All the attachments, though… man this is going to be such a pain :/

Lol. Your mom is accused of handing over your intimate personal information to your dad and grandma.

Iran has switched to intranet and isn’t looking back. They now started selling foreign traffic at ridiculous prices and only to licensed companies, not consumers. Naturally, this created a black market with even more exorbitant prices, but that isn’t really a concern when it stops quite literally 99% of the traffic from reaching outside, and russia has already been planning to cut off foreign traffic as a whole in a similar fashion, except for now they are proposing that ISPs should provide the “internet+” plan to the regular users as well.

All this to say - they aren’t saying “oh well, we can’t block VPNs anyway, so we give up”, they are justifying the upcoming internet blackout, with the best case scenario where ISPs can provide much more expensive plans for foreign traffic. Not a lot of people are going to have the finances and ability to go through the trouble of paying for the internet access, foreign traffic and a bleeding edge VPN to access youtube.

Also lol @ him claiming internet censorship and restricting freedom of speech are different things, when a state newspaper recently published an article claiming that the iranian internet blackout is a massive attack on human rights and might lead to the end of the regime (check out Steve Rosenberg on YT if you are curious).

I wish there was a program where we could fully sponsor their resettlement to nk/iran/whatever is their favourite flavour of authoritarianism.

And in the US you must list all ingredients and all contents of those ingredients, as well as any and all additives (like extra iron, vitamins and so on, even if those come from “natural” sources). You can’t just say potato, salt, oil, you have to say:

Doesn’t mean you get different shit, just means they scrutinize it a lot more in the US. There are small differences here and there with stuff like food colouring, but you are not getting “just 3 ingredients in the EU and 99 in the US”, that’s just a bullshit grifter line being repeated by people who didn’t bother to actually read.

You can choose to reject it, which is what my Google Phone app does by default when I block a number, or accept it to instantly hang up. I just chose the reject option, most calls stopped completely after a couple of weeks. I do not use voicemail, so not sure how it interacts with that. The app also has an option for a subscription (as in you just insert a link) to an ever updating list of spam numbers, but I just went with not my contact = no business calling me.

Get a new phone number and ONLY share with those who needed it for emergencies.

Not a bad advice, but depending on where you are that might not do anything. I bought a new SIM recently and it was getting spam calls before I even added a single contact. Slapped SpamBlocker from F-Droid on it immediately.

Theoretically - yes there will be some loophole to do some stuff online. Something tells me people don’t exactly want to pay for gigabit connections and then be forced to tunnel through kilobit loopholes. Look at north korea to see the end goal, look at iran to see phase 3, look at russia to see phase 2, you are currently in phase 1 of the plan to isolate the internet.

Tor also has been banned in authoritarian shitholes for ages. New bridge IPs pop up and get banned daily. Good luck getting a working bridge in the first place, too.

Cloudflare and recaptcha are the best ads for Anubis.

Depends just how willing you are: demand domestic websites block any non residential IPs and report any attempted or even successful VPS connections, allow only registered businesses to operate VPNs, use government shipped mobile apps to detect people’s network configs/installed apps/private and public IPs, block any known VPN IP ranges, use DPI to block VPN protocols and detect unusual traffic, allow access only to a select list of domains and IP addresses, etc. There’s a myriad of ways to enforce this, but in the US they will need a few years to set up the hardware necessary to do it, that’s the one thing the US has going for it. Sleep on it, though? You will wake up to intranet in 10 years.

The title is overly optimistic imo. This is more of a life support system for a comatose patient. The work done is great and keeps some people informed and provided with at least some international news and tools, but this is far from defeating the internet blackout.

I’m also somewhat surprised iran isn’t shooting down the satellites. The article mentions previous full jamming practices were stopped in fear of sanctions, but not like that’s a concern anymore, especially considering iran is in russia’s little fascist club.

