[Solved] How to set up Linux for gaming on GIGABYTE G5 MF?
Hi all, I'd like some help with setting up Linux for gaming, I'm not a new user but I'm not expert either, I've been having problems with my current setup, before I had Bazzite 42 which worked perfectly, however I was afraid things would eventually break over with that layering thing, since I use some things like Pale Moon which has a dependency that needs to be layered (IIRC it was libdbus), MEGAsync, ZeroTier and Kvantum, all of which have to be installed to the system, so I switched to openSUSE TW (both distros using KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland session), which was been working excellently so far... well, except for one thing:
For some backstory and context (you can skip this paragraph): the computer I've been running these distros on is a GIGABYTE G5 MF with 16GB of RAM, which I bought back on May/2024 and it had winblows 11 Home, it was my fault not knowing I should've chosen a laptop with AMD hardware instead (I don't exclusively use it for gaming and sometimes travel with it but that's besides the point), but it's served as a lesson for next time and winblows was used for some time after tweaking it... until I had enough of it, because even with the patches people make to reduce telemetry, the way it's now just doesn't feel at home and any more trustworthy than 7 or XP both of which I've grown up with, so I've been hoping to have this laptop run any Linux distro, so long as I can game in it.
Anyway, the G5 MF ships with a big troublemaker Made in Nvidia™, it's has an RTX 4050, and in it I play a variety of things on and off my Steam library, but at least one game has been giving me serious problems every time I hit almost an hour after playing ever since I switched to openSUSE: Wuthering Waves (or WuWa for short), it lags gradually - it starts fine for a couple of minutes where it runs fluently before the lag kicks in and becomes worse and worse the more I play (on occasions it even hangs the system so I have to force a restart), although while the lag is there, it seems to happen primarily when I try to move the mouse regardless of the situation (if I'm in dialogue or exploring, but it's the worst when fighting), and during cutscenes where they always play slowly and voices go out of sync.
I tried everything I could think of as well, changing settings in game as well as launch options, DirectX version (11 or 12), and Proton forks, but the gradual lag still persists (this didn't happen in Bazzite).
Currently, these are my launch options for the game:STEAMOS=1 STEAMDECK=1 PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1 WINE_GSTREAMER=1 VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.json PROTON_DLSS_UPGRADE=1 PROTON_NVIDIA_LIBS_NO_32BIT=1 prime-run gamemoderun %command% -dx12.
I found via ProtonDB (which I've been using to get different launch options from fellow Nvidia users) that adding that VK_DRIVER_FILES variable lets me run the game on the dGPU, otherwise it refuses to and runs on integrated, this wasn't required when I had Bazzite.
Another problem this laptop has is that [Secure Boot] is always active and I don't know how to disable it (mainly because there doesn't seem to be a way and I didn't find any info) otherwise I'd have long done it, also, my understanding about it is vague so I'm afraid of touching anything and bricking the machine, but I'm not looking to replace the machine yet since it still works great.
About [Secure Boot], here's the related settings I found in the BIOS settings, but I forgot one more option and it's like a boot list with two entries about openSUSE, one has "secureboot" on the name and the other doesn't, if it helps I'll add a picture of it to that album.
Worse, I don't have many distros I can pick from, as they must include support for [Secure Boot] out of the box so I can boot into the OS.
The drivers are installed and should be signed though since the game is offloaded every time I run it, here's some more info from commands I thought I'd add.
So here's the options I'm pursuing:
1) Stay on openSUSE, if there's any fix to the gradual lagging.
2) Switch to another distro while also trying XFCE on X11, I'd love to use Ksnip for my screenshotting needs while I'm at it, but Wayland is annoying with the portal thing because Ksnip isn't native and that's like the only thing I hate about Wayland from experience, so Spectacle is the closest best alternative for me wherever I end up stuck with Wayland and I'm satisfied with it. I'm kinda thinking about Fedora but I'm concerned about the possible use of AI even with their proposals/rules. Otherwise I've read XFCE is lightweight so it could maybe help?
3) Just go back to Bazzite: perhaps the most suitable choice despite being based on Fedora, but if it works the best for my use case, then I guess I'll have to keep it as my daily driver.
Any other ideas on what I could try would be appreciated as well (so long as it's not coming back to winblows), or just possible fixes so I don't have to do distro hopping would be great, and if any info is missing I'd be glad to add it, just let me know what I should run on the command line, thanks for any help in advance.
PhotoStructure vs. PhotoPrism
Hi everyone
Do you use PhotoStructure or PhotoPrism? And why?
I would like to index all photos which I've taken with a DSLR (JPG and RAW).
I used photoprism briefly, and it seemed okay, but my use-case was porn so I switched to stash.
If you want a Google photos clone, most people use immich.
Tried photoprism, then tried immich. Never went back.
Easier installation, easier management, more polished, just better overall
I used to use photostructure. I like its appearance and feature set (and the developer is a super nice guy), and really like how it leaves my asset files alone but works with sidecars, but i stopped using it because I only use open source software now.
I currently use Immich* and really like its appearance, features, self-hostability, but dislike how it manages the asset files. Even if i add my assets as an external library, which immich will theoretically not manipulate, the immich apps on iOS and Android will only upload images to a sifferent library that Immich manipulates. I'd have to ignore Immich's upload feature and roll my own, which is annoying.
*I realize Futo's license is not really FOSS. Disapppointing, but at least not peopeietary and secret.
I realize Futo's license is not really FOSS. Disapppointing, but at least not peopeietary and secret.
Two points to that:
1. Immich is licensed under the AGPL3.0, not the FUTO license.
1. If it's not FOSS, it's proprietary, no in between. Even if it's source available and open to public contributions, it's still proprietary. As far as proprietary goes, I'd say it's a good place to be, but proprietary nonetheless.
Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: archive.today/uZB13
Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
💡
Do you have a tip to share about age verification? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.The other states include Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, and Ohio.
“As you may know, your elected officials in Missouri are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. On the blocked homepages there’s also a link to an explanation of the “Restricted to Adults,” or RTA label, which porn site administrators place on their sites to signal to device-based parental controls that the websites are inappropriate for minors.
Like most of the other 24 laws across the country, Missouri’s age verification law requires websites containing more than one third of material that’s considered “harmful to minors,” or sexual content, to perform age verification checks. Similar or more restrictive laws have swept the country since Louisiana became the first state to enact age verification legislation in 2023.
Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet
Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach.Last week, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, WIRED reported. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, said in the letter. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
Instead of protecting minors, age verification laws spike usage of virtual private networks and send users—including, potentially, minors—to unregulated or unmoderated sites that don’t care about complying with U.S. or UK laws. In Missouri, searches for VPNs spiked following the law’s enactment.
Missouri schools are not required to teach sex education, leaving it up to local school boards to decide what, if anything, children are taught about sexual health. School districts that do teach sex ed are required to promote abstinence, a modality long recognized as ineffective at protecting children from engaging in risky sexual behaviors. Even if a district offers sex ed, parents are allowed to pull their kids out of that class altogether. But despite research showing age verification laws don’t work either, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway believes forcing adults to undergo age verification protects the children in her state. “We are proud to stand on the side of parents, families and basic decency. Missouri will not apologize for protecting children,” Hanaway said in a press release.
Do age-verification laws work? Not according to this study.
People seem to be working around them, according to their Google searches.Anna Iovine (Mashable)
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soon we’ll have no states to vpn to
I've yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you're really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just... not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
then all the websites will be in French
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
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I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
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Setting aside the fact that there's no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.
FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.
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Why California is moving to make porn sites check ID
A California bill that would require porn site visitors to show an ID or verify their age with a credit card or software is moving through the Legislature.Ryan Sabalow (CalMatters)
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on "child sex trafficking" and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you're going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as "please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography" laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
Is California no longer liberal?
Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)
Looks like they're retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the "Supporters and Opponents" what you're going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.
They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don't see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they're toothless if you've got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.
AB 3080: The Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act. | Digital Democracy
Digital Democracy overview of bill AB 3080: The Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act.calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on "child sex trafficking" and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you're going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as "please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography" laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
I'd say rather than a compromise, the "protect the children!" porn bans are an excuse to go after LGBTQ content by marking any and all content related to them as explicit and demonizing them as pedophiles going after children. They don't care who it hurts along the way.
Napster was audio only.
It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that's easy enough to work around.
Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
They all had it as well, yes
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Interesting…all of it? I’m in Ontario but my hub/ISP is in Quebec so all my random advertising is in French.
Somehow it knows to target advertising to you in English…maybe you need to work on your privacy?
I've got a lot of privacy stuff, but I also know that I'm being tracked. I'm not using the VPN for privacy though. I'm using it to watch porn, so I don't really care. If I did want privacy there's a lot of things I could improve, but I'm not that worried about it.
As for the targeted advertising, I don't see any of that. I wouldn't be surprised if that were in French but I wouldn't know.
- YouTube
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.www.youtube.com
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States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.
Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.
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As a watcher from the outside:
It might not be fun to hear but vpn is neither the solution to government oppression nor a solution against tracking (recently there was a good article regarding that) so all you do is pay more.
Ironically? If we were a less prudish society this genuinely wouldn't matter.
"Oh no! Sarah likes threesome porn. Uhm... okay?"
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And there are so many of those these days that a new one genuinely doesn't matter.
If you haven't been offered a free year of identity theft insurance recently? Some company/org is plugging their ears.
SSNs are a fundamentally broken system (look it up). Photo IDs? I will guarantee you that if you go to ANY city there is someone at the DMV who will look up whatever you want for fifty bucks. The ONLY reason credit card fraud is less massive than it is (and it is MASSIVE) is because the CC companies put in the effort to monitor that and lock it down.
EVERYONE should have their credit records locked unless they are actively applying for something.
No. the issue with these is that we live in an increasingly christofacist society where even looking at porn makes you Unclean. And if you look at the wrong porn? Off to the reeducation camps with you!
Um, having direct access to pull my government photo ID is a huge deal. Lots of online services require photo ID or other more in-depth verification to pull loans and stuff. So yes, this new vector IS a serious concern.
And paying someone $50 at any DMV? C'mon, man, that sounds like some unfounded bullshit. Hardly anyone is going to risk a cushy government job with solid benefits and great hours for fucking $50, let alone the potential risk of going to jail.
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Your "government photo ID" really isn't all that useful unless people are skilled enough to make fakes (which is a whole different mess). What matters is your SSN, your credit card number, your address, etc.
And those are basically everywhere.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
Huh?
If you go to a bar with an ID you cut out of printer paper, they are going to throw your ass out Jazzy Jeff style. The actual ID isn't useful without a LOT of additional resources... at which point your photo means almost nothing.
As for stuff like addresses? Again, that is basically EVERYWHERE because just about EVERY org has a data breach at least once a year. You might as well be saying people need your long form birth certificate to know what your name is.
Like... I'mma be blunt with you. A lot of the "your photo ID is the most important secure thing ever" nonsense comes from republican chuds trying to disenfranchise voters who live in cities. It is the idea that your photo ID is some magical artifact that protects you when the reality is that it is basically just a way to tie your name to your face. All the pertinent information is everywhere else.
Like... photo IDs tend to be one of those weird cases where we are ACTUALLY using biometrics (in this case, appearance) as a login rather than a password. Anything of value will just use that to cross reference you with an entry that is already in a system.
And in terms of the actual avenues for fraud? That ID doesn't mean shit.
my dude nobody is using a stolen identity to go to a bar. they're taking out lines of credit and you don't have to always present a physical, photo ID for those because there are entire industries of creditors that have no physical location. you don't even seem to be aware of the reasons why someone would bother stealing someone's identity so if you'd like to continue this argument I invite you to have it with yourself.
edit: and MAJOR lol at using a bar as your example. establishments well known for being sticklers about the quality of fake IDs you "sweet summer child"
And legit creditors just need your SSN, address, and maybe an old address. They run a credit check (hence why you freeze that shit) and then you are driving away in your 4k a month pickup truck.
And less legit creditors... don't ask too many questions other than where you live and where your loved ones love.
But hey. Feel free to throw a hissy fit rather than think through why that plastic card actually doesn't matter anywhere near as much as you thought it did. I mean, it would be nicer if you could actually sit and think and learn. But this is the 2020s. Ain't nobody doing introspection.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
Lol, dude, I'm in my early 40s. Go to the DMV and try bribing a government official and report back. Please. I beg of you.
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Yikes! You dug her up just to get a piece?
I mean, far be it from me to kink shame, so...to each their own, I guess.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, yeah, straight heterosexual intercourse is gay or something. I guess?
But the real question is - who fucking cares?
( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
Lol, sorry, I should've added an '/s' on my reply!
No, I got it, just was being way too sarcastic for text.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: I ain't straight. Or gay, or bi, or pan. Fuck labels, man! I don't fit into their tidy little boxes, and why should any of us?!?
In Soviet Russia, wife fucks you!
......wait, what?
Hey, part of growing and learning is understanding that failure is only a step in the process. Keep at it, brother. When making jokes, I always try to remember this: "If you're going to be offensive, make sure you are more funny than you are offensive. Just being offensive isn't funny."
Now get back in there and make some god damn jokes.
That will protect the children, for sure.
If I lived in the US, I'd be far more concerned about sending my kids to school but whatever.
Sure, but that is more of a Christian church problem over a US one. There are plenty of cases where I'm from too, and also a few recent scandals with private Catholic school, so I'd tend to shit on the Vatican rather than the US on that particular one.
I just can't imagine thinking my children could get shot every time they go to school.
Damn, I'm sorry to hear. I have seen a couple of your posts around, and yeah, let's say I know this struggle.
It can get better, I hope it does for you.
I suppose dvd order porn will become a thing once again.
Or alternatively we can start sharing bootleg USBs with our friends.
The Internet had begun its enshitification stage, as governments look to control and lock down access to the internet people will find new and creative ways to bypass these barriers. For one, things like Tor or going back to DVDs and physical media might get more main stream.
I don't think we're ready for the drives unless it's some weird hippie business that uses a reuse redemption program.
Thumd drives are twice the cost or more and only have a 5-20 year life expectancy vs DVD of 30 to 100+ years.
So thumb drives only makes sense as some sort of transfer service
Sure enough the vast majority are Republican shithole states, although Virginia and Arizona are a surprise.
It's not that it's immortal to want IDs for porn (although GOP generally is immortal), it's just so... technologically stupid. The red states are stupid states.
I'm going back to physical media. Guess that will include my porn soon too.
Hmm, might actually still have some old playboy somewhere 🤔
Someday, we will be using AI to generate fake IDs and faces, simply because our governments refuse to respect our privacy. They will have uncanny resemblance to political critters who enacted the surveillance.
As with everything born of enshittification, I do not know if this is to be a lame joke or reality. 😒
Someday?
People were literally doing that day 1 of the first of these new ID laws. Also using video games that use real likenesses of people like uploading pics of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2. lol
this-person-does-not-exist.com saved me from showing youtube my face
.../s
.../?
You must send me a copy of your photo ID before viewing the rest of this comment:
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
(.Y.)
).(
( # ):::
All this actually does is push people to porn sites outside of Missouri's jurisdiction and/or sites that don't give a fuck about being "legitimate businesses" or whatever. It's effectively prohibition and the outcome will be the same.
This shit never actually makes anyone safer, it just draws more normal users to seedier parts of the internet.
I mean......by that logic their ramblings make sense. Porn to them is child porn. So if all porn is child porn (in their minds) then blocking access to porn isn't a bad idea.
The whole thing falls apart however if they were to realize that most people DO look at porn, but most people DON'T look at child porn.
I watch porn most days. I've never in my life had any desire to restrict others ability to watch porn.
But then again, porn for me is a woman fucking a dude in the ass, or 4 women standing around another woman who's tied up and they're tickling her until she screams bloody murder.
You know. Normal shit. Harmless shit. Fill in the blank of your own kinks, but at no point do kids come into play in my mind.
If I equated "porn" to "child porn" then yeah, I'd be trying to pass those laws too. But that says more about the way they think than anything.
Especially when you consider that schools are one of the most common places for public shootings, but you don't see them racing out to pass common sense gun reform laws.
It's such a hard problem to tackle, when you're self defeating in your attempts. No other country has this issue.
For anyone curious, the privacy video is in their latest(?) blog post on their site. It should be viewable anywhere as it's outside the NSFW area and before the 18+ notice.
(Just bear in mind that while it should be SFW, it is still under a porn-site's domain.)
pornhub.com/blog/age-verificat…
Age Verification in the US
We continue to block access to Pornhub in more states that have passed age verification laws.www.pornhub.com
Is there any organized fight against this? I feel like open access to porn is something people can get behind (pun intended).
People could literally put porn in everything until it's reversed and put their red state into porn overload. They could slip porn between the pages of the newspaper,or drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy at the same time. They could mass mail stills from 2 girls 1 cup, goetse, and blue waffle to their Congress people. They can wear the raunchiest t-shirts they can find and pack a town hall. These assholes already created a climate where woman are (understandably) even more afraid to have sex, now they want to lock down porn too. I'm not a degenerate because I watch porn; I'm a degenerate because I in ironically enjoyed Spongknob Squarenuts. But degenerate or not, I believe freedom of inquiry is important and I want to know exactly what she If you are gonna strip people of their economic output, abuse workers, stifle culture and art, etc, you at least have to give people a blowoff valve somehow. Reading the Bible after a double shift at work isn't gonna get anyone hard except maybe JD Vance and it probably still comes second to furniture warehouse ads.
Fuck these assholes.
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drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy
Soooooo, 0 dvd players? Best Buy stopped carrying physical media years ago.
bestbuy.com/site/blu-ray-dvd-p…
Best Buy International: Select your Country - Best Buy
Shop online at Best Buy in your country and language of choice. Best Buy provides online shopping in a number of countries and languages.www.bestbuy.com
Online doesn't count since you can't drop a dvd into one...
Best buy stopped carrying physical media in stores ages ago and outside of very out of date stores don't have display models like that anymore.
If you VPN into the UK or Australia, you'll run into the same restrictions.
As more countries pass this kind of legislation, VPNs become less and less of a solution, and they were only ever a solution for people who can afford them.
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The problem is that these kinds of laws are becoming widespread. When they become the norm, simply VPN’ing to a different country won’t save you, because there won’t be any “safe” countries.
Shit like this is why I unironically considered spinning up a NSFW Jellyfin instance. At least if I save the degen content like a data hoarder, they can’t legislate away my access.
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Parola filtrata: nsfw
Some states have already begun to require sites to detect connections from VPNs and block them.
eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawm…
Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and…Electronic Frontier Foundation
When I read about this I'm always brought back to the conversation of "internet as a public utility". I hope it's cool if we can take a tangent.
See unlike any of our other utilities like natural gas electricity water and sewage, the only thing that could potentially give any meaningful information about us is our sewage,, and the government already tests sewage for diseases. If we allow the government to "sell" us our internet they would basically be able to know everyone we are "talking too". Also how could we ever have enough regulatory oversight to protect everyone on the internet. Symmetrically if the government wants to have so much regulatory control over our internet it should maybe pay for it.
Like I wouldn't mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for "private internet" just so the government can have their free and regulated "public internet". Or would I (・–・)ゞ?
Like I wouldn't mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for "private internet" just so the government can have their free and regulated "public internet".
That’s basically how cable TV started. Over-the-air TV stations were ad-supported and public broadcast was largely supported by public funds. Cable TV got off the ground by marketing itself as a commercial-free way to watch.
And then once everyone had switched to cable, they went “hey, why don’t we introduce commercials anyways? I bet people will keep paying for our service if we just gatekeep the media that people have gotten hooked on…” And that’s exactly what happened. They pivoted away from the “commercial free TV” sales pitch, and moved towards “gatekeep media and force people to pay for it” model instead.
Never thought I would live to see this day. Utterly pathetic. I remember even 20 years ago online censorship was extremely taboo.
Making it easy for normies to get online was a massive blunder.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It's all about control.
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The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that's what australia will have.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
It's all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn't like dissenting opinions. We've already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn't the world we are living in.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that's only maybe 50-50.
The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents
Which just so happens to be the people who should be responsible for monitoring internet usage. This is a job for parents, not the government.
That's the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for "anonymous" groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn't in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it's available to the public, you're responsible for it.
Old school "dirty" books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
If your point is to stifle dissent, then sure. Whoever controls the narrative will make contradiction look unacceptable. If your name is tied to an opinion that may be construed as contrary to the dominant narrative, you will hesitate to post it, and if you do post it, then you will be taken down with very real consequences because of that tie to your real identity. Employers already look at social media to determine if your behavior is considered acceptable to them, even if you keep your professional life completely separate. Your proposal only destroys free speech further by making it worth less and less the cost of expressing.
Make no mistake, the excuse of protecting children from pornography is just that, an excuse, to restrict freedom of speech by putting into place the mechanisms to identify people and strike at them for daring to express their opinions. Pornography being in the form of books, magazines, tapes, DVDs, whatever physical media did not necessarily control access. There are many with stories of how they managed to gain access as children, either through a parent's collection or otherwise. Similarly, this internet ID bullshit can be defeated, but it'll be backed by stricter and stricter legislation to make defeating it illegal and they won't be prosecuting children or the companies providing the ID verification service, they'll be prosecuting adults using tools to defeat these mechanisms to express their opinions.
No, it's not my point, although there is a difference between expressing ideas, no matter how contrarian or controversial they may be, and spouting hate or other positions detrimental to advancement.
I am aware of what you mention of companies sniffing for the social media of employees and potential applicants. It is a shameful practice. And if it is illegal in my country, has it is viewed as trespassing on one's privacy, it should be as welll any and everywhere.
Nobody should be ashamed nor afraid of expressing their opinions and ideas. Unfortunately, freedom of expression is often confused with the hability of saying whatever one feels like it, which is not.
What you describe (and fear, I take) is persecution. And that already tells whatever system an individual lives in is already deep into veering towards blatant suppression of rights. The US case is so off the rails it deserves an entire category to itself but it is only one among too many.
On the question of banning access to pornography I am completely against it. Yet I can not and will not deny the amount of evidence that supports that early and easy access to it is in fact tainting how people in general and kids in particular understand how relations are constructed. Pornography is really good at teaching wrong things. Nothing against it per se, it can be fun, but it should be consumed just like sugar, tobbacco and alcohol: in moderation and knowing of its ill effects.
I personally started reading erotic books much sooner than it was supposed. I recognize that curiosity towards sex and sexuality is ingrained in what makes us humans. I'm not advocating for banning adult material of any sort. What I would like to see would be clear boundaries for that specific content, for it not reaching those who are not expected to access it unware. It can't be written off to caveat emptor. Even less because a lot of it is "free".
