“Whiskyjack”

Canada Jay

A Couple From Waging Nonviolence

WNV linked each of these. Here are the original pages with snippets.

After No Kings, It’s Time to Escalate by Eric Blanc

We need bigger—and more disruptive—nonviolent campaigns that can go viral and peel away Trump’s pillars of support Read on Substack

American democracy is on the ropes. Trump and his billionaire backers are doing everything possible to transform our country into an authoritarian state like Hungary or Russia, where the trappings of institutional democracy mask brazen autocratic rule.

Our president’s sinking popularity numbers might not matter so much if his administration is either able to ignore electoral results or to distort the electoral map so badly that there’s almost no way to vote Republicans out.

Far too many Democrats and union leaders naively hoped that the courts would save us. But the Supreme Court has given a green light to Trump’s power grab, and it appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last major legal roadblock to prevent Republicans from disenfranchising millions of Democrats and Black voters across the South.

Are we cooked? Trump would certainly like us to believe he’s unstoppable. Faced with the administration’s relentless offensive against immigrants, free speech, public services, and majoritarian rule, it’s normal to sometimes succumb to despair. But there’s no need to throw in the towel — and there are concrete next steps we can all take to win back the country through nonviolent resistance. As Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Stacy Davis Gates reminds us, Trumpism “won’t be stopped just in the courts or at the ballot box.” (snip-there is MORE on the page linked at “Read on Substack” above)

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The introvert’s guide to fighting for democracy by Protect Democracy

Six ways to protect democracy — without attending a protest Read on Substack

If you’re reading this, you’re concerned about our democracy’s slide into authoritarianism — and you want to do something about it. Wahoo! You’ve taken the first and most difficult step: committing to action.

Now come the fun parts.

I want to be really clear on a couple things to start out. First, there is no one-size-fits-all best way to exercise your First Amendment rights of speech and association. Every successful social movement has employed a wide variety of tactics and repeatedly adjusted to respond to facts on the ground. Opt for action over agonizing about optimal tactics.

Second, be realistic. We are all busy. Reflect on the commitments you can actually sustain with room to grow. It is far better to regularly move the ball forward on a smaller effort than to dive into and never complete an ambitious one.

Third, be unique! You have unique talents, skills, and passions. Let those guide your advocacy. Focus on projects that bring you joy, things you actually look forward to engaging with week after week. Lean into the comparative skills and expertise you bring to the movement.

With all that in mind, here’s a short list of six ways everyone can protect democracy — even (especially) if going to a protest or some other more public form of engagement isn’t for you.

1. Check in with your local library

Local libraries are the backbone of an informed democratic citizenry, and they provide crucial resources for underserved communities. But their funding is under attack by the administration, which has cut critical funds nationwide.

So, give the library in your neighborhood a call. See how they are doing in relation to funding cuts and if there are ways you can support them. Do they take book donations? Need volunteers? See if there are teach-in or reading groups you can join — or even lead. Offer to help curate pro-democracy reading lists for various ages. Many libraries are open to suggestions for books to add to the collection — here are some recommendations from our team.

2. Fill the gaps left by government programs

Taking care of one another is essential movement building. Check in on your food pantry and community kitchen — many of which have faced funding cuts — to see how you can help. (snip-MORE at the page linked above: “Read on Substack”)

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And more from Waging Nonviolence.org

Smart Robot Vacs Don’t Look As Attractive To Me,

unless someone’s able to override an override of an override. I’m not familiar with this publication; this was another story I read during a jog, but the story seems feasible. Experts here will know. I’m just tossing it in here.

Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline

News By Jowi Morales published 15 hours ago

The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again.

Since the A11 was a smart device, it had an AllWinner A33 SoC with a TinaLinux operating system, plus a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware.

From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that’s where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data. First of all, it’s Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn’t protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.

This isn’t unusual, by far. After all, it’s a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer’s server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers. Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers. Since he blocked the appliance’s data collection capabilities, its maker decided to just kill it altogether. “Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command,” says Harishankar. “Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

Unfortunately, many other smart vacuum brands use similar hardware, so it’s not far-fetched to think that they have the same setup. This is likely especially true for cheaper devices that have less capable hardware and aren’t capable of edge computing, meaning they’ll have to send the data to some faraway server for processing. But because your information is being offboarded to another device outside of your control, you really have no idea what’s happening to it, giving the manufacturer free rein to use it as it pleases.

In the end, the owner was able to run his vacuum fully locally without manufacturer control after all the tweaks he made. This helped him retake control of his data and make use of his $300 software-bricked smart device on his own terms. As for the rest of us who don’t have the technical knowledge and time to follow his accomplishments, his advice is to “Never use your primary WiFi network for IoT devices” and to “Treat them as strangers in your home.” (snip)

For Science!

Cosmos Magazine has changed its online presence, while still providing the informational and neat articles they’re known for. Here are a couple for this week.

Extinct Arctic rhino found in Canada

October 29, 2025 Evrim Yazgin Content Sub Type: Focus Topics:

Animals Palaeontology

A near complete fossil rhinoceros has been found on an Arctic Canadian island, making it the most northerly rhino species ever.

