviously including law enforcement.

He’s a coercive manipulative creep who works tirelessly to destroy the security culture of anarchists around the world. He's an entryist who possesses such an ego that he can’t even bring himself to deny his intentions and gleefully describes how he bamboozles people into consuming his propaganda in an attempt to "rescue them" from dangerous radical thought. He sees anarchists as mentally ill criminals and terrorists in need of de-radicalization. He perceives the state and its laws as the only obstacle separating Western civilization from barbarism. He defends the police and CEOs, he co-opts marginalized identities to colonize their spaces, he sabotages and hijacks anarchist projects and claims ownership over other people's hard work.

There’s no reason to ever entertain his games, contribute to his projects or enable his attacks on anarchy. He is, in every sense, a snake in the grass. Don’t fall for it. Don't let him lie to you and convince you his long list of projects are meant to promote anarchy or any kind of subversive, radical thought. Don't let him use our spaces to concoct his nasty campaigns against good people. He is not an anarchist in any way, shape or form.

Follows is a list of some of the subreddits he controls with his many reddit accounts (WildVirtue, IshkahYT, ZonkerStout, etc) so you know I’m not exaggerating.

• r/OrderOfTheGoodDeath
• r/DebateSocialism
• r/andykaufman
• r/LeftAnarchism
• r/AskAMortician
• r/Vegans
• r/classwar
• r/AnimalRightsActivism
• r/SolarPunkAnarchism
• r/DebateAMeatEater
• r/AileenWuornos
• r/CringyAntiVegans
• r/IndigenousAnarchism
• r/EarthFirstNetwork
• r/IntelexualMedia
• r/Reducetarianism
• r/veganPhilosophy
• r/Yippie
• r/LibraryInfoExchange
• r/DudeistPhilosophy
• r/Platformist_Anarchism
• r/abasleciel
• r/ExExVegan
• r/Makhnovism
• r/AntiCiv
• r/AngelaDavis
• r/IndependenceAnarchism
• r/MinimalistAnarchism
• r/LeftRothbardianism
• r/PhilosophicalAnarchy
• r/ContemporaryAnarchism
• r/PragmaticVeganism
• r/AnarchistLibrary
• r/Classical_Anarchism
• r/PopCultureDetective
• r/VeganvsMeatEater
• r/SaintAndrewism
• r/AntiColonialAnarchism
• r/AnarchistLibraries
• r/WorkersInternational
• r/AnarchismPlusNihilism
• r/Raddle
• r/TaraMooknee
• r/AbsurdistAnarchism
• r/CommunalistLibrary
• r/AnarchoIndependentism
• r/AntiReligiousAnarchy
• r/VeganPurists
• r/VeganAdvocacy
• r/Bookchin
• r/RadicalLibraries
• r/HinduAnarchism
• r/IslamicAnarchism
• r/AntiVegans
• r/RadicalAnthropology
• r/AfterDeathLegalReform
• r/IAF
• r/AtheisticAnarchism
• r/BreadBooks
• r/AnarchistFederation
• r/InsaneVegans
• r/ShitCarnistsSay
• r/ZoeBaker
• r/TheGrayzone
• r/EiselMazard
• r/VegansofFreegle
• r/excarnists
• r/ExAntiVegan
• r/ExCarnist
• r/ToastTube
• r/UKFreegans
• r/Bordigism
• r/CaptainHotknives
• r/Ishkah
• r/HousingCooperatives
• r/LateStageCivilization
• r/ShaunVids
• r/AntiCivilization
• r/Appropedia
• r/BoycottMeat
• r/BreadBook
• r/CommunalistAnarchism
• r/DialecticalNaturalism
• r/HobbyPublishing
• r/IndustrialAnarchism
• r/KenLoach
• r/LeftistVeganism
• r/Mexie
• r/NeoLuddism
• r/StealThisBook
• r/TheFinalStrawRadio
• r/VeganGateKeepers
• r/AnarhijaLibrary
• r/MarxistAnarchism
• r/Municipalism
• r/PuristAnarchists
• r/Reducetarian
• r/TheBlackInternational
• r/TolstoyanAnarchism
• r/AndreGorz
• r/AntiVeganOutreach
• r/AskYourselfCommunity
• r/BoycottAnimalProducts
• r/CringyAntiVegan
• r/CringyVegan
• r/CringyVegans
• r/DebateAVoter
• r/DebateCivilization
• r/DigitalFreecycle
• r/DigitalFreegle
• r/DigitalRequests
• r/EcoExtremism
• r/EcoExtremists
• r/ExExVegans
• r/Extinctionist
• r/FileExchange
• r/ForHarriet
• r/HistoricalMaterialist
• r/HumanExtinctionists
• r/InformationExchange
• r/InformationHighway
• r/InsaneAntiVegans
• r/InsaneVegan
• r/InternationalCongress
• r/IntFedAnarchistes
• r/LoompanicsUnlimited
• r/MarxistArchive
• r/MaterialistDialectic
• r/PlantBasedNews
• r/PossibilistAnarchism
• r/PragmaticAnarchism
• r/PsychoanalyticAnarchy
• r/RightWingAnarchism
• r/TheLUL
• r/Touchpaper
• r/UltimoReducto
• r/Veganarchist
• r/VegansVsMeatEaters
• r/VoteLesserEvil
• r/AgainstCollapse
• r/AnarchistPossibilism
• r/AnarchyInternational
• r/AnimalRightsDoneBadly
• r/AntiTheisticAnarchism
• r/AntiVeganExtremism
• r/BigTentAnarchism
• r/BigTentVeganism
• r/BlackRoseAnarchistFed
• r/Cantonalism
• r/CarnivoreOutreach
• r/CommunityDirectory
• r/CringeyAntiVegans
• r/CringeyVegan
• r/CringyAntiAbortionist
• r/CringyAntiFeminists
• r/CringyAntiSemites
• r/CringyAntiSJWs
• r/CringyClimateDeniers
• r/CringyNeoNazis
• r/DavidKaczynski
• r/exprim
• r/FedAnarchicaItaliana
• r/FedAnarquistaIberica
• r/FederationAnarchiste
• r/ImpossibilistAnarchy
• r/LifeoftheMind
• r/NeoLudditeHub
• r/PhilosophicalVegan
• r/PoliticalPossibilism
• r/Possibilism
• r/raddledotme
• r/SubRosasLibrary
• r/TextDebate
• r/TravellerRights
• r/TravellerSolidarity
• r/Veganism101
• r/VeganTube
• r/Wildist
• r/ZelfromAshdod
• r/OpenDistro
• r/TheLudditeClub
• r/TheModernMortician
• r/UnconventionalLives
• r/anarchistlib
• r/DoctorAvi
• r/IntersectionalVegans
• r/NihilismNow
• r/VeganGainsCommunity
• r/ARplusIO
• r/EgoistCommunism
• r/FolkPsychology
• r/FriendCollectors
• r/LeftMarketAnarchism
• r/LostInModernity
• r/MictheVegan
• r/UnnaturalVegan
• r/AmuseWiki
• r/anarchistnihilism
• r/DeepConnections
• r/DeepExperiences
• r/ExperienceCollectors
• r/ImmyLucas
• r/intentionalfriendship
• r/VeganYouTube

Sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221105015650/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-disrupting-the-purist-anarchist-pipeline

https://anarchistnews.org/content/thoughts-discussion-between-left-anarchist-and-bio-primitivist

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/177748/the-ted-k-archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20230325163248/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-jay

https://web.archive.org/web/20240209032709/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-responding-to-claims-i-ve-been-attempting-anarchist-and-or-anticiv-entryism

https://web.archive.org/web/20231115003438/https://raddle.me/f/anticiv/138355/a-friendly-reminder-not-to-get-lost-down-the-eco-purist

https://web.archive.org/web/20220812194744/https://shows.acast.com/ishkah/episodes/the-bizarre-case-of-vegan-neo-nzis-deprogramming-vegans-who-

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/197192/-

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210263/theo-slade-a-snake-in-the-grass/comment/433044

https://web.archive.org/web/20230616060722/https://old.reddit.com/r/veganarchism/comments/i5dxdf/the_bizarre_case_study_of_vegan_neonazis_why_we/

I was able to as recently as yesterday. Has this happened to anyone else?

I know at this point the app is pretty much abandoned, but I've never needed too many features so have continued to use it. But not saving posts is a breaking point.

Photographer @FishFinss@lemmy.world

A cute kitty I met while on a walk :)

The man allegedly made phone and written threats to the New York mayoral candidate, warning the democratic socialist should “go back to Uganda” before someone shoots him in the head.

Authorities have arrested a Texas man for allegedly making phone and written threats to New York City mayoral candidate and state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, warning the self-described democratic socialist to “go back to Uganda” before someone shoots him in the head, the Queens district attorney said Thursday.

Jeremy Fistel was arraigned on a 22-count grand jury indictment charging him with making a terroristic threat as a hate crime, aggravated harassment and related charges in the case. Prosecutors allege he started sending the messages to Mamdani’s office in June and continued to do so through July.

According to the charges, Fistel allegedly left an anti-Muslim message June 18 saying the Uganda-born Mamdani wasn’t welcome in New York and warning him to watch his back and his family’s backs. He called him a terrorist.

Summary:

• Iberian harvester ant queens (Messor ibericus) mate with males of a different species (Messor structor), store their sperm, and produce males that are genetic clones of M. structor while retaining M. ibericus mitochondrial DNA.

• Queens produce both M. ibericus males (hairy) and M. structor-like males (nearly hairless); all colony workers are female hybrids of the two species.

• Researchers coined the term “xenoparity” for this phenomenon; it challenges traditional species concepts because two distinct species are required for the M. ibericus colony’s reproductive system.

• The relationship appears mutually beneficial—M. ibericus secures workers and spreads M. structor via cloned males—but cloned males may accumulate harmful mutations over time, risking long-term viability.

I’ve noticed at least one app installed via F-Droid that asked me to opt-in to on-device “AI”. Which made me curious about whether the F-Droid team has formulated a policy on this.

I scratched this brain itch here, please consider weighing in!

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/f-droid-policy-on-libre-ai/33279

#SoftwareFreedom #FDroid #MOLE #AI #OnDeviceAI #OSAID

@fdroid@lemmy.ml @fdroid@social.tchncs.de

Last month, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced the sale of this state-owned nursing home and the three others to a private company.

And while the company says it has no plans to cut staff, public records show it employs fewer nursing staff on average at its facilities in other states than are employed at the state’s hospitals.

Hospitals built to provide safety net for West Virginians

Well West Virginians that voted 70% for Trump and Republicans, hope your loved ones have the day you voted for.