Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the coup is made!

If you don’t have a government that can be held accountable to some level of trust, then what you have isn’t a government it’s tyranny.

The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

Seems naive to me. The question is not whether your government has or can get that kind of information if it wants to (the gestapo had little trouble figuring out things as personal as that without any help from an app) the question is whether your government would lose the cost-benefit analysis if it was ever found to be using such information. You have to hold them accountable and keep their activities in the open so that accessing that information is as close to zero value to them as it can be and they have no incentive to try to get it because people will be able to find out if they do.

“Who watches the watchers?” We all do. At least we’re supposed to. If you don’t trust your government, priority 1 is fix your government, you’re way beyond anything a dating app’s data can be expected to help with. You’re not going to be any safer from an unaccountable government because you denied them access to a dating app.

It’s not only obvious, it’s already done worldwide. Deep packet inspection evolved into HTTPS inspection and corporate/enterprise firewalls can detect and hijack attempts to establish encrypted connections already, as a “feature”. So do government firewalls in totalitarian countries. Of course they (probably) can’t do this secretly and transparently, because of the man-in-the-middle protections built into SSL, so they simply make the actual encrypted connection themselves on the client’s behalf, and give the client a different encrypted connection signed by their own certificate authority, which they force you to accept.

In this situation, you have two choices: You accept the certificate, and you accept that the owner of the intermediate certificate will be inspecting your “encrypted” connection. If you don’t accept the certificate, then your connection is blocked and you have to find some other way to encrypt and hide your traffic without it being intercepted, because it won’t let you go direct end-to-end. Usually, at the moment, this is not that hard for the tech-savvy to avoid, it doesn’t even require something as secretive as steganography, it’s usually simply a matter of tunneling through a different protocol or port. Although those approaches are still obvious, and can easily be detected and either blocked in real-time or flagged for investigation after-the-fact if they have any interest in doing something about it. Corporations or countries that want to lock down their networks further can simply block any ports or protocols that would allow such tunneling or inspection-evasion in the first place.

Deep packet inspection already allows any non-encrypted traffic to be clearly identified. If you don’t want any encrypted traffic to sneak through, you can safely assume anything that can’t be clearly identified is encrypted and block it. Depending on how strict you want to be about it, you start essentially whitelisting the internet to known, plaintext protocols. If it’s not known and plaintext, just block it. Problem solved. Encryption gone, until people start building (possibly hidden) encryption on top of those plaintext protocols, which is inevitable, and then you update your deep packet inspection to detect the encrypted fields inside the plaintext protocol and block them, and the back-and-forth battle continues.

Encryption is probably a false panacea against a major state-level adversary anyway, especially if they have plausible access to network infrastructure, but that’s a whole different can of worms and unless you’re a serious revolutionary/terrorist probably beyond the useful scope of most people’s realistic concerns.

You can download a torrent client and start pirating because it’s encrypted. Nobody knows you’re doing that besides the people you’re directly connected to on the other end. If they wanted to crack down on it, the first thing they need to do is crack down on encryption. If they can see exactly what you’re doing, it’s now possible to easily catch you, with encryption it isn’t.

Note that this also applies to encryption itself. Once it’s banned, it gets much more difficult to hide the fact that you’re encrypting something. Encrypted data itself has to go into hiding. You have to resort to something like some pretty hardcore steganography which means you need to hide secret encrypted messages in normal-seeming non-encrypted traffic. The problem is that to do this you need to have a sufficient quantity of non-encrypted traffic to hide your secret encryption in without it starting to look suspicious, either due to the unusually massive volume of meaningless “normal” traffic needed to subtly encode the hidden data, or the fact that large amounts of hidden data in small amounts of “normal” data become increasingly obvious as the large number of supposedly “normal” mistakes and errors and artifacts that form the encoded data will suggest some of those variations are not in fact “normal” at all and will indicate that encrypted data is being concealed.

Governments banning encryption will of course never stop everybody. But it makes it much harder for the people still using encryption anyway and much easier for the people who want to see what they’re doing or at least see who they are. It’s classic “black or white” thinking to assume that because it hasn’t simply stopped encryption it hasn’t worked. This would be a big step that makes things much harder, and even taking small steps to make things slightly harder is an extremely effective tool and it’s become extremely common to try to convince people that these small regressions and erosions are inconsequential and normal even when they are in fact targeted, repeated, relentless and consistently add up to dramatic change over time. The only saving grace we have is that at least some people are simultaneously making the same kind of targeted, repeated, relentless changes for the common good and those can have just as drastic an effect.

I don’t use arch (shocking I know), so I can’t help you directly, but I will recommend instead that you invest some effort in learning about the Linux networking stack. It’s very powerful and can be very complicated, but usually the only thing you need to do to get it working is something very simple. Basically all distributions use the Linux kernel networking stack under the hood, usually with only a few user-interface sprinkles on top. Sometimes that can get in your way, but usually it doesn’t. All the basic tools you need should be accessible through the terminal.

