The rumble of 1959 Chevrolets, once the rhythmic heartbeat of Havana, is fading to the near silence of electric vehicles as the island faces its worst fuel shortage in years.

*Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, compared the administration’s effort to remove the panels to Orwell’s “1984.”*

*Nicolas Guillou said the Trump administration’s use of sanctions undermines European democracy and called for Europe to curb reliance on American tech.*

Meta's internal testing found its chatbots fail to protect minors from sexual exploitation nearly 70% of the time, documents presented in a New Mexico trial Monday show.

https://xcancel.com/BoringBiz_/status/2021930685368254749

I have a love-hate relationship with MOBAs, but Deadlock—after its new Old Gods, New Blood update—has dragged me back to the genre kicking and screaming. I've got over 2,400 hours in Dota 2 from my misspent uni years, and I'm currently sitting on 183 hours with Valve's latest and counting.

If you had to pick a good love story, you might think of something classic, like Jane Austen's Emma or Casablanca. Or maybe tragic, like Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin or Romeo and Juliet. Or possibly cozy, like Heated Rivalry or Netflix's Nobody Wants This. What probably doesn't come to mind is a video game love story, and there's a good reason for that. Despite the appearance of variety, video game romances only come in one type. And it hardly even counts as a romance.

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money fosdem 2026  Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them.…

https://archive.is/DQE9z

This could go on for another 10 years.

X faces a new EU privacy investigation after its Grok chatbot generated nonconsensual deepfake images on the platform.

A new in-depth security report is available, continuing the Bitwarden commitment to transparency and trusted open source security. The audit, conducted by the prestigious Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich, proactively tested Bitwarden core cryptography operations against the hypothetical event of a maliciously compromised server. All issues identified in the report have been addressed by the Bitwarden team and have been included in the attached cryptography report for full transparency.

For example, on Firefox:

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Feb. 16 that Russia is preparing new large-scale attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure as Kyiv's negotiating team arrived in Geneva for another round of peace talks with the United States and Russia.

AI is crypto part two

Researchers demo weaknesses affecting some of the most popular options Academics say they found a series of flaws affecting three popular password managers, all of which claim to protect user credentials in the event that their servers are compromised.…

*Federal policies under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that are hostile to vaccines have “sent a chill through the entire industry,” one scientist said.*

BBC Verify has confirmed the location of US aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln near Iran using satellite imagery, as Washington continues to put pressure on the country over its military program and recent deadly crackdown on protesters.

I spent the long weekend setting up a home dashboard and thought I would share with this community.

LUSAKA, Zambia (AP) — She says she was let down at every step. By a partner who abandoned her when she was pregnant. By a health service that denied her a legal abortion. And by a justice system that sent her to a maximum-security prison for illegally terminating her pregnancy on her own.

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Abdul-Razzaq Ahmad Saryoul began publishing books in Syria in 2003 but he used to abstain from participating in the annual International Damascus Book Fair because of tight measures by the country’s security agencies and bans on many books under Bashar Assad’s rule.

GENEVA (AP) — Iran’s top diplomat met with the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency on Monday, ahead of a second round of negotiations with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear program.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Israeli prosecutors said Monday that they plan to charge a settler in the killing of a Palestinian activist during a confrontation that was caught on video, opening a rare prosecution of violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

SYDNEY (AP) — A man accused of killing 15 people in a mass shooting at a Jewish festival on Sydney’s Bondi Beach appeared in court Monday for the first time since his release from the hospital.

CONCORDIA, Mexico (AP) — Deep in the coastal mountains above the sparkling Pacific resort of Mazatlan, towns spaced along a twisting road appear nearly deserted, the quiet broken only by the occasional passing truck.

Japan’s economy expanded at an anemic 0.2% annual pace in the last quarter, the government reported Monday, with growth for all of 2025 at just 1.1%.

Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.

White House border czar Tom Homan said that while he doesn't like that federal immigration enforcement officers agents wear masks, he believes they need to wear masks to protect themselves against threats and violence.

More than two years ago, Amazon sued a network of websites that sold pirated DVDs of Prime Video exclusives such as The Rings of Power and The Boys. The defendants, believed to be based in China, never showed up in court. This week, a California federal judge awarded Amazon $6 million in damages and granted a broad domain transfer request, targeting registrars and registries.

Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.

The smell hits you before you even see the tents. In the al-Taawun camp, wedged between Yarmouk Stadium and al-Sahaba Street in central Gaza City, the line between human habitation and human waste has been erased.

HOTFIX:

Current and former United Nations staffers have spoken out in defence of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, after she faced attacks from a pro-Israeli NGO and several European government officials.

FOR NEARLY A YEAR, Canadians have been discussing the danger posed by the United States. The anxiety shows up everywhere—online forums, polling questions, and in the unusually blunt asides from officials. This is good. We need to get in the habit of having hard conversations about who threatens us, the extent of that threat, and what we can and must do if we are to survive as an independent country.

EXCLUSIVE: The award-winning filmmakers behind upcoming Sudanese feature Blue Card have formally withdrawn from the Berlinale Co-Production Market after being refused visas by the German embassy in Cairo, which claimed they were a “migration risk”.

*Cities across the US have developed novel tactics to protect their residents from federal immigration agents*

According to a protected disclosure filed with the Office of Special Counsel, Borges told the Government Accountability Project that DOGE officials working at Social Security created a “live copy” of the country’s Social Security records in a separate cloud environment that sidestepped usual security checks.

Security researchers have discovered more than 300 Chrome extensions that leak browser data, spy on their users, or outright steal users’ data.

saw the post here with the "free ddr5 ram" van, and thought i should share this, beware i did take this from ich_iel

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/homeland-security-wants-social-media-sites-to-expose-anti-ice-accounts/

from +972’s Sunday Recap +972Magazine [published in Israel] Feb. 15, 2026

A new investigation examining emails sent between federal investigators and prosecutors has raised fresh doubts over the Department of Justice’s claim that it has released the full cache of Jeffrey Epstein files, suggesting the material made public amounts to just 2% of the data gathered by federal agents.

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260214075750/https://www.polygon.com/video-game-romances-need-to-grow-up/

A top European Union official on Sunday rejected the notion that Europe faces "civilizational erasure," pushing back at criticism of the continent by the Trump administration.

As the United States heads toward the midterm elections, there are growing concerns among some political scientists that the country has moved even further along the path to some form of autocracy.

*Rock structure which served as backdrop to countless proposals disappears into the Adriatic after storm*