4dpuzzle @ tesseract @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Muslim nations in the middle east regularly make friends with nations that indulge in human rights abuses against native Muslims. The criteria is money, not religion.

Abstaining from alcohol is one of 75 different activities and behaviors identified by the Chinese government as a sign of potential religious extremism. It is listed in brochures distributed in some parts of Xinjiang to educate the public on how to identify extreme religious activities.

What next? Breathing air?

I wonder if the codeberg site is vulnerable to such laws. I think they operate from the EU.

Wow! That's one annoying video!

The world should stop unilaterally playing nice and start declaring parts of China as independent nations under occupation. Let's see how they'll take it.

I think you misunderstood my politics from my initial comment.

It was more a reflection of my outrage at the injustice and inequality that plagues the world, than a judgement of your politics.

OK. Let me spell it out. The laws aren't there to protect the rights of the ordinary citizens. It's there to keep them under control. The rich and powerful are not only exempt from it, but the laws exist to protect their interests. That's why cracking and jail breaking are illegal.

I used the example of the UK post office because they didn't even need the evidence of theft to send hundreds of sub postmasters to jail. But even after it became clear that the post office management lied and extorted, those responsible still roam free.

If that's your notion what laws and judicial systems are for, check out the ongoing Post Office scandal in the UK.

That suggestion is because the attack took years of ground work, psyops, multiple disciplines and several levels of obfuscations. It needs the kind of effort that only a well paid and dedicated team can pull off. But that need not necessarily be a state actor. It could also be some spying/malware company (like NSO), any of the big corporates or a criminal group with lots of money.

But don't lose hope. All it took to uncover all of that was just one engineer who was annoyed by SSH slowing down from 0.3s to 0.8s. The effort needed to uncover it is only a fraction of what's needed to hide it. This is also a vindication of the FOSS philosophy. Imagine uncovering this if the source wasn't available.

While I agree that many FOSS devs/maintainers would find donations and other monetary support very useful, please remember that money isn't the solution for everything. This is especially the case for mental and emotional wellbeing. Funding might increase the entitlement and demands of the users on the maintainer's time. What the maintainer really needs might be some time off or reduction on their workloads.

I'm all for donating to these projects. But don't let that be an excuse to treat them badly and make unreasonable demands on them.

I'm sure that this won't stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.

While your argument is correct, it was none of us that raised Musk to a 'genius' idol. It was his own marketing campaign, probably done on his behalf by a professional PR team. When the rest of us heard the amount of praises going around, we just assumed that there was some substance to it. That's until the 'pedo guy' incident started the collapse of that facade.

Anyone involved with a rocket would want to run outside and watch it climb. That isn't uncommon. But Musk had a vile character even before that. The hopeful nerd was just a facade propped up by PR pros. You can check out the history of Tesla. Despite him being hailed as its founder, it was neither his idea, nor his creation. The real founders were pushed out rather unfairly in his signature power play. That power play is still visible in Musk vs OpenAI.

If that's what you expect, you're underestimating the depth of the societal problems that Trump is a symptom of. Trump bubble may or may not collapse, but the US has a lot of demons to deal with.

Let me know if and when this makes insulin cheap enough to afford. If we're going to continue making big companies richer at the expense of sick people, we might as well not gloat about these achievements.

And if you're going to talk about the dependence of price on demand and supply, you're still not getting it. These companies are masters at creating artificial scarcity by several means including patents and price gouging cartels.

Now that I read it again, you may be right.

One of the main factors contributing to this problem is how customers simply give up their rights for convenience. Pro-customer options don't disappear. They die a slow painful death.

Take the example of DRM in books. All the easy options like from Amazon are DRM encumbered. But the DRM-free options are still available if you are willing to search a bit. They don't cost much extra either. But people don't care. And direct sellers providing DRM-free books wither away in neglect. Similar examples are still around for reparable devices, DRM-free multimedia, etc.

Consumers rights are not a given. Like any rights, those are the ones you have to defend. You have to put at least a little bit of effort to protect it. When I suggested this recently, I was accused of 'victim-blaming'. What escape is there when the victims are not ready to fight back?

It's always easy to find 'can't have/couldn't have' style excuses for laziness. But ultimately, issues like DRM on ebooks or spyware from an add company all boil down to consumer vigilance and defense of consumer rights. It isn't just about the digital goods - that applies even to Mom & Pop shops, without which the mega corps are free to price gouge to their hearts' content.

Consumer rights protection is a culture that takes time and effort. There is no getting around it. If users are being exploited by big corporations, it the users' fault for not being vigilant. It's not rocket science. These options aren't hard to find. Whether that be a browser that respects you, or buying a DRM-free book directly from the publishers, it takes hardly a few minutes to learn and execute. Ultimately, there is no excuse for squandering away any respect we have as consumers, due to sheer laziness.

You are underplaying the damage Google and FB did to XMPP. It wasn't supposed to be relegated to an obscure backend protocol. The involvement of those companies ensured that it didn't become a popular user-facing protocol.

That's definitely a concern. But at least for now, the EU isn't a pretend-democracy like the US is, with the actual shots being called by rich billionaires and corporations.