Lemdro.id

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/48460929

Russia’s economy has entered a phase of contraction for the first time since March 2023, with a 2.1% year-on-year drop in GDP for January, compared to the same month in 2025, The Moscow Times reported on March 5, citing Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development.

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The Ministry attributes the downturn to several factors, including a two-day reduction in the working month and extreme cold weather, which had a notable impact on industrial output. Specifically, the construction sector saw a sharp 16% contraction, a stark contrast to the previous year when it grew by 6%, thanks to an unusually warm January.

However, economists caution that even when accounting for these external factors, Russia’s economy appears to be stagnating rather than growing. Underlying economic activity has slowed down across most major sectors.

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One of the primary drivers of the economic downturn is a significant weakening of consumer demand. In 2025, consumption accounted for 51.1% of Russia’s GDP, but early data for 2026 suggests that demand is faltering. This stagnation comes on the back of a VAT hike, which has added pressure to household finances.

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Business Confidence in Russia also decreased to 0.40 points in February from 0.70 points in January of 2026, according to the Russia's Federal State Statistics Service.

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Not mine but here you go.

Internet Protocol is the protocol underlying all Internet communications, what lets a packet of information get from one computer on the Internet to another.

Since the beginning of the Internet, Internet Protocol has permitted Computer A to send a packet of information to Computer B, regardless of whether Computer B wants that packet or not. Once Computer B receives the packet, it can decide to discard it or not.

The problem is that Computer B also only has so much bandwidth available to it, and if someone can acquire control over sufficient computers that can act as Computer A, then they can overwhelm Computer B's bandwidth by having all of these computers send packets of data to Computer B; this is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Any software running on a computer

a game, pretty much any sort of malware, whatever

normally has enough permission to send information to Computer B. In general, it hasn't been terribly hard for people to acquire enough computers to perform such a DDoS attack.

There have been, in the past, various routes to try to mitigate this. If Computer B was on a home network or on a business's local network, then they could ask their Internet service provider to stop sending traffic from a given address to them. This wasn't ideal in that even some small Internet service providers could be overwhelmed, and trying to filter out good traffic from bad wasn't necessarily a trivial task, especially for an ISP that didn't really specialize in this sort of thing.

As far as I can tell, the current norm in 2026 for dealing with DDoSes is basically "use CloudFlare".

CloudFlare is a large American Content Delivery Network (CDN) company

that is, it has servers in locations around the world that keep identical copies of data, and when a user of a website requests, say, an image for some website using the CDN, instead of the image being returned from a given single fixed server somewhere in the world, they use several tricks to arrange for that content to be provided from a server they control near the user. This sort of thing has generally helped to keep load on international datalinks low (e.g. a user in Australia doesn't need to touch the submarine cables out of Australia if an Australian CloudFlare server already has the image on a website that they want to see) and to keep them more-responsive for users.

However, CDNs also have a certain level of privacy implications. Large ones can monitor a lot of Internet traffic, see traffic from a user spanning many websites, as so much traffic is routed through them. The original idea behind the Internet was that it would work by having many small organizations that talked to each other in a distributed fashion, rather than having one large company basically monitor and address traffic issues Internet-wide.

A CDN is also a position to cut off traffic from an abusive user relatively-close to the source. A request is routed to its server (relatively near the flooding machine), and so a CDN can choose to simply not forward it. CloudFlare has decided to specialize in this DDoS resistance service, and has become very popular. My understanding

I have not used CloudFlare myself

is that they also have a very low barrier to start using them, see it as a way to start small websites out and then later be a path-of-least-resistance to later provide commercial services to them.

Now, I have no technical issue with CloudFlare, and as far as I know, they've conducted themselves appropriately. They solve a real problem, which is not a trivial problem to solve, not as the Internet is structured in 2026.

But.

If DDoSes are a problem that pretty much everyone has to be concerned about and the answer simply becomes "use CloudFlare", that's routing an awful lot of Internet traffic through CloudFlare. That's handing CloudFlare an awful lot of information about what's happening on the Internet, and giving it a lot of leverage. Certainly the Internet's creators did not envision the idea of there basically being an "Internet, Incorporated" that was responsible for dealing with these sort of administrative issues.

We could, theoretically, have an Internet that solves the DDoS problem without use of such centralized companies. It could be that a host on the Internet could have control over who sends it traffic to a much greater degree than it does today, have some mechanism to let Computer B say "I don't want to get traffic from this Computer A for some period of time", and have routers block this traffic as far back as possible.

