Joe

In some countries private law firms chase down infringers on behalf of copyright holders. They then attempt shakedowns with the threat of legal action if you don’t pay. They have a financial interest to catch people, and moral compasses vary.

Also, mistakes can happen (you, your family, guests using your wifi, in the courts, in the ISPs, in the law firms, in the tech they are using to identify people). Shit happens.

And if (when) it happens, then you would still have to deal with it, costing you time and money.

Understand the risks and make choices to minimize them if you can.

Apparmor profiles can be applied to an executable - the profile is then (if so configured) inherited by subprocesses. In my case I have a launch script to run lutris in a safe mode. It also changes the effective gid to be matched by some iptables rules (it was easier than creating a new network namespace, which is also possible). The script then checks that the Internet is inaccessible and that reading/writing to secured paths is denied before launching lutris.

Similarly I have a “safe” script to wrap other commands with an apparmor profile that stops most writes to my homedir/reads from some secure locations, which I often use to run scripts/programs from the Internet.

My sudo also requires a password (or a special keyboard combination, thanks to a custom pam configuration).

All that said and done, I’m sure I’ll be caught off guard one day.

I run a particular online windows game in a modded offline mode under Linux in network isolation and with a restricted apparmor profile. So far so good. Logs show no attempts to break out, except for the smoke test I run to ensure the sandbox is working. This is as much because of the random mods I install as the original devs (who could ban my online account).

On Windows, a VM would indeed be safer. GPU passthrough is possible … I guess easier with Windows using an onboard GPU, then passing a discrete GPU to the VM. You’ll lose some performance with a VM regardless, but it’s easy to disable networking, back up and restore from a known good state, and burn it to the ground when needed.

Your friends will find you wherever you are and will continue asking you such questions. There is no escape.

If you want fast GPS coordinates, then you give more location hints. Local privacy regulations apply.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego and Commander Keen … wait a second, the time machine’s dial is broken.

Except we know that mostly doesn’t work. It is weird to me that your preference is to waste resources and not help people.

I’m not against effective measures, but I’ve seen too many kind and well-meaning people make a lot of bad decisions over the years. I think this is often the case for politicians too, for which we expect high standards and judge harshly when they inevitably fail. I like to leave room for people to make mistakes, and the opportunity to admit & correct mistakes.

Maybe we need fewer politicians and petty dictators on soap boxes making claims and promises and more no-nonsense elbow grease bureaucracy, with more direct feedback loops, and KPIs that benefit the population.

Too many smokers continue to smoke after developing serious symptoms. People continue with poor diets and too little exercise despite their own doctor’s advice. We stare at screens for many hours per day. I’d still rather big warnings and community health initiatives than forced exercise/diets/screen-time-limits. Human rights / self determination is important. But organised efforts to appropriately highlight bullshit in public forums isn’t bad at all. In both approaches, the Q is how categorization happens, and can it be trusted.

Who was behind the anti-vax/mask psyops campaigns? To me, it seems to have been rolled up together with pro-trump, pro-russia/anti-ukraine, anti-LGBTQ, climate-change-denial streams. At least, these talking points are what a few older people (non-US-based) that I know started repeating. It looks like a giant pot of discontent, with a few usual suspects adding ingredients, no doubt with some profit opportunities along the way.

I’d rather have big fat warning labels than censorship, to be honest. The issue is that many governments and people end up in a spiral of distrust & broken trust (justified or not).

Covid was/is a shitshow though. Where was the world class PsyOps then? Perhaps too busy scaring the hell out of everyone to notice that it might not be the smartest strategy.

China seems to be far more about censorship and self-censorship. When public figures disappear from the public eye, they often reappear at some point. I hold great hopes for China’s future, and its potential as a successful & peaceful role model. Xi worries me a bit though.

General note: Most authors publishing critical material of the west in the (free speech) west don’t get silenced (edit: although professional blacklisting is all too common). Yes, I’m sure there are exceptions. You might not want to do that openly in China, Iran, or Russia these days, because the risks are well known/accepted. It definitely makes life harder for scholars and historians.

