laughs in group policy disabling of onedrive

Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.

Three basic options exist:

1. Burner: Take a device that isn’t a normally used device for each category. Make sure it has nothing you care about on it, no incriminating web history, no accounts logged in or saved as cookies that are incriminating, etc, etc. This is simplest, most expensive, but also most fool-proof against all possible threats.

2. Wiped: Wipe the device before travel, possibly backing things up in the cloud to download after arriving. You’ll have to back up again with any changes you make and wipe again before traveling back then at your final destination again restore the device from backups. If you have serious fears of close inspection or forensic analysis then it would behoove you to use a secure erase feature on the drive and reinstall the OS rather than just trying to delete problematic files. For smartphones especially doing this and restoring from a cloud back-up can be pretty easy, for laptops it’s more of a pain.

3. Mail ahead: Take the devices to a package service, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc ahead of time, mail them ahead of or just behind you so they arrive just before or slightly after you. For this to work you need a fixed accommodation that can accept packages and which you trust to store them and give them to you. This technically doesn’t prevent mail interception but unless you’re a high value target that’s unlikely at present as its kind of a multi-agency intentional effort thing. Still I’d mail the device in a fully encrypted state.

No other feasible options exist. You can encrypt yes and if you are a US citizen you cannot be denied re-entry (non-citizens can be not only denied entry but barred for years after for refusing to decrypt a device/cooperate) but they can seize your device and hold it for up to a year while trying to crack it and you’ll have to expend effort to get it back at the end of that period. They can also put you in a holding cell for hours or hypothetically up to a couple days if they really want to press it accuse you of something and be unpleasant during that time.

I need at least sheets that are thick enough not to let light through, not super thin sheets. It’s annoying in summer months. I need my feet covered because I’m paranoid about mosquitos though it’s rare for them to actually get inside and I need my head/eyes covered as well or it just doesn’t feel right, partly about light and muffling noise.

And for me it’s definitely a horizontal sleeping thing too. Propped up I can fall asleep while being only partially covered or hardly at all but horizontal I have to have it.

Can’t have a struggle if the mods just ban dissenters who make good points and call them out. Real yikes stuff going on in your thread over there defending this kind of logic.

Okay you say this but these tools are privately owned. What happens when one day the provider slams them with a 1000% price increase? They can either pay or go back to doctors who detect cancer even worse. It gives these AI companies undue influence and turns a tool into a crutch and an addiction which can be leveraged to drive up healthcare costs and punish providers who don’t play ball perhaps resulting in deaths from doctors in systems that don’t have access to the tool because they’re in a payment dispute with it or they had it but stopped paying for it and patients may not know any of this.

This is a nightmare for human beings who have fought hard to grow smart, to be intelligent as a species and to have educated professionals who have learned to use their brains be instead trained by these machines to stop using their brains, to atrophy them, to become dependent on these systems and worse than before the moment they are removed.

It will be used to attack the wages of doctors and I guarantee that they won’t be compensated with cheaper schooling (doctors need at least 6 years of university plus additional years in training before being able to practice on their own, it’s an immense expense and burden in a time of rising costs and huge debt). Which will lead to shortages of doctors and they’ll be replaced with AI and nurses not up to the task and we’ll be told this is fine. Having access to a thinking human being may become a gated luxury that few insurance companies want to shell out for until after you’ve been evaluated by AI systems several times and only IF those systems deem it necessary. Some AI systems will make mistakes that kill patients and insurance companies will be fine with this as a quickly dead patient is usually cheaper than paying for months or years of treatments and/or surgeries so they’ll have a perverse incentive to push patients towards those systems. Doctors take an oath not to do harm, not all take that as seriously as they should but usually there’s some compassion there whereas a computer system would not care one bit if you’re denied and unlike a doctor won’t fight for you against the insurance companies.

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.

Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.

Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.

then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function

A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.

On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.

I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.

Probably the best choice if OP is dreading 11. Put it off, hope that in 3 years Linux support has matured even more for their use cases.

MS support has used this software themselves in an edge case where they couldn’t get Windows to active properly.

You have two options here:

1. Enable the extended support (no pay needed with this software but if OP absolutely refuses to run it they can pay Microsoft money directly though it takes work to find where to do that at) and run on that for 3 years until 2028.

2. Upgrade to LTSC IOT using the method they outline at the link there. Again they have two options, one is free, the other is following that guide but paying for a gray-market key (G2a for instance) for LTSC IOT which would avoid running this software on their PC but would mean paying someone some money for a corporate volume key they’re not technically allowed to sell. Which means support until 2032.

No. It’s fine.

Tor uses its own DNS system to my recollection. It’s true there is DNS as part of fingerprinting and DNS leaks are a concern for VPNs (see for example https://www.dnsleaktest.com/) but Tor is not vulnerable to this and it’s more a problem of you’re using a VPN to appear to be in NYC but your DNS shows Phoenix so that’s a big discrepancy that raises the uniqueness of your fingerprint on a VPN and even lets threat actors guesstimate where you actually are. As I said though this is not an issue on Tor.