This is not a trivial problem. For one, determining that a DDoS is underway and identifying which machines are problematic is something of a specialized task. Software would have to do that, be capable of doing that.

For another, currently there is little security at the Internet Protocol layer, where this sort of thing would need to happen. A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question. One doesn't want some Computer C to blacklist traffic from Computer A to Computer B.

For another, many routers are relatively limited as computers. They are not equipped to maintain a terribly-large table of Computer A, Computer B pairs to blacklist.

However, if something like this does not happen, then my expectation is that we will continue to gradually drift down the path to having a large company controlling much of the traffic on the Internet, simply because we don't have another great way to deal with a technical limitation inherent to Internet Protocol.

This has become somewhat-more important recently, because various parties who would like to train AIs have been running badly-written Web spiders to aggressively scrape website content for their training corpus, often trying to hide that they are a single party to avoid being blocked. This has acted in many cases as a de facto distributed denial of service attack on many websites, so we've had software like Anubis, whose mascot you may have seen on an increasing number of websites, be deployed, in an attempt to try to identify and block these:

We've had some instances on the Threadiverse get overwhelmed and become almost unusable under load in recent months from such aggressive Web spiders trying to scrape content. A number of Threadiverse instances disabled their previously-public access and require users to get accounts to view content as a way of mitigating this. In many cases, blocking traffic at the instance is sufficient, because even though the AI web spiders are aggressive, they aren't sufficiently so to flood a website's Internet connection if it simply doesn't respond to them; something like CloudFlare or Internet Protocol-level support for mitigating DDoS attacks isn't necessarily required. But it does bring the DDoS issue, something that has always been an issue for the Internet, back to prominent light again in a new way.

It would also solve some other problems. CloudFlare is appropriate for websites, but not all Internet activity is over HTTPS. DoS attacks have happened for a long time

IRC users with disputes (IRC traditionally exposing user IP addresses) would flood each other, for example, and it'd be nice to have a general solution to the problem that isn't limited to HTTPS.

It could also potentially mitigate DoS attacks more-effectively than do CDNs, since it'd permit pushing a blacklist request further up the network than a CDN datacenter, up to an ISP level.

Thoughts?

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Trade ministers from Canada and the European Union are set to sign on to a series of improvements to their bilateral trade agreement.

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CETA was signed in 2016 and everything but its investment chapter took effect provisionally in 2017. Even though some EU member countries have yet to ratify the treaty in their respective legislatures, the two partners agreed to implement the deal's economic benefits, such as its tariff cuts, without waiting for its complete ratification.

CETA's current text was negotiated between 2009 and 2016, and requires modernization to address emerging issues in this rapidly evolving sector. Negotiations will officially launch Thursday to add a digital trade agreement to the existing treaty.

Other recently approved enhancements include:

• A mutual recognition agreement for architects, something the Carney government hopes will open up access to Europe's $1.1-trillion construction market to Canadian professionals.
• Expanded protocols for the manufacturing of pharmaceutical ingredients, which the two countries hope will reduce duplicative inspections and costs for that sector.
• Revisions to strengthen CETA's investment protections for small and medium-sized businesses.

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THE UNITED STATES is waging a religious war. This is, at least, how dozens of fanatical U.S. military commanders understand President Donald Trump’s illegal assault on Iran: a messianic battle to bring about Jesus Christ’s return.

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” one military commander told his combat unit, which could be deployed to fight in Iran “at any moment,” according to a complaint reportedly filed by one of the unit’s officers to a military watchdog group.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it has been “inundated” with more than 200 calls across dozens of military installations, including 110 complaints filed between Saturday morning and Monday evening, from service members reporting their commanders have invoked similar extremist rhetoric of Christian Zionist messianism when justifying the unprovoked war on Iran.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/48460929

Russia’s economy has entered a phase of contraction for the first time since March 2023, with a 2.1% year-on-year drop in GDP for January, compared to the same month in 2025, The Moscow Times reported on March 5, citing Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development.

...

The Ministry attributes the downturn to several factors, including a two-day reduction in the working month and extreme cold weather, which had a notable impact on industrial output. Specifically, the construction sector saw a sharp 16% contraction, a stark contrast to the previous year when it grew by 6%, thanks to an unusually warm January.

