(date: 2024-10-06 11:04:58)
date: 2024-10-06, from: Curious about everything blog
The many interesting things I read in September 2024
https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/forty-three
date: 2024-10-06, updated: 2024-10-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hands on Meta has been influential in driving the development of open language models with its Llama family, but up until now, the only way to interact with them has been through text.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/06/meta_llama_vision_brain/
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Reuters — Chinese hackers accessed the networks of U.S. broadband providers and obtained information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the telecoms companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized U.S. requests for communications data, the Journal said. It added that the hackers had also accessed other tranches of internet traffic.
China’s foreign ministry responded Sunday that it was not aware of the attack described in the report but said the United States had “concocted a false narrative” to “frame” China in the past.
“At a time when cybersecurity has become a common challenge for all countries around the world, this erroneous approach will only hinder the efforts of the international community to jointly address the challenge through dialog and cooperation,” the ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
Beijing has previously denied claims by the U.S. government and others that it has used hackers to break into foreign computer systems.
Lumen Technologies declined to comment, while Verizon and AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Journal said the attack was carried out by a Chinese hacking group with the aim of collecting intelligence. U.S. investigators have dubbed it “Salt Typhoon.”
Earlier this year, U.S. law enforcement disrupted a major Chinese hacking group nicknamed “Flax Typhoon,” months after confronting Beijing about sweeping cyber espionage under a campaign named “Volt Typhoon.”
China’s foreign ministry said in its statement that Beijing’s cybersecurity agencies had found and published evidence to show Volt Typhoon was staged by “an international ransomware organization.”
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
miami — People across Florida were given notice Sunday that Milton, for now just a tropical storm off the coast of Mexico, could intensify rapidly into a major hurricane before slamming midweek into the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast.
Tropical Storm Milton’s center was about 1,385 kilometers west-southwest of Tampa, Florida, early Sunday, heading east at 7 kph with maximum sustained winds of 95 kph, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
“Milton is moving slowly but is expected to strengthen rapidly,” the center said. “There is increasing confidence that a powerful hurricane with life-threatening hazards will be affecting portions of the Florida west coast around the middle of this week.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday that while it remains to be seen just where Milton will strike, it’s clear that Florida is going to be hit hard — “I don’t think there’s any scenario where we don’t have major impacts at this point.”
“You have time to prepare — all day today, all day Monday, probably all day Tuesday to be sure your hurricane preparedness plan is in place,” the governor said. “Know your evacuation zone — there will be mandatory and voluntary evacuations.”
DeSantis said as many as 4,000 National Guard troops are helping the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the Florida Department of Transportation to remove debris, and he declared a state of emergency in 35 counties ahead of Milton. He said Floridians should prepare for more power outages and disruption.
“All available state assets … are being marshaled to help remove debris,” DeSantis said. “We’re going 24-7 … it’s all hands on deck.”
FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell defended her agency’s response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene after Republicans’ false claims, amplified by former President Donald Trump, created a frenzy of misinformation across devastated communities.
“This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people and it’s really a shame we’re putting politics ahead of helping people,” Criswell told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. It’s created fear and mistrust among residents against the thousands of FEMA employees and volunteers on the ground across the southeast, she said.
Despite this, Criswell said the agency is already preparing for Milton, well before it’s clear exactly where it will move across the Florida peninsula this week. “We’re working with the state there to understand what their requirements are going to be, so we can have those in place before it makes landfall,” she said.
The hurricane center said Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, the Florida Peninsula, the Florida Keys and the northwestern Bahamas should monitor the system’s progress. Heavy rainfall was expected Sunday ahead of the storm itself, and will likely then combine with Milton’s rainfall to flood waterways and streets in Florida, where forecasters said up to 30 centimeters of rain could fall in places through Wednesday night.
“There is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning late Tuesday or Wednesday. Residents in these areas should ensure they have their hurricane plan in place, follow any advice given by local officials, and check back for updates to the forecast,” the center said.
The Atlantic hurricane season has become more active as rescuers in the U.S. Southeast continue to search for people unaccounted for in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which left a huge trail of death and catastrophic damage from Florida into the Appalachian mountains.
Hurricane Kirk diminished to a Category 2 hurricane in the open Atlantic early, with top winds of 165 kph, sending large swells and “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions” to Bermuda and northward along the U.S. and Canadian coasts, the center said. Hurricane Leslie also was moving northwest over the open Atlantic, with top winds of 140 kph but posing no threats to land.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The focus in WordPress-land should, imho, be on writers. There's so much more it can do. Keep it simple and streamlined, stay out of their way, and offer lots of choice. It has all the features "social web" need but don't have. And it's deployed, scaled, debugged, and ready to serve as a strong foundation.
http://scripting.com/2024/10/05/142118.html?title=wordpressDestiny
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
Los Angeles — For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s apartment in a blocky affordable housing development in Los Angeles’ Chinatown was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
But that grace had an expiration date. For Maalouf and her family it arrived in 2020.
The landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Maalouf’s nights are haunted by fears her yearslong eviction battle will end in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse.
While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,0000 affordable housing units like Maalouf’s across the U.S. could be yanked out from under them in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants caught facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck.
Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It has pumped out 3.6 million units since then and boasts over half of all federally supported low-income housing nationwide.
