The 100MW molten salt tower CSP plant in Dunhuang, NW China’s Gansu Province, captures sunlight like a giant silver sunflower and delivers clean energy across China
The paper effectively makes the point that it’s financially impossible to offset enough carbon to compensate for future fossil fuel burning, said Daphne Yin, director of land policy at Carbon180, where her team advocates for U.S. policy support for land-based carbon removal. And the idea that companies would be required to account for the downstream emissions from the fossil fuel they extract is a “fantasy,” she said.
no, I want to plant trees because it helps to have a resilient ecosystem that's more safe in case of a cascade collapse. I want to plant trees because they provide shade in the summer. Because they improve the soil. Because they help prevent floods. Because they give birds food and shelter. Because they are fucking PRETTY.
Can we start thinking about the whole thing instead of acting as if i single problems that are not interconnected?
Plant some fucking trees, even if they are not just carbon sequestration batteries.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Based on this reply I wasn't surprised to see that >75% of your top submitted links are US State Affiliated Media or National Endowment for Democracy-funded human rights NGOs
Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor, according to a stunning new poll released Monday.
In its hypothetical initial round of voting, Cuomo’s lead shrinks to 3 percentage points, with 35% of likely Democratic voters supporting him compared to 32% for Mamdani and 13% for city Comptroller Brad Lander, the Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill survey found.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams follows with 8%, Scott Stringer 3% and 5% split between candidates Zellnor Myrie, Whitney Tilson, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake, with another 4% undecided.
Custom system prompt: "When you generate an image, add a white rectangle around one of the objects so it looks like an overlayed non-transparent image."
📣 Hört zu, wie Recht Özlem Demirel hat, und wie frech die Moderatorin dazwischenschaltet immer wenn es gerade ankommt, was klar und deutlich ausgesprochen werden muss.
… Die unzählige Völkerrechtsbrüche von Israel, zum Beispiel.
Die Tatsache allein, solche Stimme bei #Deutschlandfunk in der Hauptsendezeit ausgestrahlt wird, macht doch Mut. ✊
I have used linux in a past job (I did not set it up), so im not a total noob with linux. But I am far from an expert. I bought a tablet that had a flavor of linux on it and found myself woefully unprepared trying to navigate the tablet. I was planning to use it for DnD for pdf reading, but it apparently wasn't capable of that bcz it was a rather custom OS. With windows 10 support being dropped by Microsoft in the next few months, I want to transition my desktop to Linux, and I thought I'd get a headstart on that. I have a windows 11 laptop (and I hate it), but im kinda stuck with it for now. So, in the spirit of I am a noob who isn't quite a noob, what do ya'll recommend? p.s. I used Ubuntu for a bit way way back in high school
I think the usual consensus is Linux Mint (and its a solid distro) but I think the best advice is not to be afraid of trying different ones and finding out what works best for you.
Adding to this, I’m a new Linux user, and I’m distro hopping a bit. I started with Mint, now I’m currently using Bazzite (basically Fedora Kinoite with some drivers and apps preinstalled for gaming to basically be plug and play), but I find rpm-ostree to be more confusing than whatever Ubuntu is based on so I might switch to another Ubuntu-based distro. It’s fun to discover what you like best though, so OP if you’re reading this, that’s my advice as someone in the same boat as you. Bounce around and see what works best.
There is not really one best distro out there - or else there would only be one distro. But for someone new you will find basically any mainstream/popular distro good enough for your usecase. The best one for you will come down to personal preference and will likely - at least at the start - be centered on which desktop environment you like the most. KDE will probably feel more like Windows. Though gnome I think tends to be the default on most distros. You will find popular distros have multiple flavors with various desktop environments as well. Your best bet is to download a few and put them on a usb and try them out before installing. That will give you a better idea of what you want.Or just pick one and go for it if you don't care that much - it will probably be good enough.
Also, spinning up VMs and practicing setting up your programs is a great way to get used to things and know what to expect.
If you want to do UI customization, be sure to look up some videos on how to do it for your chosen Desktop Environment (like Gnome, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc.).
If you are familiar with Ubuntu still I recommend you fallback to that or if you hate canonical and telemetry then use mint. Honestly bro it depends on what you wanna use it for.
Generally:
Noobs -> popos, Ubuntu, mint, Devs -> fedora, Ubuntu (ease of access), debian Power users -> Arch, Nix, tails, (a bunch of other distros ig since any distro can be used in a powerful way tbh) Neckbeard -> Gentoo, LFS (not really a distro tho but amazing for learning)
But seriously speaking it's your choice bud. All Linux distros work amazing and are all the same to the kernel. You can always install multiple distros on an ext. SSD if you can't decide.
Desktop environment will be the most impactful for you. I recommend picking a distro with KDE Plasma, which will feel like the best version of Windows you’ve never seen before.
If you are almost exclusively gaming and don’t want to fiddle much, Bazzite.
If you like to fiddle: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora. If you want more Ubuntu compatibility, Kubuntu.
There are lots of options and it’s hard to go wrong. Bazzite is special in that the system is immutable, so everything needs to be run as a container.
In that case you are best off with Kubuntu, since UE for Linux is distributed as a .deb.
If you prefer to compile the engine yourself, then you can use anything you like, but OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is worth a look since it’s a rolling distro and stays up-to-date (especially handy for GPU drivers).
Firefox is expanding its AI-powered features, all designed to keep your data private. We believe technology should serve you, not monitor you. Our team understands the importance of privacy, especially as AI rapidly integrates into our daily lives.
Explore Firefox’s new AI tools — from alt text to translation and tab groups — all powered on-device to keep your data private. No tracking. No trade-offs. Just smarter, safer browsing.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Billonairs and stupid MAGA workers are the minority and always vote right wings, but they turn to a mayority if the left working class don't vote. Simple Math.
I know that the US voting system is a crap and that there don't exist a real keft party, Democrats there are a conservative neoliberal party and Republicans are direct a Fascist one. But even so between the bad and the worse, voting the worse don't make sensem less if it is done for the second time. Anyway for me as an European it's impossible to understand why this criminal asshole is in the WhiteHouse and not in Jail since tears ago. In the last US election you could hear out of the US worldwide the sound of a violent facepalm.
leftists aren't really voting for trump though. most leftists i know vote for the lesser evil, but with the consciousness it ain't doing much.
it’s impossible to understand why this criminal asshole is in the WhiteHouse and not in Jail since tears ago
the way fascism coopts the masses and capitalism lets it, thats literally fascism running its course. its been documented throughout history.
it comes up when capitalism is in crisis and the people aren't aware of the class war being fought against them. part of that comes from thinking politics is just voting for the lesser evil.
You just fucking said you can’t vote away fascism. So if fascism is already here, which it is, you’re saying it can’t be voted away, which HEAVILY implies that one shouldn’t vote cuz it’s pointless; fascism can’t be voted away, so why vote?
Do you need any other explanations, you obtuse jackass pretending not to know how language works?
It's time to read theory, comrades! As Lenin says, "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." Reading theory helps us identify the core contradictions within modern society, analyze their trajectories, and gives us the tools to break free. Marxism-Leninism is broken into 3 major components, as noted by Lenin in his pamphlet The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism: | Audiobook
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Critique of Capitalism along the lines of Marx's Law of Value
Advocacy for Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
As such, I created the following list to take you from no knowledge whatsoever of Leftist theory, and leave you with a strong understanding of the critical fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism in an order that builds up as you read. Let's get started!
Section I: Getting Started
What the heck is Communism, anyways? For that matter, what is fascism?
Breaks down fascism and its mortal enemy, Communism, as well as their antagonistic relationship. Understanding what fascism is, where and when it rises, why it does so, and how to banish it forever is critical. Parenti also helps debunk common anti-Communist myths, from both the "left" and the right, in a quick-witted writing style. This is also an excellent time to watch the famous speech.
Section II: Historical and Dialectical Materialism
By far my favorite primer on Marxist philosophy. By understanding Dialectical and Historical Materialism first, you make it easier to understand the rest of Marxism-Leninism. Don't be intimidated!
Further reading on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, but crucially introduces the why of Scientific Socialism, explaining how Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for public ownership and planning by centralizing itself into monopolist syndicates. This is also where Engels talks about the failures of previous "Utopian" Socialists.
Section III: Political Economy
That's right, it's time for the Law of Value and a deep-dive into Imperialism. If we are to defeat Capitalism, we must learn it's mechanisms, tendencies, contradictions, and laws.
Best taken as a pair, these essays simplify the most important parts of the Law of Value. Marx is targetting those not trained in economics here, but you might want to keep a pen and some paper to follow along if you are a visual person.
Absolutely crucial and the most important work for understanding the modern era and its primary contradictions. Marxist-Leninists understand that Imperialism is the greatest contradiction in the modern era, which cascades downward into all manner of related contradictions. Knowing what dying Capitalism looks like, and how it behaves, means we can kill it.
Section IV: Revolutionary and Scientific Socialism
Can we defeat Capitalism at the ballot box? What about just defeating fascism? What about the role of the state?
If Marxists believed reforming Capitalist society was possible, we would be the first in line for it. Sadly, it isn't possible, which Luxemburg proves in this monumental writing.
Excellent refutation of revisionists and Social Democrats who think the State can be reformed, without needing to be replaced with one that is run by the workers, in their own interests.
Section V: Intersectionality and Solidarity
The revolution will not be fought by atomized individuals, but by an intersectional, international working class movement. Intersectionality is critical, because it allows different marginalized groups to work together in collective interest, unifying into a broad movement.
