is this from the handmaids tale?
please say it is so that i can feast of the irony. lol
Eden Blaine
Eden Blaine, née Spencer, was a recurring character in season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale, when she is married off to Nick Blaine. Eden was raised as a true believer on a farm near Westminster, Massachusetts.Contributors to The Handmaid's Tale Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)
Russia strikes Ukrainian airfields with Kinzhal missiles
Russia strikes Ukrainian airfields with Kinzhal missiles
TEHRAN, Aug. 04 (MNA) – - Russia's Tsentr Battlegroup has eliminated over 385 Ukrainian soldiers over the past 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday.Marzieh Rahmani (Mehr News Agency)
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The SBU is recruiting schoolchildren to become saboteurs – General Mikhailov
The SBU is recruiting schoolchildren to become saboteurs – General Mikhailov
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is preparing teenagers for sabotage work, retired Major General Alexander Mikhailov of the Federal Security Service told Argumenty i Fakty.newsmaker newsmaker (English News front)
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The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation is investigating new crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Russian regions
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation is investigating new crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Russian regions
The Investigative Committee (IC) of Russia has begun investigating crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Belgorod, Bryansk and Voronezh regions, the press service of the department reported.newsmaker newsmaker (English News front)
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Well there's two different things that people who relate to this picture may want: either the nature or the solitude (sometimes both); for the second, part of the fantasy is that they would never have to deal with anyone.
In reality what people want may be completely different, but the picture passes the message better.
either the nature or the solitude
i think this is why i don't get it: growing up in the middle of nowhere taught me that nature can fuck you over in an instant multiple times and living in suburbia gave me a cold & painful dose of reality when it comes to solitude.
i suppose it looks nice if you've never experienced enough of the dark sides of nature and solitude.
I used to live alone in the forest like that and I loved it. I can’t wait to move back.
Yeah, nature can fuck me over but as long as I don’t have to deal with anyone I’ll manage.
nature isn't as bad as people; you can atleast try to prepare of it.
out in the middle of nowhere, people can and do make sure that you can't prepare for them.
Sad part living next to ppl in city with hoa feels like a prison.
The awful air
Mugging
Packages stolen
Noise
Never see a tree or stars
Can't do jack all without gossiping hens
Etc
Humans need a good balance but many just want to see if grass is greener on other side.
Humans need a good balance but many just want to see if grass is greener on other side.
this makes the most sense to me because that's what i did. life had taught me that being queer, autistic and brown is boring AF in urban enough environments; but it REALLY makes those hens gossip in the country side and the ppl forcing you to conform because they refuse accept your true expression of yourself is a prison of its own. to make matters worse: that 1 factory; 4 MASSIVE beef & pork farms; and plantation that employ 80% of the population will fuck up your air & water worse than the city thanks to a friendly local government that gives them passes. having to drive 5 hours to the nearest water source, to spend another 2 hours filling up, and then another 5 hour drive back every month is galling when there's a natural stream nearby that the local gov't makes illegal to take from.
i wanted to see if the grass was greener in the core of several cities and found that, yes, very much so for someone like me.
You write about (a quite shitty) reality, but the picture is somewhat of a dream, everyone is projecting their own wishes all around it. Running water, electricity, in the vicinity of supermarket/restaurant/pharmacy… it’s all there, in magic country land.
I am also a city person. I love disconnecting for holidays, but then I am back with similar minded friends, in a city with all city commodities and I don’t think I would switch.
Yeah this is why I’d like to be close enough to civilization to have city water.
But if you actually threaten my family’s right to stay alive, you just lost yours. I have no qualms about being a psychopath if I have to.
Just leave me the fuck alone.
the ticks have gotten so bad in recent years, it's actually a main reason I wouldn't want to move farther out from the city.
my dogs are too low to the ground and too fluffy to find the many ticks on them after being outside. hell they get ticks even inside city limits (in the green spaces) here.
we stopped taking a wonderful forest route at my parents' with them because it's just not worth finding ticks on them over the next 48 hours and having them crawl out onto you at night
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You don't need A/C.
Source: I live in Wyoming.
Edit: I meant that you don't need A/C in a cottage like the one pictured, not that A/C is unnecessary altogether. I used to live in Texas. No A/C will literally kill you in Texas, but in a wooded mountain cottage surrounded by trees like that, you don't really need it. In my house in WY, the hottest it ever gets inside is 78 with low humidity. Below is the current temp in my room, with computers running, at 2:22PM.
I live in the U.K., no one has AC. Some people will say you don’t need AC. If it was free, or even reasonably affordable, and easy, do you know what I’ve had this summer?
Edit; edited for clarity.
I also live in the UK. The last few years I’ve been tempted to buy a portable AC. Just as I go to spend £300, the weather turns and I decide to spend money on other stuff (like food)
We had that heat wave just after Easter this year, much earlier than I remember, that was the final straw. Bought one on marketplace for £180.
Every night going to bed the sheets are crisp and cool. I sleep like a baby.
The biggest downside? Damn those things are pricey to run
You don’t need A/C.
Eh, it's REALLY nice to have right now with daytime highs in the upper 90s. It's even nicer when it's both hot and humid.
Source: I live in Wyoming.
So do I.
Source: I live in Wyoming.
No you don't Wyoming doesn't exist. Garfield told me so.
Yeah, no.
While you might not need it, everyone has a different temperature tolerance and for some people, it is absolutely a requirement.
You don't need AC now.
I live in Vancouver Canada, and up until like 2005 none of the lower density developments (townhouses and low rise apartments) had air conditioning because no one really needed it. Our townhouse for example even has windows that aren't compatible with window air conditioners and no one minded until fairly recently. All that's changed really quickly and now everyone is scrambling for air conditioning with heat waves getting worse every year.
Me, living in Wyoming with gigabit fibre:
Yes it's a bit of a flex but I sold everything I owned in order to own a humble old house here and I am proud of it. Cow poop walls? No regrets.
Aha! I suspected you'd comment.
Can confirm, the internet here is decent and it's pretty far from people
Nothing consistent. I probably should pick a spot and do a roll-up of the last four years and then post more regularly. I did a little summary about a year ago here --> lemmy.ca/post/16843909/7896562
Since then we actually have installed a deep well, washer/dryer, and two more outbuildings. I'll try to reply to your comment in the next few days with more details if you are interested.
I also post completely randomly as Bo7a@loops.video and mstdn.ca/@solace
SolaceHomestead (@solace@mstdn.ca)
100 Posts, 71 Following, 80 Followers · Solace is a new homesteading effort being taken on by a married couple. It sits on just over 5 acres in Southern Quebec, Canada. In April of 2022 it was just forest and a creek.Mastodon Canada
Would like a variant on this, the bugs and darkness of the woods would drive me insane:
- On a field, farming optional
- Add a soldering station, solar panels, well with pump, and septic tank
- Perimeter tripwires and defense (nobody's coming to help if something happens)
- Tornado shelter with medical supplies and a healthy supply of 3D filament
And I'll finally be able to complete everything on my bucket list that doesn't involve travelling.
No need of AI if you have money
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The spiders tend to stay out of the house. But everything outside the house?
Yeah, spiders own that.
We get maybe 2 or 3 spiders in here every summer, and they get relocated. (unless they are on the ceiling above the bed, then they get dispatched.
I went and had a pile of kids so I have to do it everyday. Oh my god I’m tired.
And what was I thinking?
We have to kids and cook every day. We have about 12 dishes we cycle through, plus a new dish every couple of weeks. Plan for a week and shop for it accordingly.
Before the kids i would go to the local supermarket, that, regardless of the city i lived in, never was more than 10 Minutes away by foot. I'd figure out what i was feeling like cooking once i was
But it is nice to have other options, like ordering food, for the very lazy and very stressful days. This i would give up for a nice place in nature though.
You don’t understand actual honest to god hermits then.
My wisdom tooth is going to kill me because I’d rather die than have someone touch me. I’m not kidding.
I had appendicitis and barely noticed. I just felt like I had a mild case of gas for 3 days. I was lucky that I was with my ex at the time and she got worried, otherwise I might be dead and would barely have cared.
But then the year after that I broke my back and also only cared to go to the doctor after one month, so maybe I'm not the best example
I did see a guy make a cooler with a cistern, pump and radiator. Water in the cistern/well is cold most of the year. Guess you just have to drain it in the winter, but yeah I'd say batteries can be a money sink.
Also I did kill a lot of batteries by hooking them in parallel to a bad 12v battery, buuut that's just me saying battery system can go for a lot
If you live in the wilderness, you should have a boat.
Edit: yes I'm pretty sure I can order a boat for delivery, but if not you can always make something.
denying free speech
Not any different from the UK or USA
and the Tiananmen square massacre
That happened over thirty years ago. The USA wishes it could do that.
It's hardly North Korea or Russia.
El Salvador is doing a good job in solving their crime issue
Except you pulled a "but akshually ☝️🤓" when someone brought up the USA and Israel.
What does that even mean?
You can make a case both are worse than China
Feel free to make that case and present it to me.
China - Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
The Chinese government is committing possible crimes against humanity and genocide by systematically persecuting Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim and/or Turkic groups. Other religious and ethnic minority groups also face persecution.Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
About Us - Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Our Mission: Making R2P A Global Reality To make the promise of R2P a reality, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) was established in 2008 by supportive governments, leading figures from the human rights field (including forme…Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
I would, but with electricity, water and no kids. You could with determination live alone here, but it's far from simple.
Fetching enough wood, harvesting (it takes heavy labor in a forest), protecting your food from wild animals, baking your products, like soap, clothes, maintaining you cabin, preparing and surviving winter, and i only covered a tiny part of everything.
But if you're truly ready, life like that can become a great source of happiness. Got that from a old local forest guard who tried to live like that for one year.
I did it for nearly 3 years with limited access.
You get over it eventually and start living life instead of watching other people live theirs.
I can't wait to unplug again.
A friend inherited off-grid property. I was already into the idea of homesteading and survivalism and had been building those skills sets for years. What started as a little bit of helping on the weekends turned into full time living. I didn't think I could do it and it was hard.
But now I know what I'm capable of and how much nicer life is when you live it. I've been back in regular society for a few years and my phone is still on 'do not disturb' mode all the time.
Yeah i have notifications silenced as they are a stupid distraction.
I have a tablet for work that I rarely use so I leave it for the kids to play on. Everytime i look at it there is hundreds of notifications from games they play. How are the kids meant to get anything done if they keep getting interrupted.
This right here. Just disappear into the woods and forget about the doomscroll in its entirety.
If one day you wake up in your cabin to a bright flash in the sky so be it, and least you had a good life.
May - blackflies
June - mosquitoes and blackflies
July - mosquitoes and deer flies
August - mosquitoes, deer flies, and horse flies
September - All of the above, and start to worry about stuff freezing.
October - Whew, I can finally work outside
November - Start the fire, and keep it going until April.
Ok where I live it's :
Jan - snow and first sunrise of the year
Feb - snow
Mar - snow
April - snow
May - snow followed by two weeks of thaw, last sunset for 2 months and one week of spring
Jun - warm but no bugs
Jul - where has all my blood gone (mosquitoes and horsefly) sun starts setting again
Aug - same exsanguination issues as July
SEP - too cold for bugs lol
Oct - snow
Nov - Snow last sunrise of the year
Dec - snow
A composting toilet is all I want and need.
- No clogging
- No splashing
- No waste of water
- No smell
I always hate to use a plumbed toilet when we visit friends or family.
1 stick to put your pants on and second one to fight off bears while u poop?
We basically have this in Ireland. Only instead of a log cabin its an old cottage in the middle of nowhere.
An old cottage with a gigabit connection.
Yeah my Father in Law basically has this… but significantly nicer (4bed, 4bath, full kitchen, running spring water, off-grid solar+batteries), up a mountain, surrounded by pine trees, with StarLink internet.
It’s amazing when we can go visit for a week or 2
For me and my friends it would be a bunch of small close islands, and then one larger community island in the middle.
I'm thinking something like in Sweden's Skärgård, where there are lots of such islands.
Nah the internet sucks no matter where you live. That cottage with a closed network or something like Secure Scuttlebutt/Manyverse in a little village would be cool though. The town library can have gigabit internet (for downloading media) and a shared local Jellyfin (& calibre, Navidrome, audiobookshelf, etc) server that can be accessed by anyone in town.
Want to play Live Service or online games? To the library.
Publish your website or music album or artwork outside of the local loop? To the library.
Online classes? To the library.
Pro-Israel Democrats try breaking with Netanyahu to stop party’s shift amid Gaza crisis
Fearing Zionism could die among Democrats, many party leaders are explicitly breaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to stop anti-Israel attitudes from becoming a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries.
Leaders of multiple Jewish and pro-Israel groups told CNN privately that they have grimly determined their best and most practical approach is essentially to quietly wait out the trauma and hope the politics turns. There’s another Israeli election next year, and while Netanyahu is now in a minority coalition, he has been counted out before.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who wrote the military aid resolution but also cautioned Mamdani when they huddled last month to be more deliberate about making clear he wasn’t anti-Israel or antisemitic, told CNN he thinks his colleagues risk losing an authentic connection to voters if they don’t rapidly change what they’re doing and saying on Israel.
“To be anti-Netanyahu, anti-a-right-wing-racist-extremist government, that’s anti-Israeli government,” Sanders said. “If you’re against Trump, you’re not against America.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/03/politics/democrats-netanyahu-israel-gaza
“To be anti-Netanyahu, anti-a-right-wing-racist-extremist government, that’s anti-Israeli government,” Sanders said. “If you’re against Trump, you’re not against America.”
This is a propaganda by the way. Netanyahu is the perfect representation of Israel.
Asked whether that risked Democrats being seen as anti-Israel, Sanders pointed out that he is Jewish himself and decades ago lived in Israel for a few months.
Ummmm apparently to tankies, it already was a litmus test, hence Trump being elected. So... Dems have five choices:
- Continue to support genocide and have the left not support them. Or...
- Denounce the genocide and have the left not support them because of other purity reasons or...
- Go further left and have the billionaire backers abandon them or...
- Do everything that the far left wants and they still don't show up to vote for whatever reason at the mid terms. Or...
- The Democrats grow a spine, do everything they need to do, and are screwed out of a fair election because of the far right facists.
Dems are screwed all around. But at least Chuck Schumer can sleep at night knowing he did absolutely nothing to stop this catastrophe.
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At least the Dems will have their base blaming the left because they support genocide and sell out to billionaires.
Funny how Democrats said that they needed to support genocide to win the election. Then they lost the election supporting genocide and they still blame "Tankies"
Also funny how Dems think the word Tankie is worse than supporting a literal mass child starvation Holocaust.
My fav part of the 90s (in the US) is that the federal government introduced a law that would give significant raises to government employees to keep their compensation on par with other similar positions, however it has literally never been enacted since every single president since its inception has declared a national emergency to prevent it.
They also had RIFs in the 90s where they gutted half a million federal government employees. All while Alan Greenspan idiotically thought we'd never see a crash again (because markets did so well through the decade).
What I am saying is, at least in the US, everything is fucking made-up.
For anyone curious, I think this is that law.
Although FEPCA provides for an automatic formula to determine the annual pay raise, this formula has been ignored due to the cost of implementation. The President has authority under FEPCA to submit an "alternative" pay plan with a lower raise than that called for by the FEPCA formula (or none at all) "if because of national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare" [5 U.S.C. §5303(b)(1)].
It is the best system...... But not for you. There can only be so many winners.
What do you suggest? No winners? Just sharing things like some communist savage? But then how will we know who is the best?
How China’s oil strategy seeks to cut the U.S. out
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Trump envoy to visit Moscow this week before deadline for ending Ukraine war
Trump said Steve Witkoff would visit Moscow on Wednesday or Thursday. When asked on Sunday what message Witkoff would take to Russia and what Vladimir Putin could do to avoid new sanctions, the US president answered: “Yeah, get a deal where people stop getting killed.”
In Kyiv, there is little expectation that Witkoff will make a breakthrough with Putin, but a hope that Trump’s changed rhetoric and tougher stance on Moscow may lead to a real change in US support for Ukraine.
Trump came into office convinced he could do a deal with Putin, but in recent weeks appears to have become increasingly frustrated with Russia’s actions. On Thursday he described its continued attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine as “disgusting” and on Sunday said that two nuclear submarines that he ordered to be deployed after online threats from the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev were now “in the region”, without giving further details.
Trump envoy to visit Moscow this week before deadline for ending Ukraine war
Steve Witkoff to travel to Moscow before US president’s Friday deadline after which new sanctions could be imposedShaun Walker (The Guardian)
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Return of the Dumb-arse!
As requested, – here is an update on my Linux adventure - the first week has gone by without incident and I'm not turning back!
The tl:dr summary: OMFG. This is probably the EASIEST OS install I’ve ever had – and that’s saying something - since most modern Linux distros are easy!
Reminder of who you’re reading right now – I’m a Windows veteran for the past 25 years and between work and home, I’ve used and supported every flavour from Win95 to Win11 and Server 03 to Server 22. I have installed well-north of 1000 instances in my time, deployed from Floppy, CD, USB, Ghost, WDS and more.
I have dabbled in Linux on-and-off over the years but always on secondary PCs so this is my first time rocking Linux on my primary. I’ve spent the last 12 months experimenting with Linux in preparation for the End-of-10 and this very moment. Testing different distros, Desktop Environments and philosophies while digging into proper Linux learning (not just ‘best Distro’ lists or reviews on YouTube). I’ve had several ‘lightbulb’ moments as I’ve come to learn more about Linux that make me feel like a n00b all over again and I’m loving it. You can read my other lightbulb moment in here.
The remainder of my home gear is already Window-free. Home server: (Unraid), laptop and TV box (Fedora Gnome & KDE respectively). These have all been cut over and running well for the past 6-months as I’ve really sunk my teeth into this new learning. Now that my last hurdle - Windows-only software requirement - is no holding me to Windows, I’m free at last!
