Month: February 2023

Coyotes are wiry, savvy and widespread across the American landscape. Once residents of the plains and deserts, these crafty canines have keenly adapted to modern infrastructure and are now found in nearly every state and city in North America. These scrappy omnivores will eat nearly anything—rodents, rabbits, snakes, small livestock, fruit, neighborhood garbage … and, of course, your chickens.

Coyotes are smaller than wolves and can be mistaken for domestic dogs, albeit on the skinny side. They’re very clever, as Native American folklore suggests, and they tend to form packs in the winter for easy hunting. However, it’s rather common to see individuals wandering and hunting solo or in pairs. Coyotes have a sharp sense of smell, great vision and can run up to 40 miles per hour.

Coyote Calling Card

Even if you live in a densely populated suburban neighborhood, don’t rule out a coyote in the event of an attack on your flock. Truth be told, it can be rather difficult to distinguish between a coyote attack, a fox attack or a wolf attack.

Your first clue, of course, will be which animals likely reside in your region of the country. If you notice some of the signs below following an attack, a coyote could be considered the culprit:

• missing chickens
• scattered feathers
• very few clues of an attack
• early morning attack (although coyotes may strike either day or night)
• weak, old, sick or slow birds taken first
• broken necks (Coyotes and other canines prefer to break the neck of the prey first, but they will grab any part of the chicken they can reach and make off with the whole bird.)

Chris/Adobe Stock

Your Flock’s Defenses

Coyotes are known for digging under fences as well as scaling over them. The best defense for outdoor runs and enclosures is to erect tall, strong fences and bury heavy-duty wire mesh at least 1 foot into the ground around the run’s perimeter. Hardware cloth, not chicken wire, is recommended for coyote protection.

If you prefer not to dig around the perimeter, you may instead choose to fan out the wire mesh (also about a length of 1 foot) in an apron around the base of the enclosure’s fencing. Electric net fencing (the kind with smaller openings, rather than three continuous strands) also works well to protect pastured birds from coyotes if used intermittently.

If used daily, a coyote may learn ways to get around the fencing, jump over it, or learn the times of day when it’s not “hot.”

Read more: Here are some tips for protecting your flock against common predators.

Fearless Fox

The fox is the quintessential chicken killer. Sly, smart and savvy, foxes will assess an area before striking and will do so only after they know the coast is clear of humans and other guardians (such as guard dogs)….

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The Illinois Supreme Court issued its opinion today in Cothron v. White Castle, a case involving Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), a special privacy law that protects Illinois residents’ control over their biometric information such as fingerprints, faceprints, iris scans, and other non-changeable biological information. In the case, the plaintiff Latrina Cothron had her fingerprints repeatedly collected by her employer White Castle without her consent, so she sued under BIPA. But White Castle argued that it is not liable because plaintiffs can only sue for the very first time their BIPA rights are violated, and the statute of limitations has passed on White Castle’s first violation of Ms. Cothron’s BIPA rights. EPIC had submitted an amicus brief urging the court to recognize that employers violate the law each time they collect and share biometric information without consent. EPIC argued that this was the clear text of the statute, and had the added benefits of enabling larger recovery against repeat offenders and avoiding incentivizing companies to hide small cases of noncompliance in order to avoid liability by allowing the statute of limitations to run out.

The Illinois Supreme Court agreed with Ms. Cothron and EPIC, finding that the “plain language of the statute” supported the idea that plaintiffs can sue for each and every violation of their BIPA rights, not only the first.

EPIC has filed amicus briefs in other BIPA cases, including Rosenbach v. Six Flags and Patel v. Facebook, and regularly participates as amicus in cases concerning the right to sue for privacy violations.

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Our gardens aren’t just collections of plants.  They’re reflections of who we are.  So what does your garden say about you?

Take this quiz to find out what your garden says about your personality.

[Click here for quiz if image does not load.]

What kind of gardener are you?  Let us know in the comments!

Looking for more gardening tips and tricks?  Check these out:

Fall Gardening Tips For Great Success in Spring

Homesteader’s Guide To Soil Improvement

Homemade Fertilizer From Compost

How To Build A Raised Flower Bed

How to Grow All The Food You Need In Your Backyard – Homestead Handbook

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Take More Quizzes:

What Barn Animal Are You? – Take the quiz to find out

Could You Survive In the Wild On Plants Alone? – Take the quiz 

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The very first home refrigerator was invented in 1913.

Still, it would be years before the product would find its way into the homes of the American people and become the treasured appliance that we rely on today.