The web is as it is today in great measure due to porn. There was a lot of money being poured into technology to facilitate access to it and in high definition. Let's be thankful for it but that is it. It can be almost ubiquious nowadays, along with casinos and crypto. It's too much and too much of a good thing is bad for everyone. Remember death by snu-snu.
I have no illusion we, as a species and a civilization, are going through a very dark period. Again. All the prior should have been able to sink in the lesson but we are either too sttuborn or too stupid to learn. Censoring, wide spread control of ideas, knowledge and thought is detrimental to a fair and free society.
Excuses like "protecting children", "fighting terrorism", etc, are, as you correctly said, excuses to make advances on individual rights and liberties. But we should be as concerned by now that companies do whatever they can to reach their goals and we are being force fed too many things that are not good for us. Two wrongs don't make a right but something has to change. Perhaps ceasing to be afraid of being responsible by one's own ideas and words would be a good start. Maybe stop feeding social media would be another. And perhaps reigning in companies on bad practices could be another.
If this doesnt make people stop using those sites, nothing will. 😀
And yeah, like others have said, its of course a system that will be used to control people and remove semi-anonymity from the web.
Try reading it instead. Go old school. And while you're at it, write yourself and share it. Bring back the times of hand to hand banned knowledge sharing.
But now seriously: that is completely stupid.
As anyone considered the amount of money that "industry" generates. Considering the US is so economy driven and concerned with jobs, maybe that argument can raise concerns.
Pricing
Free the internet from mass surveillance and censorship. Fight for privacy with Mullvad VPN and Mullvad Browser.Mullvad VPN
Fortunately lawmakers think all internet porn is on PornHub and that you find it by going to w-w-w dot yahoo dot com and typing "sex video" or "naked ladies" in the search thing.
The only porn they have experience with are polaroid photos that they got from a friend who knows a guy who makes tasteful art for clients with "particular tastes."
Conservative lawmakers don't know anything about porn, because if they ever recorded themselves fucking and the recording got out, they'd go to jail for statutory rape.
They're generally very comfortable around Grindr though.
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren't being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company's business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it's perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn't, anywhere in the world. 'Expressing your sexuality' and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn't always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography's effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (...) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
- 10 Negative Effects of Porn on Your Brain, Body, Relationships, and Society
- Affection substitution: The effect of pornography consumption on close relationships
10 Negative Effects of Porn
Think porn isn’t affecting you? Science says otherwise. Discover 10 ways your porn use might be impacting your relationships—and your brain.Fight the New Drug
Assuming what you're saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state's responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There's no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said "let me deal with it". They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That's on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about "small government" and "parents rights" is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It's a joke. "A government small enough to fit in your bedroom". Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
This is disingenuous. This issue is caused by prolonged use, as in unhealthy addictive behavior. Framing it as a result of porn access in general is flagrantly dishonest.
Actually it seems like all of your points regard excessive and unhealthy usage. You're portraying these as results of any level of exposure and that is blatantly dishonest.
Why not also the company that does the IDs?
And hell, also the porn site?
Its all a big money making scheme. Security theater bullshit.
ITT: People who don't realize the advanced nature of fingerprinting that makes VPNs nearly useless in an authoritarian environment
Browserleaks - Check your browser for privacy leaks
BrowserLeaks is a suite of tools that offers a range of tests to evaluate the security and privacy of your web browser.BrowserLeaks
I'm not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven't seen an implementation of it that isn't prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there's some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
When you are carded at a club the staff doesn't scan your card and keep it on file. They simply look at it and return it.
As someone who worked similar jobs and would have had to look at tons of IDs every day I can assure, I dont have the time or interest in remembering all of them.
I think people don't realize just how dangerous this shit is until they have been affected in some noticeable way, and even then they will not link just how the incredible amount of surveillance they are under every day is the cause of it.
I worked in tech support for 7 years, and one thing that will never cease to astonish me is how tech illiterate people are. Do you have any idea how many people called me and demanded that I make modifications to their account and refused to tell me any verifying information? While some might have been malicious actors , most aren't. Most of them were genuinely expecting me to do everything for them and they wouldn't even tell me what their name is. They fully expected that somehow we would already know they are just from them calling...
Some of them called me on a number not recognized by the system but they fully expected me to pull up their account (fucking how?) Without any information at all.
When you have worked in this field long enough you will know why there is so little effective opposition to all this shit. It is not just because they dont give a damn if we are literally in a 1984 scenario with active cameras and microphones in people's homes, but they just dont understand what that really means. Even younger people who grew up with these devices from early childhood don't fully understand just how much they are being observed. If anything Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more fucked since they are the first generation of people whom the algorithms and data brokers have had some profile on since early childhood.
As an elder millennial who grew up in a techie family with computers from childhood. I am fortunate in that they have nothing on me from early childhood to teen years. By the time I hit 20 the internet was still too chaotic and underdeveloped and algorithms weren't the norm yet (and I was never a Google guy to begin with). But people born within the last 10 years can't have that privilege.
Why does everyone in the US card everyone over something ostensibly about age?
It's never been about age.
I've seen a seventy year old man with a foot long white beard get carded and refused, while he was stone cold sober.
Do you think he can't handle his liquor? He's seventy. He knows what it does.
There's a lot of bars/restaurants that do.
I have literally been refused service because the only ID I had is a passport, and those barcodes wouldn't scan into their system.
It's Papers, please, and it's fucking bullshit
the easiest thing would be making the internet as a whole 18+.
under 18 would be restricted to a firewalled version and age info would be part of the cellphone or internet plan. on a family plan..? under 18s get a firewalled plan. home internet? have a family and home internet? owner of the service gets a pin to disable the firewall. when everyone in the house hold is over 18, the service is unlocked.
the truth is that none of this is actually about porn or kids, its about the new world lifestyle of surveillance state getting a foot in the door. thats why all this bullshit aligns with other aspect of modern political and business tech agendas
We are blinded by the fact that the teens are involved in this too, and they deserve equality as well. The internet is made to build bridges - get rid of boundaries - not set false narratives and infantilise those that are really impacted in this situation and have full awareness of the status quo.
This is a foot in the door technique that uses our deceived emotional manipulation, where our age discrimination is the secret ingredient in this fascist circus.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I'm pretty sure that's how that platform works, though they're a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it's so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
(C) At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel... The US isn't going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!
An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.
The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid's devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup--hardly "dystopian nightmare fuel"...
This isn't going to stop unsupervised children, which is it's own problem that technology doesn't (and probably can't) solve.
It requires every Operating System and "App Store" to know the user's age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn't get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.
The bill isn't specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.
Greedy companies do shit like that regardless of any laws. I don’t think this law makes it any more likely.
FOSS developers could create an ethical solution while still remaining legally compliant. The language is generic enough to allow for different implementations.
By creating a plaintext dotfile in $HOME, I'd reckon. Minimum effort, gets the job done. Users can lie when setting up the account so protecting the file against tampering is pointless.
But more likely, not a single distro will implement anything by default because it doesn't make sense to change your internationally-distributed OS because one state in one country passed a stupid law.
I'm 1000% against this age verification bullshit, not only because of the privacy and data reasons, but also because getting carded in a bar or at a store is also bullshit.
It Is Papers, please.
It's Never a question of if you're old enough, it's a question of "Do I think you're human enough?"
And more often than is reasonable, the answer is no, they don't think you're a person, who should be able to spend their money as they like.
And on the flip side, occasional SEO fuckups cause random terms to show porn image results
For example, I was searching for millimetre wave cell towers on duckduckgo a while back, I typed "MM wave cell tower" and saw a whole bunch of massive tiddies on the standard filtering setting. They fixed this a week after me discovering it however, so if you were hoping to see tits from searching telco infrastructure, I suppose you're outa luck.
Then you can't offend god by watching it and masturbating, like we intended!
-The Puritans pushing this legislation.
FOLLOW THE 💰:
EXON
RINAT AKHMETSHIN
ALEX VAN DER ZWAAN
KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK
CHUCK SCHUMER
JAMES COMEY
ROTHSCHILD
TRUMP
JARED KUSHNER
GARY COHN
STEVE MNUCHIN
SAM NUNBERG
NELSON BUNKER HUNT
LAMAR HUNT
MICHAEL FLYNN
DAN SCAVINO
ERIK PRINCE
WILBUR ROSS
STEFAN HALPER
GEORGE SOROS
JOHN DURHAM
DANIEL MURPHY
PETER STRZOK
LISA PAGE
BRUCE OHR
NELLIE OHR
CHRISTOPHER STEELE
CHRISTOPHER WRAY
JEFF SESSIONS
JOHN PODESTA
MUELLER
CHRIS WRAY
HUNTER BIDEN
SETH RICH
BILL BARR
KAMALA HARRIS
ADAM SCHIFF
TULSI GABBARD
AOC
CLINTON
OBAMA
ZIONISM
MICROSOFT
CLOUDFLARE
GREAT RIFT VALLEY
NETANYAHU
KISSINGER
Bet
GANDALF THE GREY
GANDALF THE WHITE
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAILS BLACK KNIGHT
BENITO MUSSOLINI
& THE BLUE MEANNIE
COWBOY CURTIS
JAMBI THE GENIE
ROBOCOP
TERMINATOR
CAPTIAN KIRK
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all came out of nowhere lightning fast and kicked Chuck Norris in his cowboy ass?
Now I have to listen to it again and have it stuck in my brain
Oh I see, a bunch of stupid-ass unsubstantiated bullshit.
I'm sure it's secretly the Clintons and Obamas behind this, that makes sense. You are massively fucking stupid person.
Exactly, all the talk about save the children, anti terrorism protection and other authoritarian bullshit is just an attempt to deceive and manipulate the masses.
Police state is what they resort to because these fascist fucks are fuelled by their narcissistic and machiavellianistic desires - the last thing they want is for someone to discover their true tyranny.
It is disappointing to see fascists are slowly succeeding by utilising their manipulative tactics.
I'm just over here in "hellscape" California enjoying the freedom to not have to do this, and I can walk down the street to the weed shop, and my girlfriend still has basic human rights over her own body.
Do any other states, like Texas, need some of our freedom? We've got some to spare.
Just to be clear, because I had to look into it a bit, California's law won't require photos/IDs.
"Operating system providers need not collect additional information like photos of government IDs to verify the user’s age. Based on this age information, operating system providers must send digital signals via real-time API (age signals) to developers upon request, transmitting the user’s age range bracket – under 13, at least 13 and under 16, at least 16 and under 18, or at least 18. When a user downloads and launches a developer’s application, the developer must request an age signal from the relevant operating system provider or the application store from which the user downloaded the application."
So I'm assuming those companies backed it because they want more analytics about the age ranges of the people who use their products.
Just posting on social media using your face to speak against the state in México gives you the privilege of being doxxed on national TV by the president, I can't imagine what they would do with something like this
Keep the downvotes coming, I live here and you don't have any idea if you really believe Morena is left leaning in any way or form
With the rising popularity of VPNs due to increasingly more countries becoming more authoritarian, I wouldn't be supposed there will be some anti-vpn directives put in place.
In addition to that, increasingly more selections within vpn profiles will be just as restrictive as the fascist internet at home.
VPNs are a great way to circumvent this police state but it ultimately doesn't stop fascists and their motives.
Oooooh! Shit. Yeah. Wow. It makes total sense now and that fucking sucks.
I hope some day these fascists get branded as the terrorists they are. And I’m so fucking sorry that they’re doing this to people.
You clearly haven't thought of the children.
Nah it's just a precursor to having all your online activity tied directly to your identity. That's the purpose. I'm sure plenty of misguided elders in government think it's about saving kids from porn though.
It's a coalition of groups with different purposes
One group wants to ban porn entirely
One group want to collect data on everyone. Your porn habits can be valuable if you're a future political rival
Some people believe it will prevent children from seeing porn
Others use it as a way to assert control over sex workers, especially female sex workers
Probably a few other smaller groups too. End of the day, none of them have your interests at heart
Some just want money.
I think this article: theverge.com/2018/2/23/1704397…
Is about pornhub’s parent company trying to lobby in favor of this because it thought it could make money by selling age verification. I read an article saying something to that effect quite some time ago, and I think this is the article, but can’t be sure because it’s requiring a login and the archive site isn’t loading for me at the moment.
Why the world’s biggest porn company is backing the UK’s new age law
The adult industry is worried about MindGeek’s role in the UK’s new age-verification system.Lux Alptraum (The Verge)
I just remembered that I'm the guy everyone in my family goes to when they need someone to scan their ID or passport for whatever stupid bullshit.
Guess it's time to sign all my conservative family members up to gay porn websites!
This may be the real reason r's are losing all of the elections, lol. They are entirely red states.
This is going to expand. The next wave is going to be keeping kids off of social media. That means they will have to be age-verified, which they can't do, because they're kids, and don't have ID. Instead, everyone else will have to be age-verified in order to use the Internet.
Here in Florida, I've already heard one state lawmaker scoffing at any objections, saying it's the same way we keep kids from buying alcohol - by checking EVERYONE'S ID. Now they're going to do it for the Internet. Every movement and post you make on the Internet will be directly tied to your verified identity. That should be perfectly fine, as long as you aren't doing or saying anything wrong, right?
Hear me out!
What if parents did their fucking job as they should instead of demanding the state to do it for them, only for it to get hijacked by both
- christofascists wanting to make it illegal to not live a "christian life",
- and corporations wanting to ensure competition will need to pay a shitton of money on age verification AI?
I'm prepared for my downvotes.
I have often joked that in the not-too-distant-future people will look back upon the early days of the internet like we look upon the 1950s view of smoking.
What do you mean kids shouldn't do it? It's fine. You know how it is, watch a kids cartoon, look at some memes, two girls 1 cup, email the fam, those two Mexican dudes who had their heads cut off with a chainsaw, research Ghana for a school project, sneak in some porn after the parents go to bed, and cap it off with some chat room conversations about Picard's superiority to Kirk while some kid across the country goes on about shooting his brains out because mom and dad either don't love him enough or love him too much. Maybe download some credit card spoofers and Diablo hacks for online play if you aren't quite ready for bed.
The early internet, and even the internet now, is a fucking wild concept. Take everything that people think, not just what we know, but what we fucking think about while we are taking a shit, and make it available for anyone look at without guidance or context. We can even watch police shootings in real time and pretend to be detectives during terrorist events, consequences to real people be damned.
Should parents know better? Sure. Is the internet an effective babysitter while they grind out a living? You bet.
If we restrict this dumpster fire behind age-verification and eliminate anonymity through tagged identification, the effect on privacy and anonymous online activism will be severe. However, CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn't have AIDS bro. #flatearth #zoroastrianismwasasteptoofar #onceagaintherealproblemiscapitalismandwearelookingatthewrongthingbecauseofmanufactured-outrageandobfuscationcreatedbytheoligarchy #worldofwarcraftclassic
CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro.
You don't need accounts tied to ID to ban such content.
Not hard to imagine, people already have to manicure their facebook and other social media accounts because employers look at them. Just because you don't want something attached to your name, doesn't mean it's stupid or bad. There are consequences for unapproved behavior and opinions, even if they're not wrong or harmful.
If you think anonymity is stupid, feel free to set your display name to your real name right here on lemmy.
I know that anonymity is the way it is and don't think that me changing my display does anything about one way or the other. I definitely shit post, because I can. There is literally no consequence. If I somehow hit the right combination of words and someone commits suicide, I would never know. If I share something that someone looks views at their workplace and then gets fired, I would never know. The entire thing is just people collectively shrugging responsibility for their behavior and that has a net negative effect on society.
I'm not going to change my name over to my real name, although that is generic enough that would not be identifying, but I am going to point out that people do shitty things with anonymity and that the world would be better off without it.
Iran: Leaked wedding video lays bare luxurious lives of the country’s political elite and highlights hypocrisy of Islamic Republic -- [Opinion]
A short video of a private wedding went viral in Iran recently, tearing away the country’s veil of piety and exposing hypocrisy and a seeming disregard for the rules by which the theocratic regime requires that most Iranians live their lives.
The wedding in question was that of Fatemeh Shamkhani, in mid-2024. She is the daughter of Ali Shamkhani, a close adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, at the luxurious Espinas Palace Hotel in Tehran.
She wore a low-cut strapless dress with a western-style bridal veil rather than the full head-covering mandated for Iranian women. Many wedding guests also wore modern western styles and a lot of the women went without head coverings.
The video displayed images that were starkly dissonant, revealing the significant class and moral divides within the Iranian Republic and contradicting Iran’s values of revolutionary simplicity and Islamic modesty.
[...]
That it was Shamkhani’s family wedding made matters worse. A former commander of the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, he is a key power broker in Iran, who has the ear of Khamenei himself. He was also involved in the savage crackdown on the public protests in Iran in recent years, in defence of the same security and morality laws his family was seen so lavishly violating at the wedding celebration.
[...]
The emerging ruling elites maintain their wealth through oil revenue, state contracts and shadow economic activities – that enable them to evade sanctions (the Shamkhani family was identified and sanctioned earlier this year by the US treasury as controlling a vast shipping empire involved in transporting oil from Iran and Russia in breach of US sanctions). .
[...]
Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran has maintained its legitimacy through its mission to reshape public conduct by enforcing rules such as hijab requirements and sex segregation. The state maintains complete authority to regulate female bodies.
So the Shamkhani wedding, with its ostentatious luxury, its low-cut gowns and lack of head coverings felt to many Iranians as showing complete disregard for laws that the regime’s “morality police” uses to enforce strict rules on ordinary women. The rules exist to control, but they do not apply to those at the top of the tree.
This incident is significant in the context of the “woman, life, freedom” protests of recent years. These were sparked in 2022 by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who had been arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. Since then, many Iranians, particularly young people, have openly defied the hijab law.
[...]
Leaked wedding video lays bare luxurious lives of Iran’s political elite and highlights hypocrisy of Islamic Republic
A wedding video which has gone viral in Iran has highlighted the country’s inequality and exposed hypocrisy at the core of the ruling regime.The Conversation
Iran's government is historically weak. It's allies and proxies have been routed in the region while American and Israeli jets bomb their country with impunity. The place is vulnerable to revolution and it would be nice to see feminists overthrow the Ayatollah.
However, it's hard to get optimistic about revolution in the Middle East. After all, it was a revolution that created the Iranian theocracy to begin with. I'm also worried that a fallen Iran would mean an Israeli regional hegimon.
I'm more surprised that people are surprised by this. Being nobility class is this: you're free to make whatever rules you want for your subordinates, and you're free to disregard any of them. You're not bound by any sense of morality (whatever it might be); that's for lower men.
What were they expecting? Obviously these people won't comply with anything that's imposed on the masses, especially in a society where the norms are so restrictive.
And I further suspect that the more totalitarian a country is, the more its elite will deliberately choose to go against their own rules, as this is the greatest proof of their powerful social status.
Does Wilhoit's law apply to Islamic Theocracy?
Frank Wilhoit said, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Wow that’s horrible: Iran has oligarchs, too. We should freedom-bomb the fuck out of Iran and replace them with our own compador oligarchs and give the oil back to British Petroleum.
It’s nice to see that you don’t focus exclusively on China and Russia, @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org. You’re an equal opportunity concern troll for US empire.
Citations Needed: Episode 08: The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex
We discuss the cynical use of "human rights" to advance US interests with guest Glenn Greenwald. The conceit that the U.S.citationsneeded.libsyn.com
Ukraine war: Russia hands 11-year sentence to 57-year old Ukrainian midwife in occupied Ukrainian territory for having 'pro-Ukrainian views’ and supposed spying
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42893848
Web archive linkThe Russian occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’ has sentenced Larysa Malovychko, a 57-year-old midwife from Enerhodar, to 11 years for ‘pro-Ukrainian views’ and supposed spying. According to Enerhodar Mayor Dmytro Orlov, Larysa Malovychko was abducted back in September 2023 and held prisoner for some time both in Russia and in occupied Crimea.
Russia has imposed a near total information blockade on most occupied territory, with next to nothing more known about Malovychko, or her so-called ‘trial’. The verdict was reported on the so-called ‘court’ Telegram channel on 20 November 2025, with nothing to indicate how many (if any) hearings there were, before the predetermined guilty verdict and 11-year sentence.
...
‘Spying’ or ‘treason’ charges have become extremely common since Russia first launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Such ‘trials’ are held behind closed doors, with convictions and long sentences guaranteed. Both men and women are targeted, and there are also no bars as far as age is concerned. Very young people have been seized and, later, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for donations to Ukraine’s Armed Forces, for example, when they were underage, while equally horrific sentences have been passed against Ukrainians in their 70s. This is all of particular concern given the very real danger of being subjected to torture in Russian captivity.
...
In June 2025, 74-year-old Oleksandr Markov from Enerhodar died in Russian captivity. He had been abducted on 8 May 2024, with his family knowing nothing about his whereabouts until March 2025. It was only then that they learned that a fake occupation ‘court’ had sentenced the 74-year-old to 14 years in a maximum-security [‘harsh-regime’] prison colony on ‘treason’ charges.
Dmytro Orlov reported then that at least 26 other residents of Enerhodar were illegally held in Russian captivity, including seven women. 13 of them are employees of the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, with Russia having begun abducting and torturing employees soon after it seized control of the plant in early March 2022. It is quite possible that the real figure is much higher.
...
57-year-old midwife sentenced to 11 years in ongoing Russian terror against residents of occupied Enerhodar
Larysa Malovychko has already been in Russian captivity for over two years, with it likely that she was seized because of her pro-Ukrainian positionHuman Rights in Ukraine
China cracks down on calls for accountability over deadly Hong Kong blaze
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42893098
Chinese authorities have arrested several activists and issued a stern warning to “anti-China and pro-chaos elements” amid criticism of the government’s response to Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in a generation....
[Among ohers] authorities arrested Miles Kwan, a 24-year-old student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, after he created an online petition calling for greater transparency and accountability from the government, multiple reports said.
The petition included four demands, including the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry to probe the circumstances of the fire, including whether potential conflicts of interest may have contributed to the disaster.
Before it was removed from the internet on Saturday, the petition had garnered more than 10,000 supporters.
...
China’s national security office in Hong Kong appeared to condemn the petition before its removal, accusing activists of using “the banner of ‘petitioning the people’ to incite confrontation and tear society apart.”
Hong Kong’s Office for Safeguarding National Security also accused figures with “sinister intentions” of exploiting the fire to return the city to the “black-clad violence” that erupted during mass antigovernment protests in 2019.
