Futurology Today

Experts say Pentagon chief has endangered secrets of US defense department and given assistance to foreign spies

As more develops about the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his repeated disclosures of sensitive military intelligence in unsecured Signal group chats, there are growing concerns his behavior has weakened the Pentagon in the eyes of its foreign adversaries and made him and his entourage a top espionage target.

Allies, already concerned by Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, have also begun to see the US as an intelligence-sharing liability. There are fears that the mounting firings and leak inquiries in Hegseth’s orbit, along with his inability to manage these internal crises, exposes the entire global US war footing – especially, if a geopolitical and external crisis comes across his desk.

“[What if] a foreign entity, whether it be a state actor or non-state actor, is able to intercept the movements of troops or department personnel, or something like that, capture them and hold them to ransom,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran and CEO at Task Force Butler. “That kind of thing could very easily happen.”

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.chemrev.4c00785

From https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1k59gj8/uwu_just_a_little_war_crime_as_a_treat/

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19629409

Pump-and-dump schemes, fraud, ransomware, multi-level marketing, spam, incentivizing selfishness, greed, and general unethical behaviour, buying elections, quasi Nazis creating their own coins, et cetera. In my opinion, over the years the evidence has piled up tall enough to show that crypto"currencies" are an overal detriment to society.

It therefore surprised me to discover that behind the ♡ donation button on top of most Lemmy instances except for Beehaw, there is an option to donate "crypto". This sets a bad example. Thoughts?

Hey all, I'm stumped for the first time since adopting Linux. I can't get Plex to see any of my folders and I cannot just move my movies to plexmediaserver because I don't have the permissions.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the permissions commands and I'm not sure what the simplest way to set up my Plex library is. Has anyone been through this process that can help me out?

Archived

Following the massive demonstration that gathered hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Belgrade on 15 March, the popular uprising shaking Serbia shows no sign of losing momentum. For nine days now, students have been blocking the entrance to the Serbian public broadcaster (RTS), accusing it of ignoring the movement and serving the authorities’ interests, resulting in disrupted programming.

[...]

To lift the blockade of RTS, Serbian students are demanding the appointment of new leadership at the helm of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM), whose role is theoretically to ensure pluralism of opinion and sanction incitement to hatred and violence.

[...]

For Serbian civil society [...] it is the authorities' widespread corruption that is seen as having triggered the tragedy at the root of the mobilisations. On 1 November, the recently renovated roof of the railway station in the major city of Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. Protesters have since demanded full transparency regarding the accident amid allegations that endemic graft was partly to blame.

Rallies are being organised almost daily in Serbia’s major cities. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević was forced to resign in January after protesters were assaulted by activists from Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).

[...]

On 16 April, 80 Serbian students arrived in Strasbourg after cycling more than 1,400 kilometres from Belgrade. Passing through Budapest, Vienna, and Munich, they eventually handed over a letter describing the political situation in Serbia to Bjorn Berge, the deputy secretary general of the Council of Europe.

Every

Single

Time

Dems always move right. Whitmer was just hanging out with trump, and now this.

Oh, and Trump is doing his 100th day rally in MI

Starting June 20, 2025, all smartphones and tablets sold in the EU will feature a new label inside the box, indicating battery life and efficiency. This is an update to the energy sticker Europeans are already familiar with on household appliances, tailored to align with the type of information consumers now expect from their electronic devices.

All suppliers - manufacturers, importers, or authorized representatives - operating in the EU/EEA market must register their product models through a dedicated EPREL platform managed by the European Commission.

While manufacturers are responsible for providing accurate data, the Commission will verify information related to ingress protection, repairability, and battery performance.

Archived at https://archive.is/HMSbQ

This post uses a gift link which has a view count limit. When it runs out, there is an archived copy of the article

I have a bad habit of impulse buying the most random stuff, but to my credit, most of those turn out awesome. If you wanna hear about great impulse buys, that'd be a good topic for another "ask" post (which I will leave as an exercise to the reader).

Here, I want to hear about your worst impulse buys; ones that you regretted almost immediately.

[The European Commission] is also working on legal options to allow EU companies to break existing gas supply contracts with Russia without facing penalties, [according to a] senior official. ...

With some member states vowing to block any EU sanctions on Russian gas, the Commission is instead looking at other tools that could hasten the end of Europe's reliance on Russian energy. It plans to set out options for doing this in a "roadmap" due on May 6.

...

The move to forbid new contracts is aimed at cutting European companies' spot purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).

While Russian pipeline gas deliveries have plunged since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU increased its imports of Russian LNG last year.

The EU still got 19% of its total gas and LNG supply from Russia in 2024.

...

If the Commission decides to move ahead with any of the legal tools, it would then propose legislation to do this. That could require approval from the European Parliament and a reinforced majority of EU countries, depending on the type of legal tool proposed.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/18447177

This year, I gave 10 euros to Libre Office

https://www.libreoffice.org/

I gave 5 euros to VLC

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

I gave 5 euros to Qbittorent

https://www.qbittorrent.org/

I come from a low-income country. Europeans can afford to give much more.

Last year, the CEO of Adobe earned 20 million dollars. He only travels in an armored SUV with bodyguards. He has been described as completely obsessed about money and power. If he could get away with it, he would murder open source developers.

With very limited ressources, Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Kdenlive are doing fantastic work, offering alternatives to Adobe.

Please support open source software. You don't have to spend fortunes. Just adopt one software.

Yeah you read the title right, i created an unofficial clone of the r/AbsoluteUnits subreddit, in an attempt to make it the home for it in the threadiverse.

!absoluteunit@sh.itjust.works

The premise is simple: an absolute unit is something, either an animal, person or object, that is really large, way more large than someone would expect. Things like massive dogs, buildings, statues, and the like. Basically, anything that can be bigger than it usually is, is an absolute unit. In the rules there’s a link to a more detailed explanation.

So yeah! it’s pretty simple. If you have a picture or a video of something larger than normal, you can share it there!

Hope you like it!!

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News.

The price tag for the project was several thousand dollars, according to two of the sources, at a time when the administration is searching for cost-cutting measures.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7681828

There may be $10,000 to every mistake one makes when applying for Social Security, from my understanding of the situation.