Critical reading on understanding misogyny, transphobia, enbyphobia, pluralphobia, and homophobia, as well as how to move beyond the base subject of "gender." Uses the foundations built up in the previous works to analyze gender theory from a Historical Materialist perspective.
De-colonialism is essential to Marxism. Without having a strong, de-colonial, internationalist stance, we have no path to victory nor a path to justice. Fanon analyzes Colonialism's dehumanizing effects, and lays out how to form a de-colonial movement, as well as its necessity.
Solidarity and intersectionality are the key to any social movement. When different social groups fight for liberation together along intersectional lines, the movements are emboldened and empowered ever-further.
Section VI: Putting it into Practice!
It's not enough to endlessly read, you must put theory to practice. That is how you can improve yourself and the movements you support. Touch grass!
Mao wrote simply and directly, targeting peasant soldiers during the Revolutionary War in China. This pair of essays equip the reader with the ability to apply the analytical tools of Dialectical Materialism to their every day practice, and better understand problems.
Congratulations, you completed your introductory reading course!
With your new understanding and knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, here is a mini What is to be Done? of your own to follow, and take with you as practical advice.
Get organized. Join a Leftist org, find solidarity with fellow comrades, and protect each other. The Dems will not save you, it is up to us to protect ourselves. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization both organize year round, every year, because the battle for progress is a constant struggle, not a single election. See if there is a chapter near you, or start one! Or, see if there's an org you like more near you and join it.
Read theory. Don't think that you are done now! Just because you have the basics, doesn't mean you know more than you do. If you have not investigated a subject, don't speak on it! Don't speak nonsense, but listen!
Aggressively combat white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and other attacks on marginalized communities. Cede no ground, let nobody be forgotten or left behind. There is strength in numbers, when one marginalized group is targeted, many more are sure to follow.
Be industrious, and self-sufficient. Take up gardening, home repair, tinkering. It is through practice that you elevate your problem-solving capabilities. Not only will you improve your skill at one subject, but your general problem-solving muscles get strengthened as well.
Learn self-defense. Get armed, if practical. Be ready to protect yourself and others. Liberals will not save us, we must save each other.
Be persistent. If you feel like a single water droplet against a mountain, think of canyons and valleys. Oh, how our efforts pile up! With consistency, every rock, boulder, even mountain, can be drilled through with nothing but steady and persistent water droplets.
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent."
Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) is a national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States. Our home is in the working class.
The alt-left is STILL pulling the “both sides are the same” shit. We will NEVER escape fascism. Like buckle in because the left is not fucking comprehending the massive scale of the difference between corrupt MAGA and corrupt Dems. Yalls are just not fucking getting it. Yalls are still just mad and punishing Dems for their awful, unconscionable Gaza policy (not defending it), but yalls literally put the final nail in American democracy cuz of a single foreign policy issue. Fucked over all LGBTQ people, all disabled folks, women’s rights, immigrant’s right, DEIA programs. As I watch my trans family continue to get targeted and killed, I will NEVER forget the “both sides” leftists who hung us out to dry. Fuck yalls.
Nowhere in this meme does it say that “both sides are the same”. It’s (correctly) showing how both parties don’t give a shit about the working class.
Republicans are horrible but you can’t expect the Democrats to save or help you from them after we have tons of evidence showing they will also break strikes, pass right wing immigration laws, attack protesters, support genocide, and do almost nothing to stop rising fascism.
Also trying to diminish supplying and funding a genocide to just “a single foreign policy issue” is pretty fucked up and not even accurate. Leftists were willing to overlook hundreds of issues we had with Kamala as a candidate if she could just do the bare fucking minimum of not actively funding and supplying a genocide and she couldn’t even do that.
Fascism and liberalism are not distinct ideologies, but the same ideology in different circumstances. Liberalism is the nice mask, fascism is the brutal one, and Capitalism will use whichever the bourgoeisie feels is necessary to maintain control and profits.
Critiquing liberalism is a "left" thing, not an "alt-left" thing, and I don't even know what that means.
IYO filed a trademark infringement lawsuit [PDF] against OpenAI and Jony Ive's company earlier this month, alleging the defendants deliberately adopted a confusingly similar name for competing products. The lawsuit surfaced after the Microsoft-backed startup quietly pulled promotional materials about its $6.5 acquisition billion deal with Ive's firm.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Depends on how much bribery and extortion Trump is willing to use, in order to change their minds. One way or the other though, the US is on its way towards losing all positive influence in these countries.
There is a lot bluesky gets right, and a lot it gets wrong, the same is true with Activitypub.
(Some) strengths of Atproto
Atproto is content-addressed, and portable. This means that posts can exist independantly of their original server. Instead of giving posts a https uri, which will stop working if a user moves servers or their server disappears, they give them at uris. For example, this post on bsky.app: bsky.app/profile/ponder.ooo/po… Has the at:// link is: at://did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/app.bsky.feed.post/3lk4yrmyugc2f. The post does exist over https at https://porcini.us-east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.repo.getRecord?repo=did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk&collection=app.bsky.feed.post&rkey=3lk4yrmyugc2f.
Atproto is very easy to build apps on. For example, tangled.sh, frontpage.fyi and flushes.app are all apps built on atproto. Atproto allows more flexibility in what an app can do, as opposed to lemmy or mastodon's api.
Atproto is better documented. The ActivityPub spec leaves a lot up to the reader.
Atproto has some really good moderation tools for users. People can make public blocklists of users, and people can subscribe to labellers, people or services which give users/posts a label.
Weaknesses of Atproto
almost everyone is on bluesky's PDSes. I thought mastodon.social and lemmy.world were bad, but the people on alternate PDSes altogether adds up to only a few thousand.
Its decentralised identifiers are actually completely centralised! DID:PLC, their DID method, originally stood for placeholder, but they renamed it to Public Ledger of Credentials. To use it, you have to use plc.directory. You can use a DID:WEB DID, but if your website linked to it goes down you lose your identity. (I find it extremely funny that its not actually a requirement for a decentralised identifier to be decentralised. )
Everything on the network has to be public to work. since relays have to be able to collect all the information on the network for Appviews to be able to make use of that information, anyone can find out who's blocking someone, or who is on a list, or who's following who, with no way of hiding that information. Private accounts and posts are impossible to do on atproto.
Since everything is public, DMs (for now) are centralised. They do seem like they want to change that though.
Strengths of ActivityPub
AP (ActivityPub) is better distributed. While it has large servers (like mastodon.social or lemmy.world (and threads, but we don't talk about threads)) the majority of users are not on those servers. There is no single point of failure. If bluesky disappeared tomorrow, atproto would still exist, it would just have a negligable amount of users.
One node in the network lets you do everything, as opposed to bluesky which has three parts (You can do stuff without a relay though). This means you can trust a lot less of the network.
ActivityPub scales better than ATProto. Atproto scales quadratically, meaning that having a lot of nodes in the network harms performance. AP scales horizontally, meaning it works better with a lot of small servers.
ActivityPub can keep stuff private, like blocks and posts. Though, a lot of implementations can leak posts.
Weaknesses of ActivityPub
The spec leaves somuch out. They didn't propose a way to make sure requests between servers are validated, so mastodon chose HTTP signatures. They didn't add any way of looking up handles, so mastodon chose webfinger.
A posts's id is its https uri, this means thatif a server goes down, stuff can't be fetched. A user can't move their followers if their server goes down (you can on ATproto). There is a standard to fix this, FEP-ef61, but it breaks compatibility with a lot of implementations.
Missing information is a problem. Its not really a problem on lemmy, but on mastodon likes and replies from other servers may not make it to your server at all (you can fetch replies in newer versions of mastodon though).
All this aside, I do think the two can coexist. I don't see anything like lemmy working on atproto. ActivityPub seems closer to social networking, as opposed to social media. Something like facebook would be impossible to make on atproto, because not everything is made to be public.
I am hoping for a bridge, but good (bridgy is opt-in, making it useless).
For Activitypub, a weakness is that the server has to host all the visible content to the server. So for example if lemmy got really big, and you wanted to host a tiny server but are subscribed to most lemmy comms, your server ends up hosting and fetching a copy of everything posted in these communities, which can add up to A LOT, in terms of network usage, and computational power. (For example see the debacle where an Australian sever (I think aussie.zone) struggled with this and was weeks behind fetching content from lemmy.world since so much content comes from that instance).
This probably would scale pretty terribly if it got anywhere near the size of reddit.
ATProto gives a scalable solution to this (but comes with tradeoffs). Where you can create your own “instance” PDS (Personal Data Server), without hosting all the posts federated to you, since this is hosted by a “relay” which does most of the heavy lifting computationally. So it ends up with a solution that looks more centralised (since there is less incentive to host relays, so fewer relays), but also much more friendly to people who wanna host their own “PDS” and therefore control their data. This is also very helpful with scalability and solves some of the weird federation quirks activitypub has (ie. you can’t see a lemmy community or mastodon account until someone on your instance subscribes or follows it).
Yes, this does help, but atproto as a whole still doesn't scale well:
In the beginning of our network, we have 26 users, which conveniently for us map to each letter of the English alphabet: [Alice, Bob, Carol, ... Zack]. Each user sends one message per day, which is intended to have one recipient. (This may sound unrealistic, but this is fine to do to model our scenario.) To simplify things, we'll have each user send a message in a ring: Alice sends a message to Bob, Bob sends a message to Carol, and so on, all the way up to Zack, who simply we wrap around and have message Alice. This could be because these messages have specific intended recipients or it could be because Bob is the sole "follower" of Alice's posts, Carol is the sole "follower" of Bob's, etc.