“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, who runs Housing Colorado, an organization advocating for affordable homes.
That lifeblood isn’t strictly red or blue. By combining social benefits with tax breaks and private ownership, LIHTC has enjoyed bipartisan support. Its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.
The catch? The buildings typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.
“If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s sort of like having a boat with a hole at the bottom,” she said.
Not all units that expire out of LIHTC become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by merciful landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep them low-cost by relying on several levers.
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax credits can be applied that extend the affordability, or, as in Maalouf’s case, tenants can organize to try to force action from landlords and city officials.
Those options face challenges. While new tax credits can reup a lapsing LIHTC property, they are limited, doled out to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population. It’s also a tall order for local governments and nonprofits to shell out enough money to purchase and keep expiring developments affordable. And there is little aggregated data on exactly when LIHTC units will lose their affordability, making it difficult for policymakers and activists to fully prepare.
There also is less of a political incentive to preserve the units.
“Politically, you’re rewarded for an announcement, a groundbreaking, a ribbon-cutting,” said Vicki Been, a New York University professor who previously was New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.
“You’re not rewarded for being a good manager of your assets and keeping track of everything and making sure that you’re not losing a single affordable housing unit,” she said.
Maalouf stood in her apartment courtyard on a recent warm day, chit-chatting and waving to neighbors, a bracelet with a photo of Che Guevarra dangling from her arm.
“Friendly,” is how Maalouf described her previous self, but not assertive. That is until the rent hikes pushed her in front of the Los Angeles City Council for the first time, sweat beading as she fought for her home.
Now an organizer with the LA Tenants’ Union, Maalouf isn’t afraid to speak up, but the angst over her home still keeps her up at night. Mornings she repeats a mantra: “We still here. We still here.” But fighting day after day to make it true is exhausting.
Maalouf’s apartment was built before California made LIHTC contracts last 55 years instead of 30 in 1996. About 5,700 LIHTC units built around the time of Maalouf’s are expiring in the next decade. In Texas, it’s 21,000 units.
When California Treasurer Fiona Ma assumed office in 2019, she steered the program toward developers committed to affordable housing and not what she called “churn and burn,” buying up LIHTC properties and flipping them onto the market as soon as possible.
In California, landlords must notify state and local governments and tenants before their building expires. Housing organizations, nonprofits, and state or local governments then have first shot at buying the property to keep it affordable. Expiring developments also are prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires that all LIHTC applicants have experience owning and managing affordable housing.
“It kind of weeded out people who weren’t interested in affordable housing long term,” said Marina Wiant, executive director of California’s tax credit allocation committee.
But unlike California, some states haven’t extended LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.
Colorado, which has some 80,000 LIHTC units, passed a law this year giving local governments the right of first refusal in hopes of preserving 4,400 units set to lose affordability protections in the next six years. The law also requires landlords to give local and state governments a two-year heads-up before expiration.
Still, local governments or nonprofits scraping together the funds to buy sizeable apartment buildings is far from a guarantee.
Stories like Maalouf’s will keep playing out as LIHTC units turn over, threatening to send families with meager means back into the housing market. The median income of Americans living in these units was just $18,600 in 2021, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“This is like a math problem,” said Rossbert of Housing Colorado. “As soon as one of these units expires and converts to market rate and a household is displaced, they become a part of the need that’s driving the need for new construction.”
“It’s hard to get out of that cycle,” he said.
Colorado’s housing agency works with groups across the state on preservation and has a fund to help. Still, it’s unclear how many LIHTC units can be saved, in Colorado or across the country.
It’s even hard to know how many units nationwide are expiring. An accurate accounting would require sorting through the constellation of municipal, state and federal subsidies, each with their own affordability requirements and end dates.
That can throw a wrench into policymakers’ and advocates’ ability to fully understand where and when many units will lose affordability, and then funnel resources to the right places, said Kelly McElwain, who manages and oversees the National Housing Preservation Database. It’s the most comprehensive aggregation of LIHTC data nationally, but with all the gaps, it remains a rough estimate.
There also are fears that if states publicize their expiring LIHTC units, for-profit buyers without an interest in keeping them affordable would pounce.
“It’s sort of this Catch-22 of trying to both understand the problem and not put out a big for-sale sign in front of a property right before its expiration,” Rossbert said.
Meanwhile, Maalouf’s tenant activism has helped move the needle in Los Angeles. The city has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal wouldn’t get rid of over 30 eviction cases still proceeding, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes.
In her courtyard, Maalouf’s granddaughter, Rubie Caceres, shuffled up with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but with special needs, her speech is more disconnected words than sentences.
“That’s why I’ve been hoping everything becomes normal again, and she can be safe,” said Maalouf, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We’ll keep fighting,” she said, “but day by day it’s hard.”
date: 2024-10-06, from: The Lever News
A fish story, a perfect storm, a toxic loophole, and more from The Lever this week.
https://www.levernews.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-s-envoy-to-us-ends-term-at-time-of-turmoil/7812088.html
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — For years, the Grammy Awards have been criticized over a lack of diversity — artists of color and women left out of top prizes; rap and contemporary R&B stars ignored — a reflection of the Recording Academy’s electorate. An evolving voting body, 66% of whom have joined in the last five years, is working to remedy that.