Thanks for the links. I’ve been reading. It is not far off my understanding. It’s novel to me that anyone claims that the famine itself was deliberate. I’ve never heard anyone claiming that before.

Anyway, I noticed that https://lb.ua/news/2010/01/14/19793_nalivaychenko_nazval_kolichestvo_zh.html says 10 million, while https://hexbear.net/post/20004 links to it and claims it says 4 million. I guess the wayback machine should be checked.

My day was long, I’m tired, and there is more to read. I’ll have to re-read your previous comments to find the Q that interests you.

The holodomor was the famine you doofus. It was also not an action taken deliberately by the Soviet government, and historians and scholars agree that the holodomor didn’t target Ukraine specifically - it was instead a famine that.hit the Soviet Union as a result of years of war. Do you not know your hostory?

Here is where a disagreement starts. Yes, there was a widespread famine (and not just in Ukraine)… but it was, as recognised by many scholars, made far more deadly in parts of Ukraine by decrees from above. Collectivisation caused the wider famine, and callous decisions resulted in deliberate starvation of some. This is not something anyone should celebrate or diminish, even though the situation vastly improved in later years.

Note: I’m travelling today, so most responses will have to wait. Have a good one.

“you libs”, “you smuglords”… do you really think that pluralizing an assumption or insult makes it less of one? This could be some weird use of the English language that I’m not familiar with, but it reads the same to me, and comes across as rude and dismissive. I have engaged extensively with you here and elsewhere … in good faith. I have not resorted to insults. I’ve left open the possibility for simple misunderstandings, giving you the possibility to explain. I don’t think you are arguing in bad faith, but I suspect that you have reached some limit and are falling back to bad habits.

An observation of mine: You and some other hexbears seem to throw around the term “libs” as an insult whenever someone doesn’t agree with you, and often prematurely. To me, this comes across as a cop-out, and as a way of stroking your own egos without adding value.

I also think that you have developed your own “common knowledge” in relative isolation, and often have trouble explaining/justifying it outside of the hexbear community. Instead, a lot seems meme-ified and is repeated without thought.

I will continue to encourage people to explain or argue their case. I will also continue trying to be open and inclusive, and advocating for dialogue.

And now you turn to name calling and making further assumptions about me? Sigh.

There are threads that end with good comments or arguments, either because they are solid (eg. class struggle is never ending) or funny. They don’t need me to pat them on the head.

There are A LOT of problems out there, I agree. There is, however, a difference between destroying a country/regions ability to produce essential and strategic goods (like food, which has very immediate effect) through reckless decisions by authoritarian regimes (then throw in the Holodomor for fun), and inequality & a lack of social safety nets.

Right now, the whole world has, through various efforts, has solved the global food production issue. That the soviets and china managed to solve this aspect of it too is not a win for socialism, especially given the mass starvation that accompanied their efforts, but I see (and correct me if I have misunderstood) you and others holding this up as some kind of tenuous proof of superiority.

Social inequality and the denial of what I believe are basic human rights (food, housing, safety, access to healthcare, and freedom of expression), OTOH, are a continuing problem world-wide. I am much more interested in efforts here - both local, regional, and global.

Thanks for the quotable quote, but I didn’t say nor imply that.

They eliminated famine in their own borders … after causing famine in their own borders. Congratulations, I guess?

International efforts to deliver food aid to those most in need are typically hampered by war, not by a lack of food. Real supply & demand issues caused by poor yields, conflicts & other supply chain disruptions often drive up prices which hits the poor the hardest, but we haven’t had a global food shortage in a long time.

I engage with an upvote. If there’s something more to be said, I’ll say it. An unfortunate side effect is that those good comments get drowned out by nonsense initiated by … hexbears, and then further upvoted by hexbears. It doesn’t seem like an effective strategy to me, but if that is what y’all want to do, you can. It will probably lead to more of the same, along with more complaints, instances defederating, and personal user & instance blocks.

If only the dead could argue their case…

I think it is important to take a critical look at past tragedies and mistakes, and work hard to avoid them in the future. Unfortunately I fear that many people would repeat them if given the opportunity and it served their idealogical and/or selfish interests, unless it was more convenient to do the right thing.