50501

I want to get involved in protesting. I am in PA, are there protesting groups around me? I am brand new to it and would like to join the causes.

I did not realize 50501 was a protesting group itself lol, I joined the newsletter if there's any more info I am on board.

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You are a god, you have access to cheats, you can take the ladder out of the pool, you can install hacked items, whatever you want! What will you do if America in 2025 was just a game of the sims?

I'm mostly sailing the high seas, using the tv as a giant monitor for the always-on laptop connected to it. I'm afraid of the 1984-esque "You must connect to the internet to continue using this TV" that might come after some time.

Around the world, discussions about digital sovereignty are intensifying. Governments, institutions, companies and civil society are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of controlling their own digital infrastructure. From concerns about data protection and vendor lock-in to questions of political autonomy, the topic has moved from niche circles to mainstream policy debates. In our new Digital Sovereignty Index, we show how countries compare in digital independence!

[...]

Nextcloud developed the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI): a simple metric to illustrate how much self hosted collaboration applications are actively used across nearly 60 countries. It represents the relative amount of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100,000 citizens, compared to other countries.

[...]

Here is a more detailed description: https://nextcloud.com/blog/digital-sovereignty-index-how-countries-compare-in-digital-independence/

Archived

New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s, but the media disproportionately covers crime, so most Americans aren’t aware of the decrease.

[...]

An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year. An overwhelming majority of Americans are wrong.

On Tuesday, August 5, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its comprehensive report on crime in the United States for 2024. As crime data expert Jeff Asher noted, not only did the report reveal that overall crime was down substantially in 2024, but crime "fell in 2024 across every category and population group." Specifically, it "was down in all seven categories of crime across all 10 population groups that the FBI measures."

[...]

Palantir, an emerging tech company that was founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with support from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, is a central player in the fight between the old guard and the up and coming weapons firms of Silicon Valley.

“The company’s transformation from an awkward Silicon Valley upstart trying to make it as a government contractor has also emboldened it. Some of its recent and prospective deals toe the lines of what even some of the company’s current and former employees consider a violation of ethical applications of AI and moral uses of software by the government—and Palantir is unapologetic.”

“Unapologetic” may be an understatement. At the height of the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza, in January 2024, Palantir president and CEO Alex Karp held the company’s board meeting in Tel Aviv to show solidarity with the Israeli war effort and to goad other pro-Israel business executives to openly support that country’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which many independent experts – including independent human rights groups based in Israel – have described as a genocide.

Palantir also has extraordinary influence inside the Trump team, beginning with vice president J.D. Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir’s Peter Thiel before joining the administration. And former Palantir employees are hard at work inside a variety of executive branch agencies. At least a half dozen former company employees worked inside the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, making recommendations for deep cuts in a variety of federal agencies. And a senior counselor at Palantir has close ties to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Palantir is aggressively pursuing business with Saudi Arabia, a move that the Journal article describes as “a departure from the company’s stated focus on Western democratic values and freedom of speech.”

The emerging military tech firms and the venture capital firms that invest in them see themselves as more than just business people. They believe that they are a special breed of human being, the “new patriots” who are willing to take risks to restore America’s position in a place of global dominance, so far ahead of China that Beijing will never catch up, or so Karp and others have said.

Swiss politicians across parties are seeking to cancel an order of three dozen F-35A fighter jets from US defense conglomerate Lockheed Martin Corp after President Donald Trump imposed some of the world’s harshest levies on the country.

Paywall? https://archive.is/WB6xN

We can’t let our farmers not have anybody. You know, these are very these people, they’re you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried. Everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally, naturally. I said, what happens if they get it to a farmer the other day, what happens if they get a bad back? He said, they don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die. I said that’s interesting, isn’t it? You know, these are very—

KERNEN: Mr. President—

PRESIDENT TRUMP: In many ways. They’re very, very special people. Okay, go ahead.

Seems like it’s a quote from a southern politician pre-civil war talking about Black people. But nope. This was said today about people from south of the border. Incredible.

The National Weather Service has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians just months after being hit hard by Department of Government Efficiency-related cuts and early retirement incentives.

The new hiring number includes 126 new positions that were previously approved and will apply to “front-line mission critical” personnel, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told CNN.

The NWS cuts have spurred concerns over how well-prepared the country is to withstand hurricane season, which is just starting to heat up in the Atlantic. The staff reductions also have been scrutinized in the wake of the deadly Texas floods in July, with vacancies at weather service forecast offices there.

The cuts to probationary employees, as well as early retirement incentives, meant the nation’s front-line weather forecasting agency’s staffing levels fell by more than 550 people since the second Trump administration began, to below 4,000 total employees.

CNN has reached out to NOAA for comment.

Agency employees are greeting the news, unveiled at an all hands meeting on Monday, with guarded optimism and relief. Current employees have been working additional hours with additional responsibilities since the layoffs and retirements earlier this year, trying to maintain the 24/7 posture US extreme weather requires. The agency has also been functioning with less data from fewer, less frequent weather balloon launches.

Originally Posted By u/Lavender_Scales At 2025-08-07 06:25:35 PM | Source

Article in Hebrew

The tech giant developed a customized version of its cloud platform for Israel’s Unit 8200, which is housing audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, a joint investigation reveals.

The Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare unit is using Microsoft’s cloud servers to store masses of intelligence on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — information that has been used to plan deadly airstrikes and shape military operations, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.

Unit 8200, roughly equivalent in function to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), has transferred audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in the occupied territories onto Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, operationalizing what is likely one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group. This is according to interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources in addition to a cache of leaked internal Microsoft documents obtained by the Guardian.

In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, the then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, won the support of the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army’s mass surveillance project. According to the sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.

Microsoft’s immense storage and computing power capabilities enabled what multiple Israeli sources described as the project’s ambitious goal: to store “a million calls an hour.”

Following the 2021 meeting, a dedicated team of Microsoft engineers began working directly with Unit 8200 to build a model that would allow the intelligence unit to use the American company’s cloud services from within its own bases. According to one intelligence source, some of these Microsoft employees were themselves alumni of Unit 8200, which made the collaboration “much easier.”

According to the Guardian’s reporting, the leaked documents suggest that 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data — equivalent to roughly 200 million hours of audio — were being stored on Microsoft’s servers in the Netherlands by July of this year, while smaller portions were being stored in Ireland and Israel. It is not possible to tell how much of this data belongs specifically to Unit 8200; as a previous investigation by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian revealed earlier this year, dozens of Israeli army units have purchased cloud computing services from Microsoft, and the company has a footprint in all major military infrastructures in Israel.

OpenAI has launched its new GPT-5 model, making it available to all ChatGPT users with different usage limits based on their subscription tier.