It turns out that no, I was not sure about that.

Billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos said on Tuesday it was suspending operations at three chemical plants ​in Hull, UK, blaming high European gas ‌prices that have made production too expensive.

The three plants employ almost 4,000 people and makes chemicals used in medicines, clothing, cosmetics, detergents, building ​materials and explosives, the company said.

The latest update to Calibre, the popular open-source ebook manager, features an AI-powered writing game.

Calibre v9.15’s “Create Your Own Adventure” mode, per the release notes, lets you build a fictional world and hand control of it to an AI who will manage it in real time based on your responses. A bit like old text-based RPGs, I guess.

The changelog notes, with obvious understatement, that the feature is “a little different” from Calibre’s usual fare, adding it began as a way for developers to test the tool’s AI backend before developing into “something fun to use”. Calibre Create your own adventure AI feature wizard Setting up your AI world in Calibre v9.15

Like all AI features in Calibre, it’s completely optional as it relies on you use adding an API key for a compatible LLM. To try it, go to Preferences > Toolbars and add the “Create your own Adventure” button to a toolbar. Click this to open a setup wizard.

This isn’t the first puzzling AI feature the Calibre has gained. Last month it added hooks to generate ebook covers using AI prompts and preset styles (a noir Wuthering Heights; a pulp sci-fi Barbara Cartland novel, and so on).

Calibre users are, largely, people who like reading books – most with a long backlog of titles they’re not getting through1. Folks who like using LLMs to generate fiction likely have no need for an ebook manager, and vice versa.

I do wonder if Calibre ought to focus on adding AI features that help, rather than distract: letting users sort ebooks, fix metadata or generate “playlists” of what read next based on a users’ library and tastes.

Generating slop covers, summarising books and, now, generating fiction feels2 at odds with its role. Other changes in Calibre 9.15

This update also ships with improvements that don’t cause a collective head scratch.

The Highlights panel in the ebook viewer lets you select multiple highlights and right-click them to change the style, and if a highlight has notes, you can see that note in a hover tooltip when you mouse over it (this behaviour can be disabled).

More customisations are present. A button can be added to the sidebar to change between saved window sizes, and in the cover grid you can now choose which corner of book emblems appear via Preferences > Look & Feel > Cover grid > Layout.

Plenty of bugs were fixed, including issues with Read Aloud stopping at large images, a spellcheck quirk that overlooked words with a single apostrophe and Calibre not starting for users in Alberta Canada after its recent timezone change. Where to get Calibre

Calibre is free, open-source software for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Download Calibre from the official website – on Linux, Calibre is installed and updated via a command-line script that will download a binary, unpack it to a system folder and create the various .desktop shortcuts needed to find and open it in app menus, etc.

Alternatively, you can get Calibre on Flathub, although it is an unverified build.

Artist: Sheya | bluesky | pixiv | twitter | danbooru

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412342/companies-make-it-hard-to-access-your-personal-data-under-state-privacy-laws-cr-finds-on

Nearly every time you buy something online or sign up for a loyalty program, you leave behind personal information that can be collected, shared, and sold among companies including advertisers, retailers, and data brokers. This kind of information is sometimes used to charge consumers more for a range of products and services, from groceries to insurance to mortgages, and to target them for financial fraud and identity theft.

A growing number of state privacy laws were designed to give consumers some control over that information, including the right to see what companies know about them. But a yearlong Consumer Reports investigation found that exercising those rights can often be extremely difficult—and that many companies and data brokers appear to be falling short of their legal obligations.

Over the past year, CR worked with 84 citizen volunteers to request their personal data from 169 companies they regularly interact with and 22 data brokers. The results were concerning: Roughly 25 percent of requests to companies failed to receive a response. Among data brokers, the failure rate was 34 percent, even though some of those brokers claim to maintain data on the vast majority of U.S. households.