At last year’s awards, women dominated the major categories; every televised competitive Grammy went to at least one woman. It stems from a commitment the Recording Academy made five years ago: In 2019, the Academy announced it would add 2,500 women to its voting body by 2025. Under the Grammys’ new membership model, the Recording Academy has surpassed that figure ahead of the deadline: More than 3,000 female voting members have been added, it announced Thursday.
“It’s definitely something that we’re all very proud of,” Harvey Mason jr., academy president and CEO, told The Associated Press. “It tells me that we were severely underrepresented in that area.”
Reform at the Record Academy dates back to the creation of a task force focused on inclusion and diversity after a previous CEO, Neil Portnow, made comments belittling women at the height of the #MeToo movement.
Since 2019, approximately 8,700 new members have been added to the voting body. In total, there are now more than 16,000 members and more than 13,000 of them are voting members, up from about 14,000 in 2023 (11,000 of which were voting members). In that time, the academy has increased its number of members who identify as people of color by 63%.
“It’s not an all-new voting body,” Mason assures. “We’re very specific and intentional in who we asked to be a part of our academy by listening and learning from different genres and different groups that felt like they were being overlooked, or they weren’t being heard.”
Mason says that in the last five years, the Recording Academy has “requalified 100% of our members, which is a huge step.” There are voters who have let their membership lapse — and those who no longer qualify to be a voting member have been removed.
There have been renewal review processes in the past, but under the current model, becoming a voting member requires proof of a primary career in music, two recommendations from industry peers and 12 credits in a single creative profession, at least five of which must be from the last five years.
Comparisons might be made to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which announced in 2016 that it would restrict Oscars voting privileges to active members — ineligible parties included those who haven’t worked in three decades since joining the Academy, unless they themselves are nominated — as a response to #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of its lack of diversity. As a result, some members protested that the new measures unjustly scapegoated older academy members. The film academy has also grown its membership, adding more women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic communities.
The Recording Academy sought to increase its voting body by reaching out to different, underrepresented communities, says Mason. “Let’s take the time to understand why those people aren’t engaging with us, figure out how we can fix that,” he said. “And once we fixed it, then let’s invite them or ask them if they would like to be a part of our organization. So, it was a multi-step process.”
Since 2019, the Recording Academy has also seen growth in voters across different racial backgrounds: 100% growth in AAPI voters, 90% growth in Black voters and 43% growth in Latino voters.
Still, Mason sees room to grow. Of the current voting membership, 66% are men, 49% are white and 66% are over the age of 40.
“Going forward, we’re going to continue the work. We’re going to continue to grow,” he says.
That might not look like a public commitment to a specific figure, but Mason promises “that our goals will be to be the most relevant, the most reflective, the most accurately representative of the music community that is humanly possible.”
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Republicans are pointing to newly released immigration enforcement data to bolster their argument that the Biden administration is letting migrants who have committed serious crimes go free in the U.S. But the numbers have been misconstrued without key context.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement released data to Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales in response to a request he made for information about people under ICE supervision either convicted of crimes or facing criminal charges. Gonzales’ Texas district includes an 800-mile stretch bordering Mexico.
Gonzales posted the numbers online and they immediately became a flashpoint in the presidential campaign between former President Donald Trump, who has vowed to carry out mass deportations, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Immigration — and the Biden administration’s record on border security — has become a key issue in the election.
Here’s a look at the data and what it does or doesn’t show:
What are the numbers? As of July 21, ICE said 662,556 people under its supervision were either convicted of crimes or face criminal charges. Nearly 15,000 were in its custody, but the vast majority — 647,572 — were not.
Included in the figures of people not detained by ICE were people found guilty of very serious crimes: 13,099 for homicide, 15,811 for sexual assault, 13,423 for weapons offenses and 2,663 for stolen vehicles. The single biggest category was for traffic-related offenses at 77,074, followed by assault at 62,231 and dangerous drugs at 56,533.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, later clarified that the numbers span decades — including the Trump administration and other presidencies — and that those not in its custody may be detained by a state or local agency. It’s a distinction ICE didn’t make in its report to Gonzales.
“When we speak of somebody who is not detained, we mean not detained in ICE custody. The individual could be in Folsom State Prison, for example,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday.
Millions of people are on ICE’s “non-detained docket,” or people under the agency’s supervision who aren’t in its custody. Many are awaiting outcomes of their cases in immigration court, including some wearing monitoring devices. Others have been released after completing their prison sentences because their countries won’t take them back.
What do both sides say about the numbers? Republicans pointed to the data as proof that the Biden administration is letting immigrants with criminal records into the country and isn’t doing enough to kick out those who commit crimes while they’re here.
“The truth is clear — illegal immigrants with a criminal record are coming into our country. The data released by ICE is beyond disturbing, and it should be a wake-up call for the Biden-Harris administration and cities across the country that hide behind sanctuary policies,” Gonzales said in a news release, referring to pledges by local officials to limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Trump, who has repeatedly portrayed immigrants as bringing lawlessness and crime to America, tweeted multiple screenshots of the data with the words: “13,000 CROSSED THE BORDER WITH MURDER CONVICTIONS.”
He also asserted that the numbers correspond to Biden and Harris’ time in office.
The data was being misinterpreted, Homeland Security said in a statement Sunday.
