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Aria

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Aria ,

The author of this article has a very strong track-record, so I choose to trust it. Though it does rely on anonymous sources. …substack.com/…/how-america-took-out-the-nord-str…

Aria ,

This is like mobster tactics or something, terrorist tactics is indiscriminate bombing, collective punishment, scorched earth, torture, targeting civilians, targeting humanitarian efforts, disproportionate responses. Everything they’ve been doing until now.

Aria ,

Somehow higher than 0% success rate.

Aria ,

This is the People’s Republic of China. Their disputed territorial claims amount to a few villages claimed by India and a few small islands claimed by Japan and Vietnam. All three countries have much bigger territorial disputes with other countries. You’re thinking of The Republic of China, who claims whole countries and very large swaths of land. The Republic of China doesn’t have a seat in the UN because they don’t have majority support. (1.4% vs 98.6% for PRC).

Aria ,

Should urge the UN to support a single state solution and Palestine’s full membership instead.

Aria ,

I think he’ll lose that bet but more importantly, how is he laying down a challenge to Apple and Samsung when he’s not even saying they’ll surpass either?

Aria ,

I’m sure you can corroborate this with evidence.

Aria ,

This is good evidence. Thank you for finding and linking these. Though I’d still object to ‘common occurrence’ if there aren’t a lot more; the most recent one is still 8 years old and all the examples are for sure guilty of breaking laws while having properly registered offices with their own data centre – high profile targets. Rather than a scenario where my VPS might randomly go offline because I hosted Invidious or Lemmy on it.

Aria ,

This time I must say your evidence and reasoning is much weaker. I disagree strongly with how you interpret this. Demanding foreign companies keep data on your citizens in your country is a good thing. The alternative is foreign spy agencies and governments having control over it. The fact that they have laws requiring companies to dox users is a completely separate issue. It’s bad, but it’s in-line with many EU nations. The NY Times article is especially bad because the tool they’re talking about, whois, is included standard with Mac and Linux. It’s not scary spy software. Inspecting and blocking traffic on the fly isn’t supported by the article as far as I can tell. And finally, having someone’s root certificate does not at all stop you from encrypting data. It lets websites that have been verified by the issuer have a green check mark in Firefox. You likely have tens or hundreds of root certificates installed on your computer. You can still keep data hidden from their issuers. It doesn’t affect your ability to encrypt.

In the case of that last link. He did go to jail for 20 days, but on the other hand, running Tor did literally save him from prison. This isn’t from that article but looking up his name, it seems he was cleared of all charges a week after he got out of jail and the judge’s reasoning was that because of Tor there wasn’t undeniable evidence. He wasn’t asked to stop hosting Tor either. Not defending the Russian justice system allowing them to jail you with only probable cause and not an actual conviction, that’s still bad, but where I live, I would get convicted instead, which is worse. This case sounds like positive confirmation that if I rent a Russia VPS and use it for Tor, I’m not breaking any laws and don’t need to worry about regular downtime, which was the original premise.

Aria ,

Here are couple of auto-translated articles with some technical details on said spy-boxes.

I found the technical exploration interesting, even if the translation I read might not have been completely accurate. But at least 8 years ago, they didn’t seem to have any ability to analyse and modify content, instead relying on a simple domain block-list. There’s domain blocking where I live too. I imagine it’s handled similarly on a technical level. Seems more of a concern for home users, I don’t think one of these boxes sitting outside a data-centre would affect you at all. Your hosted web application would have proper encryption and they’d only see the destination of one leg of the journey. Even for 8 years ago, this doesn’t really seem like a level of technical sophistication that trumps even non-rigorous general best practices.

That’s a dangerous precedent though, that a person can be arrested and held for indefinite amount of time without any significant evidence - just based on IP address.

Absolutely.

the entire Tor network was outlawed in Russia, so it won’t work as a defense any further.

This just says blocked, not outlawed. I also couldn’t find any other articles about Tor being outlawed. As long as it’s not illegal it’s no practical problem for me/you. According to this article, Tor and someone else is suing, which they wouldn’t do if they didn’t have a legal basis for operating. It even says it’s unconstitutional.

The decision violates the constitutional right to freely provide, receive and disseminate information and protect privacy.