Google says the laptops pair Android technology with ChromeOS desktop foundations and are designed to work well with Android phones. It plans an October 4, 2026, retail launch. Prices start at $899, with Intel and Snapdragon systems available.

cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/57504040

Source: Gochiusa. Made with ImageMagick.

I use open source self hosted software everyday. I love the community and I would love to be able to contribute to some of these projects.

As far as code goes, I basically no nothing about how it works. I see the development section of the repos I use and again, I’ve go no idea how it works.

How can I teach myself how to offer small improvements to the projects I use?

The French defense contractor Thales has introduced HexaForce

Source

Reference:

This wasn’t the first time Waymo has tattled on alleged troublemakers. In July, Waymo contacted the San Mateo Police Department after two teens were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of a car, authorities said at the time.

Under a new proposal, Europol is set to receive unprecedented access to personal data related to current and potential cross-border investigations. It’s part of a wider plan to expand the use of AI in policing.

Europol is not currently allowed to search for and store personal data without, according to the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), “indications” that the data is relevant. But in May 2026, former Europol officials revealed to investigative journalists that the agency has been running “shadow systems” for years. These parallel systems sit outside the agency’s mainframe, allowing them to avoid data protection and IT design requirements.

The plans would also expand Europol’s role in dealing with the private sector. The agency would become the central “hub” for private actors to share information and receive funding for digital policing tools development. Such tools include tech for subverting encryption, for instance, or for scaling up automated profiling.

Today’s game is some more Assassin’s Creed 3. I’ve been working on clearing the DLC. I made it about half way through. So far the story has been a bit mediocre, but I am really loving the new gameplay mechanics. I think in a base game they’d get old fast but in a small DLC like this? They’re a blast because they’re these cool overpowered tools that bring up the scope of what you can do.

So far my favorite has been the eagle ability just because it’s like a grappling hook. It’s a blast to use.

I’ve also been trying to get all the optional objectives. I want to 100% the DLCs too so those are something I’ll have to work towards too. So far it hasn’t been that bad. Some of the objectives are hard, nowhere near the level of the base game though.

I stopped for today and ended up going back to the first episode to finish a few tasks I missed. I thought they’d be a pain to do but I found I could farm them all by running out of the space where they spawn and running back, then I could keep farming that for the goal. I doubt this will be of any use to anyone, but the location is the hill between Lexington (or Concord, I can’t remember, whichever is closer to Valley Forge) and Valley Forge. I found running across the River and back would force it to spawn and I could repeat that for the 5 “Save the NPC from wolves” goal.

The package adds requirements involving electricity costs, water use and local control and requirements for AI data centers to pay for upgrades to the local energy grid. Newsom said the laws would give communities more control over electricity, water and land.

Artist: Tomoja Rs | twitter | danbooru

無題 | pocche #pixiv www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/149626848

Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.

The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections. The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation.

While much of the automatic license plate reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

It was way easier than I thought it would be to get started. I put Sparky Linux on an 18 year old laptop and moved a bunch of movies and shows over to it, got Tailscale squared away, and now I can watch my media ANY WHERE IN THE WORLD. The only problem is storage. Jellyfin doesn’t recognize my external drive for some reason and says the path is invalid. Is there a simple solution I’m missing?

Also I’m just stoked I was able to do this. I know I just followed a recipe, but it’s a pretty cool feeling having all my music and shows right there, and I don’t have to pay some middle man one red can’t to access media I already own.

So I asked if I was an idiot for coming up with the bright idea to start my own lemmy instance. Well I can proudly state that yes, I am an idiot, but I’m an idiot with his own lemmy instance: MopLemmy.fyi. Barebones and barely federated, but by God it’s mine.

A brief summary of the issues I ran into: Lemmy Easy Deploy was absolutely the right way to go, thanks ᛒᛚᚢᛖᛇᚦᛖᚱ@no.lastname.nz for that suggestion. I’ve very new to several aspects of this so just understanding containers and when to use LED commands and not standard container commands ended up being the biggest hurdle to deploying the instance.

