Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

    These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

    But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.


  • It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

    And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

    Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

    You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

    And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.


  • Um no.

    A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

    But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

    The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

    If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.


  • As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

    Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

    Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

    As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

    This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.




  • The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.

    However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.

    In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.



  • According to the Behind the Bastards on Peter Thiel, he is really scared of death (as in dying from old age) and really wants to stay alive or take it with him.

    So he may be the first private citizen to buy a DeepSouth supercomputer that has a capacity comparable to the human brain. All someone needs to do is convince him there’s software that can create an adequate simulation of him that he is essentially immortal.

    Of course, this thought experiment intersects with the transporter paradox, but that’s part of the deal.





  • It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations

    Fixed It For You.

    Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.

    Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.

    Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking

    Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck’s swimming coffers.

    And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)

    Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.






  • The cooperative relationship between humans and dogs has always been a working one (that is, centered around the collaboration of productive tasks), so I have less concern with dogs on duty. In this case, dogs are being used not for their keen sense of smell, but as dousing rods on the pretense of their keen sense of smell.

    I did not mention dogs used as attack dogs, which absolutely abuses the dog. Not only that, but the dog is regarded as an officer if a victim fights back, what has only become a controversy when an attack dog was used on a fellow officer.

    As for dogs used to hunt, that’s the first thing we collaborated in doing, and we seem to have developed our relationship with dogs at the same time we developed agriculture, so they’d definitely be used to hunt vermin including foxes and coyotes.


  • Go onto Techdirt ( here ) and check Tim Cushing’s blog. His beat is the abuse and corruption of our justice system. The latest issue I recall was using drones to peek into fenced backyards, into windows and deep across property lines, all without a warrant or probable cause.

    During the 2010s IMSI spoofers were being used but the Stingray corporation required precincts sign an NDE so parallel reconstruction (creating an alternative plausible path of investigation to lead to the same discovery of evidence) was the norm. Eventually defense lawyers learned to press the issue, as even FBI would drop cases before admitting they used IMSI catchers to spy on where a suspect’s phone was.

    One of my bigger beefs is the misuse of detection dogs, which have up to a ~90% false positive rate, called Probable Cause on Four Legs it’s known that most departments prefer trick-pony dogs who just signal a lot, in contrast to dogs who can actually detect stuff.

    Interestingly, there is a subset of the K9 sector who train and handle detection dogs (which are still legitimately used, say to detect explosives in long lines of luggage at airports), and thanks to the common use of dogs to force a search, the public has been losing confidence in them, and courts who believe dog searches are for real.