745 karma · joined October 16, 2024
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
"Their mouthparts include two pairs of cutting "blades" that lacerate skin and cause flow of blood out of the wound, which females lap up with a sponge-like mouthpart."
https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publichealth/insects/taban...
Fixed.
Money always finds a way. Everyone thought the changes made a few years ago would hurt Meta but they make $70 billion net profit. At a minimum, they only need a good relationship with advertisers, and a (sort of measurable) increase from a campaign. Also ads are different now. One address may see the same five seconds of an ad hundreds of times. That is a much easier ecosystem to correlate targets through data enrichment.
"An Israeli spyware company has reportedly cut access to its clients in Italy following allegations that its product was used to target critics of the Italian government.
"The move comes after WhatsApp alleged last week that spyware made by Paragon Solutions was used to target 90 WhatsApp users in two dozen countries, including journalists and civil society members.
"Italy's government confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that seven mobile phone users in the country had been targeted by spyware on WhatsApp, calling the incident "particularly serious"."
The feature is not named "back door" or "master key". It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".
Also note they have created features before that provides law enforcement access to data at different stages of a pipeline.
"...sources with knowledge of the incident have told news outlets that it appears to have been intentionally set and that the storage of wood pallets and hand sanitizer under the overpass contributed to the intensity of the blaze. Both wood pallets and hand sanitizer are known to fuel fires."
Why was there bulk pallets and hand sanitizer? It's basically kindling, with a napalm icing. Look at the photo. It is likely this product was stored there due to it was removed from somewhere else where it was illegally stored. And it was likely to be a business operating illegally, without the proper licenses and permits. Or they needed to dispose of the product and simply did not want to pay for it.
Governor Newsom has already acknowledged this was and is a failure of governance.
Six months on, and no permits have been drawn for the Palisades/Malibu reconstruction. There are 7,000 destroyed homes, in the most bureaucratic municipality for a permitting and development process. This will be particularly true for anything that requires Coastal Commission oversight. Their job is to get you to leave.
LA city sold $1 billion in bonds this year, not for strategic efforts, but to keep the lights on and water running. They basically punted and said part of the DPW is a project and we want to sell $1 billion in bonds.
In previous years, LA city annual spend includes $700+ million for homeless, and $350+ million for liability payments. It's basically a giant pot of money for a huge feeding frenzy.
Sure, the fire department has an insufficient budget, but no-one talks about 30% of all fires are started by the homeless, and why are they allowed to live under an interstate overpass anyway?
Some of those 7,000 homeowners displaced by the fire may give up and leave. Those that remain are going after LA leadership in court. LA will see massive lawsuits from homeowners and businesses, possibly the state government.
The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
https://oaklandside.org/2025/05/23/oakland-police-pursuit-po...
Remote DC's were always entertaining for us. We had hundreds, and it was usually and reluctantly due to environmental conditions where they didn't want to deal with authentication issues if the network was down.
The downside was the occasional DC that disappeared. Once in Egypt, a fire caused relocation of servers and what not, and we actually had a guy take a photo of our DC on a donkey cart in the process of moving down the street. I thought those were made up things, but donkey carts usually don't need a license or insurance.
"By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population was estimated to be 2,000 to 3,000."
That implies a huge boom and near-total depopulation crash in only 500 years.
The total area is 163.6 km2 (63.2 sq mi), but usable area is only about 1/2 of that. It is 2,300 miles west of South America and 1,100 miles from the nearest island.
"... new findings by archaeologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii may indicate a different version of events. In 2000, Hunt, archaeologist Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, and their students began excavations at Anakena, a white sandy beach on the island's northern shore. The researchers believed Anakena would have been an attractive area for the Rapanui to land, and therefore may be one of the earliest settlement sites. In the top several layers of their excavation pit, the researchers found clear evidence of human presence: charcoal, tools—even bones, some of which had come from rats. Underneath they found soil that seemed absent of human contact. This point of first human interaction, they figured, would tell them when the first Rapanui had arrived on the island.
"Hunt sent the samples from the dig to a lab for radiocarbon dating, expecting to receive a date around 800 A.D., in keeping with what other archaeologists had found. Instead, the samples dated to 1200 A.D. This would mean the Rapanui arrived four centuries later than expected. The deforestation would have happened much faster than originally assumed, and the human impact on the environment was fast and immediate."
"Hunt suspected that humans alone could not destroy the forests this quickly. In the sand's layers, he found a potential culprit—a plethora of rat bones. Scientists have long known that when humans colonized the island, so too did the Polynesian rat, having hitched a ride either as stowaways or sources of food. However they got to Easter Island, the rodents found an unlimited food supply in the lush palm trees, believes Hunt, who bases this assertion on an abundance of rat-gnawed palm seeds."
"Under these conditions, he says, "Rats would reach a population of a few million within a couple of years." From there, time would take its toll. "Rats would have an initial impact, eating all of the seeds. With no new regeneration, as the trees die, deforestation can proceed slowly," he says, adding that people cutting down trees and burning them would have only added to the process. Eventually, the degeneration of trees, according to his theory, led to the downfall of the rats and eventually of the humans. The demise of the island, says Hunt, "was a synergy of impacts. But I think it is more rat than we think."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-mystery-of-easter-...
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.