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Our boi Broccoli Cheddar is getting so big
(thelemmy.club)
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Lemmy.zip & Piefed.zip Server Update June 2026
(lemmy.zip)
Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round the lantern, settle yourselves by the fire, and let me regale you with the tale of the past month's goings-on. There have been victories, mishaps, curious discoveries, and perhaps even a little bit of chaos. Actually it was pretty much just chaos.
Server updates
DotZip turns 3 years old on June 10th! To be more precise, Lemmy.zip turns 3 years old but we're gonna use that as our official birthday across our sites. Piefed.zip turns 1 year old just 3 days later, so it's close enough we'll use it as our birthday date :)
We'll have some birthday celebrations taking place, plus a cool little mini-site (we had these in Year 1 and Year 2 so we'll keep the tradition going, although it will be slightly different this year!
Piefed took its turn at being the problem-instance for once, and caused some major headaches. Very unlike Piefed, which is normally the well behaved ~~child~~ instance.
A user disclosed publicly some vulnerabilities in Piefed that could be exploited, into a lemmy community without notifying the developer first of this. As this could then be used by anyone to exploit piefed instances, a number of Piefed admins including us took our Piefed instances offline until the fixes could be pushed. During this time, some further exploits were shared which indicated that the instance needed to stay offline longer, including the ability for any account to ban any other account without authentication. As this could be used to target vulnerable users, we held Piefed.zip offline a bit longer until these fixes were pushed too.
Thankfully all fixes were pushed in about 24 hours, and the site is back up, but it does show the impact on instances when disclosures are made improperly. The vulnerabilities were also all discovered by having an LLM scan the codebase, which probably indicates where we're at as a society right now, and that anyone developing code probably needs to do this to make sure someone doesn't beat them to it.
Thankfully it doesn't appear any real damage was done!
After last month's Lemmy drama with nested comments, Lemmy.zip has taken its turn being well behaved and I don't have too much to say here. The Lemmy 1.0 beta is out and in testing, so hopefully not too long before we're able to upgrade and get all the cool new features.
Please Don’t Be a Lurker!
If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)
Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a signed copy of your self-published autobiography.. maybe. Its participation.
Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or feed all my posts to an LLM and see how long it would take people to realise I've been replaced by a machine. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)
The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.
So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:
Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.
Donations
Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!
Liberpay (Card, Paypal)
Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is https://liberapay.com/dotzip
OpenCollective (Card)
Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is https://opencollective.com/lemmyzip
If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.
Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)
We also have our Ko-Fi page if you'd rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.
Thank you!
We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!
Graphs
Piefed.zip
CPU over 7 days:
RAM:
Performance right now:
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Cloudflare overview:
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Visitors:
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Lemmy.zip
CPU:
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Disk space:
Performance right now:
Images:
Cloudflare overview:
Requests:
Bandwidth:
Visitors:
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And that's it for another month.
Remember, DotZip's birthday is on the 10th June (only 10 days from today!) so do keep an eye out for the celebrations. You can usually win some games or giftcards or something if I'm feeling generous :)
Speak soon!
Demigodrick
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Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Breaking Up Climate Research Center
(www.bloomberg.com)
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Jean Grey wishes you a happy pride month By ProjectOrthus
(thelemmy.club)
For more context search jean grey outs iceman
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u/aramis87 Tells us about a museum theft
(sh.itjust.works)
This was originally posted by @aramis87@fedia.io on a now-deleted thread on c/AskLemmy entitled "I want to leave some confusing stuff at a friend's house." Thanks to @Rentlar@lemmy.ca for helping me find all of the text again after the post deletion.
Due to accessibility + the sheer length of the post, I will be simply re-sharing the full story here, as follows:
A baffling museum theft, and answers that only raise more questions
Oh. Oh god.
Okay, so bear with me.
Many years ago, some friends and I worked at the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania. At the time of this story, the museum was undergoing a bunch of renovations. The renovation dust would intermittently get kicked up by the ventilation system or would fall in a clump or whatever, and the movement would set of the security alarms. After a couple months of this, Security became somewhat lax in responding to alarms, because every night there were a number of false alarms.
So, one early morning, a student is walking to the university and spots something weird sitting in the middle of the pedestrian walkway on the South Street bridge. As they get closer, it starts to look familiar. They get up close and recognize it as the solid silver stand that usually supports 
in the Rotundra of the Museum. This is the first indication that anyone has that the museum was burgled the night before.