On Monday, a commentary in the Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po newspaper called on the public to be vigilant against “anti-government elements” with “malicious intentions”.
“They have even gone so far as to ‘act as representatives’ to establish a so-called ‘concern group,’ put forward so-called ‘four demands,’ distribute leaflets, and launch a petition, all in an attempt to incite public unrest,” the commentary said.
...
China cracks down on calls for accountability over deadly Hong Kong blaze
Hong Kong’s national security police arrest three, as Beijing issues warning to ‘anti-China and pro-chaos elements’.John Power (Al Jazeera)
Japan and China trade accusations after coast guard incident in disputed waters
Japan's coast guard said two Chinese coast guard patrol ships entered Japan's territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea in the early hours of Tuesday, and left a few hours later.The Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu in China, have been a regular flashpoint between the two nations over the decades.
ABC News
ABC News provides the latest news and headlines in Australia and around the world.ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
China draws in Europe’s businesses despite alarm over competition
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/54194025
archive.is/1hnqw
“Today, it’s not competitive any more to bring [products] into China when there’s local competition,” said Conrad Keijzer, chief executive of Swiss chemical maker Clariant.The company is spending SFr180mn ($226mn) expanding its plant in China’s Daya Bay petrochemical hub, where last year Germany’s BASF and Shell also announced big investments.
German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen, for example, recently announced job cuts of 7,600 in Europe by 2030, less than a year after announcing its latest expansion in Shenyang, north-eastern China. Automotive parts maker Schaeffler, which told state media in China it planned to double its business in the country in six to seven years, has announced the closure of some of its European operations and gross job cuts of 4,700.
French engineering group Schneider, Danish power-train maker Danfoss and wind turbine maker Vestas and pharmaceutical companies including Swiss drugmaker Roche and AstraZeneca have all also recently announced China expansions or factory upgrades.
More than 1,300 dead from floods in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand as rescue efforts intensify
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/54194958
The flooding and landslides killed at least 1,338 people: 744 in Indonesia, 410 in Sri Lanka, 181 in Thailand and three in Malaysia
Ireland: 'Aggressive response' needed as cyber threats aligned to states like China and Russia pose “significant threat” to national security, cyber agency says
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42887934
Web archive linkThe accelerating cyber threats facing Ireland demands “an aggressive response” by the State, according to the country’s cyber bosses.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said criminal cyber gangs and hackers, aligned to states like China and Russia, pose a “significant threat” to Ireland’s national security.
This is because Ireland is a host to some of the world’s largest tech providers and cloud computing facilities as well as the worsening geopolitical situation and the threat posed to Europe resulting from Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
The centre said it “regularly observes state-aligned threat actors carrying out scanning and other reconnaissance activities” targeting Irish government and State-owned networks.
...
Publishing its 2025 National Cyber Risk Assessment, the NCSC said Ireland was at risk from cyber attacks on “shared critical infrastructure”, such as gas and electricity pipelines connecting Ireland to the UK and France.
...
'Aggressive response' needed to tackle cyber threats facing Ireland
NCSC says criminal cyber gangs and hackers, aligned to states like China and Russia, pose a 'significant threat' to Ireland’s national securityCormac O’Keeffe, Security Correspondent (IrishExaminer.com)
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Son of drug kingpin ‘El Chapo’ pleads guilty in US drug trafficking case in a plea deal
One of the sons of notorious Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo” pleaded guilty on Monday to U.S. drug trafficking charges, months after his brother entered a plea deal.
Known locally in Mexico as the “Chapitos” — or “little Chapos” — Joaquín Guzmán López and brother Ovidio Guzmán López are accused of running a faction of the Sinaloa cartel. Federal authorities in 2023 described the operation as a massive effort to send “staggering” quantities of fentanyl into the U.S.
Joaquín Guzmán López, 39, pleaded guilty to two counts of drug trafficking and continuing criminal enterprise after admitting his role in overseeing the transport of tens of thousands of kilograms (pounds) of drugs to the U.S., mostly through underground tunnels. With the plea deal, his attorney said, he is expected to avoid life in prison.
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So Trump will pardon them right?
They'll put millions into Trump crypto so Trump will parden them?
Or they'll squeal on other cartels and get pardoned. It's very transparent.
They should be hanged.
The tech world is sleeping on the most exciting Bluetooth feature in years
Can you hear me now?
The tech world is sleeping on the most exciting Bluetooth feature in years
Auracast lets many devices tune into one Bluetooth broadcast. It’s great for accessibility and noisy environments. Why don’t more companies talk about it?John Higgins (The Verge)
To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything
With OpenAI’s memory upgrade, ChatGPT can recall everything you’ve ever shared with it, indefinitely. Similarly, Google has opened the context window with “Infini-attention,” letting large language models (LLMs) reference infinite inputs with zero memory loss. And in consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, this means persistent, personalized memory across conversations, unless you manually intervene.The sales pitch is seductively simple: less friction, more relevance. Conversations that feel like continuity: “Systems that get to know you over your life,” as Sam Altman writes on X. Technology, finally, that meets you where you are.
In the age of hyper-personalization — of the TikTok For You page, Spotify Wrapped, and Netflix Your Next Watch — a conversational AI product that remembers everything about you feels perfectly, perhaps dangerously, natural.
Forgetting, then, begins to look like a flaw. A failure to retain. A bug in the code. Especially in our own lives, we treat memory loss as a tragedy, clinging to photo albums and cloud backups to preserve what time tries to erase.
But what if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?
DOC • To grow, we must forget… but now AI remembers everything
AI’s infinite memory could endanger how we think, grow, and imagine. And we can do something about it.www.doc.cc
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Canada to sign up to flagship EU defense credit fund
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One fire, two systems: Hong Kong's grief meets Beijing's red lines
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/46579107
Archived[...]
It was [...] the speed at which the fire tore upward [in Hong Kong] that led a 24-year-old university student to launch a petition demanding an independent investigation.
He barely had time to gather signatures before police arrested him for "incitement".
The message was clear: Even grief had boundaries, and asking questions was now a political act.
From that moment, sorrow gave way to anger. And the city's fault lines — rights versus sovereignty, people versus power — snapped sharply back into focus.
[...]
The blaze [...] did more than destroy homes. It revived one of Hong Kong's most visceral fears; that lives can be reduced to collateral in a system that no longer listens.
What should have been a moment of collective mourning instead widened the fracture between Hongkongers demanding accountability and a government increasingly shaped by Beijing's doctrine that sovereignty sits above all else.
And this time, the anger was not directed at local officials alone — it was aimed squarely at Beijing.
For many residents, the horror of the fire lay not only in the ferocity of the flames but in the recognition that everything they had worked for — homes bought with decades of savings, belongings accumulated through sacrifice — could be erased in a night.
Hong Kong's housing crisis has long fed collective anxiety, but this disaster struck its deepest nerve. In a city where ordinary families already struggle with extremely unaffordable flats, even the illusion of safety can no longer be taken for granted.
The sense of betrayal deepened when Beijing issued a warning not to let "a disaster disrupt Hong Kong", reinforcing the belief that the state prioritised protecting its authority, not its people.
[...]
The unease grew when volunteers and NGOs who rushed to help the displaced were abruptly ordered to leave the site.
Many had been distributing food, locating documents, offering emotional support. Suddenly, they were told to withdraw on Sunday.
For many Hongkongers, the scene was familiar. A compassionate response — neighbours helping one another — had become politically sensitive.
Authorities appeared to fear that the disaster zone, with swelling crowds and rising frustration, might become a gathering point for something larger.
In a city still haunted by 2019, solidarity itself had become suspect.
Inside Wang Fuk Court [the place of the fire], residents were not surprised that the fire spread so fast. Some had long questioned whether the scaffolding nets used during a renovation met flame-retardant standards.
Others filed complaints as early as 2023, warning of fire risks.
A contractor even wrote to the Fire Services Department requesting clarity on safety requirements — letters that, residents say, went unanswered.
[...]
The arrest of the petition organiser — paired with the removal of volunteers — made something unavoidable: the space for Hongkongers to demand answers, or simply to show up for one another, has been quietly but steadily erased.
Under the national security regime, the line between civic action and political threat has blurred beyond recognition.
What used to be routine — filing complaints, demanding accountability, launching petitions, helping neighbours — now carries an implied risk.
Beijing's insistence that sovereignty cannot be challenged has reshaped even the vocabulary of disaster. A call for answers can be reframed as agitation. Grief can be interpreted as defiance. Volunteerism can be treated as "gathering".
[...]
For residents, the questions were immediate and practical. Why did the alarms fail? Why did the nets ignite so quickly? Why were earlier warnings ignored? Who will take responsibility?
For authorities, the questions were political. Could public anger spill into unrest? Could demands for accountability turn into mobilisation? Could crowds at the disaster site grow into something larger? Who must be monitored — not who must be heard?
This is why, for many, the fire now stands as a symbol of something larger — a reckoning not only with safety failures but with a governance model that asks citizens to trust a system that no longer feels accountable to them.
While officials have pledged support for displaced residents, the shift toward a political narrative has been unmistakable: The arrest [of the 24-year old petitioner], the "care teams", the warnings about "disruption".
[...]
In the days after the blaze, residents sifted through ash — passports, wedding photos, a child's cherished toy — fragments of lives interrupted.
But the emotional landscape of the city was shaped by a different kind of loss: The erosion of faith that the system exists to protect them, not to discipline them.
Beijing may want the flames in Tai Po to fade quickly. But what they revealed may not.
ABC News
ABC News provides the latest news and headlines in Australia and around the world.Bang Xiao (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
When a video codec wins an Emmy | The Mozilla Blog
It’s not every day a video codec wins an Emmy. But yesterday, the Television Academy honored the AV1 specification with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, recognizing its impact on how the world delivers video content.
When a video codec wins an Emmy
The AV1 specification a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its impact on how the world delivers video content.Kristina Bravo (The Mozilla Blog)
Swiss government urges people to ditch Microsoft 365 and others due to lack of proper encryption
Swiss data protection officers have warned public bodies not to use cloud services from industry hyperscalers Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, due to a lack of true end-to-end encryption.This comes as many SaaS vendors, especially those falling under the US Cloud Act, could be required to hand over data to US authorities, even if it’s stored in Switzerland.
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What's happening in Switzerland?
Flipping and flopping for the past year. I welcome this latest news, and the similar news yesterday, hopefully it is infectious to the rest of Europe but it completely contradicts things that have been proposed for the last few months, then the sudden change. I wonder did Trump push too hard:
May 14 2025 - Proposed Swiss surveillance law ‘identical to Russia’
June 13 2025 - "A war against online anonymity" – why Switzerland wants to change its surveillance law and what's at stake
September 11 2025 - Swiss government looks to undercut privacy tech, stoking fears of mass surveillance
November 15 2025 - Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US
November 27 2025 - Switzerland: Data Protection Officers Recommend Broad Cloud Ban for Authorities
..
Switzerland: Data Protection Officers Impose Broad Cloud Ban for Authorities
According to the Data Protection Conference, federal offices may only use US hyperscalers like AWS, Google, or Microsoft to a limited extent.Stefan Krempl (heise online)
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In fairness a government should be the only entity surveilling people in its own borders under most any circumstances.
I'm pretty opposed to most any kind of surveillance outside of warranted due process, and I don't think that any domestic surveillance needs privacy for longer than it takes to do an investigation and prosecution.
It's when governments are allowed to do things in secret and outside of the law that the whole concept of the law is undermined.
We have a lot of different political and government bodies. Like the "checks and balances" the US had.
So when you read "Switzerland wants to..." it could be:
* A survey of people living in Switzerland
* A initiative (an official political vote done by the swiss citicens)
* One big or multiple parties signing an agreement
* A group of cantons or communal legislative or executive politicians
* A group of semi-official people (like the conference of all the cantons data protection officers ("Kantonale Datenschützer", keine Ahnung wie all das Zeug auf Englisch heisst, Hilfe)
* Our parliament or a comitee in it
* Our other parliament or a comitee in it
* The federal court
* The federal chancelor
* The federal government
* And sometimes internetusers even mix some company into the bag, for example Proton.
I probably forgot a few and misspelt a lot but you get the idea.
And all of them are different elected or appointed persons, with their own opinions.
That is why everything is so fast at changing here 😆
(We discuss, we decide, we get blocked, we discuss, we change, we get blocked, rinse and repeat)
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That's not how the swiss government works.
Here the data protection officers are mostly independent of the rest of the government and are just doing their (somewhat hopeless) job.
Of course "warn[ing] public bodies" is about all they are can do.
It's almost like we're a multiparty democracy or something.
The press and others tend to report proposals by one part or another as though they have already been passed into law. I think it makes for better headlines.
And Andy Yen uses it for what agenda he has, like moving into cheaper German data centres or whatever.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
That's from Edward Snowden. Evidently no one is going to force you to jump through hoops to use encryption if you don't think you stand to benefit from it. That being said, the "nothing to hide" argument can be a bit of a slippery slope.
Also reminds me of someone I knew, who was doing pure maths research (so, read about as much as your fanfic) and was storing their papers on Dropbox. When informed that that was a private US entity, would enable other entities to access that data, they said "but I want people to read my paper". They are now furious about LLMs. Go figure.
Windscribe are a bit late to the game -https://x.com/windscribecom/status/1995619967996494334
They are twittering today quoting an article that was published 3+ months ago.
Proton is moving out of Switzerland because of their new surveillance laws. So much for Switzerland being some bastion of privacy huh? That makes Canada a better place for a VPN. Stop drinking the marketing koolaid.
Judging by the direction that Switzerland seems to be going, I am guessing (I could be wayyyy wrong) that Swiss privacy companies are going to be still effective for people outside of Switzerland, soon to be completely free from US big tech spying.
Canada are in the 5 eyes, whereas Switzerland aren't even mentioned in the 14 eyes.
As for Canada being a better place for the Privacy or a VPN, I think Windscribe need to stop drinking their own nonsense.
Damn. I remember seeing a Reddit AMA when I first came across Protonmail some 7-odd years ago with the Protonmail CEO saying something along the lines of "we don't plan on moving out of Switzerland because other country's intelligence agencies concern us more than the Swiss intelligence" and I thought that was a good take. Hell, I still do in lieu of everything going on.
I wonder what happens now that they will be "physically diversifying across Europe".
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Russia drew foreigners from 128 countries into its war in Ukraine using fraudulent recruitment centers, state channels through its diplomatic and cultural institutions
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42880630
Web archive linkMoscow has increasingly turned to foreign nationals to fill its ranks as it struggles with heavy battlefield losses that Ukraine says have exceeded one million since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, a government agency that monitors and counters foreign propaganda, said ... that since the invasion began “Moscow has built a transnational system for recruiting foreigners using deceit and criminal schemes.”
“Russia has recruited foreigners from 128 countries of the world using fraudulent recruitment centers, private companies and state channels through its diplomatic and cultural institutions,” the center wrote on its Telegram channel.
“Hundreds and thousands of citizens of various countries were drawn into the aggression through deception, coercion or for money,” it added.
The center estimates that more than 18,000 individuals from 128 countries have joined Russian forces since 2022.
Dmitry Usov, who heads Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, told CNN that this figure does not include the separate contingent of around 12,000 North Korean troops deployed under a military cooperation agreement between Moscow and Pyongyang.
...
According to the report, Russia has brought in 2,715 Uzbek nationals, 1,599 Tajik citizens, 1,190 from Kazakhstan and 687 from Kyrgyzstan to help wage its war, now approaching its fourth winter.
...
The agency also lists 1,338 Belarusian citizens fighting for Russia. It added that around 3,300 of these foreign fighters have already been killed in combat.
...
Earlier, OpenMinds, a defense-tech company specializing in information warfare, said in a report that Moscow has expanded its online recruitment campaigns aimed at foreigners to shore up its manpower, with the number of contract military advertisements rising more than sevenfold since last summer.
It added that about half of the foreign-targeted posts were directed at Russian-speaking citizens of post-Soviet states. Many of these ads falsely promised financial benefits, social guarantees and assistance obtaining a Russian passport, the report said.
...
Over 200 Kenyans fighting for Russia in Ukraine, as per BBC.
...
Russia is turning to African women and conscripted North Koreans to tackle its defence worker shortage, experts say.
... The military industry [In Russia] is not recruiting Russia’s women to work in most roles ... the reluctance to recruit Russian women into jobs in the defence industry does not extend to women from other countries. Around 200 women, mainly from central and west Africa, have been hired to work in defence industry factories located in the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, a Russian republic located east of Moscow. Many of these factories build drones assembled from components imported from Iran – weapons that have been used extensively by Russia in its attacks on civilians in Ukraine.The African women employed to build drones in Tatarstan were recruited through a programme called Alabuga Start, which targets young female migrant workers ...
It is advertised extensively on social media, including through paid influencers on TikTok ...
The Alabuga Start website appears to offer an attractive package of work experience, on-the-job training, accommodation ... However, once they arrive, the young women can find themselves living very different lives to those they had anticipated. There are reports of working long hours and exposure to dangerous chemicals, with passports being withheld to prevent women from leaving. For instance, Kenya has launched an investigation into Alabuga Start, which may see the programme shut down in that country ...
Musalia Mudavadi says over 200 Kenyans fighting for Russia in Ukraine
Russian recruitment networks are targeting Kenyans with fake job offers, authorities say.Wycliffe Muia (BBC News)
Who is National Guard shooting suspect Rahmanullah Lakanwal?
According to the sources, family members told authorities that the PTSD stemmed from the fighting Lakanwal did in Afghanistan, where he fought in a CIA-sponsored-and-trained unit of the Afghan special forces known as a Zero Unit.
Suspect struggled to assimilate
Lakanwal appeared to have been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weekslong cross-country drives, emails obtained by The Associated Press indicate. His behavior deteriorated so sharply that a community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, fearing he was becoming suicidal.
‘He was clean on all checks’
Lakanwal began working with the CIA around 2011, a senior US official told CNN. At the time, the CIA would have vetted him through a variety of databases, including the National Counterterrorism Center’s, to see whether he had any known ties to terrorist groups, the official said.Lakanwal would have also been vetted after he applied for asylum in 2024. It was granted in April, during the Trump administration. Noem on Sunday told NBC, “The vetting process all happened under (former President) Joe Biden’s administration.”
The above quotes from the article were chosen by me to support this thesis:
The Trump administration is actively lying about this event to justify their illegal and reckless deployment of the national guard and to cover the fact that they have installed a military force to perform policing, ironically mirroring the tactical stance in Afghanistan that resulted in similar attacks.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/30/politics/dc-shooting-suspect-rahmanullah-lakanwal
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Devastating toxic spill seen as test of whether African countries can stand up to China
Even before the dam collapsed, Lamec did not feel safe working at the copper mine.
"If our work protective gear gets damaged, it is not always replaced," he tells us. "We have to take a risk and use it again."
He is talking to the BBC in a car on a quiet backroad near a village in northern Zambia, too nervous to speak to us in public or to use his real name, for fear that speaking to the press might cost him his livelihood.
When he turned up for his shift one day in February, he tells us, he found that one of the dams at the Chinese-owned mine had been closed.
The tailings dam - used to store toxic by-products from the copper mining process, including heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and lead - had collapsed into a tributary connected to the Kafue, Zambia's longest river and a major drinking water source.
At least 50,000 tonnes of acidic debris spilled out into the surrounding waterways and farmland, according to the government. Some environmentalists, however, claim as much as 1.5 million tonnes was spilled, with one expert saying a full clean-up could take longer than a decade.
Devastating toxic spill seen as test of whether African countries can stand up to China
Chinese companies provide jobs and much needed revenue in Zambia, where the disaster took place.Mayeni Jones (BBC News)
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Suspected members of neo-Nazi terror group arrested in Spain
Police in Spain have arrested three people on suspicion of belonging to the Base, a global neo-Nazi terrorist group that incites and trains members in techniques to overthrow governments and bring about a race war.
The group, which has been designated a terrorist organisation by the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is part of a worldwide “accelerationist” white power movement that prepares its cells to carry out violent and destabilising attacks.
In a statement on Monday, Spain’s Policía Nacional said the three arrests, made in the eastern province of Castellón, had enabled them to dismantle the first accelerationist terrorist cell detected in the country.
Officers seized two firearms, replica guns, ammunition, knives and tactical military training gear, as well as accelerationist material and neo-Nazi paraphernalia.
Suspected members of neo-Nazi terror group arrested in Spain
Three people are accused of belonging to the Base, an ‘accelerationist’ white power organisation founded in the USSam Jones (The Guardian)
RRF Caserta. Cultura - Il Povero Piero di Achille Campanile
Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.
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So what's the floor here realistically, are they going to lower it to 30 days, then 14, then 2, then 1? Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
It is ignoring the elephant in the room -- the central root CA system. What if that is ever compromised?
Certificate pinning was a good idea IMO, giving end-users control over trust without these top-down mandated cert update schedules. Don't get me wrong, LetsEncrypt has done and is doing a great service within the current infrastructure we have, but ...
I kind of wish we could just partition the entire internet into the current "commercial public internet" and a new (old, redux) "hobbyist private internet" where we didn't have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity. I miss the comraderie, the shared vibe, the trust. Yeah I'm old.
Seeing as most root CA are stored offline compromising a server turned off is not really possible.
I'm more annoyed that I have 10 year old gear that doesn't have automation for this.
Signing (intermediate) certs have been compromised before. That means a bad actor can issue fake certs that are validated up to your root ca certs
While you can invalidate that signing cert, without useful and ubiquitous revocation lists, there’s nothing you can do to propagate that.
A compromised signing certs, effectively means invalidating the ca cert, to limit the damage
Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
Automate your certificate renewals. You should be automating updates for security anyway.
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This is one of the reasons they're reducing the validity - to try and convince people to automate the renewal process.
That and there's issues with the current revocation process (for incorrectly issued certificates, or certificates where the private key was leaked or stored insecurely), and the most effective way to reduce the risk is to reduce how long any one certificate can be valid for.
A leaked key is far less useful if it's only valid or 47 days from issuance, compared to three years. (note that the max duration was reduced from 3 years to 398 days earlier this year).
From digicert.com/blog/tls-certific…
In the ballot, Apple makes many arguments in favor of the moves, one of which is most worth calling out. They state that the CA/B Forum has been telling the world for years, by steadily shortening maximum lifetimes, that automation is essentially mandatory for effective certificate lifecycle management.The ballot argues that shorter lifetimes are necessary for many reasons, the most prominent being this: The information in certificates is becoming steadily less trustworthy over time, a problem that can only be mitigated by frequently revalidating the information.