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration,” the agency said. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
Mayorkas said it was “unfortunate” the information didn’t come with proper explanation, saying that “lends itself to misinterpretation, either deliberate or otherwise.”
The department also stressed what it has done to deport those without the right to stay in America, saying it had removed or returned more than 700,000 people in the past year, which it said was the highest number since 2010. Homeland Security said it had removed 180,000 people with criminal convictions since President Joe Biden took office.
What’s behind the figures? The data isn’t only listing people who entered the country during the Biden administration but includes people going back decades who came during previous administrations, said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was the predecessor to ICE.
They’re accused or convicted of committing crimes in America as opposed to committing crimes in other countries and then entering the U.S., said Meissner, who is now director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
“This is not something that is a function of what the Biden administration did,” she said. “Certainly, this includes the Biden years, but this is an accumulation of many years, and certainly going back to at least 2010, 2011, 2012.”
A 2017 report by Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General says that as of August 2016, ICE had about 368,574 people on its non-detained docket who were convicted criminals. By June 2021, shortly after Trump left office, that number was up to 405,786.
Can’t ICE just deport criminals? ICE has limited resources. The number of people it supervises has skyrocketed, while its staffing has not. As the agency noted in a 2023 end-of-year report, it often has to send staff to help at the border, taking them away from their normal duties.
The number of people ICE supervises but who aren’t in its custody has grown from 3.3 million a little before Biden took office to a little over 7 million last spring.
“The simple answer is that as a system, we haven’t devoted enough resources to the parts of the government that deal with monitoring and ultimately removing people who are deportable,” Meissner said.
ICE also has logistical and legal limits on who they can hold. Its budget allows the agency to hold 41,500 people at a time. John Sandweg, who was acting ICE director from 2013 to 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, said holding people accused or convicted of the most serious crimes is always the top priority.
But once someone has a final order of removal — meaning a court has found that they don’t have the right to stay in the country — they cannot be held in detention forever while ICE works out how to get them home. A 2001 Supreme Court ruling essentially prevented ICE from holding those people for more than six months if there is no reasonable chance to expect they can be sent back.
Not every country is willing to take back their citizens, Sandweg said.
He said he suspects that a large number of those convicted of homicide but not held by ICE are people who were ordered deported but the agency can’t remove them because their home country won’t take them back.
“It’s a very common scenario. Even amongst the countries that take people back, they can be very selective about who they take back,” he said.
The U.S. also could run into problems deporting people to countries with which it has tepid relations.
Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how many countries won’t take back their citizens. The 2017 watchdog report put the number at 23 countries, plus an additional 62 that were cooperative but where there were delays getting things like passports or travel documents.
date: 2024-10-06, from: VOA News USA
BUTLER, Pennsylvania — Donald Trump returned on Saturday to the Pennsylvania fairgrounds where he was nearly assassinated in July, holding a sprawling rally before a massive crowd in a critical swing state Trump hopes to return to his column in November’s election.
The former president and Republican nominee picked up where he left off in July when a gunman tried to assassinate him and struck his ear. He began his speech with, “As I was saying,” and gestured toward an immigration chart he was looking at when the gunfire began.
The Trump campaign worked to maximize the event’s headline-grabbing potential with just 30 days to go and voting already underway in some states in his race against his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Musician Lee Greenwood appeared on stage and serenaded him with God Bless the USA, frequently played at his rallies, and billionaire Elon Musk spoke for the first time at a Trump rally.
“We fought together. We have endured together. We have pushed onward together,” Trump said. “And right here in Pennsylvania, we have bled together. We’ve bled.”
‘This is a must-win’
Trump needs to drive up voter turnout in conservative strongholds like Butler County, an overwhelmingly white, rural-suburban community, if he wants to win Pennsylvania in November. Harris, too, has targeted her campaign efforts at Pennsylvania, rallying there repeatedly as part of her aggressive outreach in critical swing states.
At the beginning of the rally, Trump asked for a moment of silence to honor firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died as he shielded family members from gunfire. Opera singer Christopher Macchio sang Ave Maria after a bell rung at the same time that gunfire began on July 13.
Standing behind protective glass that now encases the stage at his outdoor rallies, Trump called the would-be assassin “a vicious monster” and said he did not succeed “by the hand of providence and the grace of God.” There was a very visible heightened security presence, with armed law enforcers in camouflage uniforms on roofs.
One of the most anticipated guests of the evening was Musk, who climbed onto the stage on Saturday jumping and pumping his fists in the air after Trump introduced him as a “great gentleman” and said he “saved free speech.”
“President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America,” said Musk, who endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt. “This is a must-win situation.”
Musk, who bought Twitter and rebranded it as X and has embraced conservative politics, met with Trump and Vance backstage, donning a black “Make America Great Again” hat. A billboard on the way into the rally said, “IN MUSK WE TRUST,” and showed his photo.
Earlier on Saturday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, got on stage and reflected on the events that day while criticizing Democrats for calling Trump “a threat to democracy,” saying that kind of language is “inflammatory.”
“You heard the shots. You saw the blood. We all feared the worst. But you knew everything would be OK when President Trump raised his fist high in the air and shouted, ‘Fight, fight!’” said Vance. “Now I believe it as sure as I’m standing here today that what happened was a true miracle.”
