When you think of disinfecting a space, what comes to mind? Wipes? Gels? Sprays? Maybe air purifiers or effective HVAC systems? All of these are great defenses against viruses and bacteria, but one thing has been missing from the toolkit despite our knowing about it for over a century: light.
Ultraviolet light is an incredibly powerful disinfectant. Study after study has proven that it can obliterate viruses and bacteria, and yet it’s not often thought about as a defense against germs. In fact, when most people think of UV, they think of the harmful rays from the sun that cause cancer — not the PR you want when advertising, obviously. Luckily, a few years after the pandemic lockdowns, researchers have found a type of UV that isn’t strong enough to penetrate human skin but still effectively stops the germs. Could it be our next defense? Check out the video above to learn more.
I often don’t feel well or have mind fog. Sometimes l get busy or for some other reason I need to take extra medications. Strong amounts of morphine, muscle relaxers, others. Everything makes my mind foggy. Plus last year I had a TIA ischemic event that messed with my ability to think and even speak properly. Also sometimes I just don’t feel up to dealing with other blog posts and even comments.
So I developed a system of saving open chrome pages of posts or comments in tabs, and building tabs up in different days windows. Sometimes I end up with 6 or 8 open windows saved with over 400 tabs in them combined. Over the last 6 or so weeks I had 8 open windows with over 60 to 80 tabs each. I could even close them and shut down the computer, as long as I did not clean the history.
I have three utility programs that are set to be run manually that clean the entire computer, including the internet browsers histories. Set to be run manually. Well one of those updated this morning. I never thought much of it, it happens a lot automatically. This time it bit me hard in the ass. See this time it reset my clean the browsers settings to automatically when closed. I needed to do some updates and restart the computer. No problem as I could close the tabs and then when the computer updated and restarted I could just reopen the saved tabs. I let the updates happen and restarted the computer.
When the computer restarted, I noticed CCleaner running. That seemed strange. I realized why when I opened chrome, opened the history to restore the more than 6 weeks of saved tabs full of comments and posts to find … everything gone! WTF. I checked the history on other devices, it was there, but the history for Play Blogger was gone. Damn it all to …
Seems when CCleaner updated, it changed the cleanup settings to automatically when closed. When I closed the browser windows the program cleaned the history.
I will try the hardest way to do comments, by going back through the admin board. But if you did leave an unanswered comment in the last 7 weeks, please let me know, I can look up the post to see the comments. I am so frustrated. And just want to forget the entire thing and go watch videos and play Halo. Hugs. Scottie
Coconut octopuses are vulnerable to blacktip sharks, who use smell to find prey. With the help of an unlikely ally, this octopus is able to hide from hungry sharks.
A robocall that used an AI voice resembling President Joe Biden’s to advise New Hampshire voters against voting in the state’s presidential primary has been linked to a pair of Texas-based telecommunications companies, the state’s attorney general announced on Tuesday.
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, in a news conference on Tuesday, said the source of the calls were linked to two businesses: Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. Formella identified Walter Monk as the owner of Life Corporation.
Formella said the investigation is ongoing and suggested it involves additional entities other than Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. He did not say who, or what entity, was ultimately behind the disinformation campaign and the creation of the AI audio. No charges have been filed, Formella said.
“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws. We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom, and any other individual or entity,” Formella said.
Formella said that the robocalls numbered in the “thousands,” though he offered a wide range of 5,000 to 25,000.
The calls were made ahead of New Hampshire’s presidential primary in January, urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the contest and instead “save” their vote for the November election.
“Republicans have been trying to push nonpartisan and Democratic voters to participate in their primary. What a bunch of malarkey,” says the digitally altered Biden voice in the call. “We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It’s important that you save your vote for the November election. We’ll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.”
Biden’s campaign at the time said it had been referred to the attorney general, and slammed the call as disinformation.
“I think this case is unique in that it is providing us a real-life example of an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election,” Formella said on Tuesday. “That’s been something that we’ve been concerned about in the law enforcement for a while, and it’s certainly something that state attorneys general have talked about. But we had not seen as concrete of an example as this, days before a primary, an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election or to mislead voters.”
Formella also said that other unnamed entities potentially had relevant information about the robocalls, though he declined to share specifics.
“I’m not going to give you an exact number but I can say it’s beyond the two – it’s beyond Texas Life Corporation, Walter Monk, and Lingo Telecom. There are other entities that we think have relevant information, and I would not be surprised if we discover additional entities or individuals beyond those that we have discovered up to this point,” he said.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez commended Formella in a statement on Tuesday.
“Disinformation aimed at suppressing voting and deliberately undermining free and fair elections is an unacceptable threat, and we commend the New Hampshire Attorney General for taking the matter seriously and moving swiftly as a powerful example against further efforts to disrupt democratic elections,” she said.
An AI voice creation tool
The fake audio was created using an AI voice creation tool named ElevenLabs, according to two separate analyses by the security company Pindrop and by digital forensic experts at University of California, Berkeley.
ElevenLabs told CNN in a statement that it is “dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools” and that it takes appropriate action in response to reports by authorities, but declined to comment on the specific Biden deepfake call.