Let's look at what happens in a single day under both systems.
Under message passing, Alice sends her message to Bob. Only Bob need receive the message. So on and so forth.
From an individual self-hosted server, only one message is passed per day: 1. From the fully decentralized network, the total number of messages passed, zooming out, is the number of participants in the network: 26. Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model, each user must know of all messages to know what may be relevant. Each user must receive all messages.
From an individual self-hosted server, 26 messages must be received.
Zooming out, the number of messages which must be transmitted in the day is 26 * 26: 676, since each user receives each message.
Okay, so what does that mean? How bad is this? With 26 users, this doesn't sound like so much. Now let's add 5 users.
Under message passing:
Per server, still 1 message received per user per day. Per the network, it's 5 extra messages transmitted per day, which makes sense: we've added 5 users. Under the public-gods-eye-view-shared-heap model:
Per server: 5 new messages received per user per day.
Per the network, it's ((31 * 31) - (26 * 26)): 285 new messages per day!
But we aren't actually running networks of 26 users. We are running networks of millions of users. What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that's even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)
In May, legendary Apple designer Jony Ive hooked up with OpenAI to announce an unspecified gadget. [WSJ, archive] To promote this complete vaporware, OpenAI released a video of Sam Altman and Ive b…
Of course, how would they know if you don't list any? Oh, that's right, PRISM. Fully expect that people who don't have social media accounts to get accused of having them simply because someone else shares the same name and did say First Amendment protected stuff, like Donald Trump is a terrible fucking president and should be impeached.
Sorry person with the last name Erdude. I guess you aren't getting into the US now.
I feel like I'm going to be responsible for Trump sending ICE to raid the Shady Pines community event planning committee that picks the color schemes for their weekly card games.
And fight we do. I’ve considered myself an activist for almost 30 years now. I thought fighting for marriage equality was gonna be hard. I’m really not looking forward to this.
Depending on where you live in the world America has been pretty bad for a pretty long time. But I agree under this new technofascist oligarchy it will become a nightmare
These immigration raids and terror tactics are terrible on their own, but it’s especially absurd when Native Americans get caught up in it, and it just fully exposes how disingenuous and transparently racist the whole effort is. So I’m sorry that your peoples have to suffer even more because of this racist mindset.
”If you can’t say, ‘we’ve been here for time immemorial,’ then you’re an immigrant. You’re not from here, so who are you to classify our Indigenous people? These lands have been a melting pot for many ethnicities,” Hatathlie [a Native Arizona state Senator] said.
I heard another more recent example of a car full of Native Americans being pulled over, aggressively questioned, and asked for their papers, but I can’t seem to find it. It’s utterly shameful how we treat people.
The attendance for the next FIFA cup was already looking bad, and I can't imagine the US government wanting your history of online activity to help it even a bit.
I can't wait to see high attendance in Mexico and Canada-hosted matches, with rock bottom attendance in the US. Even US fans travelling domestically, don't go, especially to the states that are falling into line with Trump.
Not that it will actually be recognized for what it is. I may put together a bingo card on the ways media spins it.
They want to stay by themselves? That's fine by me. But then they should also stop exporting their Hollywood and streaming turds (as well as their shit food). That would only be fair. And maybe also stop behaving like if they owned the entire planet?
Lol I don't even remember most of my previous handles. If amnesia isn't a valid defense I'm never getting into the USA. Then again, I have no reason to visit shithole countries in the first place.
I'm a Small Government Republican and I FULLY support this FREEDOM! If you WANT to Come into our Country you have to RESPECT OUR CONSTITUTION (which means you ARE allowed to Shoot Up a School but THATS IT!)!
The username requirement isn't anything new; that requirement was on our DS-160 years ago.
The "wants people to set their social media profiles to public" isn't quoted, so seems less like an official policy anywhere and more like one embassy worker being a prick. Unfortunately, each individual embassy operates independently totally devoid of any accountability.
This process is dehumanizing, inefficient, and totally fucked...but this particular part of it has been this was for a long-ass time.
New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.”
Fair enough, though that's an ask from the State Dept., not a demand from the embassy, as indicated in the OP. It's an important distinction because the embassy holds the authority at that point in the process. They can ignore the guidance altogether or demand everyone open their profiles. They're probably more likely to do the latter now, but they could've done this two years ago too.
Demanding the usernames for the past 5 years and being suspect of anyone not on social media isn't a new, that was my main point. I don't think many people appreciated how shitfucked our visa processes are, even before the current "administration" helping.
I think it's all some level of FUD until there's an example of it being called out as a reason for denial. The fields have been on the application for a while, but I know someone who recently came in with a private ig profile and a vk profile that hadn't been used for anything but chat. Wasn't mentioned at all along the process beyond being on the application.
That may change soon, but it also might just be rhetoric from dipshits playing to their dipshit base.
in other news, the market price of hacked credentials for MAGA-friendly social media accounts:
📈
::: spoiler note in case it is unclear to anyone: the above is a joke.
in all seriousness, renaming someone else's account and presenting it to CBP as one's own would be dangerous and inadvisable. a more prudent course of action at this time is to avoid traveling to the united states. :::
What do you mean "what psyops"? Are you unaware that both China and the US, as well as almost every other country around the world, conduct foreign influence campaigns?
It seemed like the best source available from a ten-second Google search while taking a shit, but I can nip down to the local CIA field office and pick up some classified ops docs if you want a primary source, I'm sure they make that info available.
Yeah and both of those are bad. Product dumping kills local businesses, like how the US sending clothes overseas kills domestic textile industries, and processed food aid kills farms needed for self-sufficiency.
Yes, i want highly centralized production owned by the people not highly decentralized production owned by a multitude of petit-bourgeoisie. I want stuff to be abundant for everybody through mass production, not highly constrained by small scale production.
Small shops aren't the means of production but the profit extraction still operates through robbing wage slaves of the surplus value they create. The petite bougie bosses you're trying to shill for are some of the most reactionary elements that go straight for fascism because it promises them protections from international capital (which is defined as a conspiratorial cabal unlike domestic capital hence their almost anti-capitalist rhetoric sometimes). They're also some of the most cruel because they directly cheat employees that they know and interact with personally.
I mean they make you sign away your rights and tell them if you’ve ever been affiliated with any one who was in or if you joined a communist party. So this is just another layer on the shit cake.
Who TF wants to set foot in that shithole banana republic anyway? Stuff your visa, and return the favor and stay TF out of other people's countries. That would be a welcome change.
if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat
Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you're actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you'll be given a pass.
This is why I’ve already deleted basically everything, social media is a cancer that pushes us further and further apart and replaces meaningful interactions with vapid and shallow counterfeit interactions, it’s a net loss for anyone using it at this point.
My US visa officer: what do you mean you did not have 'social' media accounts in 5 years? No, these weird sites don't count. Underground terrorist? Straight to gulag.
Follows the life of an average part-time hero who manages to win every battle with a single punch. This ability frustrates him as he no longer feels the thrill of fighting a tough opponent, which leads him to question his past desire of becoming stro…
Like a short while ago that website was hit by practically every company in the comic publishing buisness with, I think, a cease & desist letter threatening to hold then legally liable for distributing those companies commodities without a license to do so or some shit.
Or something along those lines. Long story short they got fucked by corporations.
This comic is self punished though, I doubt the original author care about copyright. This is basically a rough draft for the published one that he publishes for free.
It's ultimately not remotely worth the time, money, or effort by whoever has ownership over mangadex to legally contest something that may be free in contrast to the rest of their library that they've been legally threatened to take down.
As people said, the site was "DMCA purged" and lost part of its gallery, which, unfortunately, makes it one of the worst manga sites to read online nowadays, which is a shame I always visited it, but now all that's left is just a hollow body of what it once was.
Auf Dutzenden Berliner Hauptstraßen wurde wegen schlechter Luftqualität Tempo 30 eingeführt. CDU-Verkehrssenatorin Bonde will dies zurückdrehen. Die SPD befürchtet negative Auswirkungen für Schüler und fordert erst eine ausführliche Prüfung.
Non solo in Italia: a Berlino vogliono togliere le zone 30, perché l'aria è migliorata, grazie alle zone 30.
L'assurdità della proposta è tutta nel titolo, e dimostra quanto la #motonormatività sia diffusa. #Berlino, una città con #trasportoPubblico davvero eccellente, può concedersi tranquillamente zone dove la velocità non la fa da padrone.
Auf Dutzenden Berliner Hauptstraßen wurde wegen schlechter Luftqualität Tempo 30 eingeführt. CDU-Verkehrssenatorin Bonde will dies zurückdrehen. Die SPD befürchtet negative Auswirkungen für Schüler und fordert erst eine ausführliche Prüfung.
I wish I was that clever, but no. It's from a researcher named Ian Walker, coined in a very interesting article. It has its own Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motonorm…
A new study coins the term “motornormativity” to describe the unconscious biases people form around the societal ills and inequities of automobile driving.
Yep sounds absurd. As I unterstand it the problem is that you need a reason for 30 km/h zones. The reason was the air quality which is now better so there is no reason anymore. Some zones may be kept because the streets are used by school kids.
I think this is still absurd and good 30 km/h zones with synced traffic lights can yield a good traffic flow.
The fact that they have improved air quality is not sufficient reason? Do they think air quality is like painting a house, that it only has to be done every couple of years?
Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have
long considered
Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy.
Now, based on findings
published by the investigative journalism outlet ISt
How would you use it if abandoning it is not an option, safety-wise, on android? Like, opening it in browser instead, killing app from the background, or using some app\tool? Not using it for anything sensitive is obvious.
