Tootfinder

A Ukrainian arms company says it has modified one of its
ground robots to carry and launch
unjammable fiber-optic drones.
Ukrainian forces can put the drones in the air closer to the front without exposing pilots.
Ratel Robotics shared a video this week of its Ratel H model robot
equipped with a protected box.
In the clip, the launcher opens up and releases a small drone connected to a fiber-optic cable.
The uncrewed ground vehicle functions as a …

These new Ukrainian ground robots can launch unjammable fiber-optic drones close to the front so troops don't have to
The Ratel Robotics' robot launches fiber-optic drones close to the front lines in Ukraine so operators can stay farther back and safer.

Very nice thread and worth the long read too on why UK electric prices are still influenced by gas.
https://mastodon.energy/@drsimevans/116222845147511874
drsimevans@mastodon.energy - NEW: Why does gas set the price of electricity – and is there an alternative?
Make yourself a tea (or grab a beer??) and enjoy my Friday longread on marginal pricing, ideas for market reform – & how to break the link btwn gas & power prices for good
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of-electricity-and-is-there-an-alternative/
1/8

Via David DiMolfetta on BlueSky
“A letter from House Dems says CISA’s former acting director failed a second polygraph exam. House Homeland staff were informed of the second exam and its results by one of the individuals placed on leave who helped administer them, a person familiar said.”

Lawmakers seek watchdog probe into former acting CISA chief’s polygraph failures
A letter penned by House Democrats indicates CISA’s former acting director failed a second polygraph examination during his tenure.

Way to Win,
a Democratic donor network and strategy organization, is launching its
“Affordability Listening Tour”
in partnership with members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The tour will hold events in battleground states, including Nevada, Texas and Arizona, with the first stop set for Saturday in Las Vegas.
Reps. Yassamin #Ansari of Arizona and Steven

Progressive Lawmakers Launch Affordability Listening Tour in Battleground States
A Democratic donor network and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus will hold small-group sessions with voters in Las Vegas, Houston and Phoenix to hear about rising costs and shape their election message.

This is my 1st time learning of #Guacamole, despite being an ASF Member. Looks cool…
Basically a J2EE app that talks HTML5 with WebSocket (or falls back to a custom HTTP-based stream proto) to a JS client in the browser on the front end, and speaks its own abstract remote desktop proto to a backend proxy that talks RDP or VNC to desktop servers. Apparently there’s also a X11 graphics drive…

Proper #security nightmare time.
#LMDB is a database that's designed to operate on trusted input. Upstream has historically rejected all bug reports regarding problems with malformed input.
Py-LMDB project provides #Python bindings to LMDB that are normally built against bundled LMDB. Someone recently started mass-filing "untrusted input" vulnerabilities against py-lmdb, and py-lmdb started #slop - coding fixes to their bundled LMDB. Of course, nobody even bothered reporting most of these bugs upstream, and the one that I've seen reported was rejected as "don't do that".
Py-LMDB supports building against system LMDB, and #Gentoo was doing that so far. However, now we are facing a problem: system LMDB operates under the assumption that it is working on trusted input, while py-lmdb (and its bundled LMDB) operates under the assumption that it may be working with untrusted input. The guarantees no longer align.
If we continue to use system LMDB (and skip all the added slop tests that literally cause Python to crash), then Gentoo's py-lmdb package will now have different input expectations than upstream py-lmdb. And of course we can't just remove that crap because someone added exactly one package (TorchVision, i.e. part of the plagiarism machine suite) depending on it.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/971352

Europeans are booking fewer trips to the US,
Europe’s biggest travel operator has said,
as appetite for long-haul travel wanes and concerns linger around Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Tui, which receives most of its bookings from customers in Europe, has seen
“significantly lower demand” for travel into the US, according to its chief executive, Sebastian Ebel.
“What we do see is growing business to the Emirates and Asia,” he said.
“We also see Europ…

The Senate returns to work today, while the House will hold a brief procedural session before getting back to regular business on Tuesday.
Lawmakers have still not passed a funding bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subagencies affected by the record-breaking partial government shutdown, now in its ninth week.
During the two-week recess, House Republican speaker Mike Johnson took no action to advance a Senate-passed measure that would reopen agencies like th…

Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery,
-- a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of rival bidder, the MAGA friendly technology heir David Ellison.
Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance,
adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer financially a…

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for Paramount Takeover
The move was a stunning development in the long-running corporate battle for the storied media giant.

In reversal, Johnson embraces Senate’s Homeland Security bill
Less than a week after he and other House Republican lawmakers rejected a Senate plan to fund the Department of Homeland Security
— but not its immigration enforcement operations
— Speaker Mike Johnson has made a complete about-face.
Johnson’s embrace of a two-track Senate bill marks a sharp reversal, after he had derided it as a “joke,”
and said he was “quite convinced that it can’t be that every S…