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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 15th, 2024

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  • Imagine being 6 years old and your mother hugging you while crying. You have no electricity. It’s night time. Artillery shell explosions followed by the crumbling buildings and injured crying in pain are the only break you get from your mother’s sounds of sobbing. They’re destroying your entire block, but what you feel is terror. You can look out a window and see flashes. You don’t even know what politics or weapons of mass destruction. You’re just there scared until you die. You wonder what you did for this to happen. Now imagine hundreds of that same experience per night.

    That never makes it into the news. I would love to see people’s responses. Show the child and mother live. Then, people are randomly asked, “Push button to kill this person immediately or you will be put in jail and shamed for life.” Let’s see how they react to that guilt for eternity.

    There’s a quote from Game of Thrones that I think of often. The setting is that 3 brutal high-class leaders have to decide which one of them will die as punishment. They start getting nervous, so Tyrion says:

    It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it, other people dying?

    I find it validating.


  • Smart observation! While it doesn’t give a precise location (~300 miles), that info can still be dangerous to certain people. A state agency with a history of going after activists and journalists (eg North Korea & Saudi Arabia) could use that info to know where to focus efforts if not at least somewhat confirm their target’s location found through other means. If anything, they could at the least find out what country their target is hiding in.

    The How to Protect Yourself section doesn’t provide instructions on how to protect yourself. I guess there really isn’t a way to protect yourself if you use those services, correct? The best thing you could do is prohibit notifications and only open communication from people you trust. That seems quite limiting and keeps your vulnerability in the control of anyone that messages you anyway. The only effective way to protect yourself is to not use any communication services at all, which would then make activists and journalists ineffective.


  • But the thing is that here in Europe, we are more relaxed than USians because we have government mandated vacation days. It’s even better when I get sick at the same time because I can catch a free ambulance ride to the hospital near the beach since there is no “out of network” medical care (whatever that means) here. I can then take mass transit from the hospital to the beach and make university-educated friends with everyone because tuition here is free. Because I didn’t die in a mass shooting when leaving the beach, I can order a reasonably-sized meal that doesn’t cause instant cardiovascular disease and not leave a tip because our servers are paid a living wage. I can’t imagine the horror of living in such an underdeveloped country as USA. I am so glad I am in the EU.

    • Sent from my phone without concern of being doxxed or tracked thanks to EU privacy laws








  • I haven’t used Windows in about 3 years, so I may be out of date, but in my experience, Ubuntu and its derivatives work easier with scanners and printers. For me and my printer-scanner combo, I literally just have to place it and the Linux desktop on the same network/WiFi. I don’t even have to add the printer-scanner. The OS finds it in the background on its own. It confused me the first time it happened because like you, I had wearisome issues in the past. Last I used Windows, I had to tell the OS to search for the printer and find the drivers for it myself online. Now, it’s installed before I open up printers on my OS.



  • It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I’m aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.

    That would be an interesting experiment. Maybe cancel culture and public shaming will cease when everyone realizes no one is perfect and most people do shitty things from time to time.