Shipping it with Linux is the easiest way to convince a consumer that it does run Linux. :)

A counterpoint: unmanned technology has developed really fast recently. In old times, one had to be motivated as hell, because taking a shot at a president meant likely death.

In our days, for a technically capable adversary, an attempt costs only moderate amounts, escape is far more likely, and tools can rigged with self-destruction mechanisms to considerably hinder evidence collection.

I’d say that barriers are lower due to drones and robots. Then again, to get drones and robots pointed at oneself, one has to piss off people who have better things to do. That is, people who are unlikely to be desperate, since they could likely emigrate and find a well-paying job in a week.

If I try to predict a profile, I come up with “a technically competent person with an incurable disease, no longer covered by health insurance”. Or perhaps “a war veteran with an incurable disease”.

Note: design and licensing is a far cry for semiconductor fabbing, and not every country can do the latter.

Most countries depend ridiculously much on TSMC (from Taiwan), while TSMC depends ridiculously much on instruments from ASML (from the Netherlands). Grossly simplified, getting where those two currently are takes a decade, and by that time they’ll be a decade ahead (unless they get lazy).

As far as I recall, Samsung (South Korea) can fabricate large quantities of semiconductors on their own (but several times less than TSMC). Then come several Chinese companies, one in the US and one in Israel. Beyond that, there’s very small fish. The only European foundry worth mentioning (X-Fab) has dropped out of the top 10.

Wow, interesting. :)

Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.

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. :)