oxjox

It's a bit shocking to me when I see people online putting 9/11 conspiracies in the same box as "MAGA" conspiracies (for lack of a better term, sorry).

For reference, I was 24 in 2001 living in central NJ. Even without social media or fake news websites or what cable news has become today, I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?

Jet fuel melting steel beams was one of the more fringe and unfounded (and quickly debunked) ideas but the rest of everything on that day was questionable. Tower seven falling, the missing plane debris at the pentagon and central PA, the military / president not responding to known threats, if a person with limited flight time could hit a tower, the fact that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event, and so much more are still, I thought, reasonable questions - especially when looked at together.

This is not about rehashing each theory. Or maybe it is? Have I missed that everything has been debunked?

I mean, I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. I thought this was still a common opinion of most or many Americans over the age of forty.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240905014936/https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/russian-misinformation-social-design-agency-sergei-kiriyenko-20240904.html

Federal authorities in Philadelphia announced on Wednesday the dismantling of a wide-ranging, Russian-backed misinformation network targeting voters in Pennsylvania and five other swing states ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The network — known colloquially as “Doppelganger” and which prosecutors said was run by a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin — sought to dupe Americans in key demographics into believing Kremlin-produced propaganda it spread online had been produced by legitimate American news outlets.

The campaign also sought to enlist the aid of unwitting influencers in America and other countries to spread disinformation, sow social media discord, and advance the campaign of former President Donald Trump, whom the program’s backers viewed as more supportive of Russian interests.

The takedown of that effort — involving the seizure of more than 30 internet domains by agents from the FBI’s Philadelphia field office — was just one of a sweeping series of steps President Joe Biden’s administration announced Wednesday to fend off attempts by Russia to meddle ahead of November’s vote.

Taken together, they amounted to the most significant public response yet by U.S. authorities to Russia’s alleged efforts to undermine the integrity of the election.

“Protecting our democratic processes from foreign malign influence is paramount to ensure public trust,” U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero said in a statement detailing the Doppelganger seizures.

In Washington, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions against a Russian-based nonprofit tied to the Doppelganger network, and Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled an indictment against two Russian employees of state-owned broadcaster RT, who he said had paid a Tennessee company to spread nearly 2,000 English-language videos supportive of Kremlin interests.

Prosecutors said that the defendants — Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva — used aliases and that the company involved was unaware it was being used by Russian plotters.

Court filings in that case and the Doppelganger seizures were careful not to specifically name the Trump campaign as an intended beneficiary of the misinformation effort, and there was no allegation that anyone in the campaign was aware of or involved in the effort.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts,” Garland said in a statement Wednesday.

“The investigation,” he added, “is ongoing.”

For months, intelligence agencies have warned that Russia remains the primary threat to the integrity of the 2024 election — despite recent headlines about efforts by other foreign governments to shape the outcome of the vote.

Last month, federal authorities accused Iran of hacking Trump’s campaign and attempting to breach the campaigns of Biden and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

Officials have also raised alarms about threats from China, which they have accused of maintaining a vast network of social media accounts aimed at targeting U.S. voters.

But ever since the U.S. was caught unprepared in the 2016 presidential election by Russia’s sophisticated social media campaign to influence voters — a push that included organizing fake campaign rallies for Trump in Pennsylvania and other swing states — U.S. intelligence efforts have focused on Russia as a priority.

An FBI affidavit unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Philadelphia outlined the Doppelganger scheme, drawing on reams of planning documents and meeting notes by Kremlin officials as they mapped out their 2024 strategy. All references in the Russian documents to specific candidates or U.S. political parties were redacted.

“The conspirators specifically targeted the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s citizens … in order to influence the electorate in this, and other districts,” the affidavit said.

According to the court filing, the effort had been overseen since at least 2022 by Sergei Kiriyenko, a former Russian prime minister and Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. He and several of the entities cited in the court filings have already been subjected to U.S. sanctions for their roles in spreading misinformation.

Their primary goal, agents said, was to pass off inflammatory or fake news stories — supporting Russian interests or backing Trump — as work produced by legitimate American media outlets.

Plotters registered domain names similar to those of well-known media brands — like washingtonpost.pm and foxnews.cx — and posted stories under the names of real journalists who worked for them.

For instance, investigators said, one story featured on the spoofed Washington Post website — run under the headline “White House Miscalculated: Conflict with Ukraine Strengthens Russia” — sought to diminish public sentiment for Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country.

“It’s time for our leaders to recognize that continued support for Ukraine is a mistake,” that story read. “It was a waste of lives and money. … For the sake of everyone involved in the conflict, the Biden administration should just make a peace agreement and move on.”

The Doppelganger network also focused on ensuring those stories went viral, going so far as to create fake social media accounts posing as U.S. citizens to spread them and seeding the comments on other social media posts with links back to the propaganda they had posted.

