neopet sematary

The CDC has paused testing for rabies, smallpox, and mpox. This comes after widespread layoffs and resignations have significantly shrunk the CDC's virus teams.

I led Texas Democrats in demanding DHS abandon Big Bend’s border wall. The rugged terrain already deters crossings; a wall would only choke wildlife and trigger flash floods. We cannot let taxpayer dollars destroy one of America’s crown jewels for a barrier that isn't needed.

The most fearsome of insects—praying mantits

the funniest thing about falling out with someone is when they randomly start shitting on ur interests like? okay?😭

Pioneering the “Irish Hello” where I turn up unannounced to a friend’s location

because people would rather self-insert than ever think about what another person would think or do

VIDEO | Israeli National Security Minister Ben Gvir, outside the Knesset chamber, celebrates the passing of the death penalty law for Palestinian detainees, describing it as historic and saying, “Soon we will count them one by one.”

For $5, someone can upload your photo to an app called Sherlock and pull up your name, your social media, and every website where your face appears. The app has over a billion faces indexed. It launched in January. and it's far from the only tool that does this. PimEyes came first, back in 2017, out of Poland. It has about 3 billion face photos copied from the internet without anyone's permission. Costs $30 a month. The company runs through a tangle of businesses registered in Belize, Seychelles, and Dubai. When five people in Illinois tried to sue them for collecting face data without asking, the lawyers spent two years trying to track down PimEyes' CEO. Sent people to the country of Georgia, to Dubai, to Belize. Never found him. The case got dropped. Clearview AI is the one police use. Over 70 billion face photos in its system. There are about 8 billion people on Earth, so Clearview has roughly 9 photos for every one of them, pulled from social media, news articles, and random websites without asking. Ukraine's military used Clearview to identify over 230,000 Russian soldiers during the war. The database keeps doubling roughly every 18 months. Texas sued Meta for scanning Facebook users' faces without consent and collected $1.4 billion. Then went after Google for the same thing and got $1.375 billion. Meta had already paid Illinois $650 million in 2020. TikTok paid $92 million. Clearview settled for $51 million. Total payouts from face-scanning lawsuits across the US: over $3.5 billion. Last October, two Harvard juniors connected PimEyes to a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses (regular-looking sunglasses with a tiny camera built into the frame) and built a system called I-XRAY. They walked around campus, looked at strangers, and within about a minute had each person's name, home address, phone number, and part of their Social Security number show up on their phone. They didn't release the code, but said anyone who can write basic code could build the same thing with tools already available online. On March 17, three US senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking what Meta plans to do about facial recognition in its smart glasses. Their letter pointed out that one person wearing these glasses could scan thousands of faces in a day without anyone knowing. There is still no federal law in the US covering any of this. Illinois passed one back in 2008. A few states have followed. For everyone else, the only thing between your photo and your home address is whether someone feels like spending five bucks.

what a boring world, without giants, without dragons, without monsters under bridges, without vampires in castles...