The ballot also argues that the revocation system using CRLs and OCSP is unreliable. Indeed, browsers often ignore these features. The ballot has a long section on the failings of the certificate revocation system. Shorter lifetimes mitigate the effects of using potentially revoked certificates. In 2023, CA/B Forum took this philosophy to another level by approving short-lived certificates, which expire within 7 days, and which do not require CRL or OCSP support.
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note that the max duration was reduced from 3 years to 398 days earlier this year)
2020 really has been the longest year of my life
Reducing SSL/TLS Certificate Lifespan to 398 Days | Qualys Notifications
Update October 13, 2020: Starting with SSL Labs version 2.1.8, a ‘T’ grade is applied to servers with certificates valid more than 398 days and issued on or…Tamthing Shimray (Qualys, Inc.)
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But can you imagine the load on their servers should it come to this? And god forbid it goes down for a few hours and every person in the world is facing SSL errors because Let’s Encrypt can’t create new ones.
This continued shortening of lifespans on these certs is untenable at best. Personally I have never run into a situation where a cert was stolen or compromised but obviously that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I also feel like this is meant to automate all cert production which is nice if you can. Right now, at my job, all cert creation requires manually generating a CSR, submit it to a website, wait for manager approval, and then wait for creation. Then go download the cert and install it manually.
If I have to do this everyday for all my certs I’m not going to be happy. Yes this should be automated and central IT is supposed to be working on it but I’m not holding my breath.
The entire renewal process is fairly cheap, resource wise. 7 day certificates are already a thing.
In terms of bandwidth you could easily renew a billion certificates a day over a gigabit connection, and in terms of performance I recon even without specialized hardware a single system could keep up with that, though that also depends on the signature algorithms employed in the future of course.
The dependence on these servers is the far bigger problem I'd say.
This shortening of lifetimes is a slow change, so I hope there will be solutions before it becomes an issue. Like keeping multiple copies of certificates alive with different providers, so the one in use can silently fall through when one provider stops working. Currently there are too few providers for my taste, that would have to improve for such a system to be viable.
Maybe one day you'll select a bundle of 5 certificate services with similar policies for creating your certificate the way you currently select a single one in certbot or acme.sh
The current automation guidelines and defaults renew certs 30 days from expiry. So even today certs aren’t around for more than 60 days, it’s just that they’re valid for 90.
Additionally you can fairly easily monitor certs to get an alert if you drop below the 30 day threshold and automatic cert renewal hasn’t taken place.
I use Grafana self hosted for this with their synthetic monitoring free tier but it would be relatively trivial to roll your own Prometheus-exporter to do the same.
That's a lot easier said that done for hobbyists that need a certificate for their home server. I will give you a real world example. I run Ubuntu Linux (but without snaps) on my main desktop machine, however like the person you replied to I am old and I don't have a good memory so when I do use Linux I try to take the easiest approach possible. But I also have a server running on a Raspberry Pi, and another family member (that has a Mac) that I exchange XMPP-based instant messages with. The server runs Prosody, and on my Ubuntu box I run Gajim (the one from the apt repository which is version 1.8.4, I have no idea why they won't put a newer version in the repo). The other family member uses some MacOS-based XMPP client. The problem is that if there is not a valid certificate on the server, Gajim refuses to send or receive anything other than plain-text messages. It won't sent or receive files or pictures, etc. unless the certificate is valid.
However the Raspberry Pi does other things as well (it would be silly to dedicate a Pi to just running Prosody) and one of those other things puts a pseudo-web server of sorts on port 80, which is only accessible from the local network. So I can't use Certbot because it insists on being able to connect to a web server. Even if I had a general web server on the Pi, which I don't have and don't want, it would be restricted for local access only. Also, I'm not paying for a DNS address for my own home server. What I found I could do is get a DuckDNS address (they are free) and use that to get a LE certificate. But the procedure is very manual and kind of convoluted, you have to ssh into the server using two separate sessions and enter some information in each one, because of the absolutely asinine way LE's renewal process works if you don't have a web server. I hate doing it every 90 days and if I have to do it every 45 days I'll probably just give up on sending and receiving files.
I should also mention that it took me hours to figure out the procedure i am using now, and it seems so stupid because I have that server locked down with two firewalls (one on the router and then iptables on the server) I don't even want a certificate but the designers of Gajim in their infinite wisdom(?) decided not to give users the option to in effect say "I trust this server, just ignore an expired or missing certificate." And the designers of LE never seemed to consider that some people might need a certificate that are not running a web server (and don't want to run one) and provide some automatic mechanism for renewing in that situation. And just because someone uses Linux does not mean we are all programmers or expert script writers. I can follow "cookbook" type instructions (that is the ONLY way I got Prosody set up) but I can't write a script or program to automate this process (again, I'm OLD).
I know somebody's going to be tempted to say I should use some other software (other that Prosody or Gajim). I tried other IM clients and Gajim is the only one that works the way I expect it to. As for Prosody, I have from time to time tried setting up other XMPP servers that people have suggested and could never get any of them to work. As I said, had I not found "cookbook" type instructions for setting up Prosody I would probably not be running that either, it was a PITA to get working but not that it IS working I don't want to go through that again. And Prosody isn't the problem, it works perfectly fine without a valid certificate, but pretty much every Linux IM client I have tried either loses functionality or won't work at all if the server doesn't have a valid certificate. And no I don't run or use Docker, nor do I have any desire to (especially on a Raspberry Pi).
EDIT: After giving this some thought I decided look further into this, and discovered that while Certbot can't handle this, it's possible that a script called acme.sh can. See github.com/acmesh-official/acm… (also github.com/acmesh-official/acm… - may need to scroll up just a bit, the pertinent item is "8. Automatic DNS API integration"). I haven't tried it yet (just manually renewed yesterday) but it looks promising if I can figure it out. Thought I'd post the links for anyone else that might be in the same situation.
GitHub - acmesh-official/acme.sh: A pure Unix shell script ACME client for SSL / TLS certificate automation
A pure Unix shell script ACME client for SSL / TLS certificate automation - acmesh-official/acme.shGitHub
That's a lot easier said that done for hobbyists that need a certificate for their home server.
I'd you're going to self host you need to learn. I have no time for kids who just want "Google but free" and don't want to spend any time learning what it takes to make that happen.
You don't need to if you're just using things locally.
But also - domains are cheap.
So what's the floor here realistically, are they going to lower it to 30 days, then 14, then 2, then 1?
LE is beta-testing a 7-day validity, IIRC.
Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
No, those are expected or even required to be automated.
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7-day validity is great because they're exempt from OCSP and CRL. Let's Encrypt is actually trying 6-day validity, not 7: letsencrypt.org/2025/01/16/6-d…
Another feature Let's Encrypt is adding along with this is IP certificates, where you can add an IP address as an alternate name for a certificate.
Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025
This year we will continue to pursue our commitment to improving the security of the Web PKI by introducing the option to get certificates with six-day lifetimes (“short-lived certificates”).letsencrypt.org
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The current plan is for the floor to be 47 days. digicert.com/blog/tls-certific… and this is not until 2029 in order to give people sufficient time to adjust. Of course, individual certificate authorities can choose to have lower validity periods than 47 days if they want to.
Essentially, the goal is for everyone to automatically renew the certificates once per month, but include some buffer time in case of issues.
The best approach for securing our CA system is the "certificate transparency log". All issued certificates must be stored in separate, public location. Browsers do not accept certificates that are not there.
This makes it impossible for malicious actors to silently create certificates. They would leave traces.
The only disadvantage I see is that all my personal subdomains (e.g. immich.name.com and jellyfin) are forever stored in a public location. I wouldn't call it a privacy nightmare, yet it isn't optimal.
There are two workarounds:
- do not use public certificates
- use wildcard certificates only
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There are some nameserver providers that have an API.
When you register a domain, you can choose which nameserver you like. There are nameservers that work with certbot, choose one that does.
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Doesn't caddy support that (name cheap txt mod) via a plug-in?
I haven't tried it yet, but the plugin made it sound possible. I'm planning to automate on next expiration... When I get to it ;)
I did already compile caddy with the plugin, just haven't generated my name cheap token and tested.
I definitely know that feeling.
Now that I'm at a keyboard, here's the (Caddy) plugin I was referring to : github.com/caddy-dns/namecheap
GitHub - caddy-dns/namecheap
Contribute to caddy-dns/namecheap development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Isn't this just CRL in reverse? And CRL sucks or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Part of the point of cryptographically signing a cert is so you don't have to do this if you trust the issuer.
Cryptography already makes it infeasible for a malicious actor to create a fake cert. The much more common attack vector is having a legitimate cert's private key compromised.
No, these are completely separate issues.
- CRL: protect against certificates that have their private key compromised
- CT: protect against incompetent or malicious Certificate Authorities.
This is just one example why we have certificate transparency. Revocation wouldn't be useful if it isn't even known which certificates need revocation.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, a subordinate CA of the Indian Controller of Certifying Authorities (India CCA), issues rogue certificates for Google and Yahoo domains. NIC claims that their issuance process was compromised and that only four certificates were misissued. However, Google is aware of misissued certificates not reported by NIC, so it can only be assumed that the scope of the breach is unknown.
Maintaining digital certificate security
Posted by Adam Langley, Security Engineer On Wednesday, July 2, we became aware of unauthorized digital certificates for several Google ...Google Online Security Blog
Partition the internet... Like during the Morris worm of '88, where they had to pull off regional networks to prevent the machines from being reinfected?
The good old days were, maybe, not that good. 😀
I would assume total anarchy (especially in the stock trade lol)
Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?
Certbot's default timer checks twice a day if it's old enough to be be due for a renewal... So a change from 90 to 1 day will in practice make no difference already...
where we didn't have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity
But you always did, it was always being abused, regularly. That's WHY we now use secure connections.
I think I'm just not picking up whether you're actually trying to pitch a technical solution, or just wishing for a perfect world without crime.
Is this the same trust that would infect a box in under a minute if not behind a router?
The same trust of needing to scan anything you downloaded for script kiddie grade backdoors?
Zero click ActiveX / js exploits?
Man I'm probably the same age and those are some intense rose colored glasses 😅
Ah yeah, those were interesting times. (Although there were some historically interesting viruses back in the day for those floppies too)
Fond memories though. Learning basic on a cartridge... Using literal cassettes for storage. That horrifying sound of a 5" floppy drive struggling to read that file you really needed. Good times.
Generally speaking that was probably what most of us would identify as pre internet times - but usenet / BBS / and early internet and prior definitely was more bright eyed and optimistic. Probably because it was more about learning and tech and less about monotizing every square inch of your existence 😂
Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025
This year we will continue to pursue our commitment to improving the security of the Web PKI by introducing the option to get certificates with six-day lifetimes (“short-lived certificates”).letsencrypt.org
Yes, this requirement comes from the CA/Browser Forum, which is a group consisting of all the major certificate authorities (like DigiCert, Comodo/Sectigo, Let's Encrypt, GlobalSign, etc) plus all the major browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, and Apple). Changes go through a voting process.
Google originally proposed 90 day validity, but Apple later proposed 47 days and they agreed to move forward with that proposal.
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Don't worry they'll reduce the cost of certificates proportionally to the longevity of the certificate.
Right?
Anybody?
<< Cricket noises >>
Edit: obviously not LE, but other certificate vendors.
Lol, never had to buy a cert huh?
You're still buying a year or more at a time, no matter the lifetime of the cert itself. Even if the cert lifetime was a week, you're still buying the same product, no matter how many times you rotate it.
Personally? No I've never bought a cert before. Given there's free alternatives and it's a homelab it doesn't make sense. Otherwise I've used them on AWS, where ACM also just provides them for free.
What you're saying is that certificate providers will still charge you and provide certificates for a year, but just provide you with N certificates to span that year?
E.g. if the duration is 45 days then they will give you 365/45 certificates ?
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. if the duration is 45 days then they will give you 365/45 certificates ?
Minimum. We get through digicert at work, and we abuse the hell out of our wildcard and reissue it tons of times a year. You're buying a service for the year, not an individual cert.
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It's being deiven by the browsers. Shorter certs mean less time for a compromised certificate to be causing trouble.
cabforum.org/working-groups/se…
Latest Baseline Requirements
Version: 2.1.9Date: 10-November-20251. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview This document describes an integrated set of technologies, protocols, identity-proofing, lifecycle management, and auditing requirements that are necessary (but not sufficient) for the …CA/Browser Forum
most trouble is probably caused in the first few days. Doesn't matter if it's 45 or 90 days, it would have to be a few hours to be meaningfully short. Given that automating things like this is annoying sometimes, you'll be sure people will max out the 45 days…
I'm pretty sure it's the SSL seller lobby just wanting more money, tbh. Selling snake oil security.
I'm pretty sure it's the SSL seller lobby just wanting more money, tbh. Selling snake oil security.
And selling “certificate automation” tools.
Given that automating things like this is annoying sometimes, you'll be sure people will max out the 45 days…
I know from professional experience that this is a stupid as fuck idea that leads to outages. One of the many reasons I'm working to automate those annoying ones.
Also, don't let perfect be the enemy of better.
I'm not a capitalist, I don't care about outages. I can live with Facebook being down for a few days, or my bank not accepting transfers for a day or so. Then again, I grew up with the internet in the 90s and prioritise good software and tools over availability, I guess?
Obviously at my job I have to do what my employer thinks. But if nobody cared I'd definitely do our Gitlab upgrades once a week once they're out and not in some weird "maintenance window" mandated by SLAs and stakeholders.
Reducing the valid time will not solve the underlying problems they are trying to fix.
We're just gonna see more and more mass outages over time especially if this reduces to an uncomfortably short duration. Imagine what might happen if a mass crowdflare/microsoft/amazon/google outage that goes on perhaps a week or two? what if the CAs we use go down longer than the expiration period?
Sure, the current goal is to move everybody over to ACME but now that's yet another piece of software that has to be monitored, may have flaws or exploits, may not always run as expected... and has dozens of variations with dependencies and libraries that will have various levels of security of their own and potentially more vulnerabilities.
I don't have the solution, I just don't see this as fixing anything. What's the replacement?
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Well it should be as short as possible while still being practical. LE doesn't have infinite server compute, renewal also takes some amount of time, plus if they make the validity too short people might stop using them (pretty evident judging from sentiment here) and move to other CAs and make what they do pointless.
45 days are still plenty of time yet people are already complaining. Does make me worry.
And you still can't self certify.
It's cute the big players are so concerned with my little security of my little home server.
Or is there a bigger plan behind all this? Like pay more often, lock in to government controlled certs (already done I guess because they control DNS and you must have a "real" website name to get a free cert)?
I feel it's 50% security 50% bullshit.
Edit: thank you all I will dive down the CA certification rabbit hole now! Have worked in C++ & X509 on the client side so maybe I'll be able to figure it out.
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That's a fair point. However, on the practical side, it's sad that I would have to root my gf's phone to let her access the services we host.
I ended up using a DynDNS and Caddy for managing my cert.
But you have to manually accept this dangerous cert in the browser right?
Very interesting actually, do you have any experience about it or other pointers? I might just set one up myself for my tenfingers sharing protocol...
No, because it's no longer dangerous if it's trusted.
You give your friends your public root and if applicable, intermediary certs. They install them and they now trust any certs issued by your CA.
Source: I regularly build and deploy CA's in corps
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Thank you!
Is there some simple soft that let you make those certs, like with a root cert and then "derived" certs? On linux 😀 ?
I guess people have to re-trust every now and then because certs get old, or do they trust the (public partof the) root cert and the daughter certs derived from root are churned out regularly for the sites?
Openssl can do everything.
That's right, but instead of the word derived we use "issued"
Correct certs get old by design, they can also be revoked. As another commenter mentioned the biggest pain is actually in the redistribution of these end certificates. In enterprise this is all managed usually with the same software they use for deployment or have auto enrollment configured.
You should find tons of guides just take it slow to understand it all. Understanding certificates in depth is a rare and good skill to have. Most sysadmins I come across are scared to death of certificates.
I was forced to learn some of it at work (using and signing medical payment transactions, with x509 certificates) so I have ar least a starting point. I have no idea how the revoke process works though, I can't figure out a way that it functions without a central authority getting queried regularly. I thonk I can start without that knowledge though.
Anyway, with your information I'm up and running, thank you again!
"Derived certificates" not child certs, noted !
Yes you can but the practicality of doing so is very limiting. Hell I ran my own CA for my own internal use and even I found it annoying.
The entire CA ecosystem is terrible and only exists to ensure connections are encrypted at this point. There's no validation or any sort of authority to say one site is better than another.
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And you still ~~can't~~ can self certify.
Skill issue, you've always been able to self certify. You just have to know where to drop the self signed cert or the parent/root cert you use to sign stuff.
If you're running windows, it's trivial to make a self signed cert trusted. There's an entire certificate store you can access that makes it easy enough you can double click it and install it and be on your way. Haven't had a reason to figure it out on Linux, but I expect it won't be super difficult.
I already did but my browser choked on it.
So yes I should probably set up the whole CA thing.
It's the "change your password often odyssey" 2.0. If it is safe, it is safe, it doesn't become unsafe after an arbitrary period of time (if the admin takes care and revokes compromised certs). If it is unsafe by design, the design flaw should be fixed, no?
Or am I missing the point?
The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there's no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.
If your password gets stolen, only two entities need to be told it's invalid. You and the website the password is for.
If an SSL certificate is stolen, everyone who would potentially use the website need to know, and they need to know before they try to contact the website. SSL certificate revocation is a very difficult communication problem, and it's mostly ignored by browsers because of the major performance issues it brings having to double check SSL certs with a third party.
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The point is, if the certificate gets stolen, there's no GOOD mechanism for marking it bad.
That’s what OCSP is for. Only Google isn’t playing along as per that wiki entry.
I mean, are you intending to retroactively add SSL to every tool implementing SSL in the past few decades?…
Browsers aren’t the only thing that ingress SSL.
Short lifespans are also great when domains change their owner. With a 3 year lifespan, the old owner could possibly still read traffic for a few more years.
When the lifespan ist just 30-90 days, that risk is significatly reduced.
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Moot point!
You could still get certificates for other people's domains from Honest Ahmed 's used cars and totally trustworthy CA or so. But that's another story. (there are A LOT of trusted CAs in everybody OS and browser. Do you know and trust them all?)
The maintainers of the big web browsers have pretty strict rules for CAs in this list. If any one of them gets caught issuing only one certificate maliciously, they are out of business.
And all CAs are required to publish each certificate in multiple public, cryptographically signed ledgers.
Sure, there is a history of CAs issuing certificates to people that shouldn't have them (e.g. for espionage), but that is almost impossible now.
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Personally, yes. Everything is behind NPM and SSL cert management is handled by certbot.
Professionally? LOL NO. Shit is manual and usually regulated to overnight staff. Been working on getting to the point it is automated though, but too many bespoke apps for anyone to have cared enough to automate the process before me.
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Why can't you just have a long lived internally signed cert on your archaic apps and LE at the edge on a modern proxy? It's easy enough to have the proxy trust the internal cert and connect to your backend service that shouldn't know the difference if there's a proxy or not.
Or is your problem client side?
One such app I can think of would be a client side issue. If the public cert doesnt match the back end private cert it will sever the connection and mark it as insecure. Hopefully I won't need to deal with it much longer though.
I just heard back from my other team that "this project sounds great for your team" even though they manage many of their own apps and certificates. Perhaps I should just let them burn then!
Can't imagine how annoying it would be to interface with every equipment so there are no https errors...
Reducing the validity timespan will not solve the problem, it only reduces the risk. And how big is that risk really? I'm an amateur and would love to see some real malicious case descriptions that would have been avoided had the certificate been revoked earlier...
Anybody have some pointers?
No, but I have a link showing how ISPs and CAs colluded to do a MITM notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.r…
Shorter cert lifespan would not prevent this.
It really just helps in cases where you get hacked, but the hacker doesn't have continued access. Say someone physically penetrates into your building, grabs the key through an unlocked station, and leaves.
That being said, like you mentioned, if someone is going through this effort, 45 days vs 90 days likely won't matter. They'll probably have the data they need after a week anyways.
Encryption key theft really requires a secondary attack afterwards to get the encrypted data by getting into the middle and either decrypting or redirecting traffic. It's very much a state level/high-corporate attack, not some random group trying to make a few bucks.
Terminology: revoked means the issuer of the certificate has decided that the certificate should not be trusted anymore even though it is still valid.
If a attacker gets access to a certificates key, they can impersonate the server until the validity period of the cert runs out or it is revoked by the CA. However ... revocation doesn't work. The revocation lists arent checked by most clients so a stolen cert will be accepted potentially for a very long time.
The second argument for shorter certs is adoption of new technology so certs with bad cryptographic algorithms are circled out quicker.
And third argument is: if the validity is so short you don't want to change the certs manually and automate the process, you can never forget and let your certs expire.
We will probably get to a point of single day certs or even one cert per connection eventually and every step will be saver than before (until we get to single use certs which will probably fuck over privacy)
The five-assed monkey of cert lifetimes.
As useless measures go this will certainly be one; especially while CRLs are a thing.
Yeah, I think Letsencrypt (and others) are one of the best things to happen for the internet.
You used to have to cough up a good chunk of monies for a certificate.
Now it's easily accessible and you (i) never have to think about it after the first setup because a robot automatically renews expiring certificates for me.
Generally this is one of the best improvements: a more secure web that is easier to achieve.
Make no mistake: this is an improvement.
There are substantial unsolvable issues with long lived certificates, and automatic deployment of very short lived certificates is the way to solve them.
Plan for certificate validity of six days in a few years.
Just saying:
There are alternatives for LE,not for all things, but for a lot.
Afaik not all of them do follow suit.
While I agree for my personal use, it's not so easy in an enterprise environment. I'm currently working to get services migrated OFF my servers that utilize public certificates to avoid the headache of manual intervention every 45 days.
While this is possible for servers and services I manage, it's not so easy for other software stacks we have in our environment. Thankfully I don't manage them, but I'm sure I'll be pulled into them at some point or another to help figure out the best path forward.
The easy path is obviously a load balanced front-end to load the certificate, but many of these services are specialized and have very elaborate ways to bind certificates to services outside of IIS or Apache, which would need to trust the newly issued load balancer CA certificate every 47 days.
Yeah, this has become an issue for us at work as well.
Currently we are doing a POC for an in-house developed solution where a azure function app handles the renewal of certificates for any domain we have, both wildcard and named, and place the certificates in a key vault where services that need them can get access.
