Well, if this isn’t a sign to get off those VPNs in favour of Mullvad, I don’t know what is. They’re clearly big enough corporations to be targeted - time will tell if they’re gonna fold like one

I think we should find alternative ways, provided they don’t already exist, to ban predators and bad actors that doesn’t punish the entire userbase. Unfortunately, with initially ethical control comes state- and money- sponsored surveillance and oppression. It is seemingly impossible for the former to be free of the latter.

We’re already bombarded by services requiring users give up their age in order to be placed in data farming and advertising categories, with some banning those who cannot be farmed. Hell, every social media provider’s user age limit is 13 as per the EU GDPR – regulators only need to increase that age to 15/16 if they’re uncomfortable with its current level.

And no - I do not see a way to enforce age restriction without breaching basic rights to privacy. The only reason services demand your permission for cookies, device information, identifying data etc. is because the regulators mandate they cannot take your data without your permission. If they cannot find a way to sandbox the under-18 internet from the over-17 internet, then we should just keep the existing rules and expand support for victims. I dont believe there is an ethical solution for preventative measures.

*or one of Israel’s hired foreign militia

I’m just pissed off we let America have so much power over the world as it is. They’re one country, for fuck sake, not the World Police.

I’m not qualified enough to answer that, but…

I tried setting up calls and while STUN/TURN works in WAN, but not LAN, Element are supposed to be making a replacement that makes voice and video calls entirely E2EE, aka Livekit, which I’ve completely failed to get working. So far I’ve given up on improving my instance’s features and stick to Element Classic. I hope you get it running well!

I’m not queer, I’m “Jew and other”

I don’t recognise the state law as a righteous law anyway - there are more important laws than the opinionated statements of a few hundred aging or dead men. State law might govern the low-income population but it does not govern or define fact or reality, as reality is irrefutable and empirical.

By labeling Palestine Action as a terrorist group, without delving into the broadness of their own definition, the government imply to the public that the group is cruel or manipulates using terror, which is false as PA do not participate in cruelty.

bro. Fucking – Think about it. Klarna pay in 3 installments divide the cost by 3 and take payments monthly. Month A, you pay one third. Month B you pay one third of months A and B. By month C onwards you’re consistently paying three thirds or 100% of the rent. You’d only defer yourself the value of one month’s rent over the span of two months. Pointless.

Holy Yhorm that’s a cool image

“Content filtering” is just corporate jargon for subjective censorship, dynamically and discriminately restricting access to knowledge. I abhor all censorship.

Gmail is one of the most, if not the most, annoying recipients to avoid the spam category. My ISP lists their non-business IPs on Spamhaus PBL because they’ve monetised having a static IP and decided email servers aren’t for residents. (But I’ve snoozed – they haven’t been the highest rated ISP for years and the new highest, Zen, is much better than EE)

I do this with @duck.com except it’s free, strips trackers where possible, and supports generating any number of alias addresses that can be disabled. For those who don’t want to spend $250 but still want forwarding security

Fatal police shootings in the UK are getting more common. In 2019 one man was “lawfully murdered” because an officer said the victim’s mobile phone looked like a handgun. In 2024 it was announced the officer would not be prosecuted. Not one police officer has been found guilty of illegal murder as of yet.

In the UK the term is defined by the government as anyone who is deemed by the government a threat to the government or the people or someone’s property or the predominant local religion. But recently it’s been exclusively used for the first one. In this country state law is valued higher than corporate, moral, ethical and religious laws, so YMMV

"
Terrorism: interpretation. (Terrorism Act 2000)

(1)In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where— (a)the action falls within subsection (2), (b)the use or threat is designed to influence the government [or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and ©the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious [, racial] or ideological cause.

(2)Action falls within this subsection if it— (a)involves serious violence against a person, (b)involves serious damage to property, ©endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d)creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e)is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

(3)The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.

(4)In this section— (a)“action” includes action outside the United Kingdom, (b)a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated, ©a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and (d)“the government” means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.

(5)In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.
"

Link

What does it taste like? Asking for a friend

Essentially, musicians in an orchestra play the instruments, while the conductor plays the musicians. In both contexts they guide the instrument to make a specific note at a specific time, intensity and timbre, for a specific duration.

As for how the musicians interpret the movements, not sure. Perhaps it’s unique to every orchestra and relies on the familiarity between musician and conductor.

Oh yeah. One of my probably unprovable theories is that the data they collected on me will always be floating around, I can just do my best to stop new data being harvested and, potentially, old data might be unsellable. Like when Daniel Radcliffe didn’t update his outfit for several months and paparazzi couldn’t sell the photos they took of him to magazines because they all looked outdated and therefore inaccurate

I used to be the same, but I eventually got sick of seeing these constant requests to spend my money on whoever’s product. If I see a problem that can be solved with a product, I know tlwhere to find stores, and I’ll go look for it. I don’t need 45,000 attempts at my money in case one is what I need. So I block all ads, pointedly avoid sponsored results, and use my own brain to decide what I want, when I want it.

Plus it improves my experience on all services when the UI isn’t wasted on banners and games don’t play a video every thirty seconds. I haven’t yet figured out how to block real-world ads. Maybe XR glasses with a brand censoring mod lol

This. I thoroughly checked all of my account’s settings and toggled off about 15 switches related to history or data access. Not only that, Google can occasionally add new ones or toggle them back on, either through deceptive user prompts or underhanded updates.

I highly recommend a Navidrome/Slskd/beets[lyrics]/Symfonium setup!

I have a Proxmox container running: Navidrome, that serves music in a Library Folder (B); Slskd, that serves a SoulseekQT web UI and downloads to a Download Folder (A); and beetbox beets program with the lyrics plugin installed via pipx that has config parameters set so that I can manually run it, it’ll detect and allow me to identify songs downloaded to Folder A, inject synced lyrics, and move them to an organised folder structure in Folder B.

• Navidrome doesn’t need organisation, I just do it to be neat.
• beets uses MusicBrainz and another I believe for song/album ID, and lrclib for synced lyrics
• I also have Lidarr set up to download from Soulseek with the Tubifarry plugin, get lyrics via lrclib and move to Folder B with the same structure as beets, but its metadata is heavily lacking and many images and artist song data is just nonexistent after about two months of “populating” (see below), so I recommend keeping the manual Soulseek/beets approach
• Again I recommend ignoring Lidarr or maybe using it for a visual library without downloading, but there is a pro, now I’ve configured it - Lidarr doesn’t often automatically request and then organise music, but when it does, the music is exactly the quality I requested. So at least Tubifarry is solid.
• You can use any Subsonic client but I find Symfonium to be incredible. Paying these devs is worth it!
• slskd can be configured to run beets after download I believe, but I haven’t figured that out and don’t plan to, for want of less complexity.