Monk has had run-ins with US robocall regulations before, said Formella and the Federal Communications Commission. On Monday, the FCC issued a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom and said both Lingo and Monk’s company, Life Corporation, have previously been warned about apparent illegal robocall violations.
In July of 2003, the FCC issued a citation to Life Corporation for delivering “one or more prerecorded unsolicited advertisements to residential telephone lines.”
In the citation, the FCC said Monk’s company delivered the prerecorded advertisement calls to telephone subscribers who did not have a business relationship with the company and did not authorize the calls.
The FCC’s citation found that Life Corporation did not disclose required information in the prerecorded calls – including the name of the caller, who the call is made on behalf of, and an address or telephone number.
The citation — which is addressed to Life Corporation along with 16 other business aliases for the company — notes that the unsolicited advertisement calls were in violation of the Communications Act of 1934, as well as the FCC’s rules regarding telephone solicitation.
Included in the citation is a warning that subsequent violations would result in financial penalties of up $11,000 for each such violation or each day of a continuing violation.
Telecom companies that persistently facilitate illegal robocalls can and have been forcibly disconnected from the US telephone network by FCC order, as part of a wider crackdown on illegal robocalls by state and federal officials.
More than 50 attorneys general from both political parties wrote to Life Corporation on Tuesday about the AI-generated robocall, as part of a task force focused on anti-robocall litigation.
The attorneys general expressed concerns that Life Corporation or others “may seek to replicate in each of our respective states” the type of deepfake calls that hit New Hampshire. The letter told Life Corporation “that it should cease originating any illegal call traffic immediately,” adding that the calls risked violating numerous laws.
In social media profiles reviewed by CNN, Monk describes himself as a serial entrepreneur and, in an interview with Dallas Magazine in 2016, discussed many of his business ventures that failed. The list included a company marketing “upscale survival gear” to women, which Monk reportedly spent more than $1 million of his own money on but that Dallas Magazine wrote was a “failure of epic proportions.”
One of Monk’s ventures, a company known as Voice Broadcasting, has been paid to send political robocalls and advertises the ability to send 8 million calls per day on behalf of clients. When CNN attempted to contact Voice Broadcasting, a person who answered the phone said Monk was “very busy” and that the company is “undecided” on whether to issue a statement.
Little is known about Monk’s own political history. According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by CNN, Monk and his ex-wife each donated $5,000 in 2008 to PLR PAC, a Kansas-based political action committee that has spent most of its receipts on advertisements airing on Spanish-language broadcast channels.
Senior US law enforcement officials have been closely monitoring the New Hampshire robocall incident to determine if a federal crime was committed, a senior US official familiar with the matter told CNN.
The official declined to discuss the status of any investigation into the robocalls, but said that the Justice Department has brought at least one recent case against a defendant accused of suppressing votes by spreading false information. That case was against Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer accused of targeting Black voters on Twitter with false messages claiming they could vote for Hillary Clinton via text message in the 2016 election. Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison in October.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Allison Gordon, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez and Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.
Hello all. So Sunday I decided to dump my video computer, clean out some old stuff, clean it up, reorganize it, and tweak the setting. The reason was I had a Microsoft security update that kept faulting out on installation. I did a quick search on it, did not see anything about it online, and Ron kept pushing me to do stuff to distract me. I had suffered from the resurfacing of some abuse memories, I was feeling sick because on Thursday I had steroid injections into my spine, Friday I got allergy shots, and then this weekend I was to take my testosterone injection and that really hurts. Then to top it off, the new roof has leaked and water leaked down into the ceiling and now we had mold growing in the bedroom.
I decided to do a full deep clean. I could have just reset windows and left the drive alone. But I wanted a good clean up. So I had the computer wipe the drives, remove everything on them, which means I had to rebuild the directories, switching things from the C drive to the D drive that has twice the room for data, photos, videos, movies, TV, and any other storage needs than the C drive which I save for program files. That took most of one day. Then Monday I was really feeling badly, and noticed I still had the same issue. This time I did a deep dive search in the error codes and self repair. It involved the size of the rescue environment section on the hard drive. I was seeing how large I would have to make it to fix the issue when I saw that a lot of people who tried this self repair did not get the issue fixed and had to end up reinstalling windows and or repartitioning their hard drives again. While I have good software for this and have done it many times, I was not wanting to spend the time because I was not feeling well. Still am not. So I did what I should have done in the very first place. I started reading the Microsoft Windows support community posts, and more important, the replies from Microsoft staff. Turns out on Jan 10th they released a statement acknowledging the problem, the failure of the update to install on a lot of computers and they were working on a fix for the next batch of Windows updates. Everything I had done until then and the next day and half of putting all my programs back on and their settings correct, was not needed. Grrr. All because I did not want to spend a half a day wading through all the community support stuff I ended up doing anyway. Well I was distracted from the other issues. Hugs. Scottie
The right lives on hate, racism, and bigotry. They can not allow other religions, minorities, people different from them to have the same rights and opportunities. For some reason they feel that others having the same rights they have makes them less than, makes them lessor as people. They take no joy in the happiness and success of others. They hate the inclusion of anyone slightly different from them, and they react with temper tantrums. Look at the meanness towards and smug superiority they think they have over others. Instead of admiring the skill of the flight crew, the pilots and the plane stewards that saved lives, these people mock and slur others. Hugs. Scottie
They’re blaming airline safety issues on disabled people, Black people, women, and drag queens to gin up anti-diversity sentiment.
