tal

Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.

If, say, the only thing that you're exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there's a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you're fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.

I'm not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the "big" stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I'd be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.

To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn't run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it's got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy's open-source project. That's a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it's probably rather lower than plain old malware.

It's good to be aware of what you're doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.

I think that there's some pretty heavy lifting done by self-segregation into news sources. There are a relatively-small number of Republican-leaning sources.

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/

Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources. These include the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), the cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, major public broadcasters PBS and NPR, and the legacy newspaper with the largest number of digital subscribers, The New York Times.

Republicans, meanwhile, are much more likely to distrust than trust all of these sources. A smaller number of the sources we asked about are more heavily used and trusted by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart.

Fox News only really has competition on the further right for TV news, from Newsmax and One America News Network. I'm actually kind of surprised that there hasn't been a challenger from the center-right side.

I was commenting a year or so back on the decline of the titles-released-per-year of VR titles on Steam.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=21978

That's been going on for some time, not looking really healthy.

I remember once reading that in bleak times, like the Great Depression, people historically favored upbeat movies; they wanted escapism. And then in boom times, people tend to favor grittier movies.

There might be something to that. That is, if you're not happy, you might be better off consuming happier media.

I don't use Perchance, but what was the image resolution?

I'd expect the processing time to grow linearly in the image area, and I imagine that you could probably find an image that, if the thing has sufficient memory available, will take quite some time to process.

If it is particularly high resolution and you just want a test image to see whether you're having some other problem, you might try using a low-resolution image to check.

Over the summer, Mr. Rubio said in a video commemorating huge anti-Communist protests in 2021 that many Cubans had found it “easier” to “abandon” the island than stay and fight the regime.

That seems kind of ironic.

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

Rubio asserted that his parents intended to return to Cuba in the 1960s.[5] He added that his mother took his two elder siblings back to Cuba in 1961 with the intention of living there permanently (his father remained behind in Miami "wrapping up the family's matters"), but the nation's move toward communism caused the family to change its plans.[5] Rubio said that the "essence of my family story is why they came to America in the first place and why they had to stay".[14]

Basically, for those of you who have been living under a rock, Mercosur is a trade deal...

Mercosur is an economic bloc in South America which the EU has been negotiatiating a trade agreement with.

This would be like some Argentinian saying "the European Union is a trade agreement that we are negotiating with some countries in Europe".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93Mercosur_Partnership_Agreement

The European Union–Mercosur Partnership Agreement is a signed, but not yet ratified, free trade agreement on which the European Union and the South American trade bloc Mercosur reached agreement in principle in 2019.

It sounds like the federal government can move cases involving federal law enforcement agents performing their duties to federal court.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1442

28 U.S. Code § 1442 - Federal officers or agencies sued or prosecuted

(a) A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:

(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.

I think

and I may be wrong

that in a case in federal court, it'd be up to federal prosecutors to prosecute. I don't know if the Trump administration actually has to prosecute them in that scenario.

Not something that I've read up on before, though. I imagine that there are probably articles out there with various lawyers chiming in.

searches more

https://poracldf.org/blog/supremacy-clause-immunity-for-federal-officers/

In short, subjecting federal officers to state criminal sanctions for carrying out their federally appointed duties could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the federal government to function. Even the most dedicated federal servant would be reluctant to do his job conscientiously if he knew it could mean prison time in the state penitentiary. Seth P. Waxman, What Kind of Immunity? Federal Officers, State Criminal Law, and the Supremacy Clause, 112 Yale L.J. 2195, 2230-31 (2003).4

In carving out the contours to the federal immunity defense, the courts have established a two-part requirement, adopting in part the Neagle language: “a state court has no jurisdiction if (1) the federal agent was performing an act which he was authorized to do by the laws of the United States and in (2) performing that authorized act, the federal agency did no more than was necessary and proper for him to do.” Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Long, 837 F.2d 727 (6th Cir. 1988).