Epiatheracerium itjilik [eet-jee-look] is described for the first time in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The “Arctic rhino” lived about 23 million years ago during the early Miocene epoch.

The new species was found in fossil-rich lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island which is part of the northern-most Canadian territory of Nunavut. Devon Island lies at a latitude of about 75°N, well within the Arctic Circle. It is also the largest uninhabited island in the world. (snip-MORE)

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Milestone image maps the Milky Way as it’s never been seen before

October 30, 2025 Imma Perfetto Content Sub Type: Focus Topics: Space

The largest low-frequency radio image of the Milky Way ever assembled has captured an unprecedented view of the galaxy, enabling astronomers to study the life stages of stars in new ways.

The data was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.

“This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our Galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies,” says Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). “No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy.”

Hurley-Walker is principal investigator of one of the extensive surveys used to construct the image, the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey. (snip-MORE, and it’s interesting)

Teaching tolerance isn’t indoctrination. It’s protection

https://www.advocate.com/voices/mahmoud-v-taylor

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Protesters in support of LGBTQ+ rights and against book bans demonstrate outside of the U.S. Supreme Court Building while the justices heard arguments for the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor in Washington, DC., April 2025

Opinion: In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices gave bigotry a permission slip and ruled that parents can “opt out” of LGBTQ-inclusive lessons, further diminishing lessons and practices on inclusivity in civic society, argues Darek M. Ciszek.

Darek M. Ciszek

October 20 2025 6:00 AM EST

The U.S. Supreme Court made a decision earlier this summer that has a significant impact on classrooms nationwide. In their 6-3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the majority completely missed the point as to why LGBTQ-inclusive education matters. By giving parents the option to pull their kids out of lessons that include LGBTQ+ characters or content, the Court prioritized personal religious objections over creating schools where students can learn without feeling invisible.

Justice Alito‘s majority opinion is especially troubling. He treats LGBTQ-inclusive education as if it were some optional “add-on” that schools can easily work around. As a former teacher, I can confidently say that is not how education works, especially when it comes to curriculum and lesson planning. And while Justice Thomas calls LGBTQ-inclusive education “ideological conformity,” he fails to see that most LGBTQ+ adults today grew up in a school system that forced us to conform to a cisgender and straight worldview. Ironically, I’d consider the Court’s narrow view of public education to be ideologically driven.

Let’s be clear about what LGBTQ-inclusive education is and isn’t. When teachers include books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding in their curriculum, they are not trying to convert anyone’s child or attack anyone’s faith. They are trying to show students that families come in all colors, shapes, and sizes, reflecting our diverse society.

LGBTQ+ people are also part of every community. We have always been a part of human history, and we deserve to be represented in our nation’s schools. The goal is not to change what students believe at home; it is to teach them how to be respectful in a democratic and diverse world. Luckily, in her dissent, Justice Sotomayor got it right when she said that LGBTQ-inclusive education is “designed to foster mutual civility and respect.”

I could not agree more.

But here’s what the Court’s majority really got wrong: they ignored the anti-bullying efforts that motivate many LGBTQ+ inclusive education programs in the first place. According to the latest National School Climate Survey from GLSEN, 68% of American students reported feeling unsafe in school due to their SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression) characteristics.

That is two out of three LGBTQ+ youth.

These aren’t just statistics. These are real children trying to learn while dealing with a school environment that tells them, whether implicitly or explicitly, that their identities or families are somehow wrong or shameful.

When schools include diverse families in their lessons, they are not pushing an agenda. They are teaching kids that being different does not mean bad. They are giving LGBTQ+ students a chance to see themselves reflected in their education and helping other students see and understand those who are different from them.

Research shows inclusive education works. Studies have found that an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum can improve the social and emotional well-being of LGBTQ+ youth. When kids learn about different types of families early on, they are more likely to treat their classmates with kindness instead of cruelty. In other words, when implemented correctly, LGBTQ-inclusive education can be an essential anti-bullying and student well-being strategy.

For instance, as a result of my doctoral research, I have learned that some schools around the world are starting to address LGBTQ+ bullying head-on, and, not surprisingly, it’s through curriculum and instruction. In Scotland, LGBTQ-inclusive education became required in 2021 across both primary and secondary, and most major subject areas. When I interviewed government staff about their experience implementing the new policy, I learned that they even worked with religious groups to inform the effort. Faith communities could agree that inclusion was important for reducing homophobic bullying, even if they had some religious concerns. Scottish students now learn how homophobic language hurts people and develop the social-emotional skills needed for creating safer schools. It’s not ideological instruction; it’s teaching kids critical peer relationship skills.

Similar to the Scottish experience, the U.S. Supreme Court could have left the door open for education authorities to find a balance that respects both religious families and vulnerable LGBTQ+ kids. Real inclusion programs do not ask anyone to abandon their faith. They ask people to treat others with respect and dignity, a lesson I believe everyone should support in class. Kids can learn that some families have two moms without being told their family is wrong. They can remember that using “gay” as an insult hurts people without abandoning their religious beliefs. Getting to know your neighbor does not go against faith.

