cecilkorik

Depends who you’re talking about. The US population doesn’t yet seem to be anywhere near that, indeed, which is very unfortunate, because the US government, on the other hand, seems to be on a pretty clear 1938 trajectory. What happens when the government turns into a completely oppressive regime before the people are desperate enough to organize against it? Nazi Germany happens, and World War starts, because the government will be so far ahead of the people that they won’t be able to effectively resist.

If you don’t think the US population is anywhere near that, then I assume you must agree how urgent it is for the US population to get there really fucking quick.

If you don’t think the US government is anywhere near that, then I assume you’re simply in a different information bubble than I am, because, uh… it’s fucking bad out there, dude. I’m constantly checking in with American friends to make sure they haven’t been fucking kidnapped and disappeared, and instead of telling me I’m crazy, they’ve got the same concerns and they’re grateful that someone is looking out for them. I’ve got friends in Minneapolis. I’ve got friends in El Paso. I’ve had to check in with both in the last week. The fucking scary shit isn’t just an imaginary hypothetical, it’s happening in real time.

Depends on your precise definition of the camera “end” I suppose, but an IP camera absolutely can be and should be end to end encrypted. Even if the camera itself does not support native encryption, at worst the aggregation point/server should. Really, surveillance cameras should be on their own dedicated private IP network anyway, ideally with physical isolation on any wired connections. Besides a physical, on-site attack (which is what the cameras are for!) there really should not be any plausible method of an outside attacker breaching into the non-encrypted part of the network at all.

And that’s the worst case, real-world scenario. Quite a few cameras do in fact support on-device encryption now so “never” is still definitely incorrect. You do have to do the work though. That’s how good security works, it doesn’t come in a box as much as many wish it would and even if it does it’s never one-size-fits-all.

Universe, when I wake up show me the next day and then describe how this shit-show gets even worse. Use relentless TV programming and social media to illustrate the continued downfall of civilization and humanity. Include a variety of banal events spanning approximately 18 hours. Always fully pad out the entire day with tedious and boring life stuff. Minimize any genuine human emotional connections. Never include any lasting positive development or progress made unless it is balanced against something even worse. Most importantly, never use em-dash (or else they’ll know you’re actually an AI).

I think the thing people need to come to terms with is that while we insist on playing everything by the book, because it’s the right thing to do, they are playing by a completely different book that literally uses our own book against us. We continue playing right into their hands, and we’re eventually going to have to change our playbook very drastically, and it’s not going to be comfortable. We can’t win this by continuing to play by the same book that got us here.

It seems like everyone’s pinning their hopes on the midterms despite the clear evidence already available that not only are they in the process of being manipulated and rigged, and they’ve still got over half a year to be even more egregious about it, but even if they aren’t or if they don’t succeed, there’s a good chance that the other side will make up their own numbers anyway and create a smoke screen of misinformation or simply refuse to follow the rules like they’ve already been doing this whole time. Even if Dems take back the house and the senate, where’s their actual power to do anything about any of this? What actual enforcement mechanism can they actually implement that isn’t procedural and “by the book”, the exact same book that Trump’s administration is ignoring?

“The book” and even “the constitution” is just words on paper, and we’ve entered an era where the sword is once again mightier than the pen. Where’s our swords? If Trump starts doing everything by executive order again, continues stacking the deck in all the militarized federal law enforcement institutions to surround himself in his own personal gestapo and use them to enforce his executive orders, who’s going to actually try anything to stop him? Who’s going to be brave enough to take actual action against his militarized forces to stop him? And it’s not enough to just have one guy or a handful willing to stand up to him. Yeah, maybe that will embolden some more to stand up to him, but you don’t just need to have some guys stand up to him, you need to stand up and win against an army of violent thugs, you need your own army, and it needs to be a well-trained army that can actually beat these fuckers in direct combat. A bunch of angry guys shouting mean things in congress and the senate and courtrooms and hearings aren’t going to stop him, no matter what book they think still matters. The violent thugs on the ground will not stop because of any book unless Trump’s the one writing it. I think this is going to get real, real bad. I desperately hope to be wrong, but I’m not willing to concede that I am.

I love woke bridges. Let’s paint them all in rainbow colors.

Hopefully nobody uses it for actual remote system access anymore, but it’s still a great protocol (well… “great” with some caveats) for things like MUDs and BBSes and other toys. I’m pretty sure you can even use it for IRC or IMAP or HTTP if you know what you’re doing. Is it secure? Of course not. That’s why we use modern protocols using SSL or TLS when we need security. But we don’t always need security.

Sure, telnet is not secure. But neither is, say, Minecraft. Because it’s a game. It’s not that important and in some ways it’s actually frustrating. There are pros and cons. It sucks if people are cheating or you get griefed or you get your account hacked or some other shit hacked, oh well, it’s a game, all you need to do is go outside and touch some grass about it. Not everything in life needs to be bank-vault secure. Sometimes it’s fun to just play around with raw text that doesn’t have ironclad security rules and certificates and key renegotiation guardrails built around it. Just go spew some text at some other protocol and see what it says. It’s fun and educational. I love telnet.

