Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed. / This eliminates every platform I know of.

Within the I2P anonymous mix network there was an attempt, at some point around 2015, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.

It failed to take off, but I’m not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.

Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can’t know why something appears on one’s feed.

I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.

Trump’s administration:

“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

Vance, in his old interviews:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Also Vance:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

It is interesting that Reddit took it upon themselves to remove it. They are government employees, those aren’t their private addresses, but end with “.gov”. This seems to be public data.

In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the SSID, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

The obvious reason is that Google tries to protect a billion inexperienced people from scammers and malware.

But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

And a big problem is that so many apps rely on advertising for its income stream. Spying a little has been legitimized and turned into a business under Android. To maintain control, the operating system then has to be restrictive of apps. Which pisses off developers who have a trusting relationship with their customer and want their apps to have freedom to operate.

The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.

Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.

The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).

If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).

Impressive. :)

I’m tempted, but won’t try to guess how operation endurances will progress - it would be an poorly informed guess by a rando. Better to wait what they write about it in journals.

Maybe I’m misreading because one poster above deleted their comment, but I can’t understand: how exactly has TSMC shown “disrespect”? Or was the poster showing disrespect?

Putting corporations aside and speaking of states: the US and Taiwan have respectful and friendly relations. They depend on each other.

Now, a tariff of 25-100% on a partner’s primary export and one’s own vitally important import is more like putting a shotgun to one’s leg out of spite. It would be hurting oneself and hurting the other side - and not a little bit.

The US is a store that Taiwan frequently shops in - a very big defense equipment store, I should say. Some of the toys cost money, but if you buy enough, you get kickbacks - the US gives Taiwan some security assistance for free. It also says it will assist Taiwan if anyone (we can imagine who that might be) attacks it.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is a store the world frequently shops in - a very big microprocessor, memory and microcontroller store. Frequent customers can tell TSMC “it would be nice if you brought some of your business here, we have a vacant spot suitable for your plans”. And it works: one factory will be built in the US, one factory in the EU. Maybe elsewhere too. Getting that to happen didn’t need Trump or insane levels of customs tariffs.

To achieve that, people just negotiated like normal people do. TMSC know they operate in a country prone to violent earthquakes and close to an agressive neighbour, they are quite OK with placing some of their business abroad.

Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.

I checked now, and apparently there is none - but LibrePay claims to accept “direct debit from an euro bank account”, so small donations over Librepay should not feed any banks. :)

Regarding e-mail: “riseup.net” requires that a long-time user vouch for a new user and invite them. If the new user quickly turns into a complaint magnet (there’s a coming-of-age period after which their actions are considered their own), both the user and the inviter will be held responsible (kicked off the service). I think (hope) they aren’t so strict with VPN, but they have limited people and could not administer a mess made by a big bunch of people.

Needless to say, none of my (anarchist) comrades have ever been kicked off RiseUp, but they don’t send spam or threats, they just send their cat pictures encrypted with GPG, causing the authorities endless work. :)

Just like every reasonable service, RiseUp has a few technical mechanisms to ensure they aren’t compromised (disk and inbox encryption, etc) but obviously those can’t help against a dedicated and well-resourced adversary.

So, whatever e-mail server you use - use PGP / GPG. :) Then the adversary must compromise your device. If you are hardcore, encrypt and sign on an offline device. Then the adversary must breach the air gap.

(I used to sign releases for some anonymity-related project years ago. Those were the times when I seriously took measures because others depended on me. Currently, not so much.)

P.S. As for the lack of resources at RiseUp: this can be alleviated by donating to them. Which reminds me, I should set up a small regular donation to their representative organization in the EU.

Under the divine guidance of Elon Musk, I strongly doubt if emperor Trump will break any big tech. More likely he’ll pat them on the back while requiring more surveillance data to be submitted.

Whoever you are, whatever you do - downregulate Musk in the ways you can, for the benefit of societies all over the place.

Thanks, this taught me something new about how a seismogram can be analyzed. :)

Short answer: no.

Long story follows. Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist, but ages ago, I did reasonably at high school physics contests.

In above-ground nuclear explosions, you detect the signature immediately, you don’t need to wait for weeks to see radiation.

You will be detecting great amounts of gamma photons (which a chemical explosion can’t create). Satellites looking for extraterrestial gamma flashes (attributed to collapsing stars, formation of black holes and such) will register a nuclear explosion on Earth.

A direct observer will experience a blinding flash and scorching heat, followed by a shockwave. Victims will have clothes that caught fire and skin that burnt instantly. Wood will flash to a burning state, paint will burn off metal, etc.

This was not the case. We have multiple videos of the explosion. Nobody got burned by seeing it, but the shockwave that arrived was indeed very powerful. I hate linking to Twitter but this “NAFO” guy that does war reporting doesn’t seem to have an account in other places that I know: link 1, link 2, link 3.

