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I don't sleep like other people. "What? Upside-down in a closet?" asked someone at Radio Paradise. Well no but my sleep is very irregular.

This was first noticed by the maternity ward nurses in the hospital where I was born: I didn't want to wake up for my feedings.

In general I sleep far more than other people, but for most of my life I've had the odd ability to stay awake, and to do useful work, far longer than anyone else, but then crashing for two or three days. I can't do that anymore though. If I try, I pass out.

I was having seizures for several years. I don't really know but speculate that the seizures were due to my practice of staying awake for several days at a time. I haven't had a seizure since last summer, when I started taking Trileptal. It's a modified form of Tegretol, it apparently works the same way but has a somewhat different chemical structure so as not to be so harmful to the liver.

I also have the problem that I don't get tired when it's time to sleep. A friend says "It's like dying of dehydration because you don't know you're thirsty".

Realization of my recent depression dawned upon me because I was sleeping excessively. When I get depressed I sleep to much, when I sleep too much it makes me depressed. Taking antidepressants eventually led to my recent pattern of staying awake for hours into the night, then awakening early, long before the shelter staff wakes us. At the same time, my depression has lifted.

I've been getting hit with a lot of these today:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin[at]soylentnews.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

It only seems to happen on trying to post comments or story submissions, maybe every other attempt?

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

EgyptAir hijack: Man surrenders at Larnaca airport

Falkland Islands fears new ruling expanding Argentina's sea control

Can Micro Bit replicate BBC Micro success?

Pet insurance claims hit record number

US pulls Tanzanian aid worth $470m over Zanzibar vote

White House to commit $116m to heroin and opioid abuse epidemic

Iraq dossier looms over lone MI6 Eurosceptic

Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

Last week I had another first date. I met this girl on OkCupid. We met in the afternoon at a local pub and shared a meat and cheese platter. She was visibly nervous when she arrived. I found her nervousness charming, and it put me at ease. Once the nerves calmed down, we had some great conversation as we picked at the cheese and meat tray.

She is recently out of a multi-year relationship, and isn't looking to get right back into one, so she thought that dating a married person would be a good way to avoid being locked down again. We chatted about stuff and things, and wrapped it up after a couple hours. As we parted ways, we hugged and I went in for the kiss. Her lips were soft and I ended up floating back to my car.

We arranged for a second date a couple days later. We went for drinks and appetizers at a somewhat trendy restaurant downtown. She is new to non-monogamy, so I brought her a present -- a book called "The Ethical Slut". This book is considered by some as the bible for non-monogamous relationships, and as she is new to the scene, I thought it would help. We chatted, ate, drank, and eventually made it back to her place for some fooling around.

This girl has really done a number on me. I can't stop thinking about her. I can't wait to see her again.

According to some sources, now also this camera recording central for CCTV can be taken over easily (p0wn3d):
Remote Code Execution in CCTV-DVR affecting over 70 different vendors
So next time you pass some border wink to the hackers:
Bulgarian Government border control buys the vulnerable Chinese TVT system

The devices you buy even refuse your direct orders:
The stubborn Foscam FI9286P refuses to drop the phone-home. Unless you apply a firmware update plus an additional patch and re-configuration.

And you probably read about "smart-tv", consoles, bios "checks", telemetry in w10, router advert injection hello Belkin, etc. It's all spy on you without real consent.

So I think one can draw some conclusions:
  * Manufacturers can't be trusted on either ability to secure or objective to care for customers
  * Devices will do phone-home by instruction
  * Code quality is so bad it will be hacked eventually
  * Security updates won't happen

So make sure all devices you take ownership of are prevented from any RF links and from unfiltered wired network. Or that you have documentation and the ability to put your own firmware on the device.
Thus if the device isn't friendly for hacking. Avoid it. You won't have any idea what stinking code that exists inside the device.

Any thoughts on this? especially on the options of putting your own firmware on devices and generally doing a good choice of modifiable devices? IoT are useful, you just have to be in control.

A photo of me with a phone from 2020

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

My life would be hard to face if I had to face it alone. But I don't, I have many friends online and off. I particularly want to thank you folks here at Soylent News. Your kindness means a great deal to me.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".

When submitting an article without an title the site script seems to complain that one has to preview the article before submission. Please alter it such that it point the correct error (title missing) .. ;)