• Russia's yuan reserves are nearly depleted due to Chinese banks' fear of US sanctions.
• Lenders have urged Russia's central bank to address the yuan deficit, causing the ruble to drop.
• China's hesitance stems from US threats of secondary sanctions over Russia's Ukraine war financing.

The populist BSW and far-right AfD parties, both of which did well in recent state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, are opposed to arms deliveries to Ukraine. This stance is having an impact on federal politics.

Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks

(LIMITED ACCESS CONTENT)

Analysis of the opportunities and limits of decentralized networks as a resource to overcome the problems of traditional social networks and the resilience of these networks as a tool to fight disinformation and censorship

@fediverse

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-63153-5_2

The US has promised Ukraine a new military aid package including more Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

The US-made armored vehicles, which offer maneuverability, versatility, and sufficient firepower, have proven valuable to Ukraine efforts on the battlefield — more so than the main battle tanks and other heavy armor it's received.

The US Department of Defense announced the aid package, estimated at $250 million, on Friday, noting that it "will provide Ukraine additional capabilities to meet its most urgent needs, including: air defense missiles; munitions for rocket systems and artillery; armored vehicles; and anti-tank weapons."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/28466921

The IRS has collected $1.3 billion from high-wealth tax dodgers since last fall, the agency announced Friday, crediting spending that has ramped up collection enforcement through President Joe Biden’s signature climate, health care and tax package signed into law in 2022.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour an IRS campus and announce the latest milestone in tax collections as Republicans warn of big future budget cuts for the tax agency if they take over the White House and Congress.

Yellen said in a speech in Austin that in 2019, the top one percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”

Earlier this year, the Australia's eSafety commissioner took X to court over its refusal to remove videos of a religiously motivated Sydney church stabbing for its global users.

The case was ultimately dropped, but commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she received an "avalanche of online abuse" after Mr Musk called her the "censorship commissar" in a post to his 196 million followers.

[...]

A Columbia University report into technology-facilitated gender-based violence - which used Ms Inman Grant as a case study - found that she had been mentioned in almost 74,000 posts on X ahead of the court proceedings, despite being a relatively unknown figure online beforehand.

According to the analysis, the majority of the messages were either negative, hateful or threatening in some way. Dehumanising slurs and gendered language were also frequently noted, with users calling Ms Inman Grant names such as "left-wing Barbie", or "captain tampon".

[...]

Ms Inman Grant said that Mr Musk's decision to use "disinformation" to suggest that she was "trying to globally censor the internet" had amounted to a "dog whistle from a very powerful tech billionaire who owns his own megaphone".

She said that the torrent of online vitriol which followed had prompted Australian police to warn her against travelling to the US, and that the names of her children and other family members had been released across the internet.

[...]

The case turned into a test of Australia's ability to enforce its online rules against social media giants operating in multiple jurisdictions – one which failed after a Federal Court judge found that banning the posts from appearing on X globally would not be “reasonable” as it would likely be "ignored or disparaged by other countries".

In June, Ms Inman Grant's office said it would not pursue the case further, and that it would focus on other pending litigation against the platform.

X's Global Government Affairs team described the outcome as a win for "freedom of speech".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19499744

The populist BSW and far-right AfD parties, both of which did well in recent state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, are opposed to arms deliveries to Ukraine. This stance is having an impact on federal politics.

Robot mowers damage biodiversity and harm many creatures, including hedgehogs, according to German conservationists. Some of them are calling for a ban on nighttime mowing.

Conservationists and scientists in Germany have called for a ban on the nighttime use of robot mowers in order to protect hedgehogs, with a study showing that many of the animals die after being lacerated by the devices.

According to the study from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, almost half of the 370 hedgehogs that were examined after being cut by the mowers' blades died of their injuries or had to be put down.

Hedgehogs are particularly in danger from mowers operating at night, as the animals are nocturnal feeders and do not flee when in danger, instead relying on their spines as defense — an inadequate protection against the sharp metal blades of a robotic mowing machine.

I asked this company to close and delete my account, and they replied that they have closed it. They use a type of ticket system where you need to log in to their site to see replies.

I wanted to reply, to ask if they also have deleted my data, instead of just closing the account. In order to contact them, they will create a new account SMH

For women and girls in Afghanistan, there is a ban from secondary school classrooms, and much of public life, by the Taliban.

But a few young women could flee the country, and are now enjoying freedom and education in the West.

What's the best way to restrict my Android devices to only use approved apps? I want to manage the whitelist remotely.

Bonus points if I can keep everything in-house, on my home server or similar via my existing VPN.

This is for my kids' future phones. Ages 12 to 16.

Archived version

You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.

Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.

In a Q&A session that Tom's Hardware attended at IFA 2024, AMD revealed that the next generation of its Ryzen handheld gaming processor, AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, will arrive early next year. The Z2 Extreme is the successor to AMD’s current Z1 Extreme, which powers devices like the ROG Ally X and Legion Go.

One AMD representative said, “So, we’ve our Z1 Extreme and Z1 in market today, right? Z2 is in the works. We’re working with a number of partners across the OEM ecosystem on that, and it will be coming to market probably in the early part of 2025.”

A little background: Through my teens in the 90's I did a lot of the things you may expect. I was a script kiddie on mIRC, made a tank game in Unreal Engine, and did some Quake modding. From 2002-2004 I landed a job doing Java web dev, SQL, and overall database administration because my father's friend needed someone that could do that. I was ok at the job, but not great. Being young, my hobby that turned into a 9-5 made me want to stab my eyes out and I quit.

With that said, I can understand a lot of what's going on, but it doesn't "click" anymore. I spent 20 years as a career machinist, but I physically can't do that anymore. Here's the rub - my twin brother is a brittle diabetic and can't work (lots of other stuff going on as well), and our mother is getting old (father passed this year). The only reasonable way forward that I can see in order to be able to support my brother is trying to get back into development.

When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I'm trying to understand Git, but it's a giant conceptual leap. I guess, what I'd like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.

Thanks

The United Nations has called for a "full investigation" into the killing of a US-Turkish woman in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday.

Local media reported that Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot dead by Israeli forces as she took part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

Israel's military said it was "looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area".

[...]

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a "gunshot in the head".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the "tragic loss", while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action "barbaric".

Turkey's foreign ministry said Ms Eygi had been "killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus".

Before travelling to the Middle East, Ms Eygi had recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

I was playing Sea of Thieves again with a Friend. We figured out we could get on top of the mast and were messing around with emotes. We thought it was the funniest shit ever. Here’s a screenshot I took of me laying on the Mast. I have another of me in a barrel too.