If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The political push for online platforms to introduce age verification was never a war between users and their privacy could win – if the battle to prevent it in the first place was lost. The reasons are the methods and technologies available – one being the unmasking of all users with government-issued IDs, while one seeming alternative, now in the works over at Meta, is yet another facet of the age verification dystopian nightmare. Reports say that instead of seeking outright proof of identity (and therefore age), Meta (Facebook, Instagram) is opting to “estimate” that age – by going the route of aggressive data mining. The “AI” tool Meta plans to put to use is proprietary – meaning, closed-source, therefore unavailable to a public audit, despite the fact it is affecting billions of users. It is called, an “adult classifier.” The tool goes through content related to users’ profiles, and the profiles themselves in the hope of “guessing” whether they belong to somebody 18 and under, or an adult. As is to be expected of proprietary software, the giant isn’t – because it doesn’t have to – revealing how accurate the results are expected to be. What is known is that the type of data Meta is gathering and analyzing is found in users’ follower lists, including things like “happy birthday” messages. But in the end, if it decides this is insufficient to “guess” the real age, or suspects a user’s self-reported age is fake, Meta will ask for proof of real-world identity. All this is now developing around an Instagram feature announced in September, known as “teen accounts,” which feature appropriately restricted settings. Thus far, the information used by Instagram has been the birthday each user declares while creating an account, but now the murky – in both its mechanics and usefulness – tool, the “adult classifier” – is coming onto the scene. It does look like Meta trying to convince the world it is doing something, while in the end, the whole thing comes down to demanding proof of identity via government-issued ID. The circle is complete – those counting on spreading biometric mass surveillance will have their way. “Teens who try to manually increase the age listed on their account will have to prove themselves by uploading formal identification, like a driver’s license, or by sending in a video-selfie to Yoti, a third-party service that can estimate age based on facial features,” says a report. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Privacy Takes a Hit: Meta’s Digital ID Check Plans Dig Deeper Than Ever appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

In Scotland, whose witch trials were among Europe’s most deadly, 3,000 people burned at the stake for witchcraft – a startling proportion of its overall population. Like other places, the Scottish witch hunt began during times of political instability and unrest. And as elsewhere, the witch acquired a particular representation. European artists played an important role in shaping the image of the witch, transforming it into a powerful cultural symbol. In the History Hit film The King’s Curse: Scotland’s Notorious Witch Trials, art historian Dr Catriona Murray explains how these depictions evolved. Sign up to watch The broomstick, for example, is evident in a medieval manuscript which identifies two women who are religious heretics. The broomstick is a classic icon now associated with witches, but why is it included here? “I suspect they are acting as phalluses,” explains Murray. “They are empowering these women and they are riding them. On another level they provide flight, and that’s one of the key characteristics of witches, that they fly to their Sabbath.” Albrecht Dürer’s later, memorable depiction of witches resembles how we often think of witches today. “This is the hag, the crone. And one of the other things that’s very interesting about it is that she’s naked,” says Murray. “There’s a real focus on the gross nakedness of this old woman.” Witchcraft was often linked with ugliness, and Dürer’s witch has aged features and withered limbs. The Witch, Albrecht Dürer, circa 1500 Additionally, Dürer depicts her riding a goat, an animal particularly linked with the devil. She does so backwards to signify that the natural order is upset. “There’s a feeling of real [discomfort] here, that things do not happen as you expect them to happen.” “This is the subversion of what the feminine should be doing, that there’s this patriarchal anxiety going on here,” says Murray. The growing fear of witches in the 16th century included increased anxiety about them joining together in a coven. Increasingly witches were depicted in a group, as in a painting of the witch’s sabbath by Frans Francken. Francken picked up his brush at a time when the Spanish Netherlands experienced a growing panic about witches. He portrays witches of different social orders engaged in lewd dancing, spells and incantations, and also reading grimoires, which links female literacy and knowledge with witchcraft. Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, ‘Hammer of Witches’, had already provided instruction on how to catch witches. Kramer argued that women were particularly prone to witchcraft. He wrote accounts of their alleged powers and habits, including the harvesting of male organs and depositing them in birds’ nests, “where they move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn”. In The King’s Curse: Scotland’s Notorious Witch Trials, Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney investigate one of Europe’s bloodiest witch hunts: Scotland’s North Berwick Witch trials of 1591. In this extraordinary case, fears escalated all the way up the social hierarchy to the king himself, James VI. A wild storm in the North Sea had nearly killed James and his new wife Anne of Denmark, fuelling his fascination with the intellectual study of demonology. A maelstrom of terror brought together the king’s paranoia of a conspiracy against him with local rivalries and misfortune. It twisted together the fates of individuals from maidservants to magistrates in the hunt for scapegoats. Anthony and Maddy host After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal, a History Hit podcast. Sign up to watch The King’s Curse and to listen ad-free to After Dark. Sign up to watch

One specimen had a tongue length of 28.5 centimeters (11.2 inches) when fully unrolled.

Beneath the deep red rock, the rover found unusual patches of green.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read. The post UFOs Hacked Nuclear Codes: Russia and USA Were Near the Brink of Nuclear War appeared first on Anomalien.com.

