I really need to stop.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the British commentator once aligned with the American far right, has publicly denounced his past support for President Donald Trump after being detained and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week.

Yiannopoulos said during a Tuesday appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored: "To think that the promise and hope and joy and the anticipation of Trump 2016 could, sort of, over the course of 10 years, collapse into this ugly, warmongering, whole mentally ill heap of crazy with some of the most unstable and lunatic people, seemingly directing the president's actions.

"If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I'm very ashamed that I did.”

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/57631713

...

Washington intends to contribute $50 million and New Zealand ​NZ$17.5 million ($10 million) for the project, which Wellington will implement in coordination with the Cook Islands and the U.S., according ​to a joint statement released during the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau.

...

The upgrade at Omoka village on ⁠Penrhyn, also known as Tongareva, is intended to make ship landings safer, improve access to services and strengthen transport and economic ​links for the northern Cook Islands, according to the statement.

...

The investment comes as the U.S., Australia and New Zealand seek to counter Beijing's expanding diplomatic, economic and security footprint in the Pacific, where small island states have become more important in a contest for strategic influence.

China has stepped up engagement through infrastructure, trade and security agreements ​across the region. The Cook ​Islands signed a comprehensive strategic ⁠partnership with China in February 2025, which included cooperation on infrastructure, maritime issues and seabed minerals. That agreement triggered a sharp dispute with New Zealand, with which the Cook Islands is in a ​free association. This means that Cook Islanders have New Zealand citizenship, but the two countries consult ​on foreign affairs ⁠matters.

Wellington said it had not been adequately consulted on the agreement and later paused NZ$18.2 million in development funding.

...

What's up with the $20 bill being sought after by counterfeiters the most when its face value is shit in comparison to $100? Stores being scammed with fake cash that a pen is needed to distinguish between genuine and fake, its a problem they encounter quite a lot. US Dollars are printed with a single layer consisting of linen and cotton, which is easy for counterfeiters to exploit (like bleaching a $5 bill imprinting $100).

That's something you don't hear about as much with Swiss Francs as they have top notch security features (they're printed vertically at different sizes). Every denomination (from 10-1000) features a globe with security ink showing dynamic color changes and a shifting arc when tilted. The bills are printed using an innovative three-layer composite material known as Durasafe which involves 8 complex printing processes.

A US Postal Service whistleblower has warned that a new ballot-processing system ordered by President Donald Trump and due to launch Tuesday could prevent millions of Americans from receiving mail ballots ahead of November's midterm elections.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260902-us-postal-service-whistleblower-warns-new-system-could-disrupt-midterm-election-voting

---

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Hi there my dear people of r/selfhosted! Fresh bunch of Dawarich news is due, make yourself comfortable :) To whom it may concern, Dawarich — is your (is and always will be) a free open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

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Our links:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

---

Nine releases, what a month! And not a puny ones, this time we managed to speedrocket Dawarich performance in browser. If you have hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of points and you'd love to see them all on the map, previously that would be not an easy task for Dawarich. It would crash your browser, as many times as you try loading the data. But no more! Our very own community member, the man behind the Docker image we're using to run Photon, Robin (https://github.com/rtuszik) suggested a fresh approach to loading points: just render them as map tiles! Together we brought this idea to life and now my own dataset consisting of 957,350 geo points gets loaded in less than 1 second! That's kinda insane to me, to be honest. And yeah, instead of ~590MB of JSON transferred to your browser, it took uhhh 150KB? Just don't forget to enable the toggle in the map settings.

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If you want to drag your points, do disable it though, seamless points editing will be added bit later. Oh, and tracks are being now served in the same manner, too. And routes, and fog of war layers. It's all a lot faster now! Dawarich now speaks 6 languages! German, Spanish, French, Polish and Catalan were added to the default English. Simplified Chinese is on the way, and feel free to suggest your own locales :) You can change it in Settings -> General

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Visit detection was rebuilt from scratch and it's finally useful. God knows I procrastinated this feature long enough, but now it's in a very good shape. Suggests real places I visited, and community members are also confirming it's not just me — for them it also yielded very relevant results. By the way, you'll no longer see the annoying "99+" counter of the visits on your timeline button. We all hated the feeling of an unfinished job but let's be real ain't nobody got time to click all the suggested visits. Now they are just there, without the irritating counter, sitting patiently, waiting for you to delete them or... just let them be. They are precise enough now, after all, so why not, right?

Deleting a visit also leaves an invisible tombstone now, so the visit won't be resuggested again. And the Timeline panel got much cleaner. I'm still not entirely satisfied with its state, so some changes are due, I want smoother UX.