Looks to be working, so the main issue now is finding a non-US certificate provider that supports acme. EU has some but even more local there aren't many options.
I'm using automated renewals.
But, that just means there's a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven't had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it's going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.
Technically my renews aren't automated. I have a nightly cronjob that should renew certificates and restart services, but when the certificates need renewal, it always fails because it wants to open a port I'm already using in order to answer the challenge.
I hear there's an apache module / configuration I can use, but I never got around to setting it up. So, when the cron job fails, I get an email and go run a script that stops apache, renews certs, and restarts services (including apache). I will be a bit annoying to have to do that more often, but maybe it'll help motivate me to configure apache (or whatever) correctly.
Debian Stable
Challenge Types
When you get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, our servers validate that you control the domain names in that certificate using “challenges,” as defined by the ACME standard.letsencrypt.org
While I do have some control over my DNS and can create arbitrary TXT entries, I can't to that in an automated way easily. I'm using Gandi.net to host my DNS rather than running my own DNS sever(s).
EDIT: Gandi is listed community.letsencrypt.org/t/dn… so maybe I can automate a DNS-01 challenge without too much issue, I just have to switch away from certbot to one of the other tools.
DNS providers who easily integrate with Let's Encrypt DNS validation
In the spirit of Web Hosting who support Let's Encrypt and CDN Providers who support Let's Encrypt, I wanted to compile a list of DNS providers that feature a workflow (e.g.Let's Encrypt Community Support
It does have access to the HTTP root directories. But, it still can't open port 80/443 when apache already has that port open.
EDIT: I guess my certbot renew just needs to be reconfigured to use a --webroot, so it doesn't try to listen on it's own.
I've got it setup automated on all my external domains, but trying to automate it on my internal-only domain is rather tedious since not only do I NOT want to open a port for it to confirm, but I have 2 other devices/services on the network not behind my primary reverse proxy that share the same cert.
What In need to do is setup my own custom cron that hits the hosting provider to update the DNS txt entries. Then I need to have it write and restart the services that use the cert. I've tried to automate this once before and it did not go so smoothly so I've been hesitant on wasting time to try it again... But maybe it's time to.
What would be ideal is if I could allow it to be automated just by getting a one time dns approval and storing a local private/public key to prove to them that I'm the owner of the domain or something. Not aware of this being possible though.
Ours is automated, but we incur downtime on the renewal because our org forbids plain http so we have to do TLS-ALPN-01. It is a short downtime. I wish let's encrypt would just allow http challenges over https while skipping the cert validation. It's nuts that we have to meaningfully reply over 80...
Though I also think it's nuts that we aren't allowed to even send a redirect over 80...
The same screwed up IT that doesn't let us do HTTP-01 challenges also doesn't let us do DNS except through some bs webform, and TXT records are not even vaguely in their world.
It sucks when you are stuck with a dumber broad IT organization...
our org forbids plain http
is redirecting http to https also out of the question? because let's encrypt HTTP-01 accepts http -> https redirects:
Our implementation of the HTTP-01 challenge follows redirects, up to 10 redirects deep. It only accepts redirects to “http:” or “https:”, and only to ports 80 or 443. It does not accept redirects to IP addresses. When redirected to an HTTPS URL, it does not validate certificates.
Forgive my ignorance but why would that incur a downtime?
The only way I can think of for downtime to happen if you switched certs before the new one was signed (in which case ..don't) or am I missing something?
It also strikes me as weird that LE requires 80 but does allow insecure 443 after a redirect. Why not just do/allow insecure 443 in the first place?
the TLS-ALPN-01 challenge requires a https server that implements generating a self-signed certificate on demand in response to a specific request. So we have to shut down our usual traffic forwarder and let an ACME implementation control the port for a minute or so. It's not a long downtime, but irritatingly awkward to do and can disrupt some traffic on our site that has clients from every timezone so there's no universal '3 in the morning' time, and even then our service is used as part of other clients '3 in the morning' maintenance windows... Folks can generally take a blip in the provider but don't like that we generate a blip in those logs if they connect at just the wrong minute in a month...
As to why not support going straight to 443, don't know why not. I know they did TLS-ALPN-01 to keep it purely as TLS extensions to stay out of the URL space of services which had value to some that liked being able to fully handle it in TLS termination which frequently is nothing but a reverse proxy and so in principle has no business messing with payload like HTTP-01 requires. However for nginx at least this is awkward as nginx doesn't support it.
Thanks for the explanation!
Though it ought to be possible to only respond with the new self-signed cert when LE does the challenge and with the previous, properly signed cert otherwise.
I found codeberg.org/neilpang/acme.sh/… which demonstrates one method to achieve that but I lack practical experience judge whether that's optimal.
YES! Keep cutting it down!
Revocation is a lost cause and if you don’t automate you deserve what you get.
I agree, but it's impossible to convince my less tech savy roommates and friends to let me install a root certificate. "That sounds like i could read all their private messages", lol. Just let me have my certificate for https in my local net. I don't need to be "even more" secure. I get that that's necessary for public services, but surely not for local selfhosting. I don't even have a port open other than wireguard. And i would not even care "if a roommate hacks/gets access to a guests voice commands for home assistant." (Not complaining at you but at this trend. I do think my use case is valid)
You are gonna laugh if i tell you how i partly automated this workaround. A script changes the (dyn) dns entries of all subdomains to point to my public server in a datacenter. There, it ssh's in and requests the certificates with certbot. Then, it restores the dns entries and downloads and installs the certificates in the local net. Still requires manual supervision and sometimes intervention. My domains do not support automated dnssec. I don't have time to secure my local net enough to feel good about opening ports. If all certificate lifetimes get shorter, i'll either have to switch my domain provider or give up selfhosting for other people.
I've had dns-01 validation running for a while now. It's not difficult, just a paradigm shift. I spent a minute just now looking for a concise how-to for you and didn't find one, so I suppose I'll have to write it.
I'll bookmark this comment so I can find you once I've done that.
Allowing a certificate without proper validation for local only networks is a terrible, terrible idea. I could super easily use this as a loophole to set up a honeypot public free wi-fi, redirect all traffic through a reverse proxy and man-in-the-middle every single HTTPS connection, effectively allowing me to harvest everyone's passwords in a really quick and easy way.
Just use DNS verification. It's not that hard.
Like what?
SSL is so simple and automatic with certbot.
Then there's CORS if you really need to load resources from other sites, but you won't need that for small sites.
Making the backend is easier than ever. It's much harder to make security mistakes nowadays.
And if you don't know what you're doing, just ask an LLM if you made any fuckups..
Email client that imports labels as tags instead of folders on Linux (and Android)
Problem Statement
I'm in the process of de-googling, and I'm about 60% there, but I still need gmail for the things that I cannot or have not yet migrated.
I've also recently experimented w/ the Thunderbird app for both Linux and Android, and it's okay. One thing that really irritates me is the fact that when I import my emails from gmail, all my labels are handled as folders in Thunderbird. This is an issue b/c I have rules to help organize incoming email by assigning one or more labels. I believe Thunderbird has the concept of tags, but by default Thunderbird routes gmail labels to folders instead of tags.
Question
Is there a mail client on Linux (and Android) that handles labels from gmail as tags instead of folders? Alternatively, is there a setting in Thunderbird that will use tags instead of labels that I'm just not aware of?
I've tried searching DDG, but came up with nothing useful beyond other posts on other social media websites asking similar questions.
* offlineimap in case you need something to fetch your IMAP emails.
* gmailieer is a tool which uses Gmail API to fetch emails.
* notmuch is a tool which indexes your email. You can assign whatever labels you want and rather than folders it uses tags.
* For notmuch you then need a front-end which can display the emails. I use Emacs for that. And since notmuch uses tags, you can then create whatever ‘folders’ by making saved searches.
Labels/Tags are a product feature, not part of email standards. Meaning: it's not a thing when looking at the raw mail server data.
Each product handles this in their own way, and the tool being used to export your mail from one host/product to another would be what is handling that, if at all. Gmail probably just uses folders because that is part of the structure a mail server would have.
I believe Proton's import tools handles this correctly from Gmail using both labels as folders and preserving tags, but I believe Thunderbird just puts them in folders as is standard.
You can double check by looking at the raw data exported from any mail service. You could probably easily write a quick script to handle getting tag info and applying it yourself, though it could be quite slow.
Labels/Tags are a product feature, not part of email standards. Meaning: it's not a thing when looking at the raw mail server data.
Thanks for the info. This helps me understand why things are the way that they are. It has me rethinking the use of tags altogether and leaning more toward reviewing my labels in gmail so I can tweak the ones that are still useful and remove any that are obsolete.
That's a solid plan.
If you want a deeper dive, just make some stuff in Thunderbird, then export and view it. It'll give you a bit of a look into how email standards servers organize data.
i don't use rules but fairmail has an option about gmail labels in rules ☞ m66b.github.io/FairEmail/#faq7…
I've been using fairmail for some years. I'm on tuta now but i may end up getting a mailbox.org just to have fairmail as my main mailer again
I went þrough þis years ago. My ultimate solution was offlineimap and notmuch. Þere are several clients which can work wiþ notmuch, but my favorites are TUI tools, which it sounds like may not be your bag.
About a year ago I switched to mbsync, and more recently to imapgoose, which does bidirectional sync'ing, differential updates, and push notifications.
Regardless of how you sync, notmuch is þe secret sauce, as it performs full text indexing and tagging. Þe downside is þat þere's no good solution for syncing notmuch DBs across servers, which means tagging is bound to a single computer; and notmuch indexes can get enormous - since þey're binary databases, diffing and keeping versions is non-trivial. However, it's about as close a solution as you can get to þe far superior gmail "tagging" and search-based email organization approach.
An alternative is mairix. It's far faster at indexing þan notmuch and þe index is smaller, but it's far less powerful. I actually use þem in conjunction - notmuch on my PC and mairix on þe mail server, because þey boþ understand email IDs - so you can e.g. search for "tag:spam" on a PC wiþ notmuch and dump email IDs, þen pipe þose to þe server and look þem up wiþ mairix and run "dspam learn" on þem. It's all a bit convoluted, but once you get it set up, a couple short shell scripts is enough to manage email using þe far superior paradigm of tags.
GitHub - gburd/isync: isync/mbsync - a mailbox synchronization program
isync/mbsync - a mailbox synchronization program. Contribute to gburd/isync development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
th → þ replacement going on in your text? Trying to bring back the thorn?
Heck yeah - it's just a configuration option!
Settings -> Languages -> English (assuming þat's your language setting) and turn on symbols. It shows up in þe long-press pop-up option for "t".
I don't know how many mails you have. But if that is what you want, then do the work... Import it into Thunderbird, select all mails in a folder, give them a tag, and move them where you want them. It might take a little time, but my guess is, that it will take way shorter time, than trying to find different programs to help you do it your way.
Oh, and maybe you could come up with a different system, than that google put on you... Just a thought here.
Agreed, this is where I'm at as well.
What I've had in place for the last decade or more made sense to me once upon a time, but it's over engineered and of limited usefulness.
Despite the potential technical solutions offered in other comments, I've resolved to go through and clean up my email history, including deleting stuff I no longer need and reconfiguring how I assign labels to incoming messages in gmail in order to make sense to my current self and play nice with the folder system, which seems to be more industry standard anyway.
Filen free plan. Any good?
I was looking for a Google Drive alternative. Its mainly for storing small documents. 10GB is Filen's limit on their free plan. Its more than enough.
But I am concerned about their privacy. Have anyone used it? I am ready to pay for a really good service but if they are giving it for free than I why should I pay if they are private enough?
They also have paid ones but they are an overkill for me. I mainly use offline HDD backups. These are for some quick access files. I don't need an app or anything. Simple web login would be fine.
Filen – Next Generation End-To-End Encrypted Cloud Storage
Filen – Next Generation End-To-End Encrypted Cloud Storage. Get started with 10 GB of free space.filen.io
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I use it and their free plan works fine but I've quickly upgraded to a paid tier. They claim zero knowledge E2EE, that's all I know. Free and paid plans offer the same level of privacy, as far as I know. But, if you plan on sharing files (I don't) make sure the free plan still offer that feature as I think I remember it was removed awhile ago (but I may be wrong).
I also think most our governments will sooner than later decide those kind of fully privacy-respecting cloud storage should not be accessed by mere users like ourselves (because 'think of the children' and the usual bullshit). So, I don't rely on it as my sole backup, I have another online backup solution (not cloud) and also keep a copy of all my files on a fully encrypted disk drive (two of them, as a matter of fact).
(deleted: an affiliate link that seems to not be working anymore)
Edit: typos.
I use it as my cloud backup along with 2 drives. It’s pretty good, smooth, open source, and claims e2ee just like proton and mega, and no bugs that I’ve found. I would put it on the same level as proton just newer. But just like how Libb said, if you worry about the future governments or want more privacy, maybe consider using cryptomator and this goes for any cloud storage. I use it with Filen and everything has been good so far.
Also you sadly just missed their last lifetime pro plans sale but doesn’t sad like you need it. Hope this helps!!
Pay for stuff if you want something reliable and supporting your privacy. Sure test the free tier to make sure it fits your requirements but please do consider not sticking to it.
Might be Filen (don't know of it) or Hetzner Storage Box (~10e/month for 5TB iirc) or Proton Drive (Visionary customers have a large quantity, e.g. >6TB) or whatever else you prefer but if you do not actually help people providing services by funding their work they you are supporting BigTech and their "free plans" that comes precisely at the cost of our collective privacy.
I have been playing around with it. Ended up buying more recently of the lifetime stuff. Tried their android app and windows/web interface. Web interface has been 100% rock solid. Android app not so much:
- Camera sync sometimes doesn't sync all the pictures. Sometimes it doesn't show synced pictures either, I have to manually navigate to the folder. Not sure whats up.
- Android app has a long delay on starting up sometimes.
- Poor battery optimization comparatively speaking to alternatives (nextcloud & gphotos)
- App occasionally crashes, but that's stopped recently.
Also, just full disclosure I am on Graphene, so sometimes things are a bit different. Recently, I have started to setup their rclone connection to use it as an offsite encrypted backup of ~ half a terabyte of important shit. Its my 2nd offsite backup and I am planning to regularly test that repository (using Kopia). While I am happy with it so far (outside the android app), I am still a bit wary on how reliable they are. They have been around for a few years now, so I feel more confident, just overall being cautious until I see a public audit of their backend. The client code is all OS (supposedly, I haven't confirmed beyond the rclone code), so you can check that if you like (which should at least confirm local encryption before transit).
Canadian air passenger traffic to U.S. down for 9th consecutive month
For the ninth consecutive month, fewer passengers at Canadian airports are heading to the United States amid the trade war.New data from Statistics Canada shows total Canadian air passenger traffic in October was up by 4.5 per cent to five million travellers from the same time last year, but the number of people on U.S.-bound trips is down 8.9 per cent to 1.2 million travellers.
Canadian air passenger traffic to U.S. down for 9th consecutive month
The drop comes almost a year after U.S. President Donald Trump first started musing about making Canada the 51st state, a threat he has repeated throughout the trade war.globalnewsdigital (Global News)
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The world should follow Canada's lead and nobody should visit from anywhere.
I’m American living in Germany and married to a German. I brought him to meet my family last November, because I suspected trump would win or there would be a more significant version of January 6th. People keep asking when we’re coming back, but why the hell would I endanger my husband like that? It’s simply not safe for anyone right now, but especially for noncitizens.
I miss my family and friends, but they can come visit us. We’ll even help them get started learning German and help with their visas and housing if they want to stay.
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The world should follow Canada’s lead and nobody should visit from anywhere.
I think a lot of the world absolutely is, a few months ago I saw similar numbers from Europe, with Denmark and Germany among the biggest declines.
viewfromthewing.com/new-data-s…
Denmark is not in the chart, but it is very noticeable here, and although we are a small country we have higher tan average level of traveling and economic interaction with other countries.
New Data Shows Europe to U.S. Fall Travel Plunges Up To 12.5% — Expect Fares To Be Slashed To Fill Seats
Advance bookings for fall travel from Europe to the U.S. are down as much as 12.5%, a sharp drop that could push airlines to cut fares in order to keep planes full.Gary Leff (View from the Wing)
There will always be FFFF* tourists, but I have refused business travel to US. The world does too much unnecessary business travel.
*Fat Fucks with Flip Flops
Well, you can't see or eat the AI the Americans are spending all their money on.
You can experience it from home. It's underwhelming.
Air traffic to USA down 8.9% is very significant, and way beyond any statistical variance or uncertainty. Numbers at that scale tend to change slowly, so by that perspective 8.9% is a lot.
And ironically the Canadian economy is up 2.6% in Q3, and industrial production is up 3.3%. And inflation is down to 2.2%!!
So Canada is doing very well on major economic markers despite the sanctions from USA.
USA on the other hand is not, and Trump is so embarrassed he won't even allow his fudged numbers to be released.
I call them fudged because he fires people who release "bad" numbers, because Trump claims bad numbers are fake.
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none of this apparent success is helping cost of living in Canada.
Except lower inflation is doing exactly that.
Most of the world has been through a period of increased inflation, but Europe is getting it under control now, and apparently so is Canada. So yes this should definitely be helping.
My in laws have a second home in the US and have been faithfully going back and forth pretty regularly to maintain it.
Now we’re finally getting to the point where they’re uncertain about going and talking about selling it.
I think there’s a lot of people coming a bit late to the party. I don’t think we’ve stabilized those numbers yet.
It's always been stupid how CDNs spent billions in the US for vacation travel.
However, all this has made vacationing in Canada unaffordable, especially with Boomers gouging on AirBNB for their shacks by Mosquito Lake. Finding cottages for summer 2026 has already ended by September 2025.
Everyone considering visiting the US should ask themselves some serious questions: is my visit so important that it’s worth the risk of being jailed for years? What if I unknowingly break an insignificant law and catch ICEs attention? Do my skin color/religious beliefs put me at greater risk of abuse? What are the possible repercussions for the people I’m visiting, and my loved ones back home?
They can talk about numbers being “down”, but frankly, 1.2 million is WAY too fucking many.
How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM
Telefoncek.si • How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM
NanoKVM is a hardware KVM switch developed by the Chinese company Sipeed. Released last year, it enables remote control of a computer or server using a virtu...telefoncek.si
and runs a heavily stripped-down version of Linux that lackssystemdandapt.
Ok, that's a plus in my book. Probably Alpine (often used in containers) or something.
Edit: cut the first question into another one, since this one here likely derails into a System discussion.
Scope creep and not-invented-here syndrome; replaces a lot of unix/gnu tooling/specifications with poorer ones, while shitting on some that made nix great. Which is why your distro is either Systemd or not, and not-Systemd distros still need wrappers and shims, because Systemd *also enforces some things in apps.
Then there was only hackjob SysV scripts or Systemd, so it's understandable that most big distros switched to it but now there's s6, runit, Dinit and you need to create a extra distro for them for above reasons. I'm using Artix btw.
Can't speak to him, but I have used unix-like software since the 1990s.
The entire UNIX philosophy boils down to one simple fact. Everything is a file.
This makes maintenance a breeze as no special tools are needed.
You don't need to install anything to read log files.
You can pull a hard drive from a dead system, and just read all the logs.
Most of systemd is just a solution in search of a problem.
Apalrd has done some great "popular computer science" videos on the various remote KVM devices that is well worth looking up. One of them specifically goes into the ridiculously sketchy methods that are used to fetch and execute unsigned code in random buckets to handle firmware updates.
But as for the mic? Honestly, if you open up a LOT of consumer devices you are going to find random microphones. Not because they are all secretly spying on you. But because they use "off the shelf" chips and boards that already have those embedded. Especially since microphones and speakers are kind of the same hardware in most cases and we ALL love a good beep.
I 100% agree the software stack shouldn't be on there. But, as the blog post points out, there is a LOT of developmental code and packages in that image that shouldn't be. It is likely just a case of not removing unnecessary packages from the base image.
Because... the entire point of a device like this is that you plug it in somewhere you aren't. MAYBE JetKVM corp can hear me muttering profanity or wondering where I left that USB c splitter when I am trying to assemble it the first time. The rest of the time? It is plugged into the back of a server that I am booting up so that I can install proxmox without having to drag a monitor over. And while you can potentially get some juicy info out of that? It is not at all worth the hassle to set up fake companies and market a fake (moderately high demand in the right circles) device.
Yeah you 100% have the right of this. Not a secret at all and very clearly documented on their github.
github.com/sipeed/sipeed_wiki/…
GitHub - sipeed/NanoKVM: Affordable, Multifunctional, Nano RISC-V IP-KVM
Affordable, Multifunctional, Nano RISC-V IP-KVM. Contribute to sipeed/NanoKVM development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Note: Out of the 256MB memory in SG2002, 158MB is currently allocated for the multimedia subsystem, which NanoKVM will use for video image acquisition and processing.
To summarize: the device is riddled with security flaws, originally shipped with default passwords, communicates with servers in China, comes preinstalled with hacking tools, and even includes a built-in microphone - fully equipped for recording audio - without clear mention of it in the documentation. Could it get any worse?I am pretty sure these issues stem from extreme negligence and rushed development rather than malicious intent. However, that doesn’t make them any less concerning.
Slop everywhere. As far as the eye can see.
(though JavaScript JIT must be enabled)
How did they manage this? Is there a JS command to check that?
I disabled JIT/ion in my FF profiles, because js got so complex that it only speeds up the heavy webapps i avoid and has huge security concerns otherwise.
I had several IOT smart plugs that have GPS built in.
why? why would it need to know its exact geographic location?!
after that I created an entire hardware segmented network that's specifically used for IOT and cameras.
last I checked the router/firewall it's on has blocked over 11million requests a month trying to access the outside.
I will never have a "smart" device in my home that's connected to the internet. I'll live like it's the 1930s if I ever have to.
Yeah. Believe it or not but the sex pest who actively didn't warn his contemporaries about the impact of the honey plugin and who now advertises on kiwi farms might be kind of a piece of shit who will say anything for a buck?
And now for a word from d-brand!
Obviously never rely on a single source before buying something, but this isn't news. See the other dude's comment lemmy.world/comment/20879776
Yeah you 100% have the right of this. Not a secret at all and very clearly documented on their github.
github.com/sipeed/sipeed_wiki/…
GitHub - sipeed/NanoKVM: Affordable, Multifunctional, Nano RISC-V IP-KVM
Affordable, Multifunctional, Nano RISC-V IP-KVM. Contribute to sipeed/NanoKVM development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I had a server that was off, when I booted it the bios was in Chinese. Although someone did say that motherboard had a flaw that would do that, I wasn’t Sure if it was the KVM or the motherboard, but still…
It could probably change the language selector.
