There’s been like 14 similar cases of this.
I imagine the Flock techs, installing a fleet of cameras for the local fuzz, do training seminars where they encourage exactly this kind of thing (surveilling romantic partners). Still, the fact remains that the fuzz have good reason to know that that in particular is not allowed under any circumstances.
This is a hijacking: True — the reader is damaged by restricted access, but it is also true that the author is damaged.
You post something that you intend to be read by the general public. You don’t control access; the place where you post it does. After age gating mandates, that place will assume the worst — that your content is adult content.
There are three age tiers: adult, young adult, and infants. After age gating mandates, many of your readers in the general public won’t comply by stipulating their ages. The worst-case assumption is that they’re all infants.
When age gating breaks down, there’s a mismatch between default age rating of authors’ content with default age rating of readers. Content that is adult by default won’t reach readers who are infants by default. Much of your content will go unread by much of the general public. One assumes this is age gating’s intentional design — to restrict access to your content.
Same. Nobody listens to his radio 24x7. Hardly anyone ever responds to “Hello, World!” messages in real time. We do see nodes located far, far beyond the horizon. On a good day, there are way over 150 nodes operating, which is enough to keep channel utilization above 10% without any traffic beyond NodeInfo, Telemetry, or Position.
I don’t know what it’s all for. A couple of friends keep nodes charged and on the air locally. We expected to be able to exchange off-grid text messages, but, on a bad day, only about 2/3 of our messages ever go through. We need more LOCAL nodes! It’s difficult to imagine how to advertise though.
I suspect the agenda of Ham-Radio Operators with regard to Meshtastic who had nodes up before we did was just to dabble with the technology. Their agenda with regard to emergency preparedness is much more robust. For example the list of certifications required of Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network volunteers is (long):
"All SATERN Members • Must be a FCC licensed amateur radio operator • Must have an up to date completed volunteer profile • Must be credentialed and have an ID badge • Must follow the amateur radio operators code of conduct • Complete Safe from Harm training • Complete Introduction to Emergency Disaster Services training • Complete FEMA ICS-100 and ICS-700 • Complete Salvation Army SA-200 Incident Command System Training • Be proficient with net operations • Be proficient with the ICS-214 form • Be proficient with the ICS-309 form • Understand the ICS-217 and ICS-205 forms • Be proficient with the ICS-213 message and ARRL radiogram • Must have an understanding of how to report and/or halt any unsafe operations.
"TYPE FIVE Shadow Communicator, TYPE FOUR Canteen Communicator, & TYPE THREE VHF / UHF Communicator
“In addition to the general training and proficiencies above: • Must have a Technician Class License or higher • Recommended Completion of FEMA AUXCOMM training • Be able to program their radio equipment in the field without the aid of a computer • Know their radios’ capabilities and limitations • Arrive equipped to meet the needs of the team typing • Be able to function in high stress environments and in adverse conditions • Be able to serve as a net control operator • Be physically fit and able to walk for 10 minutes or more to serve as a shadow • Be able to lift 50 lbs as part of a canteen crew. • Type Three must be qualified to drive a Salvation Army vehicle (must have a valid driver’s license and be a Salvation Army approved driver)”
… so, if Meshtastic node owners aspire to having any role to play in emergency preparedness, then just operating a $50 LoRa radio probably isn’t going to cut it. Understanding how to keep out of the way of the folks doing the heavy lifting is important, too. Meshtastic Users’ getting the cold shoulder from anyone else having the least familiarity with emergency services is surely plausible.
I tried Tor for a while but it was too clunky and when used in conjunction with a search engine like Mojeek, was unusable. Whatever it was doing in the background made it impossible to search, with most failing due to suspected bot activity.
Yes, this is the point: Search engines are harvesting YOU and YOUR SEARCH TERMS! TOR prevents that, and they don’t like it.
OTOH, DDG Search and DDG(Onion): https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmv/ et al., almost always works for me. Startpage and Startpage(Onion), too, but Mojeek and Brave Search show results less often.