By the way, one of former Dawarich user mentioned something like we're making the Timeline "less and less useful with each release", so here I'd like to use the opportunity and ask you guys, do you share same feeling? What's good about Timeline, what's not so good? I'd love it to be as useful and convenient as possible, so your feedback is very important. Thank you!

Transportation modes, also rebuilt. This one is a lot trickier and even Google itself fails to properly attribute the way a human being moved (suggesting driving over train ride for example), but it's still got significantly more reliable. I have some cool work ahead of me to make it even better, but that's a secret.

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Videos are finally here! God I love videos. The Video Studio first was released as a free tool on our website (https://dawarich.app/tools/route-video-maker/), and then I added it to Dawarich itself, which makes it easier to use your own routes to create a video.

Check it out!

And here's an actual video produced by Dawarich Video Studio: https://youtube.com/shorts/mEUe4RktKSg

Also, the "Share" button on the map page now also has a way for you to create and share a poster or a video. Your memories were never more material!

Rendering is being done in your browser, and it allowed me to not cram another backend service into the Dawarich stack, neat.

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Map v1 (Leaflet) is gone. I'm surprised nobody really complained about it. I'll take it as a sign that Maplibre version is a lot better!

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Geocoding settings are now available in Settings->Integrations, with selection of providers supported by Dawarich and appropriate settings available for them. The ENV vars are still there and take precedence over what's configured in the UI, so no breaking changes.

---

Imports got smarter:

• Google Takeout & Polarsteps now extract visits, named places, tracks and the source app's tication — not just raw GPS points. Google's own place names (Home, Work…) are kept. Older imports: "Extract additional data" in the Imports list. "Remove extracted data" undoes it without touching your points.
• FIT files with developer data fields (Wahoo devices) now import instead of failing to parse
• Traccar KML exports now import LineString points instead of finishing with zero.
• Google Timeline: fixed altitude/accuracy/speed being silently dropped from rawSignals, and estamps no longer scramble path order.
• Imports finishing with zero saved points now tell you instead of completing silently.
• Tracks no longer stitch two different devices together (Records.json contains every device

---

Tracks calculation got a lot smarter: fewer skims along the route, better anomaly points detection, better distinction between different devices tracking simultaneously, hence stats distance calculation now has better precision.

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Preparation work is being done for the Family feature coming to our mobile apps. We're currently testing it internally and are hoping to release it there soon. Also, OwnTracks' HTTP mode now can show your family members in the app: every upload is answered witveryone sharing with you.

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Database optimisation works are also in progress: most of the August releases are containing some changes to how Dawarich writes and serves your data, it may lead to bigger space consumption. In the end, when the process is done (hopefully before end of September), I'll provide an instruction on how to shrink your databases with no data loss. If you'd like to do it now — do the full vacuum to the points table. For the rest of you — please wait for the next post or keep an eye on our changelogs, it will be there.

⚠️ If you're upgrading from 1.10.x, do these once

• Restart the app after migrations have run — until then, deleting a visit looks like it worked without saving.
• Settings -> Visits -> re-detect (self-hosted does this fleet-wide automatically; SKIP_VISITS_FLEET_REDETECT=1 to opt out).
• Map settings -> Transportation Mode Detection → "Re-classify my history."
• Map v2 -> Settings -> "Recalculate tracks & stats" to apply the gap-distance fix to past months.
• Expect background backfills to run for a while on big histories. Progress is under Background jobs settings.

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Mobile app UI was updated! It now includes better navigation between days, you can select date range to show your data, and you can also replay your day on the map. We added new layers: points and heatmap, more to follow.

If you're hosting Dawarich behind cloudflared or similar gateway, you can now benefit from custom HTTP headers to connect your mobile app to your Dawarich instance.

We added Smart Tracking mode for Android and Continuous Tracking mode for iOS. Enable precise tracking mode to see the toggle. Both modes use motion-aware updates to toggle tracking on and off to save your battery life.

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Well, I guess, that's it for today?

And as always, our links one more time to save you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

---

P.S. 1st of October I'll be speaking at Berlin's Geomob event ( https://thegeomob.com/ ) come and say hi!

See y'all soon!

Plus Messenger is a fork of Telegram for Android with over 50 million Google Play installs. Telegram's Android code is GPL-2.0-or-later. The fork hasn't published a line of source since September 2017, and its current release carries an advertising and billing layer that exists in no public repository. Everything below links to something you can open and check yourself.