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Conservatives are angry that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been, for at least a decade, trying to expand the diversity of its workforce, and they’re blaming gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
A terrifying video of a door blowing off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 went viral earlier this month. No one died, but the Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to return to the airport and make an emergency landing. Some loose bolts around doors were found when other planes of the same type were later inspected.
She didn’t hesitate to launch homophobic attacks on the out Transportation Secretary and his husband, but now that she wants some of that cash for her district, she’s trying to play nice.
“The FAA is the latest victim of the radical [diversity, equity, and inclusion] agenda,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on social media this week. “Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with ‘severe intellectual disabilities.’ How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being hired based on DEI rather than qualifications for the position?”
DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” workplace policies that seek to hire and support candidates from diverse backgrounds. Right-wingers have increasingly targeted these policies as a “woke” form of “identity politics” while ignoring the workplace disparities that they seek to address.
The FAA is the latest victim of the radical DEI agenda.
Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with 'severe intellectual disabilities.'
How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being…
Boebert was likely referring to a story that spread like wildfire on conservative media. The conservative New York Post ran a story about the FAA policy – which the Post stressed is “overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation” – with the headline, “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”
The story noted that the FAA has a diversity statement on its site that says it recruits people with disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”
X CEO Elon Musk shared the Post’s story and wrote: “Just had a conversation with some smart people could not believe this is happening.” He also shared a post that claimed that Black airline employees lower the “average IQ of US Air Force pilots.”
The problem with their explanation? The policy has been on the FAA since at least 2013, during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration didn’t do anything to remove it. The Post’s story didn’t mention the fact that the policy is from 2013 and instead just noted that the FAA’s website was updated in 2022, which isn’t a relevant fact to the story but may have been intended to imply that the policy was put in place during Buttigieg’s tenure.
“The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions,” the FAA said in a statement. The FAA has 45,000 employees. “Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that, of course, will vary by position.”
Snopes noted that the rightwing “media coverage provided no evidence linking any DEI initiative with the Alaska Airlines incident” and that the investigation into the Alaska Airlines flight is still ongoing.
But disabled and Black people aren’t the only group that conservatives are blaming for the incident. Hate influencer and former realtor Chaya Raichik – whose Libs of TikTok account has been massively influential in spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and has led to hospitals getting bomb threats and queer and trans teachers getting death threats – decided it was women’s fault.
That’s because Southwest Airlines made an innocuous post about an all-women flight crew shortly after the Alaska Airlines incident.
“All female flight crew? Go off, queens!” the Southwest Airlines’s X post read. The post included a picture of six smiling women in a plane.
“They’re openly mocking us,” Raichik wrote, sharing the post. “They know what they’re doing.” The implication was that supporting women in the workplace was somehow inappropriate following the incident in the Alaska Airlines flight.
Her post was viewed around 300,000 times and widely shared on the platform. Southwest later deleted their post celebrating the women.
Later in the week, Raichik raged at United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby doing drag at a Halloween party in 2011. Kirby is married to a woman and has seven children with her, but being a stereotypically masculine, straight, cisgender white man wasn’t enough to protect him from the right’s grievances about diversity in the workforce.
“This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into United,” Raichik wrote. “This video should tell you everything you need to know.”
This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of @united. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into @united.
Anti-trans activist and fifth-place swimmer Riley Gaines responded to the video, writing, “It’s time to bring back shame.” She also wrote that people “fly United at your own risk,” not explaining exactly how she connected the video to flight safety.
Cisgender, heterosexual white men on the right have donned drag in the past without controversy, including Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) boyfriend, rightwing media personality Brian Glenn. Greene, who has protested drag queen shows in the past, laughed off claims that there was anything inappropriate about her boyfriend doing drag because it happened “years ago.” The same grace, though, apparently doesn’t apply to CEOs of airlines that support diversity in the workplace.
Buttigieg, for his part, assured travelers that he has confidence in the FAA’s ability to keep flights safe, noting that they grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets for further inspection following the Alaska Airlines incident. He explained that FAA staff is putting in extra hours to get to the root of the problem.
“I have confidence in any aircraft cleared by the FAA,” he told reporters last week. “The FAA’s doing a great job and [FAA Administrator] Mike Whitaker’s doing a great job.”
He added that, as a father, the images of the plane with the door blown out affected him.
“Anybody looking at those pictures has to be thinking about what you’d do in that situation,” he said, explaining that he was just on a flight with one of his children. “That is what’s on our mind.”
Russian hackers were inside Ukrainian telecoms giant Kyivstar’s system from at least May last year in a cyberattack that should serve as a ‘big warning’ to the West, Ukraine’s cyber spy chief told Reuters.
6 minute readgrinvalds/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock
Scottie's Playtime 