Rule #1: don’t read an article entitled “How Do I Protect My Privacy If I’m Seeking an Abortion?” on the internet with your own computer or cellphone. Borrow someone else’s - preferably a man’s so you don’t end up potentially compromising another woman later - or go to the public library.

China did

Oh yeah, China… There’s an economic and societal model I really dig right there.

That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.

And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.

George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.

People coming here to rant about Reddit isn’t activity.

baseless lawsuits erode public trust

Haha that was a good one. As if lawyers had any reputation to lose…

Here’s an old joke:

You’re in a cage with a wild angry gorilla and a lawyer and you have a revolver with 6 bullets: what do you do?
Shoot the lawyer 6 times and try to reason with the gorilla.

Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He’s better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.

This argument hinges on the premise that churches aren’t evil to begin with.

Here’s an interesting video about Zuckerberg’s rebranding:

Why Zuckerberg’s Rebrand Shouldn’t Distract Us

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Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes… that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he’d market that particular ability of his.

His lowest rate is $300 / hr for “simple” cleanups and he’s doing very, very well.

I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.

Hotspot & Tethering

• Allow clients to use VPNs

Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!

Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.

(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)

get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that

That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.

I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.

end-to-end VPN

Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?

At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.

The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.

To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.

Hmm… Touché.

There are others that aren’t Chinese but nothing anywhere near the price bracket you’ll get from GL.Inet

Can you give me some pointers to non-Chinese equivalents of those GL.iNet routers? I’m quite ready to suck up the extra cost.

the TikTok of the fediverse

Gee just what the Fediverse needed…

First world problem.

You’re hungry.

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Wholesome, yes. But the magic and the poetry is immediately spoiled by the poster’s username.