Unfortunately for the U.S., the impact of the Court’s decision may be severe and widespread, especially in ideologically conservative states. Instead of dealing with complicated opt-out policies, I fear many school districts will probably remove LGBTQ+ inclusive materials entirely. Unfortunately, it can be easier to bow to political pressures than to fight, especially when faced with potential lawsuits or a loss of school funding. This means LGBTQ+ kids lose representation, and all students miss out on critical lessons in diversity and inclusion.

The Court’s decision also has broader implications beyond the LGBTQ+ community. By way of a new precedent, the case approves a heckler’s veto, allowing parents to claim a religious objection to any educational content they may not align with at home. This is because the majority opinion wasn’t apparent on how opting out of inclusive education would work in practice, or what would even qualify as a personal religious objection. We might start seeing opt-out forms for instruction on topics like human evolution, women’s rights, or civil rights history. Thanks to the Court, there is no line in the sand.

When we remove students from lessons about diverse communities, we fail everyone. But the call for truly inclusive education is not going anywhere. Our kids—all of our kids—deserve better.

Darek M. Ciszek is a PhD Candidate in Education at UCLA with a research focus on curriculum, learning, and social development.

Voices is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit Advocate.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.

“Tick-eater”

Groove-billed Ani

So Many

things that are just wrong about this; things to be said about him being full of BS; things to be said about him being full of himself; that he presents as if he is actually designing and building these; that he names them Optimus (from Optimus Prime, a hero in “Transformers”), and so on, and so on, and so on…

Elon Musk Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the ‘Robot Army’ He’s Building

In a Tesla earnings call Wednesday, the world’s richest man pondered the future of his company’s Optimus robots—and his control over them.

Tesla might be an electric auto maker, but CEO Elon Musk has made clear that he thinks of it as much more: an innovator in artificial intelligence and software, a builder of world-shaking robots. He’s also argued that Tesla should be worth a lot more than it is today: up to $20 trillion, he posted in July, more than five times the current worth of Nvidia.

Musk has also made it clear that he wants to get paid, a lot. In November, Tesla shareholders will vote on the board’s proposal to pay the CEO a remarkable $1 trillion over the next decade. The deal would also increase Musk’s stake in Tesla from 13 percent to a quarter. But Musk would only get that big figure—and the extra control—if he hits a series of ambitious metrics, including 20 million vehicles delivered, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and an $8.5 trillion valuation. And also, 1 million Optimus humanoid robots delivered.

On a call with investors on Wednesday, Musk locked on to that last point to make his most threatening argument for a gigantic payday yet. “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” he said. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

Generally, Musk talks about Tesla’s Optimus project as more of a force for peace than war. He’s said that Optimus will upend the job market and free humanity from the drudgery of work. (“Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store,” he posted this week.) Elsewhere on the investor call Wednesday, he said that Tesla’s robots would “actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care.”

Optimus, he added, “will be an incredible surgeon, and imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.” For Tesla, Optimus will be “an infinite money glitch,” Musk said, arguing that everyone will want a humanoid robot who can do their work for them.

At Tesla events—and at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles—Optimus robots are usually seen doing service work: serving drinks and popcorn, or entertaining visitors by dancing or playing rock, paper, scissors. (Optimus participants in a 2024 Tesla event were later acknowledged to be not fully autonomous, but remotely operated by humans.)

Whether Optimus chooses to do laundry or battle, Tesla’s vision of a robotic future still seems a ways away. On Wednesday’s call, Musk dwelled on the challenge of building humanoid hands and forearms, seeming to confirm earlier reporting that the features were proving especially hard for Tesla engineers to hack. And while Tesla set internal goals to produce 5,000 Optimus units this year, The Information reported this month that the company scaled down those production plans over the summer. On Wednesday, Musk said Tesla would have a “production-intent prototype” ready by February or March. Full-scale production, he said, would start at the end of next year.

Centrist Dems Push Anti-Government Healthcare BS

A Good Question, Or Betteridge’s Law?

There is a fine discussion about A.I., over on Barry’s blog. But this is a different sort of use.

Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

Anthropic partnered with the US government to create a filter meant to block Claude from helping someone build a nuke. Experts are divided on whether its a necessary protection—or a protection at all.

At the end of August, the AI company Anthropic announced that its chatbot Claude wouldn’t help anyone build a nuclear weapon. According to Anthropic, it had partnered with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make sure Claude wouldn’t spill nuclear secrets.

The manufacture of nuclear weapons is both a precise science and a solved problem. A lot of the information about America’s most advanced nuclear weapons is Top Secret, but the original nuclear science is 80 years old. North Korea proved that a dedicated country with an interest in acquiring the bomb can do it, and it didn’t need a chatbot’s help.

How, exactly, did the US government work with an AI company to make sure a chatbot wasn’t spilling sensitive nuclear secrets? And also: Was there ever a danger of a chatbot helping someone build a nuke in the first place?

The answer to the first question is that it used Amazon. The answer to the second question is complicated.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Top Secret cloud services to government clients where they can store sensitive and classified information. The DOE already had several of these servers when it started to work with Anthropic. (snip-MORE on the page. It’s good-read it!)