cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/9555

The tiny town of Holly Ridge, Louisiana will soon be home to a massive $27 billion artificial intelligence data center being built by Facebook parent company Meta that, when finished, will be the largest in the world.

However, residents of Holly Ridge do not feel honored that they are at the epicenter of Meta's ambitious data center buildout, which they say has upended their entire community.

As reported by New Orleans-based public radio station WWNO last week, the nonstop parade of trucks driving through Holly Ridge has led to a 600% increase in vehicle crashes over the last year, including three truck crashes that occurred just outside Holly Ridge Elementary School.

Penelope Hull, a fourth-grade student at the school, told WWNO that the data center construction trucks are highly disruptive to learning even on days when they don't get into accidents, as they often cause the classroom walls to shake.

"You can't pay attention," she said. "And then you get off track and you lose what the teacher was telling you to do."

Hull also said that the school has had to shut down its playground out of concern that Meta construction trucks will crash into children playing during recess.

The threat of trucks crashing into schools isn't the only problem that the data center has brought. Local residents Joseph and Robin Williams told WWNO that they've noticed their tap water is frequently rust colored since Meta started building the data center, and they say their electricity frequently goes off for hours on end with no warning.

Similar issues were documented by progressive media outlet More Perfect Union, which sent its reporters down to Holly Ridge and found residents felt their concerns were being completely ignored by both Meta and their local elected officials.

"We had no voting on it, no community meetings, no nothing," one local woman told More Perfect Union. "It was done all under the table."

Another local resident told More Perfect Union that Holly Ridge has become "totally different" ever since Meta began AI data center construction.

"Who wants to live like this?" he asked as he looked on at more construction trucks barreling through the community.

Zuckerberg is building a data center in Louisiana the size of Manhattan — while Meta runs ads about how small towns love their data centers, we found furious locals who plan to leave town completely. pic.twitter.com/xHLG4KJMLO
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) November 19, 2025

According to a Monday report in the Wall Street Journal, the massive Meta Louisiana data center is being funded through debt that is being papered over with accounting gimmicks that the paper notes are likely "too good to be true."

Specifically, the Journal said that Meta has created a joint venture known as a variable interest entity with investment manager Blue Owl Capital, in which Meta will rent the data center for up to 20 years as a way to keep the debt from its construction off its books.

"This lease structure minimizes the lease liabilities and related assets Meta will recognize, and enables Meta to use 'operating lease,' rather than 'finance lease,' treatment," the Journal explained. "If Meta used the latter, it would look more like Meta owns the asset and is financing it with debt."

However, the report noted that Meta is relying on "some convenient assumptions" in justifying its use of this accounting tactic, some of which "appear implausible" and "are in tension with one another," which makes it hard to justify keeping debt from the data center off its books.

"Ultimately, the fact pattern Meta relies on to meet its conflicting objectives strains credibility," reports the Journal. "To believe Meta’s books, one must accept that Meta lacks the power to call the shots that matter most, that there’s reasonable doubt it will stay beyond four years, and that it probably won’t have to honor its guarantee—all at the same time."

Commenting on the Journal's story about the data center financing, Wired editor Tim Marchman described it in a post on Bluesky as "the equivalent of a 500-foot neon sign reading 'FRAUD.'"

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

If this is too much like fedposting, I can delete it. I currently have a *arr+Jellyfin on a remote server that uses public trackers, but I'd like to set up a home server and not get letters from my ISP telling me to stop pirating. I've heard private trackers mostly don't suffer from this issue, so I was wondering how to get on one or who to contact or what I need.

Apparently there is a SaaS(?) Company called PostHog

@Fritange France is taking state actions against GrapheneOS. They're conflating us with companies which they've previously gone after and taken over their servers. We aren't vulnerable to being attacked in the same way but we still don't want accesses to our website/network services being logged or our website being hijacked. France isn't a safe country for GrapheneOS to operate in anymore and we're going to be protecting the project and our users by avoiding the country completely now.

From the official GrapheneOS Mastodon account.

I'm a multi decade Linux user but I'm mostly an advocate for people using the software they want to use be it Linux, Windows, whatever. I don't care what you use.

This is an indefensible nightmare, however. What the fuck.

According to Adafruit, the new policies introduce sweeping user-license provisions, broaden data collection (particularly around AI usage), and embed long-term account data retention, all while integrating user information into Qualcomm’s broader data ecosystem.

Section 7.1 grants Arduino a perpetual, irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts, and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your content indefinitely.

