Britain’s richest family sentenced to jail for exploiting staff in Swiss mansion
Prosecutors claimed four members of family paid staff a pittance and gave them little freedom to leave Geneva mansion
Hasnain says:
Like I mean if you’re that rich you’re definitely not hurting for *this* amount of money. Sigh.
“Household staff were paid a salary of between 220 and 400 Swiss francs (£195-£350) a month, far below what they could otherwise expect to earn in Switzerland. “They’re profiting from the misery of the world,” Bertossa told the court.”
Posted on 2024-06-22T16:34:20+0000
Scorching Heat Ravages Hajj as More Than 1,170 Pilgrims Die — The Wall Street Journal
Americans and hundreds of Egyptians among the dead in Saudi Arabia’s annual event, which suffered its highest death toll since 2015
Hasnain says:
:(
“The bus that was arranged to take him to Arafat on Saturday filled up fast, so he paid $400 for another ride. But the police stopped that bus from transporting unpermitted pilgrims, forcing him to walk for miles.
Kamal last heard from his father eight hours later when he reached Namira Mosque in Arafat for midday prayers; after that, his phone was off. Relatives in Saudi Arabia checked area hospitals but it wasn’t until Tuesday that they learned Kamal’s father had died. His name appeared on an online list of the deceased without indicating a cause.”
Posted on 2024-06-22T02:15:40+0000
Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted.
Hasnain says:
“Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture.”
Posted on 2024-06-22T01:59:01+0000
CAIR-Texas Calls for Hate Crime Probe of Alleged Murder Attempt Targeting Two Muslim Children in Euless -
Alleged attacker reportedly interrogated mother about her country of origin and her speaking to her children in a foreign language before jumping in swimming pool and allegedly trying to drown them. The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas), the nation’s largest M...
Hasnain says:
[ insert phrasing that would probably get me banned from Facebook ]
“The mother reported jumping into the pool to save her children. According to the mother, her 6-year-old-son was able to escape, but her petite 3-year-old daughter was unable. The alleged attacker snatched off the mother’s head scarf and used it to beat the mother as well as kicking her to keep her away while forcing her daughter’s head underwater.
Mrs. H stated that an African American man helped rescue her daughter from the attacker and more people gathered and witnessed. Cuffed and taken away by the police officer, the attacker reportedly shouted to a bystander woman who was calming the mother down “Tell her I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.””
Posted on 2024-06-22T00:54:01+0000
Project Naptime: Evaluating Offensive Security Capabilities of Large Language Models
Posted by Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand, Google Project Zero Introduction At Project Zero, we constantly seek to expand the scope and e...
Click to view the original at googleprojectzero.blogspot.com
Hasnain says:
“Since mid 2023 we've been working on a framework for LLM assisted vulnerability research embodying these principles, with a particular focus on automating variant analysis. This project has been called "Naptime" because of the potential for allowing us to take regular naps while it helps us out with our jobs. Please don't tell our manager.”
Posted on 2024-06-21T06:51:59+0000
FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions
The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against software maker Adobe and two of its executives, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, for deceiving consumers by hiding the early terminati
Hasnain says:
More Lina Khan Ws
“According to the complaint, when consumers purchase a subscription through the company’s website, Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year. Adobe’s ETF disclosures are buried on the company’s website in small print or require consumers to hover over small icons to find the disclosures.”
Posted on 2024-06-17T16:47:30+0000
Acts of Language | Isabella Hammad
Since the protests began on campuses throughout the United States, I have been struck by the verbal contortions many writers have gone through to avoid
Hasnain says:
“Since the protests began on campuses throughout the United States, I have been struck by the verbal contortions many writers have gone through to avoid engaging with the gravity of Israel’s assault on Gaza—one of the most brutal, punitive military campaigns in modern history—and with the clarity of the students’ moral outrage. If you are in this country, and you have successfully ignored the images of children, dead and living, being pulled out from rubble in Gaza, of people being operated on without anaesthetic, of bodies torn limb from limb, of babies removed from incubators and left to die, of embryos destroyed in fertility clinics, of bodies hanging from buildings, of mothers and fathers carrying pieces of their children in plastic bags, of friends walking together struck and killed with precision missiles, you might get the impression from much of what you read that a woke mob has been flinging words like “colonialist” around indiscriminately, aggressing American Jewish students, and intimidating all those who oppose their views into silence.
It has been startling to me to read so many writers lamenting the speech of pro-Palestine protesters in the US compared with this actual violence—tantamount, according to numerous experts, to the crime of genocide. Such essays frequently describe speech as being either threatening (from the Palestinian side) or under threat (on the anti-Palestinian side).”
Posted on 2024-06-17T04:53:49+0000
New 'Washington Post' chiefs can’t shake their past in London
The new CEO of The Washington Post and his hand-picked news chief come from a tradition of rough-and-tumble British journalism that plays loose with ethics, compared to U.S. media.
Hasnain says:
“Emily Bell says Lewis may be finding it hard to adapt to American values, despite his time at The Wall Street Journal — noting his patron there, Murdoch, was born in Australia and trained in Britain.
In the U.K., Bell says, newspapers are largely national in scope and engage in a ferocious battle for paying readers, advertisers and influence. Murdoch is among the most combative.
"In Britain, there are much more incestuous relationships, with much greater alignment of power rather than a genuine interest in actually holding power to account," Bell says. "And I think, if you bring that to The Washington Post, then I think you're going to see a lot of damage.”
Posted on 2024-06-17T04:45:18+0000
Virtualizing Our Storage Engine
Find out how virtualizing our storage engine led to significant improvement in query runtimes for bigger, more complex environments.
Hasnain says:
“After rolling out this change, we saw a significant improvement in query runtimes for bigger, more complex environments, including ones with more than 2,000 services and on the order of 100,000 events per second flowing into our system. Median query duration in situations like these started at around 20s (a customer experience we were certainly not proud of!) and decreased to around 0.2 seconds. That’s two orders of magnitude and well within our internal query performance SLOs.
Additionally, this layer of abstraction affords us a lot more freedom to add more features to Honeycomb without worrying as much about the implications of our data model on query performance, since the two concepts are now (mostly) independent concerns. And finally, we’re brimming with ideas about how to leverage this new model to continue to improve query performance!”
Posted on 2024-06-17T00:42:26+0000
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccines
The covert effort began under Trump and continued into Biden’s presidency, Reuters found. Health experts say it endangered lives for possible geopolitical gain.
Hasnain says:
sigh. First the Pakistani polio vaccine shenanigans, and now this. The pentagon does not shy away from opportunities to kill people.
““I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.
To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.””
Posted on 2024-06-16T02:42:19+0000