since this type of interference is geographically relevant, it clearly has nothing to do with the war.

So, I’m not sure what the rationale is – it might be worrying about long-range drones, like those light aircraft, flying around Belarus, but I’ve definitely seen some sources say that they believe that the Kaliningrad jamming is a function of the war.

This article, from late May, has the Finnish government saying that they believe that it’s related to the war.

https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect-of-russian-military-activity-finnish-transport-agency-says/

Jamming GPS signals over the Baltic Sea is “most likely” a side effect of Russia’s anti-drone activities, Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, said today.

“The interference intensified when Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure began in January 2024,” Traficom said in a press release.

Estonia also blames Russia for the signal jamming, but the Finnish agency doesn’t agree with the Tallinn government in defining the interference as a hybrid attack.

“It is possible that the interference observed in aviation currently are most likely a side effect of Russia’s self-protection” that is used “to prevent the navigation and control of drones controlled by GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] or mobile frequencies,” Traficom said.

Well, as things stand, there’s no right in customary international law to a radio frequency. If Russia wants to produce disruption, Russia basically can. It’s going to annoy countries, but there isn’t really a lot that can be done aside from pressure, sanctions and such. Hell, even if there were such a right, it’d ultimately need to be backed up by ability and willingness to use force at some level, by someone. I’m not sure that countries are willing to wage war over radio broadcasts, no matter how disruptive.

In theory, a country could probably run a pretty powerful broadcast off a ship. So I don’t think that Kaliningrad is even all that special here – Russia could be doing the same even if it didn’t have a little enclave of territory and didn’t mind annoying whoever is using the signal.

My guess is that Russia will stop when the war ends. That is, my assumption is that Russia isn’t willing to do peacetime jamming for the purpose of just being obnoxious.

If it’s enough of a problem, it’d probably be possible to set up navigation systems that are more-limited, don’t have the degree of military utility of something like GPS. Maybe reactivate LORAN, say.

In the case of transatlantic aircraft, I’d assume that those normally have INS navigation systems; while limited in accuracy, those should be usable as a backup to GPS in most roles.

Looking at the New York Times, they are massively hammering Biden. Like, a huge chunk of the front page is negative pieces on him.

The law requires web-based age verification on sites with at least one-third of their content devoted to adult sexual material. Now the Supreme Court will solicit arguments and briefs about the case.

My hot take is that it won’t fly, but that Texas can also potentially revise the law to make it pass.

The problem is that this is targeting websites serving non-porn material if the site also serves porn. Like, there’s porn on Reddit, for example. But this doesn’t say “we restrict access to minors just to porn”, but “we restrict access to the website”, where someone like Reddit can do finer-grained filtering. It’s hard, I think, to argue that this is the “least restrictive means” to solve the issue.

For a law that that restricts speech to pass the First Amendment, it has to pass strict scrutiny, and “least restrictive means” is one requirement of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny

In U.S. constitutional law, when a law infringes upon a fundamental constitutional right, the court may apply the strict scrutiny standard. Strict scrutiny holds the challenged law as presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrate that the law or regulation is necessary to achieve a “compelling state interest”. The government must also demonstrate that the law is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that compelling purpose, and that it uses the “least restrictive means” to achieve that purpose. Failure to meet this standard will result in striking the law as unconstitutional.

The standard is the highest and most stringent standard of judicial review and is part of the levels of judicial scrutiny that courts use to determine whether a constitutional right or principle should give way to the government’s interest against observance of the principle. The lesser standards are rational basis review and exacting or intermediate scrutiny. These standards are applied to statutes and government action at all levels of government within the United States.

The ACLU lawyer references a “reasonable” criteria, and apparently that’s one element of the “rational basis” review, so I’m guessing that they’re attacking it on those grounds.

I assume that it should read “executive order”.

I wouldn’t.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit challenging the statutes in 2022, arguing they were too old to enforce

I mean, laws don’t have a sunset date.

Unless there’s a split between the upper and lower state legislatures and governor, why not just either pass a new law making abortion either explicitly illegal or repeal the old law so that it’s explicitly legal? Like, what’s the point of having court cases over some law from 1849?

What’s the makeup of the legislature?

kagis

Ahh.