My conclusions:

• this was a very powerful conventional explosion, perhaps comparable to the Beirut port explosion (ship full of ammonium nitrate)
• the initial warhead probably was a bunker buster
• the bunker was probably full of interesting stuff
• the big explosion was a secondary explosion

Projectiles being cast out of the site and orange clouds of fire hint of which chemicals are burning. I’m not competent to tell what.

If radiation levels increased, then most likely the ammunition depot contained radioactive material.

Israel does possess nuclear weapons, but would have a great amount of acceptance to lose if it used them for a frivolous or vain purpose. Destroying the remnants of a collapsing regime’s more powerful weapons would be a frvivolous and vain use for a nuclear weapon. Israel would not expose itself in such a way. It has conventional weapons which can break a bunker.

While that is possible, I believe Ukrainians have South Korean assistance for analysis and a lot of expertise of their own. In case of a diary, you can use old-school detective work - you look for progressively great wear towards the beginning. You look for stains and grease on older pages. Such things are difficult to manufacture in a quantity.

And, besides, it would not be very motivating for a soldier to carry a fake diary on the assumption that it’s going to be recovered from his body. I think they want their folks a bit better motivated than that. :)

I can only speculate, since I’m not from there. To my understanding you aren’t either.

If war came here, I would probably stay. Maybe because I’m an aeromodelist that flew drones already in 2004. I would probably think “it’s bad stuff, but I have trained for this job for 20 years”. But if someone didn’t give me a correct job to do, I’d politely refuse. Jail is better then stupidity.

If someone thinks that jail is better than any participation in war, I understand.

If someone thinks that emigration or hiding is better than jail, I understand. If my home country wanted my building or flying skills to invade or conquer, I’d disappear or resist.

But there is something you need to understand, which I feel from reading your post that you don’t.

In Ukraine, the president changes, in Russia, the same guy rules since Yeltsin picked and propped him up 25 years ago (after so much stealing that Putin’s first decree was to give Yeltsin and his family immunity, and of course, after Yeltsin had started enlarging presidential power during the constitutional crisis and the Supreme Soviet (parliament) had been fired upon). Putin continued that path, but the word “autocracy” seemed appropriate until recently. In the last decade, only the term “dictatorship” seems appropriate. Full totalitarianism hasn’t been achieved yet, but is approaching fast.

In Ukraine, you can campaign and demonstrate against the government and my anarchist comrades operate above ground. Some of them have voluntarily joined the army, and some have died. Some have gone there from Russia, joined the Ukraininan army, and some of them have died too. They weren’t patriots. They just knew the difference and knew the cost of Putin’s regime to society. Officially, they fought for Ukraine. In their own mind, they fought to stop Putin’s conquest and help break his regime (which had imprisoned and killed people who mattered to them).

In Russia, they operate underground. Saying the wrong stuff gets 5 years. Army has a habit of torturing and shooting its members. Police has a habit of torturing people. Courts take direct commands from the prosecutor and security apparatus. Opposition politicians die of poisoning or get railroaded to prison.

If one has any interest in politics, the difference between Ukraine and Russia is massive. Only for a person who wants to eat in the morning, work during day and eat in the evening - with no interest in society whatsoever - only for that kind of a person is the difference limited. Yes, it’s possible to live in both countries. Sun still rises and wind still blows.

Indeed, war has a flip side of selection. Ukraine will lose some percentage of its society and Russia will lose some percentage. The social profiles of the people who are lost - can be understood. Both societies are burning through their groups most willing to fight, but the way of mobilizing people differs considerably, so the groups that lose most members will differ by country.

I will tell as much as I know about the profiles.

• professional military -> very big losses on both sides
• national guard and interior troops -> medium to big losses on both sides
• volunteers (trained, well motivated) -> medium to big losses on both sides, they fight better than others, but also get sent to more dangerous misssions
• conscripts (untrained, young) -> big losses only on Russian side, almost no losses on Ukrainian side (they don’t send folks under 25 to the front unless they volunteer)
• reservists (trained, old) -> big losses only on Russian side, since they practise meat attacks (Ukrainians aren’t willing to attack under such conditions)
• convicts (training varies, age varies) -> big losses on Russian side, since they practise meat attacks (Ukrainians only recently allowed convicts to join the war, and I have no idea about how they train or fight)
• a Russian special seems to be burning through ethnic minorities from remote places

As far as I’ve read, starting from a known and equal condition (e.g. “you have a bullet wound in your arm”) or even no condition (“you are in a frontline trench”), levels of ending up dead differ quite radically. Ukrainians seem to be evacuating their wounded and don’t seem to practise suicidal attacks. I’ve seen fundraisers for remote-operated evacuation vehicles (stretcher on tracks), DIY ambulances and a long list of medical equipment.

On the Russian side, it doesn’t seem to go like that. I’ve read of the wounded remaining on the front for weeks, and being pressed to attack again.

Also, Ukrainians have infrastructure behind their back. Russians, not so much, because their attack has destroyed it.

Numbers aren’t public, but I’d estimate a fourfold difference in survival of the same type of wound. Historians will figure out the exact rate later.