If I'm an elite hacker spy who works for the hacker spy division of the Chinese army, am I going to change the system language of the thing I am hacking to Chinese and forget to change it back?
Samsung reveals first tri-fold phone
Samsung Announces its First Tri-Fold Foldable Phone
Samsung has announced the Galaxy Z TriFold, a foldable phone comprised of three ultra-thin (~4mm) panels and two sets of hinges, that unfolds into a 10-inch tablet. When closed, it resembles a standard smartphone with a 6.5-inch display that is 12.Rich Brome (Phone Scoop)
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Well phones already vibrate so they're ahead of the curve in that regard.
I'm waiting for the twelvefold myself.
I'm waiting for the twelvefold myself
The Samsung Origami
6 little Samsungs twirling on a branch
Eating lots of iPhones on my uncles ranch
You know that old children's tale from the sea
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You had me and then you lost me.
Samsung’s Most Versatile AI Phone, Powered by the Largest Screen
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When you try to look at a spreadsheet and there are too many columns even in portrait mode, I open up the phone.
For some reason nobody figured out "zoom all the way out" functionality on the phone yet
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Honestly I feel this was always the goal (one of several), but R&D is expensive. Shipping an odd phone that people still buy keeps the shareholders happy while the multi-year research process can eventually produce more usable results.
Single-flip phones were the awkward teenagers, now this phone can be the 18-20 age young adult, fully featured, but needing refinement. Next gen or the one after this will add a lot more robustness.
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Sales figures and market trends suggest most people do not, in fact, want a keyboard.
You might want a keyboard on your phone. Lots of people here might want a keyboard on their phone. People on Lemmy are not most people.
people want a keyboard on a phone not more foldsI don’t give a shit what most people want
🤔
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Statement with no substance. What do you desire that's not there?
Aside from the screen being softer and easier to scratch, name a practical difference between this and another 10" Android tablet...
If a 10" tablet meets your desires, and your desire to fold it and put it in your pocket, what's left?
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A lot of the issue with foldable is the non-standard aspect ratio. This gets to a standard tablet aspect ratio, so should run out of the box with most apps without additional modification.
Also DEX support on-device means it can run fully windowed applications and use mouse and keyboard natively, which is a big boost in functionality for productivity applications.
DEX is actually pretty good when used with a keyboard and external monitor. I also dont love thr Samsung walled garden, but I end up buying their products because I use my phones for several years at a time before replacing them so top end hardware specs are a priority and especially cameras.
I would go Sony but the data band support in the US is incomplete, and I can't get caught out by poor cell service while traveling.
I am considering going Pixel next but Graphene hasn't been announced for Pixel 10 yet so I'm a bit on the fence, I guess I could buy an older model and give it a try wifi only for a bit to see how I like it.
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No word on if it's coming to the EU 🙁
My pixel 6 is dying and I'd like to get something for graphene or another less monopolized distro but there's no support for phones released this year as far as I can tell from most distros so I'm looking for one more normal phone until hopefully that ecosystem is better off.
Even the new pixels look weak from several angles
It was hard to get want them after all the reviews came in.
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all the modern features I want
What are those? Because the difference between midrange and top of the line has been shrinking from year to year.
the best processor
What do you do with your phone that needs the best processor? Maybe you have some special use case, but the vast majority of people don't need the best processor - often that's a case of chasing the shiny new thing.
I mean I don't have a laundry list but like:
- all day battery, doesn't seem Fairphone hits this exactly. When I'm vacationing I'm using my phone constantly to map and translate and record so it's the single biggest thing I want in a phone.
- a great camera, until I get a standalone shooter this is what I got. This is a great argument for a Fairphone because it's on the cheaper side.
- a large screen, ideally the largest I can possibly get. I joke that I won't be happy until I can unfold a 72 inch OLED from my pocket. So bright, colorful, OLED, fast refresh and variable refresh, and big.
- wireless charging. I really like the idea of the pixel snap feature. That would be a big selling point for me.
- great processor. I don't play phone games a ton but my current phone turns into a toaster on an idle game and that's unacceptable. Would like to not worry about performance.
- USB C, think everything has this these days.
- dual speakers, I listen to things when cooking so good speakers are actually nice. All the casting that used to be so easy seems like it's gotten harder these days.
- if someone other than apple would offer the lidar camera setup they've got, or whatever allows them to get a good topographical scan that would be a big selling point.
Again, not really exhaustive, but I'd consider myself a pretty normal consumer with a larger budget and a recognition that I use my phone more than any other device in my life so I might as well make it good.
Fair phone is compelling, especially compared to getting an expensive folding phone, but I'm not sold yet. You guys have definitely given me something to think about though as my screen continues to dim.
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It's comments like this that make me worried about literacy rates and reading comprehension.
I want to replace my Pixel with a cutting edge phone that is user friendly, repairable, highly private, has all the features I like, and whose company is owned by its workers and not evil.
That phone doesn't exist.
So now we talk priorities. With Google looking to close down android, I want something more open than stock android. My options are very limited. Graphene only works on the pixel line and not even the newest pixels, which are very underwhelming, so that's not a great fit. LineageOS doesn't seem to support any new phones albeit I didn't cross reference every phone. The nothing phone, and every other competitor, seems lackluster as well.
So I've resigned to settling for any phone that's cutting edge. If this is going to hopefully be my last mega evil corpo phone, I've been flirting with going with multiple screens because I doubt in 3 years there will be a non-corpo folding phone option if the normal slabs are still struggling. Samsung only "comes to mind", and this might surprise or confound you, because we're commenting on a thread about a Samsung phone.
If anyone has better recommendations for a last corpo phone out now or on the horizon, I'm all ears. And if someone wants to try and convince me there's a great phone out there that can run a non-stock OS and still be a largely enjoyable experience I'm also ready to be wow'ed. But I've looked around a bit and failed to find anything.
So I've resigned to settling for any phone that's cutting edge.
If you drop the "cutting edge" condition instead, you could grab a Fairphone, which ticks all the other checkboxes.
Unless you game on your phone, you won't notice a thing between modern high end and low end phones as long as they put enough RAM in.
Samsung is the opposite of everything you mentioned besides cutting edge.
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They could have also reread my original message. They could have also commented something meaningful even with the wrong initial reading.
They could have asked for clarification, additional context, or anything else useful.
Instead their comment was... Idk how I would describe it. An attempt to insult? An unhelpful observation?
Its the opposite of being an ally, of helping people break from their chains, to misread their position and then write something snarky. Idk, I think people who make online spaces exhausting or worse deserve a few more insults in their life. Especially if they're not being helpful.
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Considering everyone I know with a folding phone has had a fault with the folding part of it - I don't think its the best idea from a durability standpoint to add yet another folding part.
If one screen or fold point breaks, you're now left with two unusable (but perfectly functioning) screens. Seems like an expensive gimmick to me.
Mine grew a visible line at the foldy bit that you can see at an angle.
I like the phone though, just know what you're getting into.
From the moment I saw it, I knew what the problem would be, and surprise! That's the problem.
BTW, I'm a musician, not an engineer. If I saw that obvious issue, what is their fucking problem?
If I saw that obvious issue, what is their fucking problem?
The engineer's problem is that the marketing and sales department started running all of the companies two decades ago. So, they're constantly overruled.
The foldable phone are fine, yet expensive and not so widely used.
And who asked for it? They very well know that nobody will buy that.
Just get a tablet at this point.
If it didn't cost so much and the hinges and screens were as reliable as a phone without them, I'd buy it.
Having a big screen in the size of a normal phone would be great.
At the current prices and reliability though, the market is sure to be small.
Same here. I didn't understand why anyone would want a double thick (or now triple thick 🫨) phablet that folds out into a full tablet.
The razr I bought two years ago is the first phone that comfortably fits in my pocket in like a decade.
damn! I love my fold 5, but only cause the front screen is slim. not a fan of the standard screen size on the front of this one but a 10 inch tablet in my pocket is intriguing....
ill wait for the second or third generation to come out before I consider this
You want 2-3 phones instead of a folding phone. Light pocketable phone for actual mobile purposes. Can get a data only esim phone with voip to supplement voice/text phone, and have independent enabled data. independent charging. Backup when broken/lost phone. I suggest:
1-2 lightweight phones for mobility.
1 large possibly rugged phone for video or rugged adventures. Can be steam deck on a stand that is better setup as a dashboard. email + web tickers/discord. samsung and other phones also have a "desktop multiwindow mode"
3rd phones, can help with having 2 separate phones act as bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. Keep banking/secret stuff seperate/more secure during travel. Keep one in a locked tilt/swivel stand near bed most of the time. mod to alternate os.
2 or 3 phones is much more storage/ram and audio quality than including a tablet, with better portability options in both packing and daily use. It's also much less $, and can leapfrog upgrades.
Can't speak for the TriFold, but I easily get a full day out of my Fold 7, even with Battery Protection set to 85%. I usually end my day with a 40% charge, which is considerably better than my last phone (Fold 4). Easily over 1.5x more battery life.
That said, I miss the pre-Android/iOS days; back then I was charging my phone maybe once a week.
I don't need origami for a phone. Just bring back classic flip phones or stop. FFS
Yeah, even as a foldable enthusiast, I see no reason for this to exist. A second hinge is just another failure point.
Wake me up when the first cylindrical, rollable phone comes out. Until then, I'm happy with my Fold 7.
Imagine the possibilities!
- Heated camping mattress
- Sausage roll warmer
- Car windscreen defroster
This would be the coolest shit ever if these phones didn't have a reputation for breaking so easily. I had the Z Fold 4 and after I left it partially folded for about 30 mins in my car while I was driving, something went wrong with the hinge and it could no longer open fully flat. Unacceptable for a device at that price range.
I want us to go back when it comes to smartphones, not forward. Bring back the holy trinity of removable battery, headphone jack, and SD card slot.
Yawn. Samsung can have more money and attention from me when theyhave something i want. Give it 5 years.
A few ideas: A) projector! They are like $99 on Amazon now, put in phone. B) and app that pairs w Google glasses to count calories and nutrition of everything I eat all day. C) faraday cage setting D) no bloatware C) idk, im content... anyone else have ideas?
An flashlight concentrates it's light in a small cone, a projector must spread it over a larger area, while still being brighter than the ambient light if you want to use it as a projector. Take a guess why any good projectors cost more and use expensive hardware, instead of "hurr durr let's just juse a 10 cents flashlight LED!1!!"
There are YouTube channels who review cheap temu tech, and some of them also did cheap projectors, with the expected results.
The outside display is just about 21:9 and internal about 4:3, sounds like it's an ultimate retro gaming handheld. Lack of SD card support is a pain though
For folds, I like the old flip phone style flips better. The only puzzling thing with those ones are why keep the front facing camera when the rear cameras have a display on that half on the phone. The outer display on this is 6.5". It's not a compromise in size at all like the flips/razrs. Internal screen shouldn't have a selfie camera either
I know a person who has some Samsung foldable phone that is as of right now (2025.12.03) about a year old. According to them, everything was fine since February when the phone was bought. But last week we got below 0C weather, so the fold line on the screen got layers separated.
Z Fold 7 is 2000 euro. They might have Z Fold 6, I am not sure. Regardless, that is way too expensive of a phone to breaks under a mildly cold weather.
It's really not. The screen is 4k OLED. It's a perfect display. The tech had one tiny downside when it first launched which wasn't the crease was relatively noticeable, that's a long since fixed issue.
The only people who think folding phones are a gimmick are people who have never had them. Or and apple users who want one but can't get over the fact that Apple doesn't make them.
Who wouldn't want a phone that can change size on demand. How is that not a useful feature? Sci-fi is full of transparent screens which are objectively terrible, but folding is useful.
After reading through the comments and seeing the majority of people are commenting negatively but have never had a folding phone. i feel like i should chime in.
I have owns a fold 3 a fold 6 and now a fold 7, my wife has a fold 5 and we have never had one fail on us. No broken screens, no scratches or bugs. There are also several people where i work who have had at least 2 generations of these phones and also have never had issues.
I know these things break, but so does any phone. Phones breaking tend to be a user problem and not a hardware one. If you dont handle with care then you are the problem.
In fact i have only ever broken 1 phone in my 20+ years of using them and it was entirely my fault. I put it on a book on a table, then without thinking i lifted the book and it slid off and landed in a bucket of water. Pixel 1 not waterproof. My bad.
I guess i just think people are quick to judge these phones without ever having used one and i think thats so short sighted.
I had my fold 3 for 4 years and my wife used it to get a feel for them after me and she very quickly got a 5. I had some of the paint chip off in places after a few years and one time that i got scared by something and jumped a bit and threw it out of my hand to the ground with the inner screen open (only cosmetic damage to the body) it survived a lot. A hell of a lot of engineering went into the hinge so its pretty much the strongest part of the phone. Jerryrigeverything on youtube has tried to snap these phones and they are very strong and so far have not broken in one of his tests.
Any phone can break, but i say if you care for your phone it should last. The 3 onwards have been really solid phones and the fears around them, to me, seem made up.
Pretty soon Samsung is going to release a foldable that can become an imax screen. You just need to unfold it 1000 times, and you're set. It also needs to be unfolded 4 times to be able to answer a call, or use the 1.2 back screen to do that.
When in doubt, just add more fold.
Also AI will fake all your pictures and you can gloat that it’s “better.” Fuck Samsung.
Before you downvote, consider this shit.
Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon
A Reddit post has revealed just how much post-processing the Galaxy S23’s camera applies when it detects it’s taking a photo of the Moon, inserting extra detail that isn’t present in reality.James Vincent (The Verge)
This means that there is a wrong way to fold the phone, but the phone has automatic vibrating and visual alerts to keep you from doing that
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Lemme know when they are able to fold a phone 13 times and break the record.
I do love the idea of having a 10" tablet that fits into my pocket.
I'm still waiting for the tech to mature more, come down in price, and increase in durability though.
Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government
Deloitte allegedly cited AI-generated research in a million-dollar report for a Canadian provincial government
In a healthcare report aimed to address a nurse and doctor shortage, Deloitte cited several fake studies with real researchers’ names attached.Nino Paoli (Fortune)
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But they will kick back to me 30% of a fat contract. And when things go south I will blame Deloitte. So why would I change my highly lucrative for me behavior?
I won't.
Yeah fuck these guys wasting our money on this hot garbage.
""The revelation comes on the heels of news last month that Deloitte leveraged AI in a $290,000 report published in July to help the Australian government crack down on welfare. But a researcher flagged hallucinations in the 237-page study, which included references to nonexistent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.
In the revised study, which was quietly uploaded to the Australian government’s website, the consulting firm admitted it had used the generative AI language system Azure OpenAI to help create the report.""
Yeah fuck these guys wasting our money on this hot garbage.
It's ok, we'll just cut cancer research, again.
Whew.
The thing about these incidents that I find most interesting is that they basically reveal a widely held suspicion among many people that these government contractors are over-crexentialed bullshit artists.
This just shows what we've all suspected: they've been cutting corners, claiming underserved authority, and making up shit for years. But now some folks are checking and reporting on it.
I hope we demand a refund and fire them.
What a waste of money, I hate these companies and I hate that our government keeps using them.
I get they’re all scared of fixed costs but at this point how much have we wasted on these companies? They could have hired 7-10 full time employees at $80-$100k for a year for the cost of this one report. They could have hired 4-6 highly qualified professionals for that cost. They could have hired some really good term employees.
How many reports like this are we wasting resources on?
Newfoundland and Labrador is the province involved.
Had to read far too deep into the poorly written article to find that important bit of context.
ipv6now.com.au/primers/IPv6Rea…
Basically, Legacy IP (v4) is a dead end. Under the original allocation scheme, it should have ran out in the early 1990s. But the Internet explosion meant TCP/IP(v4) was locked in, and so NAT was introduced to stave off address exhaustion. But that caused huge problems to this day, like mismanagement of firewalls and the need to do port-forwarding. It also broke end-to-end connectivity, which requires additional workarounds like STUN/TURN that continue to plague gamers and video conferencing software.
And because of that scarcity, it's become a land grab where rich companies and countries hoard the limited addresses in circulation, creating haves (North America, Europe) and have-nots (Africa, China, India).
The want for v6 is technical, moral, and even economical: one cannot escape Big Tech or American hegemony while still having to buy IPv4 space on the open market. Czechia and Vietnam are case studies in pushing for all-IPv6, to bolster their domestic technological familiarity and to escape the broad problems with Business As Usual.
Accordingly, there are now three classes of Internet users: v4-only, dual-v4-and-v6, and v6-only. Surprisingly, v6-only is very common now on mobile networks for countries that never had many v4 addresses. And it's an interop requirement for all Apple apps to function correctly in a v6-only environment. At a minimum, everyone should have access to dual-stack IP networks, so they can reach services that might be v4-only or v6-only.
In due course, the unstoppable march of time will leave v4-only users in the past.
SIDN - Het bedrijf achter .nl
In 8 years' time, Czech government websites won't be accessible using IPv4. From then on, people without IPv6 won't be able to reach the nation's IPv6-only sites. No absolute requirement to use IPv6 yet exists in NL.SIDN
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I'm not an expert, so somebody may be able to give better responses.
It looks like IPv6 addresses have access to all 65,000 ports, whereas IPv4 addresses need to 'forward' them. I don't know about other VPNs, but the one I'm using only allows forwarding 1 port at a time and I don't get to choose it.
With IPv6, I hope to be able to have multiple ports open to make it easier to host multiple services.
Port forwarding is a function of NAT. It’s only needed because there aren’t enough ipv4 addresses for every device, so in most networks a lot of devices share a single ip and specific ports are forwarded to specific internal hosts
IPv6 has a large enough address space that this isn’t needed. You can still do it if you want. But mostly you just need a firewall without any NAT.
There’s more to it than this but you should get the idea.
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You responded to a question with an incorrect answer. I was correcting that.
VPNs shouldn’t need to forward any ports when using ipv6. They can provide an entire ipv6 subnet to you.
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The main benenfit is not having to deal with NAT. You get your own address and your traffic is not conflated with other people's.
You also get privacy extensions. Your device generates a temporary address for making outgoing connections. The address has no listening sockets. This means that you cannot get portscanned by every website you visit.
You don't need to try and figure out your external IP address. There's no differentiation between internal/external addresses. They're all global, as the internet was intended.
You can throw as many IP addresses on an interface as you want. If you want to run two web servers from one machine, you can have multiple addresses with different services on port 443.
You might also try asking on !ipv6@lemmy.world .
Be advised that even if a VPN offers IPv6, they may not necessarily offer it sensibly. For example, some might only give you a single address (aka a routed /128). That might work for basic web fetching but it's wholly inadequate if you wanted the VPN to also give addresses to any VMs, or if you want each outbound connection to use a unique IP. And that's a fair ask, because a normal v6 network can usually do that, even though a typical Legacy IP network can't.
Some VPNs will offer you a /64 subnet, but their software might not check if your SLAAC-assigned address is leaking your physical MAC address. Your OS should have privacy-extensions enabled to prevent this, but good VPN software should explicitly check for that. Not all software does.
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From what I've read, he primary concern with VPNs that do not support IPv6 is leakage. If a user’s device tries to access an IPv6 resource while connected to a VPN that only routes IPv4 traffic, the IPv6 packets can escape the VPN tunnel. This exposes the user's real IP address to external servers, undermining the privacy that the VPN is supposed to provide. Some servers have moved to strictly IPv6. Some servers only accept IPv4.
Some of you networking gods set me straight.
Reddit was the playground for ai slop long before commercial LLMs existed. Subredditsimulator was like 2014 or 2015 and people were fucking with markov chains and other shit that dated back to like the 90s or even 70s but that also had some people experimenting with rudimentary neural networks, though obviously none with the computing power of shit like chatgpt or gemini. And obviously that whole experiment was inspired in part by the fact that botted comments were becoming increasingly common and obvious on reddit in the years leading to it, so why not make a subreddit where everyone participating is a bot?
There’s no proof but openai researchers may have been fucking around on that sub. There was a fairly drastic increase in quality of posts in that sub around the time openai would’ve been making gpt1 (2018ish) and then they began aggressively scraping the entirety of reddit, quora, etc for content. Could just be a coincidence though and they’ll never confirm it even if it’s true bc redditors will flip shit
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Right now I don't have a reddit account and I just lurk there, but if I really wanted to talk about, say, a specific TV show I like, or a Movie, or Anime, or a Book... that would not exist on the fediverse. It's either just Reddit or maybe Discord.
If I wanna talk about stuff from a non-white perspective, the best place I'd really find my people outside the great firewall is Reddit.
I mean I the amount of Cantonese-speakers on Lemmy is like... single-digits
but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
And if they do exist, there are 4 subscribers and zero posts in the last 6 months.
I use redlib to lurk.
I find the drama subs like /r/AITAH entertaining. I know its all fake, but the groupthink responses are intriguing.
For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.
On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.
That’s 54 kilojoules.
…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.
And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.
Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.
But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.
Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that's part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.
you should feel ashamed but not for resembling an AI...
there is no reason to ever use a semicolon
And fuck his weird teeth.
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn't exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he'd have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That's absolutely hilarious.
spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
I don't especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was "don't break Reddit".
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit's first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can't sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don't want to make or enforce such a rule.
one of the most human spaces left on the internet
Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.
I'm not going to read the article on account of time right now but I'm guessing it's written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn't happen.
It hasn't been human since the early 2010s. Reddit was botted to death long before LLMs.
Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.
But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.
Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.
Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it's human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.
Now, it's all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction
They're here, too.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?" That seem pretty likely to just be bots trying to generate data on certain topics for AI training. Thankfully, most people seem to ignore them.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?"
Fuck. Am I a bot?
Repost bots should be built in to Reddit tbh
Just take whatever was the top 5 a year ago and repost it at the same time
Karma guaranteed
Lately there's been someone chopping chives every day and posting a photo of the result.
There was a bit of a drama when someone noticed that the same photo was reused from a couple of weeks back.
The poster said they didnt have time to do it that day but wanted to keep the streak so they just re-posted an old one hoping no one would notice.
It was just such an amazing and engaging sequence of events and I feel fulfilled having been able to follow this roller coaster of emotion /s.
We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.
…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.
Letting gallowboob "moderate" the basically the whole front page was an insane decision. Some of those guys were selling product placement.
The centralization of power to few mods was always a problem, but smaller communities got by.