Assuming that’s true, then that’s a pretty easy win for any data centre hosting my blackbox VPN-routed seedbox or whatever it would be.

you indeed have nothing to worry about, except for the downtime, and certain protocols and endpoints being unreachable

Yeah but I don’t feel you’ve demonstrated that at all. There were a few high profile raids, but they were decades ago. If my cheaper than average hosting has average downtime then I’m still getting a good deal. Based on what you’ve provided, it sounds like the anonymous computer in a cave scenario in the meme would go completely unnoticed by an averagely aggressive and averagely competent police state.

Though, if you are a political figure, the advice would still be to not touch anything Russian even with a 10-foot pole

assassination attempt to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agencies

Come on. I’m not planning to spy on the Russian military for the MI6! That’s several levels of shady beyond ‘anti-establishment website’.

This allows them to perform MITM attacks by connecting to the website on your behalf, decrypting it, then re-encrypting it with their own cert and you’d still get the checkmark.

In theory that is true. And not particularly hard. But it’s not invisible, and so it would get discovered quickly. And it can also be mitigated with a VPN and not using the state’s DNS. Users of Russian e-banking are be susceptible to MITM, but my VPS isn’t, because I don’t have that certificate. And the Russian banking public isn’t being spied on because they’d burn the card when they use it. Is it being deployed to discretely and sparingly MITM-attack specific individuals? I mean maybe. But I think it’s being deployed so they can have a green check.

Aria ,

I’ve never needed dead hand software. I wipe my phone before going through airports but that’s it. If I needed it, my first instinct would be to write my own, because my use case would probably be pretty simple. I’m not sure. I think you’re vastly overstating the danger of travelling through Russia. Still, I’d wipe my phone (or leave it at home) like anywhere else of course. Always best to be cautions.

But then, renting a box in Russia just to break out of it using a VPN kind of defeats the whole purpose.

This is just kinda how I use everything. I mean I’m paying for the VPN anyway… But it doesn’t degrade performance for a seedbox. You connect to it and stream your files when you need them, it’s less hassle than if you download things to your own home. Doesn’t degrade performance for most private tasks to be honest.

If your place also does this and it has a working democratic and judicial systems, I would suggest starting to raise questions about it.

It absolutely does not. But even if it did, I think most countries in the EU have some form of internet censorship. Almost always left to the discretion of the ISPs when it comes to implementation. Your instance is in Estonia, so I checked, and Estonia blocks copyright infringement and gambling, and according to one source, as if this year, ‘Russian propaganda’.

Aria ,

Eh, a red passports in my pocket, along with a military id of same color say otherwise

Then you know better than me.

Though I’d advice to consider one in Armenia, if possible. It’s close, but much more liberal and the internet speeds are just as good. Though computer part imports seem to be problematic in there so I’m not sure if there are any good providers.

I don’t have a particular love for Russia for this type of thing, it just happens that a lot of low cost barely-professional providers are in Russia, and that Russia isn’t among the worst countries in terms of surveillance law and competence to enforce those laws. I’d happily rent from an Armenian provider, they’re just a little worse at SEO. Thanks for the tip.

ones that don’t use it as a pretense to infringe on your privacy.

My current ISP works with any router but there is a mandatory purchase of their partner’s router when you sign up. That router doesn’t host a configuration page, if you want to configure the SSID or password, you need to use their Windows/Android app. The Windows app installs a root certificate. I haven’t done that, and I think it’s just to facilitate regular updates rather than MITM decryption, but it could be either. ISPs have smart people (or people with skills in the right technical area), but they don’t have any financial incentive to use a clean solution sadly.

But it’s sad to see that they are, too, going political with this.

I’m not categorically against blocking illegal content, but it’s the surveillance I find really icky. Countries with laws about having to keep logs on users. Mandatory invisible/silent data-sharing with police. Gross.

Aria ,

You know what ‘racial slurs’ they care about. “White”, maybe “privileged”, maybe “spoiled”, “entitled”, “Northerner”, “Imperial core”.

Aria ,

If Hamas started attacking Yemen or Lebanon or Syria we’d all join you in being cross with them, but so far they seem to be attacking Israel.

Aria , (edited )

Yes. I’m genuinely unsure how it could be any easier. It’s just add the repo and install.