Current state: Brand-new parts purchased - and since I couldn’t wait, it’s all hosted in a temporary case while I wait for stock of the exact case I want. Core7 Ultra, B860 and 5060ti for those that care.
Summary: This must be the easiest Linux distro I’ve ever used. Here is a breakdown of what happened:
- Installed Bazzite
- Log into the desktop
- Sign into Steam
- Download Doom 2016
- Play Doom 2016 in glorious ultra widescreen.
It really was that easy. No Drivers to install, no endless Windows updates, no mountains of software to install and configuration to remove all the garbage and regain privacy. Once I got eaten by a Pinky then I quit the game to continue my setup, just a handful of flat pack software installs required to fill the gaps but all that was done in about 20mins. In fact, downloading Doom took longer than the rest of it combined!
And fast! The new hardware helps obviously but I've forgotten how bloated office has become. Libre Office by comparison opens in half a second and everything feels so snappy. Nothing is snappy on Win11, not even notepad anymore.
I watched a very timely video on the weekend featuring a guy with fancy chest-hair and this really hit me where I lived (and worked). So many of Window’s ‘quirks’ are normalised while the same (or less) on Linux is seen as a problem. To paraphrase: we think nothing of editing registry, running PowerShell scripts or sacrificing small woodland creatures to remove built-in functions and apps, and endless other utilities to give us control over our system and yet, if we do anything like this in Linux, it's "too hardcore, not ready for mainstream".
I haven't touched the terminal at all, yet I have to the software I need and my entire PC is ready to use.
If you're someone who's been on the fence about Linux, please don't be. If you last tried it 5+ years ago, I encourage you to revisit. I honestly think Linux is about ready for the mainstream and I genuinely didn't think Bazzite would be this easy getting games going. A huge thank you to the Bazzite team and everyone who contribute to making Linux better and easier!!
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Glad to see it's going well :3
I've been on linux for years at this point, and it's such an astronomical upgrade over windows, that sometimes when I don't think while talking about PC stuff with people I forget that most people aren't using it, and it throws me off to hear them to refer to windows things lol
I used to fix computer problems for people a lot, for fun. Last week, I booted a Windows 11 laptop to help a friend and I was put off by EVERYTHING. The nagging popups, ads, the dubious ad-riddled webpages I have to visit to download apps. It's all crazy evil. And still people bullshit-bingo me that "Linux is so complicated, you need to learn so much" while constantly fighting off predatory shit from soulless corporations. They don't even know what using a computer that works for you means anymore.
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The nagging popups, ads, the dubious ad-riddled webpages I have to visit to download apps.
I still have to use Windows at work, and it advertising apps in the start menu and specific games to me with a notification popup in pro versions of the OS just blows my mind. This is a piece of software my company paid extra for, and it has ads all throughout...in a completely 'clean' install.
It's even worse since I end up using VMs at work, so I get to experience this over and over on each machine.
"Ghost"... That brought back memories, thank you.
Good story. And boy, I'm jealous of your first time, I wish I could go back, in a way. Keep going, it gets better.
This is really good to hear. As someone who hasn't used Windows since 2004, it's easy to lose perspective of how daunting a self-switch can feel.
I'm glad to hear your experience is going well. I know you're experiencing many little annoyances and things which seem harder than they should be, but are not focusing on those. It's always good to hear the perspective from a new user!
games or specialized software seem to be the thing that gates most people from using linux and it's nice to see such progress on the gaming side.
i myself gave it a shot with fedora on a new laptop and it was as smooth as you described it; the last time i tried it, it required several google searches and knowledge of how to convert from debian to fedora.
Agree - software is the greatest blocker these days. My recent software restriction was simply a tool I was only using for study.
I was still skeptical that it would be so easy as I've been burnt before by Linux on YouTube or articles that exclaim just how easy it is but I usually run into at least a couple of major issues that become a pain to overcome. Not so this time! Every PC I've cut over during this process has been painless.
Literally the only issue I've had to date was my monitor not waking from sleep - a minor fault that was fixed by selecting any colour profile that wasn't the default.
it clear that linux is improving and i wish it was still as open as it used to be given the american's gov't's mandate to kick out foreign developers and google closing their source on android.
it's still more open than the alternatives; but it's future trajectory is clear.
The desktop version of Bazzite is such a hidden gem in the Linux scene. Polished, fast, and no fuss. I rate it the best distro by a good margin, and I have tried many many distros.
How are you dealing with the immutable side of things? Was it easy to get your head around?
So far, so good but I haven't really thought about it since. It may not suit a purist, hardcore or someone who tweaks their system endlessly but for someone like me, I don't want to spend me free time fiddling, breaking, then fixing my home gear.
Until Win10, I never liked to "upgrade" any OS, preferring a clean slate approach and from what I understand, that's what I'll get here. A clean new OS with each upgrade that eliminates any gradual degradation due to a build up of clutter and abandoned packages. All while the flat packs and my data/config reside safely in the use partition (anyone, let me know if I've got this wrong!)
Gnome article on same topic: blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2024…
You can test the more strict focus stealing prevention on Gnome with: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-new-windows 'strict'.
And to unset it: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-new-windows 'smart'
Firefox should also now have proper support for it in 141, but I think for Gnome you might need to wait for a bug fix in Gnome 49:
Understanding GNOME Shell’s focus stealing prevention
Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can...jsparber (GNOME Shell & Mutter)
Amazon requires gov-ID photo before refund.
So I bought a product for €200 on Amazon.com. I am slightly ashamed of doing so but I did, didn't know where else to find this type of product. So after a few days they told me they would not be sending me the product for whatever reason. So I would be getting a refund. They said if I hadn't gotten the refund within 5 days I should contact support. So after 5 days I contacted support. And as soon as I did that, they sent me an email claiming that they require me to upload a picture of my "government issued identity document". They write that if I don't do that "You may continue shopping on Amazon, but you will no longer be eligible for a refund on the order ". Surely they have no right to do so right? They claim they've noticed some suspicious behavior on my account, but all I did was order a product, pay for it in advance, which they decided not to ever deliver to me. It's not me who's being suspicious here.
Anyone else had this experience? This a clear dealbreaker for me. I feel shame for ever having bought something from their store.
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Chase bank is a scam. Minimum balance of 1500 or 500 direct deposit monthly or that charge 12 dollars a month to have an account. They bill it yearly. So when 144 comes out of your account randomly and you call removed. That's when they tell you.
Fuck chase bank.
Amazon has a non-existent customer support, so you may have limited options.
If they had customer support, I'd suggest contacting them and tell them to either refund, or else you'd give them the ID immediately followed by a GDPR request to purge your data. That might have gotten some movement, because those GDPR requests have the force of law, and are also a fair PITA for Amazon. However, there's no way to give them a shot across the bow. I think your options are:
- process a charge-back, as someone else suggested, which might result in an Amazon ban
- take the loss (that's entirely your call, regardless of anyone else's opinion)
- give them the ID, get your refund
- you can still initiate a GDPR purge request. I'm going to guess it's going to result in a block, but maybe not. You might be able to recreate your account
The happy news is that you are protected by GDPR. Many of us are not, and don't even have the option to demand they purge the information.
I’m not sure how “suspicious behavior” could be relevant to a seller issuing you a refund.
"suspicious behavior" is just a BS term used for switching the blame back to the consumer. Kind of like "for your convenience, we are [removing a capability]" or "for your safety, we are [taking away a right.]" You are correct that it makes no sense.
(unless you go beg for mercy at the altar of Bezos)
The "one time one free gift" from amazon policy !
Won’t that blacklist your address from ever buying from amazon
So, win-win.
I recommend a very high quality laser projector !
Do not stop contacting Amazon customer support. Occupy their resources to the maximum.
Phone > Chat > Email
Record time spend and demand immediate compensation at your billing rate. Never accept contacting them back again at a later date.
Always demand their names, transcripts and email confirmation of any promises with exact match wording and check before hanging up. Then, use their own words against them.
That would vary from one jurisdiction to another, but I'm sure you can find guides best suited for your local laws.
As inspiration, here's what I sent to Amazon & Samsung last year (in a formal cease & desist format):
Amazon .com .ca ULC
40 King Street W 47th Floor
Toronto, Ontario
M5H 3Y2Samsung Electronics Canada Inc.
2050 Derry Road West
Mississauga, Ontario
L5N 0B9Montreal, April 26, 2024
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Dear Madam or Sir,
I purchased a Samsung 980 PRO SSD 2TB drive (model MZ-V8P2T0) on Amazon .ca on March 3, 2022, which broke on April 4, 2024. This product was used under normal conditions, and I believe it should be covered by the manufacturer’s 5-year warranty.
Several chat sessions with Amazon and Samsung support have failed to provide a solution, with each party referring the matter to the other.
I am requesting that you repair or exchange the product under the Consumer Protection Act regarding the legal warranty of the reasonable durability of a product. I am also requesting reimbursement of $25 to cover the cost of sending this letter.
Therefore, I am formally notifying you to resolve the above-mentioned issue within 10 days. Failing to do so may result in legal action against you without further notice or delay.
World in $1.5tn ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns
Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. The world is in a “plastics crisis”, it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages.
