July 4th, 2025

Posted by Dan Savage

Let’s struuuuuuuuggle… I took a call on the Lovecast this week from a woman who slept with a former professor when she was 19 and he was 27. They were both consenting adults, she wasn’t his student anymore, she pursued him… and then he dumped her for someone else. Years later, she reached out to … Read More »

The post STRUGGLE SESSION: Reassessing Relationships, Interrogating Desires, Snipping Ligaments and More! appeared first on Dan Savage.

July 3rd, 2025
solarbird: (molly-feeling-alone-andor-pouting)

Once upon a time, I was friends with a guy named Jim. A very, very few of you might know him. Almost all of you won’t.

I walked away some years ago, blocked him on the socials over his support for the fascist, because I said that the fascist’s promises absolutely, positively, literally required American concentration camps, and that’s what he was supporting by supporting the fascist, and I could not abide that…

…and yet, he carried on, saying I was a fool, and that none of it would ever happen.

(I asked him then why did he support someone he insisted was lying to him. I do not remember getting an answer, before I quit.)

So now that we have American concentration camps…

…and now that people with direct access to the fascist are talking about sending literally every American citizen of Latino heritage there to die…

Laura Loomer on X, screencap-quoted on Bluesky:"Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now."El Norte Recuerda on Bluesky, who posted the screencap:"The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us."

(it will require more concentration camps than that, of course, but that’s a detail which makes no difference)

I wonder…

…has he yet been moved to repentance?

Or is he still a good and solid member of that wretched cult?

It’s immaterial now, of course. We are long past the point where the pebbles’ opinions matter, and crimes already done cannot be undone.

But once in a while, I think of it.

And for a moment – a pointless, irrelevant moment – I still wonder.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I don't believe in a fast take-off for evil AI because it's gonna take at least a few weeks to get the human-grinders up and running.


Today's News:
posted by [syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed at 11:06am on 03/07/2025

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it:

A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice department report.

The incident was disclosed in a justice department inspector general’s audit of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical surveillance,” a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.

[…]

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the US embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the [FBI official] through the city and identify people the [official] met with.”

FBI report.

July 2nd, 2025
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 02/07/2025

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The waiter then politely reminds the customer that all possible information is contained in the price.


Today's News:

Posted by Bruce Schneier

A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops.

Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.

After discussion between Intel and Canonical’s security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level. At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.

I agree with this trade-off. These attacks are hard to get working, and it’s not easy to exfiltrate useful data. There are way easier ways to attack systems.

News article.

July 1st, 2025

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Dozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran.

Well, that’s one way to identify fake accounts and misinformation campaigns.

posted by [syndicated profile] savagelove_feed at 11:00am on 01/07/2025

Posted by Nancy Hartunian

A woman in her late 40s is struggling to process a relationship she had when she was in college. She slept with a former professor of hers but then got rejected by him. After she moved away, she arranged a visit with him, and got rejected again. Now, over 20 years later, she’s wondering if … Read More »

The post Dom Mommy appeared first on Dan Savage.

posted by [syndicated profile] savagelove_feed at 11:00am on 01/07/2025

Posted by Patrick Kearney

1. What advice do you have for young people who want to have an open conversation with their partners about changing aspects of their sex life to make it more pleasurable without hurt feelings or awkwardness?  What’s more likely to lead to major hurt: A few awkward conversations now that (hopefully) lead to better conversations … Read More »

The post Quickies appeared first on Dan Savage.

June 19th, 2025

Posted by Dan Savage

Hey, gang: I’m still traveling back and forth and up and down this grating country of ours to see family — Iowa and Illinois down, Arizona and Colorado left to go — so this week’s Struggle Session is gonna be quick: just one letter from a reader, sent via email, just one uncharacteristically brief response … Read More »

The post STRUGGLE SESSION: Pride Is (Still) Queer & Size Matters appeared first on Dan Savage.

June 30th, 2025
solarbird: (korra-on-the-air)

Not later; not tonight; RIGHT NOW. Pick up the phone and dial the switchboard if you don’t know their office’s direct number:

(202) 224-3121

Tell your Republican Senator or Senators that you demand they vote AGAINST the Big Ugly Bill that transfers wealth to the billionaire class at a scale not seen in decades if ever, and balloons the national debt to levels never imagined.

They’re still going through amendments. There is still time, if you call RIGHT. NOW.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

alierak: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] alierak in [site community profile] dw_maintenance at 03:18pm on 30/06/2025
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Still better than the deontology watch, which stops you from lying, even to tell a murderer not to look in your basement.


Today's News:
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 30/06/2025

Posted by Bruce Schneier

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.

Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in the machinery of democracy itself.

Commentators blame ideological tribalism, misinformation campaigns and partisan echo chambers for this crisis of trust. But these explanations miss a critical piece of the puzzle: a growing unease with the digital infrastructure that now underpins nearly every aspect of how Americans vote.