The police are called, the stand goes through evidence collection, everyone traipses over to the Museum, Security (and the museum administration) is shocked. Everyone starts looking around for whatever else might have been taken. Eventually we conclude that only three items are missing: the Dowager Empress' crystal ball, the solid silver stand the ball usually rests on, and a 2500 year old bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. [The ball is gorgeous: it's like the third largest crystal ball in the world, it's absolutely flawless, and John Wanamaker bought it for like $50,000 back in 1920.]
All three items were taken from either the Rotundra itself or just nearby. This is somewhat confusing, as the Rotundra is all the way toward the back of the Museum, and up a couple staircases. Why wouldn't the thieves grab stuff from a more accessible area instead of crossing almost the entire Museum? Also, the objects are heavy or difficult to carry - why wouldn't they take something smaller, more easily portable, and more valuable - for example, the Tang dynasty horses that are also in the Rotundra and much more valuable?
Even more confusing is why the thieves decided to ditch the stand for the crystal ball. Presumably they were having problems carrying all three items and decided to leave one behind. Did they drop the four-foot tall 60-pound statue of Osiris? No. Did they leave the 50-pound crystal ball which is very round and can be hard to hold safely? No. They decided to leave behind the 20-pound stand, which has lots of easy finger-holds, is made of solid silver, and is easily meltable into easily-sold unidentifiable metal. It's all just ... very weird.
Anyway, the police show up. Because of some University association with the state that I can no longer remember, the FBI shows up. There's lots of chaos. And ... nothing happens. The FBI takes the stand into custody for forensic examination, but they can't find any clues. They keep the stand in custody for a couple years in case "something else turns up" but the case goes cold.
Eventually they return the stand to the Museum. We clean it carefully and, heartbroken, put it into storage. And for a couple more years, nothing happens.
Then one day, Jes Canby (one of our Museum workers) happens to visit a junk store a few blocks off campus - Jes loves junk stores! As she's wandering around looking at stuff, several aisles over, she sees something and thinks to herself, "Hunh. That kinda looks like the Osiris statue that was stolen from the Museum a few years ago." She gets a couple aisles closer and thinks, "Wow, that really does look like the Osiris statue that got stolen!" She goes over to get a closer look and discovers the Museum accession numbers still on the side of the statue. She calls the police.
The police show up. The FBI shows up (again). The shop owner is interrogated: Where did you get this statue?! Why, from Al the homeless junk guy, of course. Al wanders around on trash day and pulls out stuff, and the junk store guy buys it from him. Just last week, he paid Al $25 combined for the Osiris statue and an old side table. Does the FBI want the old side table, too? After much examination and consultation, the FBI does not want the old side table.
And where, they ask, might the FBI find Al the homeless junk guy? I dunno, says the store owner, he's homeless. So the FBI starts searching West Philly for Al.
Eventually they find him. Where did you get the statue? they ask. "From the curb in front of some house a couple miles away; sometimes they throw away some nice stuff in that neighborhood." They put him in the car and drive around a whole lot until they eventually find the right house (things look different from a car).
They question the homeowner: Where and how did he get the Osiris statue? "I didn't," he says. "I have a large garage and my family and friends sometimes store things there. I was on vacation in Europe a few years ago, and when I got back, this statue was there. I asked my family and and friends about it and no one knew anything about it.
"I started clearing out my garage a month or so ago, and asked again and no one still knew anything about the statue, so I gave it to my brother-in-law; he wanted it for a lawn ornament. Except his wife thought it was ugly and made him bring it back. I didn't have any use for it, so I put it out with the trash."
Oh? asks the FBI real casually. Did anything else happen to show up around the same time?
A pause while the homeowner thinks. "Oh yeah - there was a crystal ball, too. I gave it to my housekeeper - she's really into all that New Age-y stuff. Where does she live? Oh, somewhere across the river - maybe Trenton, I think?"
So the FBI gets the housekeeper's info and drives across the river to Trenton and knocks on her door. She truly does have a bunch of New Age-y stuff in her place. They ask her about the crystal ball the homeowner gave her.
"Oh yes," she says. "You know, I used to keep it in my bedroom, but the light in there was just too strong - it burned a hole in my arm!"
And where, they ask patiently, is it now?
"Oh, it's right over there." She points. It's on the coffee table; she's using it as a hatstand.
Various epilogues:
The FBI confiscated the crystal ball and the Osiris statue, and re-confiscated the stand, for "forensics analysis". But the staff at the Museum had thoroughly cleaned the stand before putting it into storage, the housekeeper took obsessively good care of the crystal ball, and the Osiris statue had been through too many locations under different conditions and entirely too many hands for anything useful to be found. Eventually, after many years of us asking, they returned the items to the Museum.