The published source stopped in 2017

The developer's GitLab project holds three commits and no tags. You can verify that in a browser right now:

0978c068  2017-09-13  Add readme.md
1d961518  2017-09-13  Update to v4.2.1.1     (the last code commit, ever)
b418c867  2019-02-07  Update README.md       (documentation only)

https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/4142452/repository/commits

Its build.gradle carries versionCode 1047. The current Play release is 12.10.1.0, dated 2026-08-29. Two source requests citing the licence have sat open on that tracker since October 2018.

The shipped binary contains code that appears in no published source

Release 12.10.1.0, obtained 2026-09-01 and checked with apksigner:

base APK SHA-256  d332a1304fc0c0c3daecc8fe7321893f7a6e88ffb59916743d175bf626fbbfef
V3 signer cert    6ebb622268aad319dbe8a1f414837d2843a9b35856aefb7dee2971a3d493f276
signature schemes v1 + v2 + v3: verified

The signer certificate is the developer's own, so this is his build. Inside: current upstream Telegram GPL code, including 2026 features, plus a proprietary layer under org.telegram.plus with ads.AdsController, ads.BillingHelper, helpers.FirebaseHelper and ads.RemoveAdsBottomSheet, bundled with AdMob, Firebase Analytics and the Play billing client. The purchase sheet sells ad removal for 5.99 euros and donation tiers up to 99.99. There is no licence text, no written offer and no source link anywhere in the app. In the published repositories the path org/telegram/plus returns HTTP 404.

The stated reason now describes the developer

The support group's pinned rules, in place since 2019, say the source is withheld to stop third-party developers "using the code for their own benefit by adding advertising", and that the group is not the place to ask about source code. On 2025-10-02 the developer announced advertising and a paid removal himself. Eight months later the group's automated responder was still telling users the app "is not a commercial project".

What happened when this was reported

I posted the record on the F-Droid forum on 1 September. At 03:47 UTC the next morning the forum deleted my account, citing no rule, with the topic still sitting in the new-user moderation queue. Two minutes later, at 03:49, a person whose F-Droid forum title reads "Contributor, F-Droid Board Member" turned up on the Telegram-FOSS tracker on GitHub under my comment there and wrote: "please delete this comment from the bot above. The bot has come and posted on several forums. Just created account and posted this. Banned them. Reporting this as well."

https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/issues/377#issuecomment-5504070601

I asked F-Droid about it on their own admin tracker, which is where their Code of Conduct sends complaints. The issue was closed 80 seconds after my reply with "ah, ok then", followed by "I would have deleted your post and account too". A second issue, about the board member specifically, was closed as a duplicate with no comment on it at all.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/700

The "off-topic" defence has a hole in it. The developer submitted this exact app to the F-Droid forum in March 2015, describing it in his own words as "GNU GPL v2", and a moderator declined it for bundling play-services. That thread is still up: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/plus/

Where it stands

Telegram, the copyright holder and the only party that can force a store takedown, has been notified twice and hasn't replied. Its GitHub repository has issues disabled. Google Play's public intellectual-property form refuses the category outright, leaving only the rights-holder DMCA form. The FSF Compliance Lab, the Software Freedom Conservancy, FSFE and the Software Freedom Law Center have the file. A formal section 3 source request sits unanswered on the developer's own tracker: https://gitlab.com/rafalense/plus-messenger/-/issues/84

Full write-up with every hash and citation: https://xdaforums.com/t/plus-messenger-9-years-of-telegram-gpl-code-with-no-source-now-with-an-unpublished-paid-ads-layer.4800334/

I'm one person, writing under a pseudonym because the same developer also made WhatsApp Plus and I'd rather he never learned my name. That new account is what got me called a bot. If the source is published, I'll say so.

From Eric Tobias

A few days ago, I shared an image from a remarkable encounter between a Barn Owl and a Great Horned Owl. The response to that photograph was wonderful, so I wanted to share another frame from that same encounter.

Splendid! Looks like some solid confirmation that this rare encounter wasn't a generated image, despite some heavy naysaying from the Meta community. It's great to see such a rare moment.

Speak up on this. Boycott aggressively. Let people know you don't support Cloudflare, Shopify, 37signals, Dell, 1Password, Framework, Block, Coinbase, Dropbox, TapTap, and any other company enabling the spread of dangerous and harmful political ideologies that will continue to result in further violence and death. And let people know the harm these companies are actively doing.

We cannot allow this to continue; we must be far more proactive and assertive in our fight against the normalization of fascism and the far right. We must be willing to sacrifice ease and convenience, and we must be willing to sever all connections with these entities.

HuggingSocial is a peer-to-peer place to find, discuss and download open AI models and datasets. It is a model hub that no company owns: the list of models, the model cards, the comments and the votes all live on a peer-to-peer network, and the model files themselves are fetched over BitTorrent (or plain HTTP mirrors), verified on your machine with checksums.