The most basic things you can check are ip a which should show a bunch of interfaces, the one you’re particularly interested in is obviously the wired interface. This will tell you if it’s considered <UP> and whether it has an “inet” address (among other things). If it doesn’t, you need to get the interface configured and brought up somehow, usually by a DHCP broadcast. Network Manager is usually responsible for this in most distributions. Arch seems to have some information here.

If those things look good, next step is to look at ip r which will tell you the routes available. The most important one is the default route, this will tell your system where to send traffic when it isn’t local, and usually sends traffic to an internet gateway, which should’ve been provided by DHCP and is usually your router, but could also be a firewall, the internet modem itself, or something else. The route will tell it what IP the gateway has, and what interface it can be found on.

Assuming that looks good, see if you can ping the gateway IP. If your packets aren’t getting through (and back) that suggests something is wrong on a lower level, the kernel firewall might be dropping the packets (configuring the kernel firewall is a whole topic in itself) or one of the IPs is not valid and is not registered properly on the network, or the physical (wiring) or the hardware on either end is not functioning or misconfigured.

If you can ping the gateway successfully, the next step is to see if you can ping the internet itself by IP. ping 8.8.8.8 will reach out to one of Google’s DNS servers which is what I usually use as a quick test. If you get no response then it’s either not forwarding your traffic out to the internet, or the internet is not able to get responses back to it, and ultimately back to you. Or Google is down, but that’s not very likely.

If you’ve gotten this far and 8.8.8.8 is responding to you, then congratulations, you HAVE internet access! What you might NOT have is DNS service, which is what translates names into IP addresses. A quick test for DNS is simply to ping google.com and like before, if that fails either your DNS is broken or Google is down, which is still not very likely.

Hopefully this will help you at least start to find out where things are going wrong. From there, hopefully you can at least steer your investigation in the right direction. Good luck!

Screw them! We’ll build our own peertube, with blackjack, and hookers

The mature thing to do would be to tell them something like “I can see that you’re trying and I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I can like or respect you after what you did to my mom and my family. I’ll let you know if that changes but I’m not ready to have you mother me, I can and will cook my own dinner for the foreseeable future.” however be advised this could cause more hurt and lead to escalation because some people can’t handle rejection even when it’s honest and will either desperately seek approval anyway or reject you back. Given what you said about her age she may not even be emotionally mature herself.

Also you’re under no obligation to be mature about it. You’re allowed to be an asshole if you want. Cheaters and homewreckers and broken family creators are some of the worst things in the world to me. As someone who was raised in a broken home I really have little sympathy for the people who don’t understand that having children is a commitment, not just personally but to their whole relationship. They’re not just possessions you get custody of and get to drag around on your own personal life journey.

I’m not religious but I think this is one of the things that religion was trying to accomplish by making marriage such a sacred thing and divorce so restricted and children out of wedlock so disapproved of. The “nuclear” family was a secular version of the same principle. Yes, all that had unintended consequences too but if you are not prepared to raise children with a person you should not be having children with them. Yeah, “people change” but your commitments do not. That’s why they’re called commitments. If you’re not going to follow through on your commitments you’d better have some really damn good reason to be causing such lasting damage to your child. It can be justified in some cases, but I think it’s pretty rare that it actually is justified. Children deserve a stable and lasting family environment. I think that’s a big part of why foster care is generally such a disastrous failure too. How do we fix this? I don’t know, but I know it starts with the parents being responsible.

State-sponsored violence, typically.

Authoritarianism is a threat.

Even if we don’t have any, it doesn’t matter. We could build them so quickly that we are considered a “paranuclear” state, with an estimated nuclear latency of about 3 days. We have all the technology and infrastructure we need already and we know exactly what we would need to do.

This is why anyone who considers invading us needs to consider Canada as a nuclear state, even Russia’s “3 day special military operation” took a lot longer than 3 days – and by that time we’d be expected to have nuclear weapons ready to retaliate with. They thought terrorists with nuclear weapons were scary, imagine what Canadian resistance insurgents would do with them. Last time we were in a war we burned the white house down. This time we’ll have nukes. The Canadian occupation is going to last a very long time and be a very dangerous project for an invader.

The internet cannot download more RAM into your PC. (Sssh! Don’t tell them! I don’t want the supply to run out!)

That means Bedrock unless you use the Geyser tool someone else mentioned to allow Bedrock to connect to Java but I have no experience with that and am not sure how reliably it would actually work as they are quite different versions of the game. I have no idea how it would handle mods that are not supported by the Bedrock clients for example.

First you need to understand the difference between Bedrock edition and Java edition. Bedrock is for consoles, phones and Windows, it’s the default version that Microsoft pushes now. It’s not compatible with Java clients or Java servers. So if you’re planning to have the kid play on Switch or something like that, it’s not going to work.