Email. Everything about getting the SMTP setup was basically terrible. Brevo won’t let you make an account using an email address with a “.” in it, so I ended up needing to make an email account so I could make an email account. Then I was troubleshooting a typo error for too long, and then I was troubleshooting a bad bit of info I got from the internet which had me using my account email address instead of the Brevo created one for the SMTP, so those were human error and by far the single most time consuming issue.

Second to that, a script to check if my external IP address changed. This ended up being the single most annoying thing, partly because of my newbity. I was using Remote Desktop Connection into my Linux box and copy and pasting stuff. Copy and paste was screwing up the data and kept breaking things. Once I realized that and switched to SSH things went smoother. I know, rookie mistake.

Setting up backups to my RAID that I could then access from my Samba share ended up being another issue. First it was saving to the wrong folder, then I thought I had broken my Samba share and couldn’t access it from the network… and the problem ended up being UFW because I forgot to allow Samba through the frickin’ firewall. Oh and then the same thing happened when I was trying to look at my Netdata but at least that time I figured it out much quicker.

Those were the major annoyances, the rest was more about the learning experiences of finding out certain things were a lot more complicated than I thought they would be. I did not expect to have to put so many different DNS records. I didn’t expect to have to spend so much time deciding on white list vs black list federation, or host images local or not, or image retention, etc. But it’s up and stable and working and I am very slowly federating to more communities and deciding what all I want to be able to see. Thanks to everyone on the original post with advice and suggestions, even the people who suggested things I ended up not doing, heh.

I created a tool that’s easy to set up and gives you fast and beautiful web UI and TUI from a single Go binary.

It can serve both as a cron replacement, or just as a cron supplement - let’s say, to version control your cron tasks in a small team. It also has an alert system that allows you to send slack/discord/telegram/email when something bad happens.

I want your feedback. You can help me shape this product into something people will find pleasant to use.

This daemon is copyleft GPL-3.0-or-later - completely free to use.

RunWisp is currently in pre-release phase but is slowly approaching its v1.0 stable release.

Website: runwisp.com

GitHub repo: github.com/runwisp/runwisp - feel free to open an issue!

Quick start: docs.runwisp.com/getting-started/quick-start/

AI Disclosure

• Design - Hint
• Implementation - Pair
• Testing - Assisted
• Documentation - Pair
• Review - Hint

In January, the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism unit sent out a memo warning police officers about a new potential “security and counterintelligence” threat: Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

The memo directed officers to “conduct thorough inspections of all eyewear permitted within inmate cells” and cautioned that people who have been arrested could use these glasses, equipped with small cameras and microphones, to record inside police facilities. The memo cited two examples of such videos posted on social media.

“The ability to covertly record inside a law enforcement or detention facility, could result in a security risk if proprietary information about cell layouts, camera placements, or officer patrol/site protection routines are released,” the memo read.

If they put cameras in your bathroom and you are not aware, your privacy wasn’t violated

This was the Chairman of the US Intelligence Committee

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1413780/chatgpt-now-knows-what-you-do-on-other-websites-via-ad-collector

Hacker News.

Get your shortnames while the getting’s good.

I’ve been using Linux for decades, I’ve worked as a software engineer/architect/sre for around a decade, but networking has always been my biggest gap in knowledge.

I have a local server, I have caddy spun up, a glinet router running their version of openwrt, and I have a domain name purchased through porkbun.

I am looking to setup “local.domain.com” to point to my local server, ideally without exposing it publicly, and enable devices on my home network to be able to access it from that url. Id also like to be able to access containers running on that server by something like “searxng.local.domain.com” or “local.domain.com/searxng” aka without using the port suffix. Id also like to enable https.

I have read so many guides that have fragments of what I need, but nothing that ties enough together to get it working. And with all the options around different domain registers, let’s encrypt, reverse proxies, etc, im struggling just a bit.

Are their any guides (prefer text over YouTube, but beggars cant be choosers) that people recommend that encompass the whole process, instead of just pieces? Id like to understand it instead of just fumble through it.