So the Republicans control the upper and lower legislative houses. The governor is a Democrat. The Republicans have a two-thirds supermajority in the upper house, but only a majority in the lower house. So basically, nobody has enough oomph to push through a change (at least if the division is along party lines, which it may not be in Wisconsin).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Legislature

So based on that, the Republicans need two more seats in the 99-seat lower house to have a supermajority there as well and be able to override a governor’s veto, or to get a Republican governor, which avoids the veto issue. They’re very close to being able to pass legislation without Democratic support, but not quite there.

The Democrats are nowhere near having a majority in both houses, so they probably can’t pass legislation anytime soon without Republican support.

Nvidia is worth about $3 trillion at this point. France’s GDP is about that each year.

I did some time back. I don’t recall it being incredibly difficult to get running. What hardware are you trying to run it on?

That alternative would replace Ohio’s current system for drawing congressional and legislative maps, which relies on elected officials, with a 15-member panel of Ohioans without close ties to politics.

Honestly, I feel like if districts are gonna be drawn, it’d make more sense to just choose some algorithm and have a computer do it.

Like, if you want to have non-partisan oversight of the algorithm selection, great, but I’m not at all sold that partitioning up the election map requires anything beyond a simple, mechanical process.

reads further

Fed up with politicians manipulating maps to ensure reelection, a crowd of Ohio voters took a key step toward offering a redistricting alternative on the November ballot.

The commission would draw maps that “correspond closely to statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” Unlike redistricting proposals approved in 2015 and 2018, this requirement is explicit and mandatory.

If you divide up electoral districts to try to clump similar voters, you kind of guarantee that you’re ensuring re-election. In fact, from past reading, that’s what gerrymandering tends to do. It isn’t primarily that politicians try to get an edge for their party overall. It’s that they try to ensure that they have safe seats without serious competition, even if that ensures that politicians from the other party also enjoy the same situation. Think of an oligopoly, where companies divide up territory or something like that, and each has a monopoly. Like, if you’re going to mandate that under this district-drawing system, what you’re functionally doing is minimizing the power of the public in elections relative to that of incumbent politicians.

kagis

Yeah.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/biggest-problem-with-gerrymandering/

Biggest problem with gerrymandering

Researchers found tactic, widely used in 2020, made little difference in partisan numbers but yielded safe seats, less-responsive representatives

Basically, what gerrymanderers principally aim to do is to reduce how much a politician in an electoral district tends to need to care about what their electorate wants, by eliminating realistic challengers.

kagis

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gerrymandering-competitive-districts-near-extinction

One of the most consequential outcomes of this redistricting cycle has been the continuing decrease in the number of competitive congressional districts. Under new maps, there are just 30 districts that Joe Biden won by less than eight percentage points in 2020 and, likewise, just 30 districts that Donald Trump won by less than eight points.

All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.

In the end, a closely divided House remains up for grabs, with reasonable opportunities for both parties to win control in coming years. However, barring unforeseen political shifts, most voters will watch that fight from the sidelines due to maps that artificially reduce competition. If Americans hope to reverse the long-term decline of competitive districts, reforms to create fairer, more independent map-drawing processes will be essential.

That’s a good deal if you’re an incumbent politician who wants to be in a position to make use of political influence without being at political risk. But it’s the worst deal you could get in terms of your own influence if you’re a member of the voting public.

Ted Linscott, the retired bricklayer from Athens, said Appalachians tell it like it is: “When we see BS, we call BS and the way our districts are drawn is BS.”

I’m not saying you’re wrong there, dude. But being happy about this proposal is kinda, well…I’m gonna need Gary Larson to help me out on this one.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/6a694b63-9618-4b6a-a685-a26f1be54bb9.jpeg

Video of the accidental ascent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g

I’d assume you, given that you asked.

That’s not incompatible with what they said. They’re saying that the rate of wage increases over the last year outpaced inflation. They also ran below inflation during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19’s impact started in 2020.

looks at graph in article

Okay, though it looks like inflation only took off in early 2021.

They’re saying that from June 2023 to June 2024, real wages increased. But they also decreased for about two years prior to that, from a couple months into 2021 until about halfway through 2023 – you can see the dark blue line being below 0 for that period (or, equivalently, that the medium blue line was above the light blue line). Halfway through 2023, it then rises above 0, and has been above since that point. But the period of time that it was decreasing (a bit over two years) was about twice as long as the one year that it’s been increasing, and during that decrease period, was decreasing faster than it increased over the last year. So they’re rebounding, but they won’t be where they were immediately prior to the crisis.

