Yax | they/them | 🇺🇦🌻🇺🇦 | genderqueer ace bi | ‘97 | country kid from NY, US scientific educator | healthcare worker | astronomy and biology I use likes to bookmark posts Credit for header image goes to me and @wingedscribe
A days-long electronic warfare drill was one of the causes behind the loss of a four-passenger medevac flight.
New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.
The horrifying incident happened in May, the publication reports, when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico. Heading West for the small mountain village of Ruidoso, the crew became the victim of an electronic warfare exercise being conducted at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system inoperable.
Due to a combination of low visibility and an air-traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity — at least three other planes reported navigation disruptions due to the GPS jamming — the pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and the landing strip
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I was just talking with a friend who hates cooking which is so wild to me bc I love cooking so much it is hard for me to understand people that don't like it, but i know many exist. my parents don't like cooking either, but my grandmothers both do, so i feel like it jumped a generation for us. and then i also wonder how much of it is learned and how much not. so! poll time
do you like cooking and were you taught to cook by your family?
With a vow to destroy the abomination she had created if it was the last thing she ever did, television host Oprah Winfrey has spent weeks on a ship pursuing Dr. Phil through the Arctic, sources reported Tuesday.
Sailors aboard the vessel confirmed that while Winfrey appeared ill and exhausted from continuous exposure to the harsh tundra, she nonetheless spent hour upon hour peering through a brass spyglass and scanning the desolate landscape for any sign of the grotesque TV personality and formerly licensed therapist. Despite the heavy winds and raging sea, the 71-year-old media entrepreneur reportedly urged the ship’s captain to press northward.
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Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
Refusing to connect to the internet doesn't help. You have to open a Command Prompt (Shift+F10) and typing start ms-cxh:localonly (and pressing enter) during installation when you get to the sign in/create stupid ms account screen
For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains
Maintain only a local account on your Windows 11 PC.
Unless there's really really specific reasons to subject yourself to windows, please consider installing linux mint instead.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
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whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.
Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!
There are some characters where giving them therapy and cleaning them up is the fanfiction equivalent of buying antique furniture and painting it white
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I don't know what's triggered it but I keep thinking about what I internally term "the yaasification of Orcs" and what it has to say about people. Ill frontload my caveats up here and just say 1. I realize I'm not the first to remark on any of this and 2. I'm really not trying to imply that your opinions or lack thereof on fantasy art is of deep ethical concern.
First off, what I mean by this is how, especially in recent years, depictions of Orcs in a lot of media has become less monstrous and much more 'just a buff person with green skin and tusks'. Compare the DnD art for playable Orcs from their inclusion in the Volo's Guide to Monsters expansion (2016) to their next appearance as a core playable race in the 5.5e Players Handbook (2024):
I could talk at length on dissecting these images and other popular depictions, but in the interest of brevity and staying on message Ill just summarize. In 2016 Orcs are monstrous humans, in 2024 they are buff elves.
Ill admit that part of m dislike of the change is just a departure from things I liked growing up. Warcraft II was a big part of my childhood and introduction to Orcs, and Ill always love them that way best. But there is more to it than that.
I understand that a lot of this change comes from a place of reimagining Orcs beyond simple evil archetypes, to avoid the potential for unfortunate racial or xenophobic undertones, and so on. I think that's a good and noble thing. Fantasy tropes are modern myths, we can and should shape them and build upon them. But I don't feel like this really does that.
What does it say that to make the Orcs less 'problematic' that they need to become elves? Why can't they keep their bestial jaws, their somehow both ape and swine-like features? I remember once, on this very website, seeing someone repost a bunch of art of very elven looking Orcs with a comment to the effect of "Who says Orcs have to be big and buff?" and framed itself as somehow, frankly, woke for the depictions. As though saying "I have made the thing slender and elegant and now its beautiful" was somehow deviant, and not the most mainstream of takes.
There also comes with it a kind of strange erasure, a kind of white-washing of Orc lore. I think its because if we want to imagine Orcs in the frame work of modern conceptions of race they definitely aren't "fantasy white" so they must be "fantasy POC" and therefore anything wicked is a big no-no. They can't be demon-blooded marauders, they need to be misunderstood. Ironically, I feel we just reinvent the Noble Savage but green.
I think better depictions of Orcs include works like Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon for those who didnt read it before the official translation and must be resigned to sounding like a pretentious weeb) or even just Warcraft III. In Dungeon Meshi the Orcs are explicitly porcine in appearance and absolutely do raid and kill. The story touches on this as a conflict of cultures, economic conditions and more. In Warcraft III, coming after a game where the Orcs were heavy metal dag-blasted evil, the story focuses on Orcs living in the aftermath of a failed invasion, abandoned by their demonic overlords and oppressed by the human victors. The story manages surprising depth on the subject of their culpability in the evil they wrought upon the land as well as the injustices they face now. Both takes are, I think, more interesting, more honest, and more, well, intellectually valuable takes on the topic.
I don't hate the Orcs from 5.5e, and generally don't like to harp on people depicting things how they like. And there's still plenty of good monstrous Orcs out there. But something always gnaws at me about it when I see "green elves". Some kind of stolen valor for monster-fuckers I suppose. "Yeah, I love the monstrous" says someone talking about an generally attractive woman with muscles.
I could really do a deeper dive on this, but that would perhaps just be indulgent. Im going to cut myself off here. Zug Zug.
