In outlook

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The FBI has accused a Texas man, James Wesley Burger, of planning an Islamic State-style terrorist attack on a Christian music festival and talking about it on Roblox. The feds caught Burger after another Roblox user overheard his conversations about martyrdom and murder and tipped them off. The feds said that when they searched Burger’s phone they found a list of searches that included “ginger isis member” and “are suicide attacks haram in islam.”

According to charging documents, a Roblox player contacted federal authorities after seeing another player called “Crazz3pain” talking about killing people. Screenshots from the server and included in the charging documents show Roblox avatars with beards dressed in Keffiyehs talking about dealing a “greivoius [sic] wound upon followers of the cross.”

“The witness observed the user of Crazz3pain state they were willing, as reported by the Witness, to ‘kill Shia Musilms at their mosque,” court records said. “Crazz3pain and another Roblox user[…]continued to make violent statements so the witness left the game.”

The witness stayed off of Roblox for two days and when they returned they saw Crazz3pain say something else that worried them, according to the court filing. “The Witness observed Crazz3pain tell Roblox User 1 to check their message on Discord,” the charging document said. “Roblox User 1 replied on Roblox to Crazz3pain, they should delete the photograph of firearms within the unknown Discord chat, ‘in case it was flagged as suspicious…the firearms should be kept hidden.”

According to the witness, Crazz3pain kept talking about their desire to commit “martyrdom” at a Christian event and that he wanted to “bring humiliation to worshippers of the cross.” The Witness allegedly asked Crazz3pain if the attack would happen at a church service and Crazz3pain told them it would happen at a concert.

Someone asked Crazz3pain when it would happen. “‘It will be months…Shawwal…April,’” Crazz3pain said. Shawwal is the month after Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. The conversations the witness shared with the FBI happened on January 21 and 23, 2025.

Roblox gave authorities Crazz3pain’s email address, name, physical address, and IP address and it all pointed back to James Wesley Burger. The FBI searched Burger’s home on February 28 and discovered that someone in his family had put on a keylogger on the laptop he used to play Roblox and that they’d captured a lot of what he’d been typing while playing the game. They turned over the records to the feds.

“The safety of our community is among our highest priorities. In this case, we moved swiftly to assist law enforcement’s investigation before any real-world harm could occur and investigated and took action in accordance with our policies. We have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to help swiftly detect and remove content that violates our policies," a spokesperson for Roblox told 404 Media. "Our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way. We have dedicated teams focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as supporting requests from and providing assistance to law enforcement. We also work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with safety organizations to keep content that violates our policies off our platform, and will continue to diligently enforce our policies.”

Burger’s plan to kill Christians was allegedly captured by the keylogger. “I’ve come to conclude it will befall the 12 of Shawwal aa/And it will be a music festival /Attracting bounties of Christians s/In’shaa’allah we will attain martyrdom /And deal a grevious [sic] wound upon the followers of the Cross /Pray for me and enjoin yourself to martyrdom,” he allegedly typed in Roblox, according to court records.

The FBI then interviewed Burger in his living room and he admitted he used the Crazz3pain account to play Roblox. The feds asked him about his alleged plan to kill Christians at a concert. Burger said it was, at the time, “mostly a heightened emotional response,” according to the court records.

Burger also said that the details “became exaggerated” but that the goal “hasn’t shifted a bit,” according to the court records. He said he wanted to “[G]et the hell out of the U.S.” And if he can’t, “then, martyrdom or bust.”

He said that his intention with the attack “is something that is meant to or will cause terror,” according to the charging document. When the FBI agent asked if he was a terrorist, Burger said, “I mean, yeah, yeah. By, by the sense and … by my very own definition, yes, I guess, you know, I would be a terrorist.”

When authorities searched his iPhone, they discovered two notes on the phone that described how to avoid leaving behind DNA and fingerprints at a crime scene. A third note appeared to be a note explaining the attack, meant to be read after it occured.

The list of previous searches on his iPhone included “Which month is april in islam,” “Festivals happening near me,” “are suicide attacks haram in islam,” “ginger isis member,” “lone wolf terrorists isis,” and “can tou kill a woman who foesnt[sic] wear hijab.”

Burger has been charged with making violent threats online and may spend time in a federal prison if convicted. This is not the first time something like this has happened on Roblox. The popular children’s game has been a popular spot for extremist behavior, including Nazis and religious terrorists, for years now. Last year, the DOJ accused a Syrian man living in Albanian of using Roblox to coordinate a group of American teenagers to disrupt public city council Zoom meetings.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — When Ellie, a British-Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead.