However, economists caution that even when accounting for these external factors, Russia’s economy appears to be stagnating rather than growing. Underlying economic activity has slowed down across most major sectors.

...

One of the primary drivers of the economic downturn is a significant weakening of consumer demand. In 2025, consumption accounted for 51.1% of Russia’s GDP, but early data for 2026 suggests that demand is faltering. This stagnation comes on the back of a VAT hike, which has added pressure to household finances.

...

Business Confidence in Russia also decreased to 0.40 points in February from 0.70 points in January of 2026, according to the Russia's Federal State Statistics Service.

...

https://social.coop/@cwebber/116178050263113242

[...]

So bezeichnete Gehrckens etwa Pforzheim als "gottlose Kanacken-Stadt" und nannte Linke "geisteskrank". Weiterhin bestätigte sie die Behauptung, die Banken in Amerika würden den Juden gehören - "das stimmt halt einfach". Über einen angeblichen Zusammenhang zwischen "Ethnie und IQ" sagte sie: "Ultra kontrovers kommt dann noch dazu, wenn du sagst, Ethnie und IQ, dass das auch zusammenhängt."

[...]

THE UPHEAVAL IN the international order prompts Canadians to think thoughts that would have seemed preposterous a short time ago. We hear our Department of National Defence is “modelling” what a US invasion might look like. A former Canadian chief of defence staff says we should keep our “options open” with respect to building our own nuclear deterrent one day.

Anyone who had been asleep for a few years and suddenly woke up would think the world had gone mad. They would be right.

One of the key developments of the last year is the loss of confidence that the United States will honour its Article V commitment under the NATO Treaty, particularly in the light of a Russia that is seen to pose a greater threat than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Article V is the promise to come to the aid of any ally under attack. A strike against one member, in other words, would automatically widen into a war with the entire alliance. If adversaries believe that promise is now conditional, negotiable, or politically fragile, then the deterrent logic collapses. Indeed, there is now a fear—apparently put aside for the moment as far as Greenland is concerned—that the US might itself attack (or at least coerce) its allies.

This raises monumental questions for the rest of NATO. One of these is whether the US nuclear guarantee, the ultimate expression of its willingness to fulfill Article V, is still worth anything. In a major study prepared for the Munich Security Conference, European security experts explored possible responses, including the creation of an independent deterrent for the continent.

Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales has dropped his re-election bid after admitting an affair, which he had previously denied, with a staff member who died by suicide.

The decision comes after the most senior members of his party in Congress released a statement calling for him to end his campaign.

"After deep reflection and with the support of my loving family, I have decided not to seek re-election," he said in a statement posted to X.

It also comes as lawmakers prepare an ethics investigation into Gonzales, and days after he failed to convince voters to back him for the party's nomination ahead of the mid-term congressional elections.

https://topspicy.social/@guffo/116176508979479573

On Tuesday, Texas held its Democratic and Republican primaries ahead of the upcoming November midterms. Democratic voters chose between Jasmine Crockett, the anti-Trump firebrand congresswoman, and James Talarico, the populist state representative, in an election that attracted national attention. Crockett conceded the race and endorsed Talarico on Wednesday, but only after claiming late on election night that she wasn’t ready to concede because of a voting issue in Dallas.

“We don’t have any of the results because there was a lot of confusion today,” Crockett told supporters at her election-night party. “We were able to keep the polls open, but I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.” Crockett received 45.6% of the vote, compared with Talarico’s 53.1%.

Voters in Dallas and Williamson counties faced challenges due to a change in voting location. Voting rights advocates say that the difficulties in voting amount to voter suppression – and they raise concerns about how smoothly the November midterms will go. (The Republican candidates, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and the incumbent senator John Cornyn, will face off in a runoff on 26 May.)

Denisse Molina, who worked as a poll monitor with the Texas Civil Rights Project in Williamson county, said that she saw several voters go into one precinct only to be routed elsewhere. In one large voting site, Democratic and Republican voters were unsure where they were supposed to go because of a lack of adequate signage.

At another site, a leasing office at an apartment complex, Molina said there were only three voting machines available despite people from 13 precincts being routed to that location. About 200 people waited in line for hours – so long that voters began to leave.

“I had never experienced voter suppression like that,” Molina said. The difficulties Molina witnessed were not isolated. Across Dallas and Williamson counties, voters described classic suppression tactics: long lines, extended wait times and confusion about voting location.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43905444