But I suppose it’s a lot if you don’t know what anything means, so I’ll try to explain it at a super basic level. Sorry if this is patronising, I can’t ascertain your experience level so I have to make an assumption.

The first thing it asks you to do is:

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc

Hm. Okay so I guess before even deciphering the command, you have to know how Linux works. So on Linux, the first word is the name of the application you want to use, and everything afterwards is stuff that you pass along to the application. It’s up to the application to program in the behaviour for interpreting the words that come after the first word. So “sudo” is the name of the application you’re using, and all that other stuff is stuff you’re telling Linux to tell that other application.

Okay, so what is sudo? sudo is short for Super User Do. It’s an application that does something (sudo) as the super user (sudo). Super User is like admin on Windows. So it’s for when you want to make system level changes or want to override permission limitations. In the past, or at a basic level, you would switch user, make the change, then switch back to your personal user. But with sudo you can borrow the permissions of the super user for the purposes of that one command and everything works smoother that way.

The way you use sudo is you run the application by typing sudo, then you type in a second application and what you want that application to do, then sudo starts that other application and gives it the instructions you asked to be passed on. The second application in this case is curl.

For example, on Windows you might do sudo photoshop open C:userswinuserdocumentsrestrictedfile.psd to open a file in Photoshop that the Windows admin decided you aren’t allowed to open.

Let’s look at the command again.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc

Sudo is to get super permissions and doesn’t actually tell you what the command does. The application that is actually being run in this command is curl. curl goes to a url and sees it. So it basically just means download whatever is at this URL. Here the URL is https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.ascAll that other stuff in this command is technically curl specific, so you have to check how curl works to know what it does. But it does follow Linux conventions very closely, therefore a normal Linux user who has never used curl could still guess what it does with 100% accuracy and would probably use it correctly for the first time without checking how to use it. If you want to learn how to use it, you can use the included manual program man, by typing man curl, and as a convention, almost every Linux application will tell you how to use it if you use the -h or --help flags by typing curl -h or curl --help.

In this case, curl takes flags, these are -fsSLo, that’s 5 different flags. A flag is like a mode switch for an application, it’s specified with adding a hyphen and the trigger word. The hyphen is useful because an application like curl might want a file path /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc and a URL https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc, so by adding the hyphen, the application knows that fsSLO is not part of the file path, but is instead specific instructions you’re giving the application. This is a normal convention on Linux, similar to how Windows applications normally program the X button in the corner to close the window.

For curl specifically, by default curl doesn’t save the file, it just displays it in the terminal. So the most basic version of the command would be curl https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc and nothing else. Let’s look at what the flags do.
-f is for fail.
-s is for silent. Both of these just change the behaviour of curl to give you less feedback and information. Mullvad probably chose to do this to make it more beginner friendly, ironically.
-S is for show error. There’s a difference between lower and upper case. Show error means that even though curl was asked to be quiet and not show what it’s doing, it should still let you know if there’s an error.
-L is for location, it’s to allow redirects. Mullvad chose to include this option so that the old instructions still work if the URL changes in the future or perhaps if you have a common typo in your command.
-o (output) writes the downloaded file to disk at the specific location. /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc. The -o flag is the only one in this list that actually matters and changes what the application does. The rest is just there to be beginner friendly, but I think Mullvad made a mistake in including them personally, as I think they add to the confusion instead.

As a standard Linux convention, flags can either be a single hyphen and a letter or two hyphens and a word or a hyphenated sentence. These are conventions and up to the application, but for curl and most applications you’ll use, both work. Similarly, curl and most applications let you use a single hyphen and then all your flags in a row, or separate them with spaces and new starting-hyphens. curl -f --silent -S -L --output file.txt https://lemmy.ml for example.

Okay, so hopefully now you can read it a bit better. Let’s look at it again.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc

Wtf is that file and why do you need it in that folder? It’s downloading their encryption key to the folder where apt (a different application we haven’t encountered yet) looks for encryption keys. You need this for cryptographic verification. It’s a safety measure, and more important for security software like Mullvad. It’s not mandatory for adding repositories.

So with this command, you borrow the super user’s permissions and you download a file and put it in a folder.

