cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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532

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2 yr. ago

He's not dumb. He's cancer. He's aggressive. And he intends on metastasizing to the entire world. Strongmen only respect strength. We need to show him how nasty we can be. Watch what he does with targets he perceives as weaker than us (if there are any). If he goes after Panama first, or Greenland, you can be certain that we are next.

This is not empty rhetoric folks. I've been saying it since before the election and I'm going to keep saying it, he's actually coming for us. His first term was full of empty threats. This one hasn't been. He has followed through, and he will follow through. He will continue to bully us and come at us sideways for awhile, take what he can by hook or by crook, but eventually he will get impatient and greedy. He is coming. Prepare to be another Ukraine, another Afghanistan. The latter is a tiny, technologically backwards nation that is called the "Graveyard of empires" for good reason. We can be that, and we will need to be that. I say this to reassure you that it is absolutely possible to defend our sovereignty against a much larger aggressor. This is anything but a lost cause, but we need to take it very seriously, because he is deadly serious.

Wired takes a sober but meaningful look at what's happening from the context of 20th century history. I learned some new terminology there, "electoral autocracy" which is what they're calling most modern dictatorships that continue having mock but ineffectual elections.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

I'm not being facetious and I'm not joking, and I don't think he is either.

If you don't have a government that can be held accountable to some level of trust, then what you have isn't a government it's tyranny.

The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

Seems naive to me. The question is not whether your government has or can get that kind of information if it wants to (the gestapo had little trouble figuring out things as personal as that without any help from an app) the question is whether your government would lose the cost-benefit analysis if it was ever found to be using such information. You have to hold them accountable and keep their activities in the open so that accessing that information is as close to zero value to them as it can be and they have no incentive to try to get it because people will be able to find out if they do.

"Who watches the watchers?" We all do. At least we're supposed to. If you don't trust your government, priority 1 is fix your government, you're way beyond anything a dating app's data can be expected to help with. You're not going to be any safer from an unaccountable government because you denied them access to a dating app.

It's like people only do things because they get paid, and that's just really sad

But yeah, our corporate oligarchs and the billionaire class are evil manipulative money-grubbing leeches and we've let them run unchecked for way too long.

It's not only obvious, it's already done worldwide. Deep packet inspection evolved into HTTPS inspection and corporate/enterprise firewalls can detect and hijack attempts to establish encrypted connections already, as a "feature". So do government firewalls in totalitarian countries. Of course they (probably) can't do this secretly and transparently, because of the man-in-the-middle protections built into SSL, so they simply make the actual encrypted connection themselves on the client's behalf, and give the client a different encrypted connection signed by their own certificate authority, which they force you to accept.

In this situation, you have two choices: You accept the certificate, and you accept that the owner of the intermediate certificate will be inspecting your "encrypted" connection. If you don't accept the certificate, then your connection is blocked and you have to find some other way to encrypt and hide your traffic without it being intercepted, because it won't let you go direct end-to-end. Usually, at the moment, this is not that hard for the tech-savvy to avoid, it doesn't even require something as secretive as steganography, it's usually simply a matter of tunneling through a different protocol or port. Although those approaches are still obvious, and can easily be detected and either blocked in real-time or flagged for investigation after-the-fact if they have any interest in doing something about it. Corporations or countries that want to lock down their networks further can simply block any ports or protocols that would allow such tunneling or inspection-evasion in the first place.

Deep packet inspection already allows any non-encrypted traffic to be clearly identified. If you don't want any encrypted traffic to sneak through, you can safely assume anything that can't be clearly identified is encrypted and block it. Depending on how strict you want to be about it, you start essentially whitelisting the internet to known, plaintext protocols. If it's not known and plaintext, just block it. Problem solved. Encryption gone, until people start building (possibly hidden) encryption on top of those plaintext protocols, which is inevitable, and then you update your deep packet inspection to detect the encrypted fields inside the plaintext protocol and block them, and the back-and-forth battle continues.

Encryption is probably a false panacea against a major state-level adversary anyway, especially if they have plausible access to network infrastructure, but that's a whole different can of worms and unless you're a serious revolutionary/terrorist probably beyond the useful scope of most people's realistic concerns.

