Scott Francis

New version of the same graphic showing how gerrymandering is unrepresentative and cheating.

Gerrymandering isn’t “free and fair elections,” any more than voter suppression is.

It’s cheating. It’s stealing elections.

“It’s when the politicians choose the voters instead of voters choosing the politicians.”

Call it out.

(new version of the graphic)

Before you commit to a name for your free software you should at least once say it aloud in a public place

Free software people I am begging you to stop naming your software

@ifixcoinops the filtering on Eero (that I have for wifi kit at home) relies on Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 under the hood, which is free for anybody IIRC

Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up SYDNEY—Saying the ruse began as a harmless prank about the continent’s mammals having pouches, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese admitted Tuesday that all those animals like wallabies, numbats, quokkas, and bandicoots were completely made up. “We just assumed everyone would have caught on by now, because these creatures are clearly imaginary,” said Albanese, adding that […] The post Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up appeared first on The Onion.

I knew it https://theonion.com/australia-admits-all-those-animals-made-up/

Picture of the back of my iPad case, covered with stickers including the OpenBSD blowfish, “crypto means cryptography”, a Cybercat, Anjunabeats, and several others.

My Cybercat sticker from @zackwhittaker ‘s This Week In Security continues to age well

Good overview of #quantum-enhamced use cases in this WSJ article, from improved network routing to molecular modeling for drug discovery to nitrogen production for farming. Some of these use cases are already in early trials on existing machines, and IBM’s roadmap for a full-scale fault tolerant […]

White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite The White House has instructed NASA employees to destroy two major, climate change-focused satellite missions. As NPR reports, Trump officials reached out to the space agency to draw up plans for terminating the two missions, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatories. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health. One is attached to the International Space Station, and the other is collecting data as a stand-alone satellite. The latter would meet its permanent demise after burning up in the atmosphere […]

The amount of money that is going to need to be spent to undo all of this nonsense will be staggering. Like national debt-dwarfing staggering.

https://futurism.com/white-house-orders-nasa-destroy-important-satellite

Exhibit 2025-08-05-A in “understanding ‘why’ is more important than understanding ‘how’”
https://mastodon.social/@Pawpower/114978573495492525

while I am somewhat sympathetic to the systemic pressures levied against the wayland developers, "no no you don't understand, we ruined the desktop windowing experience so we could have a display server that *also* ruined the mobile windowing experience" is not the straightforward win that they […]

@superball as an alternative to the ubiquitous red plastic SOLO cups seen at parties, beer pong, etc., the Ball company in the US (known for making home canning supplies) now makes aluminum reusable/recyclable cups in the same format. At parties I write guests’ names on with a sharpie and reuse […]

@taggart-tech.com everything is a grift

@JessTheUnstill @catsalad they have formed an entity akin to SCP-162 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-162

@taggart-tech.com it’s certainly a completely different approach than, say, https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/nasa-successfully-extracts-oxygen-from-lunar-soil-simulant/ which led to https://www.universetoday.com/articles/making-rocket-fuel-out-of-lunar-regolith and was then […]

Just release Half-Life 3 already, and then you can buy another superyacht company
https://mastodon.social/@verge/114972623171230710

@taggart-tech.com it’s almost as if he has no domain expertise at all; almost as if he’s completely unaware of current relevant research projects from his own organization

Screenshot from some other social media. Text reads: millenianthemums i want a shirt that has a QR code on it for some kind of horrible malware so that if anyone ever tries to film me in public their phone will automatically scan the code and be reduced to a functionless brick iwasrightaboutthesun Modern day Medusa

This. Just, this.

With the launch of Ghost 6.0, every publication that runs on Ghost becomes part of the #fediverse. You can follow and comment on Platformer or 404 Media articles without leaving your Mastodon feed. This is the future of social media.

Congratulations to @johnonolan and all the team at Ghost!

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who fled his own impeachment hearings and refused a court order to release his travel records after speaking at the rally in Washington that preceded the January 6 insurrection, has described wayward Democratic legislators as “cowards”.

Thank you @TheGuardian for showing US news outlets how actual journalism is done.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/04/texas-democrats-republicans-maps

GitHub - jeanlucdupont/EXEfromCER: PoC that downloads an executable from a public SSL certificate PoC that downloads an executable from a public SSL certificate - jeanlucdupont/EXEfromCER

Embedding a binary payload (e.g., Windows executable malware) into a standard x.509 TLS cert. I’m not generally a fan of MITM TLS inspection proxies, but I can certainly see an argument for them here. https://github.com/jeanlucdupont/EXEfromCER

@jik @adamshostack as @Tarah said, “the best way to prevent data breaches is not to store data you don’t need”

I can’t help but wonder if Pritzker or his advisers are taking a page from history when, during the antebellum period in the U.S., northern states asserted the connection between their interests and the country’s as a whole, specifically by fighting the Fugitive Slave Act. Northern state courts […]

I was supposed to go out for a taco lunch today but my friends bailed so instead I'll just eating a bag of tortilla chips in my kitchen, in silence.

Walking Your Dog.....

When suddenly Tsunami waves crash onshore after a M8.8 earthquake strikes nearby off the coast of Russia.
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #Ukraine #Russia #Putin #EU #NATO #Zelensky #war #Breaking #BreakingNews #Earthquake #tsunami

i hate when people see a hobby and go "but can you make money" stfu it's called having fun

Researchers have established a new foundation for future quantum cryptographic protocols—not just new algorithms like the current crop of #PQC standards, but entirely new approaches to some of the primitives that modern cryptography relies on (like one-way state generators). The fundamental […]

This seems extremely low
https://mastodon.social/@levelbot/114956301379173422

Photo of paper edition front page of The Onion. Headline reads “ICE Confirms Agents Do Not Have Faces Beneath Masks”, subhead “Agency says what lies under balaclavas ‘unspeakable’”

The sharpest journalism in the world right now is probably found at The Onion

Ten Thousand

@ifixcoinops highly relevant: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Construction is now underway on what would be the world’s first fusion power plant. Will it work? We will find out in three years. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/helion-breaks-ground-on-what-could-be-the-worlds-first-fusion-plant-despite-significant-uncertainty/