NaibofTabr @ NaibofTabr @infosec.pub

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2 yr. ago

rhymes with lootin'

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.

This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.

Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don't patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.

And don't romanticize ignorance.

Aaron Swartz was right about everything

This works in theory, but the mixer knows, and we know that several of them have been infiltrated by various government agencies, and records extracted for criminal investigations. I'd put 50/50 odds on any current mixer being already infiltrated and having some enforcement agency collecting data on the transactions.

If not law enforcement, I wouldn't trust the mixer operators to not be gathering data and profiting off of it somehow. You're talking about money launderers. Trustworthiness isn't exactly the status quo. Hell, for all you know the people operating any given mixer are actually backed by Russia or North Korea or something.

futuristic technology

In which case anyone who wants to can read the message traffic and make changes to it before passing it on to the receiver.

No, you can't conduct business this way.

No one can bank online without reliable encryption. No one can transact business online without reliable encryption.

Fantastic. Hadn't heard it before.

throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.

This is the part I don't really get - they've spent decades working to control these resources, and I can't really see what benefit they get from this that offsets that time and effort.

Manipulating the flow and the prices makes sense. Cutting it off entirely just to participate in a dick-measuring contest with the US really doesn't make any sense. Nations are already looking at moving their supply chains especially for electronics after all the COVID disruptions. Encouraging those nations to go looking elsewhere for the entire supply chain just loses you business and influence, no matter how much short-term cost you inflict.

This is kind of interesting... China has been working on monopolizing sources of raw materials for awhile now, and putting them on the market cheap so that they become the de facto supplier, making it difficult or impossible for any other sources to be developed.

But... there are other sources of things like lithium and cobalt, it's just been cheaper to buy it from China so everyone does.

Cutting off the supply will cause some slow-downs and a bit of chaos in the short term but what will happen is local sources will suddenly become worth developing. What this does is effectively burn a big piece of China's economic power... I wonder what they're getting out of it right now? The impact won't last very long.

Darths and Droids - Star Wars rewritten as a TTRPG campaign, started in 2007, still regularly updating, fantastic (ab)use of the source material

Also check out Dr. McNinja. It ended years ago but the entire series can be downloaded from archive.org (legally).

And scholarship programs.

Cutting federal funding will make it harder for anyone but the wealthy to access higher education.

Is there any possibility of mounting some threaded inserts inside the body and running some screws through the panel?

When you're using the mouse and resting your hand on it, you're going to be putting a lot of pressure at random angles on it. As you move your hand around the plastic will flex and twist - any semipermanent bond is going to work loose pretty quickly. Also if it's gummy or sticky it will pick up dust and crud. Fasteners would be better.

And it only covers a period of 51 years (1948-1989).

You're a drain on resources you authoritarian bootlicker.

The spear in the Other's heart
\ is the spear in your own:
\ you are he.

There is no other wisdom,
\ and no other hope for us
\ but that we grow wise.

-attributed to Surak

as written by Diane Duane in Spock's World

Empathy is not some mere emotion that you feel - a fleeting reaction to some external sensation. Empathy is an intentional shifting of perspective, where you experience another's circumstances as if they were your own.

This is a skill, meaning that it is something which you learn through practice, and that you do on purpose, until the doing of it becomes instinctive and no longer requires intent.

To say "I do not feel empathy" is to give yourself an excuse not to practice. This is a cop-out, used by weak people. Do not wait to "feel" it before you practice. Always remember you do not practice only for the sake of other people, but for the sake of your own growth and edification.

• Kotor
• Chrono Trigger
• Ocarina of Time / Twilight Princess / Wind Waker
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
• Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage
• Crash Bandicoot: Warped
• F-Zero GX
• Halo CE / Halo 3 / Halo: Reach
• Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door
• Journey

Always buy local if you can. It has the lowest climate impact.

Even buying a less-green local product vs. a more eco-friendly import might have less climate impact due to resource extraction, production in areas with possibly less environmental protection regulations, and above all shipping.

Climate cost-benefit outweighs all other arguments for rational people.