The huge quality drop came when Spez felt he missed the IPO wave around 2018 and decided to growth hack the site. Then they finally killed most of them too with the API drama.
Popular and moving away from hot to best was also bad. They horribly failed to discipline abuse from the_donald for years...
New reddit is still not even usable from a phone. It crashes frequently and i swaer to God it only shows like 8 posts and just fucking loops through them (how have thry not noticed this, I only check 4 subreddits and its unbearable).
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Oh, I've looked back. It's hard not to rubberneck at such a horrendous train wreck. Especially when I was just a passenger on that very train.
I left reddit during the great API massacre as well, then I went back to only be taken out by the great Trump massacre of '24 where they banned a huge chuck of the community that had any anti-trump sentiments in their profile history...because Trump threatened them.
Now I have been banned 6 more times, just by AI detecting language it doesn't like and its catalogue of dislike only continues to grow.
They pretend that humans are reviewing ban appeals, it is clear that they are not. The AI is banning more people than they could possibly keep up with. Now, more often than not, there is no reply to ban appeals whatsoever.
Spez is a spineless coward who threw the reddit community overboard a long time ago and continues to do so whenever it suits him. Reddit exists only to shit money for him now.
It has been left twisted and corrupted in favor of the conquest for money and controlling public opinion
I'll be back to fight the good fight just as soon as I can create a new account and switch VPNs
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like "i have this tells tl detect AI" would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
Exactly. This is like blaming rats and cockroaches for dirty town.
No, they won't be there (as much) in a cleaner town.
Yeah, I've noticed an uptic of AI generated content being posted outside the AI circle jerk subreddits. Places like the AoE4 and Bionicle subreddits have had quite a number of AI posts already.
Theyve become too courageous, with others going out of the way to defend the use of generative AI with weak arguments like "but cars also steal jobs".
The one subreddit that I've seen have a healthy response against AI generated content is the Bionicle subreddit. Doesn't really surprise me as the Bionicle community is full of creatives.
"stealing jobs" is a weak argument itself, that can always happen with new technology.
The real argument is that people create something uncreative and unthoughtful and therefore slop. AI doesnt make uncreative people creative.
Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That's why I left.
The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.
Let’s be real…Reddit itself is moderated by AI.
People who moderate subs should be called “hall monitors” or something. It’s rare to find moderators who are actually moderating with impartiality, rather that being petty and taking sides. They also have tools to exploit the Reddit auto-mod system.
It was enshitified ages ago.
There's no point in taking moderation seriously. It's a volunteer position and the tools to handle slop aren't there.
I hear they're bringing back digg.
I also hear it's a former Reddit C-suite that's bringing it back, so it'll probably be more of the same.
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Nazi sympathizing has already ruined Reddit.
That shithole has been sanitized for advertisers, which means banning anyone who talks about resisting the fascist slide America is currently in but allows /r/conservative to exist for foreign actors to spread misinformation from.
Fuck Reddit, fuck Spez, those Nazi fucks will get what’s coming to them if we’re lucky.
After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys
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As a theoretical avenue of thought, I'm not sure there's much harm for 11-17 year olds to talk to "smart" toys with no internet connectivity (at all, in principle, no fucking way) about that stuff. Not much different from Elisa. They are seeking and finding pretty explicit things on the Internet, with their peers, in media. It's not a question of whether they should, it's a fact that they predominantly do.
I live in a big city, but I've been to a smaller town nearby a couple of years ago, sitting on a bench after one LARP event and listening to a bunch of teens (13-15 years old) discussing everyone they were seeing passing by, and, eh, it was pretty clear they don't just discuss sex. It's funny to remember some specific phrases, but it was pretty depressing to sit there then, because when they weren't talking about sex, they were talking about SCP and footy, and all the time I was thinking of a polite excuse to leave, until I just left. Made a friend, though.
You're assuming that whatever they're talking to is capable of giving only good advice with awareness and consideration of their living situation.
Sex education is beneficial if done well, but there is zero evidence suggesting AI can do anything well.
$16.7bn global smart-toy market
HOLY FUCK, I always though that the toy market was cheaper, since I mean, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT TOYS, I didn't even know that SO many people still pay for toys.
I didn't even know that SO many people still pay for toys.
There's not many alternatives for kids
I have a kid but he's at the stage where the greatest level of entertainment can be derived by sticking things up his nose.
I won't get him smart anything as a toy.
Anyone who works in IT wouldn't want that, like most cyber security professionals everything in my house is either analogue (door locks, fire alarm) or not internet connected, I have a smart TV but it's not connected to the internet and if I want to watch Netflix I just hook it up to the PS5 which basically is a media streaming service.
Veronica Explains why she doesn't stream (from Netflix etc) #algorithmic_helplessness_sucks
I'm one of those hipsters who doesn't use streaming services.I did, a while ago, but I quit using them because the experience is kind of awful, and I'm happier now for it. I collect physical media and watch it using Jellyfin on my Linux-based home theater PC, and I'm completely satisfied with how it works.
I'm making this video because I am really troubled by algorithmic helplessness, and I feel like corporate-centralized streaming media makes that worse. Maybe this video will encourage someone else to cut the cord and rediscover an appreciation for owning your media and being choosy about what to "watch next". Or maybe I'm just wasting time. Who knows? I suppose, you know, you're reading this description, right?
If you read the description, say "algorithmic helplessness sucks" in the comments. That'll make me feel better.
I stream nothing, and I am happy.
I'm one of those hipsters who doesn't use streaming services.I did, a while ago, but I quit using them because the experience is kind of awful, and I'm happier now for it. I collect physical media and watch it using Jellyfin on my Linux-based home theater PC, and I'm completely satisfied with how it works.
I'm making this video because I am really troubled by algorithmic helplessness, and I feel like corporate-centralized streaming media makes that worse. Maybe this video will encourage someone else to cut the cord and rediscover an appreciation for owning your media and being choosy about what to "watch next". Or maybe I'm just wasting time. Who knows? I suppose, you know, you're reading this description, right?
If you read the description, say "algorithmic helplessness sucks" in the comments. That'll make me feel better.
Oh right, I need to tell you about the things I mentioned in the video.
Software:
- MakeMKV: makemkv.com/
- To support MakeMKV and get all the advanced features: makemkv.com/buy/
- That LibreDrive forum post on the MakeMKV website which is hard to find (contains list of LibreDrive compatible drives): forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewto…
- Handbrake: handbrake.fr/
- Asunder: littlesvr.ca/asunder/
- Jellyfin: jellyfin.org/
- Kodi: kodi.tv
- Finamp (via GitHub): github.com/jmshrv/finampHardware I mentioned - not sponsored and no affiliate links.
(These drives might not be currently available at Micro Center, but I'm providing these links as they're probably the most helpful if you want to find one yourself.)
- My LG portable Blu-Ray drive, a BP60NB10: microcenter.com/product/607144…
- And my internal Asus BW-16D1HT drive: microcenter.com/product/435513…
- FLIRC receiver (I don't remember if I bought it here but maybe): pishop.us/product/flirc-rpi-us…Other links of note:
- 13 minutes of videotaped footage of the Wii Netflix app:
- Video about smart TVs by @[url=https://indieweb.social/users/lonseidman]Lon Seidman / Lon.TV ☑️[/url] :
- My PeerTube (watch this video without ads or tracking): tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaex…
- My blog post about how I use Handbrake: vkc.sh/handbrake-2025/Lastly, links to support my very unsponsored videos:
- Patreon: patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
- Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
- Bandcamp: thestopbits.bandcamp.comChapters:
0:00 My motivation for ditching streaming
3:21 Physical media is awesome
4:05 Ripping media
5:59 Serving with Jellyfin
7:09 Bookstores and libraries are lit (get it?)
8:10 I don't want an algorithm programming us.The Free Software Media System | Jellyfin
The volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached.jellyfin.org
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The thing I hated about Netflix was the stress of knowing i was being watched with my viewing habits and that affected how they decided to cancel or continue shows.
Imagine being a customer at a restaurant and the chef is in the back watching you eat, saying things like:
"well, if he doesn't eat the whole thing in less than 10 minutes that means he probably hated it and won't continue to buy more burgers, so we should just remove it from the menu now and never serve that burger again."
Who the fuck wants to 'relax' and watch stuff when i know if I start watching something and stop after episode 1 because I liked it, realize my partner might also like it, and I wait 3 months to watch it together (not within their 30 day or whatever window), knowing that might contribute to Netflix canceling a show that I fucking liked in the first place!
SO RELAXING GUYS!
So no, I don't stream stuff anymore. I'm sick of paying for content that constantly gets canceled, and also experiencing stress while doing so.
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I mean... that IS how restaurants work. If people don't order the fish of the day then they buy fewer and fewer fishes until it is no longer a thing. Even the speed people eat DOES matter since restaraunts tend to be designed around each customer spending a certain amount of time dining. Too short and they will never order a dessert. Too long and they are costing you money while they nurse that coffee.
And similar happens with even buying blu-rays. If nobody bought Master and Commander in 4k then you can be sure that experiment would be over. Instead? That thing sold like toiler paper during COVID and we'll likely see more "prestige" releases with a huge dose of FOMO.
As for up fronts versus long tails? Guess what is motivating all those revivals "nobody asked for"?
Don't get me wrong. I vastly prefer to rip blu rays to my NAS and watch via plex. But the idea that you are somehow no longer part of the marketing cycle is just... wrong.
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I'm commenting on literally being watched though, so let's say you get up to go to the bathroom after your first bite the chef marks that as 'didn't like his burger' because you took a bite (watched 1 episode) and didn't continue to binge eat the burger (binge the whole season by the end of the month), BAM because you had a life event you couldn't control, you now hate the burger and hate the show.
This is not a fun way to consume anything.
I mean... depending on how new an item is and what "tier" the restaurant is? They are 100% watching for stuff like that and probably making a note that you got up after eating only a quarter of your burger. Because if the burger were good, you would want to finish it. Is it too sloppy? Did you feel the need to wash your hands mid bite? Did it make you nauseous?
Same with taking out your phone. Does it look like you are telling a friend what a great burger you had? Or are you feeling bloated and trying to digest a bit before you eat more?
This level of market analysis is not at all new. Streaming services just have a much easier time automating it but... give it time until startups are selling cameras to monitor the dining area and automate analytics based on who ordered what and did what.
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Or you know, don't? And just live your life.
Because it only matters at an aggregate level. The restaurant won't change anything for one customer.
That was my polite way of ending the conversation, I disagreed with the person, but I got tired of arguing about the metaphore and burgers, etc with someone who was clearly not gonna let this go.
"I don't like being watched while consuming anything, really."
"Yeah, but bro, you're too stupid to realize why they're doing it, let me tell you why!"
Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data. And many of them are specifically designed to fulfill a role that industry standard tools aren't (or are too expensive for) and... guess where the data on that comes from?
The reality is that you cannot escape consumerism in the modern world. You can pretend you are but... you aren't. What you CAN do is focus on supporting tools and media that you want/approve of and making your own life better as a result.
And a big chunk of that involves actually thinking through consequences.
The reality is that you cannot escape consumerism in the modern world.
Didn't downvote you but, I guess what I was leaning heavily on was 'striving to be as self sufficient as humanly possible'. Sure, even though I grow my own food, garden crops, beef, chickens, goats, et al, I still have to buy things. I didn't mean it like I had transcended commercial consuming. But, do I really need a iPhone 17 pro max as much as AT&T says I do? Do I really need the cutting edge computer when the 14 year old one I built serves me just fine for what I do? That kind of stuff that people just seem to be compelled to purchase.
Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data.
I feel it is important to make a distinction here, though:
GitHub, the for-profit, non-FOSS, Microsoft-owned platform keeps track of the ‘stars of a repo’, not the open-source self-host projects themselves. Somebody hosts their repo forge on Codeberg, sr.ht, their own infrastructure or even GitLab? There’s generally very little to no algorithmic number-crunching involved. Same for MR/PRs.
Additionally - from my knowledge - very few fully FOSS programs have extensive usage/install telemetry, and even fewer opt-out versions. Tracking which couldn’t be disabled I’ve essentially never heard of in that space, because every time someone does go in that direction the public reaction is usually very strong (see e.g. Audacity).
That is a distinction without difference. It doesn't matter what mechanism is used to collect those metrics. The fact is they are there
And, at a glance: Forgejo/Codeberg definitely has stars and watches and fork tracking as well
Which is all fundamentally the supply and demand aspects of consumerism. It is the idea that people can identify what there is a high demand for and work to provide a supply. Which is not at all a bad thing and extends far beyond capitalism.
But it goes back to the previous poster's comments about how they don't like that netflix analyzes everything they do and greenlights projects based on that. That extends FAR beyond netflix and well into even open source projects.
Well, beyond organized legal avenues: national & local elections, writing your representatives, protesting, marching, I see no real recourse against a corrupted and compromised government, and my government is corrupted and compromised top to bottom, side to side. No one gets a pass. Not this administration, and none in the past. So, no matter who sits in the seat of authority, you will always feel the effects of a corrupt and compromised government.
It is not I you have to convince. It is millions of apathetic citizens, blown around by blustering, deceptive political winds, without compass or direction. Beyond not feeding the machine more than you have to while still scratching out a life on this planet like everyone else is, it is hard to make inroads that stick. This machine turns slowly. You see, there are still a majority of people in my country that are comfortable. Comfortable people do not illicit change....uncomfortable people do, but here is no change without pain. Pain is something that the citizens in my country are unwilling to put up with to a better goal. They do not act with the long term in mind. Their future is tied to once every 4 years, never contemplating that the legislation passed today, will be with us for generations, if not longer.
What's your take on scrobble services?
I don't like that one monopoly company gets all the data and abuses the system with it even further.
exactly this. i say PIR - Private Information Retrieval
offline everything, no middlehands
condition "the industry" as these are called to change the RND departement - live without dependency on fuckers
Side note, the restaurant analogy is exactly why I hate the seemingly American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through.
I guess that's a good analogy for how creepy surveillance capitalism is, it's like a waiter judging and recording your every move and reaction throughout the entire meal.
American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through
So that's what's going on! I was wondering why people are doing that everywhere I eat out all of a sudden. Bloody annoying. Me with a mouth full of food having to force out a "yhh shh rlly gwwd tnnk yww".
Gtfoutahurr
Not by reading pitchfork or rolling stone. Those are only for people who hate music.
Back in the aughts I would find bands because they were an opener for another band I was seeing.
I saw Joshua Ray Walker open for Marcus King and didn't even like his show but looked him up and found his recorded work to be incredible, THEN he found out he had cancer and that was part of why the live show was weak, nothing to do with his music, and says he is recovering now, but I felt so uncharitable thinking the show sucked when he was dealing with something so awful.
But anyway - I do use streaming but like you find bands other ways, opening acts, radio, sometimes Brooklyn Vegan, that site posts about bands I've never heard of, I listen and find stuff I like (and a lot I don't).
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but I remember finding the songs for mixtapes on… the radio
Back in the day, disk jockies would announce 'Alright, get your cassettes out, we're going to play the entire Led Zep - Kashmir LP, usually late at night.
But yeah. Crazy to think how quickly things changed.
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Music-Map - Find Similar Music
Music-Map is the similar music finder that helps you find similar bands and artists to the ones you love.www.music-map.com
NPR's tiny desk
asking your friends and aquantances
listening to dj sets
rutracker
I miss the days of people having their own bespoke collection of their favorite movies and shows. Everything is homogenized now. At least when I pirate, I'm still building my own personal media library. And I never have to worry about the show I like being removed later.
But I'm not gonna lie. The quality drop off in content caused by streaming services I think is a bigger issue
Netflix activity tries to make content that's not actually good enough to watch without browsing a phone. Second screen content, they call it. And I guarantee someone in a finance role realized they could make way more by doing just enough to keep people, rather than try to actively create amazing content, because it's soo much cheaper to not pay for good writers, or good set designers or actors when you could just find someone who's good enough. I think it's because the money people spend is recurring, linked to the service as a whole, and not linked to the individual work.. users have to vote by watching now, and some of the best stuff I've ever seen is also some of the least watched.
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I miss the days of people having their own bespoke collection of their favorite movies and shows
I don't miss the shelves to house all of it tho. Now, I have quite a collection of audio from my days of internet radio, that I ripped to flac a long time ago All of it sets on my shelf as a NAS.
Everything is homogenized now
I'm interested to know what you mean by this, because if anything, I've heard the older generations reminisce about ye olde monoculture when there was only a handful of good shows on a handful of television channels, and everyone would tune in weekly to watch and then talk about the next day around the water cooler. I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there's so many more shows being made.
I’ve heard the older generations reminisce about ye olde monoculture
We old folks most often reminisce through very dark, rose colored glasses which often leave out important negative features of days past.
I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.
I'm not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.
Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.
But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.
For all of the emphasis on "eradicating woke" in the last few years, there really isn't a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.
Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there's a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.
If you're looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you're spoiled for choice. But when you're looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.
And that's leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in "universes" that are decades old. A lot of "new" movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.
There's a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.
All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it's hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.
I'll just leave this here as well:
nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-i…
Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public's throat.
Why Is Everything So Ugly? | The Editors
Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this?n+1
I'm old enough to remember when this was a thing. TV didn't have a remote, 3 main channels. That era.
The thing that hasn't changed is people wanting to talk about their favorite media. What has is the arena. I don't know irl people watching what I watch. So I end up talking with other fans on Discord or watching youtubers geek out like I am.
The trick is not falling for parasocial relationships with these people gathered around the virtual water cooler.
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Bread on Penguins
I make stuff. Bread (me), on penguins (linux). If you read this, make a comment about a real-life penguin to confuse people :^) also, the only accounts I have are the ones linked: bandcamp, github, & patreon. anything else is not me.YouTube
I'm all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There's no GOG for movies and TV; there's not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn't even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a "digital copy", which is just rental streaming by another name. I'm not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn't going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn't even something I'm interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can't be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that's not a great experience when it's supposed to be a gift anyway.
Unlike the video author, I'm not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don't watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I'm not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?
yeah okay well your watchparties are increasingly going to get worse until you too hit your threshold: such is the business.
the rest of the world uses a VPN like MullvadVPN and qBittorrent to "digitally back up media we've already bought". without ads, in better quality, without telemetry, without serfdom-subscriptions. you may like AI offloading your decisionmaking, but keep doing it and you will be codependent on authority for choosing anything in life. what do you want in a cozy moment away from work? it frustrates me to read people are too anxioys to begin to do otherwise and accept the way things are. that's a rant in return
have a nice day, i won't make this into a chain of replies.
GOG gave up at the beginning of 2025.
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This is why the seedbox SaaS market exists. Providing turn key hosted solutions, the only heavy lifting is the configuration which takes some reading to understand.
Check out the Servarr Wiki, Ombi, Syncthing as a starting point for media discovery and curration tooling.
So bizarrely the best experience is to self host and pirate. That's what you get when the entire entertainment industry is hostile to consumers.
When Netflix first became big, it was popular because it was a one-stop shop for almost all your content. It was like a big library of content in one place, you pay a reasonable monthly fee and it's all there. Piracy dipped as a result.
Now all the content is fragmented into numerous walled gardens you have to pay separate fees to access. People can only consume the same amount but now they have to pay 4 or 5 fees as the content is spread out.
Unsurprisingly piracy is booming again.
Threads alternative
Threads have been gaining traction recently and I’m actually enjoying the atmosphere there. However it’s clearly on a growth phase where they don’t show any ads or paid content. This obviously won’t last, so I’m wondering if there’s a platform which I could recommend?
I tried Mastodon a couple of years ago but it felt a bit too technical even for me, so I’m a bit hesitant to explore that. Thanks for any input and my apologies if this has been asked too many times already.
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Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there's really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.
Honestly, I'd say that Mastodon's perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn't feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you'll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it's pretty seamless.
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The answer is definitely Mastodon. We just need to make it work for you, OP.
I wonder if this helps?
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FYI check out pixelfed. Here's a preview: pixelfed.social/web/explore
It's basically a replacement for Insta rather than Threads, but the upside is it tends to be less technical. Also iirc it includes all the image posts from Mastodon. If you create an account, click on "Global Feed" and start following individuals and hashtags.
I’m frankly mystified by anyone who thinks Mastodon is “too technical.”
Please explain. Because the steps as far as I know are:
- Want a mastodon account
- Search for “join mastodon”
- Pick a server
- Create an account
- Enjoy mastodon
Because the steps for Xitter were :
1. Want a Xitter
2. Go to Xitter
3. Create an account
4. Enjoy(?) Xitter
Even one extra step that adds friction can lead to you just not doing the thing.
Mega-corpos spend billions to reduce the number of steps to your wallet, because they make it back tenfold.
you don't even need mastodon; you can also try wafrn, which is more like tumblr, misskey/sharkey, which is more like blogger or livejournal, or even piefed/lemmy.
they all talk to each other.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia deploy militaries as Asia floods death toll passes 1,100
Sri Lanka and Indonesia deploy militaries as Asia floods death toll passes 1,100
Millions of people affected by torrential rainfall in Sri Lanka and large parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern MalaysiaRebecca Ratcliffe (The Guardian)
Israeli settlers attack and rob Italian and Canadian volunteers in West Bank
Israeli settlers attack and rob Italian and Canadian volunteers in West Bank
Group beaten in early hours of morning in village where they volunteered to help protect Palestinians from settler violenceJulian Borger (The Guardian)
This will probably get me whacked…
Or has the historical narrative been rewritten so thoroughly, and public opinion directed so well, that… well no no we can’t say that out loud.
But I mean has this been the behavior of millennia? Does capitalism even exist in its current form without usury?
At this point I am pretty comfortable saying glass Israel. If there was a vote right now I’d say just do it. You can’t just be complicit and benefit from these horrible things and expect complete absolution. That’s pretty extreme and a worldwide ban of Israel, dissolution, a ban on any sort of theocratic or quasi-theocratic state and anything looking like it would be mandatory. I don’t think that would work in practice though, just more lies would be the result. “God promised us this land” is a mental disorder at best and more likely a blatant “you can’t outright say I am lying” high school level lie in practice.
The embarrassment and shame of being Zionist like Germany had over nazism is absolutely necessary though. I’m just not sure that was as well placed as we think. Currently we discuss the nazis persecution of Jewish people as “that’s just crazy and sick, how could anyone do such a thing” while Zion exists and is shamelessly genociding a people while overtly manipulating the gentiles as if we are animals. Is this the behavior pre ww2? Was this telegraphed? I believe so.