Okay, next part.

echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list

Okay, this one is actually pretty complicated! Similar to above, how they added all those superfluous flags that make curl quieter, this is another case of the mullvad help-article-writers choosing to make the experience of copy/pasting the commands more seamless by sacrificing legibility.

But let’s go through it anyway. It’ll be a super quick crash course in how to use Linux.

echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list

Echo is an application that repeats whatever you type at it. If you run echo hi it’ll output hi into the terminal. Deb is an application that installs .deb packages. These are like .msi files on Windows. It’s specific to Ubuntu and certain other Linux distros. The stuff that follows echo is a command. deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main, if you run it on its own, it does something. But because you wrote echo first, it’s only words that are being printed in the terminal. We’ll look at what it’s supposed to do in a minute. After that part, comes a pipe |, this is very important, then a second command. sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list.

Okay, we’ll break this down backwards. sudo you already know. It’s just an application that starts another application. In this case tee. tee is an application that takes whatever you give it and writes it to a file. It’s called tee because it’s like a t-split, it both writes to a file and to the terminal at the same time, so you can monitor what’s being written. It’s specifically designed to be used with a pipe.

Wtf is a pipe? A pipe | is a built in Linux function that let’s you take the output from one application and feed it to another. In this case, the stuff you had before the pipe was a echo command. So the output is what you asked echo to echo back to you. deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main". That means that tee is writing this command (without the echo part in front of it, because that’s your command, not the output from an application) into the file located at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list. Tee by default overwrites whatever was already in the file, and in this case, a mode-switch flag wasn’t used to ask it to not do that. So if that file already existed (which it doesn’t), it would now be deleted and replaced with what you echo’d into it. deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main".

What is /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list? That’s a file that belongs to apt. apt is your package manager, we’ll loop back to that. The /etc folder is somewhere applications put their files, rather than where the user is supposed to put their files. Having the user’s files separately like that helps with knowing which files you care about when it comes to backups and system migrations and things like that. So inside /etc, apt gets it’s own folder, and inside that folder it created sources.list.d, and inside that folder, you’re now creating a file for mullvad. In this file is the definition of the new repository you’re adding.

[Cutting this up to two parts because API limit]

Aria , (edited )

[Part two]

Two questions:

What is a repository?
What’s the stuff that goes in the file? Why is it a command and why is it so long?

I started answering the second question, so we’ll continue with that and loop back to what apt and repositories are for the next and final command.

echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list

So echo just means “repeat what you’re given”. Then deb is the Ubuntu equivalent to msi. Then you’re telling the deb application where to find the encryption key you installed earlier, and you’re telling it which arch (short for architecture, it’s the hardware configuration of your computer) you’re interested in. When it says $ and then stuff in parenthesis like that, that stuff gets computed and substituted. So you’re not literally asking for the architecture $( dpkg --print-architecture ), but instead something like arch=amd64. dpkg is an application that keeps track of what .deb packages you have installed. With the flag --print-architecture, it’s switched to a different mode where instead of it’s primary purpose, it’s telling you what system architecture you’re using. Then it’s the URL for the repository. The URL is also variable, part of the URL will get replaced later. $(lsb_release -cs). lsb stands for linux standard base, and lsb_release is just an application that says which Linux distro you’re using. The reason this ‘standard base’ is used rather than the specific distro and version, is because it’s meant to simplify the very large diversity of Linux distributions and versions down to the minimal number of possible versions that actually have some level of incompatibility with each other. So it would say your specific major version of Ubuntu, but it wouldn’t say exactly which patch you’re on. Someone who’s not using Ubuntu, but using something that from a compatibility standpoint is fully Ubuntu compatible, might also report as a Ubuntu version when using this application. The output from this program is added to the URL. The computed result is something like https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable mantic minotaur main. Main just means the main branch of the application, as opposed to a special branch, like a beta-branch.

If you notice, you’re not computing these things first and then putting the result into the file, but instead you’re inserting it with variables. This will allow your system configuration to change without the need to update the repository definition.

All in all, this is a very complicated way to add a repository. On most systems, and indeed on Ubuntu, you can do this with a single application or a flag for the package manager and then a single URL. For Ubuntu it would be apt-add-repository https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable mantic minotaur main. But they chose to do it like this to make it easier to do once and forget.