The 2024 presidential campaign is ending pretty much where it began: loathing the never-ending presence of Donald Trump. On the day before the election, The New York Times front page displayed a gaudy editorial (badly disguised as “News Analysis”) under the title “Torrent of Lies Redefines Political Norms.” Doesn’t that sound like a hard-charging rerun of 2016? Nothing ever seems to change from the paper that gaudily proclaimed under Trump that “The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever.” You can point and laugh, since The New York Times refused to admit that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of corruption details was authentic until 2022, and then it acknowledged reality in a story on page A-20, in paragraph 23. It was buried, almost like an unmarked grave. Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker’s editorial bubbled over with contempt for how many lies Trump told in the first 300 seconds of an interview with Tucker Carlson on Halloween. “Public appearances by Mr. Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality.” Baker thinks it’s amusing that Trump will sell his administration as the greatest ever seen in American history. Baker can’t imagine anyone thinks he and his journalist wife Susan Glasser and his journalist friends sound like the exact opposite. They have sold Trump’s administration as the most horrendous years America has ever seen.   Every American who pays even a moment’s attention to American politics knows that Donald Trump exaggerates wildly and egotistically, selling himself like he’s closing another real-estate deal. Everything is the best or the worst ever. Everyone loads that into their political calculus. But Democrat-coddling journalists act perpetually shocked, like they’re all starring in the movie 50 First Dates and forget every night how Trump operates. What’s really shocking here is how the major media pretends that the Democrats are dramatically more honest, like ten times more honest. Set apart on page A-16 is their New York Times analysis of candidate speeches. “64” is the number of false or misleading statements at a typical Trump rally, according to them. By contrast, “6” is the number of false or misleading statements at a typical rally for Kamala Harris. The obvious joke is that Trump’s rally speeches can go on for 90 minutes, while Kamala is closing out the campaign with ten-minute speeches. So what’s the minute-by-minute falsehood rate? Under these stilted numbers is “33 percent,” as in the percentage of registered voters who agree with Trump’s false claims that Biden “did not legitimately win.” The Times can’t acknowledge the fraction of this 33 percent who believe dramatic media suppression of Biden scandal news can translate into “illegitimate” victory. You can accept the result and yet protest the unfair process. Then the partisanship is underlined by their selected expert. “No one in American politics has ever lied on this scale,” said Bill Adair, a founder of PolitiFact whose new book is titled Beyond the Big Lie. The Times left out Adair’s partisan subtitle: “The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.” Republicans could “burn down our democracy” since they lie so much more, maybe ten times more. Adair is quite candid about how he thinks the Republicans were aggressive liars before Trump, so put the Democrat donkey ears on his head. Republicans refuse to accept the “norm” that political news must be dominated by people who want the Republicans disparaged and then destroyed – as they identify themselves as nonpartisan truth-tellers. That’s a very large and egotistical lie. 

The main thing that stops me from getting interested in MMOs or MMORPGs is how they - by their nature - lack a kind of consequence, or a permanence. There are raids, bosses, and world events, but ultimately everything resets and no matter what happens, the in-game universe remains largely the same. I like games where it feels like things matter - where you get a sense of ardor, bitter loss, and hard-fought victory. Combining the huge-scale WWII combat of Battlefield V, the production and building systems of Factorio, and the persistent sandbox world of WoW, Foxhole is still an MMO that resets every few weeks, but there are some novel ideas to make it feel more weighty, more meaningful. It ought to be one of the biggest games on Steam, and the upcoming Airborne update will hopefully push it closer to the top. Continue reading Huge WW2 MMO Foxhole deserves more love, because it’s only getting better

The Zenless Zone Zero 1.3 update is here, and that means long-awaited lightning rod Tuskishiro Yanagi is finally playable in the stylish anime gacha game. Whether you’ve been eagerly anticipating picking her up, or are looking to save for future characters after burning through all your hard-earned pulls in the hunt for Caesar and Burnice, you’ll want to jump back in now. You can get free ZZZ Polychrome and Master Tapes in a number of ways, including login bonuses, maintenance compensation, and new events, giving you the best chance to build your dream Zenless team. Continue reading Zenless Zone Zero 1.3 offers free Polychrome and bonus pulls as Yanagi arrives MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Zenless Zone Zero review, Zenless Zone Zero codes, Zenless Zone Zero banners

Warhorse Studios confirms that the upcoming Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is not launching with Denuvo. Players were assuming that the digital rights management (DRM) tool was going to appear in the medieval RPG, but now the developer has put those concerns to rest. Denuvo has remained controversial for a few years, but Warhorse says there was some “misalignment” and “misinformation” around its inclusion in KCD2. Continue reading Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 dev says that Denuvo is a hard no MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best RPG games, Best action-adventure games, Best medieval games

What is the best Black Ops 6 AEK-973 loadout? There are few things more satisfying in Call of Duty than dispatching an enemy with a single burst, and the AEK-973 is the best in the game at doing so, at least, up to the 40-meter mark with this loadout. This powerful marksman rifle is also surprisingly stable out of the box, making it a dream to build in Black Ops 6. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the AEK-973 is stationed on our best BO6 loadouts list, and with our tried and tested build you’ll be tearing up lobbies in the FPS game - more on that below. Continue reading Best Black Ops 6 AEK-973 loadout and class build MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Black Ops 6 guns, Black Ops 6 missions, Black Ops 6 loadouts