“The aim of the campaign,” according to one Russian planning document quoted in the FBI affidavit unsealed Wednesday, “is securing Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

In another planning document, Doppelganger plotters outlined a scheme they dubbed “The Good Old USA Project” aimed at targeting voters from specific demographics in the U.S. with fake news and spoofed social media posts.

They included Hispanics, American Jews, conservatives, and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards such as 4chan (the ‘backbone’ of right-wing trends in the U.S. segment of the internet),” according to Kremlin planning documents included in Wednesday’s filings.

“In order for this work to be effective,” it warned, “you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information. At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

Egg prices are back on the rise as a devastating bird flu outbreak and swelling consumer demand eats into supply.

Wholesale egg prices surpassed about $3 per dozen in August, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from the usual $1 to $2 range. Retail egg prices were up 19% in August compared to last year, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data, while the broader grocery category increased only 1%.

highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, has forced egg supplies to be “less robust than normal.” At the same time, U.S. sales have jumped to levels not seen since the pandemic.

Despite the price fluctuations, consumers continue to buy eggs — and more of them, as of the last few months. August egg sales were up more than 5% compared to 2023, and producers sold 237 million eggs in the most recent four-week period. “We haven’t seen that number since the first year of COVID,” he said, when sales soared as consumers stocked up on staples including eggs and toilet paper.

As domestic demand stays strong, other countries are also buying more U.S. eggs. According to the U.S. Egg Export Council, total exports for the first four months of the year increased by 22% to 63.5 million dozen eggs, though values were down 22%.

Demand is expected to rise further during the fall and winter months with the holiday baking season entering full swing. That could further pressure the commercial egg supply, especially as bird flu also spreads more easily in colder climates.

Is anyone self-hosting a genuinely snappy and robust media hosting service for themselves? What's your setup look like?

The best thing about Apple's Photos on my iDevices is the speed at which everything loads. Even videos (usually) load reasonably fast over LTE. The user interface is decent enough and has a high percentage of features I'd like to have on the go. The on-device AI is awesome (recognizing / organizing faces and objects and locations).

I'd like to get away from iCloud for numerous reasons: the subscription, the chance the UX gets worse, privacy, ease of data ownership and organization, OS independence, etc.

I currently have a QNAP TS-253A with 8GB RAM, Celeron N3160 1.6GHz 4 core, (2) Seagate IronWolf 8TB ST8000VN0022 at about 98% capacity, Raid 1 . I mostly use it for streaming music and videos at home but I also stream music outside the house without issue. Movies don't stream at HD immediately but once they cache up they're good within a minute.

Some people have suggested this hardware should be sufficient. I feel like it's archaic. What do you think?

I've tried Immich but find it to be slow and very limited with features. I've even tested hosting it on Elestio but that didn't go too well. I'm not opposed to paying for offsite services but at that point it just seems like I should stick with iCloud.

I already have Plex running on my NAS so I use that for archiving but it's way too slow to use for looking at pictures, even locally. QNAP has the photo app QuMagie with facial recognition and it seems alright but it's agonizingly slow, if it works at all.

All of the self-hosted apps, in my experience, are well outside the scope of iCloud Photos' speed and feature set. If I could even just test one that matched its speed, I could better assess whatever features they have.

What I'm not sure of is if I'm hitting a wall based on the apps, my hardware, or even my ISP (Speedtest reports upload: 250mpbs). The fact that apps like Plex and QuMagie suck even locally suggests to me it's not an ISP issue (yet).

My NAS is already at capacity so it's time for an upgrade of some sort. While I'm in the mindset, I wanted to see if there's a better product I could use for hosting. My space and finances are not without limits but I'm open to ideas.

I realize I'm not a multi billion dollar company with data centers around the world but I feel like I should be able to piece something together that's relatively comparable for less than an arm and a leg. Am I wrong?

I'm on MacOS and typically use Safari as my main browser. I have several other browsers installed on my computer which I use for different things or just to try out from time to time. Orion is one I haven't tried in a while.

I've launched Orion and found that when I previously used it I saved some tabs - one of them being Ebay. I am not signed into my Ebay account in Orion but when I open this tab I'm seeing "Your Recently Viewed Items" and it's very much showing me the items I viewed in Safari just moments earlier.

Orion promotes itself as a privacy focused web browser.

Privacy by design, like no other browser.
Orion has been engineered from ground up as a truly privacy-respecting browser. We did it by embracing a simple principle - Orion is a zero telemetry browser. Your private information will never leave Orion by default.
And to protect your privacy on the web, Orion comes with industry-leading anti-tracking technology as well as a powerful built-in ad-blocker.

How does one browser know what the other browser is doing regardless if I'm, signed into my account on a particular website?

In my experience, the retail shopping environment has been on an increasing rate of decline over the past decade+. Post-covid, it seems corporations have figured out how to maximize profit, in part, by reducing labor and tailoring towards online sales.

I grew up in a time when people would complain about salespeople pestering them by simply asking if they needed help with anything. Now, I would love to have someone help me with a purchase.