And then finally, what is a repository? What is apt? A repository is a place that hosts software. It’s like the Play store on Android. You can use the Ubuntu repository that is standard for your Linux distribution and guaranteed to work, guaranteed to be safe, guaranteed to be respectful towards you as the user, but you can also add third party repositories. Third party developers can add their applications to the official repository, but doing so means they have to go through a quality assurance step, and that they are limited in the ways they are allowed to abuse you. For security software, this might add too much delay between when it’s critical that they provide an update, and when that update is approved for distribution to Ubuntu users. Instead they have opted to host their application on their own repository.

Apt is your package manager. It keeps track of everything you have installed, every library and component used and required by every application, and for some package managers, every file created by every application. It checks all repositories you’ve specified for updates and automatically updates all your applications. It also deals with requirements and conflicts, ensuring that you don’t have superfluous old libraries taking space, and that when you want to install something with requirements, you don’t need to manually hunt down all the prerequisites. Some package managers available on other systems will even compile applications and deal with build files for you.

A library is a set of application features that doesn’t necessarily belong to a specific application. They do common things and are used my many applications. For a Windows equivalent, you can think of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable or Direct X.

And that’s everything.

sudo apt update

Sudo is to get super user permissions, and then run the application apt, apt is your package manager, and the command you’re giving to the apt application is to update it’s internal knowledge of available packages and versions. It needs to do this because it didn’t previously have the Mullvad repository.

sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

Sudo is to borrow the super user’s permissions, apt is your package manager, and you’re telling it to install, and then the name of the application you want to install is mullvad-vpn. This final step sudo apt install mullvad-vpn, sudo apt install firefox is how you install applications on Ubuntu typically. Everything before this was because you needed to add a third party source.

Phew, that’s a lot of text! So in hind-sight, it could be easier after all lol. Feel free to ask if you have any questions. It’s a lot of text, but I assure you that if I was going to explain anything about how to use Windows at this level of detail, it would be pages upon pages longer! I hope the explanation wasn’t too condescending. Good luck with learning how to use Linux.

_
Pedantic clarifications:

  • Technically, sudo is a command and not an application, but it’s made to be treated like an application. Also technically it doesn’t stand for superuser do, but all the stuff I told you is assumptions they want you to make to make it easier to use, but because it’s such a core part of Linux, it works differently on a technical level.
  • | is actually part of bash, not Linux, but most shells have | with identical behaviour.
Aria ,

These aren’t instructions. The instructions are 3 lines and provided by the vendor.

Aria ,

If you’re going to verify repos then you might as well just verify the packages.

Aria ,

Says Pravda.com.ua. Shouldn’t this fall under rule 1?

Aria ,

Bears love men who fish, they’re trying to attract bears.

Aria ,

The USA should change their tactic. Lift all sanctions against all countries, stop political interference, but Russia has to execute their capitalists. I think they’d go along with it.

Israel has just given BP licences to drill for gas off the coast of Gaza. So, people blockaded its head office (www.thecanary.co)

On Wednesday, 6 December, dozens of activists from Fossil Free London assembled outside BP’s London headquarters to protest Israel’s approval of 12 new licences for natural gas exploration off the west coast of Gaza to six companies, including BP....

Aria ,

I hereby grant Cupet exclusive drilling rights off the coast of Britain.

Who's winning the war in Ukraine?

The media won’t give me great answers to this question and I think this I trust this community more, thus I want to know from you. Also, I have heard reports that Russia was winning the war, if that’s true, did the west miscalculate the situation by allowing diplomacy to take a backseat and allowing Ukraine to a large...

Aria ,

The absurd claims of Russia’s goals are all from western propaganda. This is from the day of the invasion: rt.com/…/550466-putin-ukraine-opeartion-goals/What are their goals?

  • Demilitarise Ukraine – This is a huge task, but they’re making fast progress.
  • Denazify Ukraine – They’re failing this task, but it’s something that can’t be done until after the war anyway.
  • Create a buffer between a NATO-member-Ukraine and Russia – Incorporating Donbas might satisfy this goal.
  • Stop the sieges on Donetsk and Lugansk – This goal has been met.

And then they clarify, denazification is optional. A general occupation of Ukraine is not their plan.