Crowds pack stands
Crowds were lined up as the sun rose Saturday. The crowd packed bleachers, folding chairs and the field stretching to the venue’s edges. Area hotels, motels and inns were said to be full and some rallygoers arrived Friday.
Much of the crowd waited several hours for Trump. About half an hour into his speech, Trump paused his speech for more than five minutes after an attendee had a medical issue and needed a medic.
Trump used the event to remember Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter struck and killed at the July 13 rally, and to recognize the two other rallygoers injured, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. They and Trump were struck when 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.
The building from which Crooks fired was completely obscured by tractor-trailers, a large grassy perimeter and a fence. Most bleachers were now at the sides, rather than behind Trump.
How Crooks managed to outmaneuver law enforcement that day and scramble on top of a building within easy shooting distance of the ex-president is among many questions that remain unanswered about the worst Secret Service security failure in decades. Another is his motive.
Butler County District Attorney Rich Goldinger told WPXI-TV this week that “everyone is doubling down on their efforts to make sure this is done safely and correctly.”
Mike Slupe, the county sheriff, told the station he estimates the Secret Service, was deploying “quadruple the assets” it did in July. The agency has undergone a painful reckoning over its handling of two attempts on Trump’s life.
‘I believe God’s got Trump’
Butler County, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a Trump stronghold. He won the county with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of the county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats and 14% something else.
Chris Harpster, 30, of Tyrone, Pennsylvania, was accompanied by his girlfriend on Saturday as he returned to the scene. Of July 13, he said, “I was afraid” — as were his parents, watching at home, who texted him immediately after the shots rang out.
Heightened security measures were making him feel better now, as well as the presence of his girlfriend, a first-time rallygoer. Harpster said he will be a third-time Trump voter in November, based on the Republican nominee’s stances on immigration, guns, abortion and energy. Harpster said he hopes Pennsylvania will go Republican, particularly out of concern over gas and oil industry jobs.
Other townspeople were divided over the value of Trump’s return. Heidi Priest, a Butler resident who started a Facebook group supporting Harris, said Trump’s last visit fanned political tensions in the city.
“Whenever you see people supporting him and getting excited about him being here, it scares the people who don’t want to see him reelected,” she said.
Terri Palmquist came from Bakersfield, California, and said her 18-year-old daughter tried to dissuade her. “I just figure we need to not let fear control us. That’s what the other side wants is fear. If fear controls us, we lose,” she said.
She said she was not worried about her own safety.
“Honesty, I believe God’s got Trump, for some reason. I do. So we’re rooting for him.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
New York Mets rally in Game 1, top Philadelphia Phillies.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/41629971/new-york-mets-rally-game-1-top-philadelphia-phillies
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Truth Social Users Are Losing Ridiculous Sums of Money to Scams.
https://gizmodo.com/truth-social-users-are-losing-ridiculous-sums-of-money-to-scams-2000506604
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
FeedLand: Getting started with FeedLand.
https://docs.feedland.com/gettingstarted.md
date: 2024-10-05, from: Gary Marcus blog
Is AI so valuable to society that we should place this bet?
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/eric-schmidts-risky-bet-on-ai-and
date: 2024-10-05, from: OS News
In ancient Greek mythology, Kassandra, priestess of Apollo and daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo, in return for “favours”. When Kassandra then decided to, well, not grant any “favours”, Apollo showcased that as a good son of Zeus, he did not understand consent either, and cursed her by making sure nobody would believe her prophecies. There’s some variations to the story from one author or source to the next, but the general gist remains the same. Anyway, I’ve been warning everyone about the fall of Mozilla and Firefox for years now, so here’s another chapter in the slow decline and fall of Mozilla: they’re now just flat-out stating they’re an online advertising company. As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the “product” and “infrastructure” elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition, Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry). ↫ Laura Chambers Pretty much every one of my predictions regarding the slow downfall of Mozilla are coming true, and we’re just waiting around now for the sword of Damocles to drop: Google ending its funding for Mozilla, which currently makes up about 80% of the former browser maker’s revenue. Once this stream of free money dries up, Mozilla’s decline will only accelerate even more, and this is probably why they are trying to get into the online advertising business in the first place. How else are you going to make money from a browser? In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There’s no proper Firefox fork, there’s no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing. There’s going to be a point where shipping a further enshittified Firefox becomes impossible, or at the least highly contentious, for Linux distributions, and I don’t see any viable alternative anywhere on the horizon. I’m sure things will turn out just fine.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140861/mozilla-is-going-to-be-more-active-in-digital-advertising/
date: 2024-10-05, updated: 2024-10-05, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/big-apple-blues/
date: 2024-10-05, from: VOA News USA
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran has emerged as a twofold concern for the United States as it nears the end of the presidential campaign.
Prosecutors allege Tehran tried to hack figures associated with the election, stealing information from former President Donald Trump’s campaign. And U.S. officials have accused it of plotting to kill Trump and other ex-officials.
For Iran, assassination plots and hacking aren’t new strategies.
Iran saw the value and the danger of hacking in the early 2000s, when the Stuxnet virus, believed to have been deployed by Israel and the U.S., tried to damage Iran’s nuclear program. Since then, hackers attributed to state-linked operations have targeted the Trump campaign, Iranian expatriates and government officials at home.
Its history of assassinations goes back further. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran killed or abducted perceived enemies living abroad.