I recently bought some sneakers in a store and it turned out I probably bought the wrong ones for my needs. A knowledgable salesperson likely would have saved me from wasting my money on the wrong purchase. Most of the supermarkets in my area are self-check out only. These stupid things never work for me so it takes me forever to simply scan a few items. At some stores, items are locked up behind glass so I'm not even able to make a purchase - pushing me to buy from an online retailer instead.

I try to go out of my way to find stores that have humans working there. I try not to buy things online and try to support my local businesses. This is becoming increasingly more difficult and I fear the day will come soon where I'm not able to shop in a physical store.

Especially in this post pandemic world, I crave human interaction. I crave a brief interaction with someone who's a member of my community.

There's a small two-location food market I shop at weekly. It's a fifteen minute walk where I do at least 85% of my shopping. Most of the produce and goods are procured within a hundred miles. There are no self-checkouts. I've gotten to know the people who work there. We talk about produce and the neighborhood and the weather. I freaking love that place and legit do not know what I would do without it.

I imagine I'm in the minority. I imagine most people, especially younger people, desire not interacting with others. Some people find it difficult to engage in real life. Some people are fraught with the impact social media addiction has struck upon them - be it the fear of judgement or bigotry or simply not knowing how to interact respectfully with others.

I remember a time when people would say they trust online reviews more than salespeople who get paid on commission. Is this still a prevalent idea? I'll admit that I typically ignore reviews because reviews have become their own industry. However, there are times I've bought a product, found it to be trash, then saw some reviews, buried below the 'paid' ones, warning me to stay away.

I feel strongly, I am fearful, that as we shift more and more of our shopping online - easily enabled by [Click To Buy] buttons and mobile wallets - corporate capitalism is gaining ground on mom and pop shops. Never mind the rise of the likes of Temu. Moreover, the Walmartification of everything is diluting our sense of community.

It's because we only shop online and in warehouses, it's because we have no choice but to not engage with anyone, it's because we're increasing our reliance on 6" in-our-face screens, it's because we don't ever need to leave the comfort of our home that our neighborhoods and society are doomed to crumble.

I'm looking to replace a 6TB G-Drive for my Mac. I'm considering the OWC Express 1M2 NVMe enclosure along with a WD Black 4TB SN850X.

The drive is mostly used as my photography drive. I work off of it with Capture One. About 20% of it is archive data.

I'd like to upgrade to SSD for the sake of longevity and speed. And because I find the ticking and knocking my existing drive makes to be annoying. And because MacOS does this weird thing where opening random apps causes the external HDD to spin up and stalls operation. I fear everyday that this seven year old drive is suddenly going to die on me.

Just looking for some suggestions if anyone's familiar with these OWC + WD products or if you'd recommend something else.

Meanwhile, 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system.

Why would people want to live under an authoritarian’s thumb? It’s rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security—real or perceived—and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group—especially if it is the “right” group whose interests will be protected. Recall the Trump supporter who, during the 2019 government shutdown, complained, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

I've recently been working to minimize my email clutter, my dependance on certain email providers, and to consolidate services under certain accounts.

I'm down to the following uses:
Apple ID, mydomain-billing/subscriptions, mydomain-official/legal, anon, friends/family, business domain.

I also have a handful of aliases and an account just for newsletters and my RSS app.

I'm curious if others have several email addresses for similar uses or if you use your email client to categorize incoming messages for you. For people who only have one email address, how do you manage this?

Regardless of your geographic location, religion, heritage, party affiliation, or your firmness on historical texts; what is it that you believe government's role to be - or should be?

If you'd like to elaborate, what is it you think your local or national government gets right and gets wrong?

I pose the question because I believe this fundamental belief is through which we observe and react to politics. There are things we want or don't want government to do but often legislation or special interests or geographic or political threats get in the way. Our reactions to politics are often, but not wrongly, short-sighted and emotional without context or wisdom. I don't see much dialog around this topic and I wonder if people subscribe to political parties without really considering if the party aligns with what they genuinely believe government's responsibility is or should be.

I just received an order for a few shirts from LL Bean. Right now, any brand's Large is just a tad tight on me but I'm trying to lose weight and expect to squeeze in soon. These shirts are HUGE.

I double checked their website's fit guide. By all accounts, it's suggesting I'm a large (5'6" 43 chest). The long sleeve shirt is one size too big, the short sleeves are at least two sizes, if not three, too big. The sweat shirt is a bit large but wearable.

My plan at this point is to take the nearly two hour drive (with traffic) to my nearest store to try the shirts on in person. Just wondering if I got a weird batch or if I'm a size small in LL Bean.

Or, should I be expecting these to shrink a lot in the wash?

UPDATE: So, I drove the store and confirmed my suspicions with the associate. “Traditional Fit” is two sizes bigger, “Slim Fit” is one size bigger, and “Signature” is about right, he said.
I didn’t like the signature sizing at all; it was oddly a little smocky and ballooned out at the bottom. And while the small traditional fit fit my width okay, I think it’s a little short, and I’m just 5’6”.