US citizens, call on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the practice of negotiating lower prices on prescription medicines. We need to counteract massive lobbying by Big Pharma.
Deadline for commenting, Aug 17!
E-scooters turn out to be especially dangerous to ride — much more dangerous than bicycles.
Comparing the magats' efforts to seize power, and embed themselves irreversibly in it, with the efforts of Nazis in 1933.
*Why making Anthony Fauci the enemy will harm US public health for years.*
US citizens: call on your senators to save funding for Medicaid.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
*US senators urge crackdown on wildfire betting amid warnings of arson risk.*
Betting on other government actions is dangerous too, because it can offer magats the temptation to burn down good government.
*Human Rights Watch and Amnesty* accuse Israel of knowingly attacking journalists in Lebanon — a war crime.
*[Progressive Democrat] Abdul El-Sayed offers a model for successfully turning a non-progressive opponent's richly funded campaign against that opponent's rich backers, and thus against the opponent.
Pakistan has prohibited anyone from reporting internationally on what happens there. It has also blocked access to Al Jazeera's web site from Pakistan.
Many restaurants and pubs in the UK have banned wearing of snooper glasses. Theaters, too.
Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station's lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and programming, which she says span over "70 years of our organization's history." [...]
The contract provided 30 days for Nine PBS to retrieve its data from OSS' storage "upon termination of services." But on March 6, OSS cut off the station's access without warning, according to the complaint. When Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS to sort out the problem, it discovered that OSS' website was defunct and the company had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State. [...]
Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned "the physical services housing the data" within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
Google oligarch Brin has now spent $100 million to avoid paying $13 billion in taxes.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated another $20 million to Build a Better California, an organization advocating against California's proposed billionaire tax, according to a new filing. That means that the world's fourth-richest man, whose net worth hovers around $267 billion, has now spent more than $100 million to avoid an estimated $13.3 billion tax payment.
California's Prop 40, known as the billionaire tax, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of around 200 billionaires that live in the state. The windfall from this proposed tax would mostly go toward funding California's healthcare programs. The state's Medicaid program alone could lose up to $30 billion in federal funding once Trump's budget cuts take effect next year.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Naturally, that means it's time for our latest installment of CYBERDELIA.
This is the THIRTY-FIRST Anniversary of HACKERS, yes really. Join me as I crumble to dust. So, as per tradition, we will have:
- A screening of Hackers at 8pm;
- Hackers costume contest at 11pm;
- Head-to-head Wipeout XL competition throughout the night;
- Skate ramps! Rollerblades welcome!
- Electro / big beat / cyberpunk dance party to follow.
If you've been to some of our other movie nights recently you may have noticed that people tend to clear out pretty soon after the movie ends. This one is not like that. There really is a dance party after, so be prepared!
"Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists."
And we hope we will also see you at our subsequent movie nights as well! The Crow, Thu Oct 29 (Devils' Night Eve), Scott Pilgrim, Sun Nov 22, and the greatest Christmas movie, Batman Returns, Sun Dec 20. Season Pass tickets available!
Bonnie Tyler died last month, and so the glorious "Total Eclipse of the Heart, Literal Version" by Persephone Maewyn and dascottjr was making the rounds again, dodging takedowns. (This video is a textbook case of fair use, since not only is it a parody song, but the lyrics are direct commentary on the video itself, I mean come on.) Anyway all extant copies of it are shit quality, so I reconstructed it from the official HD video plus the "literal" audio, and re-built the subtitles by hand. Immediate takedown. I appealed. A week later, some intern or chatbot at BMG said "fuck you no". Then I tried to do a counter-claim, but they wouldn't let me, because I wouldn't give them a lock of my hair first. Then... 30 days later... they're both up, and all is forgiven I guess?
Mirror them while the mirroring's good.
Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New AI Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling "Unsafe".