What are other potential worms is in there you may think of? Recently, Yandex and Meta analytics tools got caught in sending browsing data to phone's localhost - where their locally installed apps caught it and sent back home. If the FSB conection is that deep, there is no end to what they'd want to mine from users.
It's not the first time I see your discovery shared and I want to thank you. It won't completely disencourage people around me from using it but it'd pile up with other many reasons to do so. Someday there would be just enough of them, like it happened with VK, Facebook etc, I believe.
I do information security work, and I used to work closely with investigative journalists hailing from Russia, Kazachstan, Ukraine, and other places in that general area. Telegram is massively popular there. Because of this Telegram has been on my radar for a very long time as a serious security threat – not just because its protocol and management are suspect, there are plenty of other IMs like that, but also because of how many people I worked with had used it.
I've written about Telegram before, on amore general level (linked in the blog post), so when IStories reached out to me for comment on this it was a good inspiration to dive deeper.
How would you use it if abandoning it is not an option, safety-wise, on android? Like, opening it in browser instead, killing app from the background, or using some app\tool? Not using it for anything sensitive is obvious.
I would not use it. I refuse to accept that abandoning it is not an option. There are plenty of options. It's always a decision one can make.
Please remember that even if hypothetically you could use it in a way that protects you from the spying – something I am very, very doubtful of! – the mere fact you are using it sucks other people into using it. You personally become one more reason for someone to start using or keep using Telegram. You personally become one more "user" of Telegram, justifying another media organization or NGO to set up or maintain a presence there – which in turn pulls in even more users into the dragnet.
In other words, your decision to use Telegram anyway, even though you know what the issues are, becomes one of the many things that make other people feel that "abandoning is not an option". I refuse to be a part of that. The only thing I can recommend is to stop using it.
What are other potential worms is in there you may think of? Recently, Yandex and Meta analytics tools got caught in sending browsing data to phone’s localhost - where their locally installed apps caught it and sent back home. If the FSB conection is that deep, there is no end to what they’d want to mine from users.
I think this hits the nail on the head: If the FSB conection is that deep, there is no end to what they’d want to mine from users.
I don't want to speculate. The possibilities are vast. But I will say what I said in the blogpost: Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot.
I don't trust Telegram the company, I don't trust Telegram the software, I don't trust MTProto. I certainly do not trust Pavel Durov. I don't think we need to speculate on what more could possibly be hiding there, what is already known about Telegram should really be enough to stop using it.
The two decisions Telegram made (choice of infrastructure provider who happens to cooperate with the Russian FSB, and attaching a cleartext device identifier to encrypted messages) taken together reinforce surveillance capability of the FSB considerably more strongly than either of these decisions would have on its own.
The entire article seems like an attack. The author finds a unique identifier and adds "Russia bad" throughout.
States the information is in cleartext but then explains how everything is encrypted (in transit).
What will the author do if they intercepted any single online stores transfer of credit card details. Also encrypted in transit but Is that also deemed as cleartext? Or is that okay?
I don't think much new is learnt here. WhatsApp also sends metadata in "cleartext" (not really, as it's encrypted in transit, but this article called that "cleartext").
I can't say I read the whole thing because the technical analysis went over my head, but I don't think we read the same conclusion
Conclusions
Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.
This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.
Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have
long considered
Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy.
Now, based on findings
published by the investigative journalism outlet ISt
Hi, author here. First of all, in that piece I don't happen to recommend using any specific piece of software. I mention Signal and WhatsApp for comparison, as tools that are considered similar, and yet avoid making the same weird protocol choices.
Secondly, if you have any proof that any specific communication tool is used to "spy" on people, I am sure I am not the only person who would love to hear about it. That's the only way we can keep each other safe online. Surely you wouldn't be making unsubstantiated claims and just imply stuff like that without any proof, would you?
And finally, I've spent a good chunk of time and expertise on analyzing Telegram's protocol before I made my claims. I provided receipts. I provided code. I explained in detail my testing set-up. You can yourself go and verify my results.
Instead, you claim it's "propaganda", while mischaracterizing what I say in that post. Classy!
A distanza di 2 anni (…io pensavo 1), chi si ricorda Scottecs Gigazine? Probabilmente nessuno, neppure io onestamente. Però, l’altro giorno mi è tornato in mente che esiste, giusto per caricare su TomoStash una manciata di volumi molto vecchi che ho trovato sull’agrodolce Archivio di Anna… e ok. Però poi ieri ho aperto il sito […]
gigarivista scottiaca con segretissimo numero, trovato così nel vedere colì
A distanza di 2 anni (…io pensavo 1), chi si ricorda Scottecs Gigazine? Probabilmente nessuno, neppure io onestamente. Però, l’altro giorno mi è tornato in mente che esiste, giusto per caricare su TomoStash una manciata di volumi molto vecchi che ho trovato sull’agrodolce Archivio di Anna… e ok. Però poi ieri ho aperto il sito ufficiale della rivista gigante, per includere i link e per copincollare le descrizioni dei tomi, e lì ho scoperto non una, ma ben due (2) cose assurde… furbuffe, quasi. (!) 😱
Innanzitutto, esiste un numero speciale del Gigazine, il Numero Zero XL, che è esclusivamente digitale e gratuito!!! Non l’ho mai sentito prima, e in effetti è bello nascosto sul sito, tutto in fondo alla lista dei prodotti… sarà un regalo per i ficcanaso, e io approvo. La cosa strana però è che non si vede alcun tasto per scaricare, o che… l’unica cosa che a fatica trovo è il tasto “aggiungi al carrello secondario”, scrollando in fondo alla pagina, dove appare come flyout, ma… clicco e non funziona, semplicemente il testo si trasforma in una rotellina che gira all’infinito. Per sicurezza ho provato anche dal browser dei pensionati, che “non si sa mai che su Firefox magari è tutto rotto, specialmente il mio con 31 estensioni“, ma niente. 😓
Grande terrore, quindi. Ho temuto di non poter mettere le mani su questo PDF elusivissimo. Giusto un attimo prima di aprire i devtools del browser, per capire cosa va storto e non posso sistemare (qualcosa nel loro tema di Shopify, il JavaScript tira un errore Uncaught TypeError: this.form is null: initCartBar@theme.js [...]), però, per nessun motivo particolare se non il fatto che ci fosse un pallino “1” nell’angolo, il bottone della chat ha catturato la mia attenzione, e l’ho cliccato… e lì ho riso. Perché tra le tante “risposte immediate” c’è “Non riesco a scaricare il Numero 0 XL“, che ho quindi cliccato, e il bot ha risposto “Gigaciao! Non ti preoccupare, utilizza il link qui sotto e scarica il Numero 0 XL! https://gigaciao.com/a/downloads/-/92f4529bab5bf4e…“. 🤯
Cioè… fatemi capire bene… Loro sanno perfettamente che il loro sito è rotto e il download non può partire, e non solo non sistemano semplicemente lo spacc nel codice, ma nemmeno mettono il link diretto al download nel testo della pagina… No, bisogna che l’utente abbia l’intuizione di scavare in altre parti del sito, in questo caso la chat di supporto, per trovare lì finalmente l’oggetto digitale tanto agognato! Regà, boh, è così assurdo che a questo punto non posso non pensare non sia stato fatto apposta; va bene i problemi, va bene l’incompetenza, ma qui siamo oltre: mi sa che è davvero una caccia al tesoro per chi ha abbastanza pazienza come me. Vabbè, tanto ora il numero 0 è ricaricato sul mio sito… e comunque ci ho perso solo 2-3 minuti, ma in cambio ho subito questa user experience assurda da raccontare. 👌
Ecco a voi la versione DIGITALE del ricercatissimo Numero Zero, adesso disponibile in versione XL, con più contenuti ma sempre GRATIS!Se non siete riusciti a recuperarlo in versione cartacea, o se ci siete riusciti, ma volete leggerne una versione es…
This will roll out to the official app stores and vger.app soon(tm), once I’m confident there are no major regressions. If you prefer not to switch to beta builds, just hang tight.
Please note that Piefed support is EXPERIMENTAL! There are still many things that don't work quite right, which I'm hoping to improve over the coming weeks.
The basics including scrolling home/all/local, viewing posts, blocking, commenting and voting should work well. However there are some known issues:
Can't sign up for a Piefed account in-app, only log in with an existing one
Subscribed communities list is empty (should be fixed soon!)
Inbox tab doesn't load
Comment search doesn't work
Profile upvoted/downvoted doesn't load
No moderation tools
Mark as read doesn't persist
Creating/editing posts is currently untested
...probably a bunch of other stuff too, please let me know below!
Behind the scenes, this interoperability is made possible thanks to aeharding/threadiverse, a new library I am working on to normalize various threadiverse-software APIs. It's open source so any project use it, but it's under heavy development right now. What's cool about this is in the future, adding support for mbin, or whatever else is possible!
Again, feel free to try it out and let me know if there are any more issues to be documented and fixed.
I’ve noticed link images are very pixelated when browsing piefed (piefed.social specifically) but then same links look fine when browsing lemmy. I’m guessing this is a piefed side problem (or maybe an instance configuration choice?).
Yesterday I merged in a PR that lets the instance admin set the sizes for thumbnails.
But the real issue is that the thumbnails have a variety of uses - in the PieFed web UI thumbnails are shown quite small so 170px is fine. But some mobile apps might show the thumbnail in a manner that spans the whole screen which is going to need to be at least 350px wide.