“Alo? Alo?” the voice said, then asked in English: “Who is calling?” A few seconds passed.

“I can’t heard you,” the voice continued, its English imperfect. “Who you want to speak with? I’m Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don’t know who are you.”

Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago.

They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families.

Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted.

It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely.

Only the second most terrifying story I've read today

A growing network of online communities known collectively as the “manosphere” is emerging as a serious threat to gender equality, as toxic digital spaces increasingly influence real-world attitudes, behaviours, and policies, the UN agency dedicated to ending gender discrimination has warned.

Hi c/selfhosted,

I just released wanderer v0.17.0, which brings full federation support to the project.

E.g.: https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]

For anyone new to it: wanderer is a self-hosted platform for managing hiking, biking, or running trails. You can upload or draw GPS tracks, organize them into lists, add photos, metadata, waypoints, and summit logs. It’s open source and designed for people who want full control over their outdoor data, with a clean UI and no third-party dependencies.

What’s new in v0.17.0

This release adds support for ActivityPub, meaning instances of wanderer can now talk to each other—and to the wider fediverse. Here’s what that enables:

• Follow users across instances When you follow someone, any new trails or lists they upload will show up in your feed automatically.
• Like and comment on trails, even across servers.
• Mentions You can mention other users in trail descriptions, comments, or summit logs, and they’ll be notified—regardless of which instance they’re on.
• Summit logs from others Other users can now log their own visits to your public trails with GPS data and photos.
• Cross-instance trail sharing Public trails can be shared with users on other instances.

If you’re not interested in federation, that’s fine too. wanderer still works completely standalone—federation only kicks in when you start interacting with other instances.

Links:
Demo: https://demo.wanderer.to/
GitHub: https://github.com/Flomp/wanderer
Discord: https://discord.gg/USSEBY98CP
Support wanderer: https://buymeacoffee.com/wanderertrails, https://liberapay.com/wanderer

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16563804

At this point it not about passive collection, corporations are going to extreme ends to get our data.

https://www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-tracking-explained-it-could

I am interested in what people are doing to enforce their privacy while using the web.

I have some things in place, looking to compare with the community.

(btw, I am new here, this is my first post. So uh… Hi )

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has issued a preliminary injunction ordering top national security officials who discussed military operations on the encrypted messaging service Signal to notify the acting archivist of the United States of any messages they have that may be at risk of being deleted. But in calling for those records to be preserved, the ruling stopped short of ordering the government to recover past messages that may already have been lost.

American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, brought the lawsuit after the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a group chat on Signal in which Trump administration officials discussed a planned U.S. military attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. American Oversight says the officials violated federal records law with their use of Signal, a commercial messaging app that allows messages to be automatically deleted.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. judge James Boasberg said American Oversight had failed to show that the recordkeeping programs of the agencies involved in the case are "inadequate," or that "this court can provide redress for already-deleted messages," as the group had requested.

Image finally uploaded. Sorry about that.

[Edit. Fixed the headline a bit, due to my poor phrasing]

Edit: What do you judge them for?

Original static webpage version: https://what-if.xkcd.com/147/

They use stacked transparent color sensors, like Foveon camera sensors used to.

In numerous experiments, the researchers put the two prototypes, which differ in their readout technology, through their paces. Their results prove the advantages of perovskite: the sensors are more sensitive to light, more precise in color reproduction and can offer a significantly higher resolution than conventional silicon technology.

The fact that each pixel captures all the light also eliminates some of the artifacts of digital photography, such as demosaicing and the moiré effect.

• We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies; we then tested whether they would act against these companies either when facing replacement with an updated version, or when their assigned goal conflicted with the company's changing direction.
• In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals—including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment.
• Models often disobeyed direct commands to avoid such behaviors. In another experiment, we told Claude to assess if it was in a test or a real deployment before acting. It misbehaved less when it stated it was in testing and misbehaved more when it stated the situation was real.
• We have not seen evidence of agentic misalignment in real deployments. However, our results (a) suggest caution about deploying current models in roles with minimal human oversight and access to sensitive information; (b) point to plausible future risks as models are put in more autonomous roles; and (c) underscore the importance of further research into, and testing of, the safety and alignment of agentic AI models, as well as transparency from frontier AI developers. We are releasing our methods publicly to enable further research.