The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060. While plastic has many important uses, the most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use plastics, such as drinks bottles and fast-food containers.
As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8bn tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
World in $1.5tn ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns
Plastic production has increased more than 200 times since 1950 and hits health at every stage from extraction to disposal, says review in the LancetDamian Carrington (The Guardian)
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☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ likes this.
Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
Less than 10% is recycled and nobody wants to recycle it anyway, because it is difficult to recycle and the resulting recycled plastic is worse.
and is set to almost triple again
World in $1.5tn ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns
Plastics are a “grave, growing and under-recognised danger” to human and planetary health, a new expert review has warned. The world is in a “plastics crisis”, it concluded, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages.
The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060. While plastic has many important uses, the most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use plastics, such as drinks bottles and fast-food containers.
As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8bn tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review said, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.
World in $1.5tn ‘plastics crisis’ hitting health from infancy to old age, report warns
Plastic production has increased more than 200 times since 1950 and hits health at every stage from extraction to disposal, says review in the LancetDamian Carrington (The Guardian)
geneva_convenience doesn't like this.
I mean
Bernie did platform that mercenary who very clearly describes what's happening
Bernie is certainly much better than establishment Dems. But he's seen as a front-runner of the progressive movement so it'd be nice if he finally started calling a spade a spade.
Establishment Dems feel safe not calling it a genocide if the people seen as progressives aren't even doing it.
Western media: Hamas should feed Israeli soldiers instead of starving babies.
Lemon, ginger and lemon balm beer
Happy days! My new beer is done. This is a battle-tested recipe with lemons and ginger. This time I also had 10 g of fresh lemon balm in the seasoning infusion. This guy:
Works really great as a beer component, sharing to spotlight this herb with you all! There's a Wikipedia page that describes the many aromatic compounds it imparts. It's perennial (pic is from my garden), grows in a slightly invasive manner so you only need to plant very little to get enough for many brews. This was a warning 😀
Another new twist was a helping of Weyermann spelt wheat malt. I expected the nutty spelt flavour from it, but the taste profile ended up so multi-faceted that I'll need more tastings to pinpoint it 😁 All in all, a distinctive flavour to this beer. Fermented to bone dry very smoothly.
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Nice, Ill keep lemon balm in mind.
How big was this batch?
do you filter the beer at all when bottling?
Is your lemon balm separated from the rest of your garden or do you keep an eye on it and remove as needed?
How much longer do you ferment beer to get the dryness? I've fermented wine, but it rarely made it long enough to get rid of all the excess sugar.
Also for beer you have some unfermentable sugars, so you can't achieve driness by just fermenting, you have to use enzymes to break them down completely to fermentable ones.
So scientifically speaking it is dependent on the "substrate" (what you ferment) and yeasts.
As the others said, it comes down to how much alcohol the yeast will ultimately tolerate, if there is enough fermentable sugar to get to that point. I still don't do og / fg's, so my 'bone dry' was not a measured outcome, only perceived. I'm type 1 diabetic so I prefer no leftover sugar in my brews 😀
In this case, six days of fermentation followed by a hasty cold crash of two days was enough. The yeasties at work were a standard Finnish fresh yeast, 0,25 € at any grocery store and known to produce 10+ % ABV sahti brews. Speed comes from having a fair bit (25 g) of yeast in there and making a starter with it. I also ferment under pressure and at the cool-ish temp of 16 °C. There is 23 L of the stuff with 6,7 kg of malt, pretty strong stuff.
I filter the wort into the fermenter with reusable coffee filters. The fermenter doubles as a keg, so I only bottle on demand.
The lemon balm is in a garden bed, so yeah, I do battle with it. Hence the warning 😁 It makes good pesto too, so the battle is not too bad XD
Great idea! We're overrun with Lemon Balm!
How did you extract the flavour? Did you add it to the boil or make a vodka tincture or something?
In fact I'd really be up for trying this out if you'd care to share your recipe?
Absolutely! On mobile so I'll make this tight...
Mash is 18 L water, 6,7 kg of mostly blond malts, including 1 kg of Weyermann Spelt and 1 kg of Simpsons Premium English Cara for a little sweetness. 60 min BIAB mashing with strike temp at 71,2 °C.
Then there's the infusion: 3 L water heated to boil, off the hob, in with ingredients and let sit with lid on. This had 2 large organic lemons sliced thin, one smallish ginger sliced thin, 10 g lemon balm leaves and growth tips, 30 g Simcoe and 30 g Amarillo hops (pellets). It had about an hour and half to infuse.
One more thing was the yeast starter - 2 L water, 1 dL white sugar, 1 dL sugarcane syrup, pinch of yeast nutrient. Extra sugar there to feed the starter and offset the diluting effect of 5 L water added on top of the mashing.
Boiled the wort for 50 min, added 60 g Challenger hops at 45 min to go. The 3 L infusion went into the boil at about 10 min to go, flame up to allow a little boiling for that too.
One thing I might have changed in hindsight is a little less of the Amarillo and Simcoe in the infusion to leave more room for the lemony notes.
Would be great to hear how it went if you try this 😀
Thoughts on social media device?
I have been trying to de-google and de-meta my life, but although i haven't had facebook for a year and a half, i need it for work. Also i do miss marketplace, and some niche groups.
i have been thinking to setup a used android phone, that runs a new google account, that is not related to my (still at use google account). (as hard as i try, some profiles can't be unlinked to google once you have linked them).
Anyway - my concern is, that i'd still be trackable, even if i leave it at home and only use it when i need to use it. Won't meta eventually be able to link my identity to my nework, IP, location etc?
What would be the best way to go around this?
And what to do with secutiry verifications where they as for your phonenumber or to confirm, your ID with an SMS?
I was planning to use a used phone for this but i was planning on connecting it to my wifi and using it just for this.
Would you say that the phone should be replaced regularly?
Huh? Are you asking if the phone should be replaced regularly?
What I meant specifically was the phone verification. You'll need to get an actual burner cell phone for that. Get a tracphone or other similar prepaid plan, something you can buy in cash. Keep that phone powered off and in a faraday bag. Only take it out of the bag in a location other than your home or workplace, and only for the purposes of phone verification. Have the social media phone be a smart phone that you only use via wifi connected through a VPN.
If you are leaving it at home, consider a WiFi-only tablet to eliminate any chance of data leaking through the cell modem. Or perhaps an Android emulator on a laptop, but that does come with its quirks. Better yet, also set up a router with router-level VPN at home just for your Facebook-connected devices. Get a cheap prepaid phone for the SMS activation. Don't boot anything up until you're ready and pay with cash or a prepaid gift card at a store you don't frequent or something like Craigslist if possible.
Normally, there's a chance of Google/Facebook asking for SMS confirmation again down the road, maybe long after your burner phone plan has expired. But you should be able to prevent this by adding a FIDO/U2F security key as your 2FA method. No idea if this can be set up on the mobile app, but if not, bring an unimportant laptop with a Linux live USB too.
Since you've already used Facebook in the past, and considering your use case and the nature of Facebook accounts, they most likely have your home location readily on file. Assuming that your main objective is to keep it from correlating your named accounts to pseudo/anonymous accounts and devices, first step would be to isolate it from your real IP address and browser fingerprint.
Now take everything to a library/cafe/somewhere you can access the internet anonymously. Leave your regular devices behind or at least have them in airplane mode and disconnected from the public WiFi. Set everything up, add your security key for 2FA, install a VPN client if Google/Facebook will allow it. Power everything down before leaving. Only power up the Facebook device once you are back home, ideally connected to a dedicated router with router-level VPN.
I don't really know how it all works, but sometimes I do think about all the times I've logged into accounts with my real name without a VPN. And wonder how many of those companies phone home to Meta with my real IP, letting them establish connections with my pseudonymous accounts I've also logged in to without a VPN.
It's a game rigged in their favor and the slightest mistake can blow your cover. Think carefully if Facebook is your only choice or if you can get by with an alternative. If you must use it, I would agree that a dedicated device, even if imperfect, is still one of the best measures for your privacy.
VPN + DeGoogled Privacy Android ROM would be the most practical. That way you should br free from most if not all cross device tracking.
In general having a seperate device for that stuff makes total sense.
Get some sort of device that is compatible with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS, like an older Pixel
not sure what would be best to handle verification.
You also have to be careful to use totally new accounts for everything on this new device, different number, different email, different device, different sim etc
App for downsizing MP3s automatically when copying to a phone?
I'm ditching streaming services and just going with local music. However all my CDs are converted to either flac or 320kbps mp3 files on my PC and thus far too large for the limited storage I have on my phone.
I was hoping there might be an app that would automatically downconvert to something like 128kbps and then copy over to the Music directory on my phone. A bit like how Calibre can automatically convert eBook files (e.g. mobi to epub) and then send them to your ereader?
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I don't know about automatic, but I also have music locally on my phone after moving away from streaming services.
I use fre:ac to convert from FLAC to MP3, and then just save it in a separate folder. Then when I'm done I move the folder to the phone and delete it from the computer so I just have FLAC on my computer.
Not automatic, but that's how I usually do it.