As a complete aside, and I am very interested and empathize with the Romani people, I am fascinated by their ability to see non Romani as (insert however they actually see us here) and include their children in their hustles. Like how do you explain to kids that it’s us against the world(literally) and we are allowed to lie and manipulate them at all costs? This thought occurred to me when I was helping a nice family who apparently had ran out of gas. The kid was doing their part with the sad eyes and all that. I would love to chat with a gypsy(with all due respect) to get some insights on their culture.
I can’t help but draw a parallel there though. Nazi persecution of peoples who see themselves as apart and those two groups overt exploitation of those who are not of their culture. Zionists simply being much more successful as of now.
I kinda see extreme measures being required to get these people(zionists) to stop being necessary. And where is the line? How is that accomplished?
I dunno but more and more being disgusted with this farce in Palestine I can’t help but reflect on this…
Is e.g. Schindler's List an exploitative movie?
Hong Kong’s Response to Deadly Fire Is Squeezed by China’s Firm Hand
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42837641
Web archived link...
On Sunday, thousands of people had gathered outside the charred buildings in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district to lay flowers and leave mementos and messages such as “rest in peace” and “Hong Kong be strong.” At a plaza at the complex, people manning a local relief effort collected donations and distributed essentials such as clothing, bedding, diapers and food to residents displaced by the fire.
By Sunday evening, the donation booths were gone, replaced by police command tents.
Government authorities have stepped in with official relief measures and sanctioned mourning activities, such as flying flags at half-staff and the establishment of designated condolence sites.
Beijing’s national-security office in Hong Kong warned that any attempt to exploit the fire to create disorder would be punished by law. The office said anti‑China groups and individuals were spreading false information, undermining relief efforts and inciting resentment toward the government and its leaders.
Alleged rabble-rousers are “attempting to use the victims’ grief to advance their political ambitions, pushing Hong Kong back into the turmoil of the extradition-bill unrest and reviving the darkest days of violent unrest,” the security office said.
“Darkest days” refers to the months of protests and violent unrest in Hong Kong in 2019 that were sparked by a proposed law that would allow the extradition of suspects for prosecution in mainland China.
...
A petition circulated online by activists demanded an independent investigation of the fire that goes beyond construction materials and addresses how Hong Kong is run. The list of demands in the petition echoed the protest chants of 2019.
The Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights, a group of rights advocates, said that the national-security laws may keep people from expressing opinions about what happened. “They fear questions regarding the cause and handling of the disaster could be deemed as sedition,” the group said.
...
Hakboard - Home Assistant Integration for Kanboard
cross-posted from: discuss.online/post/31434838
Reddit postHAKboard, a comprehensive Home Assistant integration for Kanboard, a free and open source Kanban project management tool.
- Roadmap
- Repo
- ScreenshotsFeatures:
Interactive Lovelace cards Integrates project, task and people data into sensor entities Documented entity schema aids in dashboard and automation development Supports multiple instances, enabling blue/green deployment Configurable replication and project filtering settings per Kanboard instance Zero YAML editing required
Functionality:In this initial release, it is a one-way sync of Kanboard data into HA, with deep-linking to Kanboard projects from the HA dashboard. It will create an entity for every project that provides aggregate data for tasks, task status, assignees, columns etc.. giving you an excellent birds eye view of your environment, as well as the ability to create automations from the sensor data.
A very near release (see Roadmap in the repo) will introduce the creation of entities for each task and person, and likely others. We wanted to ensure the core entity generation system is rock-solid before opening it up to potentially thousands of new entities and thought it prudent to stagger this functionality.
If you use Kanboard (or want to try it), this turns your HA dashboard into a real-time project hub.
Repo & Docs: github.com/aktive/hakboard
⚠️ IMPORTANT INSTALL NOTES: I'm still working through the HACS repo approval process. In the meantime, please follow these instructions if you would like to install (existing Kanboard server required):
HACS > ⚙️ (Top right) > Custom Repositories > Add: https://github.com/aktive/hakboard as type Integration Configure your Kanboard instance via Settings (Bottom left) > Devices & services > Add (Bottom right) > Search for HAKboard NOTE: If HAKboard does not appear (either as an integration or a dashboard card), please refresh your browser or restart HA.
GitHub - aktive/hakboard: 🔸 Integrate Kanboard projects into Home Assistant dashboards and automations
🔸 Integrate Kanboard projects into Home Assistant dashboards and automations - aktive/hakboardGitHub
Thinkpad Yoga X1 gen 6 pen not functioning
I need to aggregate a lot of details on what I've tried so far, but I figured I'd make this post now since I have time over lunch.
I purchased a used Thinkpad Yoga X1 gen 6 from a university surplus sale. Intending to move away from the data hoarder that is Microsoft I of course installed Linux. I decided on Linux Mint since I haven't touched Linux in about a decade and I've forgotten everything.
Everything that I need to use correctly for job applications, printing, etc is working just fine, but much of the reason I bought the yoga is to use the Wacom stylus pen for drawing and taking notes.
It was working in Windows, but now does not seem to be recognized in Linux. It's odd since the touchscreen does work.
I did find this post which I will try to follow tonight:
reddit.com/r/LinuxOnThinkpad/c…
If anyone has had experience with this or has some advice for a new newbie, I'd very much appreciate it!
Can you try live iso? If your tablet functionality wont work there I suggest making live iso of other distro as there are plenty. Many of them use Cinnamon DE which you can customise to look exactly like mint.
I rock cachyos like this but it's not as begginer friendly as minty
Europe's plan to use $105 billion of frozen Russian assets tantamount to war, says Russia's Medvedev
Europe's plan to use $105 billion of frozen Russian assets tantamount to war, says Russia's Medvedev
It follows fresh proposals by the European Commission to unlock $105 billion to support Ukraine.Tasmin Lockwood (CNBC)
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India’s Desert State Reignites Coal-Fired Power Debate | The competitive cost of batteries is making clean energy a viable alternative to coal in parts of the country
India’s Desert State Reignites Coal-Fired Power Debate
The competitive cost of batteries is making clean energy a viable alternative to coal in parts of the country.Rajesh Kumar Singh (Bloomberg)
Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule | Lawmakers are finally waking up to the problems the defense secretary has created.
Pete Hegseth Is Seriously Testing Trump’s ‘No Scalps’ Rule
Lawmakers are finally waking up to the problems the defense secretary has created.Missy Ryan (The Atlantic)
Calls for accountability over deadly Hong Kong fire silenced
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/46524461
ArchivedNot long before he was reportedly detained, Miles Kwan approached commuters outside a Hong Kong train station, urging them to demand accountability for the deadly inferno that tore through nearby apartment blocks.
"We all feel unhappy that (Hong Kong) has come to this and we want things to improve," the 24-year-old student said Friday, while handing out flyers that called for an independent probe into the blaze, which killed at least 128 people last week, with another 150 still missing.
"We need to be frank about how today's Hong Kong is riddled with holes, inside and out."Kwan and other organizers' demands turned into an online petition that gained more than 10,000 signatures in less than a day.
A second petition with the same demands has been launched by a Tai Po resident who is now living overseas.
“Hongkongers demand the truth and justice,” read one note in the comment section of the new online petition.
But local media reported Saturday night that Kwan was arrested on suspicion of sedition by national security police and the text of the online petition had been deleted, showing how under Beijing's watchful eye, dissenting voices in Hong Kong can vanish as quickly as they appear.
[...]
Reporters' attempts to reach Kwan by phone Sunday morning went unanswered.
[...]
Kwan was reportedly detained not long after Beijing's national security arm in Hong Kong publicly condemned "anti-China forces" for exploiting the disaster and "inciting social division and stirring hatred against authorities."
Asked on Friday if he feared being arrested, Kwan said he was only "proposing very basic demands."
"If these ideas are deemed seditious or 'crossing the line,' then I feel I can't predict the consequences of anything anymore, and I can only do what I truly believe."
Kwan and a handful of activists gave out flyers at the train station near the charred residential estate Friday, demanding government accountability, an independent probe into possible corruption, proper resettlement for residents and a review of construction oversight.
The demands reflected a belief that the fire was "not an accident" but a human-made disaster, he said.
[...]
Residents of Wang Fuk Court were told by authorities last year they faced "relatively low fire risks" after complaining about fire hazards posed by the renovation, the city's Labour Department said.
The residents raised concerns in September 2024, including about the potential flammability of the protective green mesh contractors used to cover the bamboo scaffolding, a department spokesperson said.
[...]
When Britain was grappling with public fury over the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, which killed 72 people, the government announced a public inquiry.
Lawyer Imran Khan, who represented the bereaved and survivors in the inquiry, said "the lessons from Grenfell apply around the world" as all governments need to ensure high-rise residential buildings are safe.
Khan said a public inquiry with court-like powers was a better option for the situation in Hong Kong because "an internal investigation will not get to the truth and there will be no faith in it by the bereaved, survivors and residents."
Based on his experience with Grenfell residents, he said, "without justice they cannot grieve."
[...]
Near the site of the blaze a short walk away, a long queue snaked through a park as mourners brought flowers and handwritten notes of remembrance.
One unsigned note left on the ground read, "This is not just an accident, it is the evil fruit of an unjust system, which landed on you. It's not right."
Addition:
Reporting on the the deadly fires, Australia's ABC says that Hong Kong residents are asking hard questions about safety following last week's deadly high-rise tower blaze (video, 7 min).
Accountability sought after Hong Kong’s deadly apartment fire
Sarah Ferguson presents Australia's premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.www.abc.net.au
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Honesty, China only recently regained control of Hong Kong. Having not heard much about what ultimately caused it. Outside the complete lack of sensors and alarms. I could have dismissed it as a possible pre existing situation. But as always, the CCP continues to bully and behave guilty.
I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, this is a horrible tragedy. And right now, everyone's heart is going out to all the victims and those who've lost. But the CCP and local related governments are so incompetent and oppressive. They can't even take what could be a reasonable win for them and actually help the people they're supposed to be serving. Attacking the victims more instead. Really makes you wonder how many more tall ticking time bombs there might be. Throughout Hong Kong or the rest of China.
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China’s Missing Housing Data Sparks Fresh Fears After Vanke Bond Extension
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/46523973
ArchivedChina’s already fragile property market took another blow this week as two of its largest private housing data agencies, China Real Estate Information Corp. and China Index Academy, failed to release monthly sales figures for the top 100 developers as expected on Sunday. This data blackout came shortly after China Vanke Co. a developer long perceived as relatively stable requested a delay in repaying a local bond, its first such move.
The agencies did not provide explanations for the delay, a rare deviation from routine reporting schedules that has triggered widespread speculation. The timing suggests a correlation between Vanke’s distress signal and the withholding of market data, reinforcing concerns that the November sales figures may be significantly worse than anticipated.
[...]
The absence of November figures adds opacity to an already uncertain environment. According to Kristy Hung, senior real estate analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, withholding the data “could increase uncertainty about the struggling sector’s condition” and likely reflects “steeper declines” in sales performance across the board.
The lack of transparency is particularly troubling as it undermines efforts by regulators to stabilize market sentiment. Investors are now left to interpret silence as a negative signal, which may accelerate capital flight and further impair refinancing efforts for developers already teetering on the edge of default.
[...]
Vanke’s request to delay bond repayment marks a critical turning point. As one of the few firms previously seen as weathering the crisis, its need for restructuring signals that even stronger developers are now succumbing to funding constraints and weakening sales. This suggests a causal deterioration of sector-wide liquidity, as refinancing options dwindle and investor confidence erodes.
While Evergrande and Country Garden have already defaulted or restructured, Vanke’s case sends a new signal to markets: no developer is immune. The Vanke episode has also likely prompted data providers to pause release to avoid further market panic, underscoring the depth of sentiment fragility.
[...]
China’s housing sector risks sliding further into a protracted downturn marked by fear, opacity, and investor disengagement. The Vanke episode may be just the beginning of a broader reckoning for an industry long seen as a pillar of China’s economic engine.
China’s Missing Housing Data Sparks Fresh Fears After Vanke Bond Extension - FastBull
Two major Chinese private data providers withheld November home sales figures following Vanke’s unexpected bond extension request, raising new concerns about the property sector's transparency and underlying stress....www.fastbull.com
Snow droughts intensify across the Hindu Kush Himalayas
Snow droughts intensify across the Hindu Kush Himalayas
A new study finds the frequent occurrence of snow droughts and their hotspots across 11 major river basins in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.Priyanka Shankar (Mongabay-India)
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics. reshared this.
anon5621
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •To disable secure boot u have to put supervisor password in uefi, set to any u like 1234 otherwise this option on laptops often locked without password,then disable it
Then install any disto u like,I am using cachyos(arch based) but it's up to u what to use
Also are u sure game using not integrated gpu? And use nvidia
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to anon5621 • • •Thank you! I didn't realize that could work (I had to disable the enforcement option and that made [Secure Boot] turn off as well), interestingly it made the [Hybernate] option pop out in the start menu on Plasma, I think I'll try a bit more on openSUSE before deciding if another distro could be what I need but the gradual lag seems to be a Steam Overlay issue, otherwise I happened to be testing CachyOS with XFCE on a virtual machine and I really liked it.
And yeah, I check with
nvidia-smiand there's also noticeably different performance if the game is offloaded or runs on integrated, its EXE shows up on the output when it's offloaded.Veraxis
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Hello from the owner of a 2018 Gigabyte Aero 15Wv8! Neat to see these less common Gigabyte laptops being used with Linux.
That UEFI looks a lot newer than the one on my machine, so I am not 100% sure, but I would assume disabling "enforce secure boot" would be the same as disabling secure boot. Other folks may know more, but I cannot think of any reason why turning it off would brick your Linux install.
As for XFCE vs KDE, I would say stick with KDE/Wayland unless you can really not find any workaround. The difference in resource usage between DEs is probably not significant enough that it would make a difference on a machine with 16GB of RAM and a relatively recent CPU. I mostly see that advice given for older machines with very little RAM.
I'm not sure about that game or the gradual lag issue. A quick google shows someone describing a similar-sounding issue in this Linux Mint forum thread, though. Maybe some of the suggestions there might help? They mention some stuff around
LD_PRELOAD=with various parameters in Proton.You are being redirected...
forums.linuxmint.com🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to Veraxis • • •Hi, that's nice!
But sorry for the delay, I needed some more time to test, I did try
LD_PRELOAD=""but I was hoping I wouldn't need it since I prefer Steam's screenshot tool from their Overlay, as I can quickly take screenshots in a row and quickly view them without leaving the game.I'd prefer Plasma as well although trying other DEs would be a nice experience, but I was able to disable the [Enforce Secure Boot] that also disabled [Secure Boot] in itself (interestingly it made the [Hybernate] option appear in the start menu on Plasma) after testing anon5621's suggestion, then I left the game mostly idling for a little over 2 hours without
LD_PRELOAD=""while I had some things to do, played a bit, and the gradual lag didn't happen at all (the game was consistently above 60FPS), I tried bringing in and out the overlay a few times but nothing, I might need to do more testing like maybe take more screenshots when I plan to play WuWa or something else for longer one of these days, but I'm pretty sure I idle'd before with the game open and it lagged later anyways (before disabling [Secure Boot], that is) and now it's not...At any rate, thanks for the suggestions, here's a screenshot of the game with Mangohud overlay after that +2h test.
Wuthering Waves 20251207 003601 hosted at ImgBB
ImgBBFauxLiving
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •There was an issue with the Steam overlay that happened when they added the screen recording feature. After about 25 minutes any input will cause a delay in rendering the current frame.
You can disable the overlay or add LD_PRELOAD=“” to your launch options, if this is the problem
Flameshot is pretty good too
Try booting with the non-secure boot option then
1 means secure boot is enabled, 0 means disabled.
If it’s 0 then you could use any distro, regardless of secure boot support.
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to FauxLiving • • •LD_PRELOAD=""did work but I was hoping I'd be able to keep the Steam Overlay for its screenshot utility (I use it a lot), but it appears to be fixed now thanks to the others' suggestions here, after finding how [Secure Boot] is disabled.That file doesn't seem to exist (in fact the
ipldirectory isn't even there), but probably because I managed to make that change, the game seems to be working normally as I said in another reply as it's running consistently above 60FPS, I'd like to test one of these days again before marking my question as solved (taking more screenshots and playing with less idling).Otherwise here's a screenshot of a test without
LD_PRELOAD=""after a little over 2 hours of having the game open.Thanks anyway!
Wuthering Waves 20251207 003601 hosted at ImgBB
ImgBBFauxLiving
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Disabling Secure Boot fixed it? That is very interesting.
Glad you got it solved! 😀
just_another_person
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Very first thing: see if the Nvidia driver is actually loading properly by running
nvidia-smiand see what it says.You may have the Nouveau driver loaded instead, which you can check with:
lsmod | grep nouv🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to just_another_person • • •Thanks, I actually ran
nvidia-smion multiple occasions, I did while I was figuring out the launch options to put in WuWa and ensure it's being offloaded.But here's the output of these commands right now while the game is running with Mangohud to show FPS, thanks to help from others here, I was able to work it out by disabling [Secure Boot] but I'll test some more when I can to ensure it's all working and mark as solved.
I had the propietary driver set up with help of the openSUSE wiki here.
20251207 024243 hosted at ImgBB
ImgBBjust_another_person
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •data1701d (He/Him)
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Although seem to have solved your main issue, I have a few comments on your Steam Run command.
For one, I think
VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.jsonand yourprime-runcommand are redundant - both of those will do the same thing. Personally, I use neither of those and instead do something likeDRI_PRIME=1 %command%(obviously not this exactly always, as there might be other flags, but roughly the idea).In general, I’d just recommend seeing which of these command flags you really need, because I see people in ProtonDB getting away with much simpler launch commands.
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to data1701d (He/Him) • • •DRI_PRIME=1and reply after I'm done, but for some reasonprime-rundid nothing on its own, adding that other variable with the path made the game offload, but that was when I had [Secure Boot] enabled, so things might work now with these changes, we'll see...data1701d (He/Him)
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •glxinfo.🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to data1701d (He/Him) • • •I tested with these launch options:
STEAMOS=1 STEAMDECK=1 DRI_PRIME=1 mangohud %command%. I keep the Steam Deck options just in case, since this game has anti-cheat and is officially playable on the Deck.Otherwise, the game ran on integrated, showing it here.
I also looked around a bit to see how's that variable tested and got this: [output on Pastebin].
I'm fine with the options I have tho! So long as it works for me I'm not complaining, most of the time I'm not looking at them and I can just paste them on a text editor if I need to, thanks for the suggestion anyway.
20251209 001441 hosted at ImgBB
ImgBBCrackedLinuxISO
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •I know it's late advice, since you already switched from Bazzite, but I've never understood why people have an aversion to adding a layered package to the immutable system.
My attitude has always been: If an update breaks something, the whole point is that I can roll back. I've been running Fedora Silverblue with many layered packages for several years, and the worst thing that ever happened was when I had to delay a system update by a few hours because the latest build of a layered package hadn't hit the repos yet.
Plus, for anything like development work that requires build dependencies, I spin up a toolbox to compile it. The nice thing about the default toolbox is that it's a base Fedora install, so all the system libs are compatible with my host machine. I've found it's often simple to compile a project in the toolbox and then launch the executable from my host system without adding any new layered packages to it.
Toolbx
Fedora Docs🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to CrackedLinuxISO • • •Ah... maybe for me it's because I didn't get much experience with distros that work like that, I didn't want to mess up things and ignore the warnings they set up on the wiki, before having this laptop I had some familiarity with Linux, but for well over a year it's been mostly running winblows, and a lot of things changed on Linux, so distros that work with layering were a new thing to me.
But for now I'm good on openSUSE after fixing (?) the problem by managing to disable [Secure Boot] with help of the others here, I've gotten a few suggestions on distros to try out on virtual machines so I might end up switching if I feel like doing more testing, but for now I'm happy here. Bazzite still remains as an option so I'll get it back if I need it.
rpm-ostree - Bazzite Documentation
docs.bazzite.ggMangoPenguin
in reply to CrackedLinuxISO • • •mrcleanup
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •After I left Bazzite i switched to Garuda, which is also gaming and performance focused. I also chose the xfce option, which has been great.
If your are considering switching, give Garuda a look. I'm also on a gigabyte board with an Nvidia card.
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to mrcleanup • • •BCsven
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •With OpenSUSE are you using the open source nvidia driver, or did you add the nvidia hosted repo and install their proprietary drivers?
The nvidia owned repo did work better for me.
But could be memory leak.
For anyone with laptop, and onboard graphics and nvidia RTX I had to install an opensuse swicher package to ensure appa start on the right GPU (right click option on the app)
I forget the app name at the moment, it wanst the bumblebee or optimus, it was something else, Switcheroo maybe.
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to BCsven • • •I'm using the propietary driver, latest stable release as of now which is 580.105.08, I thought it could be a memory leak as well, maybe I should've tried if it happens with other demanding games like this, bur once I could learn how to disable [Secure Boot] it seemed like WuWa remained running above 60FPS consistently (maybe it was blocking something that wasn't signed but I'm not sure).
You must be talking about SUSEPrime, I have it up and running, it provides the
prime-runI use to launch the game. I remember trying to set up the dGPU when I had Debian a couple months ago, and it didn't go well (Bumblebee was among the stuff I tried), my games weren't off-loading unless they had a native Linux version, like ETS2.GitHub - openSUSE/SUSEPrime: Provide nvidia-prime like package for openSUSE
GitHubBCsven
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Could be signing, if removing secure boot changed behaviour. The proprietary nvidia kernal module needs you to enroll the key in MOK interface at boot after an install or some updates.
You should have gotten a blue screen at boot that said options like, continue or enroll MOK, delete MOK, cancel, etc.
🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to BCsven • • •🦋 af1899 🦋
in reply to 🦋 af1899 🦋 • • •Hi all, I'll mark the question as solved, was just playing for over an hour with Steam Overlay on, sometimes multitasking and when playing still taking screenshots and randomly bringing up Overlay, and performance has been consistently on 60FPS (or above it if I set it in-game to 120 but I tweaked the settings recently), there's rare cases in which the FPS drop to 40~45, normally on fights with a bunch of enemies grouped nearby (on that I get 40), then I think probably on some places I get 45? But I think I'm happy with the main issue having been fixed, and that's good enough for me.
Now that I have [Secure Boot] disabled I might give another distro a try, maybe Nobara or CachyOS. 🤔 If anyone has any suggestions on the issue above or distros to test, feel free to share, for now I haven't planned to move so I'll be here on openSUSE for the time being.
Thanks for your suggestions and help!