Tony Bark

Arf! I’m Tony Bark. Artist by day, programmer by night. Gamer all the way.

*Foxtrot Delta TACO.*

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Last Notes

2026-03-10 22:22:41 UTC

> Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
>
> The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
>
> Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

2026-02-26 20:26:00 UTC

> A student at Columbia University was detained Thursday morning by federal immigration officers.
>
> Columbia University President Claire Shipman said that “federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person.’” The school’s campus has been closed to outsiders since 2024.
>
> The president did not name the student, but it has been confirmed to be Ellie Aghayeva, an undergraduate neuroscience student who was expected to graduate this year. She was taken from her dorm room at the school’s New York City campus at 6:30 am.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailybeast.com%2Fice-seizes-columbia-university-student-ellie-aghayeva-in-their-dorm%2F

2026-02-08 21:52:01 UTC

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Oh, now you want us to take vaccines?

2026-02-07 21:59:57 UTC

> A Missouri cattle farmer is facing financial ruin after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) froze funding for key conservation programs, despite previously signed contracts with the government.
>
> The freeze, part of the Trump administration’s sweeping federal review of spending programs, has left Skylar Holden, a first-generation farmer, scrambling to save his land.
>
> Holden, who voted for President Donald Trump, had signed a $240,000 contract with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to improve water lines, fencing, and wells on his farm.

2026-02-06 01:02:36 UTC

> The Department of Justice redacted the face of the Mona Lisa, a 522-year-old painting of an Italian woman who died centuries ago, as part of its release of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein.
>
> In a PDF of an email with the subject line “simply paris” sent on July 3, 2009, a redacted sender sent Epstein several photos of, presumably, himself and a woman sightseeing in Paris. The photos of the woman are all redacted with a black box over her face, but the man’s face is visible.
>
> The photos are from tourist locations like Disneyland Paris, the Versailles fountains, and the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is installed. “We just walked around all over the city not just the sight seeing...we took like 1500 pictures so was really difficult to decide wich to send! :)” the sender wrote at the end of the email.
Archive: http://archive.today/38KfF

2026-02-02 20:14:33 UTC

> The Department of Justice left multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls exposed as part of Friday’s dump of more than 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Unlike the majority of the images in the released files, both the nudity and the faces of the people were not redacted, making them easy to identify. In some of the photos, the women or girls were either fully nude or partially undressed, posed for cameras, and exposed their genitals.
>
> The files include more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday in a press conference, including “large quantities of commercial pornography and images that were seized from Epstein’s devices,” some of which were taken by Epstein, according to Blanche.
Archive: http://archive.today/2isdD

2026-01-29 17:27:09 UTC

> Dispatch's release on Nintendo platforms today was poised to be another testament to AdHoc's tremendous success with the point-and-click superhero workplace comedy, but news of a platform-specific difference has overshadowed much of the excitement for fans hoping to play the episodic series on-the-go. Instead of celebrating the release, fans are launching campaigns against Dispatch's censorship, returning their purchases, or refraining from playing it altogether.
>
> Normally, Dispatch contains nudity and sexually explicit scenes involving its gang of ex-villains. AdHoc allows players to toggle sexual content like this off on most platforms. Curiously, however, the newly-released Switch version automatically depicts censored versions of these scenes. There's no option to turn the setting off.
>
> AdHoc confirmed the censorship to Eurogamer, but noted that the overall experience would still be the same for Switch players.
----
Mind you, Nintendo is cool with putting Doom and Duke Nukem on the Switch.

2026-01-29 04:07:05 UTC

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/38838877
---
> Republican lawmakers in Kansas are trying to ram through an anti-trans bathroom ban by including it in a bill that previously only related to whether trans people could change their gender markers on their driver’s licenses.
>
> As the Kansas Reflector reports, Republicans on the state’s House Judiciary Committee voted earlier this week to approve an amendment to House Bill 2426 introduced by Rep. Bob Lewis (R).
> In its original form, H.B. 2426 would have required Kansas driver’s licenses and birth certificates to indicate a person’s sex assigned at birth, regardless of their gender identity. That version of the bill was opposed by more than 200 people who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting earlier this month, even though the bill only appeared on the committee’s agenda 24 hours before.
>
> But prior to Monday night’s hearing, the committee gave no public notice that it would be taking action on the bill or that it would consider the bathroom ban, according to the Reflector.