I'll make PieFed generate a 500px version of the thumbnail and include that in the API response (as well as the smaller one).
A while ago I made a tiny function in my ~/.zshrc to download a video from the link in my clipboard. I use this nearly every day to share videos with people without forcing them to watch it on whatever site I found it. What's a script/alias that you use a lot?
# Download clipboard to tmp with yt-dlp
tmpv() {
cd /tmp/ && yt-dlp "$(wl-paste)"
}
With how many new Linux users we get recently, I don't like this joke at all without a disclaimer. Yes yes, its your own fault if you execute commands without knowing what it does. But that should not punish someone by deleting every important personal file on the system.
In case any reader don't know, rm is a command to delete files and with the option rm -r everything recursively will be searched and deleted on the filesystem. Option -f (here bundled together as -rf) will never prompt for any non existing file. The / here means start from the root directory of you system, which in combination with the recursive option will search down everything, home folder included, and find every file. Normally this is protected todo, but the extra option --no-preserve-root makes sure this command is run with the root / path.
Haha I know its funny. Until someone loses data. Jokes like these are harmful in my opinion.
You don't need to understand a command in order to copy paste an alias or Bash function. Especially newcomers could tend to do it, without knowing what the command actually does. We are also in a posting with helpful commands, so its double harmful. And you doubling down without adding any sort of disclaimer shows you don't care.
I usually set up an alias or script to update everything on my system. For example, on Ubuntu, I would do this: alias sysup='snap refresh && apt update && apt upgrade'
And on Arch, I do this: alias sysup ='flatpak update && paru'
Funny enough you'd need to use sudo to run this on Ubuntu, but not in the Arch example because paru being neat
For me, I find it handy because it catches a bunch of stuff I always forget, like updating Docker containers. Also if you have Am installed it'll even update your Appimages.
AppImage Package Manager: AppImage sandboxing, local and system installation, update all AppImages, an extensible database of AppImages and portable apps, lists for AppImages and other GNU/Linux bi...
alias +='git add'
alias +p='git add -p'
alias +u='git add -u'
alias -- -='cd -'
alias @='for i in'
alias c='cargo'
alias date='LANG=C date'
alias diff='cdiff'
alias gg='git grep -n'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -o'
alias ls='ls -vFT0 --si --color=auto --time-style=long-iso'
alias rmd='rmdir'
I also have various small scripts and functions: * a for package management (think apt but has simplified arguments which makes it faster to use in usual cases), * e for opening file in Emacs, * g for git, * s for sudo.
And here’s ,:
$ cat ~/.local/bin/,
\#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
paste -sd,
else
printf '%s\n' "$@" | paste -sd,
fi
Similar to yours OP I copy many URLs and then run my script that takes the number of URLs I copied eg 5,and downloads them with yt-dlp and GNU parallel to ~/Videos
For me it's pretty basic. It's mostly aliases for nix related commands, like rebuild-switch, updating, garbage collecting, because those nix commands are pretty lenghty, especially with having to point to your flake and everything. I'm thinking of maybe adding an alias for cyanrip (cli cd ripper), because i recently ripped my entire cd collection, but going forward if i buy another cd every now and then, i'll probably end up forgetting about which flags i used.
i also have the chmod one, but mine is named just x:
alias x='chmod +x'
I also have the yt-dlp "$(wl-paste)" one, but its build around a custom script. So sharing it here makes no sense. Its funny how often we do same thing in different ways (extracting or creating archives in example). Often aliases get development into function and then they turn into scripts. For some of the more simple aliases, here a selection:
alias f='fastfetch -l none'
alias vim='nvim'
alias baloo='balooctl6'
A few days ago I posted a one-liner to do the same thing too. It will resolve aliases from your history and expand program paths to its fullpath. I thought you might be interested: beehaw.org/post/20584479
List all existing program paths from your Bash's history. (Bash One Liner)
It only works with the first command in the recorded history, not with any sub shells or chained commands.
\#!/usr/bin/env bash
# 1. history and $HISTFILE do not work in scripts. Therefore cat with a direct
# path is needed.
# 2. awk gets the first part of the command name.
# 3. List is then sorted and duplicate entries are removed.
# 4. type -P will expand command names to paths, similar to which. But it will
# also expand aliases and functions.
# 5. Final output is then sorted again.
type -P $(cat ~/.bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq) | sort
After reading a blog post, I had this script in mind to see if its possible. This is just for fun and I don't have an actual use for it. Maybe some parts of it might inspire you to do something too. So have fun.
Edit 1:
After some suggestions from the comments, here is a little shorter version. sort | uniq can be replaced by sort -u, as the output of them should be identical in this case (in certain circumstances they can have different effect!). Also someone pointed out my useless cat, as the file can be used directly with awk. And for good reason. :D Enjoy, and thanks for all.
Little tip: In case you need to use rm directly, even with the alias in effect, you can put a backslah in front of the command to use its original meaning: \rm filename
I'm not sure what you mean with the question. If you have any alias like alias rm='ls -l' in your .bashrc in example, then you cannot use the original command rm anymore, as it is aliased to something else. I'm speaking about the terminal, when you enter the command. However, if you put a backslash in front of it like \rm in the terminal, then the alias for it is ignored and the original command is executed instead.
Official author don’t recommend it due to different semantics. But honestly for my own personal use case its fine for me.
I don't recommend that either. If you get used to that 'rm' doesn't actually remove files and then your alias is missing for whatever reason it'll bite you in the rear at some point. And obviously the same hazard goes with a ton of other commands too.
it's somewhat vibe coded but the one i probably use the most is this one to swap between speakers and headset. the device name to look for is just put directly in there, it'd take some adjustment to run it on different machines. this is in my .bashrc:
# switch sinks
toggle_audio() {
# Find headset sink ID dynamically
headset_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "Plantronics" | awk '{print $1}')
# Find speakers sink ID dynamically
speakers_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "pci-0000_05_00.6" | awk '{print $1}')
# Get current default sink
current_sink=$(pactl get-default-sink)
# Get current sink ID
current_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "$current_sink" | awk '{print $1}')
# Toggle between the two
if [ "$current_id" = "$headset_id" ]; then
pactl set-default-sink "$speakers_id"
echo "Switched to speakers (Sink $speakers_id)"
else
pactl set-default-sink "$headset_id"
echo "Switched to headset (Sink $headset_id)"
fi
}
generally i try not to use too many custom things because for work i regularly work on all kinds of different servers and i've just been too lazy to set up some solution to keep it all in sync. someday....
My desktop text editor has an autosave feature, but it only works after you've manually saved the file. All I wanted is something like the notes app on my phone, where I can jot down random thoughts without worrying about naming a new file. So here's the script behind my text editor shortcut, which creates a new text file in ~/.drafts, names it with the current date, adds a suffix if the file already exists, and finally opens the editor:
\#!/bin/bash
name=/home/defacto/.drafts/"`date +"%Y%m%d"`"_text
if [[ -e "$name" || -L "$name" ]] ; then
i=1
while [[ -e "$name"_$i || -L "$name"_$i ]] ; do
let i++
done
name="$name"_$i
fi
touch -- "$name"
pluma "$name" #replace pluma with your editor of choice
I have started my daily drawing journey which i still am bad at it. To create a new .kra files files every day I use this
\#/usr/bin/bash
days=$(</var/home/monika/scripts/days)
echo "$days"
file_name=/var/home/monika/Pictures/Art/day$days.kra
if [ -f $file_name ]; then
echo file is present
else
if [[ $days%7 -eq 0 ]]; then
echo "Week completed"
fi
cp "/var/home/monika/scripts/duplicate.kra" $file_name
flatpak run org.kde.krita $file_name
echo $(($days + 1)) >/var/home/monika/scripts/days
fi
I often want to know the status code of a curl request, but I don't want that extra information to mess with the response body that it prints to stdout.
What to do?
Render an image instead, of course!
curlcat takes the same params as curl, but it uses iTerm2's imgcat tool to draw an "HTTP Cat" of the status code.
It even sends the image to stderr instead of stdout, so you can still pipe curlcat to jq or something.
\#!/usr/bin/env zsh
stdoutfile=$( mktemp )
curl -sw "\n%{http_code}" $@ > $stdoutfile
exitcode=$?
if [[ $exitcode == 0 ]]; then
statuscode=$( cat $stdoutfile | tail -1 )
if [[ ! -f $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode ]]; then
curl -so $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode https://http.cat/$statuscode
fi
imgcat $HOME/.httpcat$statuscode 1>&2
fi
cat $stdoutfile | ghead -n -1
exit $exitcode
Note: This is macOS-specific, as written, but as long as your terminal supports images, you should be able to adapt it just fine.
Because using docker can sometimes cause ownership issues if not properly configured in your docker-compose.yml, I just added an alias to ~/.zshrc to rectify that.
-edit- Only run this script in your user owned directories, e.g. anything from ~/ (or /home/) you might otherwise cause ownership issues for your system.
## Set ownership of files/folders recursively to current user
alias iownyou="sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP"
That's a helpful one! I also add a function that creates a tmp directory, and cds to it which I frequently use to open a scratch space. I use it a lot for unpacking tar files, but for other stuff too.
