In that position you're far more protected from retaliation than a "regular person" -- it's easier to prove with an established history and courts really don't like have their judgments undermined. You've also shown your employer trying to screw with you is expensive.
Go back and do your job to the letter. They're either going to be very wary of pissing you off, or they're going to do something stupid and you'll get another payout.
A set of torx screwdrivers and an exacto knife will take care of that. Pretty hard for a cellular modem to transmit data when the traces to the antenna are cut.
Every city in the western world already has at least one rack of servers running 24/7. The have their own domain names, they have a web presence, etc -- running a mastodon instance on existing infrastructure hardly qualifies as wasteful.
It's not and if anything the fact it's small has advantages. Small is easier to turn into an echo chamber.
If you can push bullshit onto a small but passionate group of people online they'll do all the hard work for you. They'll recruit, polish/tailor the message for other audiences, and spread it across the wider internet.
And we know it works, because that's exactly how the whole "Q-anon" thing operated. Some vague, crazy bullshit on an obscure imageboard became a nearly mainstream "movement".
Normally when you're on a VPN all the network traffic to and from your device is going through the connection to the VPN server, e.g. browsing the internet, online games, etc. It can cause issues with other online services and uses bandwidth (cheap as it is) many VPS provider charges for.
A split tunnel tells the VPN client to only send certain traffic through the tunnel. My wireguard setup assigns IP addresses for the VPN interfaces in the subnet 192.168.2.x, so only traffic addressed to IPs on that subnet get sent through the tunnel. In wireguard it's a single line in the config file:
Fortunately there's a million companies that offer VPS with a static IP address for only few bucks a month. I set one up to run a wireguard VPN server which all my devices and home servers connect to as clients. I also configured everything to use a split tunnel to save bandwidth.
"I have nothing to hide, I just question your judgement and motives."
In a world entirely populated by empathetic, decent, and sane people we wouldn't need much privacy. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in. There are countless unstable, stupid, and evil people in the world -- some of them are in positions of power or might achieve power in the future. They are absolutely the sort to weaponize "harmless" information against you.
Do you want those people to know your sexual preferences, political leanings, etc?
"Different world views" isn't a problem, the problem is users espousing repugnent "world views" and being assholes.
Pretending like we have to put up with other users' repulsive, insane "ideas" and bullying behavior in our spaces is laughable. Bigots, fascists, and actual tankies can fuck off.
A hexbear user "called me out" in chapotraphouse for "transphobia" for a comment I made pointing out how insane it is that the hexbear team was calling the admin/mods of blahaj.zone "transphobic" -- the admin and most of the mod team are actual trans people.
So I replied to the callout by saying I'm a landlord (I'm not) and asking how much I should charge for rent as a "card carrying leftist." Replied to a few responses about how I'm a one of the good landlords and providing an essential service at a reasonable price.
My idea was to bait the worst offenders, and it worked. I waited for the replies to roll in, then blocked every single user that commented on that post. Anyone that DMed me about it got blocked too. A couple weeks later I blocked the hexbear and lemmygrad instances in my user settings.
It worked great and I haven't had many issues since.
Hexbear mods tolerate (and sometimes encourage) the worst behaviors of their user base, which is why instances defederate from hexbear.
When those users join other instances one of two things happens:
the mod team does their job, forcing those users to tone down their behavior or get banned.
the instances goes to shit and other instances defederate from them.
As long as you stick to a decent instance it's eventually a self correcting problem. You can also block instances yourself in your account settings on lemmy.
Any major power could easily assasinate the leadership of any other major power, but doing so is taboo for obvious reasons.The nuclear taboo is higher on the list of "things that are not done."
Opening the door to actually using nuclear weapons represents a threat to everyone -- including the rich and powerful. Whoever is dumb enough to use even a tactical nuke is going to not only find themselves a pariah, they're going to face coordinated efforts to eliminate the threat they represent by everyone.
Imagine being in his inner circle: you'd be getting credible offers of "whatever you need and want" to remove Putin from power from every major power on the planet.
In places where natural gas is cheap and electricity is expensive cost is a factor