SDF Chatter

DeepL:

Ring, das zu Amazon gehörende Unternehmen für Hausüberwachung, gab eine formelle Partnerschaft mit Flock Safety bekannt, einem privaten Überwachungsunternehmen, dessen Systeme bereits von Tausenden von Polizeibehörden in den Vereinigten Staaten genutzt werden.
Die im Oktober 2025 angekündigte Partnerschaft integriert die Funktion „Community Requests” von Ring direkt in die Strafverfolgungsplattformen von Flock, FlockOS und Flock Nova, sodass Polizeibehörden über die Ring Neighbors-App Aufnahmen von Ring-Kameras anfordern können.
Strafverfolgungsbehörden, die Flock-Software verwenden, können nun Ring-Aufnahmen unter Angabe von Ort, Zeitrahmen und Falldetails anfordern, wie TechCrunch erstmals berichtete.
Flock Safety betreibt eines der größten privatisierten Überwachungsnetzwerke des Landes.

Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO and co-founder, is facing growing criticism over a joke he made about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) monitoring international employees during an event for the company.

Employees publicly expressed outrage about Benioff’s comments in his keynote address at an internal conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and leaders at Slack, which Salesforce owns, have said he should apologize.

Benioff reportedly asked international employees to stand, before joking that ICE agents were present and monitoring them, drawing boos from the crowd, several employees told media outlets including Wired and 404Media. A recording of his speech published on an internal Salesforce site was edited to cut his remarks about ICE, Business Insider reported.

The incident comes as hundreds of Salesforce workers reportedly plan to urge Benioff to denounce ICE and cancel future business with the agency, Wired and CNBC reported.

The Washoe Tribe has purchased more than 10,000 acres of land near Lake Tahoe for conservation in one of the largest tribal land returns in California history.

The sprawling property, located 20 miles north of Reno, Nevada, stretches from the Great Basin through the Sierra Nevada and encompasses sagebrush scrublands and juniper and pine forests.

It marks a key development for the tribe, which was forcibly removed from its lands and saw its individual allotments stolen, said the tribe’s chairperson, Serrell Smokey.

“We were told we could no longer use the land for resources or ceremony. Since that time, the land has been calling us back, and we are answering that call,” Smokey said in a statement. “This land purchase is good medicine for our people. This is a small start to healing from generations of historical trauma, and the benefits will go on for many generations to come.”

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/7181724

Archived link

Reflecting on the preliminary agreement between Canada and China to address economic and trade issues, China’s ambassador to Canada Wang Di says that we “should advance co-ordination across all sectors … In a spirit of mutual understanding and friendly consultation.”

Canadians should hear the pitch politely — and then read the fine print.

“Co-ordination” and “friendly consultation” sound perfectly amicable. They suggest predictable rules, neutral tribunals and commerce insulated from politics. But Beijing’s operating assumption is different. For Beijing, increased trade is not a destination. It is leverage — banked for the next dispute.

...

Beijing’s ambassador is asking Canadians to imagine a version of China that behaves like a normal trading partner. The record suggests caution.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s report on the Chinese Communist Party’s coercive diplomacy tracked 152 cases over a decade and notes Canada among the more frequently targeted countries. The pattern is familiar: pressure is applied, the political link is denied and the target is invited back into the warm light of “good relations” if it makes the right gestures.

Canadians don’t need to look far for what this feels like in practice. When relationships sour, the pain is rarely spread evenly across the economy. It lands where it can generate domestic pressure — farmers, exporters, universities or a single marquee firm that can be singled out and made an example.

...

China is simply not built to uphold international agreements in the ways Western nations still too often expect. Its party state can fuse economic policy, internal security and propaganda in a single campaign. Beijing treats narratives and markets as connected instruments of national power.

...

We [Canada] need selective engagement and hard guardrails. Keep channels open for consular cases and narrow commercial issues, while tightening rules on critical minerals, sensitive data, advanced research and dual use technology. If Beijing wants deeper access, it can start by proving reciprocity and predictability.

Then we need strategic coalitions before concessions. Carney’s “variable geometry” is applicable: build resilience with like minded partners first — Japan, the EU, Korea, Australia — then engage China from a position where “no” is credible and costs are shareable.

...