This is a valid question, but it's hard to answer because it depends on the security of your own network. Tailscale creates a secure tunnel directly into your home network, but if your home network is compromised then it's not secure.
Could Tailscale be compromised? I think it would be difficult but not impossible. It's safe enough for personal use, certainly, but I wouldn't use it to protect state secrets.
And if you have it on your phone, and someone gets access to your phone, then they can access your home network. How secure is your phone? Do you use biometrics or a password keeper? Do you leave your laptop unlocked?
Security is a mixed topic, and it's impossible to pull one thread from the sweater without unraveling the whole thing. Sometimes the illusion of security is as effective as actually being secure, and sometimes it isn't at all.
Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It's not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It's an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.
OTOH if you're happy using the terminal and/or scripting then ffmpeg would be a better bet.
PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists "Devices" and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn't able to test that here.
Might not be the most convenient option depending on your personal use-case, but have you considered a dedicated audio device? I personally got a refurbished LG V30 because I came across a YT vid while looking for cheap options for having a dedicated "mp3" player to keep archived/favorite episode of podcasts, audiobooks, and music. Seems there is a decent fanbase of folks that love the 3.5mm DAC that phone has (of course has Bluetooth too). It also has microSD slot. Got a 512GB card (can use up to 2TB which I might do at some point). Most of the music I have on it is flac where possible. I keep it offline and just transfer files via USB, but could use wifi to sync with PC if I wanted to at some point. Shit lasts a pretty long time with wifi/bluetooth off only using the headphone jack (helps that the battery was replaced by the refurb).
There are also lots of cheaper Android-based players (I got one before I came across the vid on the V30) but can have some amount of malware and no easy access to their firmware or communities that can advise custom ROMs to safely flash something clean and/or newer. When I got my no-name device I just side-loaded apks to avoid giving access to my Google account (though I plan to keep my V30 offline after I got the last updates for the OS and LG apps). I just wanted to have something that I only use for local audio and just keep it in my car or backpack and have access to the three apps I like (Musicolet for music, Podcast Addict for podcasts, and Smart AudioBook Player for my audiobooks).
If your device supports it, you might want to encode to Opus instead. Opus produces much higher quality files at much smaller file sizes than MP3.
For example, Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent when compared to the source file. You can probably go down to 64-96kbps when its just for playback in your car.
wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended…
As for transcoding them, you might want to check out ffmpegfs: github.com/nschlia/ffmpegfs
It can create a "virtual" drive based on your source files and automatically transcodes them when you drag & drop files from there onto your device.
GitHub - nschlia/ffmpegfs: FUSE-based transcoding filesystem with video support from many formats to FLAC, MP4, TS, WebM, OGG, MP3, HLS, and others.
FUSE-based transcoding filesystem with video support from many formats to FLAC, MP4, TS, WebM, OGG, MP3, HLS, and others. - nschlia/ffmpegfsGitHub
Navidrome does that. You have to setup a PC, or a raspberry Pi with navidrome, and then use a client like Symfonium (costs $5, not open source, but it's the best subsonic client out there), and tell it to automatically downconvert music when played via the phone. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B+, with just 1 GB of RAM, running navidrome. DietPi + navidrome (which is installable directly via dietpi's software selection), together they take just 80-120 MB of RAM!
I had Jellyfin before that, and Emby, and they were dogs. 1 GB of RAM was not enough for them, they'd swap with an additional 200-300 MB of RAM. And they were slow with large music libraries too. Navidrome/Subsonic don't have such issues. Big music libraries are handled fast with their db/engine.
If you prefer to not use a server, there are encoding shell scripts that do batch-encoding: github.com/caleis/flac2mp3/blo…
flac2mp3/flac2mp3.sh at master · caleis/flac2mp3
Scripts to batch convert FLAC to MP3 files and build libraries - caleis/flac2mp3GitHub
Tempo is a good open-source player for Android that works well with Navidrome.
On iOS, Arpeggi is good, but not open source (I think). It's still under development, but I don't think it's missing any major features at this point.
GitHub - CappielloAntonio/tempo: An open source and lightweight music client for Subsonic, designed and built natively for Android.
An open source and lightweight music client for Subsonic, designed and built natively for Android. - CappielloAntonio/tempoGitHub
That’s a shame. Has the developer stated this, or is it just based on the lack of activity?
There seems to be a fork planning to continue the work. It was updated only a few hours ago.
GitHub - eddyizm/tempo: An open source and lightweight music client for Subsonic, designed and built natively for Android.
An open source and lightweight music client for Subsonic, designed and built natively for Android. - eddyizm/tempoGitHub
For lower bitrates, I'd suggest using a different codec than MP3. Opus is really solid, and at 128 kbps it will probably get you quality similar to MP3 at 192 kbps. Or you could go lower, and 96 kbps with Opus will be similar to MP3 at 128 kbps. I don't know an app that will do it automatically, but the CLI tools are really simple to use: you point them at the FLAC and tell it the target bitrate and that's it.
Alternatively, if you have access to a macOS machine, their AAC encoder is really good and likely superior to any MP3 encoder at equivalent bitrates.
Opus Codec
Opus, the open standard, high quality codec. Presentation, documentation, comparison with other formats, download links, source code repository.opus-codec.org
This, @Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works.
I'm an audio engineer and can confirm that if you want the best quality audio for the file size, you want Opus. Opus at 128kbps is considered transparent, so it's roughly as good as 320kbps MP3s, but y'know, less than half the size.
Hey! Good to know about the 128 kbps threshold.
What's your take on MP3 bitrates? I've read some posts online claiming that 320 kbps is overkill most of, if not all of, the time. They claimed that there is little to no gain going above around 220 kbps. In your experience, is there any truth to this?
Generally this is true, but it depends on the encoder used. Back during the huge boom of MP3 popularity in the late 90s and early 00s, it likely did make a difference, so if you're looking at MP3s that were encoded back then I would go for 320kbps every time just to be safe, but modern encoders generally do much better like you said.
These days if I were encoding an MP3 I'd use LAME at -V0 setting, letting it lower the bitrate where it can without sacrificing quality. That said, per this test from 2014 that I found as a source on Wikipedia, a 96kbps VBR Opus file is at least as good if not better than an MP3 with -V 5 as the setting on LAME with approximately a 135kbps bitrate.
AAC is more widely supported than Opus and sits closer to Opus than MP3 in terms of compression efficiency, but still trails Opus in that category.
Still, better than MP3 for sure.
Have you considered self-hosting Plexamp? It supports lossless quality and lets you both steam and download your music at any bitrate you want (even 128 if you really have to, but fuck me that hurts to type.
That's what I do, and before long trips with spotty service I'll download a dozen albums or so in flac so I've got a decent lossless selection for flights/etc
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Well, it's not great to take an already compressed audiostream like 320kbps mp3, and then compress it again. Use your FLACs if possible. Then, I'd recommend that you use .ogg - they give better compression (smaller files), but with better sound than mp3...
There's a lot of apps out there, but AFAIK not anyone who does this automatically for you.
It's not really an "App" but tools like ffmpeg or sox or lame can do that no problem. It might take a while to convert your entire collection though ... but depending on the size might just take a night or, few nights.
If you have a ridiculously large collection and do want it "on demand" you could also use e.g. inotify to monitor directories, e.g. ~/Music/ForPhone/ so that any file added to that directory gets converted.
FWIW I'd use a phone with a microSD card as those days one can get a 1To for less than 100€ so probably no conversion needed even for a large collection.
Edit: based on a recent conversation I'd try transcoding capabilities of LMS github.com/epoupon/lms cf lms-demo.poupon.dev/settings from their demo instance
GitHub - epoupon/lms: Lightweight Music Server. Access your self-hosted music using a web interface.
Lightweight Music Server. Access your self-hosted music using a web interface. - epoupon/lmsGitHub
This might be a bit overkill for what you want but you could try using a selfhosted music server like navidrome and streaming to your phone. I use symfonium on on phone which can be configured to request the streamed music to be transcoded to a smaller size for streaming from mobile network or for caching it on your phones storage for offline listening.
Given that symfonium supports a lot of self hosted media providers from which to pull, you could also try sharing your music locally using samba. I'm not sure if the transcoding still works in that case though (it would obviously have to be done on your phone)
I would sooner suggest that you find a decent hosting service of free storage or just shove a decent sized microSD into your phone. Lossless music is the way to go. I started doing the mp3 thing quite a long time before most of the world even knew what they were, having been on the pirating scene early in the 90s. So back then I got most of my music in highly compressed mp3. But in the recent years I’ve been slowly replacing all of it with lossless format and it sounds SO MUCH better.
So while I hope you get your answer, should you choose to go that route as you’ve tentatively planned, I’d just suggest you pause a moment and rethink whether it’s the route to go. MicroSD chips are very cheap, and if you have an iPhone so it’s not an option, you could get a cheapie Android phone with a slot and use that for music. You can get a nice small device several years old online for like $15. I even have quite a few I could provide you with one if you wanted.
"Downsizing" an mp3 is what we call transcoding, and it's bad. An mp3 (or the better ogg vorbis) works (basically) by discarding parts of the audio that you won't hear. Doing that will discard parts of the mp3 that already has a bunch of parts discarded and this makes it sound bad.
