VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.

This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.

Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don’t patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.

And don’t romanticize ignorance.

Aaron Swartz was right about everything

Kill Bill? or its inspiration, Lady Snowblood?

No, no one should do this.

First off, definitely don’t mail anything hazardous. You’re mostly putting postal workers at risk.

Second, the instructions in it were written by an angsty 19-year old, not a chemist or weapons expert or bomb technician. Trying to actually make these things puts you at risk.

Third, if you’re going to talk about this book then it really is necessary to talk about the historical context that the author wrote it in and how he regretted it after, and what the consequences were:

[…] and the incidents where the book was found among the belongings of the perpetrators, including, but not limited to, the Columbine High School massacre, the Arapahoe High School shooting, and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting, as well as a number of assassination attempts on government officials.

In which case anyone who wants to can read the message traffic and make changes to it before passing it on to the receiver.

No, you can’t conduct business this way.

AI is surveillance tool.

No one can bank online without reliable encryption. No one can transact business online without reliable encryption.

Which part of Apex did they find inspirational?

• Kotor
• Chrono Trigger
• Ocarina of Time / Twilight Princess / Wind Waker
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
• Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage
• Crash Bandicoot: Warped
• F-Zero GX
• Halo CE / Halo 3 / Halo: Reach
• Paper Mario: the Thousand-Year Door
• Journey

My point of view is that a human rights violation is a human rights violation regardless of the context in which it happens, and is therefore an important thing to discuss and give visibility to.

Labeling it as “political” and using that as an excuse to hide discussion of it feels like bootlicker behavior to me.

Yep, it’s very much “rules for thee but not for me” at .ml

ICE’s actions are political.

Discussing ICE’s actions is not necessarily political, unless you consider human rights violations to be necessarily political as a topic.

Silencing discussion of human rights violations implies tacit support for the action, so I guess we know now where .ml stands. Any claim of leftist ideology on their part is a sham, they just have a hard-on for authoritarians.

Uni Jetstream:

Yeah people here are overlooking the Sharpie pen, it’s quite nice.

The best reason to use PowerShell on Linux is if you are working in a mixed/complex environment, or think that you might pursue a career in enterprise IT and want to learn about working in mixed environments. With PowerShell you can remotely manage Windows systems without having to RDP into them, you can just open a remote PowerShell session and issue commands to the target machine.

I’ve used this to do things like loop through a list of endpoint hostnames, open a session to each one and get an inventory of installed applications on that system and also flag any hosts that didn’t respond to the remote session and then spit out all the results in a .CSV, fully automatic. Run monthly or as needed.

You can also interact with the Windows registry via .NET classes, which PowerShell understands natively because it is .NET. You can do this locally and remotely, which looks something like this:
[Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey([Microsoft.Win32.RegistryHive]::LocalMachine, "<hostname>").OpenSubKey('<registry key path>').GetValue('<key value name>')
So if you wanted to check if a particular registry key was set on a group of Windows machines, you could write a PowerShell script that could just do that for you with no interaction. It’s also possible to modify registry keys remotely with .SetValue('<key value name>'), so if you need to do that in bulk it’s very convenient.

Basically PowerShell can take previously arduous and time-consuming Windows sysadmin tasks and make them scriptable. And not just Windows, anything and everything .NET can be easily managed via PowerShell.

some BOFH energy

Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.

I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.