sapient [they/them] @ sapient_cogbag @infosec.pub

Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code,

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I'd just install custom ROMs with no google crap in them, like LineageOS.

Then grab stuff from F-Droid.

The conservative attitude to climate change would indicate as such, yes ;p

Ignorance is bliss until reality punches your face in.

I wish, but unfortunately am not very hopeful about this :(

Large parts of the world seem to be headed further in the direction of restricting self determination around your identity and your body. The worst part is seeing almost no-one fighting back. I live in the uk though, so some of that is related to the hellish media landscape here >.<

I use:

• qpdf for mucking around with pdfs, reordering, selecting pages, combining them, etc.
• ffmpeg for video and audio sicing and transcoding. Usually encompassing a command in a script because I forget the precise params every time ;p
• nvim for anything like Markdown (which can be converted to other things like LaTeX or pdf or html, sometimes in multiple stages)
• imagemagick for simple image conversion stuff.
• wget for downloads .
• youtube-dl or yt-dlp for grabbing youtube stuff.

Vote with your dollar means rich people get way more votes.

insert explanation of the fundamental contradiction vetween capitalism and democracy here ;p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

Autistic people feel empathy. Source - am autistic, feel (pretty strong and sometimes unpleasant) empathy.

extract zee vital files

:)

Wonder if there's a way to do this with self-hosted AI/localllama-type stuff? .

Your brain, use it.

Given that people are continuously trying to make existing in public as a trans person hard or completely illegal, or treat trans people as sexual predators and legalise the other parent kidnapping their kid, or any of a million other things I can't be arsed to list, I recommend gaining a little perspective.

But I don't think you're arguing in good faith soooo >.<

Society doesn't want people to be trans. In fact, it loves trying to get rid of us or subjugating us.

I use decsyncCC - which can use a folder as a form of DAV - combined with syncthing across devices. This requires no server and works well, the only problem is idk of any good decsyncCC folder-structure parsers that can be accessed as a local DAV service from the desktop.

I mean I have very negative views towards both concepts sooo ;p

Pretty sure Falun Gong is a cult last I remember.

IPFS is pretty neat (though I think bittorrent is better due to content locality and speed, but that's just my experience). I'm more talking about starting up hardware for alternate network paths - for instance, chained together wireless or wired routers - outside the existing internet backbone to get across the borders of these countries that want to cut off the internet nya

Presumably, you'd do this in combination with some kind of mesh network router (like yggdrasil) capable of organising discrete connections into a proper network without a central authority, so that many people can autonomously build up this kind of alternate routing backbone.

Basically, right now, anti-censorship efforts are in a constant back-and-forth war between censors and the anti-censorship groups. This is because it is far too costly for a country to completely blackout communication from the wider internet, at the minute, but many of the countries doing this are continuously working to make that more viable. However, should it become viable for a country to disconnect all cables linking their internet to the outside internet, they have the technical means to do it by physically cutting the cables.

They know where the cables are and control them - that is part of how the censorship is implemented after all nya. Current censorship resistance techniques essentially are an armsrace between trying to make it so their filters don't detect your "forbidden" connections, and the censors trying to improve their filters without unacceptable levels of economic and social damage (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom)

The less their economy and population depends on external services, the more aggressive and broad-spectrum they can be in cutting off external connections, because the harm from the collateral damage is reduced. What these countries want to do is reach a point where the collateral damage from cutting off the wider internet is small enough that they can cut the cables and block all connections. You can't actually evade that within the current model of censorship/filtering resistance, because at that point it's basically like those connections don't even exist and hence can't be traversed by any mechanism nya.

What I'm proposing is we build alternate pathways out that don't depend on these cables. For example, either our own cables, or a chain of wireless nodes capable of building paths through the network autonomously (this is what a meshnet is). Because these alternate routes out would not be state-controlled, and presumably operated in a distributed manner which is hard for the state to locate, censorship becomes physically impossible without essentially containing your entire country in a sphere of RF interference (which would destroy basically all modern life), and building a massive, constantly monitored perimeter of sufficient depth to check that no-one has laid secret cables or whatever.

One other example of a potential route out is Starlink-style satellite internet, except a mesh network of satellites rather than it being controlled by any singular entity. But that's essentially a larger-scale version of the "massive number of small-scale wireless nodes" idea. Hell, to improve censorship resistance you could do something with Li-Fi networking too, or mixed cable-wireless networks, or anything. The most important part is that you can build routes in- and out- of a country that the country's government can't easily locate or shut down .

Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that's more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.

Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food .. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya

Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.

I'm a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I'm a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)

Edit: also I think it's desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of "rewilding" (though I think that's a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people's idea of "nature" is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ""nature"" in the same way)

Yep! Im actually somewhat familiar with those :)

I mean more we need a way to run either cables or a very long series of wifi relays into and out of these countries. Perhaps using something yggdrasil-adjacent for route autoconfig . nya.

Alternate hardware outside of state control or influence :)

Turn them into vertical farms if its apparently too hard to turn them into housing ;p

What we need is some way to make a distributed/p2p alternate meshnet backbone across borders . - much harder to control the internet when other physical links are available.