Ethan Black @golemwire@librem.one

Commander Dave Scott of Apollo 15 validates Galileo's theory on the Moon by dropping a hammer and a feather, proving that objects fall at the same speed, independent of their mass.

I wonder how Linux distributions will remap the Microsoft Copilot key that's appearing on some new Win11 laptops.

#linuxDesktop #copilot #microsoft #keyboards

Rite Aid was just banned by the FTC from using facial recognition software because of how they abused it (and their customers). I'm hopeful that this will create a precedent that gets applied beyond retail.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/rite-aid-facial-recognition/

#privacy

It's nice to see there what appears to be real movement toward law enforcement here and globally to go after the perpetrators and enablers of pig butchering scams. These four accused were living in the United States, working w/ human traffickers throughout E. Asia to trick or kidnap people into perpetrating romance scams over the Internet 24/7.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/four-individuals-charged-laundering-millions-cryptocurrency-investment-scams-known-pig

I wish I still didn't get several desperate emails from people a month, full of shame and anger and frustration at having fallen for a pig butchering scam and lost their life's savings. The FBI said this year that pig butchering scams are now a $3B problem.

I'm not particularly proud of some of my early responses to these messages, which basically said, "sorry, but your money is almost certainly gone forever, and anyone offering to help you get some or all of it back for a fee is scamming you."

While this is still mostly true, I always now advise every single crypto scam victim -- pig butchering, theft, whatever -- to be sure to file both a police report and a report with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov), which collects stats on cybercrime and sometimes bundles victim reports into cases for DOJ/FBI prosecutors and investigators.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that you could see some of this money back many years from now if they ever catch the people responsible and/or are able to seize their financial accounts. Again, an outcome like this is unlikely and could take years. However, if you don't file official complaints it can be hard to learn if any of that ever comes to pass, because if they do one day seize some money from this group, they would try to contact victims and help them with remuneration.

One thing I've learned is that very often stolen funds are not gone forever in some badguy bank account but instead held by the U.S. govt in legal limbo because they were seized in the process of law enforcement actions. But the money just sits there in the govt's possession while the legal process goes forward, and meanwhile victims have no idea that some or all of their money is being held by the govt, and can't access that either b/c it's officially "evidence" of a crime.

IMHO, there is a yawning disconnect between the government's ability and eagerness to seize ill-gotten crypto funds and any process to figure out who got robbed and notifying them within some kind of time frame that is likely to be meaningful to their life. So many people really have lost everything, and yet they really haven't. Anyway, the process here is super spotty, but I think it will improve over time. It has to.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/07/massive-losses-define-epidemic-of-pig-butchering/

Ah, just a lovely zoom in on Death Mountain, courtesy of #Zelda #TearsoftheKingdom!

The world's loudest bird, the Amazon's white bellbird, has a call that peaks at 125.4 decibels, louder than a chainsaw or jackhammer.

Video Credit: Anselmo d'Affonseca
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221931190X#section-cited-by

Hey everyone! I'm guessing a lot of you will be buying last minute gifts for people, and those tend to involve gift cards. Be very careful when you're buying these off-the-rack at retail stores that sell gift cards for various popular restaurants and brands. Especially those that are not in particularly tamper-proof packaging.

A friend just shared some photos he took after buying a bunch of Dardens restaurant gift cards for some gifts to clients. They didn't discover until leaving the store that several of the cards had been tampered with, their PIN scratch-offs re-covered with look-alike scratch off stickers. Also, the phony ones seem to have goofy looking barcodes, like they were scanned and printed by a laser printer without enough ink.

The trick here is the thieves pull the card out, scratch off the PIN part, record that, cover up the pin with fake tape, and then shove the thing back in the packaging and put it back on the shelf. Then, when someone buys it, the thieves can access the value on the card the minute it is activated (purchased).

The image shows two of these cards that are non-tampered (left) and two on the right that were. These cards can slide right out of their packaging with a little wiggling, and slide back in the same way.

Some stores keep their gift cards behind the counter for this reason. Might be best going for those instead of the ones in aisle 19.