Original title:

Researchers fitted five Australian magpies with GPS trackers to map their movements, but within an hour the birds began helping one another remove the harnesses, turning a failed tracking experiment into an unexpected observation of cooperation and problem-solving

Tallahassee, FL – On September 17, Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society gathered at Landis Fountain to demand an end to “Flock Safety” in the city. Around 30 students gathered holding signs against Flock mass surveillance, and speakers discussed the harmful effects of Flock on our community. Student slogans included “What do we want? Privacy! When do we want it? Now!” and “No justice, no peace! No racist police!”

On August 31, Governor Ron DeSantis announced the removal of LPRs (License Plate Readers) on state roads, with a 30-day deadline. County and city governments, such as Tallahassee, have followed up on this move in an atmosphere of opposition to Flock surveillance, with Tallahassee City Commission voting to suspend ALPRs (Flock and Motorola cameras) on September 9.

However, the city commission rejected a vote to cover these cameras, which would prevent them from recording. Leon County voted on September 15 to remove all ALPR cameras within 30 days.

These removals and suspensions have so far not included cameras in neighborhoods and campuses. The frequent misreports from ALRPs and their constant recording have been met with backlash, but the state campaign for mass surveillance has not ended.

Amy Farnum-Patronis, the senior director of university communications at FSU, reported vaguely to FSView that, “in light of current ongoing conversations on this topic and in the interest of being as transparent as possible, we can confirm that the core of FSU's campus does not contain Flock devices.”

The Tallahassee Police Department wants people to think they can regulate Flock. They claim to have “have implemented policies governing the professional and appropriate use of ALPR technology.”

Flock, a private company for mass surveillance, wrote in its own February 2026 Terms of Service that the company has “irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services.” Customer data, defined as whatever Flock cameras record, can be shared by Flock to local and federal agencies around the country for “investigative purposes,” even if TPD opts out of data sharing. Flock has frequently used this data to aid the ICE terror campaign.

As residents of Tallahassee know, our city has been a center for ICE deportations in Florida. On May 29, one of the largest ICE roundups in Florida occurred in Gaines Street, Tallahassee, detaining more than 100 construction workers. Tallahassee has also agreed to the 287(g) agreement, whereby police officers can take on ICE duties and racially profile the residents of Tallahassee.

At the SDS protest at Landis Fountain, a speaker and Tallahassee Immigrant Rights Alliance member said, “These cameras have been used by police for their own personal gain, to stalk and harass primarily women.” He pointed out, “We have no idea how they’re using this technology right now, because there is no transparency. Recently, the Florida governor made it illegal for undocumented students to even enroll in Florida public colleges. So, do you think that the only line of defense is going to be the admission’s office? What happens when they start to be even more muscular in their crackdown against students on campus? When they start to suspect that some brown kid might actually be illegal on campus?”

FSU students refuse to accept the vague sidestepping of FSU admin and refuse to back down on the fight against Flock. Suspension and ALPR removal are not enough, and SDS will keep up the pressure to protect the right to privacy for all residents of Tallahassee. SDS will demand Flock removal until every Flock camera in Tallahassee is removed.

#TallahasseeFL #FL #StudentMovement #FlockCameras #Flock #SDS #ImmigrantRights #Surveillance #ALPR

From Fight Back! News via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52250345

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/71988239

As the ongoing genocide in Gaza approaches its third anniversary on October 7, the Zionist State of Israel suffered another major blow to its already tarnished image with the banning of a 43-year-old U.S. rap artist and songwriter, Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, popularly known as Macklemore, from a tour headed by . . .

Continue reading Ban on Macklemore draws global attention to Palestine at Workers.org

From Workers World via This RSS Feed.

Recently there have started to be a few accounts that seem to be used by a person for writing comments while also being used by scripts to automatically repost content from Reddit and possibly elsewhere. This doesn't cleanly fit into our existing tools for classifying accounts and posts - a conventional bot might post RSS articles or other automated content, and users can choose to filter based on that bot setting. These new types of accounts are different from that because they're partly human and partly automated.

This causes a few problems:

• there are cases where the reposted content is written in the first person. Like for example, a Reddit post might say here's a photo of my cat, but when that post is automatically reposted into the Threadiverse by a reposter script, it can appear to us that the PyFed account owner is claiming the cat as their own. Yet that's obviously not the case, which gives an inauthentic feel to the environment.

• sometimes some of the material being reposted is content that violates the rules and norms of Threadiverse. And so we see a lot of strange culture war stuff and racist content coming through sometimes.

• a lot of people left reddit to get away from all the astroturfing and bots and LLMs running amok so letting that happen here too will just drive those people away.

Despite this, their content is often quite popular and many people upvote it and comment on it. Many people seem totally ok with it.

Before I change anything, I think it'd be really good to understand what the community wants to happen in response to this. I'm considering several possible approaches, including doing nothing, or introducing a new automated / reposted indicator for accounts (with a feed filter, separate from the bot indicator and filter), or continuing to apply the existing bot label onto those accounts, or restricting those kind of accounts completely. But I'm not going to propose a particular outcome yet. I'd like to hear what, if any, problems people are experiencing from these accounts and what information or controls would be useful.

