• 17 Posts
  • 328 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • 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.









  • Well, I know it’s all going through the internet anyway nowadays, so yeah it’s technically always voice-over-IP even if I use the cell network. The only difference between normal calls and WiFi calls is how it connects to the internet really. I just don’t want the extra baggage that comes with staying connected to the cell netowk method of getting on the internet.

    And of course what I referred to when I said VoIP is pure VoIP providers that sell you a number and access to a SIP server, independent from your cellphone provider.




  • You know, I have to say you’re right.

    At this point, unless you have been living under a giant rock, there are simple, hard facts you can’t possibly not know about Donald Trump that should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of political leanings. It’s simply impossible to ignore them.

    Therefore logic dictates that whoever votes for Trump today must agree with the Nazi stuff, the Trump Purge, shooting protesters in the legs, hanging vice-presidents or locking up former speakers of the house. I mean LITERALLY agree - because he LITERALLY said those things. Even MAGA people shouldn’t agree with those things: making America great again implies not destroying America!

    Meaning roughly half of this country agrees with those things. If that’s not fucked up to the n-th degree, I don’t know what is.



  • annoying to me because my wife didn’t take my surname!

    You think that’s annoying? My wife and I aren’t even married.

    I mean we call each other husband and wife but we don’t believe is shackling ourselves to one another, even for tax purposes, and we find the ease of permanent separation keeps our relationship fresh, and has for 35 years.

    We used to get mail addressed to our house as Mr. and Mrs. <my name> or <her name> and we quickly realized why: it’s just advertisers collecting my name or her name, gender and the fact that we’re married (not legally but we say we are). Absent the name of the spouse, they assume a man would bear his own name and a woman the name of her husband.

    Obviously it can’t be anything other than fucking advertisers since we’re not legally married: city or state agencies wanting to send us mail know exactly what both our names and marital status are and use them correctly.

    The easy solution is to not provide real data to data brokers whenever possible. We now use fake names, and we also track which names we provide to whom because it’s interesting to see how they bounce back at us.

    For example, is she uses the name Elizabeth Corona-Smith to, say, book an appointment at the hairdresser, and I get mail addressed to Mr. Corona-Smith with advertisement inside for arthritis products, I know the online service her hairdresser uses to book appointments sold her data, and the hairdresser filled in her approximate age to add to the data they sold.

    With that knowledge, next next time she goes to town, she can give an earful to the hairdresser and tell them she’ll never patronize them ever again.

    It’s happened several times. It’s really interesting to see how your information gets sold when you use fake information.




  • Two comments about this:

    • It is my firm belief that 99% of the population of any country ruled by a dictator are the primary victims of that dictator, don’t condone what their rulers do, have done nothing wrong and are just trying to be good people in unfavorable circumstances.

      The Russians are no different and it isn’t fair to impose on Russian individuals of obvious good will the treatment governments apply to the Russian government, because the Russian government and the Russian people are two very different things.

    • Linus said in this interview:

      I’m Finnish. Did you think I’d be supporting Russian aggression?

      and here I’m telling you this: Linus acts like a dipshit.

      I know the Finns very, VERY well, and while they’re generally great people, when it comes to Russia and Russians, they have epidermic reactions of totally unreasonable proportions.

      I understand where they’re coming from and why they react like that, but Russia is to the Finnish people what peanuts are to someone with a peanut allergy: the reaction is totally disproportionate and with zero nuances.

      Don’t ever try to argue with a Finn that a Russian person can be good, and that Putin is also their enemy: the Finn will shut down and stop talking to you - meaning, in their culture, that you can politely go fuck yourself.

      And that’s what we’re witnessing here with Linus: however many years he’s lived in California, he still hasn’t shed that part of his upbringing, and quite frankly, shame on him.