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Wonder how long until we see more Lepas on the road than Lexus

Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.

Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.

Russian Yandex

Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.

Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.

For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.

That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.

Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.

I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.

Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !

That requires large plots of arable land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley

The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. The growing high-tech industry in the 1960s transformed the area from farmland to densely populated cities, and it became referred to as the Silicon Valley.

But we paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.

There’s no unfucking that chicken. We are living in a world that is substantially less arable than it was a century ago. We do not have an Eden to go back to.

Less criticism and more pity.

Sheryl Sandberg seems like a Grade A asshole to work for - possibly the only woman CEO I’ve ever heard of getting #MeToo’d. Zuckerberg is an absolute baby-brain completely up his own asshole with delusions of grandeur, outright comparing himself to Roman Emperors.

But if you get into the tell-all released by Sarah Wynn-Williams, all you really take away from it is that this company is as corrosive to the body public as it is ravenous for economic expansion. There’s no “keeping close” that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Might as well try to keep a rabid dog on a short leash.

I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.

I’m not above peaking in on Citations Needed or QAnon Anonymous to see how the other side lives. But the actual right-wing material itself is really ugly stuff, particularly in the modern moment. When it isn’t nakedly xenophobic or Mean Girls callously cruel, its just pumping your eyeballs and ear holes full of the dumbest fucking advertisements imaginable.

Not good to ingest that stuff.

They just need to throw some bread and games at us and we go one living as nothing ever happend.

I mean, there’s not a whole lot of alternative. It seems like the only two “valid” avenues of resistance are retreating from society into a hermetically sealed bubble and starting a podcast.

And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.

Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?

Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?

In a delightful change of pace, the Nazis are putting themselves in the oven.

One of the appeals of Bluesky (for now) is the Followimg feed that presents comments exclusively from people I follow, in chronological order.

Crazy that Facebook can’t deliver this anymore

Logic correct: “Donald Trump’s administration” isn’t a substitution for “Chinese economy”.

Chinese bureaucracy appears to be stable and consistent when adhering to policy over the span of decades.

Trump’s administration appears incapable of setting a policy that survives a holiday weekend.

What’s crazy is that the domestic business community and their pets in the national legislature are content to let Trump run a wrecking ball through the last 80 years of delicately assembled and refined trading partnerships. America truly is a madhouse.

We should start making a list of really important USA exports (I bet that list won’t be long) and search for alternatives.

Lot of that already happening at the multi-national level. We’re seeing a real bifrication of supply chains as the US grows openly hostile towards international trade. And Chinese business leaders seem eager to fill the gap.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is also very good.

Anyone notice how the population of religious people globally is falling at a rapid rate, but the power being amassed by religious communities and officials continues to appear unassailable from within liberal-ish institutions?

It’s almost as though the promise of liberal democracy and secularization is being renegged upon as soon as it inconveniences old bourgeois institutions. Damn shame there’s no group of 19th century intellectuals and revolutionaries who could have warned us about this. Oh well… I’m sure this will be fine.

Enjoy another 30 Years War, Europe. You’ve earned it.

Networking Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

ARE WE LEARNING HOW “SOCIAL MEDIA” WORKS YET HUMANITY?

Apparently not, because people keep feeling surprised and offended when the Networking Effect happens.

Seriously. How many more fucking times do we need to go around this goddamn merry go round until we just start calling each other on the phone and meeting face to face again

Idk, when are we going to get low-cost public transit and VoIP that’s not like talking over two tin cans connected with string?

I can’t believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.

There’s no way he’s just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.

Glorifying a system can never be the answer.

Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don’t need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.

Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.

There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of “enemy” nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.

The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.

Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn’t a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It’s just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.

Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you.

You mean the relatives we were visiting?

China isn’t perfect either.

I’ll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for “imperfect China”