We're soon coming up on the Worlds patch (which is the patch after this one), so our first round of pro-focused Summoner's Rift changes are coming up here. We've identified some potential fringe picks for the tournament that could also provide some normal play variety without becoming disruptive with a nudge up in power, and knocking some individual meta outliers as well (and also Nasus). Is anyone actually reading these things? Systemically, the top lane role quest has been quite successful at freeing up top laners to skip Teleport, so we think increasing their map influence through that spell (both if you take it from the start of game or just through the quest) is a fair place to give the role some power.

On Sunday, September 20, the Anti-War Action Network (AWAN) held a webinar to hear from activists who traveled to the Republic of Korea (RoK) to participate in demonstrations against the U.S. military occupation of the country.

Speakers on the webinar included Meredith Aby of the AWAN steering committee, Chrisley Carpio of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and Sonya Chung of Nodutdol, the organization of Korean American activists who organized the trip. The event was moderated by Maria Sohn Hasman of the AWAN-aligned Tucson Anti-War Committee.

In mid-August, Nodutdol brought activists from over 20 different groups around the U.S. together to form the Jaju Solidarity Brigade, the first-ever international delegation to participate in the RoK’s long-standing August 15 protests. In addition to joining the 10,000-strong march on Seoul, members of this delegation spent a week traveling the country to visit occupation bases and learn from local activists about the history of Korea’s struggle for independence.

“It’s important to know the relationship between the U.S. and South Korea is one defined by imperialism,” said Carpio, commenting on the historical context which the present movement has emerged from. “The U.S. went ahead and carved up Korea in 1945 and divided the Korean people.” Carpio went on to characterize the 1950 war as an attempt to reunite Korea, which the U.S. violently put down with the help of the same corrupt politicians who had supported the Japanese occupation during World War II.

Chung spoke to the current memory of this history, saying, “Many people still have really raw wounds, and I think that that was something we really experienced going through all the site visits.” As Chung explained, it is estimated that the RoK hosts around 80 U.S. military bases, though the exact number is kept intentionally obscured. Chung further characterized the U.S.-RoK relationship by quoting a top U.S. commander, who called South Korea “a dagger in the heart of Asia aimed at China.”

One major issue relating to U.S. bases which the delegation heard about is that of land disputes. On their trip to Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas military base in the world, the delegation learned about the 2004-2006 struggle of Daechuri village, a community forcibly relocated to create space for the foreign base to expand. A similar struggle is being waged today in the vicinity of the Gunsan Air Base, where a proposed expansion would devastate the local ecology, disrupting both nearby communities as well as endangered species.

Later on in the webinar, Aby reflected on her 2002 trip to Palestine, noting how “a lot of the messages that I heard from people in South Korea really reminded me of the messages I heard from Palestinians. About how they’ve been pushed off their lands, that everything that Israel wanted they got to just take in terms of land. Similarly, everything that the U.S. military wanted [in South Korea] they got to just take in terms of land.”

Another major issue which Aby spoke about is the sexual violence which the U.S. occupation continues to perpetrate against Korean women. “Not only did the U.S. take military control of the peninsula, they also took control of women’s bodies,” said Aby, as she described how the U.S. and RoK governments collaborated to establish “camptowns,” where Korean women were coerced into prostitution for the pleasure of U.S. soldiers. Emphasizing the scale of this project, Aby remarked that at one point this prostitution “got to be 5% of the South Korean gross domestic product.”

While in the vicinity of Camp Casey, the delegation visited an abandoned STD management center, where the women who worked in these camp towns faced further medical abuse. Here women were forcibly tested, “and if they tested positive, they got a dose of penicillin that was ten times the amount of penicillin that people would normally get,” said Aby. This treatment often left women unable to stand, at which point they “were then imprisoned in that STD management center for a week.” The particular facility visited by the delegation remained in operation until 1993.

As regards the protests which the delegation participated in, Chung commented on how impressive it was to see so many organizations and demographics gathered to protest with the same core message: “There is truly a unity of messaging, and there’s clarity in the political message of wanting the U.S. out.”

Carpio likewise spoke about how inspired she was by the strength of Korean protest culture, which she described as achieving a high degree of organization, while balancing a celebratory tone alongside a militant focus. Carpio put it, the prevailing mood was “We’re not going to obey. We’re going to get done what we need to get done.”

#AntiWarMovement #Korea #AWAN #AntiWarActionNetwork #Nodutdol #International #JajuSolidarityBrigade

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I'm not sure if I fit the standard template of a Leftist but I personally believe that it is the duty of the strong to stand up for the weak.

I found myself in a situation (minor real-world radius) to consider if accessibility or union attendance was more important. Here is my response:

I don't have a perfect idea of attendance right now, but it will be a learning curve. Realistically, for the 22nd it will be about 140 people, declining from there. We can work around anomalies and if people have to sit on the floor we can accommodate.

I have to make a call. We want to maximise attendance but not exclude any groups. If 200 people in wheelchairs turn up on the 22nd, we will make sure you are heard. Likewise, I expect that any unionist is asked to give up their seat because a disabled person needs a seat they will gladly stand to help a fellow member of the union can vote.

Sometimes I fear that inclusivity is weaponized against the left. Do you think I made the right call?