Lemdro.id

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43920398

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/48826507

"It is not a mild infection, it is not a mild virus; it is a severe illness. And they kept on telling me they wish they'd known beforehand how bad measles was, so that they could have protected their family," she said.

https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/116183610319293706

A consumer watchdog group is calling on the federal agency that regulates prediction markets to investigate what it says are a series of "highly suspicious bets" placed on President Donald Trump's war with Iran.

In a letter sent on Thursday to Michael Selig, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a representative for the group Public Citizen pointed out that users have been able to make off with six-figure winnings from betting on political outcomes using platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, which "advertise that you can bet on almost anything, anywhere."

"While bets on the future of the Iranian regime had been sporadic and imprecise for months before the invasion, several very substantial bets were placed in the last-minute moments prior to the February 28 attack," wrote Public Citizen's government affairs lobbyist Craig Holman.

"For most of the year, bets of [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] being removed from power were long shots and low-balled guesses," Holman said. "In just the few hours before public announcement of the February 28 attacks, the odds and amount of the bets changed radically, rising from small bets at less than 25% to a few very large bets at over 50%. In the end, a few anonymous bettors hit the nail on its head and became very wealthy."

Holman pointed to a report from NPR that an anonymous account with the username “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 placing bets on Polymarket just before the Iranian leader was killed by an Israeli strike Saturday.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported findings from the crypto analytics firm Bubblemaps, which identified “six suspected insiders” who had won a $1.2 million profit on a US strike through Polymarket. As the Journal wrote:

Most of them bet on a strike by February 28, which turned out to be the exact date of the operation, the firm said. One such user bet $26,000 and won over $200,000, a return upward of 657%.

These users’ bets were among half a billion placed on Polymarket alone regarding the precise timing of US strikes on Iran.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said "it’s insane this is legal" and that "people around Trump are profiting off war and death." He added that he was "introducing legislation ASAP to ban this."

Holman asked Selig to identify the users who placed the highly lucrative bets and who, within the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, may have been privy to insider knowledge about the strikes.

The Trump family is deeply intertwined with the world of prediction markets. The president's media company, earlier this year, partnered with Crypto.com to launch its own prediction platform called "Truth Predict." Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

The president's CFTC chair, Selig—who has appointed the CEOs of prediction market platforms as advisers—has sought to shield betting markets from regulatory scrutiny, describing his goal as ushering in "the Golden Age of American financial markets."

Last month, facing what he called “an onslaught of state-led litigation,” Selig made the legally questionable assertion that Congress had given his agency the exclusive authority to regulate these platforms, not as tightly controlled gambling hubs but as commodities markets, which have much looser rules.

The Iran war is not the first time that mystery users have walked away with massive hauls after placing fortuitously timed bets on Trump's military operations. In January, a user won $436,000 on a bet that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted by the end of the month, which they'd placed just hours before Trump's operation to remove him from power.

“Allowing prediction market platforms to bet on virtually anything, any time, is a recipe for disaster,” Holman said**.** “The American people should not have to wonder whether government officials are exploiting their access to classified information to make a quick buck. The CFTC must act swiftly to regulate platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket in order to protect the public.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

RICHMOND — Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that prohibits schools from teaching that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was a peaceful demonstration or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the first Democratic state to try to shape how such events are taught.

“The White House webpage says January 6 was a peaceful protest, and people who instigated it were the police and National Guard,” said Del. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax), the sponsor of the bill, which passed the state Senate this week and the House of Delegates last month. “This is a preventative measure against a massive disinformation campaign on the part of the White House.”

In just three days of fighting in the Middle East, more than 800 Patriot missiles were used — more than Ukraine has received throughout the entire Russian full-scale invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a press briefing on March 5.

The statement comes as tensions continue to escalate in the Middle East after the U.S., in a joint operation with Israel, carried out strikes on several Iranian cities on Feb. 28 that killed Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

"Ukraine has never had this many missiles to repel attacks. More than 800 have been used over the past three days alone," Zelensky said.

A few weekends ago, his Vancouver Island map won first place in the reference category at the CaGIS Map Design Competition, an international contest. In 2024, his Sea-to-Sky map won the same award as well as "best of show."

I would like to invite all of you Linux users to check out the latest release of Konform Browser.

Konform Browser is a free/libre and open-source (FLOSS) fork of Firefox with the primary goals of security, privacy, and user freedom. Hoping to be an example of how these three goals don’t have to be at odds but support each other and work in harmony. Would love to hear your feedback on if it's in the right direction and what can be improved.

Been posting on and off the lemmies about the project during 2026. Below are major highlights since 140.8.0-103 update from a week and a half back:

• Bundling and enforcing use of bundled fonts. Konform Browser now carries the same font-loading patches and bundled fonts as Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser. While this does increase download- and installation sizes, it has two clear benefits:
  • Significantly improved resistance against font fingerprinting used by tracking scripts. Konform Browser should now be more robust against this attack by having shared global font fingerprint.
  • All languages and scripts should render as expected regardless of what fonts you have installed on system.
• Also bundled is now Multi-Account Containers Lite addon. It's a debloated^1^ fork of Firefox Multi-Account Containers so you can utilize Container Tabs and set per-container proxies without installing addon for it.
• While "AI chatbot" feature was already disabled and hidden by default, it was previously still possible to trigger activation of proprietary networked centralized cloudbots by setting pref browser.ml.chat.enabled=true. These have now been fully removed and replaced by a single provider utilizing locally running llamafile instance.
• Ported a bunch of security fixes and improvement on fingerprinting protection from FF Rapid Release and Tor Browser which didn't make it into upstream FF ESR.

For details and references see linked release notes. For even more details I hope the commit log is digestible.

Packages available for most Linux distributions.

AUR source package

Releases

Konform Browser is also on Mastodon where followers make me happy: https://techhub.social/@konform

^1^: Similarly as rest of Konform Browser: Removal and disabling of telemetry, analytics, ads, touting, nags ("call-to-actions"), and integrations with centralized proprietary service (Mozilla VPN in this case).

Cross-post. Original Thread @ https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/56107349

Hi! I am running Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I have "Home Assistant" installed in it, I oly have some smart lights connected to it. I would like to integrate a Thermostat with HA. But I am a bit overwhelmed with the different types of connections (Z-wave, Zigbee, Wifi, ...)

Do you guys have any kind of recommendation, what connection is better? I would like to keep it local (or connecting remotely via Tailscale) but I would like to avoid any cloud or third-party server solution.

What thermostat hardware can I buy?