Futurology Today

Iran has warned enemies against any potential attack on its territory, saying it is prepared to use its underground missile cities to impose a heavy cost on the US after Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Tehran.

"Iran has achieved a level of active deterrence in which any violation of its sovereignty will be met with a severe response," the General Staff of Iran's Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday marking the anniversary of the Islamic Republic's foundation.

The state-run English newspaper Tehran Times also reported that "Iranian missiles are loaded onto launchers in all underground missile cities and are ready for launch."

"Opening the Pandora's box will come at a heavy cost for the US government and its allies," the report added, citing information it had obtained.

source: https://tenforward.social/@nonehitwonder/114246189367013927

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/sffpc by /u/154FAviator on 2025-04-02 01:22:06+00:00.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/sffpc by /u/Zachscycling on 2025-04-01 23:10:47+00:00.

Excerpts:

When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.

Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”

The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware that spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."

Recent favorite, very catchy

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31957116

Millions of Americans have downloaded apps that secretly route their internet traffic through Chinese companies, according to an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), including several that were recently owned by a sanctioned firm with links to China’s military.

TTP’s investigation found that one in five of the top 100 free virtual private networks in the U.S. App Store during 2024 were surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, which are obliged to hand over their users’ browsing data to the Chinese government under the country’s national security laws. Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a “Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.

[...]

VPNs allow users to mask the IP address that can identify them, and, in theory, keep their internet browsing private. For that reason, they have been used by people around the world to sidestep government censorship or surveillance, or because they believe it will improve their online security. In the U.S., kids often download free VPNs to play games or access social media during school hours.

However, VPNs can themselves pose serious risks because the companies that provide them can read all the internet traffic routed through them. That risk is compounded in the case of Chinese apps, given China’s strict laws that can force companies in that country to secretly share access to their users’ data with the government.

[...]

The VPN apps identified by TTP have been downloaded more than 70 million times from U.S. app stores, according to data from AppMagic, a mobile apps market intelligence firm.

[...]

The findings raise questions about Apple’s carefully cultivated reputation for protecting user privacy. The company has repeatedly sought to fend off antitrust legislation designed to loosen its control of the App Store by arguing such efforts could compromise user privacy and security. But TTP’s investigation suggests that Apple is not taking adequate steps to determine who owns the apps it offers its users and what they do with the data they collect. More than a dozen of the Chinese VPNs were also available in Apple’s App Store in France in late February, showing that the issue extends to other Western markets.

[...]

“No, Karen, I won’t hack your WiFi.”

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/SithTeam6 on 2025-04-02 03:14:05+00:00.

I make EPUBs and have decided that I'd like to open up a form for requests for EPUBs of communists (defined so broadly it encompasses authors I or someone else would not call communist, whether anarchist or Marxist, Stalinist or Bordigist, and so on). If you have a book or pamphlet that you think would be easier to read or access if it were a snazzy epub, please let me know and I'll try my best to put it together.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250331120140/https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302671624.html?taid=67e4ac8071dcb10001e70ffb