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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I did. No good, unfortunately. Could not get TOR to work at all unless connected to a VPN or using a foreign SIM card.

    If you have a foreign SIM card then you can get access to the unfiltered Internet in China. So if you’re planning a trip to China, I recommend doing that. I bought an eSim from SoSim which is a Hong Kong carrier (there is no firewall in Hong Kong—yet) and it was like 20 USD for the 14-day “Greater China region” pass. I think it had like 10 GB of data which was enough for my purposes. Extra data is pretty cheap anyway and they take foreign credit cards. No 5G or even 4G LTE though (you have to pay extra for that which sucks). You only get plain old 4G which is passable but disappointing. China throttles traffic to foreign IPs (even unblocked ones) so I don’t think 5G would be a huge benefit anyway.

    While connected to WiFi, I was able to set up my own OpenVPN server and that worked as well. Their blocking seems to be DNS based. If you keep it to yourself and don’t share your server publicly, I think you should be good.

    Since China is mostly cashless, all digital transactions are tracked and monitored, and selling access to an illegal VPN server will result in severe consequences. The Government doesn’t actually care about individual people getting around the Great Firewall.

    But like I said, the idea is not to be perfect but to make it annoying enough to get around that ordinary people don’t bother.


  • The only experience I have with countries that have censored Internet access is China, but I can say that all ordinary methods for connecting to Tor will not work and using commercial VPNs is really a game of whack-a-mole with the Chinese government.

    The idea is not to be 100% effective, it’s to make evading the censorship hard enough that most people don’t really care to do so. Everyone in China knows how to evade the Great Firewall but most people just don’t care about the fact that their Internet access is censored.


  • NateNate60@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldthe perfect browser
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    21 days ago

    I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.


  • This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you’re going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You’re betting on two facts to remain true:

    1. That the issue of avoiding American products will even be salient in three to four years’ time. By that time it’s pretty likely that America has either taken over the word or been reduced to rubble. Trump will either be god-emperor of mankind or leaving office a broken, defeated man (or perhaps in a coffin before that—the man eats more Mcdonald’s than can be good for him, especially at his advanced age)
    2. That people care enough about this to pay double the price of an American-made cell phone.
    3. That your customers don’t count the fact that their phones were made mostly by American or Chinese engineers against you. America attracted all the best tech talent in the world with high salaries and China basically brute forced it with sheer numbers.

    Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it’d have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.




  • There is no limit in the Constitution that prohibits individual US states from exchanging representatives with foreign countries or from expressing or sending support to them. However, there are some caveats, of course, and it’s a very nuanced area of law that has interesting implications:

    1. Accepting formal diplomatic representatives from another power is deemed under international law to mean recognising the independence and sovereignty of the power whose representatives you are accepting. Which essentially precludes formal diplomatic ties from consideration. This is why the US doesn’t accept diplomats from the Republic of China (a.k.a. Taiwan) and refuses official Taiwanese diplomatic and service passports, but is more than happy to accept “unofficial” representatives.
    2. Any representatives sent would not have the power to contract treaties as US states are not competent under US law to enter into treaties or make any other binding obligation to other countries. This is problematic because that means they can’t even do as much as rent an office space in another country without the involvement of the US federal government.
    3. The primary reasons that a country might consider hosting a diplomatic mission of a foreign power is so that they can (1) complain to the ambassador about that foreign power doing things that they don’t like, (2) so that the foreign power can issue passports and visas within the host country, (3) so that consular services can be provided by the foreign power to its citizens or subjects living within the host country, and (4) negotiate treaties. Since US states don’t really do anything abroad that can’t be handled or complained about through the US Department of State, and because US states don’t issue passports or visas, and because consular services to US citizens is already provided through the diplomatic missions of the United States, it is unnecessary for any country to consider hosting a US state diplomatic mission.



  • I have no idea how this screenshot illustrates your point but there is an “alt-left”… sort of. This term is not really used though. The term “alt-right” was used to describe far-right elements of the American population whose ideology was regarded to be extreme enough that mainstream centre-right politicians wanted nothing to do with them. “Alt-right” is (was) essentially a polite euphemism for right-wing extremism.

    If you want, you could consider the left-wing version of this to be the socialist and communist groups, but they are politically irrelevant in the US, not only because the centre-left absolutely refuses to even acknowledge their existence but because the “alt-left” also hates the centre-left and isn’t willing to co-operate with them to get into power. The “alt-right” holds political sway only because the centre-right realised they were useful in riling up the right-wing voter base and they could be used to get into power. Unfortunately, this really just meant that the centre-right has disappeared in America and been replaced with only alt-right or alt-right-sympathetic politicians. The “alt-left” of America is completely unrepresented in any institution of government. Again, I want to make clear that “alt-left” is not a term that is in widespread use but if you generalise the prefix “alt-”, it’s what it would mean.