2026-01-15 22:05:03 UTC

> A group of six Democratic lawmakers is proposing legislation that would dramatically rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app, according to a copy of the draft bill shared with 404 Media. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been scanning peoples’ faces with the app, called Mobile Fortify, across the country, using it to verify their citizenship and claiming that a result in the app should be trusted over a birth certificate.
>
> The move signals the first potential legislative move against the app after 404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence in June based on leaked ICE emails. Since then, 404 Media has covered its continued use against U.S. citizens, the 200 million images it uses, and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement.
>
> “When ICE claims that an image it snaps and runs through an unproven app can be enough evidence to detain people for possible deportation, no one is safe,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and who authored the legislation, said. “ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify to determine a person’s legal status is an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans’ faces and fingerprints in the field—especially with unproven and biased technology. It is time to put an end to its widespread use. We can secure the Homeland and respect the rights and privacy of Americans at the same time.”
Archive: http://archive.today/VFRak

2026-01-14 22:14:21 UTC

> We expressed concerns about Bully Online, a massively ambitious mod that promised to bring multiplayer and a host of new systems to Rockstar's classic school sim, when we ran across it in November 2025. It looked great, but the initial release was limited to people willing to pay for it through the mod team's Ko-Fi page, and that seemed like the sort of thing almost guaranteed to attract unwelcome attention from Rockstar's lawyers. Sure enough, just a month after the mod launched, it's gone.
>
> "The Bully Online project is shutting down. Thank you all for playing," a message posted on the website of YouTube and project lead Swegta (via Insider Gaming) now states. The Bully Online page on Swegta's website is already gone, as is the Mod DB page, although it can still be seen through the Internet Archive.
>
> A more detailed message about the closure was posted today on Swegta's Discord server. "The Bully Online project is shutting down forever, which unfortunately means all the following is going to happen in 24 hours: our official Bully Online server (on swegta.com) will be shutdown, development of scripts for Bully Online will stop, the source code will be removed from swegta.com, all our webpages referring to it will be removed, the launcher downloads will taken down, and all Bully Online account data will be permanently deleted."

2026-01-09 14:05:29 UTC

> Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.
>
> “I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways… suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told Kotaku in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.'” I assume that's not a verbatim quote, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
>
> The publishers also take a dim view of using generative AI for “placeholder” work, or indeed any ‘non-final’ aspect of game development. “We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” Bender went on.

2025-12-24 19:09:31 UTC

> Eight months after the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said at a border security conference that the Trump administration aims to carry out its mass deportation operation with the same efficiency as Amazon’s package deliveries, a draft document from ICE officials on Wednesday provided never-before-seen details of how the agency plans to do that using massive warehouses repurposed to hold tens of thousands of people.
>
> The Washington Post reported on a draft solicitation document, a version of which ICE plans to send to private detention companies this week.

2025-12-13 22:10:40 UTC

> Sweeping Democratic victories in off-year elections seem to be foreshadowing a very good midterms for the party, and one expert believes it’s even bigger than that.
>
> “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to statehouses, told Mother Jones.

2025-12-12 04:16:28 UTC

> Dozens of government and university websites belonging to cities, towns, and public agencies across the country are hosting PDFs promoting AI porn apps, porn sites, and cryptocurrency scams; dozens more have been hit with a website redirection attacks which lead to animal vagina sex toy ecommerce pages, penis enlargement treatments, automatically-downloading Windows program files, and porn.
>
> “Sex xxx video sexy Xvideo bf porn XXX xnxx Sex XXX porn XXX blue film Sex Video xxx sex videos Porn Hub XVideos XXX sexy bf videos blue film Videos Oficial on Instagram New Viral Video The latest original video has taken the internet by storm and left viewers in on various social media platforms ex Videos Hot Sex Video Hot Porn viral video,” reads the beginning of a three-page PDF uploaded to the website of the Irvington, New Jersey city government’s website.
Archive: http://archive.today/tgD57

2025-12-10 02:55:29 UTC

> Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.
>
> Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.
Archive: http://archive.today/R7zCt

2025-12-03 02:17:10 UTC

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I wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up hitting the very people who thought these laws were good in the first place.