If there is more land they want to occupy, then occupying and holding it now doesn’t actually further that goal. The only thing holding it now is good for is protecting the civilians or using it strategically, either industrially or for staging. Because if the country is successfully demilitarised, Ukraine won’t be able to resist occupation, so that land can be taken later for cheaper. But they haven’t outlined a goal of taking additional land. Crimea was already incorporated at the time, so that’s an extra implied goal – Don’t lose Russian land.

Aria ,

The capitalist class in the USA is winning the war. Russia is surviving, and Ukraine is losing. The goal of the war is to launder as much tax payer money from working class USA and Europeans to the political elite and their friends as possible. They do this by purchasing weapons from their own capitalists using tax money. The capitalists then share the money with the bureaucracy that facilitates the money laundering. The secondary goal is to subjugate Russia, and failing that, hurt them as much as possible so that they can be subjugated in the future. Subjugating Russia is necessary because Russia’s military power is regularly used against the interests of the capitalist class in the USA.

Aria ,

I looked out of curiosity and the equivalent thread on Reddit is praising this decision.

Aria ,

Absolutely. My browser defaults to reader view, but I wish it was more compatible.

Aria ,

The speech to text is basically perfect, the problem is YouTube’s choice to have to presented in the awful way they do. If they just looked like regular subtitles, I’d leave them on.

Aria ,

@-moz-document url-prefix(“about:reader”) {background-color: ;} in your usercontent.css

Aria ,

What’s a leftist stance you take?

Aria ,

I’m glad you view my instance in a more positive light, and I can’t comment on early Hexbear culture, but I am still so very confident, absolutely positive, that the hate you’re seeing for Trotsky is not because of his religion.

Aria ,

This thread is about a dude in Ireland. It has nothing to do with China.

“why are we talking about the communist party of china under an article about how the bourgeoisie continues to accumulate wealth to the detriment of the proletariat?”

The thing is that the comment rings true about the other AES countries also. OP (of the thread, not the post) has identified a problem, and the commies are suggesting a solution to the problem, with statistics that prove it to be viable. You’re dismissing the solution as off-topic, but it’s very relevant. The thread is directly relevant to the article, and the reply is directly relevant to the thread.

Say what you want about the west, but China isn’t what the world should be either.

But it is. In lieu of something better, we should all be like China.

Aria ,

I’d remove the need to authenticate for accessing things that are already on your computer. Why does it have a “remember me” checkbox if it’s not going to remember me…

Aria ,

Ukraine is supporting Palestine??

Aria ,

I watched an hour long essay with only support in the comment section that was a love letter to the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film. The film has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. A lot of people didn’t mind the J.J. film.

Aria ,

Did you ask why?

Aria ,

Three different transliteration schemes used in the same name.

Aria ,

I checked and you weren’t banned for mentioning Tienanmen square, no one cared. You were temp banned (30 days) for using racist language, holocaust denial, and promoting the Uigur concentration camp conspiracy theory and lying about what your sources are.

Aria ,

Adblock users optimise their adblockers to be invisible to adblock-checking code. If your site works well, and is worth visiting, the only change in behaviour you can inspire is people nerfing their own adblockers.

Aria ,

Step one is you don’t refuse files from the server, and try to answer as if you have them when asked in js. But the current actual methods and arms race is happening by comparing computed results, how your page is rendered according to your own browser when probed, vs how the detection code expects it rendered. Adblockers do things like lie, or inject things that can look close enough to ads that you pass the tests. You can see how detection works and try to sidestep what it does by looking at libraries like these github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock

This one in particular will probably just not run in uBlock out of the box so this one’s pretty easy to sidestep. But you can stuff code like this obscured in your site and another piece of code that checks that it hasn’t been removed. It’s pretty difficult for website develops to win this fight, since ultimately they’re letting us download and render their pages with fairly transparent technology.

Aria ,

A Russian soldier who kills a child should be tried for war crimes. On June 1st, the UN said 525 children had been killed. The majority of those would have been killed by Ukrainian military, but it’s okay if you think Russia bares the responsibility for those as well, since Russia did invade the country. Though it would be misleading to not mention that the children killed by Ukraine in the civil war 2014-2022 is also around 525.

