NaibofTabr

joined 2 years ago
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[–] NaibofTabr 4 points 7 hours ago

It is not any one individual's responsibility to fix any other particular individual, true.

Rather, it is the community's responsibility to care for the community. All of the community.

If you start declaring some members of the community to be undeserving of care, then you are no better than the fascists.

[–] NaibofTabr 15 points 13 hours ago

Also came in to recommend URLCheck! Fantastic tool, everyone should use it.

[–] NaibofTabr 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (4 children)

People who are treated like outcasts behave like outcasts. The judgment becomes self-fulfilling.

The solution to this problem is inclusiveness and socialization, not further judgment and ostracization.

[–] NaibofTabr 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

I can't find a picture of that exact model, but to me it looks like it has the silver box HP logo like this one:

Compaq had this square Q logo, and usually the entire word "Compaq" also:

But there could be some confusion because HP acquired Compaq in 2002 and sold computers with Compaq branding until 2013, which covers the Vista period. It's entirely possible they sold the same desktop shell with both HP and Compaq branding.

And no thats definitely a Zip drive, not a 3.5" floppy:

The little round button on the right and the round inset under the slot give it away.

[–] NaibofTabr 9 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

Yes, surely TOR will protect us from government surveillance...

The project was originally developed on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community and continues to receive U.S. government funding, and has been criticized as "more resembl[ing] a spook project than a tool designed by a culture that values accountability or transparency".[177] As of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project's $2M annual budget came from the United States government, with the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation as major contributors,[178] aiming "to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states".[179] Other public sources of funding include DARPA, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and the Government of Sweden.

[...]

Critics say that Tor is not as secure as it claims,[185] pointing to U.S. law enforcement's investigations and shutdowns of Tor-using sites such as web-hosting company Freedom Hosting and online marketplace Silk Road.

But also...

In October 2013, after analyzing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported that the NSA had repeatedly tried to crack Tor and had failed to break its core security, although it had had some success attacking the computers of individual Tor users.[27] The Guardian also published a 2012 NSA classified slide deck, entitled "Tor Stinks", which said: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time", but "with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users".[186] When Tor users are arrested, it is typically due to human error, not to the core technology being hacked or cracked.

[...]

A late 2014 report by Der Spiegel using a new cache of Snowden leaks revealed, however, that as of 2012 the NSA deemed Tor on its own as a "major threat" to its mission, and when used in conjunction with other privacy tools such as OTR, Cspace, ZRTP, RedPhone, Tails, and TrueCrypt was ranked as "catastrophic," leading to a "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

YMMV, and your implementation and usage matter.

[–] NaibofTabr 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[–] NaibofTabr 26 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Would it? I've seen some videos here of people absolutely harassing lone ICE agents in cars sitting in parking lots, and those guys just drove off as fast as they could manage.

If you have a crowd of 20+ people around the car, not doing anything directed at the occupant, just kind of hanging around the outside, plus cameras taking video and actively posting it to social media because, hey, flash mob!... what then?

[–] NaibofTabr 137 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

The IT worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer

[–] NaibofTabr 2 points 1 day ago

Hmm, the timing of this statement about human rights suddenly makes a lot of sense.

[–] NaibofTabr 55 points 1 day ago (13 children)

Suddenly I'm having visions of the flash mob trend returning with purpose.

Anywhere an ICE agent is sitting in a parking lot... suddenly showtunes and choreographed dancing, or just a block party, all around them.

[–] NaibofTabr 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Punitive measures might feel emotionally satisfying in the moment, but what they actually incentivize is hiding the corruption and exploitation better (avoiding getting caught, rather than avoiding the bad activity in the first place). Also, while an angry mob might have a taste for violence and actually perform it for a little while, it doesn't last and it's not a basis for a stable government or economy.

If you want long-term stability you have to organize a system so that it incentivizes the behaviors that you want, even more than it disincentivizes the behaviors that you don't want.

I'm not sure what that looks like in this context, in a practical sense. But ultimately the problem is that everything in our society rewards the hoarding of wealth. This is not just a problem with capitalism - every communist or supposedly socialist society ever established also rewarded hoarding of wealth.

For things to be different, actually different, a different value system with a fundamentally different reward structure needs to be established, and it needs to be competitive long-term with the current system in order to exist alongside it and/or eventually replace it.

Like I said I don't really know what that looks like in practice. The only example I can think of is the "gift economy" described in Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars, in which the participants in every exchange always seek to give more than they get (essentially the reverse of normal behavior).

 

I'm dropping this in here for anyone who's interested in the background of where RWBY came from and what happened that turned it into the darling orphan it is today.

RWBY was Rooster Teeth's second major series. I think if you're a fan it's worth knowing about Monty Oum (RWBY was basically his personal project) and his influence on the company.

This video is the best summary I've seen of Rooster Teeth's existence, how they got started, their peak, and how it fell apart. They were internet trendsetters in a lot of ways. It's worth the time to watch.

 

My introduction to this was through the video, so it felt appropriate to share here. I'm sure this is a reupload and I saw it somewhere else earlier than 2012.

You can actually play with it on the creator's website:

https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg

 

Using only pieces from the original set.

 

This popular successor to the original Turbo Encabulator has now been itself succeeded by the impressive Hyper Encabulator. There seems to be no end to clever innovation in the important field of encabulation.

 

Don Hertzfeldt

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