Mediaboss Marketing

The El Nino weather pattern means Victorians can expect a hotter and drier summer than recent years, and communities should begin preparing their properties and creating a Bushfire Survival Plan.

CFA District 18 Assistant Chief Fire Officer Gavin Wright said conditions across the Mallee are rapidly drying out.

Over recent weeks weve seen a number of private burn-offs escape, requiring local CFA brigades to be called out to assist the landowner to bring the burn-off back under control, ACFO Wright said.

Were urging residents and farmers to complete their fire prevention activities and property preparation ahead of the FDP, but to make safety a priority when doing so.

Be sure to register your burn-off, check local conditions on the day, as well as coming days and have enough water and people on hand should you need it.

While CFAs 52,000 members are poised to respond and support communities this bushfire season, theyre urging people to use common sense and take responsibility for preventing fires.

Residents in District 18 are asked to take this opportunity ahead of the FDP to clean up their properties.

Those conducting burn-offs must notify authorities online at the Fire Permits Victoria website (www.firepermits.vic.gov.au), or by calling ESTA on 1800 668 511.

By registering your burn-off online, you allow emergency call takers to allocate more of their time taking calls from people who need emergency assistance immediately.

No burning off is permitted during the FDP without a Permit to Burn, which can be applied for through the Fire Permits Victoria website.

There are very strict conditions attached to these permits and the liability sits with the permit holder to ensure they always act safely.

Fire Danger Period information:

The rest is here:
Fire restrictions announced for Buloke - News & Media

"For the last two decades, our social networking and social media platforms have been universes unto themselves," writes the Verge's editor-at-large: Each has its own social graph, charting who you follow and who follows you. Each has its own feed, its own algorithms, its own apps, and its own user interfaces (though they've all pretty much landed on the same aesthetics over time). Each also has its own publishing tools, its own character limits, its own image filters. Being online means constantly flitting between these places and their ever-shifting sets of rules and norms. Now, though, we may be at the beginning of a new era. Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.

If this ActivityPub-fueled change takes off, it will break every social network into a thousand pieces. All posts, of all types, will be separated from their platforms. We'll get new tools for creating those posts, new tools for reading them, new tools for organizing them, and new tools for moderating them and sharing them and remixing them and everything else besides. He's talking about a decades-old concept called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. ("Sometimes the P is also 'Post,' and the E can be 'Elsewhere.' The idea is the same either way." The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms... [Y]our blog becomes the hub for everything, your main home on the internet. The article argues that for now, "the best we have are tools like Micro.blog, a six-year-old platform for cross-posters." But the article ultimately envisions a future with not just new posting tools, but also new reading tools "with different ideas about how to display and organize posts."

Link:
Will The Future See Interconnected Social Media Platforms? - Slashdot

There will be changed traffic conditions from Sunday 12 November on Cumberland Highway, Fairfield West for the installation of a red light speed camera.

Over a five-year period between 1 July 2016 and 30 June 2021, 20 crashes were reported at this intersection with 21 casualties reported, 7 serious.

The camera will be installed to monitor northbound traffic at the Cumberland Highway and Thorney Road intersection as part of the Saving Lives Accelerated Program.

Work will take place over eight night shifts and five day shifts between 12 November and 17 December, weather permitting.

During the day we will work between 7am and 5pm. At night we will work between 7pm and 5am the next day. We will not work more than two night shifts in any week.

Road Users are advised to drive to these conditions and follow the directions of signs and traffic control.

Transport for NSW thanks the community for their patience during this time.

For the latest traffic updates download the Live Traffic NSW App, visit livetraffic.com or call 132 701.

Read the original post:
Red light speed camera installation on Cumberland Highway in ... - Transport for NSW

Motorists are advised of changed traffic conditions from next week on City West Link and The Crescent, Annandale, as The Crescent overpass opens to traffic.

From Tuesday 7 November, motorists can access the overpass via Johnston Street or Link Road to travel over City West Link and onto Victoria Road or Anzac Bridge.

From 8pm on Monday 6 November, City West Link and The Crescent will be permanently reduced from two lanes to one lane approaching the Anzac Bridge.

There will be a temporary no left turn from The Crescent onto City West Link to allow for final elements of construction to be completed from Tuesday 7 November for approximately four weeks.

James Craig Road cannot be accessed via the Crescent overpass. To access James Craig Road from Annandale from this date motorists will join City West Link via Balmain Road. Detours and traffic control will be in place. Motorists are advised to follow the signs and use caution.

For more information on road closures and changed traffic conditions, including real-time traffic updates, visit livetraffic.com.

Read more:
Changed traffic conditions on City West Link and The Crescent ... - Transport for NSW

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Spread across four computer monitors arranged in a grid, a blue and green interface shows the location of more than 50 different surveillance cameras. Ordinarily, these cameras and others like them might be disparate, their feeds only available to their respective owners: a business, a government building, a resident and their doorbell camera. But the screens, overlooking a pair of long conference tables, bring them all together at once, allowing law enforcement to tap into cameras owned by different entities around the entire town all at once. This is a demonstration of Fusus, an AI-powered system that is rapidly springing up across small town America and major cities alike. Fusus' product not only funnels live feeds from usually siloed cameras into one central location, but also adds the ability to scan for people wearing certain clothes, carrying a particular bag, or look for a certain vehicle.

404 Media has obtained a cache of internal emails, presentations, memos, photos, and more which provide insight into how Fusus teams up with police departments to sell its surveillance technology. All around the country, city councils are debating whether they want to have a system that qualitatively changes what surveillance cameras mean for a town's residents and public agencies. While many have adopted Fusus, others have pushed back, and refused to have the hardware and software installed in their neighborhoods. In some ways, Fusus is deploying smart camera technology that historically has been used in places like South Africa, where experts warned about it creating an ever present blanket of surveillance. Now, tech with some of the same capabilities is being used across small town America.

Rather than selling cameras themselves, Fusus' hardware and software latches onto existing installations, which can include government-owned surveillance cameras as well as privately owned cameras at businesses and homes. It turns dumb cameras into smart ones. "In essence, the Fusus solution puts a brain into every camera connected with the system," one memorandum obtained by 404 Media reads. In addition to integrating with existing surveillance installations, Fusus' hardware, called SmartCORE, can turn cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). It can reportedly offer facial recognition features, too, although Fusus hasn't provided clear clarification on this matter.

The report says the system has been adopted by numerous police departments across the United States, with approximately 150 jurisdictions using Fusus. Orland Park police have called it a "game-changer." It's also being used internationally, launching in the United Kingdom.

Here's what Beryl Lipton, investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), had to say about it: "The lack of transparency and community conversation around Fusus exacerbates concerns around police access of the system, AI analysis of video, and analytics involving surveillance and crime data, which can influence officer patrols and priorities. In the absence of clear policies, auditable access logs, and community transparency about the capabilities and costs of Fusus, any community in which this technology is adopted should be concerned about its use and abuse."

More:
Fusus' AI-Powered Cameras Are Spreading Across the United States - Slashdot