FriendOfDeSoto

If you can’t (or won’t) cut down on having firearms freely available, and if you cannot (or will not) do more on the mental health side of prevention, and you have already invented bullet proof whiteboards, doors like battlefield tanks, and implemented a system of metal detector entry checks and maybe deployed an armed guard, then this is an almost good idea. It’s the blinking light in the window and an alarm system sticker on the window that may deter a thief but for school shootings.

I’m not sure about pepper spray. Is a blind shooter unloading their AR-15 magazine an improvement over a fully sighted one? Why aren’t they equipping them with tranquilizer darts? Cross promotion potential for zoos as well.

What are the odds that we get coordinated school attacks and we find out one part-time student at the control center can’t fly 5 drones in 5 different high schools at the same time?

If you are something like 4chan or a descendant of that type of website, the answer is as easy as that. If you are Xwitter or Facebook it is not. You’re too big. You may have opened an office in the country, either because it was a legal requirement to continue operating in the country or because you collect money through it. So throwing your hands up and saying eff you we just don’t serve your country any more comes with a cost. Your ad money now needs to be paid abroad, which comes with the danger of increasing the cost for advertisers who now need to pay in dollars rather than pounds. And the representative in the local office, which you may want to close now, may find themselves in court for all the infractions that occurred before you threw your hands up (something that happened in Brazil IIRC). Also, you want the people who make the laws continue to use your platform to give it relevance. A Melon Usk Xwitter hissy fit may finally drive the rest of the politicians away. Loss of relevance will translate to loss of money.

The internet is multilaterally interdependent and scale matters.

This looked totally legit until

secure communication channels below. TELEGRAM

You are making this up.

I don’t think I am. I was in at least two threads where people just referred to them as Nazis and in a stage of outrage weren’t open to other interpretations. However, my post can be taken as all users who got mad called them Nazis. Some got mad and didn’t call them Nazis. That’s why I said assholes are still assholes.

It is mathematically correct to say that a portion of the energy I may contribute to Mullvad will end up financing fascism.

It’s mathematically correct to say a portion of your fees in the past may have ended up in the coffers of the Örebro Party. It seems likely that continuing payments to the company may filter through Daniel to them as well. Facism is traditionally associated with right-wing extremism. This party is a Frankenstein monster of traditional associations and they lean further to the left than to the right, except on immigration. With “remigration” as the de rigeur pipe dream corner stone. Xenophobia alone doesn’t fascism make. The Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a hit destination for immigrants. So we either enlarge the definition of fascism to include these horseshoe loonies. Or we need a new word. Or we just agree to call them assholes and any continuing payments to Mullvad carry a mathematical risk of further financing assholes, more than one.

Daniel is one of the founders of Mullvad and part owner. He took a big chunk of change from his private wealth and donated it to a horseshoe loonie party. Horseshoe because they try to marry ideas from the extreme left to immigrant hateful ideas from the extreme right. Loonie is self explanatory. His donation made it possible for that party to run a nationwide campaign.

Mullvad users who got mad simplified this to Mullvad fees finance a Nazi party directly. Which isn’t true. How much of this donation truly came from VPN fees is also a matter of debate. They aren’t strictly Nazis, more xenophobic communists. But assholes are still assholes and people choose labels differently. There is a lot of kneejerk reacting going on.

The company seems to want to ride it out. They correctly point to this being a decision by a private citizen who may exercise his free speech by donating to the loonie party. But they either don’t recognize the PR hell of being guilty by association as a company or they know the subscription drain isn’t as bad as the online outrage makes it look like. They publicly say this is all about free speech, which is their DNA, yada yada yada.

The report also seems not to realize that it is being written by the Trump administration.

There are a few delightful digs like this in this article.

The only thing that’s golden is the tacky veneer on the White House walls in the picture.

If you want something European, I’d throw AirVPN in the mix. I went there and never to Mullvad. And now I’m glad I didn’t and at the same time I’m looking forward to hearing inevitably what corpses my current provider has in the cupboard.

I dislike Proton, which I quit after the CEO praised 47 on his big tech regulation and before they handed the email account of some environmental activist over to the authorities, in France IIRC. They want to be your replacement for Google and keep pushing more services at obscure subscription levels at you. In terms of VPN, they were good though.