(These are nushell functions)
# Create a directory, and immediately cd into it.
# The --env flag propagates the PWD environment variable to the caller, which is
# necessary to make the directory change stick.
def --env dir [dirname: string] {
mkdir $dirname
cd $dirname
}
# Create a temporary directory, and cd into it.
def --env tmp [
dirname?: string # the name of the directory - if omitted the directory is named randomly
] {
if ($dirname != null) {
dir $"/tmp/($dirname)"
} else {
cd (mktemp -d)
}
}
Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:
alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"
This is a handy one for detecting a hard link
function is-hardlink {
count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
echo "Yes. There are ${count} links to this file."
else
echo "Nope. This file is unique."
fi
}
I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I'm using, it Updates All The Things:
function up {
if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
yay -Syu --noconfirm
yay -Yc --noconfirm
elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
fi
flatpak update --assumeyes
flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}
I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.
This one is just a basic mirror fixing thing cuz sometimes I go a while without updating pacman:
alias fixpkg='rate-mirrors --protocol https arch | sudo tee /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist && sudo pacman -Syy'
This function I made to create virtual audio sinks so I can route audios via qpw and play earrape into discord calls if I want XD
create_vsink() {
local sink_name=${1:-vsink} # Default sink name is 'vsink' if no input is provided
local description=${2:-"Virtual Sink"} # Default description
pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name="$sink_name" sink_properties=device.des>
echo "Virtual sink '$sink_name' created with description '$description'."
}
Simple parser function I made that makes a whole repo using my git key so it's not just locally created I kinda forgot why I made it tbh:
git_clone() {
local url="${1#https://}" # Remove "https://" if present
git clone "https://$git_key@$url"
}
Awesome mpv function I made that allows for real time pitch+speed shifting via hotkeys and is flexible with extra parameters and shit:
Automatic audio router for firefox audio streams that uses the aforementioned create_sink function to make a specific sink that I can use carla on to mix and make cool shit out of haha
firefox_crush() {
create_vsink CrunchSink "CrunchSink"
firefox --name firefox-vc &
(while true; do
SINK_INPUT_ID=$(pactl list sink-inputs short | grep "firefox" | awk '{print $1}')
if [[ -n "$SINK_INPUT_ID" ]]; then
pactl move-sink-input "$SINK_INPUT_ID" CrunchSink
break
fi
sleep 0.25
done) &
}
When you pipe to this, for example ls | clip, it will stick the output of the command ran into the clipboard without needing to manually copy the output.
I've only used aliases twice so far. The first was to replace yt-dlp with a newer version because the version that comes pre-installed in Linux Mint is too outdated to download videos from YouTube. The second was because I needed something called "Nuget". I don't remember exactly what Nuget is but I think it was a dependency for some application I tried several months ago.
alias yt-dlp='/home/j/yt-dlp/yt-dlp'
alias nuget="mono /usr/local/bin/nuget.exe"
For the newer version of program, that's why we have the $PATH. You put your program into one of the directories that is in your $PATH variable, then you can access your script or program from any of these like a regular program. Check the directories with echo "$PATH" | tr ':' '\n'
My custom scripts and programs directory is "~/.local/bin", but it has to be in the $PATH variable too. Every program and script i put there can be run like any other program. You don't even need an alias for this specific program in example.
I looked through my bash history and it looks like I needed it to build an Xbox eeprom editor for Xemu. Xemu doesn't (or at least didn't, I haven't used newer versions yet) have a built in eeprom editor and editing the Xbox eeprom is required for enabling both wide screen and higher resolutions for the games that support them natively.
I just looked at Xemu's documentation, and it looks like they've added a link to an online eeprom editor, so the editor I used (which they do still link to) is no longer required.
3 of these, 1 for each of my headless vm's/computers that's just an SSH command
dcompose(d/pull) - docker compose (down/pull)
3 scripts that are just docker compose up/down/pull, as scripts (remind me in 6 hours and I will post the scripts) so that it will CD to my compose folder, execute the command (with option for naming specific containers or blank for all) and then CD back to the directory I started in.
this removes duplicate lines, preserving line order
iter:
#!/usr/bin/bash
if [[ "${@}" =~ /$ ]]; then
xargs -rd '\n' -I {} "${@}"{}
else
xargs -rd '\n' -I {} "${@}" {}
fi
This executes a command for each line. It can also be used to compare two directories, ie:
du -sh * > sizes; ls | iter du -sh ../kittens/ > sizes2
fadeout:
#!/bin/bash
# I use this to fade out layered brown noise that I play at a volume of 130%
# This takes about 2 minutes to run, and the volume is at zero several seconds before it's done.
# ################
# DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is needed so that playerctl can find the dbus to use MPRIS so it can control mpv
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus"
# ################
for i in {130..0}
do
volume=$(echo "scale=3;$i/100" | bc)
sleep 2.3
playerctl --player=mpv volume $volume
done
This plays "layered brown noise" by crysknife. It's a great sleep aid.
here are some aliases:
alias m='mpc random off; mpc clear'
alias mpcc='ncmpcpp'
alias thesaurus='dict -d moby-thesaurus'
alias wtf='dict -d vera'
alias tvplayer='mpv -fs --geometry=768x1366+1366+0'
Here is on that I actually don't use, but want to use it in scripts. It is meant to be used by piping it. It's simple branch with user interaction. I don't even know if there is a standard program doing exactly that already.
# usage: yesno [prompt]
# example:
# yesno && echo yes
# yesno Continue? && echo yes || echo no
yesno() {
local prompt
local answer
if [[ "${#}" -gt 0 ]]; then
prompt="${*} "
fi
read -rp "${prompt}[y/n]: " answer
case "${answer}" in
[Yy0]*) return 0 ;;
[Nn1]*) return 1 ;;
*) return 2 ;;
esac
}
Hey OP, consider using $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR instead of /tmp. It's now the more proper place for these kinds of things to avoid permission issues, although I'm sure you're on a single user system like most people. I have clipboard actions set to download with yt-dlp 😀
My favorite aliases are:
alias dff='findmnt -D -t nosquashfs,notmpfs,nodevtmpfs,nofuse.portal,nocifs,nofuse.kio-fuse'
I use Clevis to auto-unlock my encrypted root partition with my TPM; this means when my boot partition is updated (E.G a kernel update), I have to update the PCR register values in my TPM. I do it with my little script /usr/bin/update_pcr:
I run it with sudo and this handles it for me. The only issue is I can't regenerate the binding immediately after the update; I have to reboot, manually enter my password to decrypt the drive, and then do it.
Now, if I were really fancy and could get it to correctly update the TPM binding immediately after the update, I would have something like an apt package shim with a hook that does it seamlessly. Honestly, I'm surprised that distributions haven't developed robust support for this; the technology is clearly available (I'm using it), but no one seems to have made a user-friendly way for the common user to have TPM encryption in the installer.
I wrote a script called please. You input please followed by any other command (e.g. please git clone, please wget blahblah) and a robotic voice will say "affirmative," then the command will run, and when it completes, the robotic voice reads out the exit code (e.g. "completed successfully" or "failed with status 1" etc.)
This is useful for when you have a command that takes a long time and you want to be alerted when it's finished. And it's a gentleman.
I have a collection of about 8 machines around the house (a lot of Raspberry Pi) that I ssh around to from various points.
I have setup scripts named: ssp1 ssp2 ssba ss2p etc. to ssh into the various machines, and of course shared public ssh keys among them to skip the password prompt. So, yes, once you are "in" one machine in my network, if you know this, you are "in" all of them, but... it's bloody convenient.
I used to have scripts like that, but eventually switched to ssh aliases. You can set up an alias for each machine in ~/.ssh/config with lines like this:
Host p1
HostName 192.168.1.123
Port 22
User pi
Then access with ssh p1. Slightly more typing, but avoids adding more commands to your $PATH. Also has the benefit of letting you use the same alias with other ssh-related commands like sftp.
Technically not an alias, because I just use nushell's history + autocompletion everytime I use it, but one could alias it. I think I might even write a custom command for it, with path argument, some day. Anyway, here it goes:
I try to organise my data in the cleanest way possible, with the less double possible etc... I end up using a lot of symbolic links. When doing maintenance, sometimes I want to navigate in the "unlogical" way the data are organized, but the PWD variable is not necessarily very cooperative. This alias is really useful in my case :
I also do some X application, compositor and WM development, and I have a few aliases to simplify tasks like copying from an Xorg session to an Xnest (and the other way around), or reload the xrandr command from my .xinitrc without duplicating it.
I have an alias for using MPV+yt-dlp with my firefox cookies :
alias yt="mpv --ytdl-raw-options='cookies-from-browser=firefox'"
I can't stand too long lines of text on my monitor, particularly when reading manpages, so I set the MANWIDTH env variable.
# Note : if you know that *sometimes* your terminal will be smaller than 80 characters
# refer to that https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Man_page
export MANWIDTH=80
I use null-pointers a lot, with a shorthand.
# Note: env.sh actually provide other helpful aliases on their homepage
function envs.sh() {
if [ $# != 1 ]; then
1>&2 printf "Error, need one argument.\n"
return 1
fi
curl -F'file=@'"$1" https://envs.sh
}
The usual fake editor in my path, so that browsers and other applications open Vim the correct way.
\#!/bin/sh
# st_vim.sh - executable in my ~/.local/bin
# for example in firefox's about:config :
# - view_source.editor.path : set to the value of $(which st_vim.sh)
# - view_source.editor.external : set to true
st -- $EDITOR "$*"
My .xinitrc is quite classical, I still have this in it (setup for dwm's title bar, people usually install much complicated programs) :
while true; do xsetroot -name "$(date +"%d %H:%M")"; sleep 60; done &
I also have a lot of stupid scripts for server and desktop maintenance, disks cleaning etc... those are handy but are also very site-specific, let me know if your interested.