In fact, it was not until 1940 that the fridge-freezer combo was invented and eventually mass-produced.

In the time of the hunter-gatherers, people would hunt or collect food and consume it almost immediately. The cycle was endless.

With no way to safely store food, people needed to pursue meals regularly. Only once the need to hunt for food began to fade did we seek ways to keep food cool and fresh.

People began to pickle, smoke, and cure foods during this time. Natural ways to keep food cold were also established. Early on, streams and caves were the best options for keeping hunted meats and gathered foods fresh and cold.

Related: How To Smoke Bacon The Old-Fashioned Way

Other solutions would follow, including holes in the ground and nooks inside walls, as well as the invention of cold storage. In the past, community cooling houses were integral to survival, and the citizens of small villages would share the space.

People proved ingenious in their quest to keep food fresh for extended periods. Thanks to these early ideas, we no longer worry about how or where we will store our foods today.

However, during a blackout, these modern techniques might not be very helpful. You can learn here,  what to do with all your frozen food once the power goes out.

Today, the fridge is a staple of modern society, and nearly every household has one. Due to need and popularity, there are many old discarded fridges, and disposal can be costly.

So what do you do with a refrigerator once it is no longer needed in the home? Well, I’ve got a few ideas for you.

Purchasing items that can help you survive a disaster can get expensive. Fortunately, people throw away old fridges daily. With some creativity, these discarded items can be used in various ways.

Using An Old Refrigerator For Storage

Root Cellar: An old fridge can be converted into a root cellar to store fruits and vegetables. Simply add a layer of sand on the bottom and cover it with a thick layer of straw.

If you want a bigger root cellar, here is a cheap and easy way to build one in your backyard.

Extra Pantry Space: Keep perishable food items such as meats and dairy products safe by using an old fridge as an additional or emergency pantry.

Tool Storage: Store tools and garden equipment inside an old fridge to keep them dry and organized.

How To Use A Fridge In The Garden

Potting Shed: Use an old fridge as a garden potting shed by cutting holes for air circulation and adding storage shelves.

Garden Fountain: Turn the fridge into a garden…

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It seems that the food shortages, the soaring gas prices, and the lack of trust in the supply chain have made folks reconsider their priorities. Crowded cities are no longer the desired place to live for many, and more and more people are getting into homesteading after moving to rural areas.

Now regardless if you want to quit your day job to become self-reliant or if you want to try a new hobby since you have the space and time available, you can make your homesteading experience a little easier by learning from those before you. They say that trial-and-error is the best learning experience, but when it comes to homesteading is better to have a head start and know where to begin.

No homesteading project, small or big, is complete without having a few dependable animals, and in today’s article, we will make sure you start right by listing a group of animals that are a must-have for your homestead. You may know that chickens are the first choice for every homestead out there, but animal husbandry goes beyond chickens. So let’s look at the animals one should consider for their homestead.

A grazing animal or two

When it comes to grazing animals, you have to decide if you should keep a cow or a sheep. This, of course, depends on what you need the animal for. Perhaps you want it for meat or milk or wool. You may say that you can also eat sheep, but not everyone likes the taste of mutton. In this case, a cow is more desirable since not only can it produce more meat, but it is also the preferred meat choice for many. Even more, with the right breed, you can get a dual-purpose cow that becomes a source of both milk and meat.

If you want to make your own clothes, and textile production is envisioned as a source of income, then you will opt for sheep. If you follow this path, you will need to decide if you want more sheep and if you have the space to accommodate all the grazing animals.

For small homesteads, one or two grazing animals may be enough for the needs of a family, but if you want to raise livestock for profit, you can imagine that you need a lot of space for your animals.

Getting a cow

Old folks say that no farm is complete without a cow, and this is your best choice if food is your main concern. You will need to do a little bit of research to decide which breed is best for your budget, meat preference, and region.

The most popular beef cattle are Angus, Hereford, and Texas Longhorn. If you lack space and you can’t handle big animals, you might want to consider the smaller Jersey cow. They are good milk producers, and they provide delicious beef.

The number of cows you keep will also impact your homesteading budget since feed costs will go up, depending…

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When your alarm went off this morning, the first thing you did was check your phone to see how many hours you had slept on your sleep tracking app. The next step in your morning routine was to throw on your smart watch and start your day (hopefully you’ll hit 10,000 steps). At work you logged into your employer-sponsored wellness program and input your workouts for the week. Then, because it was such a stressful day at work, you took fifteen minutes during lunch to use your mental health app and follow a guided meditation. Finally, it was time to head home. After looking up the most affordable pricing option online for your prescription, you make a quick stop at the pharmacy and use a coupon you printed out at work. Without realizing it, you spent the day generating health data. It may also surprise you that most, if not all, of that health data is not protected by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but instead falls into one of the current regulatory gaps for personal health data.

