Futurology Today

A fully VPN'ed family member got hit with an automated copyright strike and when looking into how it happened I found out that using the default qBittorrent config with a killswitch-enabled ProtonVPN meant that the home IP address was being leaked. I verified it through a few tools, including ipleak(dot)net's fake magnet link feature which showed both the VPN and home IPs when connected. I'm at best a tinkerer so I'm not sure if this is a Proton-exclusive problem at all, or if the killswitch useage is even relevant, but that's what they were using and figured this all might be worth mentioning since it was certainly a shock to us and not something we've seen brought up before.

The solution was to change which network interface qBittorrent was set to use via "Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network interface". Which one to pick will depend on the protocol you're using in Proton's client, but unless you're confident in what you're doing I'd recommend testing each with the ipleak(dot)net (or similar) torrent tool until you're only seeing the VPN IP show up.

Hope this is useful! (and not common knowledge that we were just wildly ignorant of)

The survey found that 32% of eligible voters believe Germany has worsened since Merz took office in May, while just 22% say the country has improved. A further 37% perceive no change at all.

From their newsletter:

We’re so excited to share that the 22nd dataset release for Common Voice is now available for download.

Common Voice 22.0 has an additional 281 hours of speech data, bringing the total number of hours to 33,815. This release has also seen a jump in 296 newly validated hours, with a total of 22,640 validated hours of clips. This release welcomes the addition of Aromanian (rup), Tajik (tg), and Venda/Tshivenda (ve) languages.

Aromanian is spoken by around 210,000 people in the Balkans, while Tajik is a language closely related to Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by over 10 million people. Venda / Tshivenda is spoken by over 2 million people as a first or other language in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

This brings the total number of languages available in this Scripted Speech release to 137.

For those unfamiliar:

Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free and open speech corpus. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The transcribed sentences are collected in a voice database available under the public domain license CC0.[1] This license ensures that developers can use the database for voice-to-text and text-to-voice applications without restrictions or costs.

Hi everyone,

I’m visiting some family in another area of the country soon, and have the opportunity to set up a little remote backup server.

Essentially I would like to set something up that I can ssh into and backup photos/videos/documents from my main server periodically once a month or so. Ideally it would be off until I need to turn it on.

I’m looking for ideas on how to best approach this. What kind of hardware would you use in my shoes? I have a couple of spare raspberry pi’s I was thinking to use with an external drive. I was also considering something like those ugreen nas devices that have been popping up. I would ideally set it up and do a sync before I head there, and then just plug it in. Would wake on lan be advised for this?

US president faces Maga backlash over suspicion his administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect rich elite – including Trump

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250716121835/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/16/donald-trump-dismisses-inquiry-into-jeffrey-epstein-as-boring

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

[UK] counter-terror police have warned the activity of hostile states on British soil is posing a growing threat and urged families to watch for signs their children are being manipulated.

Teenagers, along with petty criminals and disillusioned people, may be more vulnerable to recruitment by Russia, Iran and China, they warned.

Hostile states are increasingly using proxies to carry out acts of sabotage and targeted violence in the UK, counter-terror police said, adding that investigating such activity now accounts for about 20% of their workload.

Parents and teachers should "be inquisitive" and "seek help" if they think a child is at risk, police advised.

Since the Salisbury poisonings in 2018 – which targeted Russian double agent Sergei Skripal – there has been a five-fold increase in police work to tackle hostile activity, commanders said.

"The breadth, complexity and volume of these operations has continued to grow at a rate that I'm not sure that us, or our partners internationally, or any intelligence community predicted," Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police's Counter-Terrorism Command, told reporters.

"We are increasingly seeing these three states, but not just these three states, undertaking threat to life operations in the United Kingdom."

[...]

The Metropolitan Police is now putting additional resources into tackling hostile state activity, with training for officers in "foreign interference" and hundreds taking part in recent exercises in how to respond.

"We're working with local force chiefs up and down the country to raise awareness and ensure that there really is an increased understanding about this threat," Ms Evans said.

[...]

Trump campaigned on a vow to round up the "worst of the worst" offenders among the criminals who were living illegally inside the United States. But CBS News has obtained deportation data that indicates the Trump administration's deportation push has ensnared many undocumented immigrants without violent criminal records.

Of the estimated 100,000 people who were deported between January 1 and June 24 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70,583 were convicted criminals, according to an ICE document obtained by CBS News. However, the data also shows that most of the documented infractions were traffic or immigration offenses.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/31694909

Remember the "I want a white one" video? That's the first video I clearly remember having a text-to-speech voice-over. It was really bad TTS, and it was awesome. Lately, though, I find myself wishing video hosting services like Youtube and Peertube (to a lesser degree) had a filter so that I could filter out any videos with TTS voice overs. Does this bother anyone else?

I'm a little torn about it. There are legitimate reasons for people to use them; I've seen commentary from posters about social anxiety that makes even recording audio difficult, and TTS must be fantastic for mute folks. Non-native English speakers may be more comfortable with it. I'm sure the platform doesn't help... how many videos do you have to post where the peanut gallery mocks your verbal mistakes before you give up and just have an engine read your written text? I've also noticed that the use of TTS is far, far worse on Youtube -- I have yet to come across a single video on any Peertub site that uses it, although it must exist.

Like a lot of technology, generated speech is getting abused, and since TTS has valid uses, I put it in the "enshittification" category. It's used on every bulk, low-effort "N greatest/funniest/random-adjective" videos; I hear it in increasingly in those suspiciously AI-smelling, ad-ish "reviews" that just read specs and make an odd comment about how cool it is; and there's so much more low-quality, low-information content that feels AI generated uses it -- or maybe it feels AI generated because it uses it. It's almost always on just awful content.

TTS on video content is a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things." I am starting to hate it so much, I abort whatever I'm starting to watch as soon as I hear the absurd cadence and mispronunciations -- I'd rather hear an honest non-native speaker making mistakes than that terrible TTS crap.

Whatever the reason, the use of TTS is a trend I'm putting firmly in the "enshittification" category, but am I overreacting here? Do you have a way of dodging or identifying content that uses TTS, in advance?

Maurene Comey, who prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein and is former FBI Director James Comey’s daughter, was fired Wednesday from her job in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, according to two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

I'm 29 but I get told I look 18-19. And the people who tell me this regularly see a lot of people on the daily, from police officers to nurses to salon workers. When I tell them my actual age they literally gasp or laugh at me. The older I get, the more pronounced their reaction is. Doctors were saying "you definitely have something wrong, I can tell just by looking at you" but then the hormonal results all came back normal and they just shrugged. Another weird thing is anti-loitering devices hurt my ears, and those aren't supposed to affect people older than 20.

Shout out to businesses that email tracking information and link to their own systems instead of the package delivery service's tracking system. These third party tracking site plug-ins often lag behind the information provided to them by the delivery service's site.

Special shout out to those who hide tracking information behind a required account login when they could simply provide the tracking number in the email.

Most special shout out to sites that do not allow you to know anything about a particular order unless you click through to their site and log in. It makes tracking past orders a nightmare.

From Risma Fadila

Just as dusk settled in this Northern Saw-whet owl started its evening hunt.