keverets @keverets@librem.one

NEW: A marketing firm owned by telecom giant Cox is advertising a service to companies that claims to *actually* listen to embedded microphones in users' phones, smart TVs, and smart devices:

https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

Why are TVs so inexpensive these days? Because the TV companies make billions by recording what you watch and sell that data to advertisers. “These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour”. This article tells you how to turn it off:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watching

No new fossil fuel projects. None. Period.

That's what both the United Nations and the International Energy Agency have told us is 100% necessary at this point.

But apparently someone didn't get the message. Because climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects continue to be approved.
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The massive Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope is all but certain to be built now that a federal judge has ruled against environmental groups hoping to halt the development.

While it’s set to be Alaska’s biggest new oil field in decades, it very well may not be the last: Willow could give ConocoPhillips and other oil companies cheaper access to vast, untapped reserves beneath the tundra.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason denied a challenge last week to the $7.5 billion project which the Biden administration controversially approved in March. The judge’s ruling paves the way for Conoco to drill through permafrost and slurp up 600 million barrels of oil in the northeastern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

But that’s not all. As the company moves ahead with construction of the new oil field, it’s looking to gain access to millions, perhaps billions, more barrels farther west and southwest in the reserve.

“It’s not only itself a huge project,” said Erik Grafe, an attorney at Earthjustice, which represents the environmental groups that sued to stop the project. “It’s designed to be a hub for future development and that’s an even bigger problem.”

Conoco told investors two years ago that Willow could be “the next great Alaska hub” for Arctic oil. The company leases a total of 1.1 million acres in the federal petroleum reserve, sitting on an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil. Other companies lease another 1.4 million acres combined.

Just last month Conoco proposed seismic surveys on about 272,000 acres of frozen earth, including an area west of the Willow site, deeper into the national oil reserve. The company initially said the surveys were intended to “determine the most efficient development” at Willow and “to identify potential future development areas” on Conoco’s leases.

Conoco has drilled two exploratory wells in an area named “West Willow.” The several miles of new roads and pipelines that the company plans to build at Willow could significantly lower the cost of tapping into the estimated 75 million barrels of crude beneath West Willow.

That oil “seems like the obvious next target,” Grafe said. “Willow puts in processing facilities, central operating facilities, pipelines, roads. Once that’s in place, it’s a lot cheaper for Conoco and maybe others to develop their leases and tie into that infrastructure.”
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FULL STORY -- https://grist.org/article/willow-project-arctic-oil-north-slope-conoco/

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

It was a big surprise to see an American file sync & share company go on a buying spree, buying several of our smaller European competitors like ownCloud and Dracoon.

If you rather not switch to Kiteware, you can move to Nextcloud and stay in control over your data!

We even have a migration tool! 🚀

https://nextcloud.com/blog/kiteworks-acquires-owncloud-dracoon/

With the OpenAI clownshow, there's been renewed media attention on the xrisk/"AI safety"/doomer nonsense. Personally, I've had a fresh wave of reporters asking me naive questions (as well as some contacts from old hands who are on top of how to handle ultra-rich man-children with god complexes). 🧵1/

STRONG SOLAR FLARE: A sunspot directly facing Earth erupted today, Nov. 28, producing an M9.8-class solar flare only percentage points below category X. The explosion almost certainly hurled a CME toward Earth, joining 2 to 3 more CMEs already en route. These events set the stage for geomagnetic storms later this week. Developing story @ http://Spaceweather.com #cme #solar #spaceweather

Ring customers can enable encryption so only they can view their camera’s videos, EFF’s Matthew Guariglia told News Nation—an option made available in part because people "did not feel comfortable having all that footage sitting on Amazon’s servers unprotected.” https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/holidays/doorbell-cameras-solution-porch-piracy/

It's funny that they told me not to trust wikipedia in high school when at this point it's the only link in the first page of google results that was written by humans intending to convey information

Google Drive users are reporting that recent files stored in the cloud have suddenly disappeared, with the cloud service reverting to a storage snapshot as it was around April-May 2023.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-drive-users-angry-over-losing-months-of-stored-data/

We have reports from people for whom delta chat works while signal shows "no internet" ... Various states are throttling traffic all across the planet and you need to have a robust networking layer to provide service. Delta Chat is offline-first, ignores DNS outages, can be combined with Tor or Tails. It is trying to make live easier for people who are already in stress and need a reliable messenging experience. It is project practise to keep the least wealthily connected in focus.

I wrote a piece on a #Coop alternative to Etsy that just launched, one that puts power back into the hands of artists & makers:
@coopartisans (glad they're on Mastodon!)

I didn't realize the extent to which #Etsy had become toxic to sellers until starting interviews for this piece. It's clear that artisans are being drawn to this because an alternative is long overdue.

(there's a tech issue with the authorship at the top; it names me as the author at the bottom)

https://www.shareable.net/artisans-cooperative-an-etsy-alternative-owned-and-run-by-artists-and-makers/

Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024

The "Manifest V3" rollout is back after letting tensions cool for a year.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

It honestly is truly wild to me that after Twitter imploded under the tutelage of a billionaire megalomaniac so many people - instead of going to decentralized, community-run Mastodon - chose to grasp desperately onto other platforms started by millionaire or billionaire megalomaniacs, alternatively the one by the guy directly involved in the downfall of democracy (Meta) or the one by the guy who started Twitter (which was always a shit show!) to begin with.

Like, what???

“The push for clean water is considered one of the 10 biggest public health advances of the last century, and air should be no different." https://ca.news.yahoo.com/why-still-breathing-dirty-indoor-124422556.html

Annual meeting of the Summer Tires Club

I manage a ful week of #commute on a cargo electric #bicycle. That is five trips of 5km one way. With 500Wh battery that gives 10Wh/km. An electric car does around 200Wh/km.

For the same commute distance that is 20× less #battery capacity needed. We should not focus on replacing all ICE cars with #electric cars. We should replace them with as many bikes as humanly possible.

@cstross see also the snippet when you search for countries in Africa beginning with “k” (there are none, but Kenya is closest which starts with a k sound but is spelt differently) it’s also from the defunct emergent mind project. And/or Reddit as that version of GPT was heavily trained on Reddit and Google obviously….

all you need to do is be a $170B international corporation and you too can have AI companies respect your copyrights:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/11/fake-movie-posters-with-disney-logos-force-microsoft-to-alter-bing-image-creator/

Reason why /e/OS blocks applications' trackers and web trackers (ads) by default and this is really serious actually 🧌

"Web Browsing Data Is ‘Serious Security Threat’ To U.S. And EU, New Reports Show" 👇👇👇

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2023/11/14/web-browsing-data-is-serious-security-threat-to-eu-and-us/