S410

Oh, I guess that’s slightly better. At least this fucking idiocy didn’t make it into, essentially, law. But it also means that Nintendo (and other corpos) will not stop suing people left and right.

At what point will they sue fucking computer manufacturers, I wonder? Clearly, the ability to run unsigned code facilitates creation of code that’s illegal (such as DRM circumvention tools and fucking Nintendo emulators), which, in turn, obviously facilitates piracy of Nintendo games! Poor Nintendo is loosing dozens of dollars because of those evil, evil computers which are clearly used for pirating their games and nothing else! This needs to stop!

What a lovely fucking precedent to have.

Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you’re not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to “okay, google”, which wouldn’t really be possible if it wasn’t listening.

Now, it obviously doesn’t keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

Now, data like that could “easily” get “misplaced”, of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine… Not necessary at Google’s hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.

I’ve noticed that too. Intentionally veered a conversation into a different topic and, lo and behold, I get “relevant recommendation” short time later. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the same day I unlocked the bootloader and flashed a de-googled ROM.

Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.

As for its usefulness, however… Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you’re doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.

Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.

The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)

I think I’ll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.

Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn’t available on it. From there you’ll be able to decide if you’re even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.

If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.

Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.

That way, you’d still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.

This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.

Wayland has it’s fair share of problems that haven’t been solved yet, but most of those points are nonsense.

If that person lived a little over a hundred years ago and wrote a rant about cars vs horses instead, it’d go something like this:

Think twice before abandoning Horses. Cars break everything!
Cars break if you stuff hay in the fuel tank!
Cars are incompatible with horse shoes!
You can’t shove your dick in a car’s mouth!

The rant you’re linking makes about as much sense.

Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.

Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?

Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.

One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…

The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.

“What are your thoughts about setting your hair on fire?”
“This Wikipedia article about burns covers it pretty well”
“Aha! So you’re a parrot!”

There’s a finite number of possible conclusions one can come to if they use this little thing called “logic”. If multiple people apply it to the same problem, they’re likely to come up with similar, if not identical, answers. If your conclusions about some given thing aren’t shared by anybody else, it’s more likely than not because they’re illogical nonsense. It’s even worse if your conclusions are outright nonexistent. That’s not good. Means you stoopid.

Something like a centralized financial system has some very obvious, glaring issues that should be instantly apparent to anyone. And I’m, obviously, not the first person to think about it. So, why should I write something, if people who thought about it before me already outlined all the logical concerns about this system? And, likely, in a more detailed and in-depth manner than I’d care to write in a comment on a random website.

The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

If you’re in the US, it’s not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it’s not any less “real” because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

There isn’t a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn’t a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn’t mean they’re immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are “not real”.

I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a “preventive war”. A war which would eventually end with “whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all”.

Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they’d never do anything questionable or immoral to him!

I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.

Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It’s one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It’s a similar argument here.

He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being… less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn’t come off as I intend it to.

The sentence previous to the one you’re quoting, the one you’ve omitted, changes the context quite a lot.

When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”

In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it’s fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.

The wording of his statement is… questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like “you’re are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine”.

Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren’t, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users’ permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.

“Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars … by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.”

How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?

Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I’d not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra “fuck you” to the guy.

Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There’s no way to know that you’re the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.

I’m relatively short and wide in shoulders. Fuck me, I guess, for feeling represented?