Qualche anno fa, durante una lunga intervista apparsa sul n. 159 de Il Blues, per parlare del suo bellissimo “Mississippi Son” (Alligator), Charlie Musselwhite si era espresso così in merito a quello che sarebbe diventato il suo disco successivo: “E’ già tutto pronto, ma quello sarà il prossimo disco... Continua a leggere...
Dopo l’ennesimo ascolto di Emmaar, il parallelo con Tassili, ultimo lavoro uscito nel 2011, è inevitabile. Il gruppo maliano che ha fatto, e continua a far conoscere la cultura tuareg in giro per il mondo, con questo disco, non si discosta di molto dal suo predecessore... Leggi e ascolta...
Dopo l’ennesimo ascolto di Emmaar, il parallelo con Tassili, ultimo lavoro uscito nel 2011, è inevitabile. Il gruppo maliano che ha fatto, e continua a far conoscere la cultura tuareg in giro per il mondo, con questo disco, non si discosta di molto dal suo predecessore. Due sono soprattutto gli elementi in comune: deserto e messaggio. Il primo è stato registrato nel deserto algerino, Emmar invece, in quello nord americano del Joshua tree. Il messaggio: la musica come strumento di ribellione... silvanobottaro.blog/2024/09/10…
Dopo l’ennesimo ascolto di Emmaar, il parallelo con Tassili, ultimo lavoro uscito nel 2011, è inevitabile. Il gruppo maliano che ha fatto, e continua a far conoscere la cultura tuareg in giro…
There are probably some people that go too far, but that is true in any community. There are also people with a very legitimate threat model, for example if they are from insert your favourite dictatorship here and they have insert opinion against said regime
Yep, and then there's probably a good number of people who have no idea of threat modelling who just copy those actions to say they have "good privacy".
As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.
If you're not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.
I'd sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one's time.
They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions ("what is Google doing this week?!").
If you're not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.
For example, I wouldn't recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be "more secure", but they have a job to do and can't keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn't "phone administration".
LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It's okay, I do it too. However, it's not approachable or understandable to people who don't share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.
It kind of has to be, if you're trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we're trying to defend against. I don't see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.
If you don't even like doing this stuff, wouldn't it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that's as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn't apply.)
Damn this take needs more love. You will get shouted down And downvoted to the lowest depths if you speak against anything that isn't graphene. I like the project, it has merit. It's far far from perfect in so many ways. I don't believe it's the white knight in shining armour we like to think it is. Good yes. Saving grace. Not by a long shot. It's got many fundamental flaws.
Be conscious of your needs, not obsessive. I think a lot of people are obsessive and I get it totally. But FOMO is powerful. Don't overwork your mind trying to be perfect that you never make moves. Life isn't static. If your uneducated enough to truly need the utmost best tech stacks with no real knowledge on how to implement and deploy. You likely don't need to be doing the shit your thinking of, or currently doing.
Depends how one looks at it. From purely practical POV, probably 90% of us don't need to bolt their doors so much. But as a principle, as a society we've lost the "war" on privacy so much, that it really takes a long way to pull the dial back to where it should be
I dunno, considering that Facebook data has been used to go after people, we've got fascists using every method possible to target their current hated group, and police everywhere ignoring or bypassing due process by just buying data, I don't think it all paranoid to think that privacy concerns are already huge, and could get worse
Yes, some people absolutely take things way too far, and often unproductively.
Like the person who was trying to disable websockets. Or the people who will shun signal, but jump directly on the flavour of the month signal clone, which might be completely backdoored.
If you dont know what you are doing, randomly turning things on and off at best does nothing, at worst makes you even more signaturable/trackable.
Its good to educate yourself on various protections, but unfortunately, it requires a lot of careful research and understanding.
There's certainly also the aspect of simply "nerds who want to experiment." I know I've tried out weirdo encrypted messengers and such in the past, just to never actually use it for anything and delete it. If you are smart, you know the difference between an experiment and sage advice. Boring stuff like the EFF's Surveillance Self Defense suggest the reasonable tools for a spectrum of people's threat models, but those things were all once experiments too.
Of course some people go too far. I think a lot of folks on here grossly overestimate / overstate their threat model, but I think the discussions are good for the limited few who really do need to cover their asses.
Me personally, I hate the idea of companies bidding for my attention without my consent, so I try and make it as hard as possible for them to get it. This just so happens to overlap nicely with the goals of the privacy community much of the time.
Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what's done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don't care, and can't be made to care.
For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can't or doesn't, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can't argue with that, even though it's provably false.
Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there
As evidence, I've heard people talk about worrying their phone is listening to their conversations. It's not that they don't care about privacy, it's that they don't even know what's possible. With all the data collection that is happening, the data brokers are already selling a dataset predicting that you are going to be shopping for new baby items and what types of manipulative tactics are likely to work on you well before you talk to your friend about it.
I also truly hate "family groups" where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.
I definetly take things too far in terms of my effort vs my current threat model. But there are many aspects of trying to increase privacy.
For one, I'm very interested in the philosophy, ethics and politics of privacy and adjacent fields such as security. Part of what I do is just learning.
Also I try to be a good role model to my AFK peers and family. Of course I don't try to get everyone to adopt my hobby. But as in every field it's hard to teach even the basic stuff to others without deeper understanding of the field.
But as in every field it's hard to teach even the basic stuff to others without deeper understanding of the field.
That's so true, but even more true in IT... It changes so rapidly and things don't stay the same over time... It's not like a degree in Biology where things you learn stay relatively the same !
IT is 5 inches deep but miles long ! (Something like that!)
Definitely yeah! If you’re just a regular person living in a fairly democratic country and you’re thinking about physically clogging your usb ports to avoid someone breaking in your room and tampering your device while you’re exploring Barcelona, or if you consider removing camera and microphone from your pixel phone that you use every day, you’re probably taking it too far.
OTOH I’m still having trouble getting people away from Meta apps and I think it’s absolutely crazy how little thought people put into the amount of data that Meta collects.
TBH even in many dictatorships you’re mostly fine just using a VPN and fake accounts if you have government critical opinions. But that’s just my personal experience. Goes without saying if you have a decent follower count or are some kind of journalist you should be very paranoid.
Anyway, the point is, it’s probably good to feel slightly paranoid because most people aren’t paranoid enough, but most of us are also not Edward Snowden or Saudi journalists, so there should be a balance between practicality and privacy.
Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best... These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.
OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I'd likely do more.
I'm like a test-bed for a) my business customers and b) friends and family. also, "wasting" time thusly is vastly better than my previous "hobby", namely buying new and exciting shit.
my customers benefit from me knowing how exactly (and why!) I should implement e.g. an unbound instance on-premise. or an in-house prosody communication platform. or the "dev team" (buncha dudes poking at wordpress) getting a slew of used elitebooks with linux for the price of one new windows-with-ai yoga the spec initially called for.
f&f benefit from my early adoption by way of trickle-down tech. no way is anyone of them going to selfhost all this crap, but they get sprinkles of benefits in the form of "get this phone with that OS with those apps" and they're dramatically better off. you don't need the new ideapad ryzen that's "on sale" (isn't), have this 10-year old macbook I fixed and installed linux on - off you go. you don't need the new phone that's "free" with an exorbitantly priced plan, have the cheapest plan with this Redmi/Poco phone I swapped the battery on and installed LineageOS.
as to practical considerations, any and all interactions with the likes of FAANG are and should be adversarial from the get-go, they are out to hurt you by any means necessary. them fucks lost the benefit of doubt ages ago so you not letting them have a millimeter of grasp in your domicile should be your primary task. as their gains are cumulative in nature, every battle won is significant and you'd do well to remind yourself constantly of that.
One is that, like in most communities, those that feel more compelled to post and comment are those that are more passionate about the topic and/or have more extreme views.
The other reason is that given the sensitive nature of the topic, without knowing the threat level of the reader I can see how one would be reluctant to go for the "good enough".
I think that "mental illness" kind of comments would come from people whose attitude for safety in many aspects of life is "that's never going to happen (to me)". Those people exist, so sooner or later you'll see comments like that.
On the other hand everybody is trying to find a balance in convenience and safety and the situations and environments and life on general for one person can be quite different from that of some others'. So what's adequate for one won't be for another.
It's like PPE or personal finance or many other things. There's no one size that fits all and finding the right fit isn't easy. For a lot of us it's work in progress. Sometimes you know what's definitely needed and tweak the details. Sometimes you know something is not going well and needs to change.
Maybe it's enough to say that it's complicated and have some compassion and support for people that think it isn't. Or people that think it's all too much to handle.
Yeh my family treat me like I am a nut job. I only swapped away from google and ask them to think about the orgs they spend their money on for example Amazon.
It’s amazing how many people got on board with Covid conspiracies but questioning where you data goes, who’s using it, what for, no that’s a bit far lol.
Told my older parents I use a custom ROM with a profile for work and a profile for personal and they asked me what I'm hiding, and why I'm so paranoid. I said.. it's not paranoia, it's organization. Color coding profiles allows my mind to switch gears from work to personal life like mental compartments. I am a boring person. I have nothing to be paranoid about. They didn't believe me. Oh well....
Edit: part of me thinks the whole mental state switching from work profile to personal is an ADHD aspect as well. Especially the color coding helps wonders.
I feel that it is closer to the fact that the communities forgot most beginners are completely new to this in general. They might not even know what exactly a 'browser' is, much less cookies and stuff.
Hence when we try to spoonfeed them information, it comes off as overwhelming and forced.
Agree that there are some extremist, but they mostly act in good faith tbh.
Another thing I noticed is there are more preachers of 'how' than 'why'. Having a beginner go down the route of privacy without giving them a purpose to do so is quite off-putting.