Russia invaded Feb 28, that’s 600 ish days ago, so on average one child dies as a result of this war every day. In the last 17 days, Israel has killed ‘nearly’ 2500 children. That’s ‘nearly’ 150 every single day. We’re outraged by both, but Israel’s slaughter needs to stop 150 times more urgently. Further, there is no argument, no security necessity, no motivation that can be attributed to Israel more convincing than pure hatred and a desire to steal land in order to explain why they are doing this. That means that the condemnation doesn’t deserve nuance. It needs to stop. Israel is the villain.

Aria ,

Good for them. Let’s hope Afghanistan can heal.

Aria ,

The real answer is posting memes on Reddit with a Lemmy watermark so they feel unhip. But please don’t, Reddit is currently keeping the Reddit users contained, and that’s better for every other platform.

Aria ,

Oh how I dream of the day when China decides copyright and patents are forever void.

Aria ,

Then you likely have a better impression of the shows than they deserves. And maybe that is the true potential of Gene Roddenberry’s vision.

Aria ,

Israel has executed their own disproportionally large share of civilians today.

Aria ,

Palestinians overwhelmingly would accept a proposal where the Israelis go home in exchange for promising to not enact revenge. It’s the Israelis who refuse.

Aria ,

What are you even arguing here? The link corroborates that both RFA and CDT are part of the NED. Is your gripe that they use a different acronym? Propaganda from a geopolitical rival is obviously not a reliable source of information. Though it’s true, the website doesn’t make it very clear that the NED is part of the USA government or CIA, I didn’t think that information was necessary to provide because it’s common knowledge. But I can quote Wikipedia again in case you didn’t know. en.wikipedia.org/…/National_Endowment_for_Democra…

The NED was created as a bipartisan, private, non-profit corporation, and in turn acts as a grant-making foundation.[2] It is funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.[4][6][5]

I generally prefer first hand sources so here’s a cia.gov source corroborating their control of RFA. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000846953.pdf But if you prefer, here is an article by an American journalist explaining the relation. washingtonpost.com/…/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c…For example

Preparing the ground for last month’s triumph of overt action was a network of overt operatives who during the last 10 years have quietly been changing the rules of international politics. They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private

So then it comes down to you believing Mediafactchecker’s vetting to be more reliable than an organisation’s stated goal. So who’s mediafactchecker? The website looks very amateurish. What resources do they have for verifying these news stories? Because the link you provided says they haven’t reported any fake news in 5 years as far as the site is aware. But that’s insane. They have stories like this. www.rfa.org/…/squidgame-11232021180155.html
Squid Game is extremely popular on Korean Soulseek and it’s in no way covert.
Or like this www.rfa.org/…/philanthropist-11212018131511.html
He’s alive enough to take interviews. youtu.be/scScu7rcwnI
RFAs reporting is so painfully fictitious that Mediafactchecker simply can’t have done their due diligence. The examples they give are not original reporting, so in those cases it’s completely fair to give them a pass. Most likely, Mediafactchecker simply reviewed only the cases they link and nothing else. In my opinion, this means Mediafactchecker is itself unreliable since it creates profiles for sites without looking through a large number of articles.

Chinese citizens are not allowed to use a VPN, unless government has approved it in some way.

Then quote some legislation or evidence.

Onto the article you linked with the racist cartoon. This is an ad for VPN providers. It says China bans VPNs except for their partners, and then links to affiliate purchase links from big popular partner products, popular enough that China definitely would know about them. The article is explicitly aimed at selling products to tourists, not Chinese people. The article also lists blocked sites without actually checking if they’re blocked. Not relevant to the core argument, because China does block the majority of western big tech and propaganda, but it shows that it’s not a very high effort blog post.

www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=x.com
www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=wsj.org

In summery, this is not a source, because there’s no evidence of original reporting or an effort at fact finding.

Aria ,

This is the dumbest shit. Do you really think bots can make semantically aware arguments but not parse your instruction? Or do you think the CCP police (It’s the CPC by the way, the communist party of China. Communism first, China second, China first is how you get guillotined by angry Maoists) is standing behind me with a gun? How do you reckon that is economical? Anyway I’m not gonna say fuck Xi Jingping, he’s a comrade and a great leader, long fucking live Xi Jingping. Absolute treasure. I’ll happily say fuck Putin though, hope he chokes together with all the other capitalists and killers.

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