A history of hacks
For many, Iran’s behavior can be traced to the emergence of the Stuxnet computer virus. Released in the 2000s, Stuxnet wormed its way into control units for uranium-enriching centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, causing them to speed up, ultimately destroying themselves.
Iranian scientists initially believed mechanical errors caused the damage. Ultimately though, Iran removed the affected equipment and sought its own way of striking enemies online.
“Iran had an excellent teacher in the emerging art of cyberwarfare,” noted a 2020 report from the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia.
That was acknowledged by the National Security Agency in a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2015 to The Intercept, which examined a cyberattack that destroyed hard drives at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. Iran has been suspected of carrying out that attack, called Shamoon, in 2012 and again in 2017.
There also were domestic considerations. In 2009, the disputed reelection of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked the Green Movement protests. Twitter, one source of news from the demonstrations, found its website defaced by the self-described “Iranian Cyber Army.” There’s been suspicion that the Revolutionary Guard, a major power base within Iran’s theocracy, oversaw the “Cyber Army” and other hackers.
Meanwhile, Iran itself has been hacked repeatedly. They include the mass shutdown of gas stations across Iran, as well as surveillance cameras at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and even state television broadcasts.
Low costs, high rewards
Iranian hacking attacks, given their low cost and high reward, likely will continue as Iran faces a tense international environment surrounding Israel’s conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade levels, and the prospect of Trump becoming president again.
The growth of 3G and 4G mobile internet services in Iran also made it easier for the public — and potential hackers — to access the internet. Iran has more than 50 major universities with computer science or information technology programs. At least three of Iran’s top schools are thought to be affiliated with Iran’s Defense Ministry and the Guard, providing potential hackers for security forces.
Iranian hacking attempts on U.S. targets have included banks and even a small dam near New York City — attacks American prosecutors linked to the Guard.
Hacking attempts rely on phishing
While Russia is seen as the biggest foreign threat to U.S. elections, officials have been concerned about Iran. Its hacking attempts in the presidential campaign have relied on phishing — sending many misleading emails in hopes that some recipients will inadvertently provide access to sensitive information.
Amin Sabeti, a digital security expert who focuses on Iran, said the tactic works.
“It’s scalable, it’s cheap and you don’t need a skill set because you just put, I don’t know, five crazy people who are hard line in an office in Tehran, then send tens of thousands of emails. If they get 10 of them, it’s enough,” he said.
For Iran, hacks targeting the U.S. offer the prospect of causing chaos, undermining Trump’s campaign and obtaining secret information.
“I’ve lost count of how many attempts have been made on my emails and social media since it’s been going on for over a decade,” said Holly Dagres, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who once had her email briefly hacked by Iran. “The Iranians aren’t targeting me because I have useful information swimming in my inbox or direct messages. Rather, they hope to use my name and think tank affiliation to target others and eventually make it up the chain to high-ranking U.S. government officials who would have useful information and intelligence related to Iran.”
Iran’s killings, abductions abroad
Iran has vowed to exact revenge against Trump and others in his former administration over the 2020 drone strike that killed the prominent Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
In July, authorities said they learned of an Iranian threat against Trump and boosted security. Iran has not been linked to the assassination attempts against Trump in Florida and Pennsylvania. A Pakistani man who spent time in Iran was recently charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly plotting to carry out assassinations in the U.S., including potentially of Trump.
Officials take Iran’s threat seriously given its history of targeting adversaries.
Even before creating a network of allied militias in the Mideast, Iran is suspected of targeting opponents abroad, beginning with members of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s former government. The attention shifted to perceived opponents of the theocracy, both in the country with the mass executions of 1988 and abroad.
Outside of Iran, the so-called “chain murders” targeted activists, journalists and other critics. One prominent incident linked to Iran was a shooting at a restaurant in Germany that killed three Iranian-Kurdish figures and a translator. In 1997, a German court implicated Iran’s top leaders in the shooting, sparking most European Union nations to withdraw their ambassadors.
Iran’s targeted killings slowed after that, but didn’t stop. U.S. prosecutors link Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to a 2011 plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Scripting News: WordPress has a greater destiny.
http://scripting.com/2024/10/05/142118.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Four Takeaways From Jack Smith’s Brief in the Trump Election Case - The New York Times
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Thanks John for all the kind words.
date: 2024-10-05, from: VOA News USA
washington — Transgender rights, the regulation of “ghost guns” and the death penalty highlight the Supreme Court’s election-season term that begins Monday, with the prospect of the court’s intervention in voting disputes lurking in the background.
The justices are returning to the bench at a time of waning public confidence in the court and calls to limit their terms to 18 years that have wide support, including the backing of Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s White House nominee.
Whether by design or happenstance, the justices are hearing fewer high-profile cases than they did in recent terms that included far-reaching decisions by the 6-3 conservative majority on presidential immunity, abortion, guns and affirmative action.
The lighter schedule would allow them to easily add election cases, if those make their way to the high court in the run-up to the Nov. 5 election between Republican Donald Trump and Harris, or its immediate aftermath.
“I think there are legal issues that arise out of the political process. And so, the Supreme Court has to be prepared to respond if that should be necessary,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told CBS News last month in an interview to her promote new memoir Lovely One.
The court’s involvement in election disputes might depend on the closeness of the outcome and whether the justices’ intervention would tip the outcome, David Cole, the outgoing legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said at a recent Washington event.