“For whom”, and it’s an average.

putty

I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I’d personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that’s not really my sticking point. I’m normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it’s just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.

I’m not saying that that’s an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.

APC Back-UPS 850.

I’d guess that those maybe don’t use the same protocol as an APC Easy UPS. There’s a (widely-used) Linux software package, Network UPS Tools, which can talk to the APC UPSes that I’ve seen in the past.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

It has Back-UPS devices listed in the hardware compatibility list as well as devices from many other manufacturers, but I don’t see any reference to an “Easy UPS”.

Right now when updates get applied to the NAS, if it gets powered off during the update window that would be really bad and inconvenient require manual intervention.

You sure? I mean, sure, it’s possible; there are devices out there that can’t deal with power loss during update. But others can: they’ll typically have space for two firmware versions, write out the new version into the inactive slot, and only when the new version is committed to persistent storage, atomically activate it.

Last device I worked on functioned that way.

you might lose data in flight if you’re not careful.

That’s the responsibility of the application if they rely on the data to be persistent at some point; they need to be written to deal with the fact that there may be in-flight data that doesn’t make it to the disk if they intend to take other actions that depend on that fact; they’ll need to call fsync() or whatever their OS has if they expect the data to be on-drive.

Normally, there will always a period where some data being written out is partial: the write() could complete after handing the data off to the OS’s buffer cache. The local drive could complete because data’s in its cache. The app could perform multiple write() calls, and the first could have completed without the second. With a NAS, the window might be a little bit longer than it otherwise would be, but something like a DBMS will do the fsync(); at any point, it’d be hypothetically possible for the OS to crash or power loss or something to happen.

The real problem, that I need an nas for, is not the loss of some data, it’s when the storms hit and there’s flooding, the power can go up and down and cycle quite rapidly. And that’s really bad for sensitive hardware like hard disks. So I want the NAS to shut off when the power starts getting bad, and not turn on for a really long time but still turn on automatically when things stabilize

Like I said in the above comment, you’ll get that even without a clean shutdown; you’ll actually get a bit more time if you don’t do a clean shutdown.

Because this device runs a bunch of VMs and containers

Ah, okay, it’s not just a file server? Fair enough – then that brings the case #2 back up again, which I didn’t expect to apply to the NAS itself.

I’d guess that those OSes may not permit arbitrary software without administrative privileges to initiate shutdowns. That’s the case on Linux.

I’m assuming that your goal here is automatic shutdown when the UPS battery gets low so you don’t actually have the NAS see unexpected power loss.

This isn’t an answer to your question, but stepping back and getting a big-picture view: do you actually need a clean, automatic shutdown on your Synology server if the power goes out?

I’d assume that the filesystems that the things are set up to run are power-loss safe.

I’d also assume that there isn’t server-side state that needs to be cleanly flushed prior to power loss.

Historically, UPSes providing a clean shutdown were important on personal computers for two reasons:

• Some filesystems couldn’t deal with power loss, could produce a corrupted filesystem. FAT, for example, or HFS on the Mac. That’s not much of an issue today, and I can’t imagine that a Synology NAS would be doing that unless you’re explicitly choosing to use an old filesystem.

• Some applications maintain state and when told to shut down, will dump it to disk. So maybe someone’s writing a document in Microsoft Word and hasn’t saved it for a long time, a few minutes will provide them time to save it (or the application to do an auto-save). Auto-save usually partially-mitigates this. I don’t have a Synology system, but AFAIK, they don’t run anything like that.

Like, I’d think that the NAS could probably survive a power loss just fine, even with an unclean shutdown.

If you have an attached desktop machine, maybe case #2 would apply, but I’d think that hooking the desktop up to the UPS and having it do a clean shutdown would address the issue – I mean, the NAS can’t force apps on computers using the NAS to dump state out to the NAS, so hooking the NAS up that way won’t solve case #2 for any attached computers.

If all you want is more time before the NAS goes down uncleanly, you can just leave the USB and RS-232 connection out of the picture and let the UPS run until the battery is exhausted and then have the NAS go down uncleanly. Hell, that’d be preferable to an automated shutdown, as you’d get a bit more runtime before the thing goes down.