Finally, we [Canada] need to view domestic national security resilience as part of our broader economic policy. Transparency rules, foreign interference defences and research security are not side issues. They are the entry fee for doing business in a world where economics and politics are braided together.

...

The Republican-controlled US House on Wednesday passed a new version of the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter restriction bill that would require people to show citizenship documents to register to vote and strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.

The House passage of the new bill, now called the SAVE America Act, comes roughly a week after President Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” While the latest iteration of the SAVE Act does not usurp state and local election administration in precisely that way, it would still massively federalize new restrictions on voting that Trump and his allies have pushed for years.

The centerpiece of the bill remains a requirement that voters show proof of US citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups.

That likely understates the number of Americans who could be burdened by the bill, since most people do not carry around citizenship documents with them. Half of Americans, roughly 146 million people, do not have a passport. And 69 million women who took their partner’s last name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill.

Newly released body camera footage further undermines the Trump administration’s efforts to falsely portray Marimar Martinez—who was shot multiple times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in October—as a “domestic terrorist.” Federal prosecutors shared three videos on Tuesday evening after a federal judge ruled last week that the footage and other evidence could be made public.

The videos released on Tuesday shed further light on why prosecutors dropped charges against Martinez rather than try to bring a case against her to trial.

The newly released evidence is also part of a pattern. It is one of many examples of DHS immigration agents lying and providing false information to justify shootings and other uses of excessive force against US citizens and immigrants. These claims have collapsed again and again once DHS is forced to defend them in court.

Martinez’s case follows this pattern. DHS initially claimed their force was justified because Border Patrol agents “were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” Once in court, evidence showed something much different. Like in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, DHS might have gotten away with its false claims about Martinez were it not for the video evidence that contradicted its account.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QDN2LZ7WcDM

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LTnOPKm9WR8&pp=0gcJCUABo7VqN5tD

The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.

Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.

The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed.

The assessment, which was published in the journal One Earth, synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements. The tipping elements include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that strongly influences the global climate.

nur um den Clickbait ein wenig einzuordnen: Mercedes hat immer noch 5,8 Milliarden Gewinn gemacht.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Let’s just call the insistence on wearing of masks by the brutal and murderous thugs in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the misleadingly named Customs and ‘Border’ Patrol (CBP) the bullshit (BS) that it is.

This private army operating under the authority of Trump and his Constitution-savaging executive orders, with its gratuitous violence and willful blowing-off of hundreds of court orders issued by federal district and even appellate courts, has no valid or defensible justification for hiding its “agents’” identities by wearing masks, refusing to have attach numbers and name patches on their military-style uniforms. These federal goons are no different from municipal police or activated units of the US National Guard, who do not wear masks asnd are required to be identifiable (though some bad ones do try to hide names or badge numbers). Even soldiers in war are required to wear identifying numbers , names and “dog-tags.”

The right-wing argument made by Trump’s sycophants in Congress and the corrupt and Nazi-aping leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is that without masking and otherwise hiding their identities, the ICE and Border Control agents could be “doxed at their homes,” putting them at risk.

Yes! They should be at risk of being identified, not in order to “dox” them but to punish them for criminal actions like running over, beating, injuring and even murdering innocent activists exercising their First Amendment right to protest, to film agents’ illegal and brutal actions like assaulting nonviolent immigrants, including those with valid visas, and breaking into alleged immigrant homes without a judicial warrant.

The reality is that the CBP has been a law unto itself for decades. We experienced this lawlessness in my family when, back in 1992 during my year as a Fulbright professor in China, we air-freighted our $40,000 harpsichord from zhong Kong to NY City for a concert in Carnegie Hall. To ease its clearance at the border, I taped a notice about the concert to the shipping crate and included the ioriginal nvoice for the instrument proving that it had been made in America and was merely being returned to the US for the performance.

When we got Manhattan to our friends’ apartment where we would be staying for the week of rehearsals before the performance, though, the instrument still hadn’t arrived. Calling the shipper (Fed-Ex) we learned there had been a delay for customs at the entry point in Anchorage, Alaska. When the professionally constructed plywood ahipping crate finally did arrive, I discovered that the lid–an 8’ X 4’ right triangle-shaped 5/8’ thick sheet of plywood–had been opened, and then left only loosely attached to the rest of the case by only a few of the original bolts, which had been only slightly tightened for the entire domestic part of its travel by air and truck.

