Under the new system, monitoring of a person’s messaging must be approved by a three-judge panel and should only apply to a limited number of cases. Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told the news conference it was only expected to be used on 25-30 people a year.

If it is more than 30, a report must be sent to a parliamentary committee, the government said, addressing concerns about mass surveillance and the infringement of people’s privacy.

“The police must have a well-founded suspicion of a possible terror attack” to monitor a person’s messaging under the new system, a government statement said.

Once parliament passes the legislation, a tender process for monitoring technology would be launched, and monitoring would begin in 2027, the government said.

30 USD is the lowest price it has been on Steam so far. The summer and winter sales usually have the best prices, so if you wait another six days, you’re likely to see a price at least that low; maybe lower.

I would wait.

For what it’s worth, I found RDR1 a lot less interesting than RDR2, which is often on sale for half that price.

We’re discussing things purchased at retail, as stated in the first sentence of the article and indicated in my comment by the word scalping. Not wholesale markets.

I found this in US Code Title 15 Subtitle B Chapter VII Subchapter E Part 791 Subpart A § 791.4:

§ 791.4 Determination of foreign adversaries.

(a) The Secretary has determined that the following foreign governments or foreign non-government persons have engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of United States persons and, therefore, constitute foreign adversaries solely for the purposes of the Executive Order, this rule, and any subsequent rule:

(1) The People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the Macau Special Administrative Region (China);

It looks like the determination of this “long-term pattern” was put on the books no later than 2024. Since Title 15 is about Commerce and Foreign Trade, it seems reasonable to think that hostilities being considered by the US are not just physical hostility, but also economic hostility.

I imagine there’s also political hostility to consider. I haven’t been following election interference news, but wikipedia has an article about it, so I suppose it’s at least a concern these days.

Just as Padilla took to the Senate floor to deliver an emotional speech, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested in a courthouse after demanding to see a judicial warrant for an immigrant federal officials were attempting to detain.

How about we make scalping of anything illegal everywhere, with a mandatory punishment of community service hours, valued at minimum wage, until the scalper pays back double their cumulative scalping profits?

To me, the most interesting thing about Zed is the GUI framework they’re building along with it, called GPUI. Its approach to text rendering seems like it would do a much better job than any other newish GUI framework that I’ve seen at preserving the look of a windowing system’s native glyphs.

AFAIK, they don’t plan to generalize it for use by other projects, at least for now. But if their approach to this stuff ends up working as well as it seems on paper, I could see it leading to a new cross-platform GUI toolkit capable of rivaling Qt in certain areas where there are vanishingly few good options.

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame#text-rendering

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/gpui

https://www.gpui.rs/

It’s not clear who wrote the agenda. No committee chairperson has been named and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not comment.

Who in their right mind would accept and follow such an agenda?

It was more than a few years ago when I switched my desktop systems from Windows XP to Linux. I was already familiar with the new environment (having already used various unixes for years) so the transition was mostly a matter of replacing my favorite apps and wrangling Wine into running my games. Both those tasks are pretty easy these days.

More importantly, Microsoft’s adware, spyware, and hardware demands at that time were nothing compared to now. If I were to make the switch today, I imagine it would be not just a breath of fresh air, but more like being instantly cured of debilitating asthma. What a relief.

To people planning to switch with no prior experience: Please be patient. Like moving to a foreign country with different language and culture, it will be awkward and possibly frustrating at first. You will master it over time, though, and end up with control of your computer and data again. Well worth the investment, IMHO.

Meanwhile, Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” spending and tax bill would direct $168 billion towards immigration and border enforcement. But that increased spending and other immigration-related costs could cost the U.S. an estimated $1.4 trillion over the next decade.

Well, your critical comment failed to recognize that I was contrasting the core protocol against an implementation augmented by XEPs, and what the latter would mean in practical terms. It overlooked most of what I had written, which could most simply be explained if you had only seen/considered a fraction of what I wrote. No patronizing intended.

If hurried reading was not the cause, then I don’t want to speculate on what was. Instead, I invite you to read it again later, and consider interpretations that you hadn’t at first.

Or just ignore it. Good day.

I also love how the characters age, develop, and eventually retire.

They can also turn up again in later campaigns. This lends well to both the story and team-building aspects of the game, and is one of the things that sets Wildermyth apart from superficially similar games.

Neat idea.

One of the problems caused by certain litigious corporations is that a lot of community-developed knowledge about game/emulator compatibility is lost when an emulator project is forcibly shut down. A separate repository for that knowledge, like this one, could help preserve the information.

I’m disappointed that it doesn’t show game details unless the browser allows off-site images, and doesn’t show any information at all unless the browser allows javascript. This requires users to expose themselves to security and privacy risks in order to use the site. I would consider contributing if they fix this.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to say XMPP both lacks encryption and has a XEP for encryption.

This suggests that you read only a fragment of one sentence, rather than understanding the comment as a whole.

If you don’t think it’s reasonable to say that the issues noted above contributed significantly to XMPP’s decline, or to its failure to catch up with other messaging systems, then I suppose that’s your prerogative. But for the sake of discussion, you might want to offer an alternative explanation.

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

the first thing was install FreeBSD. I have always been intrigued by it, a UNIX like OS that was by design meant to replace UNIX

FreeBSD descends from the Berkeley Software Distribution, a descendant of Bell Labs Unix. As it is very much a pedigreed Unix, you don’t have to say “UNIX like”. :)

Fun fact: The network sockets API that is (or was originally) used by every major OS for internet protocol support came from BSD.

Edit: You might enjoy these Unix family trees…

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_history-simple.svg

https://eylenburg.github.io/os_familytree.htm

Is [XMPP’s lack of popularity] really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?

No, there is more to it than that. Off the top of my head, these issues stand out as major hurdles:

• XMPP is a relatively basic protocol. By itself, it cannot compete because it lacks modern features like end-to-end encryption, persistent message history, group chat, etc. It does have extension specs (XEPs) to provide many such features, but it still lacks a single cohesive spec identifying and unifying the important ones. You could call it fragmentation. This makes it overly complex for implementors, and leads to the next problem:
• Someone wanting a messaging service with a competitive feature set must first identify at least one server that implements all the relevant XEPs, and a client for each of their devices that implements the same. That’s not viable for most people, many of whom have only a vague notion of what a communications protocol is.
• Ever since public XMPP support was dropped by big services like Google and Facebook, the availability of reliable, free, public servers has all but vanished. Most people wouldn’t know with confidence how to find one, let alone one with all the needed extensions. And even if they do find one, most will be unable to assess whether it will still be running in ten years or more. This makes it quite a gamble to tie your online identity and network of contacts to whatever server you find.

So, while XMPP (with appropriate extensions) is still a capable protocol, the expertise and support required to make it competitive is not readily available to most people. I might suggest it to small groups who have local expertise to get it all set up and keep things running well, but not to the general public.

Meanwhile, Matrix has a unified spec with a rich feature set, a variety of homeservers and client apps that support it, sufficient momentum for continued development, and the critical mass to make it viable for global public use.

Matrix is going Freemium

No, it is not. The matrix.org public homeserver is planning to add premium accounts and put some limits on free accounts. People who want free access can accept the limits, or find a different homeserver, or run their own.

The Matrix network will remain open and free for anyone to use.

I wonder if someone could upload a snapshot of it to the Internet Archive.

Pussy Riot: 5 Russian Words You’ll Need to Know in Trump’s America (2017)

(Thanks to archive.org for saving this video, which was recently removed from YouTube.)