Data obtained by VTDigger shows that police in #Vermont have conducted over 100 searches in the last three years using Flock license plate cameras.

https://vtdigger.org/2026/06/28/vermont-lawmakers-tried-to-curb-license-plate-surveillance-police-found-a-way-around-it/

The funniest thing about the #goose presentation is how completely it misses the whole point of the fable.

In the original story, the goose has been providing a steady stream of golden eggs. But the farmer gets greedy, and decides that if he cuts open the goose, he can get ALL the golden eggs inside the goose at once. But after killing the goose, he finds no eggs inside, and is left with nothing.

This is a story about the financial class, #AI, and the #Internet economy.

Anyone with a #mask and access to an electron microscope can do clandestine active monitoring for biological pathogens by wearing said mask to a large night gathering and analyzing the filter in a lab.

It's not #BioWatch , but if active monitoring is suspended, citizen science might be the last defense and the only shot at an early warning.

#Atlanta #NewYork #NewJersey #NYC #Boston #Seattle #KansasCity #maskup #covid #covidisnotover #ebola #hantavirus #dhs #hhs #vaccines

Next up, a #DEFCON #VPN service sounds awesome. Like with email there is plenty of expertise on how to build VPNs. Technically it is a realistic goal, so let's investigate!

To be attractive to a large customer base you need to offer a lot of locations with an ever changing pool of addresses for when some get blocked by someone in the world.

Those two things mean you need a pool of providers and great automation playbooks where you can easily spin up and provision "secure" VPN gateways all over the world.

Because of the reliance on 3rd parties, unlike with email, you now have to worry about the legal concept of the 3rd party doctrine, so have some more lawyers ready to do battle.

Then two things happened, I spoke with two different people with experience in the VPN game. First someone who served as a CTO to a large VPN provider.

They spent all their time trying to save money, automate more, and respond to non-stop customer complaints from over seas business people. China would block some VPN addresses and they could no longer connect to their company back home and they needed to do that RIGHT NOW. So a sort of daily fire drill. The increasing VPN competition meant they had to keep spending on advertising and cost control.

The second person put the final nail in the coffin. They explained as far as they could tell about half of all VPN providers had ties to intelligence services. Either as fronts or investors or super friendly "partners". Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, some Middle Eastern countries, all play in this space.

This means half of the VPN providers have a different business model than the other half. Their goal is maximum people at the least cost to cast as large a monitoring net as possible, and revenue from paying customers doesn't have to actually cover your operating costs.

Building a #VPN service the right way would mean we would be more expensive, in fewer locations, and support only the strongest technologies - all things that would reduce your pool of potential customers.

So, like the private email idea, it was interesting to investigate, we learned a lot, and we will never enter the VPN market.

Instead we run free #Tor relays and support @torproject Please support Tor and other privacy technologies.

"The Trump administration is holding up billions in grant funding because of a new political review process that goes up through Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the White House."

https://www.notus.org/health-science/trump-administration-hhs-health-funding-rfk-jr-robert-f-kennedy-grant-money

#healthcare #PublicHealth #biomedical #science #grants #research #HHS #CDC #SAMHSA #OMB

RE: https://climatejustice.social/@PeterRu/116822476038269087

❝ CORPORATE DEMOCRATS ❞

=

CORPORATISTS

we know #corporatism is #fascism.

∴

corporate democrats are NOT centrists. they are the fascists of the #DemocraticParty

if your opponent is a fascist, you cannot be “a little bit fascist“ and call that #centrism.

a true Democratic party would defend #democracy and oppose fascism.

a true Democratic party would be an #antifascism party and make that the anchor of their political platform.

you are for fascism or against it. it’s as simple as that.

Violence over #water resources is worsening. My new book, "When the Well is Dry," talks about the history of water conflicts &how to move to peace and cooperation. It's available for pre-order now!!

"We finally have a comprehensive account of the building water crisis that we've long needed, and that it comes with workable ideas for addressing it is a great bonus. Peter Gleick speaks with utter authority here." --Bill McKibben

https://thenewpress.org/books/when-the-well-is-dry/

There is no "gender war."

#Male #Female #Gender #Equality

@thomasfuchs

*beaver not valued in "Actual carbon storage"

#goose #beaver

Not saying carbon capture will never work, but so far, well…

Brave Little State looks at our nation's birthday, with a #Vermont perspective. https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state/2026-06-25/the-birthday-party-america-at-250

Be the elephant you wish to see in the room.

“The scope of information sought by the government here, which includes medical assessments, diagnoses, informed consent records, and revelation of plaintiffs’ transgender status, is significant,” she said, adding that that type of information is “squarely within the class of intimate materials warranting the strongest constitutional protection.”

#law #privacy #Trump #bigotry #LGBTQ #discrimination #health #medicine

🗣FINALLY!

in 2016 the king of Saudi Arabia BRAGGED to the Obama administration about how they had become The Whale that moved Wall Street. it’s no coincidence Qatar, long before that quarrel, decided #quantum computing and #AI were at the heart of their 2030 economic development plans.

THERE IS NO #TECHBROS INEVITABILITY WITHOUT #OPEC #OIL MONEY

#SiliconValley are the #petromafia’s Trojan Horse against the #ParisAccords and an existential threat to Humanity.
http://www.euronews.com/2026/06/23/no-more-hidden-costs-un-chief-demands-ai-firms-come-clean-over-environmental-footprint

Open source projects will tell you they have no choice but to allow slop, because doing anything else is a form of gatekeeping that will exclude too many potential contributors.

Nothing could be further than the truth, though. When the review queue is a non-stop machine gun of giant, bogus drive-by patches, the good contributions will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Eventually, the contributors you actually want—those who care about the long-term health of the code base, building institutional knowledge, improving their craft, mentorship—will simply leave, because they will realize their limited time and energy is better spent elsewhere.

A blanket ban on LLM contributions is not impractical, idealistic, or too radical—it's just common sense.

Newsletter: The crypto industry spent the spring buying primaries, an octagon at the White House, and — they hope — a market-structure bill by the Fourth of July.

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-106/

#Crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics

Mastodon introducing email newsletters, a feature that will allow writers to send their posts directly to subscribers’ inboxes. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/mastodon-looks-to-newsletters-to-help-revive-the-open-social-web/

Can't quotetoot the original but:

This is a VERY CLEAR attack on open source projects. Why would random people be registering domains en masse for popular open source projects that (currently) only redirect to the authoritative home?

Why? Because they're building search engine credibility. Once the attackers have gained enough credibility, they will pull the bait and swap to an attack payload at the domain.

Exercise EXTREME caution with your internet searches.

https://social.kernel.org/objects/bc6c59fe-a58c-47f7-9f1a-604d21b7f003

Céline Gounder MD articulates the current status of public health preparedness around the World Cup.

#measles #ebola #biowatch #hhs #vaccines #maskup #elbowsup #mpox #smallpox

https://www.si.com/soccer/why-us-is-unprepared-public-health-outbreak-world-cup