You can download a torrent client and start pirating because it's encrypted. Nobody knows you're doing that besides the people you're directly connected to on the other end. If they wanted to crack down on it, the first thing they need to do is crack down on encryption. If they can see exactly what you're doing, it's now possible to easily catch you, with encryption it isn't.

Note that this also applies to encryption itself. Once it's banned, it gets much more difficult to hide the fact that you're encrypting something. Encrypted data itself has to go into hiding. You have to resort to something like some pretty hardcore steganography which means you need to hide secret encrypted messages in normal-seeming non-encrypted traffic. The problem is that to do this you need to have a sufficient quantity of non-encrypted traffic to hide your secret encryption in without it starting to look suspicious, either due to the unusually massive volume of meaningless "normal" traffic needed to subtly encode the hidden data, or the fact that large amounts of hidden data in small amounts of "normal" data become increasingly obvious as the large number of supposedly "normal" mistakes and errors and artifacts that form the encoded data will suggest some of those variations are not in fact "normal" at all and will indicate that encrypted data is being concealed.

Governments banning encryption will of course never stop everybody. But it makes it much harder for the people still using encryption anyway and much easier for the people who want to see what they're doing or at least see who they are. It's classic "black or white" thinking to assume that because it hasn't simply stopped encryption it hasn't worked. This would be a big step that makes things much harder, and even taking small steps to make things slightly harder is an extremely effective tool and it's become extremely common to try to convince people that these small regressions and erosions are inconsequential and normal even when they are in fact targeted, repeated, relentless and consistently add up to dramatic change over time. The only saving grace we have is that at least some people are simultaneously making the same kind of targeted, repeated, relentless changes for the common good and those can have just as drastic an effect.

Were you asleep for the last 2 weeks they've been doing the same to Canada, Mexico and Europe? The question isn't that it hurts everybody, the question is who's next and what are you going to do about it?

I don't use arch (shocking I know), so I can't help you directly, but I will recommend instead that you invest some effort in learning about the Linux networking stack. It's very powerful and can be very complicated, but usually the only thing you need to do to get it working is something very simple. Basically all distributions use the Linux kernel networking stack under the hood, usually with only a few user-interface sprinkles on top. Sometimes that can get in your way, but usually it doesn't. All the basic tools you need should be accessible through the terminal.

The most basic things you can check are ip a which should show a bunch of interfaces, the one you're particularly interested in is obviously the wired interface. This will tell you if it's considered

<UP>

If those things look good, next step is to look at ip r which will tell you the routes available. The most important one is the default route, this will tell your system where to send traffic when it isn't local, and usually sends traffic to an internet gateway, which should've been provided by DHCP and is usually your router, but could also be a firewall, the internet modem itself, or something else. The route will tell it what IP the gateway has, and what interface it can be found on.

Assuming that looks good, see if you can ping the gateway IP. If your packets aren't getting through (and back) that suggests something is wrong on a lower level, the kernel firewall might be dropping the packets (configuring the kernel firewall is a whole topic in itself) or one of the IPs is not valid and is not registered properly on the network, or the physical (wiring) or the hardware on either end is not functioning or misconfigured.

If you can ping the gateway successfully, the next step is to see if you can ping the internet itself by IP. ping 8.8.8.8 will reach out to one of Google's DNS servers which is what I usually use as a quick test. If you get no response then it's either not forwarding your traffic out to the internet, or the internet is not able to get responses back to it, and ultimately back to you. Or Google is down, but that's not very likely.

If you've gotten this far and 8.8.8.8 is responding to you, then congratulations, you HAVE internet access! What you might NOT have is DNS service, which is what translates names into IP addresses. A quick test for DNS is simply to ping google.com and like before, if that fails either your DNS is broken or Google is down, which is still not very likely.

Hopefully this will help you at least start to find out where things are going wrong. From there, hopefully you can at least steer your investigation in the right direction. Good luck!

What a weaksauce article, spends most of the time arguing against itself, and the problem is most of the strawman arguments it sets up to argue against actually win in my opinion. Most of its arguments follow this kind of format:

I think that 2 + 2 = 5, now I know you might hear that 2 + 2 = 4, but the only thing that says that is thousands of years of math, and we can't assume that's going to continue into the future because Valve made a mistake doing math once.