The digital transformation of American elections has been swift and sweeping. Just two decades ago, most people voted using mechanical levers or punch cards. Today, over 95% of ballots are counted electronically. Digital systems have replaced poll books, taken over voter identity verification processes and are integrated into registration, counting, auditing and voting systems.

This technological leap has made voting more accessible and efficient, and sometimes more secure. But these new systems are also more complex. And that complexity plays into the hands of those looking to undermine democracy.

In recent years, authoritarian regimes have refined a chillingly effective strategy to chip away at Americans’ faith in democracy by relentlessly sowing doubt about the tools U.S. states use to conduct elections. It’s a sustained campaign to fracture civic faith and make Americans believe that democracy is rigged, especially when their side loses.

This is not cyberwar in the traditional sense. There’s no evidence that anyone has managed to break into voting machines and alter votes. But cyberattacks on election systems don’t need to succeed to have an effect. Even a single failed intrusion, magnified by sensational headlines and political echo chambers, is enough to shake public trust. By feeding into existing anxiety about the complexity and opacity of digital systems, adversaries create fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Testing cyber fears

To test this dynamic, we launched a study to uncover precisely how cyberattacks corroded trust in the vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential race. We surveyed more than 3,000 voters before and after election day, testing them using a series of fictional but highly realistic breaking news reports depicting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. We randomly assigned participants to watch different types of news reports: some depicting cyberattacks on election systems, others on unrelated infrastructure such as the power grid, and a third, neutral control group.

The results, which are under peer review, were both striking and sobering. Mere exposure to reports of cyberattacks undermined trust in the electoral process—regardless of partisanship. Voters who supported the losing candidate experienced the greatest drop in trust, with two-thirds of Democratic voters showing heightened skepticism toward the election results.

But winners too showed diminished confidence. Even though most Republican voters, buoyed by their victory, accepted the overall security of the election, the majority of those who viewed news reports about cyberattacks remained suspicious.

The attacks didn’t even have to be related to the election. Even cyberattacks against critical infrastructure such as utilities had spillover effects. Voters seemed to extrapolate: “If the power grid can be hacked, why should I believe that voting machines are secure?”

Strikingly, voters who used digital machines to cast their ballots were the most rattled. For this group of people, belief in the accuracy of the vote count fell by nearly twice as much as that of voters who cast their ballots by mail and who didn’t use any technology. Their firsthand experience with the sorts of systems being portrayed as vulnerable personalized the threat.

It’s not hard to see why. When you’ve just used a touchscreen to vote, and then you see a news report about a digital system being breached, the leap in logic isn’t far.

Our data suggests that in a digital society, perceptions of trust—and distrust—are fluid, contagious and easily activated. The cyber domain isn’t just about networks and code. It’s also about emotions: fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

Firewall of trust

Does this mean we should scrap electronic voting machines? Not necessarily.

Every election system, digital or analog, has flaws. And in many respects, today’s high-tech systems have solved the problems of the past with voter-verifiable paper ballots. Modern voting machines reduce human error, increase accessibility and speed up the vote count. No one misses the hanging chads of 2000.

But technology, no matter how advanced, cannot instill legitimacy on its own. It must be paired with something harder to code: public trust. In an environment where foreign adversaries amplify every flaw, cyberattacks can trigger spirals of suspicion. It is no longer enough for elections to be secure – voters must also perceive them to be secure.

That’s why public education surrounding elections is now as vital to election security as firewalls and encrypted networks. It’s vital that voters understand how elections are run, how they’re protected and how failures are caught and corrected. Election officials, civil society groups and researchers can teach how audits work, host open-source verification demonstrations and ensure that high-tech electoral processes are comprehensible to voters.

We believe this is an essential investment in democratic resilience. But it needs to be proactive, not reactive. By the time the doubt takes hold, it’s already too late.

Just as crucially, we are convinced that it’s time to rethink the very nature of cyber threats. People often imagine them in military terms. But that framework misses the true power of these threats. The danger of cyberattacks is not only that they can destroy infrastructure or steal classified secrets, but that they chip away at societal cohesion, sow anxiety and fray citizens’ confidence in democratic institutions. These attacks erode the very idea of truth itself by making people doubt that anything can be trusted.

If trust is the target, then we believe that elected officials should start to treat trust as a national asset: something to be built, renewed and defended. Because in the end, elections aren’t just about votes being counted—they’re about people believing that those votes count.

And in that belief lies the true firewall of democracy.

This essay was written with Ryan Shandler and Anthony J. DeMattee, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

June 29th, 2025

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Weirdly, his authentic self is three teenagers in a trenchcoat.


Today's News:
June 28th, 2025

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Inspired by the recent Quanta Magazine article, Mathematical Beauty, Truth and Proof in the Age of AI, which Dave Luebke sent me.


Today's News:
June 27th, 2025
posted by [syndicated profile] xkcd_feed at 04:00am on 27/06/2025

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