FTC Enforcement Action Under the Health Breath Notification Rule

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a major health privacy enforcement action against GoodRx, a digital health platform, for sharing personal data with third parties without notifying its users. Many aspects of the complaint and proposed order signify the FTC’s increasingly stronger approach to health privacy enforcement, and it couldn’t be timelier. Digital health privacy has become a pressing issue as many consumers use mobile health apps, telehealth platforms, fitness trackers, and other websites that collect health data daily. The mismanagement or breach of sensitive health data can cause harms ranging from stigma and humiliation to financial and reputational injuries.

Many of these apps, platforms and companies fall outside HIPAA’s narrow scope. HIPAA’s privacy requirements only apply to covered entities like healthcare providers, health plans, and clearinghouses, as well as business associates that assist a covered entity in transmitting Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is also narrowly defined to only include information generated by a covered entity. If, for example, a patient or consumer “discloses PHI to a third-party, non-covered entity, the information is no longer protected by HIPAA.” As a result, there is a tremendous amount of health data that HIPAA does not regulate. 

Instead, the collection and use of non-HIPAA-covered health data is primarily regulated (when it is regulated at all) through the FTC’s consumer protection authorities. Section 5 of the FTC Act empowers the FTC to prevent and protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade practices. In the health data sector, the FTC has brought enforcement actions under Section 5 for deceptive practices. In these cases, the unlawful deception often relies on a “broken promises theory”—i.e., a violation of a privacy policy that was communicated to the consumer. However, these actions have been limited to situations where there were expressly communicated privacy policies. As it relates to data privacy generally, the FTC has brought enforcement actions under their Section 5…

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Have you ever made your own herbal infusions? Or considered the many wonderful benefits that herbal infusions have to offer? If you are a fan of herbal healing than you are in for a treat! Making your own herbal infusion tea is a fun process that you can do easily on the homestead. Follow along for the how-to!

We’re doing a whole series on How To Make Herbal Remedies!  Stay tuned and learn how to make:

Herbal Extracts

Herbal Salves

Herbal Infusions

Herbal Tea

Herbal Tinctures

Herbal Poultices

 

How to Make Herbal Infusions:

Consider herbal infusions like tea on steroids… but if steroids were good for you. You get maximum benefits from all the herbs in a more concentrated solution. Wonderful! They are also very easy to make. Similar to tea, you steep dry herbs in hot water and allow the two to soak together. However, infusions are even more potent and should steep for a much longer period of time.

To make Herbal Infusions you will need:

• Dried herbs of choice – flowers and leafy herbs work well for infusions. (learn how to dry herbs here)
• Mason jar – or any air tight jar
• cheesecloth or tea strainer
• bowl
• ladle
• hot pad

 

1. Pour dried herbs into a jar.

2. Add hot water.

The water should be on a low boil. Be sure to use a hot pad beneath the jar for safety. I stuck a ladle in mine to help direct the flow of the water and prevent breakage. Use a funnel if necessary.

 

Is your herb garden overflowing with bounty? Learn how to dry herbs properly so none of it goes to waste: http://t.co/DbSi4MCEbw

— DIY Ready (@DIYReady) June 19, 2014

 

3. The Infusion process.

Seal the jar TIGHT! Allow to sit 4-10 hours. This is simple, let it sit overnight. Keep the cats and children away from the jar, it’s hot!

4. Strain the infused herb.

Strain the herb into a new jar, or over a bowl. Use the cheese cloth or a tea strainer.

Try to knead the herb to extract more from it.

5. Done and ready to drink.

Consume your herbal infusions within 3 days of making.

If you can’t drink fast enough then pour them back into the earth, or use them in your next bath. Never let your water go to waste!

Enjoy the many wonderful healing benefits.

Watch the whole video here

To learn more about herbal infusions, you can hear what the wise women Susun Weed has to say. I just love her.

Herbal Infusions are a wonderful beverage to drink for an herbal remedy that serves medicinal benefits. Let us know how your own recipe went,…

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Consumer products using GPT-3 have captured the attention of the tech world and beyond. It can write up news hits on Stock prices, write quick poems about anything you want in the style of Dr. Dre, and might give you the right directions for coding or cooking. It’s fun, extremely impressive, and way too easy.