I made up my mind years ago to stick to TOR Browser and TOR VPN network for anonymity, privacy, and security regardless of poor response times. Today, I feel that that choice has been vindicated. TOR response times are no worse than they ever were, but response times viewing heavily ad-ridden sites with “normal” browsers have caught up. TOR blocks receiving a lot of ads and tracker folderal that “normal” pages spew out to all comers. It’s just that a handful of search engines — and many and yet more Web sites — will not serve content to TOR’s VPN network. But — You know what? — screw them!
I will admit to using the Chromium browser to retrieve must-have content from sites whose Web-hosting providers block the TOR network because — believe it or not — some of those sites don’t support Firefox. It’s deja vu all over again for those of us who lived through the Netscape Browser Wars.
We feel mirror manufacturers should be held accountable for reflecting nudity by, of, from, or to minors.
“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”
Yeah, it’s a story set in San Diego, not San Francisco, but no science fiction fan will fail to make the connection. It’s all there: hippies, repurposed freeways, drones, anarchists, gangs.
I can see why it’s not implemented.
… but it WAS implemented in nautilus before nautilus was dumbed down!
What is an android-style application launcher?
I mean the “App Switcher” for want of a better term. Generally, you swipe up to get to it. I think it used to be called the “App Grid” or “App Tray” when there was a middle physical button (or emulated target) for it. These days, I use Nova Launcher because (Guess what!) I wanted to add icons for my own scripts and a few O/S entry points that aren’t strictly apps on their own. … so my involvement with Gnome and Android launchers is a little out of date. I’ve moved on.
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Is the GNOME app grid not a grid-view application launcher?
It’s pretty big to fit on one screen. It takes two MOUSE CLICKS to get to it. Is there a HOT KEY? Can you add icons for your own scripts? Gnome always had nautilus, but they wanted something completely different.
One-click to swap between the views I want
Yeahbutt the view you choose for a given folder does not persist from session to session. It used to… Nowadays, I use pcmanfm as a nautilus alternative, which features this retro feature. Persistence is important to me. I guess I can’t see why it isn’t to you…
I really want an Android-style (grid-view, spatial paradigm, or whatever) application launcher, but all I can find are so-called semantic launchers, which follow a series of key strokes. Well, nuts to that! Unless I write one with considerable personal effort, I am still stuck with a plethora of file managers of various types (orthodox and navigational), many of which are forks of older packages that try to subvert trends in user-interface design toward touch-friendly devices.
Wrote my own digest of NOAA text products. It’s a URL: Gnashtooth’s Weather. Needs US Zip Code. Then bookmark the details page to return. Also, there is a current-conditions page:
LAFAYETTE PURDUE UNIV AIRPORT (KLAF)
Temperature: 24.1°F
Dewpoint: 12.0°F
Wind: NNE at 3 mph
Visibility: Unlimited
Sky: Mostly clear
Barometer: 30.44 inHg
Recorded: Sat 07 Feb 2026 11:54 AM Etc/GMT+5 (Sat 07 Feb 2026 16:54 PM Etc/UTC)
en: https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/KLAF.TXT
And there is a one-liner. You can include the one-liner in your eMail sig if your mail user agent (MUA) allows a shell script. Just download and print:
24° — Wind NNE at 3 mph. Sky mostly clear.`drops on a lotus leaf
Here’s a strategy for scoring your own search results.
“Keywords” are the seven words most commonly occurring on the page. If these seven words are seen to be repeated on the page to an unusual degree, then it is a good assumption that the page was designed by the author to appear high on search results.
Keyword density is a measure of “gloss.” Most people will read pages with high keyword density as unusually glossy. Keyword density is not necessarily related to how genuine the page content appears to be otherwise, but most people will look askance at a page that is too glossy.