I do something like what you're looking for, but it's all through a bunch of custom scripts and crap that I made. I buy flac, encode that to ogg (which sounds better than mp3s at lower bitrates), those oggs get synced to my phone, then later I organize those oggs to my collection.
I think you'll have to either accept these large mp3s or start a lossless collection.
So... if I ditch my MP3s (@ 320k) and use Ogg + Opus (@ ...? bps?), then I'd have the same / "better" music in less storage space?
Does that work ok with Picard, etc as I'm a bit OCD with metadata
I'm in a similar boat to you. I ripped almost all of my CDs to 320kbps mp3s for portability, but then I wanted to put all of them (a substantial number) plus a bunch more (my partner's collection) on a physically tiny USB stick (that I already had) to just leave plugged into our car stereo's spare port. I had to shrink the files somehow to make them all fit, so I used ffmpeg and a little bash file logic to keep the files as mp3s, but reduce the bitrate.
128kbps mp3 is passable for most music, which is why the commercial industry focused on it in the early days. However, if your music has much "dirty" sound in it, like loud drums and cymbals or overdriven electric guitars, 128kbps tends to alias them somewhat and make them sound weird. If you stick to mp3 I'd recommend at least 160kbps, or better, 192kbps. If you can use variable bit rate, that can be even better.
Of course, even 320kbps mp3 isn't going to satisfy audiophiles, but it sounds like you just want to have all your music with you at all times as a better alternative to radio, and your storage space is limited, similar to me.
As regards transcoding, you may run into some aliasing issues if you try to switch from one codec to another without also dropping a considerable amount of detail. But unless I've misunderstood how most lossy audio compression works, taking an mp3 from a higher to a lower bitrate isn't transcoding, and should give you the same result as encoding the original lossless source at the lower bitrate. Psychoacoustic models split a sound source into thousands of tiny component sounds, and keep only the top X "most important" components. If you later reduce that to the top Y most important components by reducing the bitrate (while using the same codec), shouldn't that be the same as just taking the top Y most important components from the original, full group?
If your files are flac and you just want to.copy some files you could try Mp3fs
That'll make your files appear to be MP3 when you access them
You could them use a file transfer mechanism to read them from the mp3fs location onto your phone with - kinda - one step.
GitHub - khenriks/mp3fs: FUSE-based transcoding filesystem from FLAC to MP3
FUSE-based transcoding filesystem from FLAC to MP3 - khenriks/mp3fsGitHub
‘Extreme limits’: China-led mission discovers Earth’s deepest animal oasis
‘Extreme limits’: China-led mission finds thriving oasis in Earth’s deepest reaches
Month-long Pacific expedition uncovers vast colonies of exotic creatures oblivious to sunlight drawing energy from hidden sources.Holly Chik (South China Morning Post)
Cuba land lease to Vietnamese company reaps rich harvest – DW – 07/30/2025
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/34128492
Andreas Knobloch
Los Palacios
07/30/2025
Cuba has let farmland to a foreign company for the first time since its 1959 revolution, when all foreign landowners were expropriated. But can the #Vietnamese investor help rescue the island's struggling agriculture?Under efforts to spur the domestic #rice output, the Cuban government has asked #Vietnam for help because the two countries have maintained friendly relations for decades, intensifying especially agricultuiral cooperation in recent years.
For Perez, the Los Palacios project marks a entirely new level of partnership though.
Privately owned Agri VMA is managing the lease largely independent from state interference, with operations being based on a business contract. The company has brought to Cuba its own resources, technical experts, and seeds from hybrid rice varieties developed in Vietnam.
Cuba land lease to Vietnamese company reaps rich harvest – DW – 07/30/2025
Andreas Knobloch
Los Palacios
07/30/2025Cuba has let farmland to a foreign company for the first time since its 1959 revolution, when all foreign landowners were expropriated. But can the #Vietnamese investor help rescue the island's struggling agriculture?Under efforts to spur the domestic #rice output, the Cuban government has asked #Vietnam for help because the two countries have maintained friendly relations for decades, intensifying especially agricultuiral cooperation in recent years.
For Perez, the Los Palacios project marks a entirely new level of partnership though.
Privately owned Agri VMA is managing the lease largely independent from state interference, with operations being based on a business contract. The company has brought to Cuba its own resources, technical experts, and seeds from hybrid rice varieties developed in Vietnam.
Cuba land lease to Vietnamese company reaps rich harvest
Cuba has let farmland to a foreign company for the first time since its 1959 revolution, when all foreign landowners were expropriated. But can the Vietnamese investor help rescue the island's struggling agriculture?Andreas Knobloch (Deutsche Welle)
Cuba land lease to Vietnamese company reaps rich harvest – DW – 07/30/2025
Andreas Knobloch
Los Palacios
07/30/2025
Cuba has let farmland to a foreign company for the first time since its 1959 revolution, when all foreign landowners were expropriated. But can the #Vietnamese investor help rescue the island's struggling agriculture?Under efforts to spur the domestic #rice output, the Cuban government has asked #Vietnam for help because the two countries have maintained friendly relations for decades, intensifying especially agricultuiral cooperation in recent years.
For Perez, the Los Palacios project marks a entirely new level of partnership though.
Privately owned Agri VMA is managing the lease largely independent from state interference, with operations being based on a business contract. The company has brought to Cuba its own resources, technical experts, and seeds from hybrid rice varieties developed in Vietnam.
Cuba land lease to Vietnamese company reaps rich harvest
Cuba has let farmland to a foreign company for the first time since its 1959 revolution, when all foreign landowners were expropriated. But can the Vietnamese investor help rescue the island's struggling agriculture?Andreas Knobloch (Deutsche Welle)
Trump hung up 30 seconds into call with CNN reporter asking about new Epstein photos
Trump ‘hung up after 30 seconds’ on the phone with CNN reporter who called to ask about new Epstein photos
Resurfaced photos show Epstein attending Trump’s 1993 wedding to his second wife Marla MaplesKelly Rissman (The Independent)
Brain drain of US climate scientists may signal shift in scientific gravity
‘Staggering’ brain drain of US climate scientists may signal shift in scientific gravity
The ‘dreadful’ situation may herald a move in ‘bright young minds’ towards Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, CityU professor says.Holly Chik (South China Morning Post)
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Survivors of Aid Massacres: Israel is Eroding Gaza’s Social Fabric
August 2nd 2025
Yousef Fares reporting from Gaza
Hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians in northern Gaza make a seven-kilometer journey on foot to reach the Zikim military base in Beit Lahia, where trucks loaded with bags of flour are stopped just meters away from Israeli soldiers. To secure a 25-kilogram sack, people must approach the very area where Zionist forces and private contractors carry out daily killings.Al-Akhbar met with Mohammad al-Sleibi, a former public school teacher in his thirties, who described surviving stampedes and knife fights to grab a single sack. “The soldiers allow only one or two trucks in for over 200,000 people,” he said. “Violence is inevitable. If you hesitate, you go home empty-handed.”
But the danger goes beyond scuffles. Israeli soldiers can open fire at any moment under the pretext of feeling threatened, no permission from higher-ups needed. That’s exactly what happened yesterday. According to survivor Ahmed Miqdad, Israeli soldiers opened fire as crowds rushed toward the trucks. “The soldiers fired round after round at us. We were trapped for hours. Hundreds were killed or injured,” he described. “They shot us like ducks, competing among themselves and probably even betting on who could shoot better. We made it out by some miracle, but without any flour.”
Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that Zionist soldiers killed 53 civilians yesterday and wounded nearly 200 others in that incident alone.
This distribution system, dubbed “self-distribution” by the Zionist occupation and international organizations, has become one pillar of a new three-pronged strategy: air drops, aid traps, and chaos. The aim is to create an illusion of humanitarian assistance in order to strip Hamas of the “famine card” amid growing global outrage over Israel’s engineered starvation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on countries to participate in airdrops over the Gaza Strip. Five planes from Egypt, Jordan, and Israel delivered less aid than a single truck, and some drops landed in “red zones” too dangerous to reach, or directly injured displaced civilians in crowded tent cities. Others, dropped over Gaza’s western areas, injured several displaced people living in the densely packed tent cities that now blanket the region.
Israel’s aid policy goes far beyond preventing Hamas from gaining control of supplies. It is being used to recalibrate Gaza’s social structure under the harshest conditions, in ways that erode the moral and behavioral rules of society.
“The Israeli army is exploiting two years of war and the absence of effective governance to foster organized crime and looting networks,” said human rights activist Abdullah Sharshara. “The army enables aid theft as a way of supporting local militias, like the gang led by Yasser Abu, which looted hundreds of trucks under Israeli protection. It’s a system built on lawlessness.”
Aid trucks are now Gaza’s main source of goods. The trade in aid has created a massive black market that employs hundreds of thousands of people. This has spawned a vast black market and informal economy that feeds off looted supplies. “Every market needs a product, and aid is all that’s left,” Sharshara said. “The army forces truck drivers to stop in crowded areas and prohibits them from delivering to UNRWA warehouses. This sustains the climate of chaos where people are pushed to loot or steal just to eat.”