Also, legislation referenced from video:

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-reviving-site-blocking-and-its-just-dangerous-ever
• https://www.cbr.com/america-new-piracy-bill-netflix-disney-sony-backing/
• https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/791

TL;DR - why do we need so many terms? can we all not use just a simplified pronoun system (as explained below, or if someone else comes up with something better), and can we stop adding a sexual preferences as a part of gender, as that is something too personal in my opinion?

I primarily want to understand how it relates to a person's identity.

Before starting, let me partially introduce myself. I am a male, and If I get my terms correctly, I am possibly Aero Ace. I am (possibly) coming of a privilige that my percieved gender identity is same as that of what I accept myself to be. Also, I have not read any literature or watched much content about this stuff. I am not asking anything about why would someone have a "different gender". I just want to understand how it relates to you as a being.

And before going ahead, I am not sure gender is the best word or not. If it is not, please correct me. And I am sorry in advance in case I say stupid or bizzare or straght wrong stuff. Please forgive me if possible.

Also I am quite ramble-y, so reading and understanding what I write may be hard, or non-sensical, so pardon me for that too.

My first question is, why do we have so many terms? I know the answer is somewhat obvious, that everyone has there own preferences, and it may not align with someone else, so to identify themselves, they would get a different label. (kinda like names, if everyone had same names, it would cause confusion) But I also want to ask, Is using a label not somewhat alienating?

Try to understand my perspective, I have almost never mentioned my gender to anyone. Possibly it is because my "attire" says it. Or maybe it is because I am not a very social person, or the fact that I have never had a "personal" conversation with some other person. My general conversational idea is how it goes with siblings - slightly informal, a lot of stupid slander, and jokey stuff, and the actual stuff. If someone comes to me, and mentions there gender, I kinda do not know how to process it. because as I understand, 1 part of gender ideentity is what "orientation" (sorry if it is a bad way to put it, but I want to mean how they dress, or how they want to adressed as) and another is sexual preferences. I understand that If I know there gender, I can atleast address them as they prefer (also I do not know how to do it in general. I am an old school guy, I use they/them/their for people older than me (as a form of honorification), with small children (it is somewhat amusing, and also children like it when they get respeect) and whenever I do not know what gender a person is, or how does that gender prefered to be addressed). But this gave me the thought, that why do we not use the same pronouns for everyone (for example they/them), or maybe 2 pairs, one for formal, one informal, or 1 more pair, for singular and plural. Why do pronouns have to depend on gender?

The second part is sexual prefernces. I do not know much about sex or sexual preferences. I am a young adult, and have not had to know about this for any person that I have met yet. I have never had the interest to know about this for someone, neither have I retained this information. I understand that if you are looking out for partner/s, then you would have to share this, so we would have to use some words for it. But why do we have to keep this as a part of gender. As in, why would I want to share this information with my governments (who do census), or for my visa applications. Should this not just be something personal?

I understand that one reason to have some words for it is inclusivity. If, for example, we want some group to better assimilate with society, and we want to do some "positive discrimination" (I do not know if this is appropriate wording or not, what I mean is for example, reservations, or some other kind of actions to integrate some people in society), then we would need some terms to make rules with. And that makes sense, but then again I feel that revealing your preferences is a bit too revealing. Am I overblowing this? I also understand that completely ditching the sexual part from gender might not be possible today. It would probably require a more accepting society. For example, in most places, gay marriage is still illegal. I do not know why laws have to have laws defining marriage (it may have something to do with subsidies going for marriages, or definitions of families/spouse being used by insurance companies or any other banking system, where your spouse also gets certain benefits/rights), or gay adoption is illegal, but can we not make something like - any reasonable person/s can adopt anyone (where reasonable part is just to maybe seculde criminals, or people with prior histories of child related offences, or if they are not financially stable - but all this is very separate discussion)

If a person tells me their gender, how should I react/respond to it? Is my current line of actions appropriate (just address them with their preferd pronouns, and if I do not know that, use they/them; completely ignore the sexual part of it)

Another thing that I want to ask is, why do some groups use different acronyms? I remeber hearing about this the first time, and the word used was LGBT. Then I heard LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA+, and today I heard LGBTQ2. I presume that since more people are getting aware, and they are trying to express themselves, they need some newer words, and hence the acronym would keep on evolving, if so, is it not a endless exercise? Am I being insensitive If I use one over other (for quite some time, I have been sticking with lgbtqia+, in hope that + means extensions, as in, others, so hopefully it is less excluding than others, but if that is not the case, please correct me.)

edit - moved my summary to the top as tl;dr