“I don’t think the court wants to get involved, but it may have to,” Cole said.
The court turned away multiple challenges from Trump and his allies to the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden. It’s been nearly a quarter-century since the Supreme Court effectively decided the 2000 presidential election, in which Republican George W. Bush edged Democrat Al Gore.
When the justices gather Monday morning on a date set by federal law, they will shake hands with each other as they always do. Just after 10 o’clock, they will emerge from behind freshly cleaned heavy red drapery and take their seats on the curved mahogany bench, Chief Justice John Roberts in the center chair and his eight colleagues seated in order of seniority.
There are likely to be smiles and shared private jokes. But the friendliness of that moment will not sweep away tensions that have barely been concealed.
During the summer, two justices, Elena Kagan and Jackson, voiced support for toughening the new ethics code that so far lacks a means of enforcement.
The leak to The New York Times of the contents of a memo Roberts wrote last winter that outlined his approach to the court’s presidential immunity decision “was nothing short of shocking,” Supreme Court lawyer Lisa Blatt said last week at a Washington preview of the coming term.
Two years ago, Politico obtained the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case.
“Something does feel broken,” Blatt said. Describing her experience arguing before the court, she said, some justices “just seem visibly frustrated.”
Important cases dot the court’s calendar, beginning Tuesday. The court will take up a challenge to a Biden administration attempt to regulate hard-to-trace “ghost guns” that had been turning up at crime scenes in increasing numbers. The Supreme Court jumped into the case after the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the regulation.
Last term, conservatives voted 6-3 to strike down a gun regulation that had banned bump stocks, an accessory that allows some weapons to fire at a rate comparable to machine guns. Bump stocks were used in the nation’s deadliest modern mass shooting in Las Vegas.
A day after the guns case, the justices will take up the latest twist in Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip’s long quest for freedom. His case is the rare instance in which prosecutors are conceding mistakes in the trial that led to Glossip’s conviction and death sentence.
The highest-profile case on the agenda so far is a fight over transgender rights that is focused on state bans on gender-affirming care. It probably will be argued in December.
Republican-led states have enacted a variety of restrictions on health care for transgender people, school sports participation, bathroom usage and drag shows. The administration and Democratic-led states have extended protections for transgender people. The Supreme Court has separately prohibited the administration from enforcing a new federal regulation that seeks to protect transgender students.
The case before the high court involves a law in Tennessee that restricts puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. About half the states have enacted similar restrictions.
Also on tap for the late fall is an appeal from the adult entertainment industry to overturn a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of their users.
Only about half the court’s calendar for the term has been filled, and several big cases could be added. Among those is a push by Republican-led states and conservative legal outlets to further restrict federal agencies.
The immediate target is the method the Federal Communications Commission has used to fund telephone service for rural and low-income people and broadband services for schools and libraries.
The case, which the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, could give the justices the opportunity to revive a legal doctrine known as nondelegation that has not been used to strike down legislation in nearly 90 years. Several conservative justices have expressed support for the idea of limiting the authority Congress can delegate to federal agencies.
https://www.voanews.com/a/supreme-court-opens-new-term-with-election-disputes-looming-/7811578.html
date: 2024-10-05, from: Tedium site
I saw a font recently, and it inspired me to kick off work on a full redesign. The funny part: It’s the most common font, ever.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16834600/clarendon-font-inspiration-redesign
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Anndrew Shell has added a blogroll to his home page, somewhat inspired by the one on my blog.
https://blog.andrewshell.org/essays/added-blogroll/
date: 2024-10-05, from: 404 Media Group
Ants farm as Earth burns, back on the Sun beat, and a spirit animal for introverts.
https://www.404media.co/apocalyptic-asteroid-impact-was-great-for-ants/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
“I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
2018: How journalism is like the Mets.
http://scripting.com/2018/06/24/181734.html
date: 2024-10-05, from: The Lever News
The Feds take on Big Credit Card and take aim at big, bad junk fees, regulators strike again at a fossil fuel company’s poisonous machinery, and voter suppression gets suppressed.
https://www.levernews.com/swiping-at-swiping-monopolies/
date: 2024-10-05, from: VOA News USA
In the United States, nearly 24 million immigrants are eligible to vote in November’s presidential election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. census data. VOA’s Jeff Swicord spoke with two naturalized citizens about the choices they are making in this vote.
https://www.voanews.com/a/nearly-24m-immigrants-eligible-to-vote-in-u-s-election-/7811466.html
date: 2024-10-05, updated: 2024-10-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has launched an inquiry into Ryanair’s Customer Verification Process for travelers booking flights through third-party websites or online travel agents (OTA).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/irish_dpc_ryanair_probe/
date: 2024-10-05, updated: 2024-10-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A working Turing Machine was this week submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/lego_ideas_turing_machine/
date: 2024-10-05, updated: 2024-10-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The outfit that runs Britain’s Sellafield nuclear waste processing and decommissioning site has been fined £332,500 ($440,000) by the nation’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) for its shoddy cybersecurity practices between 2019 and 2023.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/sellafield_nuclear_site_fined/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Biden: I don't know if Netanyahu is trying to sway US election.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje3zl0dq2ko.amp
date: 2024-10-05, from: VOA News USA
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — Nearly a week after Hurricane Helene brought devastation to western North Carolina, a shiny stainless steel tanker truck in downtown Asheville attracted residents carrying 19-liter containers, milk jugs and buckets to fill with what has become a desperately scare resource — drinking water.