To the people living in the rest of the world - start taking ID verification threat seriously before this is your reality where the only outside news you get is from a USB stick you buy on a shady open market for 30 bucks from a guy who has a satellite dish out in the mountains.

Gave it a try, fully understanding it’s not even a released feature yet, it works alright, but on Twitch it fully breaks streams, so watch out for that if you decide to run with it.

That’s why it’s been “quietly added”, it’s not ready for use. You can add lists in about:config, but this is just a super early implementation.

Yes, you can adjust filter lists in Brave, including custom ones.

More like you are falling for yet another blanket ban as a viable solution to anything. Younger gens are significantly less into smoking and drinking? Oh, I know! Let’s turn it miles more enticing by making it a taboo!

Because realistically nobody is against it. People can whine all the want, they will verify anyway rather than miss out on online gaming, social media, porn etc. You personally might be the outlier and maybe you even convinced your family and friends, but sadly unless at the bare minimum 50% of users outright leave the platform enforcing age verification they couldn’t care less about our feelings.

Thanks, the article was entirely useless, just glazing the proposal.

While this is a better turd than k-ID and the likes, it’s still a turd. What is this supposed to achieve? Doesn’t stop kids from accessing anything, but hinders VPN usability (tunneling into ID requiring locations is going to be useless, as you can’t verify) and lays out the foundation for labeling anything as “adult” content, which we all know never stops at actual adult content.

The tool could soon help users prove their age online without sharing personal data

Once released, users will be able to download the app from an app store and set it up using proof of identity, such as a passport or national ID card.

Officials say the app will be “completely anonymous” and built on open-source technology, meaning it could also be adopted outside the EU.

The fuck am I reading?

Even if RAM they use in data centers was compatible with consumer hardware, the companies would sooner burn it all and eat the loss than let us have it. They are sitting pretty right now - they have 0 reason to ever go back to the reasonable prices.

I’ve had Windows installed on the same machine since 8 through 11. Not even a full reinstall ever took longer than 20min at most, counting the downloads. 11 updates roughly once a month, sometimes 2-3 smaller updates a month if there were some issues, sometimes it can go a month without anything, and I had the “get updates first” ticked in the settings. Every single time it estimates a 4min update and it never takes longer than that. Not once did I have any of the issues you listed. Not sitting on some crazy new hardware either, an 11 years old SATA SSD and an ok internet. I very rarely skipped updates on my PC, but I did once update a very old laptop and it took 30min only because it had a measly 8GB of RAM and an HDD.

I’m now on Cachy and I do update every day or multiple times a day, but I wouldn’t go on a rant if I missed half a year worth of updates and then had to wait some time for it to install. In half a year, even slow distros had a major update. And I simply do not buy that anyone outside of HDD and unstable internet users had to wait more than 1h at absolute worst to install a half a year load of updates.

How is this unreasonable? What is Windows supposed to do? Personally come to your house to ensure you are still getting updated? You don’t even have to use it daily, as the author said - they chose to stare at the update button (which again I don’t even understand the point of anyway, Windows won’t magically offer you more updates if you click it more times, this is the same logic as clicking the pedestrian push button more than once), which means for regular users the updates would’ve installed in the background or outside of working hours and they wouldn’t even notice.

“I enrolled my laptop into Windows 11 Insiders Program that delivers updates on a more frequent basis, turned it off for half a year and then got mad that I missed a bunch of updates, so I decided to sit there and mash the update button to constantly ping for updates instead of doing literally anything else while it’s updating, because I wanted to run tests and had to be fully up-to-date.”

Microslop got a lot of issues, but this is fucking ridiculous, the author sounds insufferable.

“But who in the temple is going to sit there for 10 minutes or more while this downloads new updates and reboots?”

Oh, idk, people who don’t enroll themselves into a faster paced update cycle.

“And may the gods help you if you buy a brand new PC that’s been sitting on a shelf for months or years. You might have hours of updates after you first take it out of the box.”

I don’t know a single piece of electronic that doesn’t require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?