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Security Alert – May 15, 2021 by U.S. Embassy in Kabul
The Embassy reminds U.S. citizens that on April 27, 2021, the Department of State ordered the departure from U.S. Embassy Kabul of U.S. government employees whose functions can be performed elsewhere due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul. The Travel Advisory for Afghanistan remains Level 4-Do Not Travel due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and COVID-19. Commercial flight options from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) remain available and the U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited.
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Well, for starters, if we’re going to have to put up with antisemites, we’d rather the ones who don’t try to use Israel as a get-out-of-jail-free card for their own antisemitism. American Jews, whether Democrat or Republican, are Americans. Not some outsider guest living in your precious country.

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No really, I promise, we’re not just “stirred by thought leaders”. I can state with complete confidence that neither Karl Groves nor Adrian Roselli have gotten in touch with me in any manner to offer beers in exchange for negative comments about AccessiBe. 😛 And really, that’s all it would take, that is, if we must mix in some stirring by thought leaders.

I could be this easily bribed to slam AccessiBe because the product doesn’t solve even half the problems it claims to solve, hell will freeze over before they manage to make the entire web accessible, and Ekerling, at least, is a lying liar who lies.

There. I said it. Publicly. The AccessiBe hashtag on Twitter is overflowing with examples of websites that don’t work, complete with videos of users experiencing them not working. Ekerling knows this. So we’re well past ignorance and well into lying territory.

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Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool, not as a platform for ‘posting’

My only response to this is: “Well of course he did.” He was handed an incredibly powerful set of tools coupled with an incredibly easy way to use them. What did people expect would happen?

State College

45 °F Partly cloudy

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Update on #AccessiBe’s insistence that its screen reader mode alert is no longer on by default.

As of Friday 30 April 2021 at 09:25 Eastern, it is in fact still there and still as annoying as ever. I’m logged into Namecheap on a computer accessing a network that doesn’t have AccessiBe’s domains blocked.

So if this hasn’t been added already, add another outright AccessiBe lie to the list. Man, you guys are really racking these up.

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I think I’ve officially gotten to the point where, if a podcast doesn’t have a transcript, I’m skipping it.

First, because actual accessibility. Second, because it’s a whole lot easier for me to quickly scroll through a transcript to find the thing I was interested in.

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Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern (Make WordPress Core)
Google is rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) for the Chrome browser. TL;DR: FLoC places people in groups based on their browsing habits to target advertising. Why is this bad? As the …

I’m responding to this on my own site because I can’t get the interface on the Make blog to do the click right when attempting to reply over there.

I 100% agree with this proposal. Users can only choose to opt in or out if they’re able to make an informed decision about this, and for better or worse, they can’t do that. I’m pretty sure Google will market this as some sort of user-beneficial feature, assuming they tell non-technical users anything at all about this. WordPress, according to its own “bragging”, (I’m using that loosely), powers something like 40% of the web. We can’t continue as a project to pretend we have no impact on it.