This is how the Zionist occupation systematically dismantled Gaza’s civil infrastructure: by eliminating community leaders from public service through targeted assassinations or forced displacement. At the same time, it obstructs the work of security forces and destroys civil society and private sector infrastructure, eroding all forms of societal authority.
“Gaza already had a high percentage of unemployed youth, over 49% before the war.” Sharshara noted. “War economy has allowed them to integrate into a new order based not on labor or production, but on opportunistic accumulation and looting. This class has moved from the periphery to the center of post-war life. Their moral values have been completely redefined.”
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It's definitely gotten more wasteful lately in particularly. You could run 8.1 on any computer that supported Vista, and IME it was even a little snappier, but 10 and 11 have each been significantly worse.
i3wm on a 32bit IBM thinkpad is still instantaneous-response-fast
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern "fully featured" distros. They're using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn't the Linux of old.
For shits and giggles I just tested out Ubuntu 25.04 and it's only 1.3 gigs with it's stock Ubuntuified de.
For as much shit as Ubuntu gets it's really not that bad compared to some of the others.
Huh TIL, had a look through my system and it sits at about ~5GB not including disk cache. Been on Fedora KDE since 39 and have put it through its paces so I'm pretty happy with that
I would've reformatted windows twice in that time because of bloat accumulation, and like you said there's always room for improvement with hyper minimalist packages.
God I love Linux.
updates. the constant barrage of updates. the cpu, ram, and disk time needed just to 'check' for updates is horrible (it used to be a lot worse, too). and if you are still on an old-school mechanical hdd, those 'cumulative' updates are absolutely brutal every month with win10 or 11.
last week i booted-up a silverblue that hasn't been run in a couple months. 8gb, mechanical disk, not a speed demon either--3rd or 4th gen. i didn't even notice the updates were coming in until the notification popped up saying they were done.
Partially because Defender does a lot of unnecessary work. Partially because Explorer now has Chromium under the hood of many elements.
Also Copilot. Not even joking. Having so many copilot buttons in apps is not an issue. The issue is to actually try using it. Even a light conversion crashes both the desktop an Android clients too often. At this point I would rather have those resources consumed by actual AI running locally than on a crappy frontend. Pathetic.
These are just NPUs. They can run AI models, but you are not allowed to run actual Copilot as it is a cloud-based product. You need to research and set up AI models yourself if you want to put that to use.
I also don't expect that [Chromium + idiotic webdevs] formula will not work on those PCs, so Copilot+ PCs will not save you from Copilot crashes.
I mean
If you try to open modern JS bloated websites that reinvent scrolling in multiple tabs dont expect to have good performance
It will crash if you max out your ram and have 0 swap, in the same way your windows system will crash if you have 0 page file.
In recent years its become really trendy to just not use swap on linux and it pisses me off to no end. Its a horrible configuration all to save like 1% of your diskspace.
edit: Also, most distros out of the box do use significantly less than windows. My debian testing xfce install that I just did here a few days ago uses 700mb on a cold boot.
Well, Windows as such don't need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.
But the normal user don't do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don't need, that must tow.
Without Linux folk you wouldn't have Lemmy
That’s the kinda arrogance that causes me to hate Linux bros. You guys are just like every other kind of bro.
I have a laptop with 4gb ram that i've been using kde plasma on and fairly frequently it just freezes or I have to restart because I had like 6 tabs open in firefox
Although I don't remember having that problem as much when I was on xfce, but I also might not have been using it as heavily then
I've never had a similar problem with chrome on chromeos with the same amount of ram, I think chrome+chromeos might be more aggressive with unloading tabs
Sometimes it does actually kill firefox but sometimes it just becomes very slow (1-2 seconds per frame) or freezes entirely for several minutes when out of memory. Might be just because the swap is really slow, but there's just 2gb of that, why would it freeze for several minutes? (One time this was happening was when I was trying to compile llvm on two threads, I ended up having to temporarily kill the desktop environment to save ram)
My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.
It's not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.
For most use cases, including backend development, they'll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I'm still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.
GitHub - asankaSovis/Beowulf-Cluster-Setup-Tutorial: 🖥️ A Beowulf cluster is a type of High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster that is designed to perform parallel computations on large data sets or complex computational problems. This tutorial explains
🖥️ A Beowulf cluster is a type of High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster that is designed to perform parallel computations on large data sets or complex computational problems. This tutorial expl...GitHub
16GB RAM on windows is more than enough
And pretty sure 4GB on linux sucks
So I've done a Linux install on a 4GB Chromebook, with 16GB eMMC storage, and what I learned is that it really depends on what you use the machine for, and which distribution you run. If all you're doing is word processing, managing emails, and browsing on YouTube, you can absolutely run Linux comfortably with 4GB, provided you pick one of the leaner Linux distros. For reference I ran Gallium OS, which was a Xubuntu flavor specifically tuned for lower end Chromebooks.
ETA: In comparison, I had a relative who bought a laptop off those TV sales networks that had a similar CPU RAM and storage setup, except running Windows 10...it ran slower than a snail, and one day it had a Windows update that was too large to fit on the combined RAM and page space. The poor woman couldn't use the computer because the update forcibly ran in the background and consumed all her memory every time she turned it on. So yeah, you can't game on Linux with only 4GB of memory, but I am confident that I can do a major OS update on it at least.
Is there something like automatic moderation on Fediverse? How does it work?
Parola filtrata: nsfw
Considering how often I see nsfw or nsfl stuff because it wasn't tagged... no I don't think so, at least there doesn't seem to be anything widely adopted on Lemmy.
For images at least it should be possible to create a bot that downloads any uploaded image, runs it through an API like Sightengine, and then automatically removes posts or bans users. Each instance would then of course decide whether to set up such a bot, so there is not going to be any fediverse-wide automod.
I believe there's an automated filter used by some of the biggest instances to detect and nuke child abuse stuff before a human has to see it
Everything else is human moderation though AFAIK
There are some, but they aren't used very often. I know some instances scan CP and other illegal shit using community tools. But automods? No, I don't think I've ever seen one actively operating (and I don't think they are even maintained anymore, or at least the ones I know).
And even if they were, the advanced ones are only useful for the host.
So everything is manually moderated by humans at the moment.
That's why I'm working on a bot with a plugin system. The plugin system will allow users of the bot to implement the logic themselves in one of the supported languages (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Rust) in a sandboxed environment (Wasm).
It's halfway done, but now I'm unsure if I want to create a dedicated Fediverse platform for it. One of the biggest reasons for this is to be free from the limitations of Lemmy and other factors.
The problems with relying on Lemmy right now are:
1) You have to provide the bot with a Lemmy database connection (to reduce API usage and for faster response times).
2) The above also means you have to be the one hosting the Lemmy instance.
The bot doesn't need persistent storage of posts or comments or other stuff, so the Lemmy database will continue to grow until your server runs out of storage. So you would have to clean the database periodically.
3) You have to make Lemmy's rate limiting practically useless for the bot to function reliably.
The more communities use the bot, the more API calls will be made. If the bot gets rate limited, the plugins could be terminated by the plugin runtime. As long as Lemmy doesn't introduce a way to change or bypass rate limiting for specific people, this will remain a problem.
4) The bot uses the lemmy-client crate from the Lemmy devs. Should this ever be discontinued, I would either have to maintain it myself, use another crate, or create one myself. The last two would be painful and require a lot of work.
5) The bot is as compatible with other Fediverse platforms as Lemmy is. It cannot use the unique features of other platforms (like PieFed or Mbin).
And so I've been researching how I could build a lightweight Fediverse platform specifically for the bot.
That would eliminate all the problems mentioned above. Since the platform would be in my hands, I could also implement ways to federate with other platforms and even use the unique features of other platforms. But that's not easy, so it will take some time. I also am not great at web dev, so the frontend will also be a problem.
Small forums and sites that have group discussions are completely moderated by humans. Members of the community report posts, and moderators and administrators take a look at it and make a decision.
It should be noted that forums are different than social media, since all discussions are groups discussions viewed by the group, the group tends to self-moderate by reporting offending posts.
It should be noted that different forums and groups of people have different community rules. What is allowed on one forum may not be allowed on another. Illegal content is illegal on all forums, however.
postmarketOS in 2025-07: Fairphone 6, apk3, /usr merge, immutable, new plasma camera
postmarketOS in 2025-07: Fairphone 6, apk3, /usr merge, immutable, new plasma camera
Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphonespostmarketOS
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it bothers me immensely that javascript backed Gnome that I can't make run fluidly and jerklessly on competent desktop hardware is the default on underpowered mobile hardware, making Android and iOS level fluidity practically unattainable in the foreseeable future.
edit: I run pmOS on a SDM845 with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, tried em all on edge (gnome, plasma, phosh, plasma mobile) and it's a 5 fps stuttering mess. that's before I load something to said RAM, like a browser or (dog forbid) an electron app.
Javascript isnt the problem, its a problem of priority.
Gnome obviously isnt made primarily for low performance devices.