Flooding tore through the city’s water system, destroying so much infrastructure that officials said repairs could take weeks. To make do, Anna Ramsey arrived Wednesday with her two children, who each left carrying plastic bags filled with 7.6 liters of water.
“We have no water. We have no power. But I think it’s also been humbling,” Ramsey said.
Helene’s path through the Southeast left a trail of power outages so large the darkness was visible from space. Tens of trillions of liters of rain fell and more than 200 people were killed, making Helene the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and search crews must trudge through knee-deep debris to learn whether residents are safe.
It also damaged water utilities so severely and over such a wide inland area that one federal official said the toll “could be considered unprecedented.” As of Thursday, about 136,000 people in the Southeast were served by a nonoperational water provider and more than 1.8 million were living under a boil water advisory, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Western North Carolina was especially hard hit. Officials are facing a difficult rebuilding task made harder by the steep, narrow valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains that during a more typical October would attract throngs of fall tourists.
“The challenges of the geography are just fewer roads, fewer access points, fewer areas of flat ground to stage resources” said Brian Smith, acting deputy division director for the EPA’s water division in the Southeast.
After days without water, people long for more than just a sponge bath.
“I would love a shower,” said Sue Riles in Asheville. “Running water would be incredible.”
The raging floodwaters of Helene destroyed crucial parts of Asheville’s water system, scouring out the pipes that convey water from a reservoir in the mountains above town that is the largest of three water supplies for the system. To reach a second reservoir that was knocked offline, a road had to be rebuilt.
Boosted output from the third source restored water flow in some southern Asheville neighborhoods Friday, but without full repairs schools may not be able to resume in-person classes, hospitals may not restore normal operations, and the city’s hotels and restaurants may not fully reopen.
Even water that’s unfit to drink is scarce. Drew Reisinger, the elected Buncombe County register of deeds, worries about people in apartments who can’t easily haul a bucket of water from a creek to flush their toilet. Officials are advising people to collect nondrinkable water for household needs from a local swimming pool.
“One thing no one is talking about is the amount of poop that exists in every toilet in Asheville,” he said. “We’re dealing with a public health emergency.”
It’s a situation that becomes more dangerous the longer it lasts. Even in communities fortunate enough to have running water, hundreds of providers have issued boil water notices indicating the water could be contaminated. But boiling water for cooking and drinking is time consuming and small mistakes can cause stomach illness, according to Natalie Exum, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“Every day that goes by, you could be exposed to a pathogen,” Exum said. “These basic services that we take for granted in our everyday lives actually do do a lot to prevent illness.”
Travis Edwards’ faucet worked immediately after the storm. He filled as many containers as he could for himself and his child, but it didn’t take long for the flow to weaken, then stop. They rationed water, switching to hand sanitizer and barely putting any on toothbrushes.
“(We) didn’t realize how dehydrated we were getting,” he said.
Federal officials have shipped millions of liters of water to areas where people also might not be able to make phone calls or switch on the lights.
Power has been restored to about 62% of homes and businesses and 8,000 crews are out working to restore power in the hardest hit parts of North Carolina, federal officials said Thursday. In 10 counties, about half of the cell sites are still down.
The first step for some utilities is simply figuring out how bad the damage is, a job that might require EPA expertise in extreme cases. Ruptured water pipes are a huge problem. They often run beneath roads, many of which were crumpled and twisted by floodwaters.
“Pretty much anytime you see a major road damaged, there’s a very good chance that there’s a pipe in there that’s also gotten damaged,” said Mark White, drinking water global practice leader at the engineering firm CDM Smith.
Generally, repairs start at the treatment plant and move outward, with fixes in nearby big pipes done first, according to the EPA.
“Over time, you’ll gradually get water to more and more people,” White said.
Many people are still missing, and water repair employees don’t typically work around search and rescue operations. It takes a toll, according to Kevin Morley, manager of federal relations with the American Water Works Association.
“There’s emotional support that is really important for all the people involved. You’re seeing people’s lives just wiped out,” he said.
Even private well owners aren’t immune. Pumps on private wells may have lost power and overtopping floodwaters can contaminate them.
There’s often a “blind faith” assumption that drinking water won’t fail. In this case, the technology was insufficient, according to Craig Colten. Before retiring to Asheville, he was a professor in Louisiana focused on resilience to extreme weather. He hopes Helene will prompt politicians to spend more to ensure infrastructure withstands destructive storms.
And climate change will only make the problem more severe, said Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
“I think states and the federal government really need to step back and start looking at how we’re going to prepare for these extreme weather events that are going to be occurring and recurring every single year,” he said.
Edwards has developed a system to save water. He’ll soap dirty dishes and rinse them with a trickle of water with bleach, which is caught and transferred to a bucket — useable for the toilet.
Power and some cell service have returned for him. And water distribution sites have guaranteed some measure of normalcy: Edwards feels like he can start going out to see friends again.
“To not feel guilty about using more than a cup of water to, like, wash yourself … I’m really, really grateful,” he said.
date: 2024-10-05, from: Maggie Appleton blog