2025-12-02 19:08:07 UTC

> As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
>
> Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13

2025-11-20 03:20:39 UTC

> Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.
>
> As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

2025-07-31 19:52:49 UTC

> The renderings are complete, the architects and contractors have been hired. After at least 15 years of talking about it, President Trump is building a ballroom at the White House. According to the White House, the work will begin this September, with a price tag of $200 million.
>
> "President Trump is a builder at heart and has an extraordinary eye for detail," said White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in a statement on Thursday. "The President and the Trump White House are fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserving the special history of the White House while building a beautiful ballroom that can be enjoyed by future Administrations and generations of Americans to come."

2025-06-24 02:23:01 UTC

> Democratic state attorneys general vowed Monday on Capitol Hill to continue legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s “outrageous overreach” through executive orders to strip birthright citizenship, impose staggering global tariffs, thwart lifesaving medical research and more.

2025-06-23 21:35:02 UTC

> After being in development for over 10 years, Hytale, a sandbox game from the Hypixel Studios team with support from Riot, has officially been cancelled. Hypixel Studios' CEO, Noxy, announced the cancellation on X on June 23, with the official Hytale forums following suit.

2025-06-21 19:50:22 UTC

> Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.

2025-06-12 02:46:59 UTC

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This is going to be interesting.

2025-03-24 01:40:03 UTC

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I'm sure the GOP will be working overtime to try and brush that under the rug.

2025-03-18 00:08:23 UTC

> For some families, Harvard University just got a little bit cheaper. The Ivy League institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts—which costs about $83,000 annually in 2024—recently announced tuition will be free for families whose income is below $200,000 per year. If you’re a family whose household income is less than $100,00, the venerated institution will basically pay for everything. And I do mean everything: tuition, housing, fees, travel costs, event and activity fees– and if you need some cold weather gear to adjust to the Boston winters, Harvard is covering that, too. They’ll even give you a $2,000 start-up grant to get you situated; all you have to do is get in.

2025-03-14 21:49:32 UTC

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/37049080
> Despite Trump’s decidedly critical tone toward Ukraine and its president and warm gestures toward Russia, the level of overall American public sympathy with Ukraine and the lack of sympathy for Russia have not changed since the summer of 2024. If the intent of the public spat with Zelenskyy was to sour the American mood toward Ukraine, the latest poll indicates that it was a failure, not only in the continued high level of sympathy with Ukraine but also in that more people rated Trump’s performance as inappropriate than said the same about the Ukrainian president’s performance in that unprecedented meeting.
>
> With only about one-third of Americans supporting his decision to suspend aid to Ukraine, Trump may have helped himself by quickly renewing the provision of aid and getting Ukraine to reportedly agree to a 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia.
>
> As one might expect, the president has had some impact on his core Republican constituency. But the drop in Republican sympathy with Ukraine from 58% last summer to 45% now is modest if one considers that the Republican president is still in his early honeymoon period.
>
> Trump received more support from Republicans for his aid suspension, with about two-thirds supporting the decision, and 21% opposing it. But while favoring Trump, one might expect more support for a president from his own party on a top and high-profile policy issue this early in his term.
>
> Of course, a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war could impact public attitudes moving forward, especially at a time when polls show more Americans favor a quick end to the war. For now, though, the bottom line is that the American public appears to have made up its mind on Ukraine and Russia and Trump is cutting against the grain.

2025-02-19 18:09:51 UTC

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They'd have to shut down Truth Social, if they did that.