Thursday, May 15, 2025

We've got far too many public officials who want to follow the Stasi line on speech from Germany,

not being suitably punished for it, and too many people committing perjury who aren't being charged for it.

And that's too bad.


Speaking of people playing Speech Police, you may have heard of WorldCon, BIG science fiction convention, who has a interesting way to choose program participants:
We received more than 1,300 panelist applicants for Seattle Worldcon 2025. Building on the work of previous Worldcons, we chose to vet program participants before inviting them to be on our program.

And by “vetting” program participants, they mean “barring anyone that doesn’t toe the far left social justice warrior line”:
Several individuals have asked to see the ChatGPT query that was used in the vetting process. In the interest of transparency, this was our prompt:
REQUEST

Using the list of names provided, please evaluate each person for scandals. Scandals include but are not limited to homophobia, transphobia, racism, harassment, sexual misconduct, sexism, fraud.
Wonderful, isn't it?


This isn't connected, but I want to get it down before I lose track of it.
LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.
...
While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.

However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.

Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

Not comforting, is it?

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