So understand that the DNS from Mullvad will only affect other programs not Tor. It will prevent say your ISP’s DNS from seeing your video games calling their domains that way. Your ISP can still see you’re connecting to infrastructure for as an example Genshin Impact when you launch the game because they can see where your traffic is flowing and the IP addresses as well as traffic patterns, ports, etc. It somewhat limits the data and visibility they get but there is something called SNI snooping as well as of course the fact they know the IP addresses where your connections go. So it’s perhaps better than nothing but understand the limits of it as they still have a lot of visibility though they shouldn’t be able to see your web searches regardless just that you’re accessing google or bing or duckduckgo as those sites use HTTPS.

Pretty easy honestly.

You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.

As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.

Tada. There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you’re sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).

The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn’t be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.

Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than “Russians” or “think of the children” or the usual criminals and terrorists.

They can’t stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that’s more than enough to control thought and action of the population.

Hmm how long until Hollywood sees this and demands the same of anyone discussing engaging in online piracy?

Also an interesting thought. What if this isn’t actually meant to get all drug producers or users talking online but the companies? This could be meant to be used as a threat and a sledgehammer against the tech companies. Basically they pass this, let them rack up not reporting anything for months, years, then come and hit them with a lawsuit demanding internal moderation logs and data and threaten to rake them over the coals for thousands of built up violations BUT then they offer to instead drop all that in exchange for them changing their moderation policies in a certain political way to suit the administration and some token reforms to address the law which won’t be scrutinized further if they comply with the political censorship wants.

The billionaire tech class was created by the Internet and are actively damaging the world for their own personal gain.

I hate to tell you but there were billionaires and multi-millionaires way before the internet and they were damaging the world horrendously for greed and personal gain. They even have this system structured around allowing them to do that called capitalism.

So no the internet didn’t create that. Capitalism created that. Just as it created the climate change denial oil industry and the people who made money off of destroying the planet with that and would still be doing so without the internet. Just as it made dishonest press barons who loved Nazi Germany such as Randolph Hearst way before the internet existed and for a more modern example Rupert Murdoch. Just as before that it created incentives to hide and denial tobacco caused cancer or that asbestos caused cancer and other diseases or that lead poisoned us especially children. And on and on. Or the Triangle Shirt-waist fire and thousands of incidents just like that around the world where people are killed in poorly maintained factories kept that way out of greed. Or companies that pump poison into the water and air because it’s cheaper. I could go on forever.

There is no special burner that turns regular DVDs and CDs into M-discs. M-discs were a special product that were special because of the disc itself. This doesn’t answer OP.

Lessons from this were applied when designing BluRay discs which are much more resilient than DVDs.

M-discs are just premium BluRays now. Probably not worth the difference in cost given you can buy two BDs from two different batches for the same price as one M-disc. Just avoid LTH BDs which use quicker degrading components.

M-discs are a meme that were made for and only had relevance in the DVD era.

Most remuxes have commentary tracks passed through. Heck, good encoder groups like QxR, TAoE and many Internal’s retain them.

I’ll agree remuxes generally drop extra video files though you don’t strictly need an iso for those, just a full BD disc dump in folder form which are far more common than ISO’s though far less common than single file remuxes.

I don’t think LoTR 4K’s changed the extras and behind the scenes from 1080p either so finding disc folder dumps of the old HD releases should suffice for OP if that’s all they want.

House centipede. They eat other bugs and while scary looking are harmless. They like spiders appear from time to time without anything being wrong. They’re just looking for other bugs to eat.

Brave words divorced from reality.

Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.

Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.

🤡

Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.

If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.

As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.

Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.

Most useful unique website thing rarbg had by far was full mediainfo listing for every single upload on site. You could immediately tell what you were getting and even dead torrents became useful by virtue of retaining chapter data that could be applied to another release.

Also, call me skeptical but IMO without access to scene FTP’s or week-1 access to (and automation on a large scale of re-uploading from) cabal trackers like BTN to get the good content from your site frankly risks ending up just another mirror among many others like lime torrents for existing public net and low hanging private tracker fruit. (If you have mediainfo for all files that adds a lot of value though)

IMO the real need left by rarbg is not for more re-hosting of content many others have but for publishing web-dl’s others don’t have, not of just new series (which everyone does as ep’s drop) but older movies and older series without other good 1080p or 4k releases available. Even today I see many old TV series the only HD releases available are old rarbg packs and this includes across multiple of the biggest PT’s.

Of course I wish anyone willing to run a big general tracker luck (assuming they’re honest and intent isn’t to distribute malware ofc).

Literal Scooby-Doo shit. Villains trying to scare locals to get at resources.

There were laws made around child actors because of the same issue. Sad it keeps coming up.