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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources. These include the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), the cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, major public broadcasters PBS and NPR, and the legacy newspaper with the largest number of digital subscribers, The New York Times.

    Republicans, meanwhile, are much more likely to distrust than trust all of these sources. A smaller number of the sources we asked about are more heavily used and trusted by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart.

    Each source’s placement on this chart is based on the average measure of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from that source – taking into consideration both the party identification (Republican or Democrat, including leaners) and ideology (conservative, moderate or liberal) of respondents. Refer to the methodology for details.


  • According to the arrest affidavit, Bryant spoke publicly about wanting the county to get rid of its Dominion Voting Systems machines. The Denver-based company has been at the center of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.

    Archuleta County’s clerk and recorder, Republican Kristy Archuleta, said she’s familiar with Bryant because he ran for sheriff in 2022 as an unaffiliated candidate, getting 16% of the vote in a three-way race. The clerk believes Bryant has continued to stew over his loss.

    Griswold noted that it’s not the first time anti-Dominion extremism has had real world consequences in Colorado, and referred to the case of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving time in state prison for allowing an unauthorized person into her voting machine system update, and to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who a jury recently found defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems executive.

    “The fact that an election office in Colorado was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail is shocking and appalling,” said Griswold. “With that said, we have seen a huge uptick in threats since Trump pushed out his big lie.”





  • Highlighted by the OP, but

    According to FFI, the Ukrainian battlefield experience reinforced Norway’s decision to prioritize artillery systems capable of achieving more than 40 kilometers in range and better survivability, and led to a reassessment of ammunition acquisition strategy, favoring volume and cost-effective accuracy improvements over limited high-cost precision rounds. The evaluation judged the acquisition to be economically sound and aligned with modern operational requirements, despite noting that long-term viability would depend on integrated force protection and continued ammunition procurement. The report applied the Concept program’s standardized methodology, assessing six criteria: productivity, goal achievement, secondary effects, relevance, viability, and economic efficiency.

    This really is a concise description what artillery means to War now, and why.





  • Some relevant quotes to summarize:

    But the videos weren’t clear enough to identify the exact make or model of the dark four-door sedan. The detectives quickly obtained what are known as tower dump warrants, which required the major phone networks to provide the numbers of all cellular devices in the vicinity of 5312 Truckee during the arson. And they slung a series of so-called geofence warrants at Google, asking the company to identify all devices within a defined area just before the fire. (At the time, Google collected and retained location data if someone had an Android device or any Google applications on their cell phone.)

    There were 1,471 devices registered to T-Mobile within a mile of the house when it ignited. Using software that visualizes how long it takes a signal to bounce from a cell tower to a phone and back again, Sonnendecker narrowed the list down to the 100 devices nearest to the house. One evening toward the end of August, detectives roamed the area around 5312 Truckee with a cell-phone-tower simulator that captured the IDs of all devices within range. That night, there were 723. Sonnendecker cross-referenced these with the 100 from earlier, eliminating the 67 that showed up on both lists and likely belonged to neighborhood residents who could be ruled out. That left 33 T-Mobile subscribers whose presence in Green Valley Ranch in the early hours of August 5 couldn’t easily be explained.

    That’s when another detective wondered if the perpetrators had Googled the address before heading there. Perhaps Google had a record of that search?

    … birth dates, and physical addresses for all users who’d searched variations of 5312 Truckee Street in the 15 days before the fire.

    Google denied the request. According to court documents, the company uses a staged process when responding to reverse keyword warrants to protect user privacy: First, it provides an anonymized list of matching searches, and if law enforcement concludes that any of those results are relevant, Google will identify the users’ IP addresses if prompted by the warrant to do so. DPD’s warrant had gone too far in asking for protected user information right away, and it took another failed warrant 20 days later and two calls with Google’s outside legal counsel before the detectives came up with language the search giant would accept.

    Finally, the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Sonnendecker received a list of 61 devices and associated IP addresses that had searched for the house in the weeks before the fire. Five of those IP addresses were in Colorado, and three of them had searched for the Truckee Street house multiple times, including for details of its interior. “It was like the heavens opened up,” says Baker.

    In early December, DPD served another warrant to Google for those five users’ subscriber information, including their names and email addresses. One turned out to be a relative of the Diols; another belonged to a delivery service. But there was one surname they recognized—a name that also appeared on the list of 33 T-Mobile subscribers they’d identified earlier in the investigation as being in the vicinity of the fire. Bui.

    Seymour’s defense argued that, in asking Google to comb through billions of users’ private search history, investigators had cast an unconstitutional “digital dragnet.” It was, they said, the equivalent of police ransacking every home in America. The Fourth Amendment required police to show probable cause for suspecting an individual before getting a warrant to search their information. In this case, police had no reason to suspect Seymour before seeing the warrant’s results. But the judge sided with law enforcement. He likened the search to looking for a needle in a haystack: “The fact that the haystack may be big, the fact that the haystack may have a lot of misinformation in it doesn’t mean that a targeted search in that haystack somehow implicates overbreadth,” he said

    After a five-month wait that Sandoval remembers as “gut-wrenching,” the court finally ruled in October 2023. In a majority verdict, four judges decided the reverse keyword search warrant was legal—potentially opening the door to wider use in Colorado and beyond. The judges argued that the narrow search parameters and the performance of the search by a computer rather than a human minimized any invasion of privacy. But they also agreed the warrant lacked individualized probable cause—the police had no reason to suspect Seymour before they accessed his search history—rendering it “constitutionally defective.”

    Because of the ruling’s ambiguity, some agencies remain leery. The ATF’s Denver office says it would only consider using a keyword warrant again if the search terms could be sufficiently narrowed, like in this case: to an address that few would have reason to search and a highly delimited time period. The crime would also have to be serious enough to justify the level of scrutiny that would follow, the ATF says.

    Meanwhile, another case—in which a keyword-search warrant was used to identify a serial rapist—is now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If the warrant is upheld, as it was in Colorado, their use could accelerate nationwide. “Keyword warrants are dangerous tools tailor-made for political repression,” says Crocker. It’s easy to envision Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requesting a list of everyone who searched “immigration lawyer” in a given area, for instance.


  • This android only.

    From the article:

    Meta managed to do this even when:

    • You aren’t using the app (but have a session open in the background).

    • You haven’t logged into your account in the browser.

    • You’re browsing in incognito mode.

    • You’re using a VPN.

    • You delete cookies at the end of every session.

    The captured data includes:

    • Complete browsing history with specific URLs

    • Products added to cart and purchases made

    • Registrations on websites and completed forms

    • Temporal behavioral patterns across websites and apps

    • Direct linking to real identities on social networks

    You’re not affected if (and only if)

    • You access Facebook and Instagram via the web, without having the apps installed on your phone

    • You browse on desktop computers or use iOS (iPhones)

    • You always used the Brave browser or the DuckDuckGo search engine on mobile