It should come as no big surprise that the pages that appear high on search results have been designed that way. They are deliberately glossy with high keyword density. You may consider whether to skip reading them or even loading them in your browser. Chances are good that the glossy pages are mostly advertising.
Generally you will find interspersed in your results a handful of sites with low keyword density. These are likely from universities, government sites, and research institutions that have sources of revenue beyond advertising. You may consider whether to load these up and skim through them. Probably they will show a publication date, author, and list of references, which will move your research forward.
It can be noted that AI-generated sites often exhibit high keyword density. This is probably deliberate so that they garner advertising revenue. However, it may also be due to “bot 'splaining,” which is polly-paraphrasing a series of several (perhaps contradictory) articles.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately NONE OF THESE — including keyword density — distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
Piskorski, Jakub, Marcin Sydow, and Weiss Weiss. “Exploring Linguistic Features for Web Spam Detection: A Preliminary Study.” Airweb '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. Ed. Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly. New York: ACM, Apr. 2008. 25-28. ISBN:9781605581590. DOI:10.1145/1451983. 09 Nov. 2025 https://users.pja.edu.pl/~msyd/lingFeat08draft.pdf.
Nevertheless, you may wish to explore keyword density as a means to rank search results.
When I try to include a direct link to my python scripts, which do that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. … something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find them in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia “Python Package Index.”) under clanker_score.
We don’t want to make this too easy for just anyone to censor all his search results. Rather, these scrips are meant as a learning tool. They demonstrate generally how rotten search results can be on one particular and not very compelling dimension. It should not be necessary to download and scan each and every page. You should be able to train yourself to ignore a priori results that include handfuls of pages from unauthoritative sites.
Boy howdy, do I have just the script for you!
https://pypi.org/project/clanker_score/
Full disclosure: It doesn’t work. But the idea is nice: … that you could — perhaps in real life — identify AI-generated content. … so I wrote a framework that purports to do that.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately none of these distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
Uh, what about gnome-system-monitor?
I’m always hiding my internet activity from others.
Me, too. What’s wrong with us?
I think the less stressful approach is limiting Internet activity altogether rather than obsessing about whether or not what I’m up to is hidden well enough. For example, you could write your own software. I, myself, obsess about whether or not my python scripts actually work instead of inveigling my friends to encrypt everything they put in the Cloud. See, for example:
Tell me more about these cow orks.
The correct term is cow-orker (n. sing. masc.). See also, http://www.fact-index.com/c/co/cow_orker.html
I recommend my python script, Tonto2.
What does Tonto2 do?
It keeps lists.
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts’ phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
Exactly! I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It’s keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right. Presumably you can map your game controller’s buttons to keyboard equivalents like <right cursor>, <tab>, and <enter> (or map your game controller’s buttons to PCManFM’s hot key config), which would allow you to navigate the PCManFM icon grid.
Yeah, I don’t know what’s going down, so, one of these days I suppose, I’ll get pinched.
I live in a medium-sized town with a dozen Flock cameras, which the police shrouded in garbage bags a couple of weeks ago (to defuse public outrage and ward off vandalism I suppose). Two days ago, the Common Council voted to break the Flock contract. The issue has been unsatisfactorily explained in the news. I mean — what did city government think would happen to the data? Surely they knew it would be kept for awhile and be searched. News makes it sound like they flipped when Flock tried to sell them a five-year traffic-pattern analysis.
The story (above) shines a (feeble) light on what may have gone wrong. It appears that police have been taking license numbers of cars that have been parked in shady locations and running those numbers against cameras all over creation to see whether they get hits in other parts of the country. The last thing local authorities want is an out-of-town authority charging in and following a lead on a suspicious vehicle up to no good in around here. That’s not what they bought the Flock cameras and put them up for. They were misled that the data would remain local for local use. I still don’t get the angst, though.
All I know is that I can’t get a hamburger to go, drive to a city park, eat it, and take a half-hour nap without some plain-clothes cop or vigilante waking me to ask what I’m waiting for.