Removing the lid, I discovered that the padded canvas inner case covering the painted keyboard instrument, had been slashed using a box cutter, instead of being untied and carefully removed. Worse yet, the instrument’s lid, which had a latch, had been opened with a crowbar (!), which had ripped the brass latch out of its recessed wooden setting. That splintering of the wood had in turn had damaged the painting of a Blue Ridge Mountains scene rendered by a gifted Chinese landscape painter on the inner lid. There was also a gouged hole in the tail end of the harpsichord where a grappling hook had been used to hoist the 140 lb. instrument out of its crate, when two men could have easily slid their hands down the sides of the valuable instrument and lifted it easily and gently out to inspect without harming it or straining themselves.

It was a shocking act of vandalism by the Border Patrol agents, who thankfully didn’t decide to next rip out the strings and the soundboard of the instrument, destroying it! As an Alaskan journalist friend on hearing this story, commented wryly, “You should have listed it as a snowmobile in the shipping invoice. Then the Customs guys would have treated it with respect.”

Fortunately, one of the instrument’s builders insisted on driving up from their shop in Virginia. She repaired the visible damage to the instrument on the concert stage the evening before the concert date. The total repair bill to restore it was $1500 plus transportation.

The interesting and relevant thing here is that when I called my congressman, the late liberal fire-brand Rep. Ted Weiss, to ask what could be done, he said, “Dave, I’m afraid the Border Patrol is a law unto themselves. They think they can do whatever they want to people and goods at the border. My word is nothing to them and you’ll never get compensation for any damage they do, even if you sue the government.”

No wonder Trump, in trying to create his own Einsatzgruppen, chose to expand the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction from the border to include the entire US, and made them the model for out-of-control behavior for their partners in crime and abuse, ICE! Only now, instead of just destroying valuable and sometimes even priceless musical instruments, they’re destroying the lives of human beings, most of them completely legal immigrants trying with valid visas or Green Cards to rebuild their lives in the United States.

It is heartening to see how many Americans, sickened at the abuses they are witnessing daily on their computers and television screens at the hands of thuggish CBP and ICE thugs, are protesting and taking serious personal risks to support and defend their immigrant neighbors. They are doing this despite this domestic “army” of sadistic goons all armed with deadly weapons of war and egged on by a deranged president and his equally deranged right-wing cabinet appointees and advisers.

If the lickspittle Republican majority on the Supreme Court cannot act to rein in ICE and the Border Patrol and hold them to the Bill of Rights in their dealings with both immigrants and protesters, Democrats in Congress should simply refuse—without backing down—any further funding and make this a top issue in all their Congressional campaigns this coming November.

The post Calling BS on DHS Insistence on Masked ICE and Border Patrol Agents appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Hello, quick introduction. I'm self-hosting beginner, started about year ago, burned myself couple times, learned a bit, but mostly still groping in the dark as nobody I personally know does anything like this.

• Currently I do have Asustor 2-bay NAS, equipped with Celeron 5105 processor, which I managed to installed TrueNAS Scale on to its NVMe drive, with two mirrored drives for data. I host couple services there (like Navidrome or Adguard). It works OKish, although I don't feel like I'm very confident in TrueNAS.
• Recently I got HP Z2 Gen3 Mini workstation with Xeon 1245-v5 with 32GB RAM. Which - according to specs - should be much better "server" than Asustor above, although it does have just one SATA and one m.2 port.

My (probably not very smart) idea is:

• Use the HP as a Proxmox node with OS installed on the SATA drive.
• Host the services in LXCs on secondary m.2 drive.
• Wipe the Asustor and use it just as a network drive for "data" (navidrome music, immich pictures, etc.). Ideally accessible from other PCs as data drive. Not sure about OS choice for this use. OpenMediaVault? Plain Debian? Another instance of Proxmox? Or maybe even original Asustor option?

Is this a good idea? Considering reliability concerns or future-proof abilities. My thought process was this way I could swap either the HP or Asustor for something else in the future when the need (or device fail) appears. Or should I scratch the idea entirely and use completely different approach and/or devices?

Or maybe I should rather post this in a different community I don't follow yet?