They seem to be on the inertia as a strategy train. Most users won’t have heard about this so they’re not in danger of losing them. A few who have won’t abandon ship because it’s a pain. And the rest they seem to tolerate losing. That’s unfortunate, say I who isn’t even their customer. I would have thought they do more but maybe another two weeks of ended subscriptions can lead them to reason and get rid of Daniel.

This will not be the final chapter on VPNs. People in government change - the UK is ushering in the 100th PM in the last decade this week. Somebody is going to scream “think of the children” again and all reason dissipates faster than you can say “haven’t we been here before?” It’s like chat control on the continent. These zombies are eternal.

A word of warning about Ente: I chose them as what I thought would be a good alternative to Google Photos based on a thread like this about a year ago. I’ve had nothing but trouble with them to the point where I can say the only thing that works is the automatic backup function. That’s not nothing but also none of the fluff on top they say they can do. Sharing is a nightmare, especially if it includes videos. They don’t have the server capacity of a multinational tech conglomerate so they offload a lot of processing onto your devices. If you don’t always get the latest and best phone and use older laptops etc. I would not sign up for them.

From my Monday morning armchair, I think it’s a fair assumption that their business was already in a downward trajectory. The automobile industry used to be the plow horse of the German economy and plenty of businesses down the supply line have suffered for their inability to move with the times and ditch internal combustion engines. Automobile gets a mention in passing but thanks to various more or less elected madmen doing their mad things in various crises on this planet I doubt any of the other fields mentioned were putting them in a better position. So either they were dumb about their IT security or the diminished security was due to their economical situation in a confounding clusterfuck.

I find it fascinating to think that you could ruin a competitor now simply by hiring a ransomware as a service outfit. If you know they’re on the ropes, they probably cheap out on IT. Send the bitcoin fueled North Koreans in and soon you can buy it up for cheap. I don’t think that’s overly paranoid to consider today.

Wait a minute… ಠಿ⁠_⁠ಠ

It’s probably worth paying attention to this to see what information they release eventually. However, if there was indeed a hacker attack of some sort, it was probably illegal to do, and it’s also very possible that their infrastructure wasn’t up to par and they were aware of that - these are just two legitimate reasons why they were counseled to be tight lipped about this at this time by the police or their lawyers respectively.

The gained advantage in your theory lies in drivers being unaware that they’re being “scanned.” They are not doing a great job at hiding this then, are they. A motorcycle could evade this all together, a car might also be able. And the solar panel could better be used to power a camera and/or a license plate reader if they wanted to know who is passing.

I’m sure if we put enough lab coats on the task they can come up with a system that can ID a model by the reaction in the coil. But at what cost? A light switch is cheap. A light switch that can tell who is using it surely isn’t. And why go to this length and not just do the cameras? Ockham’s razor.

For an immediate fix try “00” in place of “+”

In North America it may be “011”

And either way, followed by the phone number omitting any leading zero on the area code.

I don’t disagree with your thought per se. I’m looking at your train reservation example and think that soon you won’t be talking with a real person but two ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat. So corpos aversion to privacy tools drives you to corpo’s desire to cut overhead. And I’m sure there are plenty of examples where the phone in option simply does not exist. Or where it cannot exist because they can’t find people to staff it or a model to fake it effectively.

I see a future where you sadly have to feed one of these agenetic models, when proven much safer to use than today, with the minimum of information necessary to get your train tickets or whatever, and then let it fight with the other side while you do something else.

You are so awesome. Not a single fault in your conviction, your reasoning, or your personality. Who among us mere mortals could ever change your mind? The answer: none. Because we do not hold a candle to you or we simply do not care. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Don’t call me Shirley.

It’s like with planting trees. The best time was to plant some 50 years ago, the second best time is now. But it is too late in many ways.

Why “even?” Even after struggling with privacy concerns you don’t think they’re the future of wearables. Shouldn’t that be “because of?” Normally, privacy concerns aren’t a big plus point. I didn’t want to buy this hypothetical device but after learning all the data goes directly to an unencrypted database on an open server in the cloud, I was all in?

TL;Dr because of this dumb premise that is the first sentence:

As someone who is largely (if not always) inseparable from my iPhone’s camera, the desire to test out Meta’s elusive AI glasses was a natural next step.

If that’s your natural next step, your opinion doesn’t matter to me.

Nothing fills my heart with such joy as negative Meta headlines.