There had been a reward offered for the successful return of the items - maybe $10k or something? The homeowner tried to claim it, but was turned down. I personally think it should have gone to Al the homeless junk guy: he explicitly saved the statue from the trash, his actions are the ones that triggered the whole recovery process, and he's definitely the one who could have benefitted the most. But no :( Eventually they decided to give the money to Jes, who promptly turned around and donated it back to the Museum.
While the theft shows clear signs of some insider knowledge - that there would likely be no Security response to alarms going off, and that the garage would be open and homeowner away - they never caught the thieves. I personally think the number of people who knew both things would be pretty small, but no one was ever charged.
The FBI did a bunch of press conferences congratulating themselves on their diligent fieldwork and years-long persistence in recovering the objects - completely ignoring that they'd long since given up and that there would have been no discovery at all if Jes hadn't wandered into that junk store. Years later, one of the FBI guys wrote a book and it turned out these were the guys from the FBI's semi-newly-created Art Crimes Unit, and this was one of their first successful "investigations".
And, finally: the artifacts have been lovingly cleaned and returned to their display positions at University Museum. If you visit the Museum today and head to the Rotunda, you can see the Dowager Empress Cixi's crystal ball sitting proudly on it's solid silver stand, while the Osiris statue lives just a few yards away.
Anyway, OP, that's my answer to your question: a stolen, 2500 year old, 60 pound bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. I can guarantee that it will cause much confusion over many years.
25
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'She Was Brought in to Kill' 60 Minutes: Scott Pelley Unleashes on Bari Weiss at CBS Meeting
(www.commondreams.org)
Veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley took aim at the qualifications and intentions of CBS News' right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, on Monday at an explosive staff meeting that was meant to introduce employees of the 57-year-old news show to its newly appointed executive producer days after several journalists were fired in what Pelley referred to as "Black Thursday."
Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist who first gained notoriety for campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University and went on to rail against "woke" progressives and "cancel culture," appointed tech journalist Nick Bilton to lead the program last week after firing two executives and two top correspondents.
Bilton opened the meeting by reading some prepared remarks, but Pelley quickly cut in to tell the new producer that he had "many questions" about the dismissals of reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
"I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?" Pelley asked Bilton, his voice reportedly "shaking in anger" at times. "What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?"
Alfonsi and Vega won a prestigious journalism award for a story on President Donald Trump's deal with El Salvador to send immigrants to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the abuse detainees have suffered there, and the fact that many of those deported to the prison have not been convicted of crimes and have been falsely accused of being members of violent gangs.
The story was pulled from the air last December after Weiss complained that it hadn't covered the Trump administration's perspective, garnering accusations of censorship, and eventually aired with some editing.
Pelley suggested on Monday that such decisions revealed Weiss' intentions for the broadcast as a whole.
“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes.’ She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job."
"The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic," he added, "so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
'CBS Evening News' has had declining viewership, "often below 4 million viewers a night," according to NPR, with the broadcast "flagging" since Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor.
Media critics have warned that Weiss appears to be "running the Trump playbook" at CBS, as Sophia Tesfaye wrote at Salon last week: "Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform—fairness, innovation, a new direction—and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket."
Weiss took the helm of CBS after parent company Paramount's merger with Skydance, owned by the son of tech billionaire and Trump backer Larry Ellison.
Charles Forelle, the managing editor of CBS News and a close associate of Weiss, repeatedly attempted to steer Monday's meeting away from Pelley's criticism of Bilton and the new direction "60 Minutes" appears to be taking, saying at one point that Pelley's line of questioning was "not actually productive."
"It's working for me," replied Pelley.
After Pelley said the network's leadership had been "cruel" in firing veteran journalists from the show, Forelle accused him of being "rude."
"I'm not being rude," he shot back. "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at 5:00. Sending Draggon Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because no one could look him in the eye. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi's contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega's contract. Just calling them up and telling them they were fired. That's rude."
"This is a conversation," Pelley added. "That is rude, and you were part of that."
Alfonsi's contract with "60 Minutes" was not renewed; Vega was dismissed despite her contract not being up until 2027. The two journalists spoke out about their firings, with Alfonsi saying, "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
Vega said that "in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories."
"60 Minutes" employees applauded Pelley on Monday after Bilton left the meeting, and observers praised the veteran journalist for defending the show and the work of its staffers.
"Scott Pelley told the truth today," said Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. "We need independent media the right wing can't buy."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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