The license is also royalty-free and sublicensable. Arduino can use your content however they want, distribute it, modify it, and even sublicense it to others.

The terms further state that users are not allowed to reverse engineer or attempt to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission. Adafruit argues that this contradicts the values that made Arduino attractive to educators, researchers, and hobbyists.

The Privacy Policy states Arduino is wholly owned by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. User data, including from minors, flows to other Qualcomm Group companies.

qualcomm bought arduino around a month ago

And that potential is enormous. The region has all the raw materials to become a clean energy powerhouse, and foreign investors have taken notice. China's presence in the region's markets has grown immensely in recent years, and supply chains and trade relations with Beijing are increasingly central to Latin American economies. Around 90% of all installed wind and solar technologies in Latin America are produced by Chinese companies. China has inked bilateral trade pacts with Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peru, and its Belt and Road Initiative has invested in all manner of infrastructure projects in 21 Latin American countries since 2013.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820844

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820797

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820796

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820795

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820794

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820770

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6820359

Hello sweet comrades… I hope you’re all doing okay out there. On my side… things are completely not okay. It’s been a really heavy week and I don’t even know how to carry all of it by myself anymore.

It has been five days now ever since three of my girls Pretty, Olivia and Charity got arrested …They went out to fetch water after our caretaker disconnected ours. They left without telling me, the same way we used to before the attack. I expected them to return in a few hours… but they didn’t come back at all.

I searched everywhere, three nights with no sleep, walking till my legs hurt, asking anyone who might’ve seen them. Nothing. My whole chest was tight with fear.

When I finally went to the police to report them missing, one officer said he knew where they were. My heart dropped. After he spoke to another officer, they directed me to Gudele Police Station… and that’s where I found my girls. They were arrested and charged with “idling and disorderly conduct”

Today I went back to speak to the officer in charge. He told me that because South Sudan is considered a war zone, anyone who isn’t a citizen must carry documents at all times. I even ran home to get our papers but he still said it was too late since they’re already in jail.

Right now the only way to get them out is to raise 275 USD for each of them. If we can’t, they’ll go to court and then to prison… and that thought is eating me alive. I’ve been visiting them and they keep asking for food and clean water and I’ve had nothing to give since all the support we got went to clearing the rent. Right now donations have slowed down so much.

If anyone here can help …even just a little or by sharing …it would mean more than I can explain. The support link is in my profile if you’re able to help or pass it on. Every bit genuinely counts right now.

Thank you to everyone who reads this, who cares, who takes a moment to hold us in your thoughts. I’m trying my best to stay strong but I can’t lie… this is one of the hardest moments of my life.

This is a longshot but maybe someone would be able to help me with this. I have a laptop that only has a single NVMe drive. I booted it up today to find "Checking media presence......." after the splash screen and then it booted into BIOS. The BIOS doesn't see the NVMe device. I don't understand how this could've happened because I didn't update anything or change any setting or physically damage or jostle the laptop between the last successful boot and clean shutdown and now. When I boot into an EndevourOS liveusb, the installer can see my entire drive and its associated partitions. I can't access them though, I think because they're encrypted, but even so I feel like I should be able to see them in the filesystem, as I've rescued files like that before (from non-encypted drives). So I can't really make heads or tails of this. If the liveusb is seeing the drive and the correct partitions, it can't possibly be physical damage to the drive itself, right? Or any of the connections? Yet BIOS can't see it for some reason and won't boot into it. If it's worth anything, the OS on it is Arch with grub as the bootloader. Obviously I've tried to reseat the drive, move it to the other available slot, I've toggled on and off all sorts of settings in the bios, and nothing makes any progress. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be grateful. Thanks!

Editting to add: I'm not entirely sure the BIOS doesn't see the device. The menu is fairly unclear. There's a series of lines starting with "NVMe Device", which the corresponding entry is just blank. Then there's two lines of "NVMe Controller", one of which has an entry that I can't select or see more of that says "SAMSUNG (5...", which makes me wonder because my NVMe drive is 512gb, and I wonder if it's listed there? But I can't see anything beyond the elipses so I can't tell. Then the other controller line just says "Empty". Not sure what to make of that.

Second edit: There's a section in BIOS for RAID disks, and in it there's a listing for "Non-RAID Physical Disks" in which my NVMe drive is listed correctly. So maybe it's a bootloader thing? I'm so confused.

Final edit: Thank you so much for the help everyone, even though I'm sure my post was a confused mess. I luckily managed to back up all my files, so it's just a matter of fixing grub or reinstalling at this point. I hate computer :)