Assuming you’re clear on all that, you have a few options for Java servers, you can run a plain jane vanilla server (the one that Microsoft provides) fairly easily but it has some limitations, and it’s not the most manageable solution. Modded servers are much more capable and flexible but also can be a little more complex in some cases. Overall, I’ve found Purpur the easiest and most sustainable choice at least a few years ago when I was looking for the right choice it seemed like most people agreed this was the best option. Fabric is another great option, especially if you want to use mods! Fabric has a huge modding ecosystem, second only to Forge.

However I also need to mention that I’ve got a heavily modded Forge-based server running right now and I really didn’t find that any more difficult to set up than any of the others. Even though people usually complain about forge being “difficult” somehow. So take that for what it’s worth. I think it doesn’t really matter THAT much which server software you use unless you have specific requirements around things like mods, spawn protection, and other kinds of configuration that are probably most useful for large, public servers.

If you do want to run a bedrock server, it gets a little more complicated as you might have to break some things out of the walled garden. I haven’t had a lot of success with that but I understand it is possible.

Yeah it’s like the guy in Wyoming who passed an anti-trans law saying that it’s not required to use preferred pronouns to refer to somebody and then getting all upset when he was called “madam” and whining that his preferred pronoun is “chairman”. That leopard eating your face must hurt.

Even if there were some woman as hellbent on destroying civilization as these guys, then she’s a techbro. And if she gets mad about being called techbro because she’s a woman? Well, how sad for her. “My heart goes out to you”

We’re not trying to make them happy. Fuck them, fuck them all. If it makes them mad to be called a “bro” good, that’s a bonus.

Nextcloud is self-hostable or paid/managed services and either will work with an Android app that works just fine for me. It will sync whatever you ask it to, if you tell it to sync a whole folder it will sync the whole folder.

Of course. They will pump and dump that too, over and over again, with your tax dollars in the “reserve” taking the hit each time while they embezzle what will probably eventually be trillions, just wait, they will not stop looting America until there is nothing left to loot.

I absolutely would not count on a snapped in half MicroSD to protect the data that’s on it from someone determined to find out what it was. You don’t even know if you actually managed to break the memory chips themselves or just the connections between them, which with time and patience and the right equipment could be reconnected, and even if the chips are broken a great deal of the data on them will still remain intact, etched in silicon for eternity and vulnerable not only to current technology but also future technology.

Your goal is turning the data stored on your MicroSD card into a puzzle. A 2 piece puzzle is likely quite solvable even today. To properly vaporize the card and make it actually unreadable you’d likely need to do some experimentation and try things you would potentially have access to in war like fire, gunfire, explosives or corrosive chemicals, some combinations of which may serve to well and truly annihilate any hint of structure. The question is how many tiny pieces can you break that MicroSD card into, if that number is a human-countable or even human-comprehensible number like the number of pieces a document typically gets shredded into, then it’s probably not safe enough to consider it reliably destroyed.

If people can tape back together shredded documents to get the basic idea of what was written on them, someone can likewise theoretically repair your MicroSD to get a large proportion of the stored data from it if they are absolutely intent on doing so. It’s probably a lot of work, and maybe not even a not-worth-it amount of work depending on how important your data might be, and there might be a substantial amount of data unrecoverable and missing, but it can be done. Unless you make it a puzzle with so many pieces that doing so is mathematically implausible and just as likely to be an incorrect reconstruction of data that might say anything the reconstructor imagines it does, without actually giving them any confidence that it is real and correct. The only thing that’s certain is that 2 is probably not a good enough number of pieces to rely on for that to be the case.

As an alternative to the fire/gunfire/explosives/acid style methods, you might also use sandpaper (would take awhile), or better yet a grinder tool of some sort (dremel, angle grinder, bench grinder) to give yourself some confidence that the card has truly been turned to a pile of arbitrary dust. Even then, I’d still concerns as the data density increases, a single speck of MicroSD dust from a 1TB card shredded into millions of pieces might still contain 1 MB of data – that’s an awful lot of text and even potentially some images if it can be decoded. They really prove surprisingly hard to destroy. Electrical attacks, even Microwave ovens, reportedly have mixed results and don’t sound like reliable approaches either.

If you can get it to a molten state, that’s your highest confidence method. Silicon has a melting point of 1,414 °C, good luck.

Let’s just restrict them from everyone

That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

The implication is typically that they’re popular with guys. ie, they’re physically attractive to the opposite sex, they are sex symbols. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s not a two-way label, it doesn’t mean the attraction is necessarily returned. Although it is often assumed and commonly leads to people accusing them of being “sluts” despite not being justified. But on its own it just means that they are the object of desire of many boys: they probably have many suitors, lots of people want to ask them to the dance, etc. That is the way they are considered “popular”.