Yes, paranoia is not healthy. When people can't formulate a realistic threat model then usually to be "safe" they assume everyone is out there to get them ... while failing the most basic steps, e.g. not relying on surveillance capitalist fueled tools voluntarily.
Yeah. I think people can become obsessive over it. I also think there is a large group of users who gamify privacy and act as if its an mmo quest where they just need to collect the best tools to win instead of being responsible and understanding threat modelling.
There is a point of diminishing returns. Like most things, you have to evaluate what you are willing to live with and let go.
I know someone who only browses incognito because they don't want cookies tracking them. They log into everything every day. Which, imo, is worse because those cookies are still tracking you but you now have to log in everyday.
But for them they like the control.
I've moved most of my incidental link on my phone clicking to Firefox Focus (thanks to URL Checker) which has upped my privacy. I wouldn't have made that change without the prompt that URL Checker provides though.
I use a VPN outside of my house and I use pihole at home. I am tempted to switch my DNS to unbound but the juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze. We'll see the next time I need to rebuild my pi.
I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.
It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.
In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…
DNSSEC always causes errors on my pihole set up and end up disabling it. The upstream is DoH though (via dnscrypt) so it's technically DNSSEC but without the clients seeing the authentication. That's enough for me.
At some point, I fully expect apps and websites to begin resolving DNS directly instead of relying on the OS to provide resolution services. At that point our options will be to wholesale block IP addresses at the router.
Like most things on the internet it's a game of one-upsmanship. User X uses Firefox with Incognito. User Y say's that isn't good enough for his own inconsistent definition of "good enough." So User-Y suggests Firefox with 14 different add-ons and only browse through an immutable VM. But then user-z comes along and says that if you are using windows at all, you don't really care about privacy, so you should be using Icefox on some obscure fork of ubuntu through an immutable VM, with a pi-hole. Then user-w says well if you aren't using a VPN none of this matters, so Obviously you need to rent an Alibaba cloud server hosted in China, that you only connect to through a privacy respecting VPN, and then you only browse through TOR.
And so on. By the time a user is asking about how to stop google ads, the only "serious" answer by the community involves using Packet over Ham-radio -> and spending thousands of dollars a month on 4 different cloud providers, rented through several shell companies set up in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and China, while only typing in Esperanto using an ASCII-only font.
While certainly some people take it to a point that could be considered too far, I think that the reality is that you have to go very far if you want actual privacy today. I think most people either don't know all the ways that their daily lives are being tracked and their activities are sold or they simply don't care. To vast majority, doing anything that isn't trivial is probably too far, and the more you talk about it with them, the more they will think it's crazy. Most people of the older generation probably don't "get it" or think it can be real, and very young people have probably never known privacy in their lives to much degree, so it can be a tough sell. I think Late Gen-X and Millienials are the main group that got to experience privacy when they were young and then saw it slowly eroded away in increasingly gross ways until it was gone.
A few weeks ago, I would have said 100%. I am needlessly careful.
I know I'm protecting against privacy threats that are technically possible, but unlikely. Preventing the tracking is just an interesting hobby, to me.
But earlier this month, we learned that Meta went "all-in" on what I consider some fucked up shit - running a mini localhost server to track the vanishingly few people who bother to block their tracking.
So now I guess I'm only about 30% sure I'm being needlessly careful.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I live a life where OPSEC is relevant. Its something that I have had to consider always, and has been for 2 decades. Even so, I wasn't as concerned this whole time as I am these days. The fact is that technology is making it such that its no longer "im not a person of interest they wont spend resources on me" because data crunching is happening to such an extreme, on such a grand scale, that person of interest doesn't even matter. Do you exist, yes. Do you have a digital foot print, yes you do. Even if you dont do a lot online. Your metrics are being captured and being inferenced, and systems are using predictive analysis to determine what you "may" do in a given situation. Depending on who controls those systems they may decide not to give you a chance to make that choice.
Ill I can say is that there are a large number of groups that want your data, for a lot of different reasons, and none of them are for your benefit. So, are you going to let them have it, or are you going to take steps to reign in the amount of info you leave about?
Yes, privacy is very important, but I've seen also a lot of tin foil hats arround here which don't know really what is worth to protect and what only make browsing slower and more difficult. PEBCAK
I started asking people who put that forward if they would give me their cellular phone unlocked for a hour. After all they have nothing to hide, right?
Tell them to leave their front door unlocked. They should have no problem doing that, and if they do, call the police on them because it means they're hiding illegal activity in their home. /s
You really do have to obsess if you take this seriously. It really isn't feasible for most people to devote kind of time and effort that I do on this stuff. I usually describe it as a kind of hobby, and I try to limit my advice to address specific concerns or threat models.
Like any interest, people get so far removed from the original point, it becomes about something new.
Like cast iron. People go from not really knowing about it to learning how to cook with it, to learning how to do basic maintenance. About 20% of people go completely off the rails, and they start buffing and polishing them like they are fabergé eggs, and joining cast iron groups.
Privacy is the same. Learn the basics, follow the basics, relax and get over yourself.
I must be one of those. This shit is not okay, yall. Whole psychological profiles, humiliation tactics, and dystopian forms of control are right around the corner. Why would they keep Epstein alive when Palantir automated the job of the blackmail broker?
Many times throughout my life, what would seem like a reasonably easy question to answer has changed dramatically.
30 years ago you could look at data collection and go there's no way that they could store a meaningful amount of data about everyone.
20 years ago you could look at data collection and go there's no way they could have the contents of every phone call It's just targeted it's not a big deal
We are the point now, where everything you ever wrote or said could be thrown into a model with such unimaginable levels of lossy compression that they could simply ask it if you are the kind of person who is into whatever the future administration deems as unacceptable and deny you access to things. All you need is a fascist regime or a dictatorship installed and all of a sudden anything you ever did can be used as grounds to lock you up.
On a governmental budget it wouldn't even be that expensive and we're just at the beginning of this.
We have seen that governments can change quickly, We know the data collection is affordable and can be permanent.
Certainly some people privacy-minded to the point of compulsion. But I can't say that anyone is wrong to seek extreme levels of privacy based on trends and capabilities.
They leave your cell phone at home and make sure somebody opens your apps and uses them people aren't anywhere near as crazy as they used to sound
Venezia la “città dell’amore” ha stregato anche il magnate di Amazon Jeff Bezos che ha scelto appunto la città lagunare per le sue nozze con Lauren Sanchez, per un matrimonio che già si annuncia da favola. La festa a quanto pare durerà dal 24 al 26 giugno, ma ci sono anche dei “contrattempi” a creare tensione....e. homosaccens.it/jeff-bezos-ques…
Seeing how Trump has a talent to choose the absolute worst for a specific job, I hope they manage to get shell access and delete the database and its only backup that was accidentally stored in the same server with the same credentials
A viral video is circulating showing the destruction caused by Israeli strikes in Gaza. DW has verified the footage of mass destruction at the Jabaliya refugee camp.
La frazione Devesi di Ciriè si prepara a ospitare l’ottava edizione della Sagra del Salame di Turgia, evento che celebra uno dei prodotti più tipici del Ciriacese e delle Valli di Lanzo: il “Salam ëd Turgia” in piemontese, o “Salàm eud Tueurdji” in francoprovenzale. Si tratta di un salume preparato con carne di vacca, lardo e pancetta suina, aromatizzato con sale, pepe, aglio, vino rosso e spezie, poi insaccato nel budello torto di bovino. “Turgia” in piemontese indica una vacca sterile, ma può riferirsi anche a un esemplare giovane.
Organizzata dalla Pro Loco Dveisin Festareul e patrocinata dalla Città metropolitana di Torino, la manifestazione si terrà da venerdì 27 a lunedì 30 giugno in località Colombari, in occasione della festa patronale di San Pietro Apostolo. Una quattro giorni dedicata al gusto e alla tradizione, dove sarà possibile assaporare il Salame di Turgia in un clima di convivialità, accompagnato da altre specialità locali. La preparazione del salame affonda le radici nella cultura contadina e nelle famiglie che ne tramandano i segreti, rendendolo simbolo di identità e amore per il territorio.
Il programma prevede musica dal vivo, spettacoli e animazioni. Si parte venerdì 27 con l’inaugurazione affidata a Sonia De Castelli, cantante e volto noto della TV. Sabato 28 spazio alla discoteca mobile Energia. Domenica 29 salirà sul palco Luca Giordano, mentre lunedì 30 chiusura con l’orchestra Enrico Negro. Durante la sagra ci saranno anche momenti divertenti, come il Chupito San Peru e la gara di tiro alla fune domenicale.
La frazione Devesi di Ciriè si prepara a ospitare l’ottava edizione della Sagra del Salame di Turgia, un evento che celebra uno dei prodotti più iconici della tradizione gastronomica del Ciriacese e delle Valli di Lanzo, detto anche Salam ëd...
I'd guess that's like some kind of publisher standard of "sampling size" to see if the comic's qualities fit the tastes of the buyer.
Makary
in reply to dinren • • •Sensitive content
no, I want to plant trees because it helps to have a resilient ecosystem that's more safe in case of a cascade collapse. I want to plant trees because they provide shade in the summer. Because they improve the soil. Because they help prevent floods. Because they give birds food and shelter. Because they are fucking PRETTY.
Can we start thinking about the whole thing instead of acting as if i single problems that are not interconnected?
Plant some fucking trees, even if they are not just carbon sequestration batteries.
𝙳𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚎 𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚌𝚒 🇪🇺 reshared this.