FriendOfDeSoto

joined 3 years ago
[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Have you ever met anyone who got annoyed at you for asking slightly different versions of the same question?

Would people like a "X posts per Y" rate limit per user for this community?

No, people would not. It could be a tool for moderators to curb spamming but I don't see that being more effective than existing moderation tools.

We like to think in easily separate-able categories, black and white stuff (absolutely no pun on race in this case). We are also able to hold opposing viewpoints in our heads at the same time. And we are all susceptible to political messaging. It's like advertising; it wears people down.

So you can be a true believer of whatever Christian church and support a man in the White House who couldn't be much more from your professed ideals if he tried. You can also think abortion is murder and support killing children in Iran. You can believe in civil rights and still want no Arab looking neighbors. We are full of contradictions.

The US suffers also from only having one more mainline party than North Korea or the PRC. If you look at other countries that are democracies, you'll find half a dozen parties vying for power. It offers more tents to assemble under, whereas in the US most people end up under one of two and arrange themselves with the inconsistencies between their own values and those of the party consensus more easily than in France, just as one example, where Macron launched his own new party before he became president. (Just for balance: 2+ party democracies can also still be shit at the end of the day but they offer more choices.)

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Straight pride.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't disagree with your opinion that war is newsworthy in general. Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons why you don't see the stories you expect to see though. Chief among them the fact that search on the fediverse is absolutely unreliable. It ain't Google when it was still good. Also, other news outlets may have different standards in terms of what they can report. They may need more sources, more eye witnesses. A search for "Iran" may be the wrong search term because there is a certain US politician who loves a headline and the media kind of like him for that. So there is a spam of stories about his unsuccessful deal making that will algorithmically obscure any other Iran content online. Or it might relegate military strikes by other but much smaller nations to a subordinate clause in paragraph #13 of a story with an orange headline. It also stands to reason that local news sources would be better, especially if this is a developing story, and that it's possible that it simply hasn't filtered through to English language media.

And more generally, war or senseless loss of life in general and the reporting thereof are not mildly infuriating content.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Daniel is one of the founders of Mullvad and part owner. He took a big chunk of change from his private wealth and donated it to a horseshoe loonie party. Horseshoe because they try to marry ideas from the extreme left to immigrant hateful ideas from the extreme right. Loonie is self explanatory. His donation made it possible for that party to run a nationwide campaign.

Mullvad users who got mad simplified this to Mullvad fees finance a Nazi party directly. Which isn't true. How much of this donation truly came from VPN fees is also a matter of debate. They aren't strictly Nazis, more xenophobic communists. But assholes are still assholes and people choose labels differently. There is a lot of kneejerk reacting going on.

The company seems to want to ride it out. They correctly point to this being a decision by a private citizen who may exercise his free speech by donating to the loonie party. But they either don't recognize the PR hell of being guilty by association as a company or they know the subscription drain isn't as bad as the online outrage makes it look like. They publicly say this is all about free speech, which is their DNA, yada yada yada.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 66 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The report also seems not to realize that it is being written by the Trump administration.

There are a few delightful digs like this in this article.

The only thing that's golden is the tacky veneer on the White House walls in the picture.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 26 points 1 week ago (7 children)

As sad as it is having to bring this up in regards to US immigration: how Caucasian looking are you? I unfortunately feel this will have bearing here.

You can create another profile on your phone, make it look lived in but sanatize it. Your laptop will be tougher but encrypted cloud services exist. Any country you enter will get the biometrics of your passport picture on the chip. Additionally, they take fingerprints, I think, and there is nothing you can do about that.

Most people don't have problems getting in. If you haven't been to Iran lately...

Your first question is answered by the article you linked. And therefore the answers to the two-part second question are no and no.

"Rogue" is a questionable choice of vocabulary. It went rogue when compared to the intentions and expectations of the testers. It didn't do Mr. Burns hands and released the hounds on a whim. It was told to do a thing and did the thing in a way the researchers thought it wasn't possible. It boils down to human error in how this test was set up. It's worrying that the researchers underestimated the agent's abilities or overestimated their ability to properly contain the agent. But the sky isn't falling just yet.

A positive side aspect is that they didn't try brush this under the carpet.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you want something European, I'd throw AirVPN in the mix. I went there and never to Mullvad. And now I'm glad I didn't and at the same time I'm looking forward to hearing inevitably what corpses my current provider has in the cupboard.

I dislike Proton, which I quit after the CEO praised 47 on his big tech regulation and before they handed the email account of some environmental activist over to the authorities, in France IIRC. They want to be your replacement for Google and keep pushing more services at obscure subscription levels at you. In terms of VPN, they were good though.

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