Someone brought a guillotine to a city council meeting in Salem, Oregon on July 27, 2026. Not a sign shaped like one. Not a drawing. According to community accounts and social media posts, an actual guillotine structure appeared at the protest outside Loucks Auditorium, where hundreds of residents had gathered to oppose a proposed multi-billion-dollar AI data center. Company representatives reportedly assessed the scene and left, citing safety concerns -- though that detail hasn't appeared in formal news coverage or official minutes. [...]
Salem just reminded the industry that community consent isn't a formality you schedule around -- it's a variable that can stall a $5.1 billion project before a single permit clears.
Also, if you are going and we actually know each other in person, lemme know!
During the last storm, I was able to weather 80+req/sec. But this time with only 32 req/sec, responsiveness went completely to shit. Possibly because thousands of connections were staying in LAST_ACK? I dunno.
After trying many things, the only thing that alleviated it somewhat was to start blackholing entire countries by /16.
And having done so, I'm... still getting 32/req sec. But now the site is responsive. So there's some thing special about this latest attacker that makes things fall over, that is not merely "hammering you with page loads as fast as you respond". And this was the case even if I fed the scrapers a plain-old Apache 404 or 503, without dropping down into PHP at all.
To whom do I send the invoice for the lost productivity of my staff, who could not access our own web site to do their jobs for most of the week? Asking for an everybody.
Anyway, some things I have been finding helpful this week:
My approach (which had been working great last week, but not so much this week) was to create separate php-fpm pools for "real" web sites and for scrapers; and a corresponding fcgi proxy for each. The idea here being that under load, the "scraper" responder might become unresponsive, but the "real" site will be fine. And that was working pretty well... last month.
Something like:
<Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/jwz.sock|fcgi://php-jwz"> ProxySet </Proxy> ... <Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo"> ProxySet timeout=10 </Proxy>
But the fact that under catastrophic load, I couldn't even get the php-fpm status pages to load, despite using a pm.status_listen "invisible pool" to bypass the queue, suggest to me that there's some other shared resource contention I don't know about:
<Location /fpm-status-dadadodo> SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo-status.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo" Require ip ... </Location>
I also have conflicting experience with whether things are better with a "reasonable" number of Apache workers, or going hog wild on it: ServerLimit 16, MaxRequestWorkers 400 versus ServerLimit 400, MaxRequestWorkers 10000.
In summary: "AI is the future, don't get left behind." Also in this future you can't have a web site.
The Wiener campaign was in part inspired to create the chatbot in order to "lean into the AI craze overtaking the city," Arellano added. [...]
Ian Krager, spokesperson for the Chan campaign, told Gazetteer that Wiener is "desperately resorting to gimmicks" because Chan's message to voters has narrowed the gap; recent polling suggests that Chan is within five percentage points of Wiener.
"If there was ever any doubt that Scott Wiener is bought and paid for by Big AI, he's not even trying to hide it anymore," Krager said. "We know Scott Wiener is desperate for attention, but it's never a good idea for a man to put words in a woman's mouth -- especially when they are falsities fraught with racist and sexist undertones."
Krager added that Wiener has "cozied up to Big AI and corporate money," and that "voters deserve better than the tired and trite slop Scott Wiener is offering."
48 Hills: Wiener’s racist, sexist AI chatbot attacks Chan – and it’s weird and stupid and gross.
Update:: Oh no, Wiener had to take down his AI racism-bot. Oh no.
"Scott Wiener can rightly take down his bigotry bot, but he can't erase the concerns it raised among San Franciscans about his character and judgment," said Ian Krager, Chan's spokesperson.
"San Franciscans deserve better than a campaign funded by Big AI weaponizing the technology to mock an immigrant woman of color, doubling down after justified outrage, then reversing course and shrugging it off as simply 'missing the mark.'" [...]
"Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power," read the statement from Pelosi. " We should not have to fight against artificial intelligence putting words into our mouths."
This clown also had a giant sign across the street from the entrance to Outside Lands that said "Connie Chan wants to cancel Outside Lands". If she was as much of a lying piece of shit as he is, she might have had a sign that said "Scott Wiener wants to build millionaire condos on the Polo Field." I mean, it sounds true, doesn't it? My AI Girlfriend says it might be.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.