Finally ends with some vague hypothetical about how even though they admit Valve is pretty good today, but still it will become evil someday because grr capitalism bad.

Steam is fantastic, they've made mistakes yes (Australia's gaming laws are well known to be crazy for example so that's not completely Valve's responsibility) but on the whole they are doing great things and making money while doing it, which is great because a successful and profitable Steam is able to continue to do great things. Making money is not a sin if they do it fairly and ethically, and they do. 30% is a bargain for what they're providing, especially the devoted audience which they have attracted (completely legitimately), and if you don't agree it's worth that 30% you're welcome to distribute your game literally anywhere else.

Globalization can be good with conditions. The way we let it be abused by authoritarians, dictators and tyrants to undermine our own economies and cripple our environment was foolish, and we have paid and are going to continue to pay a steep price for that in the foreseeable future. The idea that we would be able to prevent war by hitching hostile economies to each other was noble but ultimately entirely flawed. However, globalization being used as a global trade network between friendly and like-minded countries makes perfect sense, once the shipping and environmental costs are de-externalized by tax or treaty. Countries that are healthy and functioning democracies should eliminate as many trade barriers between each other as we can, and encourage others to strive to become democratic if they want similarly preferential treatment. That is the right way to use globalization. It is not a right, it is a privilege, and we need to resist the temptation to compromise its principles in exchange for things we feel we "must" trade for (historically, oil)

Globalism, on the other hand, at least the way they're using it, is just an ugly pile of conspiratorial nonsense that isn't even worth discussing.

Screw them! We'll build our own peertube, with blackjack, and hookers

As someone in Southern Ontario I want you guys to know that if there's anything we can do to help you get rid of the vicious cheeto-in-chief we've got your back. Feel free to "blame Canada!" if it helps that cause, but we're going to stand up to him, and you guys should too. We'll help any way we can. This is unacceptable.

Most aggregation services are also aggravation services, so this really makes sense either way.

The mature thing to do would be to tell them something like "I can see that you're trying and I appreciate that, but I don't know if I can like or respect you after what you did to my mom and my family. I'll let you know if that changes but I'm not ready to have you mother me, I can and will cook my own dinner for the foreseeable future." however be advised this could cause more hurt and lead to escalation because some people can't handle rejection even when it's honest and will either desperately seek approval anyway or reject you back. Given what you said about her age she may not even be emotionally mature herself.

Also you're under no obligation to be mature about it. You're allowed to be an asshole if you want. Cheaters and homewreckers and broken family creators are some of the worst things in the world to me. As someone who was raised in a broken home I really have little sympathy for the people who don't understand that having children is a commitment, not just personally but to their whole relationship. They're not just possessions you get custody of and get to drag around on your own personal life journey.

I'm not religious but I think this is one of the things that religion was trying to accomplish by making marriage such a sacred thing and divorce so restricted and children out of wedlock so disapproved of. The "nuclear" family was a secular version of the same principle. Yes, all that had unintended consequences too but if you are not prepared to raise children with a person you should not be having children with them. Yeah, "people change" but your commitments do not. That's why they're called commitments. If you're not going to follow through on your commitments you'd better have some really damn good reason to be causing such lasting damage to your child. It can be justified in some cases, but I think it's pretty rare that it actually is justified. Children deserve a stable and lasting family environment. I think that's a big part of why foster care is generally such a disastrous failure too. How do we fix this? I don't know, but I know it starts with the parents being responsible.

State-sponsored violence, typically.

Authoritarianism is a threat.

Most of the flags around here have already been swapped for "Fuck Trump".

Finland is the best in the world at building icebreakers. Even the Russians, with the largest and most sophisticated icebreaker fleet in the world, get theirs built by Finland.

Sounds good to me. That said it would also be nice to have some backup capability to build these kind of ships in our own country, or at least ensure we have the ability to maintain and upgrade them. Maybe we could partner with Finland to add our nuclear technology to their icebreaker expertise and provide some actual value to the world.

The internet cannot download more RAM into your PC. (Sssh! Don't tell them! I don't want the supply to run out!)