Significantly, in analyzing the second “necessary and proper” factor, particularly in the context of an agent acting under exigencies, the courts have applied a broad view of the reasonableness of the conduct, focusing “on the intent of the officer and not the actual legality of his action.” Colorado v. Nord, 377 F. Supp. 2d 945, 951 (D. Col. 2005) (emphasizing “a federal officer is still entitled to immunity when he acts in good faith within the general scope of his duties as he understands them;” id. at 950); Clifton v. Cox, 549 F.2d 722, 728 (9th Cir. 1977) (federal officer seeking immunity need not show that his action “was, in fact, necessary or in retrospect justifiable, only that he reasonably thought it to be”). Just as Neagle involved a murder prosecution, the nature of the state prosecution is not the controlling factor; rather, the only consideration is the intent of the officer in enforcing his federal responsibilities. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes emphasized, “even the most unquestionable and most universally applicable of state laws, such as those concerning murder, will not be allowed to control the conduct of a marshal of the United States acting under and in pursuance of the laws of the United States.” Johnson v. Maryland, 254 U.S. 51, 56-57 (1920).

As five Ninth Circuit judges agree, not only is the federal immunity provision construed broadly but great leeway is given to a federal agent, so long as the agent is not acting with an evil intent: “when the federal agent is acting reasonably within the broad contours of official duty, and without malice, the courts have employed the Supremacy Clause to protect the agent from prosecution.” Idaho v. Horiuchi, 253 F.3d 359 (9th Cir.) (en banc), vacated as moot, 266 F.3d 979 (9th Cir. 2001) (Hawkins, dissenting).

looks further

Okay, it sounds

and this is just from the phrasing in an article that's arguing in favor of state charges for one of the ICE situations

like state prosecutors can prosecute even in the case that the prosecution is moved to federal court:

https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

The history of state prosecutions of federal officials goes back to the War of 1812, when some New England states used state statutes to prosecute federal customs officers who seized goods that were under a trade embargo. Often, they are used to resist a federal law that states don’t like, such as the Fugitive Slave Act.

But numerous states have indicted, charged, and arrested federal law enforcement officers for conduct that exceeded their official duties. In 1898, Virginia charged a federal tax collector posse with shooting and killing horses and cattle during a shootout. The federal posse claimed they were ambushed while attempting to collect taxes.

More to the point, in Findley v. Satterfield (1877), Castle v. Lewis (1918), Oregon v. Wood (1920), Smith v. Gilliam (1922), Maryland v. Soper (1926), and many more, states alleged that federal officers committed murder or attempted murder while engaged in law enforcement activity. Almost always, the federal response was that they were performing federal duties, that they acted in self-defense, or both. Often, these cases were removed to federal court, but the state prosecutors maintained the case. (Federal officers have the right to move cases to federal court, but not the unlimited right; they have to assert some plausible federal defense to the charges.)

EDIT: Well, or what they're actually saying is that they're trying to continue the case in state court. I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to dig into this really deeply, because I suspect that there are going to be various legal commentators with a lot more expertise than me talking about this in short order if there are charges filed. But at least I wanted to highlight one issue likely to come up if there are attempts to prosecute in state court.

EDIT2: Yes, state prosecutors do retain control of the prosecution if the case is moved to a federal court. Here's a better source (talking about the Good shooting, but same issue):

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/minnesota-can-prosecute-jonathan-ross-but-it-may-not-be-easy

Finally, whether Supremacy Clause immunity applies will almost certainly be decided by a federal court, even though any criminal charges would first be filed in Minnesota state court. That is because federal officials are able to remove both criminal and civil cases from state court to federal court if those cases involve actions taken “under color of” their federal office. If charged, Ross would almost certainly choose to remove the case. Even in federal court, however, state criminal prosecutors would remain in charge of the prosecution, and any conviction would be a conviction under state law. And the president cannot pardon a state law crime.

I don't know what YouTube does when you increase playback speed, but a lot of people who listen to podcast-type material or lectures will use software that has the ability to time-stretch the playback without changing the pitch. That is, we can often understand people perfectly well speaking more quickly than they actually do.

I imagine that some people are most-likely looking at content of that sort on YouTube.

That may be true. I'm just telling you that if so, it doesn't reflect Sweden as a whole.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics

Here's the European Commission.

https://wprices.com/energy-prices/household-electricity-prices-in-europe/

Sweden has residential electricity prices at $0.2768/kWh.

https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

The US averages $0.1798/kWh.