To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.

“It’s a miracle!”

That’s exactly where LLMs/“AI” were about 10 years ago. My point is that after the AI bubble pops, the same idiot techbros have probably already identified new things to latch onto and pump up into a bubble, they’re probably already seeding the ground with it. I can almost guarantee quantum computing will be one of their next “disruptors” that they disrupt ignorant investor’s bank accounts with.

AI is just the currently active grift of these con artists. The grift goes on, and on, and on, it never stops. Quantum computing will have its day. It’s not there yet, but someday it will be.

Is it real, or is it a giant financial marketing bubble waiting for its moment to consume the world economy? Let’s watch what happens with the AI bubble to find out.

My favorite part of the concept of these sociopaths fucking people over and then dying on a big pile of cash is the part where they’re dying.

It’s great at software development though /s

Remember that when software written by AI will soon replace all the devices doctors use daily.

Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

And don’t forget the part where, whether they get a bailout or not, they’ll still have to double the prices of everything to make up for all the money they lost on that stupid AI bubble exploding in their face (which all of us are somehow to blame for, obviously, which is why we have to pay them back for it)

I love hardware that doesn’t require sideloading. I bought the whole house, including the front door, and I will use the front door. If they don’t allow me to use the front door, then I don’t really own the house after all, do I, so what did I even pay for?

Distro-hopping is very fun and educational, but don’t dump a working system for an experiment unless you’re forced to or you’re just a masochist.

Play around with it, try and recreate your current setup within it, and once (if) you’re comfortable enough to do that, then consider replacing your main server with it.

There’s plenty of more wild distros out there too. I love Debian, I use it a lot, but you’ll also learn a ton by trying to wrap your head around Fedora Silverblue, NixOS, Arch or Gentoo. It used to be a rite of passage to build your own LFS (Linux From Scratch) distro, not sure if people even do that anymore, but you’ll probably learn a metric shitton if you try.

Mario has a brother, who I’ve heard of recently.

Also there’s a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world’s largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world’s richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world’s other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.

I’m willing to bet that is one of Putin’s goals, but it’s not his only goal, and just because he’s evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn’t mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his other goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He’s got destruction down to a science, and I’m sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he’s failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I’m willing to give him credit where credit is due.

The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we’re going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you’d better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.

I think we’ve got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that’s where the debate will start to happen, and I think we’re going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we’re going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.

Welcome to fascism! Enjoy your stay!

I don’t really care what protocol is used, the best one will eventually win and whatever it ends up being will be mostly transparent to the user, just like (and I may be dating myself here) IMAP eventually became the standard way to interact with email and POP just got essentially forgotten despite starting out as the universal and most popular choice. Even SMTP is technically just one extremely popular way to reliably transfer email, but even in that case there used to be others like UUCP and you could make an argument that other significant protocols are involved in a modern email stack now too. UUCP made sense at the time, but eventually was recognized to be a stupid and non-scalable design and the superior protocol won out. Great. Email is still email.

What I care about is having my data and account on a server that I can choose and trust or potentially even control. With Bluesky, that is currently quite hard and impractical, although gradually getting slightly easier. With the Fediverse it is foundational, and if I cared enough about it, I’d already be able to be running my own without issue, because that’s what the Fediverse is explicitly about. Again, I don’t care what protocol I’m or what protocol it’s using, I do care what network I’m on, and what features it has, and what goals it has, and what priorities it has, and on that basis I would rather be part of the Fediverse, whether it’s using ActivityPub or ATProto or something else.

Bluesky is for the centralized people to go and centralize their hearts out. Maybe ATProto won’t be permanently afflicted by their tolerance for centralizing things, time will tell, but it’s the network and the organizations and the development directions I’m interested in, not the protocol itself. May the best protocol win.

At first glance, there may not appear to be anything unusual about the social media posts that are part of the ongoing recruitment drive by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

I am SO sick of this passive, milquetoast, normalized, way of reframing the obvious neo-Nazi fascism behind all this. The time for gentle warnings was like 20 years ago. Anyone who at this point still thinks there may not be “anything unusual about the social media posts” needs to have this knowledge urgently beaten into their head with an informational sledgehammer. This kind of gentle, mild, both-sides-ing concern farming is such a waste of breath it’s hard to believe it’s not intentional sandbagging.

“I think ICE is headed in the wrong direction in that they’re attracting the wrong type of individual to be involved in a very serious mission that they have,” he said.

You think so, David Lapan? So you think that’s the “wrong type” of individual for their “very serious mission”, huh… for fuck’s sake you blithering idiot. The violent fascist brutality against people unprepared to fight back IS THE WHOLE POINT. That IS their mission and purpose now. Stop living in your idealistic outdated dreamland of what you always imagined these agencies are supposed to be for and start accepting the reality of what they are RIGHT NOW. You can’t afford to keep delaying everyone’s understanding of what is really going on here. And the people who ARE irresponsibly delaying it and softening it and dragging their feet about it, I think, maybe actually want it to succeed.