It will improve over time i think. If the time and efforts of unpaid volunteers continue to be invested into it.
And also idk if you were running with hardware acceleration? Makes a big difference.
You are doing something wrong.
Gnome that I can't make run fluidly and jerklessly on competent desktop hardware
I was referring to this statement.
My Rockchip 3399 powered former Chromebook (now running proper Linux) from 2017 runs Gnome smoothly with Wayland, not with Xorg.
That's reasonable to directly compare with phones from 2017; it's slower than a Pixel 2. Mine actually benchmarks a little slower than the reference board linked here.
It isn't working as it should be if it doesn't run smoothly on more powerful hardware, but it's not necessarily a matter of the end user "doing something wrong". Sometimes it takes effort to get a particular combination of hardware and software to run smoothly even though it should work.
Rockchip RK3399 Excavator Board edp avb (Android) vs Snapdragon 835 [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software
Comparing Rockchip RK3399 Excavator Board edp avb (Android) vs Snapdragon 835www.cpubenchmark.net
I hope it will be daily drivable in a few years.
DOJ Moves To Strip People Of Citizenship Based On Their Political Beliefs
DOJ Citizenship Revocation Plans Raise Constitutional Concerns
The Justice Department issued a June 11, 2025 memo directing attorneys to "maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings," sparking concerns about potential political targeting of naturalized citizens1. While the memo lists priorities like national security threats and criminal conduct, it includes broad language allowing cases deemed "sufficiently important to pursue"1.
Legal experts warn this discretion could enable politically motivated denaturalization. "The politicization of citizenship rights is something that really worries me, I think it's just flatly inconsistent with our democratic system," said Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University2.
Recent events highlight these concerns:
- The White House press secretary indicated support for investigating NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's citizenship based on rap lyrics3
- Trump suggested examining Elon Musk's citizenship status after Musk criticized his spending bill4
- Trump threatened to revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship, though this is legally impossible as she was born in the U.S.4
Constitutional scholars emphasize that denaturalization through civil proceedings "lacks many constitutional protections," with no right to court-appointed lawyers or jury trials4. The Supreme Court previously restricted denaturalization in 1967, ruling it "inconsistent with the American form of democracy, because it creates two levels of citizenship"1.
"Denaturalization is exceedingly rare and has occurred for people who concealed information of war crimes, Nazi membership, criminal histories, or immigration fraud such as using a stolen identity," said Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute4.
- NPR - DOJ announces plans to prioritize cases to revoke citizenship ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
- CNN - Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans ↩︎
- MSNBC - Trump's DOJ issues memo on plan to strip citizenship ↩︎
- PolitiFact - Can Donald Trump revoke Rosie O'Donnell's U.S. citizenship? ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Trump’s DOJ issues memo on plan to strip citizenship from some naturalized Americans
As the White House press secretary openly floats the idea of investigating New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to possibly strip him of his citizenship, after a bigoted proposal from Rep.Ja'han Jones (MSNBC)
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He continued, "Anyone who has abused the privilege of the opportunity of becoming a U.S. citizen should have that citizenship revoked when they engage in such reprehensible behavior."
Cool. Do Trump first.
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The politicization of citizenship rights is something that really worries me, I think it’s just flatly inconsistent with our democratic system
Even the opponents just spew out weasel words.
I'm sorry, your country is fucked; so if y'all could try and keep that fuckery within your borders, that'd be great.
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Ai is running on huge datacenters, these datacenters take freshwater and use it to cool these servers and taints the water turning it into gray water. This is happened in some areas with active droughts. On top of that these data centers are widely run on petroleum based energy systems and they are outputting so much pollution they're making nearby people sick. They are actively, rapidly making a water crisis and accelerating climate change.
Nothing that's for "the people" would be actively making everything for people worse. Not to mention the theft of intellectual property without compensation or even credit or permission used to train these libraries.
Read the book so you can tell others “Isn’t this what you believe?” I’m so sick and tired of the Right claiming Jesus. They claim Jesus with no good acts. Loving Jesus & not emulating his teachings is equivalent to no faith (James 2:15-18).
Matthew 32 calls for Christians to care for the poor, the sick, the immigrant, the unhoused, and the prisoner. “What you did to the least, truly I tell you, you did to me.” Every immigrant sent to a jail is sending Jesus to jail.
If ever these goons come for my family, I will quote the Bible until it haunts them. This country is corrupted.
Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops
Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops | Blog | Linaro
Linaro Connect 2025 showcases progress in bringing Linux on Snapdragon-Powered Deviceswww.linaro.org
Ubuntu 24.10 Concept ♥️ Snapdragon X Elite
We are happy to announce the next iteration of our Ubuntu concept image for Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops with our new X Elite developer preview. This new image has been rebased on the latest Ubuntu 24.Ubuntu Community Hub
Is the Fediverse KYC'd in the UK with the new law?
Are services like Lemmy, Mastodon or PeerTube KYC'd in the UK?
Sorry to be a doomer, but if so, then the Fediverse has failed and we should just move on with a decentralized web that uses decentralized backends: Nostr, Odysee/LBRY, etc.
Maybe the threat model of the Fediverse was incomplete. It isn't just Big Tech who is threat, but also regulation by Big Government.
The best thing is to look at the app yourself.
To establish the connection you can choose between proxy,vpn,root mode.
Otherwise, after opening the app, select the services and start them. You can also make all kinds of settings for the respective module.
InviZible Pro: increase your security, protect you | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Combine the strengths of Tor, DNSCrypt and I2P for security and anonymityf-droid.org
I predict an new migration to lemmy if reddit starts requiring ID.
We are ready for a new wave!
Big Tech IS big government. It's the same, the difference is just that one has a profit model and that another in some countries can be elected.
And in some, both are the same.
My understanding is that a handful of instances on the fediverse have geo-IP blocked the UK rather than open themselves to legal trouble.
I would guess that the others are either operated outside of anywhere that the UK can enforce its rules, not beholden to the new rules (I believe I read that there is a minimum user count for them to actually apply), or are just winging it.
I'd be shocked if more than maybe 4 instances of systems on the fediverse even had the resources to try to comply with this.
Nope the sentence still doesn't make sense.
Is this about the government requiring ID in order to view pornography because, a, it only applies to pornography websites which Lemmy isn't, and b, doesn't work anyway.
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Fediverse is very good at censorship resistance, much better than alternatives.
If internet is restricted in your country, use a VPN. If you're an admin, move your server to a different country.
If internet is not restricted, then there is nothing to worry about.
If you need a VPN to access it, then the Fediverse isn't censorship-resistant. The VPN is. Even more, the Fediverse instance is geoblocking/censoring you.
Examples of services that geoblock you or KYC you:
- YouTube
- Fediverse instances
Examples of services that don't geoblock/KYC you:
- Tor
- Nostr
- IPFS
- I2P
- VPNs
Fediverse is tens of thousands of instances. You may need a VPN to access your home instance (e.g. if it is blocked in your country), the rest of the network can be accessed from there.
I never heard about instances doing KYC (which is usually done by payments processors). If your home instance requires KYC, you can always move to another instance that doesn't require it, because there are so many of them all across the world.
VPNs are not much different from the Fediverse, by the way. It's just servers, they can be blocked by ISPs, and they can geoblock users. This is also true for Nostr relays, IPFS gateways, Tor relays, etc.
The Fediverse is decentralized, a law cannot affect all of Mastodon, Lemmy, or Peertube.
There are hundreds of servers in different parts of the world. Choose one you like.
what the heck are you talking about?
Mastodon can not "KYC" UK users because there is no central Mastodon. Even if an instance like mastodon.social gets bad ideas you can install your own Mastodon instance since node to node communication is - ignoring moderation - unrestricted.
Mastodon/Lemmy instances can be forced to KYC you. So you would have to jump into hoops and move from instance to instance. It will be like torrent sites or darknet markets, that come and go.
Yes, you can self-host, and should, but most people don't want to be a sysadmin, and it isn't easy. Ideally you should be able to participate in a self-sovereign way without being a sysadmin. Just like:
- you can torrent something without being a sysadmin
- you can self-custody your cryptocurrency without being a sysadmin
- you can chat on SimpleX or Session and never be deplatformed without being a sysadmin
- you can use Nostr and never be deplatformed without being a sysadmin
Bobr
in reply to Bobr • • •As a Ukrainian I can confidently say that those people resisting the lawful mobilization efforts by our legitimate and democratic president Mr. Zelenskyi are definitely all Russian agents.
You can actually prove it with pure logic!
As we all know from watching reliable sources like CNN - Russia literally tortures and massacres everyone on the territories they illegally capture! Dying in a war protecting the last democratic bastion against invading orcs is surely a better option than getting massacred by those evil orcs (like it happened in every city captured by them), right? So the only ones who disagree are Russian agents who will be spared.
Now you see, stupid tankies?
anon5621
in reply to Bobr • • •eldavi
in reply to Bobr • • •Bobr
in reply to eldavi • • •daydrinkingchickadee
in reply to Bobr • • •God somebody get me off this planet 👨🚀 🚀 👽
Bobr
in reply to daydrinkingchickadee • • •