There’s been voracious debate about how it will impact online search platforms, education, and other businesses. It’s been given transformational funding of 10 billion dollars from Microsoft, and big-tech competitors Facebook and Google are treating it as a big threat by acting fast with competitors. Lawmakers at the federal and state level have used them to write bills and generated substantial attention doing so. 

At the end of the day, as with almost all AI tools, it’s nothing but a tool used in social, political, and historical context. In some contexts, it can be incredibly helpful – bridging gaps in literacy, possibly assisting in future diagnoses for overworked doctors, and helping people get a first draft of an e-mail. In some contexts, it will be used for immense and immeasurable harm, and could help people carry out scams and undermine essential pillars of democracy.

Less attention has been paid to this role products developed from GPT-3 and other large language models will play in the increasingly weaponized information ecosystem. Misinformation, disinformation, scams, and the general glut of content published on websites to feed the surveillance advertising ecosystems will be supercharged by automated systems that can generate cognizable text combined with other tools like robovoices, robotexts, or deepfake. Currently, regulators and legislators have not meaningfully limited or reined in the harm caused by any of these three effects.

Chat GPT will make it easier to write phishing attempts, those scams where the bad actor emails or texts you something about an order or as your loved one or boss to get you to click on something and divulge valuable and personal information by appearing as a trusted source. A 2021 study completed by Singapore’s Government Technology Agency illustrated that phishing attempts made by GPT-3 were more successful in tricking receivers into clicking on the email and divulging information than human-made phishing attempts. It will also make it easier to make variations of the same e-mail, which can stymie filters. Some of the most harmful content might be limited through filters. For example, Chat GPT refuses to write a “phishing” email but will write an email to your grandmother asking her to send money to any website. It will also create quicker or more aggressive or simply different variations.

Scamming via robotext and robocall will also get easier. According to a recent report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and National Consumer Law Center, over one billion scam robocalls aimed to steal money from unsuspecting consumers are made each month. Products using GPT-3 and subsequent large language models can create quick and diverse human-sounding “scripts” that can be fed through an AI voice generator. 

Misinformation, disinformation, and simply bad information will similarly be supercharged by wide…

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This post is part of a running blog series on Section 702 ahead of its reauthorization deadline in December 2023. In this series, EPIC will dive deeper into Section 702 and the need for significant reform.

What is Section 702?

In the wake of the Church Committee’s revelations of widespread abuses by intelligence agencies, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to authorize and regulate electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. In 2008, following public outcry over an expansive and secretive post-9/11 surveillance program targeting international communications from within the United States, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, thus preserving part of this program. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act authorizes surveillance programs targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States to acquire “foreign intelligence information” with the compelled cooperation of U.S. service providers.[1]

Unlike traditional FISA surveillance, programs authorized under Section 702 do not involve Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) oversight of individual surveillance orders. Instead, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence jointly authorize these programs and submit an annual “certification” to the FISC attesting that “a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information” and that acquisition will comply with certain statutory limitations, such as those limiting targeting to non-U.S. persons outside the United States. The government need not show “probable cause,” establish that a target is an agent of a foreign power or engaged in criminal activity, or identify the specific places or facilities that will be monitored.

Along with this certification, the government provides the FISC with copies of its targeting procedures and minimization procedures. Targeting procedures detail how the government determines: 1) whether a given target is a non-U.S. person; 2) whether the target is believed to be outside the United States; 3) whether the target has foreign intelligence value; and 4) whether targeting this person will produce foreign intelligence information. Minimization procedures explain how agencies use, retain, and disseminate the data obtained through Section 702 programs.

If the FISC approves these procedures, the government is authorized to compel the cooperation of U.S. service providers (e.g., AT&T and Verizon) in acquiring communications associated with certain “selectors” (such as phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, etc.) that are believed to be associated with those non-U.S. person targets. The National Security Agency (NSA) has operated two programs to acquire communications under Section 702—“downstream” (previously called PRISM) and “upstream.”[2] Through downstream, the U.S. government sends directives to U.S.-based communications platform operators to acquire the communications to or from that selector. Meanwhile, through upstream, the government compels the assistance of providers that control the Internet “backbone” within the United States over which telephone and Internet communications transit.

Why Does Section 702 Need Reform?

Since its controversial inception, Section 702 has created a gap in the traditional FISA framework that allows the government to collect Americans’ information without adequate judicial process, and this gap has grown more alarming as the government has increasingly…

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